A Sacrifice

“Is it the Tower? That adds a distinct pleasure. And I always enjoy this ride, any way,” said Miss Bolingbroke.

“I shall certainly enjoy it to-day, by your permission, ” said the man to whom she spoke, wheeling the opposite chair about, after disposing of his belongings.

“You ought to enjoy it every day, Mr. Harden,” she said. “Barbara Means says there is not another such bit of railway on this side the world, — the sea, blue as lapis, all the way beside you, or else the wide meadows, rich with color and all their settlements of haycocks, and the sea lifted beyond. She says she feels, when on the way to the Tower, that the road runs up into high country, — as if the region lay on a loftier level than the rest of the world. ”

“Perhaps it does, ” said Mr. Harden.

“That is why it exhilarates me then, and makes me feel aerial, too.” And as she laughed, Mr. Harden noted, not for the first time, that the sparkle of her eyes was as blue as the sparkle of the sea.

It required, certainly, some potency to make Miss Bolingbroke aerial, — she, one of the daughters of the gods, in whom the present generation displays the result of the abundant and luxuriant life of the generations gone. Tall, and of noble symmetry and proportions, her movements were of the stately and imperious sort. But fair and beamingeyed, there was magic in her smile, and there was a genial warmth in her presence that almost made you oblivious of a not too vivid intellectuality. She spoke in a high but sweet voice, and with an accent that told of some English residence. Although it might not have been of vital moment to her, any one could see that Eliot Harden’s companionship increased the zest of the moment, as the train puffed out of the station.

“I am so glad I happened to be in town for Mrs. Sylvester’s note. I wonder, ” said Miss Bolingbroke, “who is of the party ? ”

A slight red burned under the bronze of Mr. Harden’s cheek. “It is sure to be some one,” he said, “who will add to the occasion as the perfume adds to the rose.”

Now it was Miss Bolingbroke who changed color. “You can say a neat thing, Mr. Harden,” she said, accepting the remark.

“ One is fortunate if not offending, ” he replied, covering a slight confusion at her misunderstanding. “ However, ” he added, “one needs but little where Mrs. Sylvester is, herself.”

“Mrs. Sylvester? Why, she is an old woman,” said Miss Bolingbroke.

“How old would Helen be if she were living?” he said, smiling.

“ Helen who ? ” asked Miss Bolingbroke. “Well,” she went on, as he did not reply, “I never can tell just why she invites me. She reads books; I don’t know but she writes them; her friends do, any way. And as for me, I never look into one.”

“ ' I can write love-odes, — thy fair slave’s an ode,’ ” said Mr. Harden.

“I suppose you are quoting some book or other now. But I never could see the virtue in loving literature. It is a great deal better to love life.”

“It is better to be Achilles than Homer, you think. ‘I know the joy of kingship, — well, thou art king,’quoted Mr. Harden again. And then they both gazed out of the window into the dark depths of the water the trestles crossed, green as a canal of Venice.

“There is no one with such a genius for guests as Mrs. Sylvester,” Miss Bolingbroke presently took up the thread. “But, dear me, in such a perfectly ideal place who would n’t have it? I suppose there are kings’ palaces that are finer, — yes, I have seen them; I have even visited in one. But when I am on that gallery where the Tower stands sheer on the cliff, with the blue sea beneath and far away, I can’t imagine anything more to my mind. I like kings’ palaces, though; don’t you? Barbara Means says she feels at Mrs. Sylvester’s that she is in a palace where the queen is playing villeggiatura.”

“Life being a masquerade at best,” said Mr. Harden.

“ It must take a great deal of money to keep it up, ” said Miss Bolingbroke presently. “I can’t fancy what Mrs. Sylvester will do with her money by and by. Give it to some charity, I suppose, and make Barbara Means the high priestess. Barbara has been staying there. She is always staying there. I should think it would be too sharp a contrast when she goes back to that settlement, — all the beauty, the repose, the high breeding, the — the wealth at the Tower. You see,” she said, with a laugh that had some deprecation in it, “I think well of wealth.”

