The Letter of the Contract Part 9

Chip smiled ruefully. "Oh, I like it. Kind of penance. I like it as medieval sinners used to like a hair s.h.i.+rt."

"Yes; but the hair s.h.i.+rt was kept out of sight. You're parading your penance, as you call it, before the world. See here, Walker, why don't you come up and spend the weekend with me in New Hamps.h.i.+re? My wife would like to have you. To-day is Friday, and I go up to-morrow morning.

A Sunday in the country would do you good."

Chip refused, but he long remembered why he retracted his refusal. It was the look of his apartment when he returned to it that night. It was an apartment in a house at the corner of Madison Avenue and a street in the Thirties, dedicated to the use of well-to-do bachelors. It had been a slight mitigation in the collapse of life as he had built it up, that rooms in so comfortable a refuge should have been free for him. He had furnished them with some care; and after his first distress had worn off a little had found a measure of lawless satisfaction in a return to the old unmarried ways.

But on this particular evening the aspect of the place appalled him from the minute he turned his latch-key in the lock. Under the stimulus of Bland's counsels he had come home early, which was in itself a mistake.

It was scarcely nine o'clock. There was an hour or an hour and a half to pa.s.s before he could think of going to bed. Any such interval as that was always the hardest feature in the day for him. But what smote him specially now was the air of emptiness and loneliness. It met him as an odor in the stale smell of the cigar he had smoked on coming up-town from the office, and which still lingered in the rooms. He had forgotten to open a window, and the house valet, whose duty it was to "tidy up,"

had evidently gone out.

In the small hall into which Chip entered there was a bookcase with but two or three odds and ends of books in it, for his habits of reading had dropped away from him with everything else. In the sitting-room one brown shoe stood on the hearth-rug before the empty fireplace; the other on the center-table, a collar and necktie beside it. The soiled s.h.i.+rt he had thrown off lay on the couch, a sleeve dragging on the floor. On the mantelpiece, which he had at first consecrated as a shrine for the photographs of Edith and the children, and flanked by two silver candlesticks like an altar, there had intruded an open box of perfectos, an ash-tray that still held the b.u.t.t-end of a cigar, and an empty tumbler smelling of whisky. There were traces of cigar ashes everywhere--on the arms of the easy-chairs, on the rugs, and on the terra-cotta tiles of the hearth. For the rest the room was a litter of newspapers, as the bedroom which opened off it was a litter of clothes.

He was not disorderly; he was only careless, and incapable of creating order for himself. Disorder shocked him profoundly. He always sat down in the midst of it, helpless, but with a sense of inner misery. And so he sat down in it now. "My G.o.d!" he said to himself, summing up in the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n all the wretchedness he had wrought, or that had been wrought, about him.

It was at such minutes that his mind reverted to Edith, with renewed stupefaction over what she had done. Stupefaction was the word.

Reflection on the subject only left him the more hopelessly bewildered.

If she hadn't loved him her course might have been explicable. As it was, he found himself driven to a choice between mental aberration on her part and a witch's spell, inclining to the latter--with the witch in the guise of Aunt Emily.

Not that he absolved himself. He made no attempt to do that. But he looked upon his offense as of the kind that naturally calls for mercy rather than severity. What was the letter of the contract in comparison with the spirit?--and he had kept the spirit sacredly. Of course he had done wrong. Who in thunder, he asked, impatiently, ever denied that? But how many men had not done wrong in the same way? Very few, was his answer. The answer was the essence of his defense--a defense which, according to all the laws of human nature and common sense, Edith should have accepted. That she shouldn't accept it, or couldn't, or wouldn't, pa.s.sed his comprehension.

As a rule, he tried not to think of it. He tried not to think of it by filling up the time with something else. When there had been nothing else to fill up the time he had stupefied himself with drink. He drank at first, not because he liked drinking, but because it dulled his brain, his heart. It didn't excite him; on the contrary, it brought him to a state of lethargy which, if he was at the club, made him willing to go home, or, if he was at home, made it possible for him to go to bed and sleep. It was only within a month or so that he had begun to suspect that other people noticed it; and even then he hadn't been sure until Bland had told him so that day.

He had, consequently, come back to his room in the possession of his faculties, but with a feeling of something unfulfilled that emphasized his desolation. He perceived then that a habit was beginning to form in him with a tenacity which it might be difficult to counteract. After all, would anything be gained by counteracting it? He had known fellows who drank themselves to death; and except in the last dreadful stages it hadn't been so bad. They had certainly got their fun out of it, even if in the end they paid high. He was paying high--and perhaps getting nothing at all. Wouldn't it be better if he went off this minute somewhere, and made a night of it?--made a night which would be but the beginning of a long succession of nights of the same kind? Then when he was ruined beyond recovery, or in his grave, Edith would know what she had done to him. He had tried every other way of bringing it home to her but that. That might succeed where argument had failed. She couldn't have a mind so much astray as not to be sorry when she saw, or heard of, the wreck she would have made of him.

