Tales
Date: 1884-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Stories; Manners and customs; Social and Family Life; Ghosts
Description: Short stories, from Harper’s and Century magazines. ~ ~ ~ ~ A love story with an unexpected ending… ~ ~ ~ ~ John comes to take possession of the family home — where a fire on the hearth has been kept kindled since it was lit by a brand from the burning of a witch 200 years ago… ~ ~ ~ ~ A young man secretly marries a beautiful and thoroughly selfish woman… ~ ~ ~ ~ A group of ghosts are inadvertantly invited to attend a society dinner…
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA.

FOUR TALES

BRANDER MATTHEWS
(1852–1929)

MobileRead Edition
2021

Short stories, from Harper’s and Century magazines.

A love story with an unexpected ending…

John comes to take possession of the family home — where a fire on the hearth has been kept kindled since it was lit by a brand from the burning of a witch 200 years ago…

A young man secretly marries a beautiful and thoroughly selfish woman…

A group of ghosts are inadvertantly invited to attend a society dinner…

James Brander Matthews (February 21, 1852 – March 31, 1929) was an American writer and educator. He was the first full-time professor of dramatic literature at an American university and played a significant role in establishing theater as a subject worthy of formal study in the academic world. He was a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, with over thirty books published.

Contents were first published 1885 ~ 1886. This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS

- “Love at First Sight”
- Esther Feverel
- Brief — As Woman’s Love
- Perturbed Spirits

“LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT”

A doubtful day of mingled snow and rain, such as we often have in New York in February, had been followed, as night fell, by a hard frost; and as Robert White mounted the broad brown-stone steps of Mrs. Martin’s house and, after ringing the bell, looked across Washington Square to the pseudo-picturesque University building, he felt that form of gratitude toward his hostess which has been defined as a lively sense of benefits to come. His ten-minute walk through the hard slush of the pavements had given an edge to his appetite, and he knew of old that the little dinners of the Duchess of Washington Square were everything that little dinners should be. He anticipated confidently a warm reception by his hospitable hostess; an introduction to a pretty girl, probably as clever as she was good-looking; a dignified procession into the spacious dining-room; a bountiful dinner, neither too long nor too short, as well served as it was well cooked; and at the end a good cup of coffee and a good cigar, and a pleasant quarter of an hour’s chat with four or five agreeable men, not the least agreeable of them being Mr. Martin, who was known to most people only as Mrs. Martin’s husband, but whom White had discovered to be as shrewd and sharp as he was reserved and retiring.

And so it came to pass, except that the state of the streets had made White a little late, wherefore the Duchess was slightly hurried and peremptory. She took him at once under her wing and led him up to a very pretty girl.

“Phyllis,” she said, “this is Mr. White, to whom I confide you for the evening.”

As White bowed before the young lady whom Mrs. Martin had called Phyllis, he wished that the Duchess had kindly added her patronymic, as it is most embarrassing not to know to whom one is talking. But there was no time for inquiry; the rich velvet curtains which masked the open doorway leading from the parlor into the hall were pushed aside, and the venerable colored butler announced that dinner was served. White offered his arm to Miss Phyllis, and they filed into the dining-room in the wake of Mr. Martin and Mrs. Sutton; the Duchess, on the arm of Judge Gillespie, brought up the rear.

There were fourteen at table, — a number too large for general conversation, and therefore conducive to confidential talks between any two congenial spirits who might be sitting side by side. White had at his left Mrs. Sutton, but she was a great favorite with Mr. Martin, and White had scarcely a word with her throughout the dinner. On the other side of Miss Phyllis was a thin, short, dyspeptic little man, Mr. C. Mather Hitchcock, whom White knew slightly, and whom Miss Phyllis evidently did not like, as White saw at a glance. So it happened that White and Miss Phyllis were wholly dependent on each other for entertainment, as long as they might sit side by side at the Duchess’s table.

“A mean day like this makes the comfortable luxury of a house like Mrs. Martin’s all the more grateful,” began White, by way of breaking the ice; “don’t you think so?”

“It has been a day to make one understand what weather-prophets have in mind when they talk about the average mean temperature of New York,” she answered, smiling.

“I hope you do not wish to insinuate that the average temperature of New York is mean. I have lived here only a few years, but I am prepared to defend the climate of New York to the bitter end.”

“Then you must defend the weather of today,” she retorted gayly, “for it had a very bitter end. I felt like the maid in the garden hanging out the clothes, for down came a black wind to bite off my nose.”

“Just now you remind me rather of the queen in the parlor eating bread and honey.”

“I have an easy retort,” she laughed back. “I can say you are like the king in his chamber counting out his money; for that is how most New York men seem to spend their days.”

“But I am not a business man,” explained White, thinking that Miss Phyllis was a ready young lady with her wits about her, and regretting again that he had not learned her name.

“They say that there are only two classes who scorn business and never work — the aristocrats and the tramps,” she rejoined mischievously. “Am I to infer that you are an aristocrat or a tramp?”

“I regret to say that I am neither the one nor the other. A tramp is often a philosopher — of the peripatetic school of course: and an aristocrat is generally a gentleman, and often a good fellow. No, I am afraid your inference was based on a false premise. I am not a business man, but, all the same, I earn my living by my daily work. I am a journalist, and I am on the staff of the ‘Gotham Gazette.’”

“Oh, you are an editor? I am so glad. I have always wanted to see an editor,” ejaculated Miss Phyllis with increasing interest.

“You may see one now,” he answered. “I am on exhibition here from seven to nine tonight.”

“And you are really an editor?” she queried, gazing at him curiously.

“I am a journalist, and I write brevier, so I suppose I may be considered as a component unit of the editorial plural,” he replied.

“And you write editorials?”

“I do; I have written yards of them — I might almost say miles of them.”

“How odd! Somehow the editorials of a great paper always remind me of the edicts of the Council of Ten in Venice — nobody knows whose they are, and yet all men tremble before them.” As she said this, Miss Phyllis looked at him meditatively for a moment, and then she went on, impulsively, “And what puzzles me is how you ever find anything to say.”

A quiet smile played over White’s face as he answered gravely: “We have to write a good deal, but we do not always say anything in particular.”

“When I read the telegrams,” continued Miss Phyllis, “especially the political ones, I never know exactly what it’s all about until I’ve read the editorial. Then, of course, it all seems clear enough. But you have to make all that up out of your own head. It must be very wearing.”

The young journalist wondered for a second whether this was sarcasm or not; then he admitted that he had been using up the gray matter of his brain very rapidly of late.

“I know I exhausted myself one election,” she went on, “when I tried to understand politics. I thought it my duty to hear both sides, so I read two papers. But they contradicted each other so, and they got me so confused, that I had to give it up. Really I hadn’t any peace of mind at all until I stopped reading the other paper. Of course, I couldn’t do without the ‘Gotham Gazette.’”

“Then are all our labors amply rewarded,” said White gallantly, thinking that he had only once met a young lady more charming than Miss Phyllis.

“Now tell me, Mr. White, what part of the paper do you write?”

“Tell me what part of the paper you read first — but I think I can guess that. You always begin with the deaths and then pass on to the marriages. Don’t you?”

Miss Phyllis hesitated a moment, blushed a little, — whereat White thought her even prettier than he had at first, — and then confessed. “I do read the deaths first; and why not? Our going out of the world is the most important thing we do in it.”

“Except getting married — and that’s why you read the marriages next?” he asked.

“I suppose so. I acknowledge that I read the marriages with delight. Naturally I know very few of the brides, but that is no matter — there is all the more room for pleasant speculation. It’s like reading only the last chapter of a novel — you have to invent for yourself all that went before.”

“Then you like the old-fashioned novels which always ended like the fairy stories, ‘So they were married and lived happily ever afterward’?” he queried.

“Indeed I do,” she answered vehemently, “Unless I have orange-blossoms and wedding-cake given to me at the end of a story, I feel cheated.”

“I suppose you insist on a novel’s being a love-story?” White inquired.

“If a story isn’t a love-story,” she answered energetically, “it isn’t a story at all. Why, when I was only nine years old, a little chit of a girl, I wouldn’t read Sunday-school books, because there was no love in them!”

Robert White laughed gently, and said: “I spurned the Sunday-school book when I was nine, too, but that was because the bad boys had all the fun and the good boys had to take all the medicine, in spite of which, however, they were often cut off in the flower of their youth.”

“Do you ever write stories, Mr. White?”

“I have been guilty of that evil deed,” he answered. “I had a tale in the ‘Gotham Gazette’ one Sunday a few months ago, called ‘The Parrot that Talked in his Sleep’; it was a little study in zoologic psychology. Did you read it?”

“I don’t seem to recall it,” she hesitated. “I’m afraid I must have missed it.”

“Then you missed a great intellectual treat,” said the journalist, with humorous exaggeration. “Fiction is stranger than truth sometimes, and there were absolutely no facts at all in ‘The Parrot that Talked in his Sleep.’”

“It was a fantastic tale, then?”

“Well, it was rather eccentric.”

“You must send it to me. I like strange, weird stories — if they do not try to be funny. They say I haven’t any sense of humor, and I certainly do not like to see anybody trying hard to be funny.”

With a distinct recollection that “The Parrot that Talked in his Sleep” had been noticed by several friendly editors as “one of the most amusing and comical conceits ever perpetrated in America,” White thought it best not to promise a copy of it to Miss Phyllis.

“Perhaps you would prefer another sketch I published in the ‘Gotham Gazette,’” he ventured. “It was called ‘At the End of His Tether,’ and it described a quaint old man who gave up his life to the collecting of bits of the ropes which had hanged famous murderers.”

“How gruesome!” she exclaimed, with a little shudder, although the next minute she asked with interest: “And what did he do with them?”

“He arranged them with great care, and labeled them exactly, and gloated over them until his mind gave way, and then he spliced them together and hung himself on a gallows of his own inventing.”

“How delightfully interesting!”

“It was a little sketch after Hawthorne — a long way after,” he added modestly.

“I just dote on Hawthorne,” remarked Miss Phyllis critically. “He never explains things, and so you have more room for guessing. I do hate to see everything spelled out plain at the end of a book. I’m satisfied to know that they got married and were happy, and I don’t care to be told just how old their children were when they had the whooping-cough!”

“A hint is as good as a table of statistics to a sharp reader,” said the journalist. “I think the times are ripe for an application to fiction of the methods Corot used in painting pictures. Father Corot, as the artists call him, gave us a firm and vigorous conception veiled by a haze of artistic vagueness.”

“That’s what I like,” agreed Miss Phyllis. “I like something left to the imagination.”

“Your approbation encourages me to per severe. I had planned half a dozen other unconventional tales, mere trifles, of course, as slight as possible in themselves, but enough, with ‘The Parrot that Talked in his Sleep’ and ‘At the End of his Tether,’ to make a little book, and I was going to call it ‘Nightmare’s Nests.’”

“What an appetizing title!” declared the young lady. “I’m so sorry it is not published now — I couldn’t rest till I’d read it.”

“Then I am sure of selling at least one copy.”

“Oh, I should expect you to send me a copy yourself,” said Miss Phyllis archly, “and to write ‘with the compliments of the author’ on the first page.”

Robert White looked up with a smile, and he caught Miss Phyllis’s eye. He noted her bright and animated expression. He thought that only once before had he ever met a prettier or a livelier girl.

“You shall have an early copy,” he said, “a set of ‘advance sheets,’ as the phrase is.”

Here his attention and hers was distracted by the passing of a wonderful preparation of lobster, served in sherry, and cooked as though it were terrapin; this was a specialty of the Duchess’s Virginian cook, and was not to be treated lightly. When this delicacy had been duly considered, Miss Phyllis turned to him again.

“Can’t you tell me one of the stories you are going to write?” she asked. “Here — now — at table?”

“Yes; why not?”

“Do you play chess? I mean do you understand the game?”

“I think it is poky; but I have played it with grandpa.”

“There is a tale I thought of writing, to be called ‘The Queen of the Living Chessmen’; but—”

“That’s a splendid title. Go on.” “Are you sure it would interest you?” asked the author.

“I can’t be sure until you begin,” she answered airily; “and if it doesn’t interest me, I’ll change the subject.”

“And we can talk about the weather.”

“Precisely. And now, do go on!”

She gave an imperious nod, which White could not but consider charming. There was no lull in the general conversation around the table. Mr. Martin was monopolizing Mrs. Sutton’s attention, and Mr. C. Mather Hitchcock had at last got into an animated discussion with the lady on the other side of him.

So White began:

“This, then, is the tale of ‘The Queen of the Living Chessmen.’ Once upon a time—”

“I do like stories which begin with ‘Once upon a time,’” interrupted Miss Phyllis.

“So far at least, then, you may like mine. Once upon a time there was a young English surgeon in India. He was a fine, handsome, manly young fellow—”

“Light or dark?” asked the young lady. “That’s a very important question. I don’t take half the interest in a hero if he is dark.”

“Then my hero shall be as fair as a young Saxon ought to be. Now, on his way out to India, this young fellow heard a great deal about a beautiful English girl, the daughter of a high official in the service of John Company—”

“Is she going to fall in love with him?” interrupted Miss Phyllis again.

“She is.”

“Then this is a love-story?”

“It is indeed,” answered the author, with emphasis.

“Then you may go on,” said the young lady; “I think it will interest me.”

And White continued:

“The young doctor had heard so much about her beauty that he was burning with anxiety to behold her. He felt as though the first time he should see her would be an epoch in his life. He was ready to love her at first sight. But when he got to his post he found that she had gone to Calcutta for a long visit, and it might be months before she returned. He possessed his soul in patience, and made friends with her father, and was permitted to inspect a miniature of her, made by the best artist in India. This portrait more than confirmed the tales of her beauty. The sight of her picture produced a strange but powerful effect upon the doctor, and his desire to see the fair original redoubled. From Calcutta came rumors of the havoc she wrought there among the susceptible hearts of the English exiles, but, so far as rumor could tell, she herself was still heart-free. She had not yet found the man of her choice; and it was said that she had romantic notions, and would marry only a man who had proved himself worthy, who had, in short, done some deed of daring or determination on her behalf. The young Englishman listened to these rumors with a sinking of the heart, for he had no hope that he could ever do anything to deserve her. At last the news came that she was about to return to her father, and at the same time came an order to the doctor to join an expedition among the hill-tribes. He called on her father before he went, and he got a long look at her miniature, and away he went with a heavy heart for the love he bore a woman he had never seen. No sooner had his party set off than there was trouble with the Hindus. The British residents and the native princes led a cat-and-dog life, and there began to be great danger of civil war. There were risings in various parts of the country.”

“In what year was this?”

“I don’t know yet,” answered the journalist. “You see I have only the general idea of the story. I shall have to read up a good deal to get the historical facts and all the little touches of local color. But I suppose this must have been about a hundred years ago or thereabouts. Will that do?”

“If you don’t know when your story happened,” said Miss Phyllis, “of course you can’t tell me. But go on, and tell me all you do know.”