“You have reason to do so, ” said Mr. Harden, replacing a cigar at which he had been looking tenderly. “ But wealth has its differentiations, you know. ‘ Lilies of all sorts, the flower-de-luce being one.’ ”

“Mrs. Sylvester has all the differentiations, then, ” Miss Bolingbroke replied, as the train clattered on. “When I see her in her long white cloak, cutting flowers with the dew on them, in her gardens, — face to, remember, face to, — then I think loveliness — of a sort — can go no further ” —

“You are generous.”

“When I hear of her work down in the Three Deeps, I know goodness can go no further. And when I take my tea-cup at the Tower, — O, then! O that china of hers! What luck she has picking up things! Money could n’t buy them. But there ’s some noble family living on their leavings; or some shop where a queen has left her crown in pawn; and word comes to her. She does have the luck in her finds, or she used.”

“The luck may have been Mr. Sylvester’s. Mrs. Sylvester has not troubled herself much about such affairs of late years.”

“Oh, I dare say not. She has them all, you see. But if she did n’t have them, she would miss them. That is the advantage Barbara has, on the whole. ”

If Mr. Harden made no replies to her references to Barbara, it was possibly because she gave him no time to do so. Not only an heiress, but a beauty, Miss Bolingbroke had that assurance which comes with a knowledge of one’s influence and the infrequency of any check. She could not help knowing that to most hearers it was enough to look at her ivory tints and melting lines. And she could not divine that to Eliot Harden her view of life, as merely the theatre where money deployed its pleasures, and no more, was a trifle unsympathetic. Still much is pardoned to beautiful lips, and their empty speech is often filled with a larger interpretation.

“It doesn’t seem possible that an hour should take us out of all the heat and din into this region of coolness and quiet, ” said Miss Bolingbroke, as the train-man left the door open, and the wind swept through. “Oh, just smell the sea! ”

“It is like going into the other world,” said Mr. Harden. “I am not sure it is not the other world, and that we are blest beyond mortals for the time we enter its region.”

Miss Bolingbroke stared a moment. “This world is quite good enough for me, ” she said, as the train went sliding along with glimpses of blue sea, through spaces of forest, past villas on red rocks, past places like palaces, with sward like velvet, and stretches of flowers, where everything seemed as festive, and perhaps as peaceful, as the people across the river in Mirza’s Vision.

Well, — to a man marrying Mary Bolingbroke this was a world good enough for him, too. Perhaps in time he might be less — more — ah, if, at any rate, love, — if enough affection to rub along with did not come, there was no need nowadays of seeing too much of one’s wife.

The lines ran in his mind unspoken, and then he was aware of something like a shudder. And again a guilty red sprang up his cheek as he knew that should he marry Barbara Means there could not be too many moments in the day, too many æons in eternity, beside her. He repressed his thought, as though it were coxcombry; yet he would have been very dense if, in the past weeks, he had not understood Miss Bolingbroke; and, as to the other, there are subtle currents and approaches in love that need no further assurances.

“ When one is very distrait, ” said Miss Bolingbroke, after a few moments of silence, “the common people call it moon-gathering. It seems a shame that one should go moon-gathering all alone. A penny for your thoughts! ”

“They are worth the queen’s shilling, ” said Mr. Harden. And before long the train drew up at the little station, where all was a bright bustle and confusion of pretty girls and gay welcomes and jangling harnesses ; and Miss Bolingbroke and Mr. Harden rolled away in a victoria to the Tower and Mrs. Sylvester.

Mrs. Sylvester, with her long white cloak about her, received them in the doorway; the dark shadows of the deep hall beyond making her seem more like a picture than ever. “You are just in time for a cup of tea, ” she said, as she led them in where a low fire smouldered and a tea-service glittered. And somehow to both the travelers a cup of tea never seemed so refreshing, whether it were the tea itself, the rest from a little strain, the place, — perhaps even the china, — or the charm in the presence of Mrs. Sylvester herself.