It was worth thinking of, and he sat and thought of it. He tried to conjure up the picture of himself as really besotted--he was not besotted as yet, even when the worst was said!--degraded, revolting. He rose to take a cigar, to help his imagination in the task to which he had set it, but he remembered that the cigar suggested a whisky-and-soda to go with it, and there was a bottle of Old Piper in the cupboard. He fell back into his seat again with the longing unsatisfied, but he continued his dream. It was so pleasant a dream--that is, there were so many advantages to the course he thought of taking, that he ended by springing to his feet and saying, almost aloud, "By G.o.d, I'll do it."

The resolution being formed, there was a large selection of ways and means of putting it into execution. He could do this or that. He could go here or there. It was a bewilderment of choice that saved him. He sat down again.

No; when it came to the point he wasn't equal to it. It was not the end he shrank from, but the means--the places to which he would have to go, the people he would have to consort with. He knew just enough of them to be sickened in advance. It was with a sense of fleeing to escape that he hurried to the telephone and called up Emery Bland, asking to be allowed to accept his invitation.

He arrived at Mountain Brook late on an afternoon in early June, just as the sun, hovering above the point of its setting, was throwing an almost horizontal light on the northern and western slopes of Monadnock. The mountain raised its majestic ma.s.s as the last and successful effort of a tumbling, climbing wilderness of hills. Scattered amid the upward-sweeping stretches of maple and oak, groves of spruce and pine had the effect of pa.s.sing rain-clouds. In the clear air, against the clear sky, every tree-top on the indented ridges stood out like a little pinnacle, till with a long, downward curve, both gracious and grandiose, the mountainside fell to the edge of a gem-like, broken-sh.o.r.ed lake. It was a world extraordinarily green and clean. Its cleanness was even more amazing than its greenness. The unsullied freshness of a new creation seemed to lie on it all day long. It was a world which suggested no past and boded no future. Its transparent air, in which there was not a shred of atmosphere, its high lights, and long shadows, and restful, clambering woods, and singing birds, and sweet, strong winds were like those of some perpetual, paradisical present, with no story to tell, and none that would ever be enacted. It was a world in which Nature seemed to hold herself aloof from man, refusing to be tamed by him, rejecting his caress, keeping herself serene, inviolate, making his presence incongruous with her sanct.i.ty.

It was this incongruity that struck Chip first of all. Not that there were any of the unapproachable grandeurs of the Alps or the Selkirks, nor anything that towered or terrified or overawed. All the hilly woodland was smiling and friendly--but remote. Man might buy a piece of ground and camp on it; but if he had sensibilities he would remain conscious of an essence that eluded him, the real thing--withdrawn. He could be on the spot, but he could never be of it--not any more than he could give his dwelling the air of springing from the soil.

Chip noticed that, too--the intrusive aspect of any kind of roof that man could make to cover him, unless it were a wigwam. Emery Bland had tried to temper this resentment of the landscape to what was not indigenous to itself by making the lines of his shelter as simple and as straight as possible. He was from the first apologetic to the Spirit of the Mountain, as who would say, "Hang it all, you've tempted me here, but I'll outrage you as little as I can." So he perched his long, white house, Italian in style if it had style at all, on the top of a knoll whence he could look far into green depths, with nothing in the way of excrescence but a tile-paved open-air dining-room at one end, and a shady spot of similar construction at the other, getting his effects from proportion. Something in the way of lawn and garden he was obliged to have, and Mrs. Bland had insisted on a pergola. He fought the pergola for a year or two, but Mrs. Bland had had her way. A country house without a pergola, she said, was something she had never heard of. A _sine qua non_ was what she called it. So beyond the square of lawn with its border of flowers the pergola stretched its row of trim white wooden Doric pillars, while over the latticed roof and through it hung bine and vine, grape, wistaria, and kadsu. Below the pergola the land broke to a brook that gurgled through copses of alder, tangles of wild raspberry, and clumps of blueberry and goldenrod, carrying the waters of the lake to the Ashuelot, which bore them to the Connecticut, which swept them southward, till quietly, and almost as un.o.bserved by the human eye as when they rose in the bosom of the hills, they fell into the sea.

As there was no other guest, Chip was allowed to do as he pleased. What he pleased was chiefly to sit in the pergola, where the mauve petals of the wistaria were dropping about him, and fill his gaze with the mystic peace of the mountain. On Sunday morning the three Blands went to church, leaving him in sole possession of this green, cool world, with its quality of interpenetrating purity. He took a volume of some amba.s.sador's "Recollections" from his host's shelves of Victorian memoirs; but he never opened it. He also took a cigar, but he didn't smoke. He only looked--looked without effort, almost without consciousness--up into the high wonderlands of peace, whence whatever was brooding there seemed to steal into his soul and cleanse it. It was this sense of cleansing that he carried back as a sort of possession to New York--that and the fact imparted by Mrs. Bland during the afternoon, regarded as unimportant, and yet retained, that Lily Bland was not their niece.

