The Golden Justice

III.

MRS. VAREMBERG.

DAVID LANE’S house was spacious and comfortable, but, with its tower and ornamentation in the capricious style of irregularity that too often marks the early American striving after architectural effect, it could hardly be accounted anything more. It dated from a period long before his going abroad ; now he would have done much better, but he had not thought it worth while to build again, He had only added, at the entrance to the grounds, a tall, handsome, wroughtiron gateway, like that of some foreign château. A row of conservatories flanked the house on the right hand, and clumps of shrubbery on the left.

The interior, on the contrary, was in excellent taste ; here everything accorded with an intelligent and experienced luxury. As Paul Barclay waited in one of the drawing-rooms, while his name was taken above, his eyes rested upon a warm and harmonious coloring, —upon tapestries, pictures, and carvings, the trophies of travel and exceptional position that would naturally become such a family as this.

Mrs. Varemberg rustled down to him presently in a prepossessing toilette, that seemed to stand a trifle too much in relief, however, as if the frail figure of its wearer had somewhat shrunk away from it. She was completing the clasping on her wrist of a bracelet of curious pattern, from which depended small tinkling golden ornaments.

“ Is it indeed you ? Is it actually Paul Barclay ? ” she asked, with much animation.

“ Yes, I think there can be little doubt of it. There must be a certain solidity of effect about me, even now.”

There was no lack of it in the strong, manly pressure of the hand he gave hers, which she held out to him in welcome.

‘‘You have grown stouter,” she said, beginning with the merest pleasant commonplaces.

“ It is the result of long journeys and close confinement ; I shall have to train down again. And you ” —

“ Oh, do not look at me at all! I forbid it. I am a mere bundle of aches and pains.”

She was tall, for a woman, — not very far below Barclay’s own height. Large, dark, softly lustrous eyes, with long lashes, illuminated most expressively a comely countenance, full of intelligence. A piquant nose and mobile, lovable mouth, seemingly meant for happier things, were contradicted by a pervading air of sadness. The corners of the mouth tended too fixedly downward, and there appeared upon the face sombre shadows of care and illness, which were not wholly thrown off even under such vivacity of manner as she now chose to assume. Upon her slender and graceful neck turned a head of peculiar distinction, the excellent shape of which an arrangement of her plentiful darkbrown hair in a simple knot at the back well became. Her voice, in speaking, was charmingly sweet, — the voice of Florence Lane of old, modified now by tones of deeper meaning, derived from an eventful experience.

Copyright, 1886, by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Co.

She had at times a harassing little cough, that awakened the concern of the beholder. There was a latent pathos in her smile, an elusiveness in her glance. The languor of weakness appeared in her movements, and an impaired vitality in the touch of her beautiful white hand. Her manner was refinement itself, without a trace of stiffness.

“ Fading, distinctly fading,” said the visitor to himself; “ at this age, and she is five years younger than I. These are time’s revenges. Ah, but I did not wish to be revenged.”

“ Let me see,” pursued the lady, reflectively: “about the last I distinctly saw of you, you stopped one day at our château of Varemberg, not very long after my marriage.” She slightly hesitated on the last word, and Barclay also winced. “ Always impatient, full of the true American uneasiness! The place itself was rambling and curious enough to have detained you a little longer ; but, no, nothing could make you stay over more than one train. Since then, I fear I have scarcely even known whether you were living or dead.”

“ And might one suppose that you have cared the merest trifle ? ”

“ Why, yes, I will frankly admit that I have. I suppose you have been practicing one of your learned professions, — I remember you were accomplished in more than one, — and have forgotten all about us in the mean time. When did you leave New York ? ”

“ I have left Jerusalem, Calcutta, Cape Town, Tamatave, the isles of the sea, everywhere but New York.”

“ I do not quite understand.”

“ I have been making a tour of the world for the past four years, and am only now on my way home.”

“ You must have seen everything that is rare and curious, in that time ? ”

“ I have been at some few out-of-theway places, — sometimes so far from civilization as to know very little of its goings-on. I cannot profess even now a very exhaustive acquaintance with them.”

There was some hidden meaning in this, but she did not yet know what it was.

“ And this formidable air of man of the world, with which you have come back, — do I like it, or don’t I?” she said, putting her head playfully a trifle on one side, in a critical way. “ Yes, I don’t know but I do. Do you mind my saying that ? ”

“ Not if you think you can conscientiously be so flattering.”

“Oh, I can for once in a way.”

“ This is the second time I have been referred to as a man of the world today. I must do something to get back my native air of modesty, my natural look of student and recluse. These false pretenses will not do.”

“ You will never get that look back again. And you had more of it than you may think, for all your scoffing. It was a charming look, too. Yes, you have changed.”

“Yes, I have changed,” he admitted, and smiled with a certain pleasure in the effectiveness of his new panoply.

“ Who was the other that called you a man of the world ? ”

“A little Miss DeBow, whom I met on the steamer.”

“Ah, you came on the steamer, then ? ”

“ Did you not know it ? ”

“ How should I have known it? ”

“ It was in the papers,” he said simply.

“ I do not always even read the papers ; I live so quietly.”

No further mention was made of the accident, and it was not till later that she knew of it and its real significance. She was thinking, too, of other things in his regard, and yielded to the momentary inadvertence of a mind that, though perfectly courteous in intent, has been a little strained and wearied.

“ Miss Justine DeBow is one of our local beauties of the younger generation, whom I observe from afar off,” she next said. “ I believe she holds herself on quite a high and peculiar pedestal of her own.”

“ On what does her unusual claim to distinction rest, if one might inquire ? ”

“Ah, that is it, — she holds herself so, that is all. When one makes claims of that kind, persistently enough, he generally ends by overcoming the resistance. She has her little ambitions. Did she not treat you very graciously ? She is by no means gracious to all, I am told.”

“ I suppose I can hardly complain of my treatment.”

“ You are one of the kind she would naturally like. Did you lose your heart to her ? You will be made much of by all the Keewaydin belles, and notables of every kind, if you will stay. Learned travelers and dilettanti are by no means common among us — But I forget: probably there is a Mrs. Barclay, by this time ? ”

“ There is no Mrs. Barclay.”

The visitor mentally accused her of a lack of fineness. This was not her natural manner, as he had known it; she seemed to have borrowed another for the occasion, from some source lower down. It was well to skim over the surface of things, to pretend that nothing of unusual moment had ever taken place between them, and treat the past as irrevocably settled ; that was what he had meant to do, that was what he was doing himself. But need she have gone far out of her way, as it seemed, to put her finger on a wound which, for aught she knew, might still be open and bleeding ? She was not to be supposed to know that it had entirely healed.

“ Then you will stay ? ” she rattled on. " I assure you, as a resident, that our small city will feel flattered to be added to your collection of rarities. May I ask how it already answers to your expectations ? ”

“ It could hardly have surpassed them ; the exceptional charms of Mrs. Varemberg had given me too high an ideal of it for that,” he replied, with one of those courtly satirical bows used in this kind of parley. “ You may remember, in the old times, that I always wanted to see it. I have relatives here, the Thornbrooks, — absent, by the way, just now, — and my father died here. But it is a matter of business that brings me at present. I shall have to be off again to Eau Claire and Marathon County, tomorrow. I may stop a few days, on my return, but even that is uncertain.”

