Love and Art

I.

A MUSICAL party was in progress, one afternoon, at Mrs. Du Pont Fairfax’s, in Egeria. Her cottage — commanding a view of the valley, and of the amphitheatre of bluish-purplish hills crowned by the peaks of the Sky Mountains — stood on a site, lately rescued from the bear and the wildcat, on the boulder-strewn side of Mount Egeria, which rose bristling with hemlocks, pines, and beeches to the green-capped summit. A touch of sylvan wildness, caught from the surroundings, enhanced the prettiness of its appointments. The main room, like a baronial hall, reached to the high unhewn rafters. The huge fireplace with its stone chimney was large enough to roast an ox, but on this August day the logs were covered with goldenrod. The furniture and the balustrades of the staircase and galleries were made of twisted and bent woods or of unbarked birch; there were shelves and brackets of enormous fungi ; bear and fox skins were stretched on the floor. These suggestions of primitive forest wildness, these touches of the bizarre, helped to emphasize the delicate effect of cushions, rugs, and draperies, which in their mellow blendings of color repeated the tints of the unbroken woods.

Although the cottage stood on the verge of the uncleared wilderness, it was one of a settlement belonging to a summer colony of artistic and professional people who liked to snatch their holiday out of the very lap of nature. Mrs. Fairfax’s party was composed not only of élégants, but of celebrities as well. There was Eugene Trent, the novelist and dramatist, a guest of the house. That was he sitting at the end of the many-cushioned divan ; a man of thirty or more, whose usually acute, penetrating, and rather handsome face at this moment wore an absent-minded expression. Then there were Van Houten and St. Clair, the portrait and landscape painters ; Miss Rose, the flower artist; Miss Barry, the reader ; besides Mrs. Symons, who had left the stage to become the wife of a millionaire. Mrs. Fairfax piqued herself upon possessing no cleverness save the rare cleverness of being able to appreciate clever people. Her beautiful gray eyes were full of passionate sympathy for authors, poets, and musicians; and moreover she read their books, bought their pictures, and loved their music.

Nevertheless, she showed this afternoon a certain restlessness, not to say dissatisfaction. Themusicale was moving on as amateur musicales do move. Two ladies had sung a duet, and one a solo, taking the high notes with visible nervousness ; a pupil of Saint-Saëns had played one of his master’s compositions full of thunderclap effects, and a handsome young man had contributed an incredibly naughty French song to the accompaniment of the mandolin. Still, well as she manipulated these fragments of talent, it was evident that the hostess was holding some powerful attraction in reserve. She looked eagerly at the door, as if some performer tarried ; and more than once, in the pauses between the music, she walked towards the circular loggia where Miss Esmé Lewis sat before the samovar, apparently giving her whole mind to the concoction of Russian tea. Miss Lewis was a tall, dreamylooking girl of twenty, pale, with masses of bright curly brown hair cut short, and large limpid blue eyes. She was dressed in white, the gown open at the neck disclosing a throat of rare strength and beauty, and her sleeves ending at the elbow gave a chance for the display of really exquisite arms, wrists, and hands. But in her present look of indifference or apathy her actual charm remained ineffective.

“ Now, Esmé, you promised me,” Mrs. Fairfax finally said to her, plaintively.

“ I have not the courage,” Esmé murmured.

“ But when the others are doing their best to help me out, in Mr. Von Fröbel’s absence ?”

The girl gave a visible shudder.

“ Is not that a little ungenerous ? ” asked Mrs. Fairfax, almost with indignation.

Esmé sighed. “ I cannot sing when I have not the courage; and,” she added humbly, “ I am trying to make myself useful in some way,” and she filled with fresh tea a row of blue teacups.

“I do not ask you to expend on my tea-table what was meant for mankind.” But even while Mrs. Fairfax spoke, her face lighted up with joyful relief.

“ Oh, Mr. Von Fröbel,” she cried, addressing one of two men who appeared suddenly at the foot of the steps, “ I am so delighted to see you ! ”

The new-comer was a man of middle age, dressed in gray tweeds, and carrying in his hand, besides a hazel-stick, a huge straw hat with a brim half a yard wide.

“ Will you take me as you find me,” he asked, “ or shall I go back to the Inn and dress ? ”

There could be no doubt about Mrs. Fairfax’s readiness to accept the pianist under any conditions, and Von Fröbel, all the time explaining how he and Arnold had lost their way in trying to make a short cut, followed her into the music-room, picked up a Japanese fan, sat down at the piano, and inquired what he should play. He had a heavy, homely face lighted with kindliness and humor, and a general aspect of rude strength; but the moment he touched the keys, nobody would have accused him of lacking delicacy. Mrs. Fairfax begged him to play Chopin’s Grande Polonaise ; and the instant he began, the general air of polite concession on the part of the audience vanished. Eugene Trent rose, came forward, and stood near the instrument, with the air of a man whose burden of ennui is lifted. The effect produced upon another listener was even more apparent. No sooner had she heard the opening chords of the Andante Spianato than the girl at the teatable started to her feet, the color rushing to her face, her eyes kindling. The change in her whole aspect was like that of a landscape flashing out of gray cloud into sunshine. While the piano still trembled under the vibrations of the final notes, she ran towards the hostess, and faltered in a voice of eager entreaty, “ Oh, dear Mrs. Fairfax, may I sing? ”

“May you sing?” said Mrs. Fairfax. “ As if I had not been going on my knees all the afternoon to beg you to sing ! ”

She introduced Miss Esmé Lewis to Mr. Von Fröbel, who yielded his seat at the piano with a bow, and a smile in his sleepy eyes. The girl, once more pale, sank into it, and struck two notes, faint, monotonous, iterative, in a way that drew everybody’s attention ; then, at Mrs. Fairfax’s suggestion, began Gounod’s Ave Maria. It was, if such a thing might be said, like a child’s singing in its sleep ; soft, unconscious. dreamy, telling of some inner rapture. It produced an impression of singular charm, and was applauded vociferously.

