an' looked long and 'ard at Lydy Elling.
"'Of course I'll try to do as you'd wish about the picture,
'Ugh, if that's w'at's troublin' you,' she says quiet. With that
'e closed 'is eyes and 'e never opened 'em. He died unconscious
at four that mornin'.
"You see, sir, Lydy Elling was always cruel 'ard on the
Marriage. From the first it went wrong, an' Sir 'Ugh was
out of temper pretty constant. She came into the studio one day
and looked at the picture an 'asked 'im why 'e didn't throw it up
an' quit aworriting 'imself. He answered sharp, an' with that she
said as 'ow she didn't see w'at there was to make such a row
about, no'ow. She spoke 'er mind about that picture, free; an'
Sir 'Ugh swore 'ot an' let a 'andful of brushes fly at 'is study,
an' Lydy Elling picked up 'er skirts careful an' chill, an'
drifted out of the studio with 'er eyes calm and 'er chin 'igh.
If there was one thing Lydy Elling 'ad no comprehension of, it
was the usefulness of swearin'. So the Marriage was a sore
thing between 'em. She is uncommon calm, but uncommon bitter, is
Lydy Elling. She's never come anear the studio since that day she
went out 'oldin' up of 'er skirts. W'en 'er friends goes over she
excuses 'erself along o' the strain. Strain--Gawd!" James ground
his wrath short in his teeth.
"I'll tell you what I'll do, James, and it's our only hope. I'll
see Lady Ellen tomorrow. The Times says she returned today.
You take the picture back to its place, and I'll do what I can
for it. If anything is done to save it, it must be done through
Lady Ellen Treffinger herself, that much is clear. I can't think
that she fully understands the situation. If she did, you know,
she really couldn't have any motive--" He stopped suddenly.
Somehow, in the dusky lamplight, her small, close-sealed face
came ominously back to him. He rubbed his forehead and knitted
his brows thoughtfully. After a moment he shook his head and
went on: "I am positive that nothing can be gained by highhanded
methods, James. Captain Gresham is one of the most popular men
in London, and his friends would tear up Treffinger's bones if he
were annoyed by any scandal of our making--and this scheme you
propose would inevitably result in scandal. Lady Ellen has, of
course, every legal right to sell the picture. Treffinger made
considerable inroads upon her estate, and, as she is about to
marry a man without income, she doubtless feels that she has a
right to replenish her patrimony."
He found James amenable, though doggedly skeptical. He went
down into the street, called a carriage, and saw James and his
burden into it. Standing in the doorway, he watched the carriage
roll away through the drizzling mist, weave in and out among the
wet, black vehicles and darting cab lights, until it was
swallowed up in the glare and confusion of the Strand. "It is
rather a fine touch of irony," he reflected, "that he, who is so
out of it, should be the one to really care. Poor Treffinger,"
he murmured as, with a rather spiritless smile, he turned back
into his hotel. "Poor Treffinger; sic transit gloria."
The next afternoon MacMaster kept his promise. When he
arrived at Lady Mary Percy's house he saw preparations for a
function of some sort, but he went resolutely up the steps,
telling the footman that his business was urgent. Lady Ellen
came down alone, excusing her sister. She was dressed for
receiving, and MacMaster had never seen one so beautiful.
The color in her cheeks sent a softening glow over her small,
delicately cut features.
MacMaster apologized for his intrusion and came unflinchingly
to the object of his call. He had come, he said, not only to offer
her his warmest congratulations, but to express his regret that a
great work of art was to leave England.
Lady Treffinger looked at him in wide-eyed astonishment.
Surely, she said, she had been careful to select the best of the
pictures for the X--- gallery, in accordance with Sir Hugh
Treffinger's wishes.
"And did he--pardon me, Lady Treffinger, but in mercy set my
mind at rest--did he or did he not express any definite wish
concerning this one picture, which to me seems worth all the
others, unfinished as it is?"
Lady Treffinger paled perceptibly, but it was not the pallor
of confusion. When she spoke there was a sharp tremor in her
smooth voice, the edge of a resentment that tore her like pain.
"I think his man has some such impression, but I believe it to be
utterly unfounded. I cannot find that he ever expressed any wish
concerning the disposition of the picture to any of his friends.
Unfortunately, Sir Hugh was not always discreet in his remarks to
his servants."
"Captain Gresham, Lady Ellingham, and Miss Ellingham,"
announced a servant, appearing at the door.