“ It was doubly good of you to come and find me, under the circumstances. But tell me, lost so long in the wilds and jungles of the antipodes as you were, how did you know where I was ? How had you heard anything about me ? ”

“ I have to confess that I really knew very much less than you may suppose. I followed your name up the river, on the revenue cutter, and the young girl I have mentioned began to talk of Mrs. Varemberg,”

“ And then you went over the list of V’s, and said, ‘ Dear me! it seems as if I do remember knowing a person of that name once.’ ”

“ Yes, all that is, naturally, what one would say.”

Again the forced note, the slight jarring upon his sensibilities. Was it bravado, was it defiance, lest he should gloat over her sufferings ? For that she had suffered, mentally and physically, no one could look at her and deny. Far, indeed, was it from him to think of gloating over her. He was grieved beyond measure at her invalid aspect and the hint of her misfortunes he had heard. He would once have given his life to spare her uneasiness ; and nothing that had happened, or could ever happen, could set aside the fundamental regard he had entertained for her, or replace it by small personal pique.

He was facing his past, the central episode of his existence, the woman who had disrupted his life, like one of those cataclysms in nature that leave nothing behind them as it had previously stood. He had said long since, “ It is for the best. Everything that is is right; ” and he was half tempted to add to it now, " We would never have done for each other. It is very clear.”

When something terrible has happened to a man, in this world of ours, he does not necessarily go about rending his garments and crying it at the top of his voice. He need not do this even at the time of its occurrence; still less when he has wholly recovered, and feels himself reconciled to his fate. It was not that Barclay had been formally jilted. He had not proposed and been rejected in so many words; pride, diffidence, a multitude of circumstances, had prevented that. But he had loved and lost the Florence Lane whom he had described to Justine DeBow. He had had to see her become the wife of another, when she must have known of his own absorbing devotion and desire to offer her his hand. His remote visit to the château referred to had been an attempt to harden himself to the sight of her new happiness, a desperate remedy which he could not endure. He had fled from it, and, unsettled in all his habits, views, and plans, had begun a desultory course of wandering over the face of the earth, which had lasted till now.

He had long considered himself cured. He felt quite callous to his pain, and cynically disposed to make light of it as a small matter, — something very commonly happening to young men, and no doubt wisely intended to give their sentimental economics a proper exercise. It was probably better than not for him to have gone through this experience.

He had been uncertain, even, which hemisphere contained her when he found her here. He said to himself that, in this brief visit, he wanted only to see how she looked ; what she had become; how she, on her side, had stood all these years and her altered fate. There was pathos, it is true, in the fragment of her story he had heard, and he was moved by it, but, apart from this, he believed himself stirred by no warmer motive than a calm, retrospective interest. The interview was going to have a kind of pensive luxury for him ; he was going to conjure up a faint, sweet spectre of his buried hopes. It would be like tracing the path of some imminent danger he had escaped, or walking, convalescent, on a battle-field where he had been left for dead.

He had both a better opinion of himself than formerly, and a worse. He put down his slight feeling of irritation, and said to her in effect, if not in so many words, —

“ It was by no means a person to be regretted that you have missed. I have had ample experience of him in the mean time, and can speak with lull authority.”

They began to chat of many common reminiscences of their life abroad. A listener must have gathered that they had once been on most excellent terms.

“ Do you remember,” Mrs. Varemberg asked. “ our rides in the forest of Saint Germain ? We used to go out in our habits, dine at the Pavillon Henri Quatre, and return on top of the train.”

“ And do you remember,” her companion rejoined, “ our evening at the fête foraine, on the exterior boulevards ? ”

“ Yes; you had dined with us at the Legation, and you made us go, on the pretext that it was ‘ local color’ and characteristic foreign life. My poor aunt, Mrs. Clinton, nearly caught her death of cold, with your local color, and your tombolas, and the ‘ Four Horrible Tortures ’ ” —

“ And the ‘ Bird Lottery,’ and the ‘ Torpedo Girl ’ ” —

“ And the ‘ Man of Fire.’ ‘ Entrez, Mesdames et Messieurs ! Moi, je suis l’Homme du Feu,’” she said, quoting. “ ‘ Pas dix sous, pas huit sous ’” —

“ Pas six sous, — not even five sous, only four miserable sous, — to come in and see the most wonderful, the most incredible, phenomenon in the world,” added Barclay, promptly completing the jargon.

“ You were forever trying to drag us about to some crumbly old ruin or other, or some impossible rookery with a lot of queer people in it.”

“ I must do you the justice to say you did not always come.”

“ Of course I did not. I remember you always picked out even your hotel by its picture, and would rather have one that had been a mediæval donjon than another with the cuisine of a Vatel or Blot.”

“ You speak with the proper American contempt of such things.”

“ Still, I shall never quite know bow much you had to do with influencing my destiny, by inspiring in me the same sort of unprofitable fancies.”

She laughed, but her laugh was broken by the harassing cough.

Influencing her destiny? Had he, then, ever influenced it in the slightest degree ? Ah, if she could but know how she had influenced his ! As he sat there, it gave him an involuntary thrill to look back upon such an absolute waste and devastation.

“And now that you have returned to your native land, no doubt you have some extraordinary avocation in view?”

“ None of the ordinary avocations greatly attract me, to tell the truth. I do not seem to care much for the honors they have to give, and I have money enough for my moderate wants.”

“ Naturally, with your many opportunities for enjoyment, you will avail yourself of them, and be a man of leisure,” Mrs. Varemberg amended, as in polite deference to his probable intention.

“ Why, no. I had thought of taking up some form of business.”

“ Now it is you that are American, — the greed for gain, after all, ‘ the ruling passion strong in death.’ ”

“ Who was that celebrity,” asked Barclay, acknowledging this only by a smile of indulgence, " who said that but for his cursed thirst for glory, how contented he could be in private life ? ”

“ It was not I, — perhaps it was Frederick the Great.”

“ Well, I am something like him ; I have an ambition.”

“ Ah, he has an ambition,” she repeated after him in soft raillery.

“ I wish to put in a stroke for the good of humanity.”

“ That is an ambition, indeed.”

“ Yes. How does something in the way of a manufacturing enterprise strike you ? ”

“ Like Alice in Wonderland, I ’m afraid I don’t quite understand. Do you mean to manufacture some article of such exceeding use that the whole level of human comfort will be raised? Let me see, — it will hardly be pianos; perhaps it will be a good waffle-iron, for which I am told there is a popular demand.”

“ You are a scoffer; the bears will probably come out of the woods and eat you up. The fact is that I have a certain interest in the working classes.”

“ Really! ”

“ I fell in, on my travels, with a philosopher, who interested me in this class of questions.” He went on to give some account of a man, part dreamer, part thinker, of keen and original opinions, whom he had met, retired amid the orange groves of Southern California. He had already written a treatise that had made a wide stir in the world; and Barclay had been admitted to his confidence while he was at work on another. “ He finds that poverty keeps pace with progress, and is even promoted by it. Competition is forcing even the prudent and industrious to take the bread out of one another’s mouths. And, on the surface, it all seems to be nobody’s fault; only the slow, grinding effect of natural laws.”

