Changeling_ and Other Stories Donn Byrne 62842 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Changeling, and Other Stories
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will
have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using
this eBook.

Title: Changeling, and Other Stories

Author: Donn Byrne

Release date: July 10, 2019 [eBook #59892]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59892

Credits: Produced by Al Haines and Mark Akrigg

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHANGELING,
AND OTHER STORIES ***

CHANGELING

AND OTHER STORIES

BY

DONN BYRNE
Author of "The Wind Bloweth," "Messer Marco Polo," etc.

New York & London
THE CENTURY CO.

Copyright, 1923, by
The Century Co.

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

DEDICATION
So you are going to bring out a book of your stories, said the Old Poet.

I think I am, sir, said I.

I'm sorry for it, said the Old Poet, for it won't have a friend in the world.

When it comes to the publishing of books, people are always pessimistic,
and, in my case, always right. Success, I am sufficient of a heretic to
believe, matters little, but friendship a great deal. And I could as little think
of sending a story friendless into the world as I would of sending a child, or
horse, or dog. So "Changeling" itself I will put under the friendly hand of
the Right Honorable the Lord Justice O'Connor, who will find law treated in
it in a dégagé manner that will surprise even him. And "The Parliament at
Thebes" I dedicate to Addison and Josephine Hanan.

For Bulmer and Clare Hobson, near Three-Rock Mountain, is "Delilah,
Now It Was Dusk," and for Brinsley MacNamara, that splendid Irish
novelist, "Wisdom Buildeth Her House." And "In Praise of Lady Margery
Kyteler" for Arthur Somers Roche, in memory of a chivalrous kindness.

"Reynardine" for Miss OEnone Somerville and in memory of Martin
Ross—their pens were one of the lost Irish glories. "Irish" for Jeffrey Farnol
—none more than he loves and understands the Ring. And I am sorry there
is not a story of war and its intricacies in the collection to dedicate to my
friend Lieutenant-General J. J. O'Connell.

I have not by hundreds come to the end of those whom I love to think
my friends; but so many of them are sportsmen that to dedicate stories to
them would be like giving a two-year-old racer to a maiden and church-
going lady, loading her with responsibility and embarrassment, so that—

So that the rest of the stories can go out and make friends for themselves,
and if they can't, 't was surely a poor hand that wrote them.

Donn Byrne.

By the Cinque Ports,
England. 1923.

Contents
Changeling
The Barnacle Goose
Belfasters
The Keeper of the Bridge
In Praise of Lady Margery Kyteler
Reynardine
Dramatis Personæ
Wisdom Buildeth Her House
The Parliament at Thebes
Delilah, Now It Was Dusk
A Quatrain Of Ling Tai Fu's
"Irish"
By Ordeal of Justice

CHANGELING AND OTHER STORIES

CHANGELING

I

To outward appearance the whole of the courtroom scene was drab,
ordinary. There was the stuffy rectangle of a room, half dark in the January
dusk, for all that the electric lights glowed with meager incandescence.
There was the judge, in his robe, at the desk of the court. There were the
jurymen, solemn as in church. There the court stenographers, bald, active as
ants. There the men of the daily journals, more aloof, more judicial than the
judge. There the press of morbid spectators, leaning forward like runners on
the mark. There the policemen, court attendants, whatnot, relaxed of body,
concentrated of eye, jealous of the dignity of the court as a house-dog of its
master's home. Through the windows of the court could be seen the bulk of
the Tombs, heavy, hopeless, horrible as the things whence it takes its chilly
name.

The case of the people versus Anna Janssen for the murder of Alastair de
Vries droned on.

The district attorney, youngish, slim, lithe, a little sinister—the
impression of a hunting-dog all over him—was examining a witness, a rat-
faced man who had something of the old-time bartender or private detective
about him.

"It was your business, as attendant at the Oriental Garden, to see that
order was kept?"

"Yes, sir."

"There was no semblance of disorder at all until you heard the shot
fired?"

"No, sir."

"Mr. De Vries was at a table with a party?"

"Yes, sir."

"You heard the shot and you saw Mr. De Vries fall forward?"

"Yes, sir. Crumpled up, sort of."

"Then you ran to him?"

"Yes, sir."

"You saw the woman Janssen back of the hall with a revolver?"

"Yes, sir."

"What was she doing?"

"She was laughing."

"Was she drunk?"

"The laugh sounded drunk."

"Was she very much under the influence of liquor?"

"She could n't have been, else she would n't have got away."

"You are certain that it was the prisoner?"

All eyes in the court-room were turned to the prisoner in the dock. And
there was in the sordid trial chamber a sense of great disturbance in the air,
though, from the minds and personalities of all gathered there, there rose in
gray tendrils a haze of doubt, of disbelief, of mystery.

She sat in the dock, in the sordid court-room, among the unseemly
officers and the public, as a statue in some public square might stand above
the rabble. Mature, magnificent, the prisoner seemed almost like some
goddess from a Norse mythology.

First, her strange coloring made all catch their breath. Her face was
tanned to an absolutely golden hue, and out of this work of delicate bronze
there looked, calm and confident, two eyes that were blue as sea-water. Her
eyebrows, her hair, were bleached by the sun until her eyebrows were two
half-moons of silver, until her hair was the pale, beautiful gold of honey in
dark lights and like vivid strands of live silver when the light fell on it. She
had the strange, exotic appearance of the women of Saba Isle, the ancient
colony of Holland sailors and Carib Indian belles, a small dot in the West
Indies where there is a town on the top of a mountain, and life is as in the
garden of the Hesperides.

It was not alone her coloring, her splendid face. From her there came
such an aura of health, of spiritual strength, it seemed impossible that this
woman was the chorus girl Janssen who had been the cast-off mistress of
the rake and spendthrift De Vries, who had been drunk, who attended
cabarets with wine-merchants and Broadway belles. This woman!
Impossible! In her own calm eyes there seemed also a look that said more:
"This is ridiculous. I can't have done this. Why am I here? Why don't they
get up and let me go?"

Even the rat-faced witness was perturbed.

"The prisoner in the dock?" he said with a sense of puzzled wonder.
"The prisoner in the dock?"

"Well, don't mind the prisoner in the dock, then. It was the woman
Janssen you saw."

"I am sure of that."

"You were well acquainted with her appearance. You couldn't have been
mistaken?"

"No, sir, I could not have been mistaken. She was often at the Oriental
with Mr. De Vries. Sometimes every night for a week. I could not have been
mistaken. It was she shot Mr. De Vries."

