To the Delight of the Mandarin

“ TELL me, dear, when shall it be ? ”

“ In the spring.”

“ Spring ? That is a very indefinite time. My spring, for instance, begins in March. Shall we set it for the first of March ? Or why not advance our spring this year, be a law unto ourselves, and begin our spring with the new year ? ”

“ Oh no ! People pay bills and settle obligations on that date ; don’t let us mix ourselves up so early in those matters. Not till May.”

“ May ! Why, that is midsummer, not spring.”

“ You don’t remember that last year, when we decided to go into the country on the first of May, you exclaimed, ' The first of May ! Why, that is midwinter! ’ ”

“ Circumstances alter seasons, says the old proverb. You promise, then, that it shall be in January ? ”

“ No, in May; May or nothing, you bad boy.”

“ As you will, and as I must. March is not a bad month.”

“ I said May.”

“ April ? ”

“ Not March, not April, but May.”

“ Thank you, dear, for so much,” said he, kissing her hand. He had been playing with her rings as he had stood pleading with her for an earlier date. It had begun with his trying to measure her finger for a plain band ; afterwards he had slipped her rings on and off the smooth fingers.

She had said May or never, and he

acquiesced reluctantly. He kissed her hand as a tribute to her power as arbiter of his destinies ; then he drew her to him, placing the seal of his love on hair, eyes, and mouth.

And so the date was settled.

“ I suppose we are to accept the dinner invitation at cousin Fanny’s to-morrow, and the other one from the Glenharts for Friday ? ”

“Yes, I suppose so. It is nice of them, and we must be victimized a little for society’s sake.”

“ Yes, and in turn next year we shall be doing our duty to other young engaged folk, who will accept as ‘ victims; ’ shall we not, Mrs.” —

“Sh-h-h! Not till May, you know,” said she, putting her hand lightly before his face ; and he did tender homage to it again.

“ Good-night, and God keep you,” and Tom Lane went out into the night, with a heart that thumped out an ecstatic rhythm for his feet; and Laura Bracebridge sat down by the fire to spin long thoughts which reached from this moment to the altar, and beyond into misty, indefinite probabilities, dotted here and there with realities. She met dressmakers early on the way to the altar, and then bridesmaids, and then the church, and flowers, and friends, and the wedding march; and she saw a bride walking up the aisle. Then the vision became more diffused — was it Europe, or California, or where ? And then — She had for some time been slipping her rings up and down her fingers, till gradually they noted some deficiency, and telegraphed it to her brain. She looked at her hand in an abstracted way ; half of her mind was still projecting itself into that long future. As her thoughts came back into the present, a pucker gathered between her eyebrows. She looked puzzled. She held her hand stretched out before her, gazing at it in an uncomprehending way; then she glanced at the other hand, and held the two spread out before her. Where was her emerald ring ?

She certainly had had it on that evening. Had she been upstairs and taken it off while she had washed her hands ? No; she felt sure she had not been up since dinner. Had she dropped it in her lap ? She rose and brushed out her dress. The smooth black silk whished under the down - strokes of her hand: the ring was not there. It must have dropped on the rug : she scanned that all over, to its utmost limit; then she rose and rippled a wave across it. The ring did not glisten on its black surface ; but the fur was deep, — it may have found its way down into the very depths. She lifted the end of the rug. and held it high over her head and shook it. The pungent odor of the warm fur stifled her, but the ring did not drop out; it was not there. Neither was it on the carpet : she searched carefully from the fireplace to the window where Tom and she had stood while she held out for May against his pleadings. He had then been playing with her rings, she remembered. It must be somewhere. All over the room she searched carefully. Could it have dropped into the fire ? No; she was sure it could not by any possibility have done so. She had sat down by it only after Tom had left, and the stool she had sat on was fully five feet from the fire. How different the fire looked now to her! It seemed to glow so cruelly, as if it could, given a chance, devour her emerald, — yes, even her engagement ring ; but that was still on her finger, — the emerald was gone.