“ Your sage tells nothing we have not heard before, it seems to me.”

“ No, but the difference is that he is hopeful about it; he thinks something can be done.”

“ I supposed it was a kind of dispensation of Providence; that is the usual way of talking.”

“ I had rather not think so meanly of Providence. I prefer to lay it to the greed and indifference of men.”

“ And you are going to put this remedy you speak of into operation ?

“ Hardly that, though at first I believe I was almost a convert to his theory. It seemed, however, rather too simple and straightforward to be true. It proposes a state ownership of the land, and that sort of thing. My conservatism got the upper hand of me. I conclude only to be a fellow investigator, and devote myself to finding out the conditions of the problem, — the great problem of our age and the immediate future.”

“There are too many people. I have heard it proved at my father’s dinnertable.”

“There are not too many people, and there never will be till all the waste places of the earth are made to blossom as the rose. Is there not created with every mouth a pair of hands to feed it ? ”

“ Why, yes, it would seem reasonable to suppose so.”

“ Every man’s labor ought to add a value to every other man’s. Under a proper state ot things, we ought to look upon one another, even in the most swarming crowds, with a friendly warmth, and consider that we directly benefit one another’s existence. We should hear no more of the profane vulgar and keeping them at a distance.”

Nobody could have had a more pleasing modesty than he in the statement of his views. There was not a trace ot the prig or egotist about him. At the least sign of wearying the attention or appearing to make high-flown pretensions. he was ready to stop, turn aside, and laugh, even at himself.

“ It sounds beautifully,” said Mrs. Varemberg. “ And all this you propose to accomplish in your manufactory ? ”

“ In an establishment of one’s own, you know, he could study the character, habits, needs, and possibilities of his working people at first-hand ; he need no longer hear them from demagogues or task-masters. Some sort of political career might be the best way of putting his information in practice. Why should I not take a little different career from others, if I choose ? Am I not one of the kind that can afford it ? ” he asked, as if defending himself.

“What will you do for me in your millennium?” his companion broke in.

“Anything that is possible. What shall it be ? ”

“ Ah, that is hard to say, unless it be to recommend me a new doctor. Everybody recommends me a new doctor ; it is really quite remiss in you not to have done so already.”

“ Ah, you are not well! ” exclaimed Barclay, with deep sympathy. “ Let us talk no more of these vagaries. Tell me of yourself! What is the meaning of this distressing cough ? ”

“ It is only a cold I took, at the theatre at Brussels, and I do not seem to quite shake it off. It may have touched some pulmonary organ a little. But it is not an interesting subject.”

“ You must be cured ; this will not do.”

“ Then there is need of the physician who can ‘ minister to a mind diseased.’”

It was the first reference to her troubles.

“ I feel awkwardly in speaking of it,” said Barclay, hesitating, " but may I say how pained and shocked I have been to hear of the unfortunate circumstance, of the — the — termination of ” —

“ Oh, do not think I complain,” she rejoined hastily. " Having chosen one kind of life, why should I find fault because it is not another ? ”

“ I find it hard to understand. You seemed so adapted to each other, — you seemed so content with him.”

“ He lost his money, and I left him,” said Mrs. Varemberg, looking at her visitor fixedly.

“ What! ” he cried, incredulous.

“ He promised to endow me with all his worldly goods, and if he lost them, instead, or had none in the beginning, why should I stay with him?”

This was clearly perversity. No really mercenary nature would accuse itself thus openly of its baseness. But was there, too, an atom of truth in it ? Had she become mainly hard and flippant, taken all the worse instead of the better turnings, and succumbed to a thorough-going worldliness, concerning which, he remembered, he had once entertained misgivings ? Or was this but the pathetic bravado of one who would not display her sufferings before witnesses ? He was puzzled, and could not determine.

“ You have changed, too,” he sighed.

“ How ? " she asked, prepared to receive a serious answer.

But he thought best to turn it all aside lightly with,—

“ Oh, in your liking for personal ornaments. ‘ Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,’ ” he quoted. " Once your taste was simplicity itself; jewelry was your pet aversion.”

“It is my poor attempt to conceal the ravages of time,” she replied, clasping again at the bangle with its tinkling ornaments. She had seized it in a nervous way, at the last moment, as she came down. " The years are passing, my friend.”

They had risen, and made a few steps towards the door, when a noise drew Mrs. Varemberg’s attention to the library, adjoining.

“ Papa,” she called, awaiting the answer in a listening attitude, " this is Mr. Barclay. Will you not come and see him ? ”

She went to the handsome portière which separated the rooms, and drew it aside.

David Lane was there, stock still, but he now moved a little towards them. He looked old and broken ; his face was phenomenally seamed with wrinkles. He almost glared at Barclay, and breathed in stertorous fashion.

“You are quite well. I trust?” he said, in a stiff, formal way. " It is mauy years since we last met you.”

He had risen but now from his meditations over the evening paper. The journal still lay as it had fallen from his hand on a richly-draped table, by which stood his chair, protected from draughts by a high, folding screen.

There was also present an elderly lady, Mrs. Clinton, David Lane’s sister and the manager of his household. She was dressed in some sort of durable black bombazine stuff, after her most usual custom. She had a figure in very good case, a peculiarly florid complexion, and a good deal of " manner,” as the saying is. She would beam suddenly in her greeting, as if overjoyed to see the visitor, but the next moment this rapture was apt to die out and leave a certain blankness, as if she had already forgotten his existence. She was a mistress of all the arts of routine, a person of good judgment in the more ordinary affairs of life, but without any marked individuality, and she remained as she began, a figure of minor importance in these affairs.

How well Barclay remembered the last meeting with David Lane at Paris ! His brief retrospect took somewhat the following form : —

“I went to him for counsel, in my distracted state. I had met his daughter in the heyday of her youth and beauty. She had a prestige in two hemispheres. Suitors of title and fortune had offered themselves. The great Bradbrook himself, reputed for his eccentricity and his millions, had come over expressly from New York in his own yacht to win her, and been rejected. She gave me her friendship, — happy that I was! — and next, I aspired to nothing less than herself, dazzling though her prospects were. I was then self-critical, self-torturing, full of scruples, squeamishness, and an unpractical reverence. I saw in her every excellent quality of head and heart, and her beauty possessed me with a perfect madness. How well and strong, how lithe and round and fine at every point, she was ! How her white teeth sparkled! What a fascinating malice in her smile, innocent, nevertheless, of conscious guile ! The siren had sung to me, and my bones were bound to bleach on the shores of her island as sure as that I was alive. I harrowed my soul with devices for testing her favor. Now I said, ‘ She loves me.' Now, ‘ She loves me not.’ In despair, I flew at last to her father, and asked him for his good offices.

“ ‘ Do not for one moment think of it!’ he replied. ‘ You will but incur the pain of a certain refusal. I can now speak only vaguely, but she is not free. Other views are entertained for her, and I beg you, as a gentleman, to do nothing to embarrass a course that is in accord both with her own inclinations and her best good and happiness.'