The district attorney sat down, with a gesture of his hand toward Howard
Donegan, the prisoner's counsel. With his massive body, with his massive
head, with his cruel jurist's face, Howard Donegan was as much a part of
the attraction for the public as was the prisoner, the notoriety of the ten-
year-old case, the romantic capture of Annette Janssen. The great Irish-
American was the foremost criminal lawyer of his day, all but invincible
when defending a man or a woman with the slightest chance of escape, and
right on his side. As a cross-examiner he was dreaded as the plague. The
public would get the thrill of seeing a superbly cruel and magnificent
performance when Donegan arose. Even now the rat-faced witness shook as
with ague as Donegan turned casually toward him, with hooded eyes. But
Donegan shook his head. He did not wish to cross-examine.

Even the judge was surprised.

"Did I hear aright?" He leaned forward, his fine mystic's face in lines of
doubt and worry. "The counsel for the prisoner does not wish to cross-
examine?"

"Your Honor heard aright. I will not cross-examine."

Through the big chamber there was a buzz of comment, of doubt, of all
but horror. Was there nothing to be done for this woman? Even if she did
kill De Vries, give her a sporting chance for her life! "What is Donegan
doing?" the public, the attendants, the newspaper reporters asked
themselves with mistrust. Was he throwing her down?

There was a tensing in court, a tightening, as of drama. Already there
was a sense in every one's chilled veins of the horrible harness of the
electric chair. But Donegan only drowsed.

"You can step down," the Court told the witness.

The rat-faced man crept from the witness-box, white, shaking still with
the fear of Donegan's eye. He tried to get a seat in the benches, but none
would make room for him. And though he had only done his duty, and that
at command of the law, there was about him, as he slunk from the room, the
look there was about him who was surnamed Iscariot, as he crept from the
garden on the Mount of Olives, on the world's most tragic dawn.... Like a
story from some old book there unrolled before the public the history of
Anna Janssen of ten, or twelve, or fifteen years before, in a New York we
know no longer, so changed is it in that brief space. Then it was a riotous
spendthrift, a glorious waster, hell-roaring, somehow lovable, and now it is
a burgess of standing, with all the burgess virtues.

And the eyes of the court-room glistened as old names appeared like
Falstaffian ghosts. The Poodle Dog, the German Village, the Holland
House, the Knickerbocker. Gorgeous, blowsy, out of a dim past they rose
for an instant. Baron Wilkins's and Nigger Mike's. And there was the thin
clink of glasses across forgotten bars. And at three o'clock of a morning the
flying wedge at Pat's was hurling some truculent guest to the sidewalk. And
gunmen were gunmen then, not strike-breakers.

Old days, great days, and only a dozen years before. And John
Barrymore was not Richard III but the comedian of "Are You a Mason?"
And Mr. Chambers had written "The Danger Mark," and Lieutenant Becker
still patrolled the streets. And Mannie Chappelle and Diamond Jim were
still alive and merry, who are now dust, God rest them! And cops grafted
and politics were corrupt, after the old and pleasant tradition. And out of the
side door of saloons came the old-fashioned drunkard, who with the old-
fashioned ghost-story and the old-fashioned Christmas is laid to rest
forevermore. And the voice of Dr. Parkhurst was heard through the land.

Ichabod! Gone is glory!

The night life of Paris was hectic, hysterical. The night life of Berlin was
heavy, somehow sinister. But, lush, extravagant, now joyous, now macabre,
the foam of New-World liquor, the night life of New York challenged the
heavens with streaming rays, retiring only before the chaste, armored dawn.
Like some Thousand and One Nights of some writer of the people, it
challenged the imagination, it intrigued, it repelled. Overdone not seldom,

often in bad taste, but virile, rude, and unabashed, it claimed recognition
with brazen clamor.

And on this stage, and against this background, now leading woman to
De Vries, now being supported by a caste of wasters, brokers, men about
town, there moved Anna Janssen, the Swedish Beauty. Cast in the form and
figure of a Norse goddess, fit for great epics, she was a figurante in a
debauched side-show. Her eyes, which were blue as the sea and should have
been pure and passionate as the sea, were drenched with wine, and her
mouth, with its clear-cut outlines as of a woman of the painter Zorn's, which
should have been firm as a budding flower, was relaxed and wet from
kissing.

A woman of Broadway, hungered after and yet despised, she might have
gone the accustomed path that leads from the chattering magnificence of
Broadway to the sinister silence of Potter's Field. Down the old beaten
decline toward sordid Death she could have gone, and none would have
tried to stay her, none to help. And then the end. And the only result would
have been a little chilling in the hearts of the newer Beauties of Broadway, a
ghost whispering in their hearts the most terrible of epitaphs: The wages of
sin is death. For a moment only. And some celebrity of Broadway might
feel sad for an hour, with easy sentiment: "Poor Anna! And I knew her
when she wore diamonds, and New York was at her feet!" Or some
respectable citizen in his warm home might treasure secret, ashamed
memories, and never avow them. And some one might even seek out her
grave to say a hurried prayer and make an offering of flowers. And the rest
would be silence.

But that, in a mood of drunken pique, she shot and killed Alastair de
Vries!

Of her life there is little to be said. It is a life that a thousand girls have
lived. Admit the evidence which satisfied a judge in a trial of murder and it
boils down to this: The daughter of a Brooklyn mechanic, she got a place in
the chorus of a big musical comedy, and was flattered and courted by the
blades of Broadway. And the one to whom she fell victim was Alastair de
Vries, who had forsaken Fifth Avenue to travel westward to Broadway. Of
the old patroon stock which had settled New Amsterdam and been lords of

the manor along the Hudson before the English came, bankers and traders,
soldiers and explorers, all there remained of them was one moneyed boy
who saw adventure only in ruining the daughters of tradesmen where his
forebears had seen it in hacking out the destiny of a New World.

Blond, rather chubby, not yet thirty, Alastair de Vries had already had a
large biography in the Sunday papers and weeklies of gossip in New York.
Annette Janssen was one of perhaps twenty conquests and she was not the
last. She was the all but last.

He took her from the chorus, gave her everything she desired, made her
for her brief life the semiannual queen of Broadway.

And then a small brunette came along, acclaimed as the Queen of the
Ponies, and, turning like a flash, De Vries hurried to conquer the new
arrival. And Anna shot him, not because of jealousy, not because she loved
him, but just to make trouble.

There's her life for you. There are what the dazzling facts of her
queendom of Broadway amount to. There they are, without their glitter and
romance. Through the black magic of Sinister Alley they shine like fireflies,
but, like fireflies, in the calm sanity of daytime they are nothing but grubby
crawling things we flick from our palms with a moue of distaste....

Day followed day, and witness witness, and item by item the sordid
chronicle was written. Each fact attested and proved to the satisfaction of
the court, to the satisfaction of the public. It was a sort of journey toward a
definite objective—a journey on which the public was invited to see Justice
hearken to the call of the people of the State of New York.