There was a murmur in the hall, and MacMaster greeted the
smiling Captain and his aunt as he bowed himself out.
To all intents and purposes the Marriage of Phaedra was
already entombed in a vague continent in the Pacific, somewhere
on the other side of the world.
A Wagner Matinee
I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on
glassy, blue-lined notepaper, and bearing the postmark of a
little Nebraska village. This communication, worn and rubbed,
looking as though it had been carried for some days in a coat
pocket that was none too clean, was from my Uncle Howard and
informed me that his wife had been left a small legacy by a
bachelor relative who had recently died, and that it would be
necessary for her to go to Boston to attend to the settling of
the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station and
render her whatever services might be necessary. On examining
the date indicated as that of her arrival I found it no later
than tomorrow. He had characteristically delayed writing until,
had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed the good
woman altogether.
The name of my Aunt Georgiana called up not alone her own
figure, at once pathetic and grotesque, but opened before my feet
a gulf of recollection so wide and deep that, as the letter
dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the
present conditions of my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of
place amid the familiar surroundings of my study. I became, in
short, the gangling farm boy my aunt had known, scourged with
chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and sore from the
corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb tentatively, as
though they were raw again. I sat again before her parlor organ,
fumbling the scales with my stiff, red hands, while she, beside
me, made canvas mittens for the huskers.
The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, I
set out for the station. When the train arrived I had some
difficulty in finding my aunt. She was the last of
/> the passengers to alight, and it was not until I got her into the
carriage that she seemed really to recognize me. She had come
all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become black
with soot, and her black bonnet gray with dust, during the
journey. When we arrived at my boardinghouse the landlady put
her to bed at once and I did not see her again until the next
morning.
Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's
appearance she considerately concealed. As for myself, I saw my
aunt's misshapen figure with that feeling of awe and respect with
which we behold explorers who have left their ears and fingers
north of Franz Josef Land, or their health somewhere along the
Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a music teacher at the
Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter sixties. One
summer, while visiting in the little village among the Green
Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had
kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all
the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one
of those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of
twenty-one sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled woman of
thirty. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard
followed her, and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was
that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family
and the criticisms of her friends by going with him to the
Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of course, had no money, had
taken a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the
railroad. There they had measured off their quarter section
themselves by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel
of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting
off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside,
one of those cave dwellings whose inmates so often reverted to
primitive conditions. Their water they got from the lagoons
where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of provisions
was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty
years my aunt had not been further than fifty miles from the
homestead.
But Mrs. Springer knew nothing of all this, and must have
been considerably shocked at what was left of my kinswoman.
Beneath the soiled linen duster which, on her arrival, was the most
conspicuous feature of her costume, she wore a black stuff dress,
whose ornamentation showed that she had surrendered herself
unquestioningly into the hands of a country dressmaker. My poor
aunt's figure, however, would have presented astonishing
difficulties to any dressmaker. Originally stooped, her shoulders
were now almost bent together over her sunken chest. She wore no
stays, and her gown, which trailed unevenly behind, rose in a sort
of peak over her abdomen. She wore ill-fitting false teeth, and
her skin was as yellow as a Mongolian's from constant exposure to
a pitiless wind and to the alkaline water which hardens the most
transparent cuticle into a sort of flexible leather.
I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way
in my boyhood, and had a reverential affection for her. During
the years when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after
cooking the three meals--the first of which was ready at six
o'clock in the morning-and putting the six children to bed, would
often stand until midnight at her ironing board, with me at the
kitchen table beside her, hearing me recite Latin declensions and
conjugations, gently shaking me when my drowsy head sank down
over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing or
mending, that I read my first Shakespeare', and her old textbook
on mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands.
She taught me my scales and exercises, too--on the little parlor
organ, which her husband had bought her after fifteen years,
during which she had not so much as seen any instrument, but an
accordion that belonged to one of the Norwegian farmhands. She
would sit beside me by the hour, darning and counting while I
struggled with the "Joyous Farmer," but she seldom talked to me
about music, and I understood why. She was a pious woman; she
had the consolations of religion and, to her at least, her
martyrdom was not wholly sordid. Once when I had been doggedly
beating out some easy passages from an old score of
Euryanthe I had found among her music books, she came up to
me and, putting her hands over my eyes, gently drew my head back
upon her shoulder, saying tremulously, "Don't love it so well,
Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear boy, pray that
whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that."