“ Let me try one more, please,” exclaimed the singer, impatient at the interruption. Then, as if the Ave Maria had been a mere prelude, suddenly and unexpectedly, as if withdrawing a veil and disclosing her genius in its majesty, she burst into the Ah Perfido !

Von Fröbel, who had smiled at the pretty spoiled child, expecting the timid experiment of the tyro in art, was kindled in his turn.

“ That is excellent, that is admirable! ” he cried, as soon as her voice died away. “Now you must take a rest, —wait till your breath comes. I too must try a little Beethoven.”

Not to weary the reader, to whom the sight of the two ardent faces and the thrill of the music are wanting, it is enough to say that the competition, as it might be called, went on, the performers all the time gaining fire and felicity of execution, until Von Fröbel’s friend, Arnold, pushed himself into the group about the instrument, explaining that he must take the pianist away, since they had but three quarters of an hour in which to go to the Inn, dress, and drive six miles to dine with Colonel McCosh at half past seven. Ten minutes later every guest had taken leave, save Mrs. Lewis, who lived in the next cottage, and her niece Esmé, who was talking to Eugene Trent. A soft pink color now glowed on the girl’s cheek, and her eyes emitted light.

“ I saw Mrs. Fairfax at first entreating you in vain to sing,” Eugene remarked.

“ But how could I sing ? ” she said, with a soft, piercing note in her voice. “ There were so many people.”

“ Surely you are not afraid of people ? ”

She looked at him wistfully. “ There was a lady with such strange, such hideous flowers in her bonnet standing straight up,” she murmured.

“ Flowers in her bonnet! What had that to do with it ? ”

“ Then there was a girl with green sleeves, — such huge, such extraordinary sleeves, — like balloons ! ” She put her hands to her shoulders, then extended her arms almost to their full length.

“ Sleeves ! The moment Von Fröbel touched the piano, you minded neither the stiff flowers standing straight up nor the sleeves like balloons.”

“ I know.” She regarded him with a meditative look in her blue eyes, then gave a little shiver. “ You see,” she said confidentially, “ I need a push.”

II.

“ I understand her,” said Eugene Trent. “ Often enough I long to be smitten as Moses smote the rock.”

Mrs. Fairfax and her aunt, Miss Barlow, had been speaking of Esmé Lewis, who, her father having died ten years before, and her mother having married again, had lived chiefly with her aunt in Munich, Milan, and Paris, where she had been given the best musical opportunities. Mrs. Lewis was ambitions for the girl, who had delighted her masters by her talent, but who seemed to lack the strength of will to command at need the requisite élan to make herself invariably the mistress of her own powers. Or was it a mere girlish whim which caused her to behave as Eugene had seen her that day, — at first shrinking from any display of her talent, then suddenly descending upon the piano like a whirlwind ?

It was later in the evening. The doors and windows of the cottage were still wide open, and across the indistinguishable gulf of blackness rose the outlines of the mountains,above which avast bank of cloud kept flashing back the reflections of distant lightnings. The night was so cool that the great logs had been set aflame in the fireplace, and Mrs. Fairfax had put on a long white wrap trimmed with Angora fur. But to shut doors and windows was to shut out the feeling of nearness to the mountains, the wilderness, the night, the universe.

“ Von Fröbel inspired her,” said Eugene. “ Every artist needs to be goaded like an ox, and often enough dwindles and declines simply from the lack of the necessary spur.”

“ I wish I might inspire somebody.”

“ Inspire me. Somebody has said that a poet at forty must find a fresh inspiration ; otherwise, as a poet, he is dead. That is what ails me.”

“ You are thirty-three, and you grow more and more popular every day.”

“ I am accepted, I admit; but I observe that nowadays, although everybody congratulates me on my last new thing, nobody has yet found time to read it. The critics are beginning to say, ‘ One of Eugene Trent’s characteristic efforts,’ or ‘ Eugene Trent displays his usual brilliant facility.’ I know what such signs point to.”

“ Why should a successful writer care about the critics ? ”

“ It is the successful writer who is nervous about his talent. Does a pretty woman never look in the glass and say to herself that she no longer grows each day more beautiful, and that there must come a time ” —

“ If you mean me,” said Mrs. Fairfax, a childless woman of thirty-six, with an adoring husband, just now on the other side of the globe, — “ if yon mean me, I do nothing else.”

“ Time enough for you some twenty years hence,” Eugene, the cousin of the absent Du Pont Fairfax, said, with animation. “ What I mean is that one longs for the miracle to repeat itself, for the feeling of the spontaneous upspringing of the seed from the earth, the effervescence of the sap through the veins. To feel surprise and joy in doing one’s own work is the first requisite for interesting other people.”

“ You interest everybody.”

“Who is everybody? The people you and I know have no time to read. There is too much of everything nowadays, there are ten thousand too many fellows writing, every new author is elbowing the old authors out of the way, and not even a woman’s gowns go out of fashion as do a man’s books. I tell you, Fanny, it is a dismal thing, this getting a living by one’s wits, with a dread all the time of lagging superfluous in a world which wants to forget you. Then, too, there is the sordid side to it: other men’s names are not only first on the publishers’ lists and on the playbills, but what used to come into your pocket slides with singular ease into the pocket of the other fellow.”