There was no doubt about it. Coldly, callously, for a whim, in a moment
of piqued vanity, a chorus girl had shot a gentleman.

And then in the mind of every one there loomed, as it approached nearer
until its horrible lines, its terrifying aura were visible, the objective of the
voyage—the dreadful electric chair.

"Why does n't Donegan do something? Why? Why? Why does n't he put
up a fight at least?"

But Donegan drowsed on. Only when the prisoner in the dock threw him
a swift look of appeal, as she did occasionally when some damning point
was raised, did he drop the granite mask. Now and then her face would
blanch under the tan, and her mouth quiver. And then would come a miracle
in Donegan. Those harsh bulldog features would relax, the glinting eyes
open, and over the hated face would play the smile of—oh, forty years ago
—when he was just an innocent, likable Irish boy, and not a great jurist,
whom communion with the sinister qualities of the law, and battles for life
and liberty, and knowledge of strange strata in the minds of men, which is
good for none to know, had transformed into a dark angel with a protective
and flaming sword.

But the smile did n't reassure the public.

"Yes, he 's smiling. He 's confident, all right. But why does n't he do
something?"

Had the people in the court-room read of this trial in their homes—read
the bare facts, the testimony of witnesses, there was not one who would
have wasted a second thought on Anna Janssen. Perhaps in the hearts of one
or two there would have lingered the feeling that it was not right she should
be strapped horribly in the chair. But that would have been chivalry, not
justice. One and all would have said: "That is what the death penalty is for
—to remove from human contact one who has no right to God's sunshine,
and who has arrogated to her vile and puny self the right of the Creator, the
disposal of human life. Muffle her up. Hustle her away. Throw on the
current and hide her in quicklime. Life is not for such as she!"

But between the woman whom the witnesses had drawn in black, sinister
colors and the lady in the dock there was a continent of difference. True, she
was the same height, the same figure, but for a healthy development of
years. True, such marks of identification as Anna Janssen the chorus girl
had, might be noted on the body of her who was a prisoner at the bar.

But the body of Anna Janssen the chorus girl was soft and white and
made for sinister loving, while that of the woman in the dock was healthy
and hard and tanned, after the fashion of Eve, whom the Lord God made in
the garden. And Anna Janssen's had swayed alluringly with provocative
sophistication, while the carriage of this woman was erect and of great
dignity. And the eyes of the chorus girl had been full of evil knowledge and
unhealthy flame, but this woman's had wistfulness and a strange mystery.

And in the heart of every one there rose a cry: "This is not the same
woman. This is a good woman!"

There is a theory of an old medical school whose name—not that it
matters—I regret to have forgotten. And it is this: that every seven years the
human body changes. We have not the same bones, nor the same skin, the
same muscles at thirty-five that we had at twenty-eight. They are worn out
and are eliminated, and new tissue takes their place. It may be wrong, but it
is a very taking theory. It explains to us how the track athlete of some years
ago becomes the paunchy, bald-headed, repulsive man of to-day. It explains
how the well-fed man of the world may turn into a harsh-faced monk. It
explains to us how the soft, succubine chorus girl of a dozen years before
became the splendid amazon that Anna Janssen is to-day.

And yet this may be wrong about the body. But about the mind (and
there you have the inner person) there is one thing certain, not a theory but
a fact—that people change completely. Like a child's slate, the mind is, on
which a thousand things are written. The young take so much for granted;
the old know. And gallantly they write this for a fact, that for a falsehood.
But day by day they live and learn, as the old saw goes. And simple
equations become quadratic. And the writing on the slate is altered month
by month, as new factors of life are realized. All is a correction, a
readjustment.

This is gradual, but occasionally, very occasionally, by some mental or
spiritual cataclysm all on the slate is sponged clear. And a new and startling
departure takes its place. As we see in the inner personality of Anna Janssen
the change from the petty arithmetic of Broadway, the venal crooked sums
of Sinister Street, to the gigantic calculus of life as the Lord God conceived

it, when He formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul....

The district attorney turned from his last witness to the twelve men in the
box. "Gentlemen," he said, in the manner of a workman well satisfied with
the progress of the job in hand, "I have proved the crime and proved the
perpetrator, the circumstances, the setting, the motive. There is but one
more thing to be done to clinch this case home like a nail in a horse's shoe.
It is now ten years between the time this murder was committed and the
bringing of the prisoner to the bar of justice. There is but one more thing to
do to remove the smallest iota of doubt that the prisoner at the bar and Anna
Janssen, Alastair de Vries's mistress, are one and the same person. And to
prove this I shall call to the witness-stand the detective who arrested Anna
Janssen in Tahiti, and in whose custody the prisoner has been from that day
until she was brought to justice here—a period of nine years and four
months in all."

"Officer Thomas McCarthy!"

"Officer Thomas McCarthy to the stand."

The public craned forward, and with that strange shifting sound that
betokens an immensity of interest they settled themselves in their seats for
the recital of the detective. Here was the great attraction of the trial—the
story of McCarthy and Anna Janssen alone on a desert island, a murderess
and the officer who arrested her. More than the morbid interest of the killing
of De Vries, more than the realistic tale of old New York that was, more
than the spectacle of a woman dicing for her life, more than the prospect of
watching Donegan, the greatest of criminal lawyers, harass the court, and
pound the battered witnesses, and at last possibly and probably carry off the
prisoner as in an old-time rescue from Tyburn, was the promised recital of
the adventure in the lonely Southern sea. There had been one romantic story
of it in one day of the papers, and then no more, for the matter would have
called forth intense comment from the papers, arousing sympathy or hatred,
and the case was sub judice.

But that one story stirred the imagination of the public. And the sordid
tale told of a woman killing her fickle lover in an attack of offended vanity
faded into a golden haze of romance. The scented smell of the tropics came
to their nostrils, and their eyes saw golden sands and phosphorescent seas.
And here the palms murmured with a rustle as of exotic silks, and the Bird
of Paradise winged its iridescent flight through the opaque Marquesan dusk.
And the spirits of strange gods moved upon the face of the waters....

Here was a setting for Scheherazade and here characters for a master
writer: a patrolman of New York, young, athletic, unspoiled, canny with the
knowledge of his native city, brave as only his kind is brave; and here a
woman from the sloughs of the Tenderloin, an admitted beauty, a proven
murderess.