“Well, the young doctor was captured by a party of natives and taken before a rajah or whatever they call him, a native prince, who had renounced his semi-allegiance to the British and who had at once revealed his cruelty and rapacity. In fact, the chief into whose hands the young surgeon had fallen was nothing more nor less than a bloodthirsty tyrant. At first he was going to put the doctor to death, but fortunately, just then, one of the lights of the harem fell ill and the doctor cured her. So, instead of being killed, he was made first favorite of the rajah. He had saved his life, although he was no nearer to his liberty.”

“Why, wouldn’t the rajah let him go?” asked Miss Phyllis with interest.

“No, he wanted to keep him. He had found it useful to have a physician on the premises, and in future he never meant to be without one. After a few vain appeals, the doctor gave up asking for his liberty. He began to plan an escape without the rajah’s leave. One evening the long-sought opportunity arrived, and as a large detachment of English prisoners was brought into town, the doctor slipped out.”

“Did he get away safely?”

“You shall be told in due time. Let us not anticipate, as the storytellers say. Did I tell you that the rajah had found out that the doctor played chess, and that he had three games with him every night?”

“This is the first I have heard of it,” was the young lady’s answer.

“Such was the fact. And this it was which led to the doctor’s recapture. On the evening of his escape the rajah wanted his chess a little earlier, and the doctor could not be found; so they scoured the country for him, and brought him before the prince, who bade them load him with chains and cast him into a dungeon cell.”

“And how long did he languish there?”

“Till the next morning only. At high noon he was taken out and the chains were taken off, and he was led into a spacious balcony overlooking a great courtyard. This court yard was thronged with people and the sides were lined with soldiers. In the center was a large vacant space. This vacant space was a square composed of many smaller squares of alternating black and white marble. Unconsciously the doctor counted these smaller squares; there were exactly sixty-four — eight in a row and eight rows.”

“Just as though it was a huge chessboard?” inquired Miss Phyllis.

White was flattered by the visible interest this pretty girl took in his narrative.

“It was a huge chessboard, nothing else,” he answered, “and a game of chess was about to be played on it by living chessmen. Soon after the doctor was brought into the gallery, there was a movement in the outskirts of the throng below and four elephants came in and took their places at the four corners of the gigantic chessboard. Two of these elephants were draped with white and two with black, and their howdahs were shaped like castles. Then came in four horsemen, two on white steeds and two on black, and they took their places next to the castles.”

“They were the knights! Oh, how romantic!” ejaculated the young lady.

“Next came four fools or jesters, for in the oriental game of chess the bishop is replaced by a clown. Two of these were white men and two were Hindus. They took their places next to the knights. Then there entered two files of eight soldiers, and the eight white men took the second row on one side while the eight Hindus faced them on the second row opposite.”

“They were the pawns, I suppose?”

“They were the pawns. The doctor now began to suspect what was going on, and he saw a white man and a Hindu, both magnificently caparisoned, and with tiny pages supporting the skirts of their robes, enter the square allotted to the kings. Finally in two litters or sedan-chairs the two queens were borne in; the doctor saw that one was a white woman and the other a Hindu, but the white pieces were on the side of the court opposite him, and he could not distinguish the features of any of his countrymen — for that they were English captives he felt convinced.”

“But who was to play the game?” asked Miss Phyllis eagerly.

“The rajah and the doctor. The rajah came into the balcony and told the doctor that since he wanted to get away he might have a chance for his life. If he could win the game, the rajah would not only spare his life, but he might depart in peace, and, even more, he might select from the English captives any one he chose to depart with him.”

“But if he lost the game?”

“Then he lost his life. For the doctor that game of chess with the living chessmen meant life or death. But the sturdy young English man had a stout heart and a strong head, and he was not frightened. Although he had generally managed to lose when playing with the rajah, he knew that he played a finer game. He knew, moreover, that although the rajah was a despot and a bloody-minded villain, yet he would keep his word, and if he lost the game the doctor would be sent away in safety and honor, as had been promised. So the doctor planned his game with care and played with more skill than the rajah had suspected him of having. After half a dozen moves there was an exchange of pawns. The captured men were led to the sides of the courtyard, and there stood an executioner, who whipped off their heads in a second.”

“What!” almost shouted Miss Phyllis. “Do you mean to say he killed them?”

“The living chessmen, white or black, English or Hindu, were all prisoners and had all been condemned to death. The rajah was using them for his amusement before killing them — that was all. As soon as they were taken in the course of the game, they were no longer useful, and the headsman did his work upon them at once.”

“You don’t call this a love-story, do you?” was Miss Phyllis’s indignant query.

“You shall see. When the doctor saw the fate of the captured pieces he almost lost his self-control. But he was a brave man, and in a little while he regained courage. An attendant explained that these men would die anyhow, and in time the doctor got interested in the game and intent on saving his own life, and he ceased to think about the lives of the hapless human chessmen. And the rajah gave him enough to think about. The rajah, having nothing at stake, and knowing it was the last game with the doctor, played with unusual skill and success. With oriental irony the rajah had chosen the white pieces, and he kept sending the white queen on predatory excursions among the black chessmen. The doctor saw that if he did not take the white queen he was a dead man; so he laid a trap for her, and the rajah fell into the trap and sent the white queen close to the black pieces, taking a black pawn. For the first time the doctor got a good look at the white queen. His heart jumped into his mouth and beat so loud that he thought the rajah must hear it. The white queen was the beautiful English girl of whom he had thought so much and so often and whom he had never seen. He knew her at a glance, for the miniature was a good likeness, though it could not do justice to her wonderful beauty; it was indeed fit that she should be robed as a queen. As soon as the doctor saw her he felt that he loved her with the whole force of his being; no stroke of love at first sight was ever more sudden or more irresistible. For a moment love, astonishment, and fear made him stand motionless.”

“And what did she do?”

“She could do nothing. And what could he do? It was a tremendous predicament. If he captured the white queen, she would be killed at once. If he did not capture her, the rajah in all probability would win the game — and then both he and she would have to die. He had a double incentive to win the game, to save his own life and to save hers also, by selecting her as the one to accompany him. But the game became doubly difficult to win, because he dare not take the rajah’s most powerful piece. To make the situation more hopeless, the rajah, seeing that the doctor let him withdraw the queen from a position the full danger of which he discovered as soon as the move was made, and detecting the signals with which the doctor tried to encourage the woman he loved, and to bid her be of good cheer — the rajah began to count on the doctor’s unwillingness to take the white queen; he made rash raids into the doctor’s entrenchments and decimated the doctor’s slender force. In half an hour the game looked hopeless for the young Englishman. Less than half of the thirty-two living chessmen stood upon the marble squares, and of these barely a third belonged to the doctor. The rajah had the advantage in numbers, in value, and in position.”

“Then how did the doctor get out of it?”

“The rajah’s success overcame his prudence, and he made a first false move. The doctor saw a slight chance, and he studied it out as though it were an ordinary end game or a problem. Suddenly the solution burst upon him. In three swift moves he checkmated the astonished rajah.”

“And saved his own life and hers too?” asked the young lady, with great interest.

“So they were married and lived happily ever afterward. You see my love-story ends as you like them to end.”

“It’s all very well,” said Miss Phyllis, “but the man did everything. I think she ought to have had a chance too.”

It must not be supposed that there had been any break in the continuous courses of Mrs. Martin’s delightful dinner while White was telling the tale of “The Queen of the Living Chessmen.” In fact, he was unable to answer this last remark of Miss Phyllis’s as he was helping himself to a delicious mayonnaise of tomatoes, another specialty of the Duchess’s, who always served it as a self-respecting mayonnaise should be served — in a shallow glass dish imbedded in the cracked ice which filled a deeper dish of silver. So the young lady had a chance to continue.

“I do not object to the bloodshed and murder and horrors in your story, of course. I don’t mean that I like horrors, as some girls do, but I am not squeamish about them. What I don’t like is your heroine; she doesn’t do anything.”

“She is loved,” answered the author; “is not that sufficient?”

“You say she is loved, but how do I know that she loves back? I have only your word for it; and you are a man, and so, of course, you may be mistaken in such matters.”

“What more could I do to convince you of her affection for her lover?”

“You needn’t do anything, but you ought to have let her do something. I don’t know what, but I feel she ought to have done a deed of some sort, something grand, heroic, noble, — something to make my blood run cold with the intensity of my admiration! I’d like to see her sacrifice her life for the man she loves.”

“You want a Jeanne d’Arc for a heroine?”

“Rather a Mary Queen of Scots, eager to love and to be loved, and ready to do and to die — a woman with an active spirit, and not a mere passive doll, like the weak girl your doctor married.”

Robert White remarked that her slight excitement had heightened her color and that the flush was very becoming to her.

“We shall have to go back,” he said, “to the days of Rebecca and Rowena, if you insist on having lissome maidens and burly warriors, hurtling arrows and glinting armor, the flash of scarlet and the blare of the trumpet.”

“I don’t think so,” she retorted; “there is heroism in modern life, and in plenty too, though it goes about gravely and in sad-colored garments. And besides,” she added, changing the subject with feminine readiness, “you tell us only about the peril they were in, and nothing at all about their love-making. Now, that’s the part I like best. I just delight in a good love-scene. I used to wade through Trollope’s interminable serials just for the sake of the proposals.”

“It is never too early to mend. I will take your advice, and work up the love interest more. I will show how it was that the young English beauty who was ‘The Queen of the Living Chessmen’ came in time and by slow degrees to confess that the young doctor was the king of her heart.”

“Then I will read it with even more pleasure.”

“But, do you know,” he continued, dropping his mock-heroic intonation, “that it is not easy to shoot Cupid on the wing? Indeed, it is very difficult to write about love-making.”

“From lack of experience?” inquired Miss Phyllis mischievously.

“Precisely so. Now, how does a man propose?” asked White innocently.

The flush of excitement had faded before this, but suddenly a rich blush mantled her face and neck. For a second she hesitated; then she looked up at White frankly, and said, “Don’t you know?”

Under her direct gaze it was his turn to flush up, and he colored to the roots of his hair.

“Pray forgive me if I have seemed personal,” he said, “but I had supposed a young lady’s opportunities for observation were so many more than a man’s, that I hoped you might be willing to help me.”

“I think that perhaps you are right,” she replied calmly, “and that ‘The Queen of the Living Chessmen’ will be interesting enough without any love-passages.”

“But I have other stories,” he rejoined eagerly; “there is one in particular, — it is a love-story, simply a love-story.”

“That will be very nice indeed,” she said seriously, and as though her mind had been recalled suddenly. “I am going to call it ‘Love at First Sight.’ You believe in love at first sight, don’t you?”

Again the quick blush crimsoned her face. “I — I don’t quite know,” she answered.

“I thought all young ladies maintained as an article of faith, without which there could be no salvation, that love at first sight was the only genuine love?”

“I do not know what other girls may think,” said Miss Phyllis, with cold dignity, “but I have no such foolish ideas!”

White was about to continue the conversation, and to ask her for such hints as she might be able to afford him toward the writing of “Love at First Sight,” when the Duchess gave the signal for the departure of the ladies. As Miss Phyllis rose White fancied that he caught a faint sigh of relief, and as he lifted back her chair he wondered whether he had been in any way intrusive. She bowed to him as she passed, with the brilliant smile which was, perhaps, her greatest charm. As she left the room his eyes followed her with strange interest. The heavy curtain fell behind the portly back of the Duchess, and the gentlemen were left to their coffee and to their cigars; but Mat Hitchcock took the chair next to White’s, and began at once to talk about himself in his usual effusive manner. The aroma of the coffee and the flavor of his cigar were thus quite spoiled for White, who seized the first opportunity to escape from Hitch cock and to join the ladies. As he entered the spacious parlor Hitchcock captured him again, and although White was able to mitigate the infliction by including two or three other guests in the conversation, it was not until the party began to break up that he could altogether shake off the incubus. Then he saw Miss Phyllis just gliding out of the door, after having bade the Duchess a fond farewell. Robert White crossed over to Mrs. Martin at once.

“I have to thank you for a very delightful evening,” he began. “The dinner was a poem, — if you will excuse the brutality of the compliment, — and the company were worthy of it — with one unworthy exception, of course.”

“Oh, Mr. White, you flatter me,” said the pleased Duchess.

“Indeed, I do not. Very rarely have I heard such clever talk—”

“Yes,” interrupted Mrs. Martin. “I do like the society of intellectual people.”

“And,” continued White, “I quite lost my heart to the very pretty girl I took in to dinner.”

“Isn’t she charming?” asked Mrs. Martin enthusiastically. “I think she is the nicest girl in New York.”

“By the way — do you know, I did not quite catch her name—”

“Hadn’t you ever met her before? Why, she is the daughter of old Judge Van Rensselaer. You must have heard me talk of Baby Van Rensselaer, as I always call her? She’s engaged to Delancey Jones, you know. It’s just out. She didn’t like him at first, I believe, and she refused him. But he offered himself again just after we all got back from Europe this fall, and now she’s desperately in love with him. Dear Jones would have been here tonight, of course, but he’s in Boston building a flat, so I put you in his seat at table. You know dear Jones, don’t you?”

And the Duchess paused for a reply.

“Mr. Jones is a cousin of Miss Sargent’s, I think—” began White.

“Of Miss Dorothy Sargent? Of course he is. Sam Sargent married his mother’s sister. Dorothy’s a dear, good girl, isn’t she? Do you know her?”

At last White had his chance.

“She is a great friend of mine,” he said, blushing slightly; “in fact, although it is not yet announced generally, I do not mind telling you, Mrs. Martin, that she’s engaged to be married.”

“Dorothy Sargent engaged to be married?” cried the Duchess, delighted at a bit of matrimonial news. “And to whom?”

“To me,” said Robert White.

The Century Magazine, Oct. 1885

ESTHER FEVEREL

About a mile beyond the straggling outskirts of a New England village once as young and energetic as any in the land, but today so old and exhausted that it seems to have sunk into restful sleep, there stands a house built of dull gray stone, and bearing bravely still the onslaught of the New England winters it has withstood for now nearly two centuries. This house, beginning at last to bear witness to the wear of time, is one of the oldest in America; it is one of the few buildings of the seventeenth century which survive to this last quarter of the nineteenth. To us who live in an age of rush and glitter the appearance of the house is in no wise remarkable except for its evident antiquity; nor should we turn aside now to consider what the contemporaries of the first owner were wont to call the stately nobility of its proportions. But our eyes are not the eyes of the early colonists of New England, and the stone house which Judge Feverel built was long a wonder for miles around. More than one fast-day sermon had been directed against its magnificence, which seemed out of place amid the humble beginnings of the growing colony. There yet lingered a tradition that the house had once been called “The Judge’s Folly.” But the nickname had died away long ago as the magnificence of the house had faded. And as time, unhasting and unresting, sped slowly, the house of the stern and fiery Roger Feverel had fallen from grace, and the fortunes of the elder branch of the Feverels were fallen with it.