We are not apt to associate the idea of charm with that of age. It is true that in a few individuals a certain silvery pallor and delicacy is not found unlovely, so far as the eye is concerned; but that is more from a spiritual than from a physical point of view, since it seems to the gazer as if through the garment of the body the soul itself were seen. In the greater instance old age breaks down the firm line, loosens the curve, and shrinks and deteriorates and uncolors.

It was therefore both singular and pleasant that Sylvia Sylvester, although past her sixtieth year, should preserve much more than a reminiscence of the beauty which in her youth had delighted the eyes of men, and of women, too. There were threads of gray in the once jacinth - colored hair, many of them ; but the hair was still in heavy masses. The brilliant eyes were softened; but the lashes, dark and unchanged, lent them shadow. The face was a trifle thinner; but it wore a soft pale bloom upon the cheek; the teeth were as perfect and translucent as ever; the hint of aquiline in the nose was still but a hint; and if the lips were not as richly stained as once, the expression about them was as sweet as that a spirit out of heaven might wear. The light step of youth was gone, the figure was somewhat bowed from its haughty height; you said it was an old woman if you saw her walking before you; but if she happened to turn her face upon you a miracle had taken place before your eyes.

Yet in spite of all, the first impression was the true one. And so, although it pleased the eye and satisfied the soul, the beauty was more pictorial than human; and aware of her immunity from misconstruction, she met people on a plane that gave her much liberty and usefulness. She had been, through the greater part of her life, largely occupied with charities, almost every morning searching out the poor and ill in their hiding-places, and ministering to them, almost every afternoon assisting at some function for their improvement or relief, yet none of that intruding on her home. In everything she was still full of vital force.

Her husband had died long ago, leaving her wealthy, — so long ago that he seemed a dream, or as if he had been the husband of some other woman. Among those whom she had made most welcome to her house at first were the young men and students in his office; and now it was the young men and students in their offices and in those of others, together with such of the friends of her youth as were left, and girls who earned their livelihood in gentle ways, and girls who spent their allowances like princesses, with now and then a notable beauty like Miss Bolingbroke to lend splendor to the scene. These and others who had the freedom of her house dined with her in the city where often there were guests, more or less famous, to give peculiar interest to the occasion, to which nevertheless she herself gave always the supreme grace, — or came out to pass Sunday with her in her lovely and lonely tower by the sea. There the entourage was beautiful, the hospitality was perfect, and the thought on a plane where nothing base found footing, a plane of white ideals and sublimated standards. And they all went away refreshed by contact with a nature that seemed fed by lofty meditation and emotion and the doing of good deeds, that, acquainted with the sin and sorrow of the world, looked over them to fairer heights beyond, and believing that all things were governed with love and on large lines, maintained itself in serenity.

Perhaps it was upon this serenity that Mrs. Sylvester, being not altogether perfect yet, prided herself in some degree. Although in many ways so near angelhood, in others her feet were still in the clay. She valued her position, the name of Sylvester, the traditions of the race, the estimation she received, the honors accorded her, her whole social tribute and preëminence. For Mr. Sylvester was of the old blue blood of the colony, and it was reported that she herself was the last of a proud Southern family, reduced it may be, but of the stock of the Huguenots. Notwithstanding her loftiness of soul, it was not unpleasant to Mrs. Sylvester that her patronage was precious to the great social affairs, and that her name with any enterprise was the cachet of its success. We are all human, and Mrs. Sylvester enjoyed being at the top of her world. So long had she enjoyed it that she was in a way unconscious of the feeling, and had she been aware of the enjoyment would have condemned it. She did not state to herself that all these things were of worth to her; a queen, born to the purple, does not plume herself upon her right of inheritance; but deep down in her heart of hearts if she did not know it she felt it; she felt the delight of her reign in every fibre of her being. Yet none of this hindered her airy and exquisite grace of manner. And even if she had shortcomings they did not abate the excellence of her aims and her demands ; and all the atmosphere about her was that of peace and pleasantness and perfection.