What drama had happened in that isle of dreams, in that immense act of
nine rolling years? And did she love him, or did she hate him? And had he
succumbed to her, as Adam to Lilith in Eden, before Eve was? Or had he
resisted her as Anthony of Egypt resisted the succuba in the desert near
Fayum? And did she wheedle him with words sweeter than honey? Or did
she curse him with strange black blasphemies? Or was it just one long,
dumb vigil of hatred? Or had they become friends, hunter and hunted,
marooned now on the islands of strange dead gods?

In God's name, what?

At any rate they would soon know.

"Officer Thomas McCarthy, this way!"

Then, of a sudden, up rose Howard Donegan. The judge on his bench,
the jurymen, the prosecuting attorney, the court, the prisoner herself, all
looked at him with a hesitant surprise. Somehow his action was surprisingly
dramatic. He stood up slowly and said nothing, but looked around. Into the
drama of crime and romance, there was injected a new element, powerful,
sluggish, but immensely sure.

"If it please the Court," went his heavy, significant voice, "may I say a
few words?"

"It is hardly regular, at this period, Mr. Donegan," the judge said,
puzzled. "Surely you will have an opportunity later on."

"The opportunity is opportune only now." Like some strange gargoyle in
an old cathedral the great animal appeared. His eyes, under their threatening
hoods, were black and beady like the eyes of some malevolent creature of
the jungle. His mouth, a wide, thin slit, pouted like the mouth of a fish. His
sedentary body was massive and grotesque like some monster of a mad
artist's drawing. His voice creaked like unoiled machinery. But—God!—
what power was there!

"Your Honor, men of the jury, and Mr. District Attorney, at any point I
could have obstructed the course of this trial until all of you were weary in
your chairs. I could have obfuscated facts and motives and testimony until
you were as uncertain of truth as Pilate. The woman Wilkins—I could have
shown that her word was no more to be depended on than the word of the
village idiot. Mr. Howland Christy, De Vries's relative—I could have
shaken him on the stand until he would have been uncertain of his
testimony, for he is an honest man. And the usher of the cabaret—if I had
concentrated on him, I could have made that whisky-sodden brain, that
broken will, contradict everything he had said.

"But I did none of these things. I made no haze of doubt out of honest
facts. For why? Because these facts are true. I grant them freely!"

There were a rustle and a murmur in the room. The public was suddenly
aghast. What was this from Donegan? Treachery? Who ever heard of a
counsel granting things like that? Good Lord! what was the man doing? The
murmuring went on in spite of the judge's gavel, the attendants' cries.

Donegan swept the room with his black, minatory glance, and the
murmuring died.

"Your Honor, Mr. District Attorney, men of the jury, a crime is not an
instantaneous action. What goes before a crime is important, and not less
important is what follows it. Has the affair been brooded over, or has it been
the result of momentary passion, and has the deed been regarded with smug
satisfaction, or with quaking horror?

"And what effect has this had on the prisoner, on the world, on its time?
So many things have to be taken into consideration when we are adjudging
the crime.

"Gentlemen, the law and legal procedure are as easy to comprehend as a
child's primer. The office of the district attorney is to see that a malefactor is
brought to justice. The office of the jury is to decide whether that action
was or was not done. The object of the judge is to weigh, decide, and in the
name of the people say what shall be done with a member of the
community who has hurt the interests of the community by his or her
action. The duty of the counsel for the prisoner is to see that his client is not
traduced by false witnesses, nor his or her liberty endangered by unfacts.

"But the object of all in the court-room is to see that justice is done,
though the heavens crumble.

"I have examined no witnesses. I shall examine none. But I ask this in
the latitude of the Court, and in the name of that Justice whose servants we
one and all are, as much myself, advocate for the prisoner, as the district
attorney for the people of the State of New York, as the jury in the box, as
the judge on his bench: that the next witness, Thomas McCarthy, shall be
allowed to tell his own story in his own way, relating facts which may not
seem germane to the case, but which I claim are as pertinent as the pistol
with which the crime was committed or the corpus delicti itself. I ask this of
the Court and I request the Court so to direct."

"This is hardly regular, Mr. Donegan."

"I ask this in the name of Justice!"

"This is a court of Justice, Mr. Donegan." The judge's manner had a
slight rebuke. "But if the district attorney is agreeable—"

The district attorney, a little nettled, but rather awed before the
tremendous purpose of Donegan, shrugged his shoulders.

"Very well, Mr. Donegan," the judge nodded. "The district attorney—"
Donegan addressed the jury—"is calling Thomas McCarthy to prove the

identity of Anna Janssen. He is an officer of the City of New York, a
witness for the State of New York. The attorney has called him to prove that
the prisoner in the dock is Anna Janssen. I shall not examine him. But when
he has given his testimony for the district attorney he will have given his
testimony for me.

"And I shall have proven that the chorus girl who killed Alastair de Vries
is not the woman who stands in the dock!"

There was an instant's sighing from the courtroom, a momentary
relaxation. So Donegan had fought and won his first fight, and now they
were going to hear the History of the Spicy Isles. Now all the mystery
would be lifted that had been hanging about the court-room like a
necromancer's mist.

"Call Thomas McCarthy!" Donegan barked from the side of his mouth.

"Officer Thomas McCarthy."

"Thomas McCarthy to the stand!"

As he stood in the witness-box, McCarthy seemed to bulk tremendously
in the room. As Anna Janssen seemed to fill the court spiritually, so he
seemed to fill it physically. Emanations of strength, emanations of power
came from him like current from a battery. He was not six feet tall, but so
erect did he stand, so free was his carriage that he seemed to tower above
all in the court-room. He was not a big man, but he suggested tremendous
strength, so easily with the smallest movement did the sinews ripple
beneath his coat. Brown as copper, his face had not the strange mystery of
Anna Janssen's, because his eyes and hair were black, where hers were fair.
Yet he was strange.

It was principally that he was out of place in his city clothes. One could
have imagined him easily as some young athlete in the Olympic games,
hurling the discus possibly, or flinging himself over the high jump. Or one
might have suffered him in the clothes of summer in the country, soft
rolling collar and roomy sport coat. But in the "business suit" of some

department-store, he seemed like an actor some inept stage manager had
dressed. Grotesquely, a police badge was pinned to the lapel of his coat.

As he entered the box, Anna Janssen turned toward him with a swift
outpouring of her eyes. It might have been interest, but it was warmer than
interest. It might have been appeal, but it was more confident than appeal.

"You are plain-clothes officer Thomas McCarthy?" the district attorney
examined.

"Yes, sir. Number eight thousand nine hundred and seventeen."

"Attached to police headquarters?"

"Yes, sir."

"Tell us the circumstances under which you arrested the prisoner."

"The Commissioner—the Commissioner—" McCarthy began, faltered,
suddenly stopped.

"Yes, the Commissioner."

But McCarthy seemed struck by sudden panic.