But Mrs. Fairfax was laughing, well aware that Eugene was the idol of editors and publishers, and that he had a play posted for rehearsal in New York for the opening of the season.

“ Evidently,” she exclaimed, “ this is a moment of despondency ! ”

“Yes, I am horribly tired of myself. As Miss Esmé Lewis says, ‘ I need a push.’ ”

“ Fall in love.”

“ Have n’t I been in love ? ”

“ You were in love at the age of twenty-two, or thought you were in love with Sarah Sargent. There has been a little touch of Sarah in all you have written, and I sometimes say to myself that, after all. Sarah was not all womankind, and that you ought to enlarge your experience. Of course I know,” she went on, answering his glance and shrug, “ that you have had flirtations, but they have been with women older than yourself. We old women are very well in a social way, but we cannot touch the heart, we cannot kindle the imagination. That comes only with the dawn of the early morning. ‘It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.’ ”

The clock had struck eleven, and Miss Barlow interposed, saying it was bedtime. Eugene went to his room still under the thrill of his half confession, and coerced to rehearse to himself, in the absence of other auditor, the part he had left unsaid. He leaned forth from the open casement. Strange sounds rose out of the stillness. Was it the wind that stirred the forest, and swept down with long, sighing gusts into the valley ? The clouds had risen, and, riven with lightnings, resembled beetling monsters advancing to swallow up the mountains and the valley beneath.

His usual well-braced, half-cynical habit of mind had not been broken without results. What he had at times experienced rather as a blinding flash than as a matter of clear insight, and what he had been incomprehensibly impelled to confide to Fanny Fairfax, now rose, shaping itself out of a thousand dim perceptions, and looked him in the face. He was dissatisfied with himself and with his work. His gift had been to catch and focus the ideas of his generation ; to be pliant to impressions, receptive, experimental, above all modern. His success had been so signal that it had at first contented him ; then, as time went on, the very ease with which he succeeded became a torment. He paused before each new effort, jealous, fastidious, realizing more and more that it was mere cleverness ; that the passion and the human significance which are the essence of all lasting art were left out. He was sick of his grooves. He longed to free himself from their tyranny; to break up his habits, and work spontaneously out of a clear central idea ; to go to nature, watch, observe, take notes. He was like a studio painter whose imagination has been impressed by certain models and poses, which he reproduces, until there is no longer any clear individuality in his work. What he needed, Eugene now decided, was to go back to the beginning ; to take a single personality, study it, and pluck out the heart of its mystery.

He expected to stay two or three weeks in Egeria, and his mind reverted to Miss Lewis as good material for a study. She was palpably different from the everyday girl, and he wanted some one who could give what was still fresh, uncoined. Certainly, so far there had been something suggestive in her most innocent sentences. Why not take notes ? He remembered that Tourgenieff, in his wish to penetrate the whole character and temperament of his heroes and heroines, used to write the diary of each ; in fact, fragments of Ellen’s are retained in On the Eve. “ Why should not I take some such means to preserve fragments of conversation and actions disclosing the characteristic bias ? ” Eugene now asked himself.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he fell into a doze ; then, unconscious of having slept, started up with the feeling that some one had been close beside him, singing. Indeed, the melody, which was Gounod’s Ave Maria, still vibrated through his brain. He strained his ears. He could not resist the bewildered impression not only that he had heard her voice, but that Esmé Lewis herself had been beside him, sweet, smiling, and seductive.

He went to bed, but some effect of this vision remained, and he used it as the initial entry in the new diary which was to fix his fleeting impressions, catch the charm of the incomplete, arrest the passing light which transfigures the simplest thing: the silver of the poplar leaves as they shiver and turn in the breeze ; the flight of a pigeon, its snow-white throat glistening in the sunshine ; the rising blush on the cheek of a young girl, — say the face of Miss Esmé Lewis. For let us remember that Eugene’s primary impulse was to strive after pure effect. His end was distinct from the means, his artistic ideal from the passing form it wore, his idea from its subject.

We will quote occasional paragraphs from this diary.

August 13. Young girls stir the imagination because they say only the half of what they think. A man is obliged to piece out the meaning by his perception of the creature, by the curve of the lip, by the fluttering droop of the eyelids.

August 14. Fanny’s idea of exercise is to “ walk round the mountain.” Esmé and I lead the way at a pace which permits us to make two circuits to the others’ one. The walk is charming, the fine beeches and hemlocks parting at intervals, and disclosing vistas of the valley, the little lake, the farther ranges. . . . Sometimes we talk ; again we keep silence. I quoted Hardy, who declares that a real woodlander can tell every variety of tree by the sound the wind makes in its leaves and branches. This interests her ; she listens, refining upon the idea. Now and then comes the call of a partridge, the patter of an acorn. She may be quiet, but never dull. Often when she is gazing straight before her, there is something high pitched and passionate about her face. She is docile, has no pose. I fancy her easy submission comes from her indifference to people not in touch with her. . . . Out of doors, where everything is moving, buzzing, humming, fluttering, one’s eyes and ears are taken possession of. I could sit for a week and wonder why a birchtree shivers when everything else is motionless, and why one frequently sees one particular leaf in violent motion when others show not even a vibration.

Later. For a man of my age to talk to a young girl is, in general, to take the tone of an imbecile or a dogmatist, but I find a good deal to say to Miss Lewis. She is insatiable for facts. To-day she darted up the bank, vanished into the thicket, then reappeared, leaping down the rocks like a young fawn. She had picked some blossoms of Impatiens fulva, and had hung them over her ears and in her brooch.

“ You remind me of Marguerite and her jewels,” I remarked. “ A common name of that flower is jewel-weed.”