If your hands have been full of roses, their fragrance will linger with you; and you cannot be in certain environments without absorbing something of their quality. No one came within Mrs. Sylvester’s area without feeling that a step in the great spiral was being surmounted and a loftier outlook gained, if only for a time. And no one ever felt this more keenly and more delightedly than Eliot Harden, who if not still in his earlier manhood had not yet passed the period when much is expected of one. Eliot Harden’s powers were those of which much had been expected for some years. The little he had done gave hope and promise of achievement in the future. But there had come a pause, whether like that of the tide for further incoming, or whether from sheer idleness and lack of force. People said he was becoming a dilettante, that he played at his pursuits, that the life of wealth and fashion, of luxurious enjoyment, was swallowing him, that he would amount to nothing serious, that he would take the short cut to ease and accomplishment by marrying money.

But although half sensible of this sort of remark about himself, Mr. Harden was unconcerned; for he knew that the great work of his dreams would be done when he should be unhampered by circumstance and possess his soul in peace. He had thought of two paths to pursue: one was to marry the woman who suited him to the last beat of his heart, but with whom — penniless and without station or family, as she was — life must lapse into quiet and renunciation. And he loved the pleasant things of the other side of life. It was not only a vanity but a joy to him to be Mrs. Sylvester’s guest. She had always been interested in him and in his ideas; his parents, who died when he was a boy, having been her friends. When he came back from his studies of many years in Germany, knowing few people, she had made him at home among her acquaintances, and his sense of welcome in her house had been the brimming of his cup.

There had been other pleasant things. Dinners with the Applegarths, the Chaunceys, the Bedfords, were things to which he looked forward, and which he remembered afterwards; the superb paintings in one house, the royal banquet royally served, the gold, the silver, the china like petrified flowers, the servants silence-shod, the jeweled women there, the gay give and take; in another house where all was daintiness daintily bestowed, the flowers, the poetry, the air that breathed o’er Eden, that breathed gentleness and peace; in another house the music; in all the presence of wealth and ease and beauty. The opera, too; it would be hard to forego that. Of course one might have a night or two under almost any circumstances ; but the pleasure of the whole season taken as a natural part of life, the youth, the bloom, the splendor of society there, the greeting, the expectation ; the delight of hearing Eames and De Vere, delicious tone answering tone in the duet in Figaro, the piercing sorrow and sweetness of Tristan, the rapture, the uplifting, the companionship of gods in the Walküre and the Götterdämmerung, — that would be impossible to a man on a salary, with an unknown and portionless wife. And then Mr. Harden enjoyed his horse, an expensive enjoyment; and he enjoyed the horses of other people, in the horse show, where he liked being a part of the occasion. He enjoyed — what was there fine and rich and splendid that he did not enjoy!

If you had told him this and its conclusions, of another man, he would have thought the man more or less unworthy. But in himself he recognized only the fact that he was by nature a person of superior tastes.

And if he married Mary Bolingbroke, well born, well made, well bred, living her life on the full swing of the tide, all these things were his, and more would be added unto them. And with her millions how quickly could he accomplish what otherwise would require years; and how soon and how imperially would fame come to him!

It would have startled Mrs. Sylvester had it occurred to her to mark the small distance between herself and Eliot Harden, on the line where their orbits approached. Eliot Harden was aware of his foibles, and not ashamed; Mrs. Sylvester was unaware. But on the line of departure the distance was infinite; for the plan of his life was for himself alone; and hers was to make the world richer and sweeter, not because she had been a part of it, but in the service of the supreme idea.

People meet, however, on as superficial a plane as that of Flatland, and hardly expect at dinner to prove deeper depths than those of the wine; and the present moment was usually sufficient to those about Mrs. Sylvester’s softly lighted table, where there was always something novel and exquisite in the equipage, and where the banquet contrived to be delicious without too much servility to the senses. Miss Bolingbroke in scarlet gauzes, with big pearls, was an illumination there now, till Barbara, entering like a white apparition, made one feel as if the dawn had come.

She was late, as she confessed rather breathlessly, taking her place, for she had been at a fairy festival. “The Good Fairy of it,” said Mrs. Sylvester. “How was it, Barbara? ”

“A real illusion; if there is such a thing,” said Barbara, laughing. “That grassy terrace with the sea behind it, the sunset colors, the music, the children, — these so daring, those so shy, all so happy! ”

“And you sang, Barbara? ”

“Oh yes, and there were flutes for thrushes ” —

“They didn’t need them with your singing! ”

“But the loveliest thing was the children who were not in the play, not fairies ” —

“Just children,” said Mr. Harden.