He returned to Mountain Brook twice during that summer, and in June of the following year. It was during this last visit that the girl who had been to him hitherto no more than the living element of the background gave him the impression that she was seeking an opportunity to speak to him.

Throughout Sat.u.r.day it had been an impression almost too faint to be recorded; but it was significant to him that on Sunday morning she didn't go to church. She shared the house with him, therefore, a fact of which he was scarcely aware till he saw her in possession of the pergola. With a book in her hand she had established herself in a chair not far from that which by preference he had made his own. The act roused his curiosity; but when he, too, had taken a book and strolled out to join her, she didn't keep him in suspense.

She closed her novel as he approached, looking up at him with simple directness. "I've something to tell you."

Behind the attention he gave to these words he registered the observation that when you looked at her--which he had rarely done--you saw she was pretty. Her white skin had a luminosity like that of satin, and the mouth was sweet with a timid, apologetic tenderness. The glances one got from her were almost too fleeting to show the color of the eyes, but he knew they must be blue. Her hair had been striking to him from the first, chiefly because it was of that hue for which there is no English word, but which the French call _cendre_--ashen--something between flaxen and brown, but with no relation to either--that might have been bleached by a "treatment" only for its unmistakable gleam of life. It waved naturally over the brows from a central parting, and ma.s.sed itself into a great coil behind. She was dressed simply in white linen, with a belt of "watered" blue silk, and neat, pointed cuffs of the same material.

Instinctively he knew that what she had to tell him must be important, for otherwise she would not have come out of the shy depths into which, like the Spirit of the Mountain, her life seemed to be withdrawn. What it could be he was unable even to guess at. He smiled, however, and, taking a casual tone so as not to strike too strong a note at first, he said, as he sat down, "Have you?"

She continued to speak with the same simple directness. "It's about some one you used to know."

He grew more grave. "Indeed? I should hardly have supposed that you could know any one--whom I _used_ to know?"

"I do. I know--You won't mind my speaking right out, will you?"

"Of course not. Say anything you like."

"Well, I know Miss Maggie Clare."

"Great G.o.d!" He sank deeper into his wicker arm-chair, throwing one leg over the other. He seemed to shrink away and to look up at her from under his brows.

The shy serenity of her bearing was undisturbed. "I've got a message to you from her."

He was unable to keep the note of resentment out of his voice. "What?"

"She's very ill. I think she's going to die. She thinks so herself. She wants to know if--if you'd go and see her."

He slipped down deeper into his chair, his chin sunk into his fist. It was quite like the act of cowering. It was long before he spoke. When he did so the tone of resentment was more bitter. "Does she realize what she's done to me?"

"I think she does. In fact, it's the only thing she does realize very clearly now. She talks of it continually, in her dreamy way--but a way that's quite heartbreaking. I really think that if you were to see her--"

He looked up under his lids and brows as she hesitated. "Well?" The tone was as savage as courtesy would let him make it.

"That you'd forgive her."

His body bounded to an upright att.i.tude, his hands thrust deep into pockets. "No." If the word had been louder it would have been a shout.

"I shall never forgive her."

There was no change in her sweet reasonableness. "I don't see what you gain by that."

"I gain this much--that I don't do it."

"I still can't see that it makes your situation any better, while it makes hers a good deal worse."

"If hers is worse, mine _is_ better. The woman deliberately wrecked my life after I'd been kind to her--for years."

"The poor thing didn't do it deliberately, Mr. Walker. She did it because she couldn't help it--because she loved you so."

He shook himself impatiently. "Ah, what kind of love is that?"

The audacity of her response--the curious audacity of shyness--seemed to him extraordinary only when, later, he thought it over. "I dare say it isn't a very high kind of love--but there was no question of its being that--from the first. Was there?"

"All the more reason then why she should have kept where she belonged."

"Yes, of course. And yet it's difficult for love to keep itself where it belongs when it's very--very consuming."

He leaned back in his chair, eying her. If he spoke roughly it was only because she had roused all his emotions on his own behalf, as well as a faint subconscious interest in herself. "Look here, Miss Bland. How much do you know about this?"

"Oh, I know all about it," she a.s.sured him, hurrying to explain, in answer to something she saw in his face: "Uncle Emery didn't tell me. I read it first in the papers--you remember there was a lot of talk about it in the papers--and then every one was talking of it. I couldn't help knowing. Uncle Emery," she added, "only told me one tiny little thing, which couldn't do any one any harm."