“ These ‘ other views ‘ must have been Varemberg. I had no idea that he had already made such headway in her affections and the general favor. He was of brilliant parts, a handsome presence, and at home in all the usages of society. He seemed to amuse her. She had met him with her father in their travels, and been entertained by him at his quaint, time-honored château. They had met, also, at the court of Berlin, a sister of his, married to a chief lord in waiting ; and this proud dame, an associate of all the Radziwills, the Hatzfelds, the Trachenbergs, and the princes of Thurn and Taxis, had, no doubt, contributed to the bedazzlement. This match was pushed rapidly forward. As in a kind of paralysis, I stood and saw it go on. Surely she must have known my feelings towards her, and must have heard from her father what I had said to him.”

“ Mr. Barclay has magnificent ideas,” explained Mrs. Varemberg to the others ; " he is going to reform the universe.”

“ There is so much questioning now of all that custom had considered settled,” sighed her aunt drearily.

“ Perhaps some divine rights of custom will have to go, like the divine right of kings,” rejoined the new humanitarian.

“ I’m afraid you are rather dangerous,” commented the aunt, casting at him a look of certain suspicion.

This good lady herself did not indulge in drollery, and comprehended only the most conventional aspect of things.

“ Oh, he is dangerous,” insisted Mrs. Varemberg: " he thinks there ought to be charities to keep people out of the gutter, instead of lifting them when they are in it. And the worst of it is he has all but brought me around to the same way of thinking.”

“ My brother,” said Mrs. Clinton, “ has done a good deal in that way, by means of his public library, industrial schools, and the like.”

David Lane had taken but small part in the conversation ; he appeared preoccupied, and watched the young man in a keen, nervous way, apart. With a final civil commonplace or two to the visitor, he withdrew, and Mrs. Clinton, summoned by some household care, soon followed him.

“ I never quite get over the impression that your father does not like me,” said Barclay.

“ Why should he not ? ”

“ How can I tell ? I have felt this adverse influence when near him, and yet he has done me many favors when at a distance. It puzzles me.”

“ He has the best heart in the world. Allow us our little eccentricities.”

There stood a large geographical globe in the room. Placing a hand upon it, Mrs. Varemberg revolved it, nonchalantly, and said, —

“ Show me where you have been ! ” Barclay pointed out a few of the places of his more remote expeditions. He said he had at one time thought of mining in South Africa; and again, of planting coffee in Mexico; and again, sugar in the Sandwich Islands.

“ But you came back, after all ? ”

“ Why, yes, I came back. This is the field for new experiments, this is the country of the future.”

“ I do not quite understand your interest in the working classes. Why should a young man of fortune bother his head about the working classes?”

Barclay could not tell her his true motive. It was not in order; it would now, probably, never be in order. He could not say to her that the pain she had made him suffer had softened, not hardened, his heart, and turned him upon observing the miseries of others.

If he had formulated his motto, it might have been, “ Taught by misfortune, I pity the unhappy.”

The interview was now at an end. Barclay’s imagination sighed over this lost love of his more than he had deemed possible. It was all just as he had expected, but he had not meant his philosophy to be so much disturbed. He wished he had not to go away and leave her thus suffering ; then he should have been much easier in his mind.

“ Good-by,” he said.

Good-by, echoed Mrs. Varemberg. " You have drawn me out of myself; you have been a distraction to me. Sometimes I scarcely see a living soul from one month’s end to another. Now I shall return to my medicine-bottles with a new zest.”

And she rounded out with a smile of latent pathos a poor fiction, as if her illness were really one of the most agreeable things in the world.

David Lane, meanwhile, had gone to his chamber, and sat down, in deep melancholy, by a window that commanded a view of the Golden Justice afar. Even at night some wandering gleams of radiance sought her out, and it was rare that she was not visible,

“ She does not forget,” he muttered ; “ she is still waiting for me.”

“ What fatal portent is it that brings this young man here ?” he said, again.

Some hours later, when the house was dark and presumably sunk in slumber, he made his way along the wide halls, and knocked at the door of his daughter’s chamber.

“ Are you well ? Are you warm enough ? ” he asked. " I was afraid the furnace was not working as it should.”

Receiving replies in the affirmative, he added, as if by the way, in turning to depart, —

“ Will this young Mr. — Barclay stay long in the place ? ”

“ Oh, no, he is only passing through ; he goes to-morrow.”

With this, he went back, easier in his mind, to his own apartment, to seek the repose that had fled from his pillow.

IV.

A TRUER PICTURE OF MRS. VAREMBERG.

Paul Barclay departed, next day, on his journey to the upper part of the State, as he had proposed. On his return, he found himself detained at Keewaydin rather longer than he had expected to be. The scheme of establishing a colony on his lands in Marathon County had much taken his fancy; he closed with an offer made him, and was obliged to wait for and confer more or less with the leading parties to the transaction. Then there were new adjustments to make in regard to his city property, now that he had taken the management of it into his own hands ; and there was Maxwell. Maxwell, half forgotten meantime, but by no means himself forgetful, had prepared a written statement, carefully carried out in detailed figures, displaying the condition and prospects of the Stamped-Ware Works, and had been several times to his hotel to seek him, in his absence. The rescued manufacturer talked a great deal, with a warm enthusiasm natural to him, and finally induced Barclay to go down to the factory and look at it for himself.

“ It needs only a little more money,” he said, “ to set all these wheels going again to their utmost capacity. Supposing, merely for the sake of the argument,” he suggested in fine, “ that you should feel disposed to join us, and put in the mortgage you hold on the concern as your share of the capital: why, that alone would float us, and a most profitable future would be insured.”

Curiously enough, Barclay was rather impressed, in the sequel, with the representations made him, and thought good to advise upon this, together with some other of his affairs, with his relative Thornbrook, who had been an excellent and conservative man of business in his day.

“ It looks well, — in some aspects very well,” said Thornbrook. “ If you were one who could stay here and look after such enterprise, or personally take a hand in it, I should see no objection to it at all; but to go away, and leave it behind you as a mere investment in the charge of another person, is a very different matter, and that I should by no means recommend.”

The unforeseen duration of Barclay’s stay iu the place made it incumbent on him, or at least furnished him an excellent reason, to renew his visits to Mrs. Varemberg. With his limited acquaintanceship, and the but slight demands on his time in the hours when he was not engaged in his business matters, it would have been strange indeed if he had not gone to inquire again after her health ; he assured himself that it would uot have been even civil not to do so.

Mrs. Varemberg welcomed him in pleasant surprise, and showed a friendly interest in all his recent doings. Her father, she said, was absent at the East; he had been called away on business, and would not return for a month.

Under her encouragement, Barclay described his journey at full length. All his knocking about the world and his trying experiences had not yet spoiled a receptive and impressionable nature, nor made him a blasé traveler. He had still a large fund of freshness remaining, and could be depended on to find almost everywhere—even in places that would have seemed the most unpromising — some entertaining or picturesque feature or novel matter for reflection. On the present occasion, he went on to speak of the high, healthy farming region he had traversed ; of the bold, thriving inhabitants; of villages of polyglot foreigners, Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch, Poles, and Swiss, keeping up their own manners and customs and languages ; of the sturdy lumbermen, rafting their logs down the swift Chippewa and Wisconsin to the Mississippi ; and of the unbroken forests of his own remote domain. He had come upon a pretty spot that had once been picked out by an eccentric Prince Paul of Würtemberg to be the retreat of his old age ; and, again, an Indian reservation, where the wrinkled old chief, Yellow Thunder, squatted and sunned himself at his wigwam cabin door, like some archaic image in bronze.