She could not believe it; she again mentally reviewed all that she had done that evening, and brought up at the same place : the ring was gone. She had not been upstairs ; she had not dropped it in her lap nor on the rug; she had not dropped it anywhere. Why! Tom had taken it, of course, as a foolish joke ! But how unlike him ! Whimsical he certainly was in his imagination, but a practical joke, —it was n’t in him ! And what a stupid, vulgar joke! Her face was scornful at the very idea. She would write to him at once — no, she would not write, nor speak of it. She would not lend herself to be a part of so tasteless and trivial a joke. She would say nothing to him about it; let him have the ignominy of explaining it to her and returning the ring.

But had he taken it ? Impossible ! — and the search began again, from fire to rug, and then to window. She shook the curtains and felt along the window ledge. There was no ring there. She called the maid, and told her to search every corner of the room for the ring early in the morning. What could she say to the servant if it were not found ? And then, if Tom should return it and say it had been taken for a joke — she would have to fib. How intolerable ! She could not sleep for the cruel humiliation of the thing. It had vulgarized the whole evening. The keenest sense of humor could not enjoy such an admixture of sentiment and buffoonery; and up and down, here and there, went her mind, trying to find some lurking-place for the ring, rather than in Tom’s keeping.

Tom sent a note the next morning asking her what dress she meant to wear to Fanny’s, so that the flowers could bloom to match.

She answered hastily, — she was sorry afterwards : “ Please do not send flowers to-night; ” and then, after a moment’s pause, she merely put her initial, “ L.” He ought to have spoken of the ring, she thought.

Tom came at seven ; she was ready to go, but she was not looking very well. Tom was tender and solicitous as he helped her into the coupé, — too kind to ask her if she were not feeling well, for he had that chivalrous sort of nature that could forbear even the showing of his sympathy by words. He had ventured to bring some violets, “ just for a whiff of sweetness,” he said, as he fastened them to the strap of the carriage. Laura did not wear any flowers that evening: he noticed it with surprise.

The violets filled the little space with perfume. Laura spoke rarely. Tom was puzzled ; it hardly seemed like embarrassment, but more like coldness. Laura felt the constraint of her own manner, but she did not mean to help him explain his stupid joke of the evening before.

The dinner was uncommonly dull. Laura scarcely talked, she was so piqued because Tom had not spoken of the ring. Tom did valiantly ; but a man cannot do duty for two.

Tom’s cousin Fanny said to her husband afterwards that she did n’t see why some persons’ engagements seemed to make the path to the altar so thorny. “We did n’t sulk when we were engaged, did we, Frank, you trump?”

“ No,” replied Frank. " If you held trumps, why should you have sulked ? ” “ Egotist! ” said Fanny. “ Go and see the baby in his crib, but don’t you dare to wake him.”

Tom was more and more bewildered on the way home. Laura was almost haughty. There was no chance to mention the plans for the wedding ; in fact, the wedding spirit was swept away, or wrapped in impenetrable mists. He took her hand for a moment in the hall at parting, and tried to look into her eyes (the eyes are the first fortresses to be stormed) ; but she turned her head, and said simply, “ Good-night.”

He was for a second speechless with amazement; then setting aside the ridiculous formality of her manner, he said, “ Laura, my beloved, don’t condemn me without a hearing.”

She turned and looked at him. A smile was beginning to blossom round the corners of her mouth, though under it was a determination to make him feel his want of tact in the manner of his jokes.

He did not speak, but stood smiling at her, thinking now that the ice was broken, she would tell him what had been the matter. Swift messages of love were passing from his eyes to hers.

They stood so for a perceptible space of time, — he expectant, she waiting for him to speak. Then her face began to cloud before his : why did n’t he speak ? She had nursed her grievance till she could not open the subject. He was merely expectant; he looked as if nothing stood between them but the word “ come,” to be spoken by her.

“ Well, dear ? ” he said at last, with a rising inflection.

“ Why don’t you explain ? ” asked she, forcing herself to speak. She would yield that much.

“ Explain what ? I will explain if you will tell me where your sober thoughts have been straying this evening. I can’t follow you without some clue.”