Naturally, she burst into the pretty song from Faust; then having, as it were, let it loose, questioned me about the names of the plants, exalting me as a botanist because I happened to have them at my tongue’s end, repeating them over and over.

“ Why do you care to know them ? They are not in your line,” I said.

“ Everything is in my line,” she replied. “ One can sing only as deep as one feels, as one knows.” Then suddenly stretching out her arms, she cried, “ I long to understand everything ! Sometimes I cannot sleep at night for thinking how it is ‘ all going on.’ ”

“ What is going on ? ” I inquired.

“ The wind, the moon, the planets, the stars in their courses. I hate to he safe in bed. I long to be out moving with it all.”

August 17. She told me to-day of a visit from Von Fröbel. She had sung to him for an hour ; then he told her she had an unusually good mezzo-soprano voice, of sympathetic quality, flexible, of fair compass, and correct in intonation. When she asked advice as to the future, he said, “ For one year work hard, get familiar with your work ; then for another year work harder, and get more familiar with your work ; then for a third year harder still.”

“ And after that ? ” she had asked.

“ Perhaps you may have a great career, perhaps not.”

She is not discouraged. Indeed, he seems to have kindled fresh fires in her.

August 20. How does a girl, within the space of twenty-four hours, contrive to look like a Cinderella in the ashes, a fashionable young lady dressed by Worth, a portrait by Vandyck, and a saint of Fra Angelico’s ?

August 21. I caught sight of a sailor hat, and followed ; but her “ no,” when I asked if I should spoil her walk, showed such excessive politeness, I felt abashed.

“ Oh, if you prefer solitude,” I said.

“ Oh no. Mr. Von Fröbel says I must not be solitary; I must keep myself in touch with people.”

“ Hang Von Fröbel!” — this to myself ; then aloud, “ I object to being people in general: if I can be nobody in particular, I will go the other way.”

“ But you are somebody very particular,” she returned demurely ; then added, with a little smile, “ Mrs. Fairfax says you are surpassingly clever ! ”

“ Mrs. Fairfax loves to exalt her friends. She reminds me of Madame Necker with her memorandum, ‘ Not to forget to recompliment M. Thomas.’ ”

She gazed at me with her limpid blue eyes. “ Who was M. Thomas ? ” she asked impassively.

“ An Academician who had written a book.”

“ I wonder if he was not bored by Madame Necker’s compliments?”

“ I fancy she knew her world. Are you, for example, bored when any one praises your singing twice over ? ”

“ No. I like it; but then,” she went on, with a burst of confidence, “ I am pining for a clear certainty that my voice is felt. I get in a rage with myself for being pleased by cheap successes, — I call myself names! But you, who too are an artist, you know it all, — how one longs for recognition, for sympathy, yet how poor, how stale, it seems when one gets it.”

It flattered me to the fibre, of course, to be called a fellow-artist, and thereupon she told me something which startled me: I was pointed out to her as the author of Martyrs, on the afternoon of the musicale, and she was curious enough about me, or the book, to sit up until two o’clock to read it. Then she put it down, charmed and carried away to such a degree that, in spite of the dead hour of night, she had to relieve herself by singing a little.

“ W hat did you sing ? ” I inquired.

“ The Ave Maria of Gounod.”

Now, I call it nothing less than devilish odd that just after two, that very night, I not only heard her singing that song, but felt her presence, actually saw her. It is an instance for the Psychical Research Society.

“ It is so stupid to go to bed, when one feels excited and uplifted,” she continued naïvely. “ What a dead loss the night is ! Why could not nature be restored in some more economical way than by seven hours of unprofitable oblivion ? I longed to go on singing all night.”

We had reached the summit of Mount Egeria. The Sky peaks, which when we started were veiled in mists, had now emerged resplendent. The ferns, mosses, all the rich greenery about us, seemed to drink in the sunlight, and give it back in vivid color. Great turquoise and emerald dragonflies whirled about in broken starts, brown and yellow butterflies fluttered like falling leaves.

“ I wish you would sing to me now,” I said.

Nothing loath, she clambered up a rock and began at once. Something in the girl’s face and figure, and her measured strain with its full, unbroken rhythm, opened up vistas of imagination, large, free, untrammeled. At first the song suggested the flight of a bird, that, poised on wide expanded pinions, floats above the world. Gradually the movement grew more rapid ; she sang with more abruptness, fire, impetuosity ; and then I remembered Faust’s ride with Mephistopheles. When she ceased, I asked what the song was, and she said the composer was an obscure Italian, and that it was called The Dream. It would have been a stupid obvious compliment to tell her I liked it; any woman with an ounce of insight could have seen that both she and her song had taken hold of me. But the petty vanity of the artist urged her to inquire, “ Did I sing it well? Mr. Vou Fröbel says I ought never to sing in the open air, and never without an accompaniment, until I am absolute mistress of my voice.”

August 22. Evidently she is more interested in art and in herself as an artist than in anything or anybody. She likes me, however, as a companion, little guessing that I am using her and her whims and her cleverness as a cook uses grouse for a pie. She feels that I am sympathetic, and often permits herself irresistible élan and abandon. If I were to fall in love with her, — which Heaven forbid! — this attitude of indifference would stir my emotional nature far more than either concession or coquetry, for it penetrates me with a sense of infinite sweetness to discover, to conquer. As well to note down this, but of course what I ask for is a fillip to the imagination. I should not know what to do with a durable sentiment.

August 24. We started two hours before Fanny and the others, who were to drive to the gorge. Esmé was in a quiet mood, and trudged along in the dust with a sad little white face. I wondered what thought consumed her with endless regrets. Finally she broke silence.