"Yes, yes!" the district attorney became irritable. "The Commissioner—"
He rapped the table.

Donegan rose.

"McCarthy," he explained gently, "has had no one to talk to for seven
years but my client. He finds it hard to get his words right. Take your time,
McCarthy," he told the witness. "Close your eyes. Say it as if you were
saying it to yourself."

The prisoner threw him a look of gratitude.

"I was on the vice squad under Inspector O'Gara." The witness found
words at last. "One morning the Commissioner sends for me. It was when

the trouble was on about the graft in the Raines-law hotels. The
Commissioner looks at me kind of hard.

"'Are you on the square, McCarthy?' he says.

"'Yes, Commissioner, I 'm on the square,' I tells him.

"'It's news to me they 's any one on the square,' the Commissioner laughs
kind o' mean.

"'Tell me, McCarthy, were you ever mixed up with a woman?' I gets
chilled all over, because I thinks some one's trying to frame me.

"'No, sir. Never,' I answers.

"'Then why were n't you?'

"'I don't know,' I says, 'except it was my people were from Ireland and
brought me up their own way. When I was a kid, Commissioner, I could go
to confession without holding out, and I guess I can do it to-day.'

"'Oh, you 're one of them good Irish cops,' he sneers. 'I heard tell on
them, but I never met one before.'

"'Well, you meet him now.' I looks him cold in the eye. And then I 'm
sorry, because I sees he means nothing. He 's just sore.

"'Well, square cop,' he says, 'I got a job for you. Anna Janssen,' he says,
'is found. A rich guy hides her and brings her to Tahiti on his yacht. She's
there now. The French authorities,' he says, 'have made a pinch. Go get her.'

"'All right,' I says, and turns to go.

"'Just a moment, McCarthy,' he says. 'I said: "Get her." You understand?
Get her. And keep her. Was a man to try and escape on you, what would you
do?'

"'I 'd shoot,' I says. 'I 'd bring him in, alive or dead.'

"'Well, shoot her.'

"'Oh, gee, Chief!' I says. 'I can't shoot a woman.'

"'Well, then, shoot yourself,' he says. 'At any rate, if you come home
alone, come home cold storage. I 'll pay the freight. And that 'll be all,' he
says.

"I goes to Paris, and from Paris to Marseilles—"

"That's all right, McCarthy," the district attorney waived. "It does n't
matter how you went. Tell us what happened at Tahiti."

"In Tahiti something tells me all is not right. The steamer I come on
docks in the morning and leaves that afternoon, and I hopes to make it with
Janssen. Maybe it's because I can't get their French and our consul is not a
well man, but they delay me until the steamer goes and then I 'm left flat.
The extradition papers must be in order, they say. But there is too much of
this belle-prisoner stuff.

"Well, all's finished and they takes me to her. 'Well, Janssen,' I says, 'we
got you.' 'Now that you got me, what are you going to do with me?' she
laughs; and every one laughs. Right away I see they 're all rooting for her,
and they like me like a souse likes water.

"Honest, Judge, I don't blame them. They's few white women in that
place and, such as they are, they 're not lookers. And the Kanaka girls, for
all they are pretty as a picture, they ain't human and they ain't healthy, you
know, as we white people think. Anna certainly had the looks, and was
white, and had the pep, and they were all crazy about her. The Frenchmen
are daffy about women, and they don't think nothing about a woman
shooting a man—nothing at all.

"So they smiles at me and they says, 'You must see our beautiful island
before you sail away with the belle prisoner!'

"'Your island is fine,' I tells them, 'and, no offense meant, but it's got
nothing on Manhattan Island. And as for the belle prisoner,' I says, 'ain't you

folks forgetting something? This dame is as nifty a little murderess as ever I
sees.'

"'It was a crime passional,' they says, and they shrugs their shoulders.

"'Tell that to the judge,' I says. 'I 'm only the copper.'

"'Well,' they say, 'unfortunately Monsieur will have to enjoy our island
for three weeks. The next liner will not be here until then.'

"'Oh, is that so?' I laughs. 'Well, let me tell you something. While you
guys was examining the papers for your belle prisoner, I was doing a little
scouting around the harbor. And they's a schooner leaving to-night for San
Francisco. I guess that 'll do us all right.'

"'Impossible!' They go wild. 'A lady cannot travel—'

"'Cut the lady stuff,' I says. 'She's my prisoner.'

"She was a trading schooner, dealing in copra, oranges, cotton, mother-
of-pearl, and such like, but once she must have been a fine yacht. There
were state-rooms still aboard her, though now they were filled with junk for
trading, but I made a deal with the captain and he cleans one out and fixes it
up for Janssen. And then I takes Janssen down to the docks.

"Judge, you'd 'a' thought she'd saved the country instead of killing De
Vries, the way they acted about that woman. They lined up on the docks of
Papeete, all the men and a good many women, too. And they sang and they
danced and they said good-by. 'When you get off, come back,' they says to
her. They got on my nerves so much, I had all I could do not to laugh dirty,
when they says that about getting off.

"Janssen looks at the boat, and looks at the people. And she goes crazy-
mad. 'Damn you, damn you!' She turns on me. 'Only for you, I 'd not be
going back!'

"'Yeh, only for me,' I says, 'you would n't have killed De Vries. It's all
my fault, hey? Now, listen to me, Janssen. You 're my prisoner, and my

prisoner you 'll remain. You had the game; now pay up, and stop hollering.
You and I are from the same town, and I know you. You ought to know me
a little better. I would n't have been sent for you if I had n't been able to take
care of myself. All your French friends won't save you from a New York
cop, once he 's out to get you. You 're beat, Janssen,' I tells her; 'you might
as well give in.'

"She looks at me a long time.

"'I 'm not beat yet,' she says.

"The captain tells us he's going to stop at Nukahivo and a few other
islands to take cargo aboard. He 's an old guy and sensible, and Janssen
plays up to him to beat the band, so I takes no risks and keeps close. Even if
he is an old guy and has n't any ambition, still and all, nobody likes a
copper, and every one hates to see a prisoner taken home, especially if it's a
woman. So I give Janssen and him no chance for private conversation.
Once clear of the islands, I think, and all will be well. Janssen sees my
game.

"'You don't give me much chance with the old fellow.'

"'No, ma'am,' I laughs. 'That's your business. I give you no chance. You
're beat, Janssen. What's the use of fooling yourself?'

"'Oh, I 've still got an ace in the hole. I 'm not beat yet!'

"She turns in early. 'I suppose you 're going to lock the door?' she asks
me.