As the late November sun sent its declining rays across the low western hills, and gilded the substantial chimney which rose above the slant roof of the house which Judge Feverel had built, a man on horseback drew rein before the door. He looked at the house like one who had never seen it before; but his face lighted up at once with a glance of recognition and a smile of satisfaction that he had come to the end of his travels at last, and reached a haven of rest. He sprang from his horse, which he tethered to a post at the edge of the path. He was a handsome young fellow — for young he was yet, in spite of his having already accomplished half of a man’s allotted span of life. He had dark wavy hair, quick black eyes, and a frank face, on which there might be seen at times a dreamy look. His walk indicated a resolute self-reliance, and he passed up the unfamiliar path as though he had a right to be there.

As he stood on the low step before the door of the house, after ringing the bell, he turned to look at the little garden which surrounded the house, and at the few scant fields which were attached to it; then he raised his head with a little touch of pride as he recalled the time when the owner of the house was the owner also of the land for a mile or more on every side of it. One by one these broad acres had slipped from the loose hands of the Feverels, and generation after generation the Feverels had become poorer and poorer, as though there had been a curse on them and on their house.

“On this house there may be a curse, and there is reason for it,” thought John Feverel, as he stood for the first time at the door of the home of the Feverels; “but the curse, if curse there be, is on this house only, and not on the Feverels at large. It is on them, perhaps, who remain here and keep up the flame of hatred, but it is not on those who have gone forth into the world. There was no curse on my grandfather when he. the younger son, went out from here and prospered, while the elder son remained here and saw his substance shrivel up. There was no curse on my father, who made his way in the world with out hindrance from ill fortune. There is no curse on me as yet. Standing here on the threshold of the house of the Feverels, I can look back over my past with pleasure, for I have been happier than most men, and I can look forward to the future with hope.”

Receiving no answer to his repeated ring. John Feverel rapped sharply on the panel of the door. Under the force of the blow, the door opened silently, and disclosed abroad hall, at the farther end of which, facing the entrance, there was a large fireplace, where a few sticks of wood were burning brightly. The visitor stood for a moment on the doorstep, as though awaiting an invitation to enter. Then he walked into the house and looked about him. The hall was spacious, old-fashioned, quaint. The woodwork had reached a stage of decay when care could no longer conceal the marks of age and use. Everything was clean and worn-out. The tidiness and neatness, the nosegay of fresh flowers in a vase by a window, the little touches of color elsewhere, revealed a woman’s hand. Yet the house seemed to be empty. There was no one to welcome John Feverel to the home of his ancestors.

“Uncle Timothy!” he called. “Cousin Esther!” But there came no answer. The house was as deserted as it was desolate. From its stillness it might be a habitation of the dead, where no one dwelt but the ghosts of the past.

He called again, and again he received no reply.

Neither of his kinsfolk was at home to greet him. And yet it was to see them almost as much as to take possession of the property that he had cut short his travels and crossed the ocean in haste.

John Feverel was the grandson of a John Feverel who left this Eastern home of the family to seek his fortune in the West. In this undertaking he had prospered as no Feverel before him had prospered since the fire had first smoked on the hearth of “The Judge’s Folly.” He worked and made money; he married and saw his children grow up about him; and in his old age he rested in peace before he died happily. His son, John Feverel again, made yet another move to the West, and he prospered as his father had prospered. When he died he left to his only son, the John Feverel who now stood in the hall of the house built by Roger Feverel nearly two hundred years ago, three good things: a brave heart, a keen head, and a modest fortune. To these John Feverel added a quality of his own, an inquiring mind ever athirst for knowledge. He put his wits to work and did not cease from labor until he had doubled the fortune left him by his father. Although he was then barely thirty-five years of age, and although he saw before him the prospect of great riches, he gave up his business and rested satisfied with the comfortable competence he had attained. He felt that he had a more important work in life than the mere making of money. Just what this future work might be he did not know, but he was ready to undertake whatever seemed to him fit and worthy. In the mean while he set about improving himself by travel. He had more than his share of that mysticism of the West which matches so curiously with the occult temperament of the Orient. Even as a boy he bad become an adept in the cabalistic secrets of the Rosicrucians. As a man he traveled throughout the East, seeking to sate his desire to gaze on strange things, and to penetrate the obscure mysteries of strange people. He had sought to discover the means whereby the wonder-workers of the East wrought their miracles. He was learned in the lore of the alchemists, and he had traversed Arabia in search of the surviving repositories of their recondite wisdom. To all that he saw he applied his shrewd common-sense. The results of his experiment and investigation he kept to himself; but he walked among men as one who has peered deep into the enigmas of life and pondered upon them long and earnestly.

It may be that, for a little space, he stood in danger of sinking into the lethargy of Buddhistic contemplation. He was far up in the Himalayas when he received a letter which suddenly recalled him to a sharp self-consciousness. It was from Esther Feverel, the only daughter of Timothy Feverel, the last survivor of the elder branch of the old Judge’s family. It told him in few and simple words that her fathers affairs were hopelessly involved, and that a mortgage on the old house was about to be foreclosed; and it suggested that perhaps he might like to buy it, so that the house should still be owned by a Feverel. John Feverel had never seen any of his New England relatives. and he had given them little thought; but with the old house, with the strange story of its building, and with the legends which clustered about its hearth, he was perfectly familiar. He had sat by his grandfather’s knee, night after night — during the festival reunions which brought together the various members of the Western branch of the family — and he had treasured up every word which fell from his grandfather’s lips, when he told of “The Judge’s Folly,” and of the fire on its hearth, and of the ill fortune which followed the house and its inmates. To have the house pass into his possession was a boon he had not dared to hope for. The letter which informed him that its purchase was possible was written in the name of Timothy Feverel, but the hand was the hand of his daughter. John Feverel had studied chirography as he had studied whatever else might serve to increase his knowledge of men. He was wont to read character by handwriting with a success often startling to himself. The symbols of character he deciphered in the sincere handwriting of Esther Feverel made him wish to meet her and know more of her. He wrote to her at once, venturing to call her cousin, and telling her that he had given orders to have the place bought for him whenever the mortgagee saw fit to foreclose. Furthermore, assuming the liberty of a kinsman, he begged that she and her father would continue to live in the house as before, taking care of it for him, against the time when he should return to America.

A few months later, when he had begun to be weary of his years of wandering in search of the unknowable, he had received another letter from Esther, letting him know that the sale had taken place, and that the house was his, and thanking him for the kindness extended to her father and herself — a kindness of which they would gladly avail themselves until his return. So gentle was this letter, so sweet in its maidenly modesty, so frank and womanly was it, so charming was the character revealed by its chirography, that it wrought a change in John Feverel’s views of life. He abandoned a daring trip to the chief temples of China, and made his way back to America.

Now, as he stood for the first time in the home of the Feverels, he had a sharp feeling of disappointment that Esther was not there to bid him welcome. Before he had paced the hall half a dozen times, this feeling gave way, and he began even to be glad that he was alone, and that his first impressions of the old house might be pure of all admixture of the opinions of another, even were that other his cousin Esther. So accurate had been his grandfather’s description, and so retentive had been his own memory, that he felt at home in the house as soon as he entered the door. He gazed from the windows, and the view was to him as though he had seen it before in some former existence. The tall clock on the stairs looked down on him as benignantly as it had looked down on the other children of the family in the two centuries since it first began to measure eternity into time. The mirror over the mantelpiece at the end of the hall reflected his image as it had reflected the image of eight generations of Feverels since the old Judge set it against the chimney. The ancient chair before the fire extended its arms as hospitably to him as it had to his great-grandfather, the last of his line who had sat in it. On John Feverel these things had a strange effect; he felt as though he had come home at last — and for the first time.

As he sat himself down in the chair before the fire and glanced up at the mirror, he saw an expression on his face he had never known there before. He had a strange presentiment that he was at the turning-point of his career. It was as though he were halting at the threshold of a new life, pausing for a moment to look back across the past, and yet regarding the future hopefully. He lowered his eyes, and they fell on the date carven deep into the heavy timbers of the mantel-piece — 1692. For nearly two hundred years had the fire been alight on that hearth day and night, winter and summer, year after year. There the flame had burned and smouldered and blazed since the Judge, in his fanaticism and wrath, had brought home a brand from the burning of a poor wretch whom he had sentenced to death for dealings with the devil. On that hearth, beneath the faded tiles, whereon were depicted Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, Sisera and Jael, and other characters in Biblical scenes of bloodshed, the fire had never ceased rising and falling since Roger Feverel had kindled it for the first time with a brand from the burning, that it might be an enduring witness to his righteousness, and that it should be ready at all times in the future to fire the torch whenever the same awful vengeance might need to be taken once again. Roger Feverel was dead and buried, and the hatreds and the beliefs and the heresies of his time were dead and buried also, but the fire he kindled was still smoking on his hearth. Roger Feverel’s son and his grandson and his great-grandson had passed away, one after another; but the fire that the founder of the family had lighted when he built the house lived on, and was as young as ever. Generation followed generation to the grave, but the fire of intolerance still burned on its altar as though Roger Feverel had made a covenant with his descendants that they should feed the flame forever. So strongly had the traditions of the family seized John Feverel that he bent forward and laid across the embers two pieces from the piles of cut wood ready to his hand on either side of the fireplace.

As he lay back again in the chair he saw in the mirror the reflection of his smile, for he was half conscious that his humorous skepticism mated ill with the fanatic intolerance of the old Judge who had set light to that fire. He wondered whether Roger Feverel had also looked into the mirror as he heaped fuel upon the flame. No doubt the Judge had seen the look on his own dark face, though he knew not how to read its meaning. The glass had hung there since the fire first flamed. In it had been reflected the life history of the Feverels. Across the surface of that frail glass had passed the image of the pride and the joys and the sorrows of Roger Feverel and of his descendants. It had seen their youth and their old age; it had seen their sufferings, and it may be their death. It had been a silent witness to their prosperity, and, after many years, to their poverty, but never to their disgrace or their shame, for they always held their heads high, and their poverty was never tarnished with dishonor.

As John Feverel sat in the chair before the fire and gazed up into the mirror he thought of these things, and he wished that these scenes might be evoked from the past, and shown again in the glass wherein they had been reflected as they happened. He wondered what the Judge would have thought of the magic mirrors of Japan, in which a vanished scene may be made to reappear. Surely the Judge would have seen nothing strange in the tale, but he would have been prompt to punish any man who should make use of such a device of the devil.

John Feverel recalled the temple on the flanks of Fusiyama wherein the Japanese priests preserved jealously the most potent of these magic mirrors. It was in this temple that — by one of those curious reproductions in strange countries of the rites and mysteries of ancient civilization — a perpetual fire was cherished on the altar, guarded night and day, as the virgins of Roma kept up the sacred flame of Vesta. When a certain mysteriously compounded preparation was thrown upon this fire, a dense smoke arose and veiled the magic mirror, which hung just above the altar. and it was through the dim haze of this smoke that the pictures of the past became visible in the glass.

Suddenly John Feverel sprang to his feet. It had struck him that here in “The Judge’s Folly” in New England there was an ever-burning fire beneath a mirror, just as there was in the Japanese temple on the side of Fusiyama. And at the same tune he remembered that he had begged and bribed a priest of the temple to give him a portion of the preparation thrown upon the fire beneath the magic mirror. With infinite precaution the priest had confided it to him. encased in a tiny silver ball, the surface of which was curiously wrought with a mystic device. This ball, the contents of which he had intended to submit to chemical analysis whenever occasion served, he had worn ever since attached to his watch chain as a charm. As he thought of it his fingers closed upon it, and the worn links of the chain parted and left the ball in his hand. It was as though the inanimate tiling had whispered to him that the time had come when it could be of use.

Obeying an impulse which he felt to be well-nigh irresistible, John Feverel drew forward the scattered fragments of the fire which had burned on that hearth for nearly twice a hundred years. Then, with a single turn of his wrist, he twisted apart the silver hemispheres which contained the magical compound of the Japanese temple. A white powder fell from them upon the glowing embers, a pungent aroma filled the air, and a thick smoke arose, veiling the mirror from view. As the cool evening breeze, playing through the open door, caused the cloud of smoke to waver and shift from side to side, John Feverel, reclining in the chair before the fire, felt as one looking through a glass darkly. Figures, dim and indistinct, seemed to be visible in the mirror, into which he peered resolutely, calling up the past with the whole force of his will. He sat motionless, and gave himself up to the spell. His whole being was attuned in harmony with the moment. Whether it was memory, or imagination aided by memory, or whether the charm had veritably some occult potency, mattered little.

As he gazed into the mirror through the circling smoke which rose steadily from the fire beneath he saw visions, and in time they took form and color. Some scenes stood out more vividly than others, to John Feverel’s delight, for he soon found that he saw more clearly what he was most familiar with, and what he most wished to see, as though the mirror responded to some secret sympathy of his soul. He beheld the three sons of the house of Feverel, the brothers of Esther, dead before she was born, boys all three of them, but manly and full of spirit; he saw them come to bid farewell to their mother, as they went forth, clad in dark blue, musket on shoulder, on the long march which should end only with their death, one on the plains of Virginia, and one in the bayous of Louisiana, and one on the hill at Gettysburg; and the shot which killed this last readied the heart of the mother, and was fatal, though she lingered long enough to clasp her little daughter in her arms before she followed her boys across the dark threshold of death.

Then a thick cloud of smoke rolled across the mirror, as though a volley had been fired over their graves, and as this drifted away, John Feverel, looking fixedly in the glass, saw the open door of the house, and a little maid went forth and gave a glass of water to a courtly old gentleman, who remained uncovered before her while he quenched his thirst. He knew that the little maid was his grandfather’s sister, and he recognized the courtly old gentleman as one who had come to bring us help in time of direst need, and who was, many years later, on a visit to America as the guest of the nation.

As this pleasant vision faded away softly and was resolved into nothing, there fell upon the ear of the man who was peering into the mirror, with all his faculties at their utmost tension — there fell upon his ear as it had been a rattle of drums, and he saw a company of redcoats drawn up before the house, and on the doorstep, confronting them sturdily, while she patted the babe at her breast, stood the beautiful Rachel Feverel, wife of Colonel Francis Feverel, parleying with the captain of the British troops, and bandying words with him pertly, that he might delay, all to give the Continentals time to rally and return and cut them off.

While he looked the scene changed, and the rattle of drums was drowned by shrieks and shrill yells like the cries of wild beasts. The door was closed and barred, and defended by half a score of strong men. The staunch shutters of the windows were firmly fastened, and men were firing through the loop-holes. Fiery-headed arrows fell against the door now and again, and were extinguished just as they were about to fire the house. But though the painted Indians encompassed them on every side, and escape was impossible, and death was waiting for them, and a fate worse than death, the women of the family were not craven; some of them were loading the muskets, every shot from which hit the living mark it was aimed at; and some were gathered in a group about the fire, melting lead from the roof and running it into bullet-molds. A little of the water into which the hot bullets were dropped fell upon the roaring logs on the hearth, and the white steam rushed up and bedimmed the mirror so that John Feverel could see nothing more for a long while.