“ You do not mind my being rather shabby, Mr. Trent ? You see, I am not rich, and I like to save my good clothes.”

I observed that I admired her trim little serge frock; that I rejoiced if she were poor, — it gave her a better chance to do good work.

“ Then you advise me to go on the stage ? ” she said, with a sigh which seemed to break her heart.

“ If you long for such a career and possess the requisite genius, I should.”

“ I have plenty of genius,” she hastened to say. “What I need is the requisite talent to give my genius free play.”

“There used to be such a destiny for woman as marriage,” I suggested tentatively. rather wickedly, for one needs somehow to get at the secret of the mainspring of a mechanism. But when she murmured, “Yes,” looking straight before her, a soft color rising to her cheek, I was conscious that the blush communicated itself to me, and experienced a peculiar embarrassment which forbade my saying another word.

“I suppose,” she now observed, with a luxurious little sigh, “ that every great artist must have experienced a great passion.”

When a woman gives a man back certain of his own ideas he loathes them.

“ What is important for an artist.” I said, with austerity, “ is to love his work, and do it with all his might.”

“ That is all I wish to do ! ” she cried, walking on faster than ever.

Arrived at the hut where we were to picnic, and which overlooks a gorge with a dry bed of boulders and precipitous barren sides, she assumed a new rôle : arranged the rugs, steamer chairs, and cushions which Fanny had sent on before us, opened the hamper, and, pinning a napkin over her frock, set to work making a mayonnaise.

“ How she puts her soul into whatever she does ! ” Fanny remarked to me. “ How she will love a man one of these days!”

This intensely feminine speech half enraged me. How detestable the talk is about “a man ” ! As if any member of the male sex would answer! Besides, we should never think of gauging a girl’s capacity for passion by her zeal in whisking eggs. Yet I observe that the critical subtleties of women, full of zigzags as they are, sometimes hit the mark. Fanny has more than once given me a useful hint, albeit based on a wildly illogical chimera.

III.

Shortly after this entry, Eugene gave up the diary, finding it unnecessary to take notes of what was more than sufficiently in his mind already. And it was no longer with the design of reinforcing his powers of invention with these impressions of Esmé that he spent his time watching and thinking about her, but with a cramping, narrowing, wholly inartistic sense of his own wishes. He was in love, and he knew that he was in love. Until now it would have seemed incredible that he should thus limit his future, and for a few days he tried to knock at the door of his old tastes, and summon his fastidiousness, his fixed habits of elegance and ease. Strange to say, they did not come at his bidding, but instead a fresh force of his nature, hitherto almost unfelt, which rushed into the full current of this new feeling.

Still, he experienced a sense of the irony of things when destiny handed him over, not to some supreme career, but to the joys of the common lot; and he reflected that he must be sure of himself, that he must not act upon impulse, like a boy of twenty, to whom love is like a bottle of champagne effervescing in the brain. Then, even if he were sure of himself, he was not yet sure of Esmé. Some test was needed before he could decide whether the innocence and ardor with which she threw herself into their every-day intercourse pointed to any clear central feeling for himself.

They met constantly in their walks, and at the teas, receptions, and entertainments which made up the social life in Egeria, and where Esmé was rarely let off without a song, a recitation, or other effort sure to disclose something fine, characteristic, and powerful in the girl. That Eugene experienced more and more a sort of jealousy of the other people who admired and applauded these artistic displays was natural.

“ You recited Oh, Monsieur ! capitally, last night,” he observed to her one morning. They had gone on an errand for Mrs. Lewis to Long Hill, and having acquitted themselves of it, had found a shady nook on a steep slope, where they sat down to rest. A dreamy hum from myriads of wings penetrated the ear. The poplars, all in a quiver, showed the silver under their leaves as the breeze stirred them. The whole magnificent landscape, stretching on every side away to the Sky Mountains, basked in sunlight.

“ Why do yon remind me of it now ? ” said Esmé. “ I simply repeated it. I had the lesson at the ends of my fingers.”

“ I heard what the people were saying,” he went on: “that you possessed a sure income of twenty thousand locked up in that voice of yours, whether you sang or whether you recited.”

“ I hate it, I hate it all,” she said, and he saw in her face a look like a cup of crystal brimming over.

“ But twenty — fifty thousand dollars income ! ” he repeated, as if incredulous.

“ Twenty thousand dollars for being somebody else ! ” she exclaimed impatiently.

“ You would rather be yourself.”

“Yes, myself. People have always been talking of what I could do with my voice. I should like to forget I had a voice. I should like to go into the wilderness and rough it.” She was sitting on a ledge of rocks, leaning forward, and clasping her hands on her knees.

“ What do you mean by roughing it ? ”

“ Living out of doors, sleeping on hemlock houghs or on the stones, beneath the stars.”

“You wouldn’t he afraid of snakes and bears ? ”

She shivered. “ Oh yes, I should.”

“ But then, of course,” Eugene suggested mischievously, “ somebody would be along to take care of you.”

“ I don’t know,” she said nonchalantly. “ Nobody ever did take care of me yet.”

“ You poor little girl! Do you like to be taken care of ? ”

“ Does n’t everybody? ”

“I know,” said Eugene, “that I do. But everybody says that the modern woman is not only equal to taking care of herself, but prefers it. I admire her strength of mind.”

“ You admire strong-minded women ? ”

“ I admire all kinds of women. I am pulled in all directions. If a man could but have nine wives ! ”

“ I wish you joy of your nine wives ! ”

“ You are properly disdainful, Miss Esmé Lewis, knowing that in each one of your sex there are at least nine women.”

She looked at him, laughing. “ Perhaps, then, one wife might suffice.”