“ The emerald ring.”

“ The emerald ring ? The — emerald — ring ? ” repeated he slowly, as if to get some inner meaning from the cabalistic words. “ That mystifies me more than ever. You will have to enlarge upon it a little. Is it a game of twenty questions ? ”

He was still smiling : the atmosphere was clearing ; she was going to tell him what had been the matter ; and then there would not be any more matter at all.

“ How stupid ! ” exclaimed she impatiently.

Then both were silent. Her voice had been more than impatient; it had been censorious.

She turned away again, as if for a final good-night, and said, “ Unfortunately we do not seem to be gifted with the same sense of humor.”

“You shall not leave me,” said he, half playfully, half urgently detaining her by taking hold of her wrap. “ What is it all about ? What is this dreadful thing that I have done ? What has come between us ? Don’t send me off in this way. Tell me, dear one, and don’t hold me at arm’s length. If I have offended, it has been unwittingly or clumsily,— by way of a joke, as you have intimated. But surely you can pardon me, I can make amends. You do not want to make me suffer for something that I am sure I can set right if you will only give me a chance ? ”

She was angered at his forcing an explanation on her. She had wrought herself up to the highest nervous tension, feeding her own doubts by construing his silence to be a part of the poor joke, and interpreting his remark, “ Don’t condemn me without a hearing,” as a partial admission of something that could be explained by him after he had won her forgiveness, for he evidently was surprised at the depth of her disapproval.

The whole thing was intolerable. It made her tingle with shame, and being detained by his hand seemed to bring the matter down to the lowest level. It was outrageous ! She turned hotly and said, “ I wish you would return my emerald ring, and then leave me till I can forget this most unpleasant episode.”

The blood leaped to his face, yet still he did not appear to understand her. There was no mistaking the scathing tone of her voice, even if the words had not been insulting. Suddenly he remembered himself as a boy, sitting with the rest of the school before the master, while he had arraigned them all in the name of some boy who had wantonly abstracted the weight from the school clock. At that time his was the only face in the entire bank of upturned physiognomies which had had guilt written plainly on it in red waves of self-consciousness. And yet he had been utterly innocent, never till that moment having heard of the deed.

Tom felt that his face was now carrying the same false impression. The acute moment had passed in a flash. He was stung by this very remembrance into speech. “ I have no idea, Laura, what you are talking about; but the matter is too grave to be discussed here, standing where we may be overheard. We must go and talk it out in the drawingroom. It almost seems as if you had placed things now beyond the power of explanation.”

He turned the gas up to its fullest as he spoke, and seated her where the light was full on his face and on hers.

There was something rigidly formal in the act. He had thrown back the front of his overcoat and pulled the lapels down, as if to meet some foe all cap-apie and without shirking. His mouth was set, and his eyes had a slightly pale look, as if the fire had gone out or deeper down.

The senses of both were keenly alive. The storm at the centre of each being was no longer dissipating itself in flashes ; it was gathering into ominous strength. She saw not only his grim, fortified face, but in her curiously alert state she saw behind him, on the table a little to his left, a Chinese mandarin with its delicately balanced head. Tom had hit the mandarin with his arm by chance, and had set it into its monotonous nodding. Its smile and its narrow slits of eyes moved up and down in agonizing placidity. Laura felt as if she should burst into laughter when she saw it, but there was a clutching at her throat that made it ache, and she looked away into the fire.

Tom watched her. She was pale and set of face and attitude. Her very antipathy toward the whole thing had driven her into a tenacious acceptance of the worst construction of everything. She felt that all Tom had said had been trifling and quite compatible with the theory that he had taken the ring for a joke, and that now, driven to bay, he was going to deny it.

Possibly no two persons in the whole world had ever woven around themselves a more complete misunderstanding ; and certainly, no two were ever more completely unfitted to extricate themselves. And the mandarin went on nodding, nodding, nodding, just beyond Tom, with its eternal smile and glittering eyes.