At last the steam and the smoke parted again and left the glass clear. The hall was silent and deserted; and Roger Feverel paced slowly and thoughtfully up and down, from the hearth he had lighted with a brand from the burning he had de creed, to the door which shut out the glory of the summer sun. Judge Feverel was not an old man even then, though he had aged since the day when he had done his duty at Hadley fight, by the side and under the orders of the gray warrior who came forth mysteriously to lead the colonists to victory, and who was recognized as Goffe, the regicide. As he strode up and down the hall of “The Judge’s Folly” he did not note a light footstep upon the stair, and he did not see a slight and graceful girlish figure, until his daughter stole her arm in his as he turned on his heel near the door. When Roger Feverel felt her gentle touch, his hard face softened, and he gave her a look of deep affection mingled with solicitude. John Feverel recalled the family tradition of the Judge’s daughter, who began to sicken and fade as soon as she set foot in the house her father had built; she was his favorite of all his children, in so far at least as his stern justice allowed him to make any distinction between them. As she leaned on her father’s arm she seemed so fragile that a puff of the winter breeze would blow her away, and it was true that she did not live out the first December in the new house. She turned with her father and drew near the fire, and for the first time her face became visible to John Feverel. He looked at her with surprise, for he recognized her — at least he had a vague feeling that he had beheld her face be fore. The beautiful mouth, the tender eyes, the delicate wave of the hair drawn tightly back, were familiar to him, like a face seen in a dream. There came a sudden thickening of the misty vapor which enwrapped the mirror, and for a moment he seemed to see her image upon this unsubstantial curtain; and then he remembered where it was that he had first be held the face of the Judge’s daughter, and he knew it was the face of his promised bride.

A year before, John Feverel had been in Egypt, and one day he had joined a little party who wished to view the Sphinx by night. After the pale green sunset had died away, and the ruddy after-glow had followed it swiftly, and the short twilight had given place to the darkness of night, the party sat around a fire before the house where they were to sleep. While John Feverel was lying on the sand, under the shadow of the Sphinx, musing on the riddle of life, he was suddenly awakened to the emptiness of existence by the arrival of a little band of strolling performers, one of whom, apparently a Hindu, and a man of unusual skill and presence, performed the customary wonders of the itinerant magician. A dragoman hinted to one of the party that this Hindu had great powers, and that he had been known to reveal to a man the portrait of his future bride. John Feverel, who had drawn on one side, took no part in the clamorous outcry of his fellow-travelers for an immediate exhibition of his peculiar power, and he was much surprised when the Hindu turned to him gravely and offered to work the wonder for him, and for him alone. With his keen interest in thaumaturgy, Feverel accepted the offer. The Hindu made two smaller fires equidistant from that around which the travelers sat, and at each he stationed one of the two boys who served as his assistants. Then the Hindu looked into John Feverel’s hand and studied its lines for a moment. Producing a package of some strange Oriental incense, he bade Feverel cast a handful of it on the fire. As he obeyed, a thick column of smoke shot into the air, and in the center of this column he saw a woman’s face. It was the same face he was to see again in the mirror.

It was a face he could now nevermore forget. It had been revealed to him twice in a vision, once in a column of smoke in Egypt, and once again in a mirror here in New England. He wondered if he was never to behold her in more tangible reality, and to meet her face to face in actual life, where he might take her by the hand and bid her mark the beatings of his heart, and ask her to share his life through good fortune and ill.

He sat silently and long, dreaming and musing. When he aroused himself at last, the rising smoke was now only a thin thread, and the fire had shriveled to a few scant embers. He had a suspicion that there was some ingredient in the Japanese preparation he had sprinkled over the flames which had sufficed to quench them finally. For the first time in the two centuries since Roger Feverel had lighted the fire on that hearth it burned low, and although it yet lingered and might be resuscitated by effort, it was well-nigh dead. Through the open door the slant rays of the setting sun entered the hall and bathed it in an immaterial glory.

John Feverel raised his eyes again to the mirror to see if haply he might gain another glimpse of the face which had moved him so strangely. The glass was no longer wreathed in vapor, and yet again it reflected the same face, not dimly now, nor indistinct, not as a phantom, intangible and tantalizing, but alive, and with the smile of life and health and youth. Then he heard a light footfall, and he sprang to his feet and stood before the woman of his vision. And she stood before him in flesh and blood, this woman whom he had seen only in the mirror of the past. Mouth and eyes and hair and the beauty of which these were symbols were to him unmistakable. Even her dress in its simplicity recalled that of Roger Feverel’s daughter. The beauty which in the evanescent visions had been vague and fleeting was in life beyond all question. It was the beauty of New England, and it dwelt as much in delicacy of color as in the regularity of outline. It was beauty not only of face, but also of figure, as firm in fact as it seemed fragile. But perhaps the chief charm lay in the eyes, dreamy yet noble, full of frankness and candor. John Feverel stood before her entranced, or rather as one awakened from reverie to a delightful reality.

As she came toward him, with a brilliant smile of welcome, she held out her hand.

“It is Cousin John, I am sure,” she said. “Though we did not expect you until to morrow, I know you. The Feverels are a marked race, with our dark eyes and light hair.”

“And you are Esther?” he said.

“Yes, I am Esther,” was her answer.

The voice was the voice of an angel in its sweetness and purity. John Feverel almost hesitated to believe that he was not dreaming still, that he was no longer peering into the mirror in which he had beheld her only a few minutes before.

“I am sorry that we were not here to welcome you this afternoon, but my father went into town, and I was away in the orchard, and I did not know you were here until I saw your horse.”

He took the hand she extended to him. and murmured inarticulate acknowledgment. He found few words, though he was wont to be ready. His tongue refused its office, but his love spake from his eyes. Her glance fell, under his steady gaze, and a slight blush crimsoned her cheek. It was as though, having seen her once, he did not wish ever again to lose sight of her, and to be compelled to rely on incantation for her reappearance. She hesitated for a little space, and then she continued: “I hope you will be happy here, as I have been. It is a dear old house, and I have spent my life here, and I love it. But I fear you will not be content with what pleased an ignorant girl, after your wanderings all over the world.”

“What I have seen of the house seems like a glimpse of paradise.”’ he said, when at last he found his voice. “And I should be hard to please if I were to wish to leave it. I am sure that I shall not want to roam again. I shall be content here now,” and to these last words he gave a deep meaning, so that the blush mantled her cheek again. “I have come home to rest by my own fireside.”

As he said this she cast an involuntary glance upon the hearth. Then she sprang forward with feverish haste: “You have let the fire go out,” she said, reproachfully, “and it has been burning here day and night, summer and winter, ever since the house was built.”

John Feverel said nothing, but watched her as she heaped the wood over the scant embers and sought to fan them into a flame. Perhaps it was the fixity of his glance which disturbed her, for she arose sharply and turned to seek a match. The skirt of her dress rested for a second on one of the dying embers, and as she stooped again the flames sprang up and enveloped her.

With the prompt decision of a man used to the facing of emergencies, John Feverel seized the heavy Oriental rug which lay before the hearth. He flung it instantly around the girl, and rolled it tightly, extinguishing the slight flame before it had force even to scorch her fair skin. For a minute he kept her wrapped closely in his arms.

Then, as he relaxed his hold a little, she released herself.

“But you must not let the fire go out,” she said, gently, “even if it did try to burn me.”

He placed her in the chair before the hearth, and he stepped forward and stamped out the last lingering ember, powerless thereafter for good or evil. She watched him with a woman’s acquiescence in the force of a man’s will. When the last spark was quenched, he came to her and took her hand.

“Let the old fire of intolerance and hatred go out,” he said. “For nearly two hundred years its smoke has cast a shadow over the Feverels. I hope for a new light and a purer flame on our hearth;” and he knelt beside her, and her hand rested in his.

Harper’s New Monthly, Dec. 1885

BRIEF —
AS WOMAN’S LOVE

The imperial will of Napoleon III. decreed, and the ruthless hand of Baron Haussmann traced, a broad street to connect the two great monuments of the histrionic art of France — the Comédie Française and the Opéra — and the resulting Avenue de l’Opéra, not finished until long after the Emperor and the Prefect who planned it had fallen from power forever, is now a full artery of finance and of fashion. On the right-hand side of this thoroughfare, as one walks from the home of French comedy to the temple of French music, and not far from the Rue de la Paix, there is a restaurant called the Café de Paris; and here in a private room, one afternoon early in June, were gathered three Americans, just about to begin their lunch. They had fallen into the French habit of getting through the morning with no other nourishment than a roll and a cup of coffee, so that they were wont to find themselves ready for a more ample midday breakfast shortly after twelve. The low ceiling of the entresol seemed to make the room in which they sat smaller than it was in reality; but there was ample space for the fourth member of the party, for whom they were then waiting. The melon was on the table, and the sole à la Mornay — a specialty of the Café de Paris — had been ordered, but still Dr. Cheever did not come.

Mr. Laurence Laughton crossed over to the window by Mrs. Rudolph Vernon. “I hope you are not very hungry?” he said.

“But I am,” she answered; “I am famished.”

“So am I,” added her husband.

“Your conduct is unreasonable, and your feelings are reprehensible,” retorted Mr. Laughton. “As a lady, Mrs. Vernon has no right to an appetite; and as a poet, Mr. Vernon should scorn the gross joys of the table.”

“The idea!” answered Mrs. Vernon. “Just as if a woman could live on air! Why, Uncle Larry, I am hungry enough to eat you.”

Uncle Larry arose quietly, and slyly put the table between himself and the young lady who had thus proclaimed her cannibalistic capacity. But this movement brought him close to her husband, who seized the opportunity.

“I say, Laughton,” he began, “it is all very well to be a poet, but I am a practical man too, and as a practical man I am simply starving.”

“Well,” said Uncle Larry, “you will enjoy that sole à la Mornay all the more. If it is as good now as it was last year, it is a poem, and it is worthy to be embalmed in verse. I believe that is the phrase they use, isn’t it?”

“And it’s a disgusting expression too, I say,” interposed Mrs. Vernon. “I don’t like to think of Rudolph as an undertaker. It’s bad enough to have a doctor for a brother.”

“By-the-way, my dear,” interrupted her husband, “are you sure that you told the doctor to meet us here?”

“Of course I am,” she answered. “He went to the banker’s for letters from home while I was putting on my hat to go out, and he sent back a message to say that he had business, and couldn’t go to the Salon with us, and I told the messenger to tell him to meet us here to lunch at one o’clock.”

“And it is now nearly half past,” said Rudolph Vernon, looking at his watch.

“Suppose we don’t wait for him?” suggested Mrs. Vernon. “You know, Rudolph, that if you go without food it upsets you dreadfully.”

“Well,” said Uncle Larry, “I confess I heard the dumb dinner-bell of hunger some time ago.”

“Dumb dinner-bell of hunger?” repeated the poet, thoughtfully. “It is a neat figure, but scarcely sufficiently dignified for use — except, perhaps, in comic verse.”

“I should think you would find the pictures in the Salon very valuable to you,” ventured Uncle Larry. “And it is a pity that the doctor did not get there this morning. Some of the paintings might have been useful to him — as studies in anatomy.”

“They were very indelicate, I thought,” said Mrs. Vernon.

“But I get ideas from them,” continued her poet-husband. “I took notes for two first-rate sonnets.”

“I saw one picture which suggested a poem to me,” remarked Uncle Larry, with a quiet smile.

“Indeed?” queried Mr. Rudolph Vernon.

“It was one of Henner’s, and it was just like all the other Henners I ever saw. It represented a young lady — before the bath. And it seemed to me a perfect illustration of the nursery rhyme:

“‘Oh, mother, may I go in and swim?’

‘Oh yes, my darling daughter:

Just hang your clothes on a hickory limb,

And do not go near the water.’”

“How absurd!” laughed Mrs. Vernon.

“Well,” said Uncle Larry, “it may be absurd, but it is singularly exact. Henner’s nymphs have always hung their clothes up, but they never are in the water. Now I believe that—”

But Uncle Larry’s artistic creed was cut short by the entrance of Dr. Cheever.

“I hope you have not waited for me?” he began, in a deep, grave voice befitting a physician of his wisdom and reputation.

“But we have!” cried his sister. “What ever did keep you so long?”

“I was called out unexpectedly,” he answered, quietly, “and the case proved more important than I had supposed.” Something in his manner warned his sister not to press him further with questions.

“Now you are here,” said Uncle Larry, “we will proceed with our breakfast-at-the-fork, as the French call it.”

“Do you think melon is wholesome to begin a meal with?” asked Vernon.

“Why not?” answered the doctor. “The French eat it then, and they are not as dyspeptic as we are.”

“The French don’t eat pie!” said Uncle Larry, laconically. “We do. In fact, I have sometimes thought that the typical American might be defined as a traveling interrogation mark with the dyspepsia.”

“I wonder,” remarked the doctor, as the waiter removed the melon and brought in the sole à la Mornay — “I wonder that nobody has ever attempted to explain Hamlet by the suggestion that the young Prince Hamlet has acute chronic dyspepsia.”

“By-the-way, Uncle Larry,” asked Mrs. Vernon, “you never told me how you liked Hamlet at the Opera last night?”

“Well,” said Uncle Larry, “a Hamlet who is a Frenchman and who sings, is to me the abomination of desolation. But it is such a great play that even French singing can not spoil it.”

“The construction of the last act is very feeble.” remarked the professional poet, critically.

“Very violent, you mean,” suggested his wife.

“In art, violence is feebleness. And the fifth act of Hamlet is the acme of turbulent muddle.”

Uncle Larry and Dr. Cheever exchanged quick glances as Vernon continued:

“I do not deny that it is a great play, a prophetic play even, and deeply philosophical. Indeed, nowhere is the Weltschmerz and the Zeitgeist more plainly voiced than in Hamlet; but, for all that, the construction of the last act is grossly inartistic.”

“The idea of Ophelia’s singing as she floats down the river is absurd,” said Mrs. Vernon, supporting her husband and remembering more accurately the opera of M. Ambroise Thomas than the tragedy of William Shakespeare.

“People talk about Shakespeare’s greatness,” continued Rudolph Vernon, “and he was great; but look at the chance he had. He came in the nick of time, when men and women had passions, and before all the words were worn out. I’d like to see what Shakespeare would do now, when men and women have milk in their veins instead of blood, and when nearly all the fine words in the language are second hand.”

“You do not believe in a modern Hamlet, then?” asked Dr. Cheever.

“No; nor in a modern Ophelia. Women do not go mad and drown themselves nowadays. If they are jilted by Hamlet, they marry Guildenstern or Rosencrantz, or, better yet, young Fortinbras.”

“Oh, Rudolph, how can you be so unjust!” was his wife’s protest. “I am sure that women love with as much passion and self-sacrifice as ever. Why, at Madame Parlier’s Institute for Young Ladies I knew two or three girls quite capable of loving as Juliet did and of dying like Juliet.”

“You are fortunate in your acquaintance,” answered her husband, “more fortunate by far than I, for I do not know any Romeo.”

“Man’s love today has more common-sense,” Dr. Cheever suggested. “Exactly, more common-sense, and therefore less passion, and a smaller possibility of tragedy. Shakespeare had the inside track, and it is no use for us modern poets to hope to equal him.”

“I like to think about the fatality of love, and I hate to hear you say that there are no Romeos in our time,” said Mrs. Vernon. “It seems to take the romance out of life.”