"'What's the use? They's other keys. The islands are near at hand, and
they could put you off in a boat. I 'm not going to lock the door,' I tells her,
'but I 'm going to sleep outside it, up against it. It opens out, and the
smallest movement will wake me up. You 're beat.'

"'All right! I 'm beat,' she says, and she turns in.

"I puts myself against the door, and falls asleep on the deck. It might
have been ten minutes after it, but it was really hours, the door opens. It's
the middle of the night, for the stars are high, and there 's nothing to be
seen, and the waves keep lapping the bow of the schooner and she dips
pretty like a cantering horse. And suddenly I 'm awake and lonely and wet
with dew. I looks up and there 's Janssen above me, big and handsome and
her eyes like the stars.

"'You 're not comfortable there, McCarthy,' she whispers.

"'I can't say as I 'm on a bed of roses,' I tells her.

"'Why don't you come inside?'

"'I don't know what you mean,' I says.

"'Never mind what I mean,' she laughs. 'Come on in.'

"'I think I 'll stay where I am,' I says kind of short.

"'I 'm not accustomed to having invitations like this refused.' There was a
kind of jar in her voice.

"'They 's lots of things you 're not accustomed to, you better get
accustomed to right away,' I says. 'You 're accustomed to fine hotels. Now
you got to get used to the Tombs. You 're accustomed to lying down on
couches. Now you got to get accustomed to sitting up, very straight, in a
chair at Sing Sing.' I did n't want to be brutal toward her, Judge, but I did n't
want her to be making passes like that at me.

"What she says to me then I could n't tell, Judge. But she closes the door
with a slam and leaves me be.

"I notices the wind is getting kind o' high, and that when the schooner
pitches she sort of jars, and that under the green light on the starboard sight
of the boat the water is rushing past very quick. The boat is lying over and
the sailors pass me quick as lightning and in the cordage the air is whining

like a broken fiddle-string, but over it all I can hear Janssen cursing in her
cabin, cursing just like the

II

As Officer McCarthy paused for an instant in his story the eyes of the
court-room seemed by common consent to turn to Anna Janssen in the
dock. The jury looked at her with knitted brows; the spectators with puzzled
glances. It seemed impossible that this calm, majestic figure could once
have acted the siren of the streets to the officer bringing her from her
Tahitian sanctuary. Immobile, somehow immaculate, with strange
superhuman dignity, she did not blush, she did not smile. Only a genre
shadow of pain was about her eyes, such as creeps about the eyes of some
one who remembers old, all-but-forgotten painful things of phases of life
long by.

Out of those firm lips like a rose in bloom could blasphemy have flowed
in a sluggish lecherous stream? Out of that glorious bronze throat, fit for
Magnificats? It seemed impossible, was impossible.

The judge looked at her with moved, understanding eyes. The district
attorney cast at her puzzled glances. Donegan looked neither at her, nor at
anything. He just drowsed like a dog....

"All next day," McCarthy went on, "the blow grew worse. They reefed
down sail until we were flying along under top and foresails. The funny
thing was that here and there the sky was blue. You 'd have thought all was
going to get fair in an hour or two, but it did n't. And the captain stood by
the man at the wheel and looked worried.

"You had to shout to make yourself heard. 'Ain't it going to calm down,
Captain?' I says.

"'I don't know,' he says. 'I wish to God I was out of these islands,' he
says. 'If I was all alone in the middle of the Pacific, I would n't give a damn,

but these here coral insects,' he says, 'they 're always building, and they sure
do bother me. And these charts of the Marquesas,' he says, 'they ain't worth
a damn. I wish I was out of these islands,' he says; 'I sure do.'

"'Oh, you 'll be all right, Cap,' I says.

"'You get for'a'd out o' here,' he barks at me.

"'I 'll talk to you later about that,' I says, but I goes off, because I see he 's
worried.

"All we get to eat that day is a cup of coffee and a sandwich. And night
comes and we 're still plunging on.

"And then we hear thunder.

"Janssen won't turn in. She 's scared, she says, and she sticks by me. And
the thunder keeps up, and comes closer, and it gets very dark.

"'What's that?' Janssen says.

"'It strikes me it is n't thunder at all. It's some boat in distress firing a
gun,' I tells her. 'It's too bad we can't do anything for them. But I don't think
we can.'

"'I 'm afraid, McCarthy,' Janssen says. 'That's no gun.'

"'Maybe it's a lot of guns,' I says. 'Maybe it's the French navy practising.
They take a funny night for it,' I says.

"'I 'm scared, McCarthy,' she whimpers, and comes close.

"'We 'll be all right,' I tells her.

"'I 'm scared,' she cries. 'Put your arms around me, McCarthy, please.'

"'Oh, come off!' I tells her. That game don't go, Janssen. What's the use?'

"'I 'm scared, honest. They's something going to happen.' The boat does a
little jazz step, and the guns is right in our ears. And overhead, Judge, the
stars were out. 'Please take me in your arms, McCarthy—just like I was
your sister.'

"'Well, you ain't just like you was my sister. And they 's been too many
arms around you for me to put mine. But you can hold on to me,' I says.

"And then my teeth come together with a jar and my spine is near driven
through my skull, and something hits me on the head. And all the water in
the world comes over me. And I know nothing."

The witness, it seemed, here underwent a strange dramatic
transformation. Until now in his recital, his story had been a story all could
understand, a policeman's story, told in a policeman's voice, in a
policeman's words. To the court-room he was a figure within their ken, a
person to warm the hearts of burgesses. Honest, homely, speaking in
dialect, he stood in their eyes for the typical and honored defender of city
families and city homes. Great figures, those men! They make heroism
casual. We may call the New York police grafters; we may call them brutes
and tyrants; we may call them the scum of Ireland. We can never call them
cowards.

There is on record the case of—shall I say O'Kelly? A homicidal maniac,
armed to the teeth, took refuge in a cellar. "And then what?" "I goes down
into the cellar and I gets him out." "Good God! You went down alone into
that dark hole after—" "Oh, that was not'in'; he was easy!"

You can have your great regiments—your Old Guard at Waterloo; your
Rough Riders of San Juan Hill, your Black Watch, your Bashi-Bazouks;
your Bersaglieri. Give me the New York police!

Up to now McCarthy had been only a New York policeman, telling in a
dry way the facts of a case. But a new dignity arose in him of a sudden. He
was no longer dealing with the processes of his profession but with big
human phenomena. Until now he had been deferential to court and officers,

a cog in the legal machine. Suddenly he assumed individuality, poise,
dignity. He became bigger than the personnel of the case, as big as the
woman in the dock. And curiously his language changed to fit the newer
individuality, turning from the idioms of the sidewalks of New York to what
we term, in that archaic phrase which has so much of dignity, the King's
English.