Her nonchalance tried him. He lay Stretched at full length on the rock beside her, his hand supporting his bead. He gazed at her fixedly. There was no droop of the eyes, no rising color. “ One will suffice,” he said significantly.

“ Even one might be too many,” she retorted.

“ There have been times when I felt so, when I said that to marry would be to end my career. I could not marry for money, and to be compelled to write with the idea of grinding out a certain amount of copy in order to make an income would paralyze all my faculties. I have never felt sure of myself. I have a dread of becoming second rate.”

She was gazing at him intently now. “ That would be horrible,” she said, with a shudder, — “ to feel one’s self deteriorating, yet to go on and do middling things when one had hoped to do great things! ”

“ But all that is an egoistic and onesided State of mind,” said Eugene. “ I feel suddenly contented with middling things. Who does great things except the masters ? Even if I had expected to create an art era, I am now willing to give up such dreams, and accept without question what will bring me crackers and cheese.”

“ Do not say it! ” she cried, putting her fingers in her ears. “ I cannot endure to have you say it.”

For I tell you,” Eugene pursued, with vehemence, “ a man does not live by crackers and cheese alone, nor even by partridges, truffles, and terrapin. I have been half mad with loneliness sometimes, although I have had all the luxuries, more than were good for me. I called my loneliness by other names, and I have appointed to myself strange consolations. Yet the matter was that I wanted something that was my own, — my own down to the very heart, the roots of it, — that could be no other man’s. To dismiss metaphor, Miss Esmé Lewis, what I want is the sweet little wife I used to say I did not want. No matter how poor we may be, no matter what becomes of my talent, no matter how we may have to live by my sordid quill-driving, I long for her,— to scold, praise, preach to, soothe, and get scoldings and comfort out of.”

The color had rushed to her face now, but her eyes were fixed on the distance. “ Poor thing ! ” she murmured.

“Do you mean my wife?” he said, with indignation. “ She will be the happiest woman in the world, or will think she is.”

“ When she has spoiled your career ? ”

“Perhaps,” he said softly, “art will not have uttered her final word to me. But let all that go. I am willing to put the future on the hazard of a die. One has to say sometimes, ‘I am young; I have a right to try to be happy.’ ”

“ We have no rights, only duties.”

“That is an excellent creed for a wife,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. “ My wife will have certain duties. The first will be to love me, and the next to do with delight whatever I wish her to do. When, for example, I take her out camping with me, I shall cut hemlock boughs for her bed, and shall say to her, ‘ Sleep there,’ and she shall sleep beneath the stars.”

Their eyes met. Her glance was shy, but it communicated a subtle fire to his veins.

“ Poor thing ! ” she murmured again.

“ Oh, you pretend to pity her ! ”

“ I pity her sincerely. I feel so sure that when morning comes you will say, ‘ Wake up and get breakfast.’ ”

“ That seems inevitable.”

She was laughing. “ Mrs. Lewis believes,” she pursued, “ that at heart all men are despots, — that any concession on their part depends on the woman.”

“ Of course it depends on the woman. Now, Esmé, tell me frankly, would you rather govern or be governed ?”

“ Oh, be governed, a thousand times ; except, that is, when I wanted my own way.”

“ How often would that be ? Three times out of four ? ”

“ Twice ought to do. That woold n’t look so greedy.”

In spite of the irrepressible mischief in her face, he was so sure of a feeling in her throbbing in response to his own that he was moved to stretch out his hand to clasp hers ; but midway her words arrested the impulse.

“ Mr. Von Fröbel says,” she now remarked, “ that in the ultimate triumph of civilization a man will have only to press an electric button and his every need will be gratified. I wish yon joy, Mr. Trent, of a wife like an eleetric button.”

His hand descended on hers with a spring, and held it fast.

“I assure you, Miss Lewis, the woman I love with all my heart is a creature delicate, spontaneous, catching fire easily, and acting on every impulse.”

The moment his clasp tightened on her hand she had sprung up, and he had followed.

“ It is time to go back! ” she exclaimed.

“No, Esmé, not yet.”

“ Oh yes. Please let me.”

She had withdrawn her hand, and now, without putting on her hat or unfurling her parasol, darted up the bank and reached the road, where, in the hot noontide glare, she stood awaiting him.

“ Are you angry with me ? ” she faltered, as he approached.

“ Evidently you have a bad conscience.”

“I behave badly, I know,” she said, with a touch of contrition in her voice ; “ but Mr. Von Fröbel says every successful actor must have a touch of the mountebank in his composition.”

“ It is Von Fröbel, Von Fröbel, Von Fröbel, with you! ” he cried, with actual indignation.

“ Why should it not be, when he helps me, believes in me ? ”

“ Do not I help you, believe in you ? ”

“You care nothing about my voice. ‘ My voice is nry fortune, sir, she said.’ ” She quoted it saucily, with a little curtsy.

His wrath was appeased. Still, he had no desire to pick up the scattered threads of his spoiled declaration of love while they trudged homeward along the dusty road.

“ Suppose, Esmé,” he said, “ I were to put you in a book ? ”

She laughed in glee, lowering her eyelids.

“ You could n’t,” she retorted.

“ You mean that I have not got the clue to you, the secret of you? What else have I been doing all this time except studying you ? Do you suppose I could afford to waste such an opportunity ? ”

“ Do not dare to put me in a book,” she said, in a different tone, with an indescribable change in her face.

“ But if I make you charming ! ” he said tensingly.

“No, no matter how you make me.” Then she added, with some effort at archness, “ Do you remember what the pheasants said when they were asked whether they preferred to be served up in bread or mushroom sauce ? ”

“ No.”