“But there isn’t any romance in life any longer,” rejoined her husband; “that’s my contention. We have and we can have no Hamlet, no Ophelia, no Juliet — especially no Romeo.”

Uncle Larry laughed, and suggested: “You think a modern lover more likely to take pepsin pills than a deadly poison.”

“I do indeed,” was the poet’s answer. “Man now thinks more of his stomach than of his heart, and where is the poetry in indigestion, I’d like to know?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Uncle Larry, as the smile faded from his face. “I believe in the fatality of love even in the nineteenth century. I have seen one man in love with a passion as profound as any Romeo’s, and his end was as tragic.”

“Then he was a man born out of time,” urged Rudolph Vernon.

“That may be,” answered Uncle Larry. “He was a man born to sorrow, and yet he had the happiest nature and the largest heart of any man I ever knew.”

“Is he dead?” asked Mrs. Vernon, with a woman’s sympathy. “When did he die?”

“It is nearly two years since I read the sudden news of his death one summer afternoon. It is two years, and yet he has been in my mind all the morning. It may be because I found his last letter to me yesterday in my portfolio, and I had to read it again. So today I seem to see his pale handsome face and his bright dark eyes. He had the nobility of soul which makes the true hero of tragedy.”

“But there is no tragedy today, as there is no comedy,” argued Rudolph Vernon. “Instead, we have only la tragédie bourgeoise and la comédie larmoyante.”

“I do not think you would say that if you knew his story — the story of his heart and the cause of its breaking,” replied Laurence Laughton. “To me that is as tragic as anything that ever happened.”

“I do not doubt that,” retorted Vernon, hastily. “The story of your friend’s broken heart may be as tragic as anything that ever happened; but in real life little or nothing happens in the way it ought to happen artistically.”

“That was Balzac’s theory,” said Dr. Cheever, in his deep voice.

“You remind one of the French painter Boucher, was it, or Watteau, who complained that nature put him out,” said Uncle Larry.

“Balzac’s or Boucher’s, the theory is sound for all that,” contended the poet. “In real life we have only the raw material, and it is crude and harsh, and it has no beginning and no end — in an artistic sense, I mean. It is wholly lacking in symmetry and proportion. And as modern real life is nearest to us, it is the least artistic and the most unfinished.”

“Tell him your story, Mr. Laughton, and confute him on the spot,” suggested the doctor.

“Yes, do tell us, Uncle Larry,” said Mrs. Vernon; “and then, if it really is tragic, you know, why, perhaps Rudolph can use it in a poem after all.”

“I’m open to conviction, of course,”’ admitted Vernon, “and I’d like to hear about your friend’s taking off, but I am free to say that I do not believe it is a rounded and harmonious whole. As I said, in real life we can get of necessity only fragments out of a man’s life, and a cross section of a fragment is not art.”

Laurence Laughton hesitated a moment. The waiter brought in the coffee, and the gentlemen lighted their cigars.

“It seems almost like sacrilege to the dead to tell Ralph Dexter’s story merely to prove a point,” Laughton began, taking a sharp pull at his tiny cigar. “But it will free my mind to tell the tale, and it gives me occasion to speak well of him.

“He was the son of an old friend who had been very kind to me when I was a boy, and I tried to pay to the son the debt of gratitude due to the father. His mother died when he was born, and as an only child his father gave him a double share of love, for himself and for his mother. But when he was only seven years old the battle of Gettysburg was fought, and Lieutenant-Colonel Dexter took command of our regiment after Colonel Delancey Jones had been killed in the first day’s fight. As we pressed forward to repel Pickett’s charge, Dexter fell from his horse, mortally wounded. He took my hand as I bent over him, and said, ‘Take care of Ralph.’ The boy was his last thought, and those were his last words. He had left a will appointing me the boy’s guardian, and I do not believe that ever did guardian and ward get on better together than Ralph and I. He was a bright boy, strong, wholesome, manly — a true boy, as he was to be a true man. He worshiped the memory of his father, and in remembrance of his father’s death he wanted to be a soldier. At a competitive examination he won his appointment to a cadet-ship at West Point. He enjoyed his four years of hard work there, and he was graduated first in his class, going into the Engineers at once as a second lieutenant. Side by side with his enthusiasm for the soldier’s calling lay a strong interest in science, and in getting into the Engineers he had accomplished the utmost of his hopes. He had been a happy boy; he had passed four happy years at West Point; and he began life with the prospect of happiness full before him.”

As Laughton paused to light his cigar, which he had suffered to go out, Mrs. Vernon interjected,

“Why, you said it was to be a tragedy, but it begins like a comedy. I can almost hear wedding bells in the distance.”

“Where is the heroine of your tragedy?” asked Vernon.

“Well,” said Uncle Larry, inhaling a mouthful of smoke, “the heroine is at hand.”

“I’m glad of that,” remarked Mrs. Vernon, soaking a lump of sugar in her coffee-spoon. “I don’t like stories of men only; I want to hear about a woman.”

“I do not think you will like the woman when you hear about her,” answered Laughton.

“Why, was she ugly?” asked the lady.

“No; she was almost the most beautiful woman I ever saw; and I have heard you say that she was beautiful.”

“Why, Uncle Larry, have I ever seen her?” inquired Mrs. Vernon, eagerly. “When was it? and where?”

“You have seen her, but you do not know her,” answered Laughton.

“Oh, how mysterious! Now go on and tell me all about it, and where your friend met her, and what happened.” And Mrs. Vernon lifted her lump of sugar to her lips and settled back on the divan which ran along one wall of the little room.

“Ralph Dexter got leave of absence in the latter part of the summer of 1881, and he came east for a change. Some friends were going to Mount Desert, and he joined them in a trip to that fascinating Summer School of Philosophy. His friends went away after a week, but he staid on. The Duchess of Washington Square — you know Mrs. Martin, of course?” And Laughton paused for an answer.

“Oh dear yes,” laughed Mrs. Vernon. “Everybody knows the Duchess.”

“Then you know that she is a born match-maker?”

“Indeed I do! Why, it was she who introduced Rudolph to me. The dear old soul!” answered Mrs. Vernon.

“Well,” said Uncle Larry, “then you will not be surprised to be told that she seized on Ralph Dexter as soon as he arrived, and insisted on introducing him to the most beautiful girl in Mount Desert.”

“What was her name?” asked Mrs. Vernon, innocently.

“Her name was Sibylla.”

“Sibylla? That does not help me out. I never heard of a Sibylla. Did you?” asked Mrs. Vernon, turning to Dr. Cheever.

“I have met a lady of that name — quite recently,” answered the doctor, and there seemed to be a certain significance in his tone.

“What was she like?” queried the poet.

“I’m not a good hand at an inventory of a woman’s charms, but I’ll do it as well as I can. She was a blonde with dark eyes. Her face was absolutely perfect in its Greek purity and regularity. Her neck and arms were worthy of the hand of Phidias or Praxiteles; and magnificent as she seemed, she had a certain marble statuesqueness which makes the allusion even more exact than it is complimentary. In fact, she was not a woman one could compliment on her looks, for her beauty was of so high an order that all praise seemed inadequate and paltry. I heard Mat Hitchcock once say that she walked like a goddess and danced like an angel.”

“And where did this paragon of perfection come from?” asked Mrs. Vernon, unenthusiastically.

“From a little town in the interior of New York. Her parents were poor, and they had stinted themselves to send her to a fashionable school in New York. Then she had rich relatives, and it was a wealthy aunt who had taken her to Mount Desert.”

“And your friend Ralph Dexter was the Pygmalion who sought to warm this cold beauty into life?” This was the question of the poet.

“Yes,” answered Uncle Larry; “he fell in love with her the instant he laid eyes on her, and to him love was no plaything or pastime; it was a passion to endure till death. After three brief weeks of delight in her presence, Ralph had to go back to his post. He left a throng of other admirers around her, and he had had no chance to tell her of his love. To her, their slight intimacy was nothing more than a summer flirtation; to him, it was a matter of life and death. He returned to his work, thinking that she did not care for him, and he toiled hard to see if he could not forget, or at least forgo her. But it was no use. At Christmas he gave it up, and ran over to New York to see her. She was away in the country, but she came back the last day of the year, and he went to wish her a happy New-Year. Cupid sometimes pays a New-Year’s call, although calling has gone out of fashion in New York; and Ralph Dexter came to me after he left her, with a glow in his face and a look in his eyes which told me he had hope. How handsome he was as he stood in my study, with his hack to the fire, telling me the desire of his heart! What a fine,manly fellow he was! Perhaps she had seen this; perhaps she had caught from him the contagion of emotion; perhaps she had really recognized and respected the depth and the nobility of his nature, and the strength of his passion. The next day he saw her again for a few minutes only, hut they were enough for him to ask her to be his wife, and for her to accept him as her future husband. They agreed that the engagement should not be announced, for he would not be with her again for months, and as an engaged girl she would not have so good a time.”

“Well!” interrupted Mrs. Vernon, “she was frank, at all events.”

“She jilted him, I suppose?” asked Rudolph Vernon.

“She married him,” answered Uncle Larry, calmly.

Dr. Cheever looked up with a glance of surprise and said: “She married him? Sibylla married Ralph? Are you sure?”

“I am quite sure.”

“I did not know that,” replied the doctor, resuming his attitude of silent attention.

“I didn’t know you knew anything at all about it,” said the doctor’s sister. “At least you never told me anything.”

Dr. Cheever smiled gravely and said nothing. Uncle Larry continued:

“Early in the spring Ralph Dexter received an appointment he had long wished. He was detailed to take charge of a special survey of the canons of the Colorado River, a task which would lake him several summers, while his winters would be employed in working up the observations made during the warm weather. He wrote to me that the department would allow him to do this winter work either in Washington or at Newport.”

“I think Newport is just as pleasant in winter as it is in summer,” said Mrs. Vernon.

“Ralph thought so too,” answered Laurence Laughton, “and he knew that Sibylla was fond of Newport — as she was of everything rich and fashionable. Late in the spring he came to New York. He had ten days to make ready for his long summer in the midst of the marvels of the West. He came here with a fixed idea — to get her to marry him before he went away to his work. You see, he loved her so much that his heart sank at the fear of losing her. He trusted her, but he wanted to make sure. All he wished was to have her bound to him firmly. How he got her consent I can not imagine, but I suppose the hot fire of his manly love must have thawed her icy heart. He succeeded somehow or other, and the morning of his last day in New York he came to me and told me that she had promised to slip out with him that afternoon to old Dr. Van Zandt’s to be married quietly at the rectory. No one was to know of this. It was, in fact, to be only a legal confirmation or ratification of their engagement. The wedding, to which all the world would be invited, was fixed for the following December.”

“And so they were married privately?”’ asked Mrs. Vernon.

“Yes. I was standing on my doorstep, basking in the pleasant sunshine of a beautiful afternoon in May, as Ralph Dexter came up the steps, as radiantly happy as ever man was. ‘Uncle Larry,’ said he, as he wrung my hand with a grip of steel, ‘I have been married nearly half an hour.’ ‘Where’s the bride?’ I asked. ‘She has gone home to dress for a swell dinner tonight. I’ve said good-by to her. I shan’t see her again for nearly six months. But I do not mind the parting now, for she is mine — mine by the law and the gospel. Uncle Larry, come to Delmonico’s and dine with me; I’ll treat. Let’s have a wedding feast.’ We had our dinner, and I let him talk about her through the long spring evening, as we walked up and down Fifth Avenue. He poured out his heart to me. There never was a man so happy or so miserable. He had married her, but he had to leave her almost at the steps of the altar. The parting was painful, but he was full of hope and heart, and he trusted her. To hear him talk about her would have made you think that there was only one woman in the whole wide world, and that there never had been her equal. Romeo was not more rhapsodic, nor was Juliet more beautiful than she, though the fair maid of Verona had the advantage of a warm heart, which Sibylla lacked. He told me his dreams and his plans. He had a share in a mine in Colorado, and he was perfecting a new process for reducing ore, a patent for which he expected in a few days. These were in the future. For the present he had his pay and allowances and the income of the little property his mother had left, and these together were enough for them to live on. He had had an unexpected legacy from an uncle, and of this he had said nothing to Sibylla, for he wished to surprise her with the tiny little cottage he meant to buy her in the outskirts of Newport. There they would live together and be happy in the winter; while in the summer, while he was away at his field-work, she was to invite her mother and her sister to bear her company. Now I knew her mother, and I knew she had no heart, but only a hard ambition in the place where the heart ought to be. I thought the less Sibylla had to do with her mother, the better for Ralph’s chance of happiness. But I said nothing. I never had hinted a doubt of the girl, and, in fact, all my doubts had been killed by the wedding. I never even told him he had better make the best showing he could before her. And I have often wondered whether the end would have been different if he had told her of the house at Newport. But I said nothing; I let him talk, and he talked of her, and of her only, until at last I lost sight of him as he stood on the platform of the sleeping-car of the Pacific express. I watched the train out of the station, and I have never seen Ralph Dexter again from that day to this — at least, I think not.”

At this last remark, added in a lower tone, Dr. Cheever shot a quick glance of interest at the speaker. He took his cigar from his mouth as though lie was about to say something, but apparently he thought better of it, and he returned the cigar to his lips silently. It was Rudolph Vernon who spoke: “I can’t say that I see anything tragic in your story yet, or even any elements of a possible tragedy. But go on — say your say out. I will reserve criticism until you have told the tale.”

“Yes, go on, Uncle Larry. What happened?”’ asked Mrs. Vernon.

“For several months nothing happened. I had a letter now and again from Ralph, who was working hard by day and dreaming dreams by night. Private business kept me from spending the summer in Europe. Perhaps it was just as well I was at home, for early in July old Dr. Van Zandt had a stroke, and he never left his bed again. When he died, toward the end of August, there was much to be done to get the affairs of the church in order, and most of this work was put on my shoulders as senior warden. I had been down to the Safe Deposit Vaults one hot day, about the first of September, and I bought the first edition of the Gotham Gazette to read on my way uptown in the elevated. The first telegram which caught my eye announced the death of Ralph Dexter!”

“Poor fellow!” was Mrs. Vernon’s involuntary comment.

“Was it an accident?” asked her brother.

Uncle Larry hesitated a second, and then answered: “All that the telegram told me was the barren fact of his death. It seems he had insisted on scaling the precipitous side of a canyon; before he had ascended more than a few feet he slipped, and fell head-first into the rushing river below, and in a second the current bore him beyond all reach of help. At first I was stunned by the shock. I could not believe that the brave boy I had known since he was a baby had had the life dashed out of him by the cruel waters of the Colorado. Then I suddenly thought of his wife. No one knew of their marriage, or even of their engagement, except me — and I doubted if she were aware of my knowledge. I knew her very slightly; I had felt the charm of her beauty, but I had always chilled as she came near me. I questioned if it were not my duty to break the news to her gently before the cold brutality of a newspaper paragraph told her of her husband’s lonely death. The evening paper would not reach her until the next morning, and if I took the three-o’clock train I could be in Newport in time to meet her that night. She was staying at the Sargents’, and there was to be a ball that very evening. I was always very fond of Sam Sargent’s daughter Dorothy, and she had sent me an invitation. I had accepted, although I had been moved afterward to give up the idea of going. With the Gotham Gazette in my hand I made up my mind that it was my duty to go to Newport and to break the news of Ralph Dexter’s death as best I could to his unsuspecting wife.”