All this he told her, with a certain enthusiasm and a vivid way he had of making the most of small details when he chose to exercise it; but he did not tell her how much she had filled his thoughts in the mean time. Some notion of offering himself to be a medium in effecting a reconciliation between her and her husband had even floated vaguely through his brain. For his part, he recollected Varemberg as a very pleasant fellow. Varemberg had endeavored, in those old times, to be particularly civil to him ; and though he could not accept these overtures, it was a date when he had been easily touched by kindness, and he cherished a grateful remembrance of them. He knew that these domestic ruptures are too often but the result of some wretched misunderstanding, trivial in the beginning, and widened to a tragic gulf by willfulness and lack of judgment on both one side and the other. There were such cases, at least, whether this were one of them or not, and a sympathetic mediator, acting with prudence, might do a great deal towards repairing them.

He made his first suggestions, however, in regard to her health. Some remedies that had proved beneficial in cases rather like hers occurred to him, and he ventured to recommend them to her. He recommended also exercise; he was a great believer in it on his own account, had always much to say in its favor, and was inclined to regard active motion as the sovereign panacea.

“ If you only keep moving actively enough, " said he, “ the reaper Death, who goes but a hobbling gait with his scythe, will have a long chase, and hard work to catch up with you at last.”

No doubt he was rather unpractical in some of his ideas. Mrs. Varemberg smiled at some of the propositions offered by one of his own robust physique to one of hers, but she conceded somewhat to his theory by saying with a certain bravado,—

“ Illness, after all, is the only real misfortune.”

Barclay showed a considerable bent towards taking charge of things, and had the limited period of his proposed stay permitted he would perhaps have endeavored to take charge of her, in this particular direction.

When he came to trench, delicately, on the subject of her domestic unhappiness, she adhered to the tone of audacious flippancy she had adopted at first; she seemed to take a perverse pleasure in trying to put herself before him in the worst possible light.

“ By your own showing,” said he lightly, availing himself of the license she thus gave him, “ we must admit you have treated Varemberg rather badly.”

“ Of course I have treated him badly, Has it taken you all this time to arrive at that brilliant conclusion? ”

She was certainly amusing in this mood, if it were taken entirely from the worldly point of view, but Barclay went away from these interviews with doubt and sadness in his heart. It was the devastation of an exceptional character, the searing over, as with a hot iron, of the tender sensibilities, in the loss of which no fine and delicate moral touch was possible, that he seemed to witness.

But he was shortly to be undeceived. He sat on one of the cushioned sofas in the lobby of his hotel, where a business acquaintance had just left him, and was occupied with a paper, when he heard himself hailed in a hearty way. Looking up, he saw an old acquaintance.

It was Ives Wilson, the chief editor of the Index.

Barclay had found the cards of this gentleman left for him on two successive occasions. Ives Wilson bustled out from a little group standing by the elevator shaft, and shook hands with him in a vigorous, pump-handle fashion, still keeping hold of the arm of a third party, whom he dragged forward with him, and introduced, as if he did not consider it fair to abandon one friend without giving him the advantage of the acquaintance of another. This was Lieutenant Gregg, and it seemed that he was a regular boarder at this same hotel when he was ashore. Lieutenant Gregg was a somewhat awkward, diffident man, not fluent in conversation. He had come up from a low origin, made his own very good position entirely for himself, and was not as fully at home in all the minor social observances as he would no doubt finally become. He stayed but a few moments, withdrawing after the exchange of some sentences about the tugboat explosion.

“ You had a close call, that day,” said he admiringly.

“It would have suited me much better to make my début like an ordinary private citizen,” responded Barclay.

“ Well,” began Ives Wilson, when Gregg had gone, “ I had about given you up; I never expected to find you.” Then, seating himself comfortably, “ A little different this from old Andover days, eh ? You have n’t changed much, though. Here you are, as large as life and twice as natural.”

They had been schoolmates, in the remote past, at one of the large preparatory schools of New England, and might have met once or twice since, yet Ives Wilson inclined to presume upon this as if it had been friendship of the most intimate sort.

He seemed a person so permeated with the zeal of his profession that it showed all over him ; left tangible signs upon him, as it were, just as the shoemaker has a particular stoop, the hodcarrier one shoulder higher than the other, and the baker his hands calloused in a certain way. It was perhaps the great nervous energy by which he was characterized that had left so little flesh on his bones. He was dressed neither well nor very ill. When he took off his easy felt hat you might have seen his hair bristling and awry. From the apex of his head waved back a particularly rebellious lock of it, which had served as a sort of orifiamme in many a political convention and the like. In other respects, when you came to know about him, language seemed to be for him only an ingenious medium to juggle with ; the severest allegations had for him no real and lasting significance, but only served his temporary purpose. All, or nearly all, with him, was professional; the individual, or private, aspect of his life but a very small fraction. He was regarded in some quarters, whither his interference and powers of invective had been particularly directed, as a monster of ferocity; but in reality, his professional point of view admitted, nobody was less ferocious than he. He would have shaken hands the next moment with the most roundly abused of his opponents, had the human nature of others in the community been enough like his own to afford him opportunity to do so. In strictly private life he did many amiable things, for which he did not always get the credit that was his due.

Paul Barclay had the standing interest in human nature that made him, up to a certain point, well within the limits of boredom, an excellent listener. Added to this, perhaps unconsciously, was the quest for the unexpected, the possible novel revelation, from some unforeseen quarter, that might have a fortunate bearing on his own destiny. He was rather fond of letting people exhibit themselves. It was no hardship for him, therefore, to let Ives Wilson go on, as the latter was disposed to do, at considerable length, with an account of his migration to the West, his various struggles and successes, and his rise to his present exalted position. The history included the late establishment of an evening edition of the Index. “ We had to give the papers away at first, and then go into the streets and buy them ourselves,” said he; “ but now they go off like hot cakes.”

He laid down as in a nutshell the rules he had adopted for the guidance of his own paper, and advanced these ex cathedra, as if setting forth the immutable, everlasting laws of journalism.

“ Always have somebody to abuse ; hit hard and all the time,” said he; " have at least one new sensation every day. You, for instance, were a godsend to us, the day you were all but blown up by the tug. Never back down; support the paradox, or the unexpected side, — people are sure to come round to it in time; and claim to be infallible,” he concluded.

“ If you are going in for infallibility, why not earn it by avoiding the errors instead or glorying in them ? ” suggested Barclay. “ And then, all this bragging, — is it strictly necessary ? It sometimes seems as if a newspaper expected to flourish on about everything a gentleman would want nothing to do with.”

“ Good ! ” exclaimed Ives Wilson. " There’s material in that for a first-page paragraph. But it’s clear you don’t speak from practical experience. Readers expect a journal to have a proper respect for itself ; and there is nothing so weakening to it as backing down. Readers don’t want it ; readers don’t understand it; they won’t have it. No, sir, the Index has stood more than one libel suit rather than back down, and it proposes to stand plenty more.”

No one, apparently, could have been less offended by an onslaught on his favorite views than Ives Wilson; on the contrary, he welcomed it with jovial cheerfulness, and made a hasty note of the opinions, as above, for use in his paper.