“ That they preferred not to be served up in any sauce at all.”

This was Esmé’s final word, for in another moment they were joined by half a dozen people, and for the rest of the walk, like a creature with wings, she darted, fluttered, and buzzed about, but did not once come near him. He expected, however, to meet her at a musical party in the afternoon, and in the evening she was to assist Von Fröbel in a farewell entertainment at the Inn, given for a charitable enterprise. Thus in the meshes of a dilemma as he was, Eugene yet counted on the opportunity of saying, and saying effectively, what he had left unsaid. To his dismay, he did not come face to face with Esmé again that day, except as he sat in the audience and heard her sing.

IV.

The next morning, when Eugene called at Mrs. Lewis’s cottage, he was told that the ladies were not at home. Notwithstanding, when, after luncheon, he again walked past the house, he caught a glimpse of the object of his thoughts as she passed an upper window. He stood still in the path, and bowed with exaggerated politeness.

“You are not at home,” he remarked.

“No, not to visitors,” Miss Lewis replied calmly.

“ There are people who have compunctions of conscience.”

“ Not I.”

“However, I called this morning simply to ask you to go to Phantom Falls with me.”

“ Please excuse me.”

“ Of course. Only, as we once arranged to take a walk there together, and as I am going to New York to-night, it seemed ” —

“Are you going to New York tonight ? ”

“ Please God.”

“Why are you going to New York to-night ? ”

“ I am telegraphed for. You consider me, no doubt, a purely ornamental lily of the field, when the truth is, I am the pivot on ” —

“ I remember,” she interrupted with some eagerness, “ I did promise to walk to Phantom Falls with you.”

“You certainly did.”

“ I always mean to keep my promises,” she said, with a conscientious air. Her glance searched the skies. “ But do you not think it is going to rain ? ”

“It never rains when it is as dry as it is now.”

“ Could you wait for me five minutes ? ”

“ Six.”

When she joined him, he perceived that she was pale, her eyes red with weeping. He took her hand. It was cold, it trembled in his own ; but no signs of joy could have pleased him as did these indications of woe.

“ I am so pleased,” he said, when they had walked on for some time in silence, “ that you have put on your poor little frock.”

“ You do think it is going to rain, then ? ”

“ I only meant that you seem not too magnificent to walk beside a shabby Bohemian.”

“ You would not like to have any one else call you a shabby Bohemian.”

“ Perhaps not. But I address you as I address my conscience. Do you consider it a disgrace that I am a shabby Bohemian, with nothing between me and destitution save a small balance at my banker’s and the work of my good right hand? ”

“ It brings back what you said yesterday,” she said softly. “ I want to ask you to forgive me for being angry.”

He found something enigmatical but singularly sweet in her look.

She went on : “ For a moment I was hurt to think you had perhaps been drawing me out, using me as material for your work. I ought to be proud of it; indeed, I am proud if I have given you an idea, no matter how trivial, how foolish. I only wish I might have given you great things, immortal things.”

“ Esmé,” he returned passionately, “ let me tell you how wretched I have been at the thought of what seemed like blind presumption, like cold egotism. I want to say now “ —

“No, do not say it! ” she cried. “ Let yesterday go ; this is to-day.”

It was one of those afternoons when the sky alternately brightens and darkens. A strong south wind was blowing, and as they made the steep descent to the valley which skirted the green ridges of Wildcat Mountain they met it full in their faces.

“ Let us walk on fast,” she continued, in a rapid, excited way. “ I love to drink it in.”

They tore down the path. “ Is that fast enough ? ” he asked.

“ Nothing is fast enough. Let us run.”

He caught her hand, and they ran on, until she paused, breathless.

“ I wish we had wings,” she said. She tried to draw her hand away.

“ No, I want your hand, just as if we were always to walk on, hand in hand.”

“ It is just in play ? ”

“ Just in play.” He bent toward her, smiling. “ I love you dearly, Esmé.”

“ Justas children play at being lovers.”

Their eyes met ; he felt her yielding clasp. He was insatiable of the charm of the moment.

“ If one could be a child,” she went on, “ with no thought that the impossible, tantalizing vision is not true, that occasion can ever come for sacrifice, for a difficult deciphering of duty ! ”

“ I told you yesterday what your duty was.”

“ Do not speak of yesterday. This is to-day.”

“ I am intoxicated with this to-day. It goes to my head.”

He told her about himself: that he was old and wise, having once lived through a love affair which lasted six weeks, until the return of his inamorata’s mother, who broke it off because he was too young and too poor. “ Now I am too old and too poor, but no matter. Have you ever been in love, Esmé ? ”

“ I never had any time to be in love. You see it has always been work, work, work, study, study, study, with me.”

“ Do you know, Esmé, the first time I saw you, when you were pouring out tea, I considered you a cold little creature.”

“ I had not begun to think of you then,” she said naïvely.

“ No, you thought only of music, — of that Von Fröbel.”

She gave him a startled look.

“ Tell me, Esmé, if you think of me now.”

“ I think of you too much, too much, too much.”

The confession seemed wrung from her against her will, but all the more it charmed him, for it was as if some spiritual touch of his soul and her soul evoked a force in her nature asserting itself against conventions, perhaps against her ambition for a personal career. He said nothing, only pressed the hand he held.

They had traversed the open space under the shadow of the huge bulk of Wildcat Mountain, and now entered the ravine which led up to the falls. At the same time, the sun, which had been sinning fitfully, was suddenly obscured, and the wind swept down the gorge in heavy gusts. On the right, here and there, a jutting rock on the perpendicular precipice gave lodgment to a few stunted pines and hemlocks; on the left, beyond the bed of pebbles and rocks, where the shrunken stream glided noiselessly, a deep forest climbed the slope to the very sky. Ahead was now discernible something white, misty, diaphanous, like a veil of frosty gauze floating in the air.