“ Laura, will you tell me what is the matter ? ”

She looked up. The mandarin maddened her, and brought to her again all the miserable littleness of the circumstances. In a passion of anger she said, “ You took my emerald ring off my finger last night . . . and . . . well, that is all.” How could she go over with him all the mental agitation ? He surely could understand all that. He had the ring ; let him set it right — if it could be set right.

“ You think I have taken your ring, and kept it for a joke these twenty-four hours? You think that of me? You believe that I could have been with you and planned with you our future life together, and at that sacred moment I was purloining your ring, as a joke ? And you do not admire my taste in jokes ? You are quite right; it certainly would be unpardonable and in the most execrable taste ; even to imagine the thing is beyond my comprehension. May I consider myself dismissed ? ”

Laura bowed her head, and the mandarin kept on nodding and smiling, while the light glinted on the narrow, slit-like eyes. Tom went out into the night.

After this crisis in their affairs, Tom and Laura both suffered. Each bore the trouble and developed under it characteristically. Tom went grinding on at his life like a machine that has been jolted out of the true, but not demolished. The cog-wheels impinged and made a jarring as the motion of life went on, but the machine worked.

Tom was a lawyer, and had won for himself an Opportunity ; and that is so much more than many lawyers ever get that it had justified him in begging Laura to set a day for the wedding. His opportunity was now apparently all that he had left to him out of the wreck of his engagement. He went to work with a dogged determination not to let the machine stop till the opportunity had been hammered into his own particular success.

If be carried about with him galling memories and indignant protests against his lot, he did not ask for sympathy, or reveal to any one the circumstances which had so altered his matrimonial plans. He accepted in silence all the rumored blame that attached to him, and ignored the tacitly proffered sympathy with a grave face and non-committal manner.

Laura broke down for a while after her first full acceptance of the situation. There was a very short time during which she was not seen in society, but this was before any rumors of the broken engagement came out.

She had dismissed Tom that evening with a silent bend of the head, the mandarin with its bland smile and glinting eyes confirming the decision by nodding in continued suave approval. There had been a moment of keen pain as her lover left the room. It was as if she had been struck by a bullet in the midst of a battle ; it hardly counted at the time ; it was the coming to her senses that racked her and tore her to the very centre. It was the long days of cruel adjustment that counted ; the mental convalescence when she took up her life with no heart for it, no work before her, — only the dreary commonplaces of an aimless existence. The only thing she retained unshaken was her belief in Tom’s folly.

She had put all the force of her rather limited nature into her love for Tom, — or possibly, to be more accurate, into her love of her love for Tom. It had not made her nature any broader, but it had determined its direction. A belief in marriage was her social creed. Her imagination had been satisfied, but not stimulated, by her engagement to Tom ; her ambitions had been sufficiently gratified by his opportunity, which his nature made a guarantee of success.

In her love she had never gone outside of herself. It was her love, her joy ; and now it was her grief and suffering. She could not see beyond or through or over the blank wall of suspicion she had built around herself. The conviction of his fault grew with her grief, and embittered while it augmented it. She magnified and embellished the flagrant sin of the vulgar joke. Tom had desecrated the holiest moment of her life, and then, driven to bay by the sense of her scorn, he had retreated under a pretended ignorance of the cause.

Of course, never for an instant did the loss of the ring play any part in her tragedy. It was the loss of her ideal, — the violation of her sense of what was fitting, reverential, at a sacred moment in her life. She saw no other solution of the matter. The ring was gone. Tom and she had been the only persons in the room that night. Tom had been slipping the ring off and on, and that was the last that was seen of it. Oh ! she knew all this by heart. She had only to start the thought, and on it would go till it brought her round to the standstill conviction : Tom had taken it, for a joke — and then he had refused to stand by his act.

Laura’s mother had accepted “ poor, dear Laura’s ” version of the affair. Laura had told one friend about it, — only one friend, — and of course, this friend had really never told any one else ; but everybody knew that it was something about a ring. Some said that Tom had given Laura a so - called diamond engagement ring ; then on investigation, consequent upon adjusting the setting, it had proved to be no diamond, but paste.