“Yes. They were so rapt,—lost into another world. They forgot there was any land but fairyland. And then, — of course it was an anachronism, or a profanity, or both, —but if Shakespeare could take Gothic fairies into Athenian forests, we thought we might take angels among children. Babcock did in that painting of his, you know. And so, the very last thing, we had an arch of faces with wings, nothing but faces and wings, — the cedar hedge hiding everything else; a rainbow arch of little cherubs, — perfectly still. And the great evening star came out just over them; and the other children were simply transformed with awe. All their lives those children will believe in heaven, because they saw heaven open and let the angels out! ”

“And I suppose the last small people, ” said Miss Bolingbroke, “ the ones who were angels, will have to live up to their blue china.”

“ Barbara, you are an angel yourself, ” said Mrs. Sylvester.

“I wonder if there is some psychological interest in our view of children as a distinct order of beings,” said Mr. Harden.

“They are,” said Barbara. “If they are clay it is the white transparent kind ” —

“That they make little porcelain devils of,” said Miss Bolingbroke.

Barbara laughed. “I am afraid I love them even then,” she said. “Each new child seems to me a new possibility in the race ”—

“A new heir, at any rate, for the great inheritance, ” said Mrs. Sylvester.

“A new field perhaps for the great forces.”

“A new experiment,” said Mr. Harden.

“No one can tell which one may be the starting-point for the new ” —

“Has n’t some one said, ” asked Mrs. Sylvester, “that every child follows its own hyperbolic line into infinity? ”

“I, myself,” said Mr. Harden. “I always thought it a good phrase.”

“Heavens! ” exclaimed Miss Bolingbroke. “Those terrible little Herefords who act as if the world was made when they were! ”

“So it was, for them,” said Mr. Harden.

“Do you suppose,”said Mrs. Sylvester, “that there are higher intelligences who conjecture concerning us as we do about children ? ”

“And forget that they were ever what we are? " asked Mr. Harden.

“But, dear,”said Barbara gayly, “it is the children for whom I claim the higher intelligence here! ”

“As if that were possible,” said Miss Bolingbroke, — “such pests as the young Herefords! ”

“The poor little people,” said Mrs. Sylvester. “But if there is anything in inherited tendencies, they must one day be the fine flower of the Herefords. ” “And that, at the best ” —

“Oh, Mary,” said Mrs. Sylvester, “one is tender of them because, after all, with any other inheritance, they come into the world weighted with the wrongs of generations ” —

“Because of the original savage, then,” said Miss Bolingbroke.

“No, ” said Barbara, “because of the wingéd thing in the shell.”

“There are all sorts of winged things, ” said Miss Bolingbroke, addressing herself to her mushrooms.

“One of them, the Kabalists say, is an angel named Purpurah, whose wings are only a purple sheen, ” said Mr. Harden.

“What a people it was for great fancies,” said Barbara. “Think of their supposing to know the heavenly host by name! But they lived so close to the stars.”

“ Who ? ” said Miss Bolingbroke. “Why, the ancient Jews.”

“Oh, if there’s one thing I detest more than another ” -—

“I don’t love them,” said Mr. Harden. “And yet, as Disraeli declared, all the North of Europe worships a Jew, and all the South of Europe a Jew’s mother.”

“Mrs. Vassall refuses to enter a house where a Jew is received.”

“I can’t imagine it,” said Barbara. “To me it is a people full of poetry.

I would be proud to be of the same race with Isaiah. I don’t know anything in history so romantic as the Zionist movement.”

“You are always so enthusiastic, Barbara,” said Mrs. Sylvester, a little languidly. “Don’t you think it would be pleasant to have our ices on the gallery ? ”

It was exceedingly pleasant, — the cool breath drifting in from the outer deeps, the nettings dropped and drawing a film across the swale of the sea, and the glow of the lamps making a soft cloud seem to float in an upper sea of sapphire. Here and there, out and away, the pale lights of a yacht rocked on the swell, and from one, glimmering like a ghost near at hand, a woman’s voice rose sweet and strong in Senta’s song, the low surge of the rollers beating in unison.