“ If any of our men could have found you in time, the day of your arrival here, we should have had at least a half column more about the accident, — an interview, you know, and that sort of thing.”

“ Oh, I assure you, I am quite as well content.”

“ You may, or may not, have noticed how well that report was done,” continued the editor, airing a technical pride ; “ how spreadingly, if I may coin a word, and how fully, for an afternoon paper. A few more little things like that will put the evening edition where we want it. It was a big ‘ scoop ’ even on the morning papers. The full reprint we gave of all the particulars connected with your father’s death left them hardly anything to say. All they could do was copy from us. It gave me a chance, too, to put in a good word for a man that I always like to oblige when it comes in my way, — David Lane. He showed up well in that affair, trying to work the bridge, and so on, and I guess he was glad to have us remember it. They say the Index is hard on its enemies ; well, it’s good to its friends, also, whenever they give it an opportunity.”

“ David Lane is fortunate, as a politician, to stand so well with the press,” said Barclay tentatively.

“ Oh, if I had money, I’d have a reputation from here to Timbuctoo. I’d just lay out a little sum annually on the papers, — liberal advertising, special articles, and that sort of thing,—and they’d look after me ; see ? It need n’t cost a great deal, either. But this is not a case in point. Lane is not in politics now; he’s had the best of everything, and there is n’t anything else that could tempt him. Besides, he has a genuine record, that does n’t need any puffing; he was one of the best officials ever known in these parts.”

“ And it is on his own merits you praise him ? ”

“ Yes, that, and because he gave me a lift when I was starting in the management of the paper. I don’t mind telling you that he took stock in my name, so I could control the leading interest. Oh, yes, the Index stands by David Lane, every time.”

The editor discoursed further of his patron, touched lightly on the business matters with which he occupied himself now that he was out of public life, and finally of Mrs. Varemberg. Barclay had felt, with inward agitation, that this topic was approaching.

“ Here is a man,” he had reflected, “ who, with the least encouragement in the world, will speak freely of her. It is his business to be a repository of information, and he will know all that has been said and all that can be known about her.”

Up to this time he had learned no more of her affairs than he knew on the first day of his arrival; he had asked no one about her, sought no information, but, on the contrary, scrupulously refrained from it. He shrank from discussing her sorrows with an outsider almost as a species of desecration, and how much more so when it promised but to make a certainty of the vague, disagreeable imputations she had cast upon herself ! His way of thinking had not changed, but now, as in a sort of spell, he sat and listened to the comments of this indifferent person, who nonchalantly volunteered them without a word of invitation from himself, and even against an effort he made to turn the conversation aside.

“ His daughter, Mrs. Varemberg, is a mighty fine woman, a lovely woman; she is one that was born to shine,’ said Ives Wilson. “ It’s a pity all this trouble of hers seems to keep her from taking the place that rightfully belongs to her.”

Upon a word or two further, the early reluctance of the listener was turned to an eager thirst for enlightenment. It proved to be no tale of cynical heartlessness he was called upon to hear, but one that had imposed a tone of sympathy and respect even upon the careless tongue of public gossip.

“ Her husband was one of the greatest villains unhung,” said Ives Wilson.

“ Lane told me a little about it, at the time, but it was naturally a subject on which he would n’t want to talk much.”

“ And Varemberg treated her badly ? ”

“ He did pretty much everything but kill her outright.”

“ That polished, entertaining Varemberg ? ” muttered Barclay, in wonderment; but the other went on, not heeding him.

“ He had such a devilish disposition as you would n’t find in a million times. He had made a very plausible show in the beginning, it seems, but he soon dropped that, and went from bad to worse, till there was no living with him.”

“ I had a vague impression, from some source, that — that the difficulty was of a financial sort.”

“ Varemberg never had any money speak of ; he was tangled up in every direction, and relied upon what he got with her to straighten him out a little. When he had made away with that, he took to reckless courses that got him into trouble, — put other people’s signatures to paper, and that sort of thing, — and finally had to leave his country for his country’s good. He dropped out of sight entirely, and at one time they thought he was dead; but he turns up again every once in a while, for their sins, and whenever they hear of him it is in some new deviltry.”

“ He does not dare come here?” And the questioner’s eye flashed fire.

“ Oh, no, that would be a little too brazen; he would hardly try that, I think, where she is so well protected. Added to which, he has nothing to gain by it.”

“ It was not she who left him, then ? ”

“ Very far from it. As I have said, he ran away; he left her behind him, the prey of his angry creditors, in a gloomy old rookery of a château. She was moping herself to death, when her father came and took her away. She was ashamed of her situation, and tried to conceal it, and it was more by accident than her own disclosure that it got out. I happened to see her when she first got home ; you would hardly have expected her to live a month.”

“ I suppose there are divorce proceedings pending?” threw out Paul Barclay in a nonchalant way.

“ Why, no, not at all; and it’s singular, too, when you come to think about it. They say she does n’t believe in it; they say she’d stand almost anything rather than resort to that.”

“ Oh ! ”

“ Bah ! life is too short not to take advantage of all the opportunities it affords. I wish it were my say whether a divorce should be got or not,— that’s all,” concluded the editor vigorously.

In the course of this talk, Ives Wilson asked Barclay questions, in a casual way, on a variety of subjects, to which replies were as easily returned. All was grist that came to the journalistic mill, and most of this appeared in next day’s Index, in the form of the conventional “interview.” It was meant to be, and no doubt was, a considerable tribute to Barclay’s importance. It was written in the form of question and answer. He was represented as a world-wide traveler and Eastern capitalist, temporarily sojourning at the Telson House. His views of Keewaydin and the State were given. He was made to speak in a very eulogistic way of Keewaydin, and to foresee a grand future for it. And finally — this thrown in quite gratuitously — he was said to favor the Index’s candidate for governor.

Barclay next brought up the name of Mrs. Varemberg before his relatives the Thornbrooks, and led them, as discreetly as possible, to speak of her. With beating heart he listened to what they could recall of her history. They spoke in a sedate and measured way, with the cool pulses of their age, and their feeling, as far as they understood the case, was wholly in her favor.

It happened that there came in, the same evening, still another person, who added emphatic testimony of the same kind. This was Mrs. Miltimore, the principal of the seat of learning locally esteemed of quite an august character, the Keewaydin Female Institute. Old Mr. Thornbrook, it appeared, was the president of its board of trustees.

“ Florence Varemberg, or Florence Lane,” said this lady, turning to Barclay, when she learned the object of his interest, with a certain stiff manner of her calling, “ was our favorite pupil and a great credit to us, in her time. She was a lovely character, — as lovely in mind as in person ; and no matter what may happen, I never have believed, and never shall believe, anything ill of her.”

“ The separation, then, is not to be regarded as her own fault ? ”

“ Her own fault ? If there ever was a cruelly wronged woman in the world, it is Florence Varemberg.”

With how different a feeling did Barclay now hasten back to the object of these inquiries ! How callow and besotted must he be, how prone to bad motives himself, since he was so ready to credit them in others ! He had been all but persuaded of the truth of her assumed venality and heartlessness. He looked at her with new eyes, but carefully refrained from any change in his manner that should betray to her the new light of which he was in possession.