Some one else had heard that Tom had insisted that the engagement ring should be an opal surrounded by diamonds, and that Laura was so very superstitious that she returned it, and Tom had vowed that he would not allow her to be so weak ; and so the opal had justified its evil power, and the engagement was broken. Still another version was that some two weeks after Tom had given Laura the engagement ring, the bill for it had been sent to her, as it could not be collected from him.

In the months following Tom was not invited to the places where Laura was ostentatiously made the heroine. Laura was dropped from the houses where Tom was in high favor. When ignorance or malice brought the two together, Tom withdrew and left Laura in undisputed possession of the field.

Tom changed somewhat during the year. His chin seemed to grow more square and more masterful as success followed upon his indefatigable labors. He was slightly heavier, too, and suggested the thought that he was a man who could order a good dinner at the club, and could also make a good after-dinner speech.

Laura’s family had a tendency to grow thin as time went on. Laura began to look like her mother; her cheek-bones were more in evidence ; her face had its old vivacity, but the expression was more restless than formerly, and her color had swifter fluctuations. She took tea and toast for two of her meals, also afternoon tea, after which she did not feel the strain of social life so much; and she was always very chatty and entertaining between four and six of an afternoon.

One day, as Tom was sitting down to his dinner at the club, a note was brought to him. He knew the writing, and the machinery of his being labored for a moment, as if the cog-wheels, which had begun to run pretty freely by this time, had received a new jar. He ate his dinner before he opened the note. After reading it he went across to a friend who was dining at another table, and asked him to come to his room. To this friend he told for the first time the history of the broken engagement, and then said: “ I have received a note this evening. It is a year ago to-day since the affair. I have heard lately that she has engaged herself to a cousin who has always been in love with her, and that they are shortly to be married. I do not know how true the rumor is, but I fancy it is true, and that they are to be married in a few weeks. She sends me this note :

“ ‘Please consider this as a receipt in full for the ring which you took from my finger last spring.

LAURA BRACEBRIDGE.’ " If she were a man, I think I should kill her. One can’t strike a woman.”

“ Go and see her.”

Tom went, and was shown into the drawing-room, where Laura and the mandarin were. There had been a mistake on the part of the new maid : Laura had given directions for her cousin Charlie, to whom she was not yet engaged, to be admitted. Tom was shown in, instead.

That afternoon, when Laura had come home, the maid had handed her three boxes, with a message to the effect that the dressmaker had herself left them at the house, and that she had waited an hour to see Miss Laura, as she had an important message for her, and that she would come again at nine in the evening. Two of the boxes contained dresses; the smallest of the three, about six inches square, had still another box inclosed, and within that was her emerald ring. Laura told her mother that Tom had sent back her ring without a word, — probably because he had heard rumors of her engagement to Charlie, — and she had written a note to him immediately, acknowledging the ring, because it was a relief to her to show him that she had been justified in her own attitude, and it seemed to close up all that terrible past year. “I was right,” she said. “He was and is unworthy.”

She had been right through it all.

Now they stood face to face, after a year of strangeness. He held her note in his hand, and said, “ Will you kindly explain this note, Miss Bracebridge ? ”

“ It explains itself ; it is only a receipt for my emerald ring which you returned to me this morning.”

“ Your emerald ring! ” he repeated again, in the same tone he had used a year ago that night. “ I returned your emerald ring ? ”

“ Miss Laura, said the maid, parting the curtains that shut off the hallway, “ the dressmaker wants very much to speak to you a moment.”

“ I cannot see her this evening.”

“ It is important,” was heard the voice of the dressmaker, and then it continued beyond the curtains out of their sight like the voice of a fate. “ Tell Miss Bracebridge that I found her emerald ring between the dress and the lining, when I ripped up her black silk to-day. It was so valuable I did not want to run the risk of its being lost. So I brought it back to her myself. She will find it in the little square box.”

The outer door closed. The maid passed through the hall and disappeared. Tom and Laura stood facing each other. The mandarin’s head was still; his eyes gleamed. He was waiting for the next move.

Madelene Yale Wynne.