Laurence Laughton paused in the telling of his tale, and threw his little cigar through the open window. He leaned over the table and poured out a tiny glass of brandy. Then he continued:

“Before eleven o’clock that night I was in Newport and at Mr. Sargent’s. I asked for Sibylla, and I was told she was in the ballroom. As Sargent’s house was not large, he had floored over his lawn, and the ballroom was a tent, hung with flowers, and lighted by the electric light hidden behind Japanese umbrellas. As I entered the tent I thought of Ralph Dexter living dead and alone, after a struggle with the angry current of the Colorado, while his wife, for whom he would have given his soul, was dancing the German with a French attaché. After many vain attempts I got speech of her at last. She took my arm, and I wondered if she could hear the thumping of my heart. We walked up and down a dim piazza more fit for the confidences of a lover than for the message I bore. But if I was excited, she was as calm as ever. As delicately as I could I broke the fatal news.”

“How did she take it?” asked Mrs. Vernon.

“She took it coolly. I had thought her cold, but I confess that her placidity astonished me. She never lost command over herself. She showed no feeling whatever. She listened to me quietly, and said: ‘Dear me! what a pity! Such a handsome fellow too! and so promising! You were old friends, were you not? It must be a sad blow to you.’ This reception fairly staggered me. Plainly enough she never suspected that I knew of her engagement and of her marriage. The careless way in which she brushed aside my news and offered her condolence to me was the last thing I had expected. If it was self-control, it was marvelous; if it was acting, there was never better here on the boards of the Comédie Française; if it was hardness of heart, then it was well for Ralph Dexter that his body lay lifeless on the bank of the Colorado. Just then Sam Sargent tame out and joined us. I said nothing, but Sibylla began at once, and told him of Ralph’s death. Sargent is a good-hearted fellow, coarse at bottom, it may be, but he can be sympathetic. He knew I loved Ralph, and he asked me for the details of his death with kindness in his voice. She listened, impassive and stately, as I told Sargent the little I knew. I watched her, but she never even changed color. When I had ended, she said: ‘I liked Mr. Dexter very much. I used to see a good deal of him at Mount Desert last summer — we went rocking together.’ Then she took Sargent’s arm and went into the house, leaving me speechless. Her indifference was appalling, and I did not know what to think.”

“A very remarkable young woman, I must say,” declared Rudolph Vernon.

“That’s just like a man,” said Mrs. Vernon, indignantly. “Do you suppose she wanted to reveal the secrets of her heart to a stranger? Of course she did not. She kept calm before you and the rest of you men, but when she was alone she dropped the mask of composure and cried all night.”

“I might have given her the benefit of the doubt for a little while, at all events, if—”

“If what?” insisted Mrs. Vernon, with a true woman’s instinct of sex defense.

“If I had not met Miss Dorothy Sargent, who came to me in great distress. ‘Oh, Uncle Larry,’ she said, ‘what am I to do? Papa is going to marry again, and he’s old enough to be her father too, for she was at school with me, and I was a class ahead of her, and she wasn’t clever either. I’ve no use for a stepmother younger than I am myself, have I? And don’t you think he’s big enough to know better?’ I was in no mood to talk of marrying and of giving in marriage, but I did ask her whom it was her father proposed to marry.”

“It wasn’t that Sibylla, was it?” asked Mrs. Vernon.

“It was.”

“But she had refused him?”

“She had accepted him.”

“But she was a married woman!”

“No one knew that. And at any rate she had accepted Sam Sargent. Now you know what manner of man Sam Sargent is. He is a Wall Street speculator, a man of a coarse nature, covered with a layer of refinement, a man of exceeding shrewdness, a man who worshiped success how ever attained. He’s here in Paris now; he was in a box opposite us at the Opera last night. Think of a woman’s putting aside Ralph Dexter to take Sam Sargent! She had found out that she wanted wealth and the luxury it gives, and she turned from Ralph to Sargent. She had no strength of character — worse yet, no heart. She was as weak as water, and as treacherous.”

“You don’t mean to tell me that that woman actually contemplated bigamy?” demanded Vernon.

“Well, I don’t know what else to call it,” answered Uncle Larry; “but she did not look on it that way. She thought that her marriage to Ralph was an idle form, known only to the clergyman and to themselves. Dr. Van Zandt was dead. She knew Ralph would not claim her against her will, and she believed that if she destroyed her marriage certificate — the only tangible evidence of her wedding — that she could undo the past and be a free woman.”

“That’s feminine logic with a vengeance,” said Rudolph Vernon.

“But if the certificate was destroyed, why shouldn’t she remarry?” asked Mrs. Vernon, innocently.

“When I got back to New York two days later,” pursued Laughton, “I found on my desk a letter from Ralph Dexter. I was reading it over again last night, after we returned from the Opera. I will read it to you, if you like.”

“Yes, do, Uncle Larry,” bogged Mrs. Vernon.

Uncle Larry took the letter from his pocket, and read it as well as he could, for his voice trembled, and more than once he almost broke down.

“In Camp on the Colorado,
“August 30, 1882.

“Dear Uncle Larry, — I got back to the camp last night, after a little paseata up in the hills for three weeks, and I found your welcome letter awaiting me. I was pretty tired, for we had been in the saddle thirty-four hours on a stretch, but I read it through before I took off my coat. I had hoped for a letter from Some One Else, but I was disappointed; there must be a breakdown in the mail route somewhere. Then I read over again the paragraph in your letter referring to her; and then I tumbled into bed and slept eighteen hours on end. It was nearly noon the next day when I awoke, refreshed and a new man. In truth, I am a new man, improved and made over by the patent process of Cupid and Co. I wake up every morning thanking God for my youth and my strength, and, above all, for the joy of my life. I am as happy as any man ever was. My work is a delight to me, and my future is a dream of bliss. It is no wonder that I build castles in the air; but I remember what Thoreau says, and I am trying to put solid foundations under them. The mine is doing splendidly; it is a boom and not a blizzard this year; and with experience and improved machinery we hope for even better luck next season. And I have finer news yet. You are my oldest friend, Uncle Larry, and my best friend — except one, and I know you are not jealous of her — and so I will tell you first. The patent has been granted for my new process for reducing ores. And what is more, a practical man from Leadville, a regular mining sharp, who saw the working drawings at my patent agent’s, has written to offer me fifty thousand dollars for a quarter interest. Fifty thousand dollars! Think of that, old man! I am a capitalist, a bloated bondholder, and she shall marry a rich man after all. We’ll make a raid on Tiffany’s when I arrive in New York in the fall, and you shall help me pick out a pair of solitaires — real solitaires, as the lady said — which will give her ears a chance to rival her eyes in their sparkle.

“Good-by, Uncle Larry, and forever. When you read this I shall be dead and out of her way. What use is life to me if she does not love me? Her letter has come at last, and I know the worst. She dreads poverty, she breaks with me, and I fear she is going to marry another man. This is a bad world, isn’t it, Uncle Larry? But I forgive her; I can not help it, for I love her as much as ever. Poor girl, how she must have suffered before she wrote me that letter! If she wants money, she shall have it — she shall have all I hoped to gain. I have no use for it but to make her happy. There’s a man in our party here who was a lawyer once, and he is drawing up my will for me. I have made you my executor. You will do this last favor for me, won’t you? I leave everything to her, the little money I have in bank, my share in the mine, my three-quarters of the patent — for I have just written to accept the fifty thousand dollars for the quarter. I’d like her to have some money to go on with. You will attend to all these things for me; you have done so much for me already that I feel I have a right to make this last request. This is a long letter, but I want you to have my last words — my last dying speech and confession. Don’t think I am going to be hanged; a man who is born to be drowned can never be hanged; and I am going to be drowned tomorrow. I don’t know how or when, but a fall from the rocks is an easy thing to accomplish, and the river will do the rest. If she wishes to marry, I had best take myself out of the way and leave her free. After all, what does it matter? Life is little or nothing — it is only a prologue, or the posy of a ring. It is brief, my lord — as woman’s love. I am in haste to be about my business and to put an end to it. The prologue has lasted too long; it is time for the real play to begin, the tragedy of time and eternity, to last until ‘the curtain, a funeral pall, comes down with the rush of a storm.’ Poor Poe was right for once, though I need no angels to affirm ‘that the play is the tragedy, Man, and its hero the conqueror, Worm.’ We shall meet again, Uncle Larry, and until that meeting, God be with you, and God help me!

“Ralph Dexter.”

“Did she take the legacy?” asked Rudolph Vernon.

“She did indeed,” answered Laughton. “And Sam Sargent organized a company for working the patent, and floated it in London, and cleared half a million or more out of it. And it was lucky he did, because he got squeezed badly in the Transcontinental Telegraph corner last year, and Ralph Dexter’s legacy is all the Sargents have left now.”

“So she actually married Sargent?” was Mrs. Vernon’s doleful remark.

“Why not?” asked Laughton, in return. “Ralph’s death left her free to marry whom she pleased.”

“Now you have told your tale, you have proved my assertion,” said Rudolph Vernon. “In real life the story is incomplete. There is something lacking.”

“She will be punished somehow, never fear,” was Mrs. Vernon’s cheerful assertion.

“I think the punishment has begun already,” said Laughton. “Indeed, it followed fast upon the wrongdoing. At first I fear that Ralph’s death was almost a relief to her, for it gave her the freedom she wanted. But no sooner was she married than she began to tremble at her work. With all her money she could not bribe her own thoughts to let her alone. She could not stab her own conscience, and kill it with a single blow. If a conscience must be murdered, it takes a long course of slow poisoning to do it. Then one day there came a reaction, and she suddenly changed her mind, and refused to believe that Ralph was dead. She thinks that he is alive and near her. She imagines that he watches her, and sends messages to her by one friend and another. She fancies at times that he hovers about her, an impalpable presence. Then, again, he be comes a tangible entity, a living person, and she declares that she has seen him standing before her, with his eyes fixed on her eyes, as though seeking to read the secret of her soul.”

“That’s what the doctor here would call a curious hallucination,” said Mr. Vernon.

“Well, I don’t know,” answered Uncle Larry, doubtfully.

“Why, the man’s dead, isn’t he?” asked Mrs. Vernon, with interest.

“As I said before,” responded Uncle Larry, “I don’t know.”

“But what do you think?”

“Well, I don’t know what to think,” answered Mr. Laughton. “Of course I thought he was dead. Yet his body was never found, though the surveying party searched for it for ten days or more. When I heard how Mrs. Sargent felt and what she fancied, I wondered and I doubted. Now I almost think I have seen him once, or rather twice.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“Where?”

“Here — in Paris — at the Opéra. Once as we entered, and then, again, after the third act. The first time was in the lobby; we stood face to face. If the man who confronted me then was not Ralph Dexter, he was strangely like him. I had a queer, uncanny shiver, but the man looked me in the eye, and did not know me, and passed on, and I lost sight of him.”

“And the second time?” asked Dr. Cheever, who had hitherto taken no part in the conversation, although he had listened most attentively.

“As the curtain fell on the third act, I looked at Mrs. Sargent, who sat by the side of her husband in a box to the right of us. I saw in her eyes a look of horror or of fear. I turned my head, and there, on the opposite side of the theater, stood the same man, Ralph Dexter, or his double. He was gazing intently at Mrs. Sargent. I looked at her again, and I saw her whiten and fall sideways. Her husband caught her in his arms, and they left the box at once. When I sought my dead friend again he was gone.”

There was silence after Laughton stopped speaking. Then Rudolph Vernon remarked: “The romance of real life is better rounded than I had thought, but it is still incomplete artistically. There is more behind these facts, and to evolve this unsubstantial but essential something is the duty of the literary artist.”

“Perhaps,” said Dr. Cheever, slowly — “perhaps a physician may complete the tale as well as an author.”

“Why, Richard, what do you know about it?” asked his sister.

“Very little, indeed, and until this morning I knew even less. If I had heard Mr. Laughton’s story yesterday, I could have decided more promptly and more intelligently, it may be, but my decision would have been the same.”

“Were you called in to attend Mrs. Sargent this morning?” asked his sister. “Oh, why didn’t you tell us before?”

“I should not tell you now if the case were not hopeless. I could not go to the Salon with you this morning because I was suddenly summoned to join two French physicians in an examination of Mrs. Sargent’s mental condition. There could be no doubt about it, unfortunately; we all agreed; and an hour before I joined you here I signed the order which committed her to an asylum.”

Harper’s New Monthly, Mar. 1886

PERTURBED SPIRITS

— I —

When it was announced that Mr. Francis Meredith had been appointed secretary to the council of the Saint Nicholas Relief Society, the friends of the other candidates for that office were violently indignant, and declared that the appointment was one conspicuously unfit to be made. The friends of Mr. Francis Meredith smiled pleasantly as they protested mildly in his behalf; they said that he would do very well after he mastered the duties of the post, and that the work was not onerous, even for a man wholly unused to any regular occupation; but while they were saying with their tongues that Fanny Meredith was a good fellow, in their hearts they were wondering how a round young man would manage in a square hole. From this it may be inferred that the opponents of the appointment were altogether in the right, and that one fortunate man owed the place to a freak of favoritism.

It may serve to indicate the character of Mr. Francis Meredith to record that to his intimates he was known, not as Frank, but as Fanny. He was a charming and most lady-like young man, who toiled not neither did he spin. He owed his exemption from labor and his social standing to the fact that he was the only son of his mother, and she a widow of large wealth. He had managed, somehow or other, to creep through college in the course of five years. He was a kindly youth, but heedless, careless, scatterbrained, and fixing his mind with ease only on the one object of his existence — the conducting of a cotillion. To conduct the cotillion decently and in order seemed to Fanny Meredith to be the crowning glory of a young gentleman’s career. Unfortunately his mother’s trustee made unwise investments and died, leaving his affairs curiously entangled , and it became necessary for Meredith to do something for himself. He scorned a place under government; besides, he could not pass the examination with any hope of appointment. As it happened, Mrs. Meredith’s trustee had been the secretary of the council of the Saint Nicholas Relief Society, and his death made it possible to work out a sort of poetic justice by giving the post to Fanny Meredith.

It is difficult to speak without awe of that august conclave, the council of the Saint Nicholas Relief Society. During the original Dutch ownership of Manhattan Island, and before New Amsterdam experienced a change of heart and became New York, certain worthy burghers of the city had combined in a benevolent association which continued its labors even after the English capture of the colony and through the long struggle of the Revolution. When at last New York was firmly established as the Empire City, no one of its institutions was more deeply rooted or more abundantly flourishing than the Saint Nicholas Relief Society. It was rich, for it had received lands and tenements and hereditaments which had multiplied in value and increased in income with the growth of the city. It did much good. It was admirably managed. It had a delightful aroma of antiquity, denied to most American institutions. It was fashionable. It was exclusive. To be a member of the Saint Nicholas Relief Society was the New York equivalent to the New England ownership of a portrait by Copley — it was a certificate of gentle birth. To be elected to the council of the Saint Nicholas Relief Society was indisputable evidence that a man’s family had been held in honor here in New York for two centuries. Just as the court circles of Austria are closed to anyone who cannot show sixteen quarterings, so the unwritten law of the Saint Nicholas Relief Society forbade the election to the council of anyone whose ancestors had not settled in Manhattan Island before it surrendered to Colonel Nicolls in 1664.