“ There are the falls. Like a phantom, are they not?” said Esmé. But even while she spoke, before they had gained a full view, the misty wavering outline of the cascade, with the hanging herbage, flowers, and vines which framed it, seemed to vanish as by a magic spell. It had suddenly grown so dark that they both looked up to the narrow strip of sky, with its black hurrying clouds, and saw that the trees on the summit of the precipice were bending and twisting, at the mercy of a tornado. The forest gave out a piercing moan.

“ Let us get out of this,” said Eugene, with consternation. “ I ought not to have brought you here.”

They stumbled at every step, no longer able to follow the footpath. The darkness was uncanny, and uncanny, too, were the almost articulate cries of the trees in the gale. All at once a few drops of rain fell, and then the sun burst forth again, enabling them to gain the open.

Indifferent to everything but the sensation of joyful relief, Eugene drew Esmé to him.

“ Lucky for us it rained no harder,” he said.

“ But it will rain.”

“ No matter, so long as we are out of that frightful place. If a stone — if a tree had fallen on you, Esmé” —

“ But suppose ” —

“ Yes, suppose — suppose the heavens had fallen, suppose the heavens had crushed us! ”

Their eyes met. She drew a long breath.

“ We should be dead, I suppose.”

“ Both dead or both alive. It could not matter. But think, Esmé, of one of us being alive, and the other dead ! ”

He was holding her close. She was looking into his face, and in her eyes and smile he saw all he longed to see. He bent and kissed her lips, three, four times. Once she kissed him back ; then drew away, and raised her hand, listening.

“ I hear the rain coming,” she said.

The wind had ceased. Instead, there was a steady roar as of an advancing host. The mountains were lost in gray mist. The clouds had shut down. In another moment the deluge was upon them.

They reached the cottages an hour later. They had scarcely spoken except in disjointed exclamations, but she had clung to him, and he had shielded her. There had been no adieus, although she knew that Eugene was to start at once to catch the evening train.

V.

Two days later, before the rainstorm, to which the shower was a prelude, had cleared off, Eugene had finished his business in New York, and was again in Egeria, at Mrs. Fairfax’s.

“ And the Lewises ? ” he asked, when she told him she had been so lonely that she was packing up to go to Lenox.

“ They started at nine o’clock yesterday.”

“ What do you mean ? ”

She looked at him in surprise. “ Did not Esmé tell you they were to sail for Europe this morning at sunrise ? ”

“ She told me nothing.”

Mrs. Fairfax remarked, looking anywhere except at Eugene’s face, that it was odd he should have been kept in the dark. It appeared that Mrs. Lewis had finally made a precipitate flight, although she had more than once spoken of returning to Europe in September. Von Fröbel had urged it, and they had gone with him. Esmé was to study in Paris under his auspices until January, and then he had promised to get her an engagement.

Eugene listened with a parched throat which would have hindered his utterance even if he had had words to speak. There was the obvious fact of loss, as when you are told that your friend is dead ; the grave has closed over him, you can speak to him no more, and you realize with surprise your own superfluous and nugatory gift of life. Esmé’s face suddenly shone in Eugene’s memory with parted lips, as when she had sung to him that morning on the mountain top.

“ I had wondered, Eugene,” Mrs. Fairfax now said, with some tenderness, putting her hand on his arm, “ if you really did care for her, or whether it was only an artistic experience.”

“ I loved her, — I wanted to marry her,” he returned, with a rough, altered voice.

“ Did you tell her so ? ”

“ Do not ask me,” he muttered.

“ I fear,” murmured Mrs. Fairfax, a little embarrassed, “ Mrs. Lewis may have told Esmé that it was a way you had to — half fall in love.”

As she spoke, Eugene knew that Fanny herself had imposed this belief of hers upon others.

“ Mrs. Lewis said to me once,” she proceeded, “ that she thought your acquaintance had been stimulating to Esmé’s genius. Mr. Von Fröbel had told her that Sontag’s voice lacked charm until she had been through a good deal of experience.”

Eugene returned to New York on the following day, with the intention of taking the Wednesday steamer to Europe. The manager, however, who had his play in rehearsal had blocked out different work for the author, and he was obliged to content himself with writing to Esmé. Yet in sitting down to compose his letter he experienced the fact that already his restless fever, his intense determination to win her. was moderated by his dread of imposing a dull future upon her.

Perhaps Esmé discerned this. Perhaps she was still too young to know what imperishable hopes she had roused, what disappointment she had cost. She wrote back that she was sorry to have gone away abruptly, but had felt sure he would understand, since he knew that her art could be content with nothing less than an absolute giving up of all her life, of all her faculties, and of all her powers; that he must regard her as he had often seemed to regard her, as a mere child, and forgive her foolish truancy, which had made her sutler, running away as she had done from her kind summer friend, to whom for a week, for two weeks even, she had longed, at any cost, to return through the darkness and the distance.

This letter reached Eugene just as his play was brought out, when everything outside his present anxieties was something accidental, transitory, like summer lightnings which bring no relief to parched pasture lands. After his play had survived its ordeal, and had been pruned and shaped into something which pleased the public, he was worn out, disenchanted ; and it was in this moment of despondency that he read in the paper of Esmé’s successful début in Paris, and simultaneously of her engagement for the London season. Although Eugene feels in his deepest heart that no day of forgetfulness will ever dawn for him with temptation to feel happy again, he is writing a novel which promises to be his best work.

Ellen Olney Kirk.