"I came to," he resumed. "At first it was blackness and a terrible
headache, and the thought in my brain: 'Where is Janssen? I've lost Janssen.'
And then my head cleared, and my eyes opened. And I was lying on the
sand in the dawn, and Janssen was bathing my head.

"'So there you are!' I said.

"And then it struck me. Where 's the ship?

"I got up on my elbow and looked around. We were on a strand, with
trees behind us and a bay in front and the sun just coming up, bright as a
golden eagle. In front of us was a sort of bay where the water was still and
sparkling, like wine sparkles. And then I look out further. And there 's a sort
of wall of crags between the bay and the sea, and on the other side of it the
sea is pounding, pounding, pounding, like a man crazy with anger. Swish!
Crash! Boom! And then I notice pieces of timber, a bale, a piece of cloth in
the lagoon.

"The schooner 's gone, I understand. There 's been a wreck.

"'Where are the rest?' I ask Janssen.

"'There are no rest.' She throws her arms out. 'Just you and I!'

"Then after a while I said: 'We 're in a pretty bad way here—
shipwrecked; without anything to eat; with a very small chance of rescue.
We 're up against it. There is n't even water.'

"But she only laughed.

"'We 're not so bad as you 'd think,' she says. 'There 's water. I found it
when I looked for something to bathe that cut on your head. And as for
food, I 'd been in these islands a while before they put me in the—place—at
Papeete. There 's bananas, and there 's cocoanuts, and there 's breadfruit.
And that cove is full of fish.'

"'You can't eat fish raw,' I tell her.

"I 'm turning out my pockets then, leaving things in the sun to dry—my
gun, with the shells out in a row; my watch; my knife; my pocketbook. She
points at the watch.

"'You can make a fire with the crystal of that,' she says. 'Your bananas 'll
do for the present. I 'll go off and get some. You need n't worry,' she says as
she notices me looking at her. 'I can't get off the island.'

"After a while she comes back and sits down.

"'Do you know how you got ashore, McCarthy?'

"'I don't,' I answer. 'I know nothing.'

"'When the boat struck,' she tells me, 'you and I were washed over the
reef. Something hit you on the head. But I pulled you in, McCarthy. You
went down. You were out cold. I had a job, too,' she laughs nervously. 'Your
hair is awfully short.'

"'Well, I got to thank you,' I said.

"'Don't mind thanking me,' she said. 'Tell me this!' She 's awfully serious.
'Don't you think a life is worth a life?'

"I say nothing to that.

"'Don't you, McCarthy?' she pleads.

"'I 'm sorry,' I tell her. 'I 'm awfully, awfully sorry, but I 've got to bring
you in.'

"'You 're a hard man, McCarthy.'

"'I 'm not a hard man. I 'm just a man sworn in to do my job. I 'm just a
man a big trust's been put in, and I can't fall down. Sis, you missed your
chance,' I told her. 'You ought to have let me go down, when you saw me
going. Then you 'd have been free. You ought to have stood clear and let me
drown.'

"'Oh, I could n't do that!' she says.

"'Neither could I let you go!'

"In the afternoon I go around the island to see where we are. But from no
point can I see land or a sail or anything. We are just on one of those Pacific
atolls, as they call them, away from the line of everything but sailing-ships
trading from isle to isle. I look everywhere—north, east, south, and west—
and there is nothing but boiling sea, white, muddy, with birds fluttering, or
floating in the air.

"The island itself is not more than ten miles square and there are rocks
everywhere about it except around the cove where we landed, and that has a
coral breakwater. The sand is bright and yellow like new gold, and on the
island itself there is greenness that is nearly black. And you can see
cocoanut-trees and banana-trees and oranges. And while I 'm standing there
a little pig breaks through the underbrush and looks at me, and then flies off
with a squeal. And for a moment my heart goes pit-a-pat because I think
there are people on this island. A pig is a human thing. It's always been so
near humans, it's nearly human itself. But a moment later something in me
tells me there 's no one here. It's been put ashore, it and others, by some of
the old whaling-ships that are gone now.

"I look around and I see the island, the sand like gold, the clean wind,
the water in the cove as transparent as water in a glass; the fish in the water
and the animals on the island, and the fruit on the trees. And the sun is
bright and warm and full of life, and in the distance I can see Janssen. She
has let her hair down and it covers her to the knees in a great shining cloak,
like some wonderful fur cloak.

"And I think: There's many 's the old cop in New York—there 's many 's
the millionaire, even—would like to finish his life alone in this paradise
island, away from all trouble and worry and having everything he needs in
sunshine that's more like wine than light, and with Janssen with him, when
she has let down her hair.

"But I says to myself: You needn't think that way. You 're not old, nor
disappointed. You 've got no reason to idle your life away. You 've got a job
on hand. You 're a detective officer, and you 've got a prisoner, and you 're
going to bring her home!

"I return to where Janssen is by the cove and I look for my knife and
watch and gun. But my gun is n't there.

"'Do you know where my gun is?'

"She wheels around on me suddenly and points it at my head.

"'McCarthy,' she says, 'your word's good with me. Either tell me now
you 'll let me go when we 're rescued or I 'll kill you.'

"'I can't,' I said. 'I won't. Now give me my gun and be sensible.'

"'I mean it,' she said. 'Let me off or I 'll kill you.'

"'I would n't be the first.'

"'Will you?'

"'No!' I says.

"I 'm watching the gun, to grab it if I can. Then I see a spat of fire like a
match lighting. Then something burns my ear like red-hot iron. I hear the
shot. I 'm sprung halfway round.

"I face up again.

"'You made a better job with De Vries,' I says, stupid-like.

"I 'm expecting the finisher, but she walks up to me and hands me the
gun. She just looks at me, and her throat works, and then suddenly from her
eyes run two big tears down to the corners of her mouth and I turn away.

"'I 'm going to fix you a bed of banana-leaves, and then I 'm going to
light a fire. Forget your troubles for a while. Think of this as a picnic.'

"But the tears still run down her face and she says nothing. I go off and
get busy because I can't stand the sight of It. I 'm not feeling any too like a
comedy, myself.

"'We 're sitting that night at a fire on the beach, and the thin new moon is
up. A light breeze is in shore. Suddenly she turns to me.

"'You 're religious, McCarthy,' she says to me.

"'I 'm not exactly religious,' I say. 'I 'm like every one, I guess.'

"'You believe in God, McCarthy?'

"Nobody likes to talk much about things of that kind. You think about
them, but you don't say them. And particularly you don't talk about them to
a prisoner who 's up for murder, unless you 're one of those Holy Willie
boys.

"'Who does n't?' I spars.

"'You believe—' her voice is serious—'that God takes care of you on this
island?'