They made two or three brief excursions together, about the town and environs. Mrs. Varemberg drove him in her own handsome, quiet conveyance, assuming a duty of hospitality.

“ You are the stranger within our gates,” said she, “ and, in my father’s absence, I must see that you are not neglected. You must be shown the points of view on which Keewaydin rests her lofty preëminence.”

She had a pair of large, well-broken horses, christened Castor and Pollux, in whom she took a friendly interest, as she incidentally seemed to do in pets of almost any kind. Castor and Pollux were fortunate enough to have a personal visit from her sometimes in their stable, and she had them brought to her nearly every day, and daintily fed them on lumps of sugar, from the porch, with her own hand.

She drove Barclay first to a little park, or grassy esplanade, on the margin of the more fashionable residence part of the town, with steep, neatly turfed bank extending down to the water’s edge. It afforded a most charming prospect, with a great sense of openness and light, over the wide expanse of Lake Michigan. Keewaydin was seen, hence, to spread out thickly along the central shore of a great bay, curved like a not too tautly bent bow. There were the two long breakwater piers, with their small light-houses on the ends. High on the bluff, far to the northward, was a larger light-house, and behind it the great green slope of a reservoir, which resembled the glacis of some fortification. Southward, the most prominent feature, amid thick-clustering roofs, was the shining tin spires of the Polish church of St. Stanislaus. Then, details fading into indefiniteness, and long lines of black smoke drifting seaward from the blast-furnaces of the suburb of Bay View.

“ It is magnificent, magnificent ! ” pronounced the young man, drawing a deep breath of satisfaction at the sight. “ Here is a place to exclaim, like the Greeks of old Xenophon, when they came to the sea again, ‘ Thalatta! thalatta!' It is very like the sea, your lake.”

“ But more cruel and treacherous, somehow ; we live by it, but never seem to get very well acquainted with it. A man could be chilled to death, in its cold waters, even in midsummer.”

“ Are you not going to astonish me with some statements about the place where we now stand having lately been a howling wilderness ? I have been led to suppose that was the Western custom, and I miss it.”

“ The place where we now stand was all simple bluff, and forest, and tamarack swamp, say thirty or forty years ago. A hardy French trapper, of the voyageur kind, came along and built a block-house here, to trade peltries with the Indians, and — behold Keewaydin as it stands ! ”

“ And he married the Indian princess, of course, the last of her race. Where do I get a vague impression of that kind ? ”

“ Why, no, the engagement must have been broken off. Princess Pearl Feather made a very unromantic figure about the streets of Keewaydin, in her last days; she took to drink, in fact, and, it seems to me, died in the county poorhouse.”

“ Alas, our fond illusions ! But I don’t quite believe this is real, you know,” he went on ; “ it may give us the slip. To one accustomed to the Eastern way, a city like this, solidly built as it appears, is suspiciously like Jonah’s gourd. At the East it takes the procession a couple of hundred years to pass a given point, as it were, and then, as you might say, it does n’t reach it.”

“ Will you believe there were once such fierce jealousies between the different divisions of the town that the West Side cut down the only bridge uniting it with the East Side, and planted a cannon to prevent its being rebuilt? ”

“ I will try and do so, for this once, if you will tell me further what it was all about.”

“ They thought there never could be settlers enough for both sides of the river, and, as the boat from Buffalo landed on their side, they wanted to keep a monopoly of the new arrivals.”

But now the thriving city stretched for long miles on either side of its petty dividing stream, which seemed a mere canal. The once envious West Side climbed, in long lines of compact streets, to a considerable rising ground. Our friends mounted thither, and looked back from those heights at the spires of the section they had left, — the dome of the city hall, with its figure, most prominent among them, — cut out in a strongly serrated edge against the lake, which gleamed behind them like a strip of silver. On their return, they came to the city hall, set in its quiet, grassy square.

“ Here is our Plaza,— Place d’Armes, — Piazza, — the focus of the civic life of a people with a mighty past of thirtyfive years,” said Mrs. Varemberg, in lively travesty of this kind of description as applied to the picturesque foreign market-places.

“ I know it already, as a locality; my Thornbrooks live over there,” said Barclay. He indicated, with a gesture, a large, comfortable-looking house, with a considerable space of door-yard before it. “ But as to traditions, associations, is n’t it really heart-breaking, now, that the central square of a populace of more than one hundred thousand souls, should be utterly without them, — absolutely unworthy of interest?”

” It is true that no counts Egmont and Horn have been beheaded here, nor any Mark Antonys, Rienzis, or Van Arteveldes aroused sedition by their stirring harangues,” replied his companion, in the same lively vein ; “but our best people have crossed the square from time immemorial. The most influential ladies of the Seventh Ward traverse it to their shopping, and our most eminent store - keepers bustle across it to and from their dinners in the middle of the day. What would you have worthier, more thoroughly American, than that ? ”

“Are we to decide that an interest in tradition is a form of entertainment entirely gone out, and to look for something else to take the place of it? Perhaps something in the way of ornamental effects, buildings, and so on, finer than any that have yet been seen, will ultimately be substituted. The worst of it is that we not only have no traditions, but are not even in process of forming them. Day after day passes over this grassy square, and what does it add, in that respect? Not an iota, not a hair’s breadth, of romance. If there were only some weird, remarkable story, even of modern date, hanging about, — that would be something to be thankful for.”

“ A weird, remarkable story hanging about an American city hall ? That would be rather too much to expect.”

“ Come, there might be a worse scene for something romantic even than this,” maintained Barclay. Their conveyance was now proceeding very slowly. “ That Mexican-looking cathedral, over there, is n’t so bad, as an accessory, and trees and shrubbery are always good; and then the city hall itself has its good points, — first among which I am inclined to put the Golden Justice, up there on her dome. Do you know, I have taken quite a fancy to the Golden Justice.”

“ Have you, indeed ? You would little guess whose head she has on her shoulders, whose likeness she is supposed to present.”

“ The French trapper,” he replied, promptly.

“ Nonsense.”

“ Pearl Feather, then.”

She looked at him reproachfully, and affected to move her own profile this way and that, as if to throw it into greater relief, for his inspection.

“ It is so far off— Surely not you ? ” said he, looking inquiringly from the fair model, who thus offered herself to view, up to the image, glinting resplendent and yellow in the soft, hazy autumn atmosphere, and then looking back again. The Golden Justice appeared like some visitant from a celestial sphere, new lighted on the heaven-kissing dome.

“ I suppose it might be called a distant resemblance, from here, but it was meant for me, nevertheless.”

“ It dazzles me so, — but that is the more like the original. I shall verify it at the first opportunity with a field-glass. And so it was modeled after you ? ”

It is a long story.”

“ The longer the better, since you are to tell it.”

“ Oh, if you take it in that amiable way, I will cut it very short.”

They had come to a stand-still for a few moments, and now drove on again.

“ The Golden Justice,” she began, “ was a prolific source of discord in its early stages. It was like the wooden horse of Troy. Dissensions commenced over her that have scarcely died out even yet.”

“ And how could that have been ? ”

“ The contest in the first place was as to what the subject of the statue should be. The early pioneer, the French trapper, was proposed. With his rifle and hatchet and his costume of fringed deer-skin, you see, he would have done very well.”