When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival she
was still in a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize
that she was in the city where she had spent her youth, the place
longed for hungrily half a lifetime. She had been so wretchedly
train-sick throughout the journey that she bad no recollection of
anything but her discomfort, and, to all intents and purposes,
there were but a few hours of nightmare between the farm in Red
Willow County and my study on Newbury Street. I had planned a
little pleasure for her that afternoon, to repay her for some of
the glorious moments she had given me when we used to milk
together in the straw-thatched cowshed and she, because I was
more than usually tired, or because her husband had spoken
sharply to me, would tell me of the splendid performance of the
Huguenots she had seen in Paris, in her youth. At two
o'clock the Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner program, and I
intended to take my aunt; though, as I conversed with her I grew
doubtful about her enjoyment of it. Indeed, for her own sake, I
could only wish her taste for such things quite dead, and the
long struggle mercifully ended at last. I suggested our visiting
the Conservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed
altogether too timid to wish to venture out. She questioned me
absently about various changes in the city, but she was chiefly
concerned that she had forgotten to leave instructions about
feeding half-skimmed milk to a certain weakling calf, "old
Maggie's calf, you know, Clark," she explained, evidently having
forgotten how long I had been away. She was further troubled
because she had neglected to tell her daughter about the freshly
opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, which would spoil if it
were not used directly.
I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian
operas and found that she had not, though she was perfectly
familiar with their respective situations, and had once possessed
the piano score of The Flying Dutchman. I began to think it
would have been best to get her back to Red Willow County without
waking her, and regretted having suggested the concert.
From the time we entered the concert hall, howe
ver, she was
a trifle less passive and inert, and for the first time seemed to
perceive her surroundings. I had felt some trepidation lest she
might become aware of the absurdities of her attire, or might
experience some painful embarrassment at stepping suddenly into
the world to which she had been dead for a quarter of a century.
But, again, I found how superficially I had judged her. She sat
looking about her with eyes as impersonal, almost as stony, as
those with which the granite Rameses in a museum watches the
froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his pedestal-separated
from it by the lonely stretch of centuries. I have seen this
same aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown Hotel at
Denver, their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their
haggard faces unshaven; standing in the thronged corridors as
solitary as though they were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon,
conscious that certain experiences have isolated them from their
fellows by a gulf no haberdasher could bridge.
We sat at the extreme left of the first balcony, facing the
arc of our own and the balcony above us, veritable hanging
gardens, brilliant as tulip beds. The matinee audience was made
up chiefly of women. One lost the contour of faces and figures--
indeed, any effect of line whatever-and there was only the color
of bodices past counting, the shimmer of fabrics soft and firm,
silky and sheer: red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, ecru,
rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the colors that an
impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and there
the dead shadow of a frock coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them
as though they had been so many daubs of tube-paint on a palette.
When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave
a little stir of anticipation and looked with quickening interest
down over the rail at that invariable grouping, perhaps the first
wholly familiar thing that had greeted her eye since she had left
old Maggie and her weakling calf. I could feel how all those
details sank into her soul, for I had not forgotten how they had
sunk into mine when. I came fresh from plowing forever and
forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in a treadmill,
one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a shadow
of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of
their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of
the instruments, the patches of yellow light thrown by the green-
shaded lamps on the smooth, varnished bellies of the cellos and
the bass viols in the rear, the restless, wind-tossed forest of
fiddle necks and bows-I recalled how, in the first orchestra I
had ever heard, those long bow strokes seemed to draw the heart
out of me, as a conjurer's stick reels out yards of paper ribbon
from a hat.
The first number was the Tannhauser overture. When the
horns drew out the first strain of the Pilgrim's chorus my Aunt
Georgiana clutched my coat sleeve. Then it was I first realized
that for her this broke a silence of thirty years; the
inconceivable silence of the plains. With the battle between the
two motives, with the frenzy of the Venusberg theme and its
ripping of strings, there came to me an overwhelming sense of the
waste and wear we are so powerless to combat; and I saw again the
tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden
fortress; the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin
pitted with sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain-gullied clay banks
about the naked house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the
dishcloths were always hung to dry before the kitchen door. The
world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a
cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that
reached to sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer bought
than those of war.
The overture closed; my aunt released my coat sleeve, but
she said nothing. She sat staring at the orchestra through a
dullness of thirty years, through the films made little by little