A servant removed the lamps with the cordial cups, and another drew up the nettings; a wind came curling about them, and brought the fragrance of a jar of gardenias, which seemed the very essence of the deep delicious summer night.

“‘ The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks, ’ ” said Mrs. Sylvester, as from one reef and ledge to another through the dim purple of twilight the evening lamps announced the presence of others in this waterland of loveliness and luxury.

Mr. Harden leaned back in the Indian chair and enjoyed the loveliness, the luxury, — the sense of wealth dear to his heart, the permanency of beauty that wealth made possible.

A boat touched the shore below the cliff, bringing people from the Viking; they were coming up the path from the other side into the winding avenue where the scent of big white lilies, he knew, blew through the evening air. Mrs. Sylvester and the others went in; Mr. Harden remained with his cigar in the cool velvety darkness. He was feeling obscurely that the time had come when drifting must cease and a decision must be made. The drifting had been pleasant. But if he were to do his work, either he must take advantage of his chance for unlimited wealth with a wife, or he must accept the quiet life with its economies and its renunciations. He must live, for a time at any rate, abandoning the world and forgotten by it. There would be a maid of all work; soapy steam would penetrate the house on Mondays; dinner would announce itself at the door on any day; summer nights, like this, one would sit in a narrow porch and look into a little grassplot. Now and then, perhaps, one might have a day and night at the Tower, or at some other place of delight. But as a recipient of bounty. Nothing of this living on the full swell, of the beauty, the ease. Nothing like this draught of the wine of life would brim the cup again.

Ah, —but the real wine of life, the love of Barbara Means! It made his soul seem to shiver with an intense joy, an exquisite pang, to think of it.

He looked aslant at the lighted room beyond. Mary Bolingbroke sat with face and form in relief against a huge jasper vase as tall as she. Certainly an attractive figure to be seen at the head of a man’s table, of a man’s house. He had not perhaps fully noted before the voluptuous curve, the statuesque modeling. That string of pearls she ran through her fingers, —— the price of it was almost a king’s ransom. She was good-tempered, she took life easily; she was laughing now at some inane pleasantry of one of the yachtsmen. Oh no, she was by no means stupid, even if not sympathetic, — the average intellect fortified by the phrase and style of the fashionable woman. One need not be altogether ashamed of such a wife. When could Barbara wear such pearls as those! Well; one could dispense with comprehension, with sympathy, and, in consideration of so much else, take it instead from the fellow worker, the student, the savant, by and by from the world. There was the house on the Avenue, a palace ; the next house could be bought for his study, his workshop. There was the position at the head of the social world, which if not valuable for itself was valuable for its results, and with that advantage in the scholastic and the scientific world that great income and possibilities would give. He could resign the professorship, the humdrum drilling of oafs that was deadening his vitality, — the future stretched before him like a golden lane into sunset. He threw his cigar away, for Mrs. Sylvester was coming out, and he rose and shook his shoulders like a dog leaving deep water. His mind, he said to himself, was made up.

“Do you know,” said Mrs. Sylvester, motioning him to his chair again, “when I come out here into the dark it is like a cool hand laid on my eyes, on my hair. There is a sort of personality about the dark. That sounds like Barbara, ” she said, with a little laugh, as she took her seat opposite. “But then it isn’t what Barbara says, it is what she is, that signifies. Yet did you ever notice that she has such an intimacy with nature that all its forces become real and individual to her ? She said, the other day, that the sea is remote, infinite, unhuman, but that mountains seem to camp round one with a protecting power ” —

“Are you speaking of Miss Means? ” he asked with an accent of indifference.

“Did you think I was speaking of Miss Bolingbroke? ” she replied, laughing again. “Mary Bolingbroke is a charming girl; but does any one say she has any intimacy with nature ? No; she takes nature as she does her pictures, her dinner, her house, — a foregone conclusion. Mary lives on the boulevard, the asphalt ” —

“I don’t know that I should listen ” — began Mr. Harden.