“ Ah, I was not as stupid as it appeared.”

“ But other pioneers had claims also. The question of race came up, and it was held, by zealous partisans of each, that the first German, Irish, and purely American pioneers had as good a right to the place as he. Still another party supported Pearl Feather.”

“ Why, I was divination itself ! ” protested Barclay.

The narrator smiled, indulgently. “ This party threw a romantic light around Pearl Feather. It was chiefly a committee of ladies, with Mrs. Rantoul, our leading strong-minded agitator, at their head. They thought it would be an additional step towards vindicating the true position of woman, to have a feminine statue. Bear in mind, also, that there was a South Side party, that wanted no statue at all, because it could not be well seen from that part of the town ; and lastly, a party of economy, that begrudged the expense.”

“ I begin to see,” said Barclay.

“ Oh, no; you may think so, but you don’t half begin to see yet. The question of nationality came up in connection with the choice of the sculptor, or designer, of the figure, and then of those who were to have the contracts for casting and setting up the work. The local residence of these persons and the relative advantage to be gained by the different sections were next considered. The South Side would have had the casting sent abroad, to be done at Munich, because it had no proper foundry for the work, itself; but the West Side had one, and secured it. You must get my father to tell you about the effect in the elections, and the like.”

“ It is more like the history of a Bellona, goddess of strife, than of a peaceful Justice.”

“The Justice was a compromise. There are law-courts in the building, so it is appropriate. And it is conventional and safe. Just then a youug sculptor happened to arrive from abroad, on a visit. You may remember him, — Schwartzmann. He used to come to our house, sometimes, in Paris.”

“ Schwartzmann ? I remember him very well. I have been at his studio in the Rue d’Enfer. He has done some first-rate work.”

“ Well, he did this. He was looked upon as a product of home manufacture, and got the order. My father had helped him to go abroad and prosecute his studies, and out of gratitude he wanted to make a bust of my humble self. Of course I was only too delighted. At that age — for you remember that this was at an early date — a provincial young woman, who had seen little or nothing of the fine arts of any sort, would naturally be taken by the idea of having her poor features cast in monumental form.”

Barclay recollected a winning unconsciousness of her own loveliness, even in its brightest day, as one of her greatest charms.

“ But this Schwartzmann was an original sort of person,” she continued.

“ I recollect him, myself, in connection with various cranky doings.”

“ He prepared for us a surprise, which he intended as an extraordinary compliment. What do you think it was? From the study he had made of my head he modeled that of his statue, and added more or less of my figure. He let no one know till it was complete and set in its place, and then triumphantly called upon us to observe the distinguished honor he had paid me in raising me thus aloft, six times as large as life, a couple of hundred feet above the pavement. Neither my father nor any others had made the discovery; most people are very unobservant about such things, unless their attention is especially called to them.”

“ I, for one, feel greatly obliged to your original sculptor for his pretty idea.”

“ My father did not by any means take it so amiably. He was angry at Schwartzmann for not having consulted him, and would have nothing to do with him for a good while afterwards. I was not quite sure, myself, that I liked being exalted so conspicuously before high heaven; but when I came to see how litile attention was paid to the matter of the likeness by anybody else, I became reconciled, and duly appreciative of the honor.”

“ My interest in the Golden Justice is at last intelligible,” said Barclay.

“ I suppose you are going to gallantly pretend that you knew this all the time ? ”

“ Not at all, but I assure you there has been a certain rapport between us from the first.”

f he statue with its surroundings was by this time well behind them. They followed the sylvan upper reaches of the Keewaydin River, favored of swimmers and the light skiffs of merry-makers in the pleasant summer time ; thence, by a winding road, through the rich autumn woods, full of the pensiveness of the season; and struck the lake again, a considerable distance above the city, at a charming cove and fishing-station known as the White-Fish Bay. They stopped a little at this place, to watch the fishermen drawing their nets. The water was placid and silvery, and the fish leaped in it, as the seines shoaled under them, and turned their pink and silver sides to the light.

The air was impregnated with a peculiar smokiness and fragrant smell of burning said to come from distant forest fires. Indeed, in that season there had been great fires to the northward, which had destroyed a populous town, and burned many of its inhabitants to death while standing up to their chins in the river, to which they had fled for refuge. The road homeward lay along the line of the bluffs. In the fields was encamped the corn, bivouacked in its russet sheaves, while at the door of every tent, like a goblin sentinel, squatted a yellow pumpkin. On the other side stretched out the lake, azure blue and boundless as the ocean, veiled only by scattering, thin-stemmed trees, with foliage exquisitely dyed.

“ In one particular you are not in the least like the Golden Justice,” said Barclay, returning again to this subject.

“ So much the worse for her, then; statues should resemble models, not models statues.”

” Why are you, who serve as emblem of justice to others, so unjust to yourself ? ”

“ It was not I who assumed the post of emblem, remember; it was an accident. No one who knew would ever have chosen me.”

“ Ah, no, you are better than that. I knew it, I knew it; I did not believe it,” he protested strongly. “ I have at last heard the other side of your story.”

“ What do you mean ? What have you heard?” she demanded, turning towards him, startled and flushed.

“ That you have suffered innocently, with a heroic fortitude ; that your career has been a cruel martyrdom.”

“ Let me hear no praises, no compliments, on that score, I beg of you. I scarcely knew what it was. It has all passed, like a troubled dream. But you speak of your discovery as something recent; is it possible that you did not know of this — of all this before ? ”

“ Only in the vaguest mention, on the first day of my arrival. Nor do I now know any of the details. I did not wish to talk with others about you ; it seemed an irreverence, a kind of profanation. And then, you had almost made me afraid to ask. You had almost made me think — Why did you delight to so misrepresent yourself ? ”

“ It is a way we women of the world have of talking,” she replied, with a hollow gayety.

“ Was it quite fair ? ” he urged, gently. “ We were friends once ; you might have trusted me a little more. Instead of sympathy, you tried to excite ” —

“ Do I want sympathy ? No, I will not have it,” she interrupted, almost fiercely. “ Do you suppose I am not ashamed to think of what is passing about all this in the minds of those who used to know me ? And I thought you knew ; I thought I had been the gossip of two hemispheres.” Then, in a sudden revulsion of softer feeling, with tears starting to her eyes, which she vainly turned away to hide, " Ah, what a life! what a life ! And I who had expected so much from it! ”

They were again in the streets of the town. Barclay saw that, with the best intentions in the world, he had struck some sort of false note. They remained silent a while, then spoke of indifferent things, and were presently at her own door.

So far from being an absolute recluse, Barclay found that Mrs. Varemberg showed in many ways a feverish activity. She drove about on charitable errands, visited her father’s industrial schools, took a certain oversight of his public library, and the like. At parting, on this day, she said she had taken charge of preparing a somewhat better exhibit than usual for the “ art department ” of a state fair, which was about to hold its annual session on its own grounds in the western outskirts of the city.

“ I am to go there to-morrow,” she said. “ Would it interest you to accompany me, and see what a state fair is like ? ”

“ Nothing would interest me more than to go with you, and see what a state fair is like,” he responded.

So a new appointment was made between them for an early hour the next afternoon.

William Henry Bishop