Among the descendants of the scant fifteen hundred inhabitants of New Amsterdam were not a few shrewd men of business. The affairs of the Saint Nicholas Relief Society were always ably and adroitly managed, and the property of the society was well administered. Its annual revenues were greatly increased by a yearly ball given just before Lent allowed the ladies of fashion time to repent of their sins. This public ball — for it was public practically, as any man might enter who could pay the high price asked for a ticket — being patronized by the most fashionable ladies of New York, was always crushingly attended, to the replenishment of the coffers of the charity. To this public ball there succeeded, after the interval of Lent, a private dinner of the council, invariably given on the Tuesday in Easter week, the Tuesday after Paas. The Dutch word still lingers, and perhaps the Paas dinner of the council of the Saint Nicholas Relief Society may have helped to keep it alive and in the mouths of men.

To attend to the annual ball and to the Paas dinner were the chief duties of the secretary of the council; it is possible even to assert that these were his sole duties. He had nothing whatever to do with the management of the society; he was the secretary of the council only; and it was precisely because the obligations of the office were little more than ornamental that the friends of Mr. Francis Meredith maintained his perfect ability to fulfill them satisfactorily. He had been elected at the January meeting of the council, and he was told to exercise a general supervision over the arrangements of the ball, which was to take place just in the middle of February — on Saint Valentine’s day, in fact.

“I wonder how Fanny Meredith will make out,” said Mr. Delancey Jones, when he heard of the appointment.

“Fanny Meredith is a good-looking fellow, and a good fellow too, and the girls all say he dances divinely; but he is more different kinds of a fool than any other man I know!”

As it happened, Fanny Meredith had very little to do with the ball, but he did that little wrong. He blundered in every inconceivable manner and with the most imperturbable good humor. He altered the advertisements, for one thing, just as they were going to the news papers and without consultation with anyone; and the next morning the members of the council were shocked to see that tickets would be for sale at the door until midnight — there having been hitherto a pleasing convention that tickets could be had only by those vouched for by members of the society. Then, at the February meeting of the council, he arose with the smile of a man about to impart wisdom and suggested that as the clergymen of New York were always willing to lend a helping hand to charity, it would be a very clever device if they were to request the rectors of the fashionable churches to make from the altar formal announcement of the ball, with full particulars as to the price of tickets and the persons from whom these might be purchased. And when the night of the ball arrived at last, and Fanny Meredith was requested to welcome the journalists who came to “write it up” and to provide for their comfort, internal and external, he said something to Harry Brackett, who had been sent up from the “Gotham Gazette” to provide a picturesque description of the ball, to be supplemented by the more personal notes of the “society reporter.” Just what it was that Fanny Meredith said to Harry Brackett no one has ever been able to ascertain exactly, but, whatever it was, it took the journalist completely by surprise; he looked at the secretary of the council for a minute in dazed astonishment, and then, his sense of humor overcoming his indignation, he said slowly, “Somebody must have left a door open somewhere, and this thing blew in!”

But the petty errors the new secretary committed at the ball were as nothing to the mighty blunder he made at the Paas dinner of the council. The Saint Nicholas Relief Society may have any number of annual subscribers, but it has only two hundred members elected for life. From these two hundred members is chosen a council of twenty-one. Among the members are many ladies, and at least a third of the council are of the sex which wears earrings. It is this mingling of sharp men and clever women in the council which gives its strength to the Saint Nicholas Relief Society. In nothing is the skill of the management shown to more advantage than in the choice of members of the council. There are young ladies, there are old bachelors, there are substantial matrons, and there are fathers of families; and they dwell together in unity, so far, at least, as the Saint Nicholas Relief Society is concerned. A meeting of the council presents a sight at once heterogeneous and characteristic. Possibly it is this variety of persons and of points of view that makes the council of the Saint Nicholas Relief Society so successful as it has been in its task of administering wealth and of ministering to the needy. Certainly the dissimilarity of character and the unity of object help to make the annual Paas dinner a season of refreshment. Most of the members of the council are busy, but it is very rare indeed for one of them to be absent from his seat or from her seat, as the case may be, at the Paas dinner.

The number of the council is twenty-one, and has always been twenty-one. Fanny Meredith forgot all about the Paas dinner until reminded of it less than a week before Easter. Then he rushed off to the old-fashioned restaurant where the dinner was always given, and he spent four hours there in the ordering of a proper series of courses for twenty-one people. He had seized the near est annual report of the society, and he gave it to a copyist with a score of blank invitation cards, telling her to send them out to the members of the council, in accordance with a list printed at the end of the report. The copyist did as she was bidden, and the invitations went forth by the post.

But when the members of the council assembled on the evening of the Tuesday after Easter they were only thirteen in number. They waited nearly an hour for the other eight, and then they sat down ill at ease. While they were yet eating their oysters Mr. Francis Meredith came in to gaze on his handiwork. Mr. Jacob Leisler, Jr., asked him if he had sent all the invitations.

“Of course I did,” he answered; “you don’t think I could make a mistake about a little thing like that, do you?”

To this leading question there was no answer; so Meredith continued, taking a report from his pocket:

“I wouldn’t trust myself to write them, so I gave this list to a copyist, and I put all the envelopes in the post myself.”

“Let me see that report,” said Mr. Leisler, holding out his hand. Mr. Jacob Leisler, Jr., was the chairman of the finance committee, and a man speaking with authority. On the present occasion he was presiding.

The unsuspecting Fanny gave him the pamphlet. Mr. Leisler glanced at it, read the list of the council, turned to the date on the title-page, and then inquired calmly:

“Mr. Meredith, do you know when this report was printed?”

“Last fall, of course,” answered the secretary.

“Just twenty-two years ago last fall,” Mr. Leisler returned; “so if you have invited to this dinner here tonight the council whose names appear in this report, you have not asked the eight absent members who are alive, and you have asked eight members who are dead! And that accounts for the empty chairs here.”

Fanny Meredith laughed feebly, and then he laughed again faintly. At last he murmured, “I seem to have made a mistake.”

As he shrank away toward the door, amid an embarrassed silence, Mr. Leisler whispered harshly to a mature and sharp-featured lady who sat at his right:

“And we seem to have made a mistake when we elected him to be secretary to the council.”

There was a gentle murmur of assent from the members of the council, in which nearly all joined, excepting a young old maid with frank eyes and cheerful countenance, who was sitting about halfway down the dinner-table, with a vacant seat by her side. She looked at the abashed Fanny Meredith with a compassionate smile of encouragement.

“Since you have not attended to your duty,” said Mr. Leisler severely, checking the helpless secretary on the threshold, “since you have not seen that the other members of the council received invitations, of course they will not come — we cannot expect them. We must dine by ourselves — thirteen at table. I cannot speak for the others, but to me it is most unpleasant to see those eight empty chairs!”

As the crestfallen Fanny Meredith retreated hastily from the dining-room, he could not help hearing this rebuke heartily approved by the council.

— II —

Although Mr. Jacob Leisler, Jr., and Mrs. Vedder, the energetic lady on his right, and Miss Mary Van Dyne, the pleasant-faced old maid farther down on his left, and Mr. Joshua Hoffman, who sat beside her, and the rest of the thirteen members of the council who were present, saw eight empty chairs, which made awkward gaps in the company about the board — although they could count only thirteen at table, it is to be recorded that in reality these eight chairs were not empty. They were filled by those to whom the cards of invitation had been sent — the former members of the council, dead and gone in the score of years and more since the printing of the report which the new secretary had used. To the eyes of the living the eight seats were vacant. To the eyes of one who had power to see the spiritual and intangible they were occupied by those who had been bidden to the feast. How the invitations had reached their addresses no one might know, but they had been received, and they had been accepted; and the invited guests sat at the council as they had been wont to sit there twenty-two years before. Perhaps the invitations had gone to the Dead Letter Office, and so had been forwarded to the dead whose names they bore; perhaps they had been taken — but speculation is idle. It matters not how or by whom the invitations had been delivered, there sat the ghostly guests, in their places around the dinner-table of the council. There they sat in the eight chairs, which to the eye of man were empty.

It was the first time that the dead had been bidden to this feast of the living. It was the first time since they had laid down the bur dens of this world that they had been allowed to mingle with their friends on earth. It was the first time — and they feared it might be the last, and they were eager to make the most of their good fortune. For a long while they sat silently listening with avidity to all stray fragments of news about those whom they had left behind them in the land of the living. Some of these spectral visitors had only recently quitted this life, and perhaps they were the most anxious to learn the sayings and doings of those1 they had loved and left. Some of them had been dead for years, and their placid faces wore a pleasant expression of restful and comforting tranquility. One of them, a handsome young fellow in a dark blue uniform with faded shoulder-straps, had fallen twenty-two years before in the repulse of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. Another had gone down in the Ville de Nice, in the Bay of Biscay, in 1872. A third, a venerable man with silvery hair and a gentle look in his soft gray eyes, had died of old age only a few months before.

Mr. Jacob Leisler, Jr., sat at the head of the table, and at his right hand was Mrs. Vedder, a square-faced lady of an uncertain age, with grizzled hair and a masterful mouth. The chair on her right was apparently empty, to her evident dissatisfaction. Probably her annoyance would have been acutely increased had she been aware that the invisible occupant of this place by her side was Jesse Van Twiller, her first husband, dead these ten years or more, during eight of which she had been another man’s wife.

Jesse Van Twiller had been among the earliest to arrive; and when he found that his wife was to sit next to him he was delighted. No spook ever wore a broader smile than that which graced his features as Mrs. Vedder took her place at table by his side. But his joy was commingled with a portion of apprehension, as though he feared his wife as much as he loved her. He was a little man, of a nervous temperament, with a timid look and an expression of subdued meekness, as though he was used to be overridden by an overbearing woman. He glanced up as his former wife sat down. He seemed dis concerted when her eyes fell on him with no look of welcome recognition. For a moment he wondered if he had offended her in any way since they had parted. Then, all at once, he knew that she had not seen him: he was invisible to mortal eyes. He chafed against this condition; he wanted her to see him and to know how glad he was to see her. To be there by her side, to be able to stretch his arm about her waist as he had done in the days of yore, to long to fold her to his heart which beat for her alone, and to be powerless as he was even to communicate to her the fact of his presence — this was most painful. The poor ghost felt that fate was hard on him. He would have given years of his spectral existence for two or three hours of human life.

These were his feelings at first. Then he wondered how she would receive him if she knew he were in her presence. He gazed at her intently as though to read her thoughts. She was older than she was when he had died there was no doubt about that. She had the same commanding mien, the same superb port, the same majestic sweep of the arm. Yet it seemed to the man who had left her a widow that the air of domineering determination he recalled so well was not a little softened, as though from want of use.

“She has missed me!” he said to himself. “How gladly would I have her scold me now as she used to scold me so often, if only she could see me! She could not rebuke me for being late this time, but she could easily find something else to find fault about. I shouldn’t care how much she bullied me, so long as I could tell her I was here. And then,” he concluded cautiously, “if she made it too hot for me, I could be a ghost again, and she would be so surprised!”

Just then Mr. Leisler spoke to the spouse of the spook.

“I was beginning to fear that we might be deprived of your presence too, Mrs. Vedder,” he said. “Were you not a little late?”

Jesse Van Twiller looked at his old friend Leisler in the greatest surprise. Why had he addressed Mrs. Van Twiller as Mrs. Vedder? The first husband even turned and looked at the chair next to his, on the chance that that was occupied by the lady addressed; but Mr. Leisler’s own wife sat there. His astonishment increased as he heard his wife’s answer.

“Yes,” she said, “we were late. But it was not my fault. The doctor is a most unpunctual man.”

“The doctor?” thought Van Twiller. “What doctor? and what had she to do with any doctor? Had she been ill? She seemed to be in robust health.”

“Dr. Vedder is a busy man,” rejoined Mr. Leisler, “and perhaps he cannot control his time.”

So it was Dr. Vedder his wife had been waiting for. Van Twiller looked across the table at Dr. Vedder, whom he knew very well and had never liked. Dr. Vedder was a sarcastic man, with a sharp tongue, and a knack of saying disagreeable things. It was Dr. Vedder who had once asserted that Van Twiller had no more sense of humor than a hand-organ. Suddenly, with a sharp pang of jealousy, Van Twiller recalled a vague, fleeting, and half-forgotten memory of Dr. Vedder’s admiration for Mrs. Van Twiller. He remembered that the doctor had once declared that he liked a masterful woman, and that Mrs. Van Twiller was a Katharine with a poor Petruchio quite incapable of taming her.

“That’s no reason he should keep his wife waiting,” said the former Mrs. Van Twiller plaintively.

“His wife!” repeated Van Twiller to him self. “Who is his wife?”

“I was never treated in that way by my first husband,” continued the lady.

“Her first husband!”

The poor ghost shrank back. At last he saw the change in the situation. His wife was not his wife any more. She was the wife of Dr. Vedder, a man whom he had disliked always, and whom now he hated. He was seized by a burning rage of jealousy, but he was powerless to express his feelings. His condition was hard to bear, for he could see, he could hear, he could suffer, and he could do nothing. As Van Twiller was thinking this out hotly, the sharp voice of Dr. Vedder stabbed him suddenly.

“I have noticed,” remarked the doctor, who was seated exactly opposite his wife’s first husband, “that a woman always thinks more highly of a man after he is dead and gone. She is ready enough to praise him when it is too late for the commendation to comfort him. I believe a widow doubly cherishes the memory of a hen-pecked husband.”

With the suave smile of a conscious peace-maker, who sees possible offense in a speech, Mr. Leisler said, “You are hard on the widows, Doctor.”

“Not at all,” the doctor answered, with a dry little wrinkle at the corners of his mouth, “not at all. I am a scientific observer, making logical deductions from a multitude of facts. To the man who lives out West, the only good Indian is a dead Indian; so to the widow, the only good husband is the dead husband!”

“I’m sure,” cried Mrs. Vedder indignantly, “that Mr. Van Twiller would never have said anything like that.”

“Certainly not,” her husband replied. “Van Twiller couldn’t, for Van Twiller wasn’t a scientific observer.”

A covert sneer in Dr. Vedder’s tone as he said this cut little Van Twiller to the soul, and again he longed for material hands that he might clutch his rival by the throat. At the thought of his absolute inability to do aught for himself, he shivered with despair.

It was perhaps some frigid emanation from Van Twiller which affected Mrs. Vedder’s nerves, for she shuddered slightly before replying to her husband.

“It is not for us to bandy words now about Mr. Van Twiller’s attainments,” she remarked deliberately. “He was truly a gentleman, with all the mildness of a gentleman, quite incapable of giving anyone a harsh word or a cross look.”