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Sylvester, “sits the wind in that quarter? ”

“ Why not ? ” asked Mr. Harden abruptly.

“ We have been friends so long, ” said Mrs. Sylvester, with sudden gravity, “that I may say it sounds — as if one defended himself.”

“Does one need defense in finding a lovely woman attractive ? ”

“We have been friends so long, ” she said again, “such close friends, too, that I do not need forgiveness for asking if the attractive woman outweighs ” —

“The attractive fortune, you would say? You do not expect me to commit myself. It would be unfair to her. Surely a fortune is not necessary to heighten the attraction.”

“No,” said Mrs. Sylvester shortly.

“But just as surely a fortune would make life a different thing for a man with work before him. You have always been interested in my work, for instance. ”

“Always.”

“Well, then, you understand the matter ; ” and he leaned back, as if for the silence with which old friends indulge themselves.

“No,” said Mrs. Sylvester. “On the contrary, an easy heart will do more for your work than an easy income.”

“It is not possible to demonstrate the unity of matter — the task I have set myself — without an easy income. That is, unless one goes into a cell and abandons all there is outside, all there is over.”

“Is that the scientific spirit? ”

“I must put myself to shame before you then. The things that are over, the things an easy income affords, — they are tempting.”

“That is of no consequence. That is something just thrown in, ” said Mrs. Sylvester, returning to the first theme, as she moved a trifle into the shadow of the soft wide glow coming over the sea, “if—if you love the girl.”

Mr. Harden did not at once reply.

“Love,” he said presently, “is a dream. When its ecstasy is past, friendship may remain. Why not as well forego the ecstasy and begin with the other ? It might ” —

“Well? ”

“Content me sufficiently.”

“Oh! But about her? It seems to me,” said Mrs. Sylvester, “that she has rights in the case. If I understand you, she is a girl who, if not unusual and commanding, yet deserves love. I am not thinking anything unhandsome of you, in one way. I know that you have only to make the endeavor in order to win the affection of either of these girls. But I do not admit that you have it now. ”

“I am glad you say so. I may be a cad; I don’t want you to think me one. And then — when it is time for the dream to be over — love may come. ”

“That sort of love! And you would marry on the chance ? ”

“I think,” he said, laughing uneasily, “I am sure, —since confession is in order, — that you will regard me as of still more ignoble caste if I say that in my philosophy, if not in my experience, love is a secondary thing. When poverty comes in at the door, you know ” —

“It is hardly poverty with you.”

“Comparative. For I like spacious rooms and their appurtenance, marbles, choice paintings, hammered silver, gold plate, wines that princes grow, grounds that hold gardens and forests ” —

“You not only want to live delicately, but in kings’ courts also. If I did not care for you, Eliot Harden, if I had not cared for your father and mother, — I” —

“I am sorry. But such I am. I have looked into myself, and reflected, you see. And not only these and such as these are of weight with me, but the position that adheres to long held wealth and an old family name, the social rule and consideration, not the distinction, perhaps, but the consciousness that, such as it is, no one has more. A wife with no family behind her, no name ” —

“You have an old name, yourself.” “Obscured, though, for a generation or two.”

“Mr. Sylvester had no more — except wealth.”

“Except wealth! And then,— why, he married you! ”

“Oh! ”

“No, A wife who has no ancestry, no traditions, who comes from the soil, whose blood is the blood of peasants ” — “I am ashamed of you! ”

“ But you must acknowledge she would be a weight, a clog. The peasant would be perpetually breaking through. He would live again in her, in her children. After the glamour of youth had gone, the reversion would be as evident as public disgrace is.”

“I do not believe this is really you. It is an advocate defending a client. You are making out a case.”

“You are ashamed of me? ” continued Mr. Harden. “I am not ashamed of myself. The leopard cannot change his spots. I was made that way.”

“No,” said Mrs. Sylvester, in a strange tone, as if some one else had spoken.