“In fact, he had absolutely no faults at all,” said Dr. Vedder sarcastically. But if he could then have seen the expression on the pallid face of his predecessor, he would have been in a position to contradict his wife’s last assertion.

“He had very few indeed!” replied his wife; “in my eyes he was perfect!”

She paused for a second, and Van Twiller wished that she had believed in his perfection while he was alive. Then she added bitterly, “To know him was to love him!”

The dry little wrinkle returned to the corners of Dr. Vedder’s mouth as he answered quietly, “Perhaps so — I didn’t know him well!”

And again the poor ghost writhed in invisible anguish, utterly helpless to resent the insult.

“I remember Mr. Van Twiller distinctly,” remarked Mr. Leisler blandly; “he was an easy-going and good-natured man, with a kind word for everybody.”

“In fact, he was everybody’s friend,” Dr. Vedder returned, “and nobody’s enemy but his own. His best quality in my eyes is that he is not here tonight.”

The doctor could not know that the little man at whom he was girding was separated from him by the breadth of the table only, and was suffering with his whole being as every sneer reached its mark far more surely than he who shot the chance arrow could guess.

“You are bitter,” said Mr. Leisler easily; “I fear you are a misanthrope.”

The doctor laughed a little, and answered, “No, I’m not exactly a misanthrope or even a misogynist, but I have ceased to be philanthropic since I discovered that man is descended from a monkey.”

Mrs. Vedder was about to make a hasty reply to this, when she caught the doctor’s eye. To the surprise of Van Twiller, she hesitated, checked herself suddenly, and said nothing. He wondered how it was that his wife had changed; he knew that she had never quailed before his eye; and he found himself doubting whether he would not have preferred to see her show her old spirit. He saw that she was sadly tamed now; and he marveled why he should regret the quenching of her fiery spirit. She did not seem the same to him, and he missed the old mastery to which he was accustomed. This blunted the joy of the meeting he had anticipated hopefully ever since he had received the invitation. His wife was no longer his. She was not even the woman he had loved, honored, and obeyed for years. The poor ghost felt lonelier than he had ever felt before. He began to regret that he had been permitted again to come on earth.

A waiter had filled Dr. Vedder’s glass. He took it in his hand.

“No,” he said, “I’m not a philanthropist; I take no stock in the aggressive optimism of the sentimentalists. In fact, I suppose I’m a persistent pessimist. What is my fellow-man to me — or my fellow-woman either?”

Mr. Jacob Leisler, Jr., was not a man whose perceptions were fine or quick, but he was moved to resent clumsily the offensiveness of these words.

“But your wife—” he began.

“Oh, my wife!” interrupted Dr. Vedder; “my wife and I are one, you know.”

Van Twiller looked at Mrs. Vedder to see how she would take this. She said nothing. She smiled acidly. It was not doubtful that she was greatly changed.

“I try to shape my course by the doctrine of enlightened selfishness,” continued the doctor. “Let us enjoy life while we may. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. In the struggle for existence the fittest survive and the weakest are weeded out — and so much the better!”

Both Mrs. Vedder and Mr. Leisler made ready to reply, when the doctor suddenly went on, sharpening his voice to its keenest edge:

“So much the better for him! Your dead man is your happy man. He has no enemies, and even his widow praises him — especially if she has remarried. In fact, he has all the virtues, now he has no use for any of them.” Then the doctor raised his glass. “The toast of the English in India suggests true wisdom, after all:

“Ho! stand to your glasses steady!

The world is a world of lies;

A cup to the dead already,

And hurrah for the next man that dies!”

Mr. Leisler drew himself up with dignity and addressed the doctor with a stiff severity of manner:

“I am surprised, Dr. Vedder, that you should express such views of life on such an occasion as this. I confess I do not hold with you at all. I—”

“You cannot lure me into a debate at dinner,” the doctor answered, as Mr. Leisler paused for fit words to express his complicated feelings. “I never get into a discussion at table, for the man who isn’t hungry always has the best of the argument.”

The unfortunate spook, forced to listen to this unmannerly talk of the man who had married his widow, sat silent and abashed. He knew not what to think. He did not recognize his wife. When he was alive she had been full of fiery vigor and of undaunted spirit. He would never have dared to address her thus boldly and to brave. the wrath which was wont to flame out, at odd moments, like forked lightning. In dumb wonder he waited for her swift protest; but she said nothing; whereat he marveled not a little.

Mr. Leisler asked himself why Dr. Vedder was unusually disagreeable this evening, for the doctor was a clever man and could make a pleasant impression when he chose. With the hope of turning the talk into a more cheerful channel Mr. Leisler addressed Mrs. Vedder.

“Isn’t Miss. Van Dyne looking very well tonight?” he asked.

Mrs. Vedder looked down the table at the cheery and young-looking old maid. “Yes,” she answered, after a moment’s hesitation, “she seems almost happy; but then, she is not married.”

“She has been faithful to the memory of her lost love,” said Mr. Leisler. “Let me see — how many years is it now since Captain De Ruyter was killed at Gettysburg?”

“You don’t mean to tell me that you believe that a woman has been in love with a dead man for twenty-two years, do you?” Dr. Vedder asked with an incredulous smile.

“Why not?” returned his wife.

The doctor evaded an answer to this direct question.

“If your diagnosis is right, she has had a dull enough time of it,” he said. “And she has nothing to show for her devotion.”

“Virtue is its own reward,” Mr. Leisler remarked judicially.

“But love isn’t,” the doctor replied. “Love is like this champagne,” and he raised his glass; “it is very sparkling when it is young, but as it gets older it loses its flavor.” He emptied the glass and set it down. “And if one is all alone with it, there may be a headache the next morning.”

“What has made you so sarcastic this evening?” asked Mr. Leisler.

“I don’t know,” Dr. Vedder answered. “I am in company with evil spirits, I think. If I were a believer in such things, I should say that I was subject to an adverse influence. And I was all right when I came. Perhaps it is this wretched dinner.”

Perhaps it was the dinner, but little Van Twiller was conscious of a throb of ill-natured joy at the thought that it was possibly his presence, all unknown as it was, which had thus disturbed the equanimity of the doctor and revealed his lower nature. He looked at Mrs. Vedder, and he saw she was eating her dinner slowly and in silence, with a stiffening of the muscles of the face — a sign he had recognized readily enough.

“After all,” continued the doctor, “these are the two great banes of man’s existence — dyspepsia and matrimony.”

“Come, come,” Mr. Leisler said cheerfully, “you must not abuse marriage; it is the chief end of life.”

“It was very nearly the end of mine,” re turned Dr. Vedder; “I caught such a cold in the church that I have not been into one since.”

Just then one of the waiters came to Mr. Leisler with a request that he should change his place for a little while, and take his seat at the other end of the table, where there was a vacant chair. Glad of an excuse to get away from a man in ill-humor. Mr. Leisler apologized to Mrs. Vedder and withdrew to join his other friends.

Van Twiller saw a red spot burning brightly on Mrs. Vedder’s cheek, and he knew that this was another danger-signal.

She bent forward toward her husband, and in a low voice, trembling a little with sup pressed ire, she hissed across the table, “I see what you are after! But you will not succeed. I can keep my temper though I bite my tongue out. It takes two to quarrel, remember!”

“It takes two to get married,” retorted Dr. Vedder, “so that proves nothing.”

For the first time the poor ghost saw his wife’s eyes fill with tears.

“Mr. Van Twiller never treated me so,” she said hurriedly. “I wish he were alive now!”

The dry little wrinkle came back to the corners of the doctor’s mouth, but he made no reply.

Little Van Twiller looked from one to the other, as they stared at each other. Then he said to himself, sighing softly:

“Well, well, perhaps it is better as it is!”

— III —

Miss Mary Van Dyne was sitting almost in the center of one side of the long dinner-table. At her right was Mr. Joshua Hoffman, a man whose heart was as large as his purse was long, and who kept both open to the call of the suffering. At her left was a vacant chair — or what seemed so to the eyes of the living men and women at the table. They did not know that it was occupied by Remsen de Ruyter, whose maiden widow Mary Van Dyne had held herself to be ever since a bullet had reached his heart on the heights of Gettysburg. For nearly twenty-two years now she had lived on, alone in the world, but never lonely, for she had given herself up to good works. Her presence was welcome in the children’s ward of every hospital, and the love of these little ones nourished her soul and sustained her spirit. Between her and Joshua Hoffman there were bonds of sympathy, and they had many things in common. The good old man was very fond of the brave little woman who had tried to turn her private sorrow to the benefit of the helpless and the innocent.

They were glad to find themselves side by side at table, and they talked to each other with interest.

“You are not really old, Mr. Hoffman,” she was saying; “you look very young yet. Tonight I wouldn’t give you fifty!”

“My dear young lady, you haven’t fifty to give,” he answered with a smile; “and if you had, why, I should then have a hundred and twenty-five — which is more than my share of years.”

“You are not really seventy-five?” she asked.

“Really, I am seventy-five. I am a past-due coupon, as I heard one of the boys saying on the street the other day,” returned Joshua Hoffman, with a smile as pleasant as hers.

“And how old am I?” she inquired.

“Whatever your age is,” he answered, “tonight you do not look it!”

“Shall I arise and courtesy for that?” she asked, blushing with pleasure at his courtly compliment. “You see I like to be flattered still, although I am an old maid of two-score years.”

“Really now, my child,” said the old man, “you are not forty? Let me see — it does not seem so very long ago since he came and told me how happy he was because you had promised to marry him. Does it pain you to talk of him now?”

“I think of him always, day and night. Why should I not be glad to talk about him with you whom he loved, and to whom he owed so much?”

“He was a good boy,” Joshua Hoffman continued in his kindly voice. “I can recall the day he told me about you; it was a fine, clear morning in early spring.”

“It was the 16th of May, 1863,” she said simply. “He had asked me to marry him the night before, and he said that you were the first he would tell.”

“He was a good boy, and a brave boy, and he died like a man,” said the old man gently. Then he relapsed into silence as his thoughts went back to the dark days of the war.

Miss Mary Van Dyne was also thinking of the past. Unconsciously she lived again in her youth when she first saw Remsen de Ruyter, a bright, handsome boy, scarcely older than she was: he was only twenty-one when he died. They had loved each other from the first, although it was a whole long winter before he had dared to tell her — a long winter of delicious doubt and fearful ecstasy. She recalled all the circumstances of his avowal of his love, and her cheeks burned as she thought of the gush of unspeakable joy which had filled her heart as he folded her in his arms for the first time. She remembered how, two nights after, before they had told the news to anyone but her mother and his benefactor Joshua Hoffman, she sat next to him at this annual dinner of the council of the Saint Nicholas Relief Society; they were the very youngest members, and it was the first time they had been asked. So strong was the rush of memory of the happy scene, that she gave a quick glance at the place on her left, as though half-expecting to see him seated there still. And there he was by her side, although she could not see him now.

He was there, but he could not speak to her; he could not tell her of his presence; he could not tell her how he loved her still, and more than ever. It was hard. Yet he was glad to be by her side, to see her, to look into her frank face, to gaze on her noble eyes.

And she felt comforted, she knew not why, as though by an invisible presence. Her heart was lifted up. Although the grass had woven a green blanket over his grave for now more than twenty years, he did not seem so far from her. She hoped she would not have so long to wait before she might join him, never again to be parted. Then her thoughts turned to the last time she had seen him, the morning his regiment had left New York for the front. It was a beautiful day early in June when he came to bid her farewell for the last time. They talked all the morning seriously and hopefully. Then the hour came at last, and all too soon. She bore herself bravely; without a tear she kissed him and held him in her arms for a minute, and bade him go. She watched him as he walked away. How well she could recall everything which her senses had noted unconsciously during the two minutes before he paused at the corner of the street to wave his hand before he vanished forever. There were roses beginning to blow in the little bit of green before the house; there was a hand-organ in the next street from which faint strains of “John Brown’s Body” came over the housetops; the noon whistle of a neighboring factory suddenly broke the silence as he blew her a kiss, and went out of her sight to his death. Then she had been able to get to her room somehow — she never knew how — and to throw herself on her bed before she broke down.

The memory was bitter and sweet, but never before had it been as sweet. She turned her eyes on the vacant chair by her side, and involuntarily she reached out her hand. It grasped nothing, it felt nothing, yet her fingers tingled as with a shock of joy. She gazed at the empty chair again in charmed wonder. She could not tell what subtle influence of peace and comfort enveloped her as she mused upon the past with her arm resting on the chair beside her. Then her glance fell on a card beside the plate, and with a sudden suffusion of the eyes she read his name. The new secretary of the council had used the list of twenty-two years before, and again his place had been set beside hers. The tears which veiled her sight hid the empty chair from her for a minute, and if she turned her head she might almost fancy that he was seated there. It was a fancy only, but it pleased her to indulge in it. It brought back the happy past. It brought him back, almost, for a fleeting minute.

And he, as he sat there, could make no sign. With the keen intuition of love, he read her thoughts in her face. He knew that she was thinking of him, and that in the thought of him she was happy again.

And thus the long dinner drew to an end at last.

When the president gave the signal for the withdrawal into another room that the usual business meeting of the council might take place, the members rose together. Joshua Hoffman was silent, as though he divined her mood and sympathetically respected it. He offered her his arm, and she took it, looking back regretfully, with a longing and lingering gaze, at the place where they had sat side by side.

— IV —

As the living members of the council left the dining-room, the ghostly guests gathered together to talk over what they had seen and heard. Only Remsen de Ruyter was silent; his feelings were too sacred to find vent in words. He alone wore a smile of consolation and comfort. The rest chattered along in tumultuous conversation.

“It has been a strange experience,” said the very old gentleman, “a very strange experience.”

“More painful than pleasant, I think,” little Van Twiller remarked.

“I thought we had been invited as a compliment,” said another of the ghosts discontentedly, “but it seems it was all a mistake of the new secretary — Fanny Meredith, they call him.”

“Excellent young man!” the old gentle man declared with emphasis — “an excellent young man; so thoughtful of him; so considerate of the feelings of his elders. I shall accept his invitation next year.”

“So shall I!” added several voices.

“Oh, I’ll come too,” said Jesse Van Twiller. “I want to see what will happen next.”

Only Remsen de Ruyter said nothing.

— V —

But long before the next annual dinner of the council of the Saint Nicholas Relief Society, the resignation of Mr. Francis Meredith had been requested, and in his stead there had been elected a secretary of more trustworthy habits; and the new secretary was very particular in sending out the invitations to the next annual dinner.

So the poor ghosts never had another chance. If they had been asked again, there would have been one more of them, for ten days after the dinner which Fanny Meredith had so miserably mismanaged Dr. Vedder died suddenly.

The new secretary took great pains also in the ordering of the dinner, and in the arranging of the guests. His efforts were rewarded; there was general satisfaction expressed by the members of the council; and he was congratulated on the most successful dinner ever given. Amid the pervading gaiety of the occasion there was only one guest who regretted the dinner of the year before. This was Miss Mary Van Dyne. She said nothing about it to anyone; indeed, she was accustomed to keep her feelings to herself. But she missed an inexplicable something which had made the other dinner the most delightful memory of her later life.

The Century Magazine, May 1886