“I am being utterly frank with you. Brutally so. I would have thought a few moments ago that I did not need your advice. Perhaps I do ” —

“ Oh, certainly you do! ”

“At any rate, a thing, possibly, is best looked at from all sides. And it is plain to you, it cannot help being so, that a man like me, in my place, marrying a woman of no social rank, might as well take a weight in either hand and jump into the sea.”

“I understand nothing of the sort. If you loved such a woman, — a woman who might be what Barbara is, — of such pure taste, such exquisite breeding, even if penniless, born to rule, born to soar, — oh, love is like a spring-board that sends you so much farther forward with its impetus than you would have gone alone! ”

Just then the great moon swam up out of the sea, white and full; and they turned and saw Barbara standing in the doorway at some distance from them, bathed in the full lustre of the illumination, and in her long lines, her delicacy, her whiteness, as beautiful as the lily of annunciation the angel brought the Virgin. And as Mrs. Sylvester’s glance involuntarily went back to her companion’s face, she was startled by the look there, a look in which a wild passion, a desperate longing, a tender yearning, a bitter renunciation, perhaps a stem despair, seemed to chase one another with expression varying like the play of lightning on the sky from a storm below the horizon.

Barbara waited a moment, looking at the splendor of the moon and sea, and then turned back at a word from within. And when she had gone the wide whisper of the waters served to hush them as they sat on the gallery, listening as if for a voice, while they looked out over the infinity of the dark wave, up into the infinity of the dark heaven.

“How can any one be small or sordid in the presence of this vastness, ” said Mrs. Sylvester at last.

“Well,there it is,” said Mr. Harden, with the air of throwing off a weight. “You have me.”

“There it is,” said Mrs. Sylvester softly. “You think your learning, your powers, your work, your life, are lost if you marry an obscure person, although you love her.”

Mr. Harden started.

“Although you love her,” repeated Mrs. Sylvester slowly.

“I am sure of it,” said Mr. Harden. “ You cannot overthrow the processes of nature. A weed will be a weed, a rose a rose.”

“Before men came to appreciate it a rose was a weed.”

“No; rose and man were coeval.”

There was a gay calling of goodnights from within; and then the whole company — Mary and Barbara thinking better of it and going along — went down the cliff to the boats. Mrs. Sylvester walked slowly up and down the gallery a little while, the trail of her soft white silk and lace gleaming spirit-like a moment as she crossed the lane of light from door or window. Then she returned to her chair in the shadow.

“ Do you like the way I live ? ” she said before long, her arm on the balustrade, her hand supporting her leaning head, only half glimpsed in the dusk of her corner.

“The way you live! Like it! You know it is perfection.”

“Tell me,” she said, “what most strikes you concerning it.”

“Are you in earnest? Is it not an impertinence? Well then, the absolute high breeding.”

“ And after that ? ”

“The art of selection; the choice of beauty; the power of combination ; the way you, no, not compel, but draw the world to your feet.”

“After one passes the heyday of ambition all that should be of so little worth. Do you think if Mr. Sylvester had lived,” she said softly, “I should have been a weight, a clog, upon his progress ? ”

“Mrs. Sylvester! ”

“There was a young girl in a Southern city, who carried home the linen for her mother, a blanchisseuse de fin. Her mother was a Creole; her father, who was dead, was a Jew. Her companions were of the street. She slept on straw. She was in need of everything. One day Mr. Sylvester married her.”

In the silence that followed, the beating of Eliot Harden’s heart was louder in his ears than the great pulse of the sea. It seemed to him in that instant as if everything base in him shriveled like paper blackening in the flame. Mrs. Sylvester leaned toward him out of the darkness, —

she murmured.

Mr, Harden rose, and stood erect a moment, looking off into the night where the sapphire deep of the sky throbbed with a vast bidden life and the moon lifted the sea like a shield on some almighty arm. He bent and kissed her hand. “Mrs. Sylvester,” said he, “such a sacrifice as you have made for me to-night shall not be made in vain. You have reduced me to dust. But it was out of dust that God first made a man.”

Harriet Prescott Spofford.