"That's what they say.'

"'Do you believe, McCarthy, that He knows me, takes care of me, cares
for me?'

"I say nothing—because I can't see it. She 's too far out of the pale. I 'd
like to tell her 'yes.' But I can't.

"'You don't believe, then, McCarthy—' her voice is just a husky whisper
—'that there is any caring for me, anywhere.'

"'Oh, what's the use of bothering about that?'

"'You don't, then,' she said. 'You think I 'm too bad for—even—that.'

"I get up and shake myself. 'Maybe there's nothing to it, after all,' I tell
her. But all of a sudden she is crying, her face down to the sand, as though
her heart would break.

"I move away, because I 'm no good to her, and go down the strand a bit.
The water laps the strand, and whispers in the trees, but I can hear Janssen
crying still.

"I walk on and on. I hear the sea rumble on the rocks, and the whisper of
the trees is louder. A turtle pluds into the water, and a cocoanut falls with a
thud, but over it all I still can hear the voice of Janssen crying, little tearing
cries, as though pieces of silk were being ripped from the main fabric with
shrill protesting tragedy. It struck me that she herself was flaying her heart
with brutal knout-like strokes, and that every red shred was moaning in
protest: 'Don't, don't, don't!'...

"The new moon became the full moon, and waned and died," McCarthy
went on. "But no help came.

"There was nothing to do but wait, and a policeman does n't mind
waiting. All his life is waiting, except for a hint of action now and then. But
I worried about Janssen.

"Janssen gave me no trouble. We talked just as friendly strangers might
talk, waiting on a railroad platform. She got the bananas and the cocoanuts
and the breadfruit, gathering them as they fell. I managed to kill a suckling
pig now and then, and I rigged up a fishing-line from a piece of rope I
unraveled that had come ashore from the wreck of the boat, and a pin
Janssen gave me.

"There 's nothing I like to do better than fish, and I sit there and fish and
think all the time. And little things come to me of the life in New York, and
I worry over them. I never was a grafter. I never took a penny from any one
when I was on the vice squad, in the way of protection, but there 's little
things that worry me. As, for instance, when I go into a saloon for a drink,
they never take my money. When an arrest is made, sometimes I find a
bailsman for the prisoner, and they give me something as a favor. Or I sell
tickets for this benefit or another, and nobody wants them, but nobody dares
refuse. And I sit there in a few acres of coral in the Pacific Ocean and the
sun rises in the east way over New York, and the moon sets in the west
down China way. And the winds blow south from Japan or north from the
edge of the world. And I think: It's very small. It's not worth a man's while.

"And while I 'm thinking Janssen is thinking, too. But what she 's
thinking about, I can't figure. She 's very silent. And at times her mouth is
n't hard at all, nor her eyes, either. And when she speaks her eyes are on the
ground and she 's very serious.

"'What are you thinking about, Janssen?' I ask.

"'McCarthy,' she says, 'did you ever, after a hard day's work,
disappointed, clogged with dirt, come in and turn on a cold shower and
suddenly feel better and cleaner—and be happy again?'

"'That's the only thing to do, on a day like that.'

"'Well, I feel,' she said, 'as if this island were that bath after the awful day
of my life,' she said.

"At times I think, myself, that it must be getting on her nerves, this
place. She 'll want the lights, the gaiety, the people, if only for a little space,
before she faces her trial. Even the chair must be better for her than this
waiting, I think.

"'Are n't you getting lonely, Janssen?' I ask. 'Does n't this get on your
nerves—having nobody to talk to?' We never speak any more about the
murder or the trial.

"'Why, no, McCarthy!'

"'I should have thought,' I say, 'that after the gaiety you knew you 'd find
this a terrible trial.'

"'McCarthy,' she said suddenly, 'were you ever at Saranac?'

"'I 've passed through it.'

"'Did you ever see the poor people there, quiet, waiting, glad to be alive,
just being healed? Well, I 'm like those.'

"I don't notice for a while the change that is coming over Janssen. I see
things on the outside of people. I don't see them on the inside. I 'm a
detective. I just think maybe she 's got the blues, Maybe she's worried. But
one afternoon she comes to me and springs a new one.

"'McCarthy,' she says, 'would you mind every afternoon keeping away
for an hour or so from the cove?'

"'What's the idea?' I says.

"'Well, I used to be a good swimmer,' she says, 'and I 'm going to
practise, and I have n't got any bathing-suit,' she says, 'not even tights. So
you 'd better keep away.'

"I think to myself: 'This is a queer thing for any one as tough as they tell
me Janssen is, to come out with.' And I wonder if she means exactly the
opposite of what she says. She wants me, I half figure, to hang around. And
maybe she thinks I 'll fall for her. And if I do, she has me, I say to myself.

"And then I look up at her, and I see her eyes, and I never was so
ashamed before or since.

"'All right, Janssen,' I say.

"'Thanks, McCarthy!'

"A week later she borrows my knife.

"'My clothes are in rags, McCarthy,' she says, 'so it's back to the Garden
of Eden for me. I got to dress up like these wahinies down here. Don't laugh
at me, McCarthy; promise me you won't.'

"'Not too much Garden of Eden, now,' I warn her.

"'Don't worry!' she laughs. And next morning you could have knocked
me down with a straw, as they say. She has strung together big green
banana-leaves with fiber, and made a knee-length skirt of them. And under
her arms and about her is a little closed jacket of leaves, and that great
golden cloak of her hair falls around, rippling and shimmering.

"'How do I look, McCarthy?'

"'You look fine,' I tell her. 'You look like a picture, you sure do. You
might be in a stage play,' I tell her, 'only you 're so fine and modest.' She
blushes pretty as a girl of sixteen, until it was a shock to me to remember
that she was my prisoner for the crime of murder. And I look at myself, feel
my chin, see how my suit is going. 'You make me feel like a bum.'

"The months pass and two sails go by.

"One I see in the early evening. A few very fleecy clouds shuttle in and
out before the sun, and the great sea is purple, and the sand takes on a deep
hue like the color of a gold coin that's been in circulation for years, mellow
and reddish-like. And the green of the trees is so green you can feel it. And
on the horizon is a native boat with a lateen sail that is orange-colored.

"I see it. I make no effort. I can do nothing. But it seems to me that it is
unreal. It is not there. It is just a dream. It is unreal as the island is to me,
unreal as my old life is to me, unreal as everything is—except Janssen.

"But a week later another boat comes, and this time it is n't unreal. Squat
and bulky, it is a tramp steamer headed down New Zealand way. It passes
not more than three miles off, and very ugly it is upon the sea, its funnel
belching out black smoke that is like an insult to the shining seas. I have a
bonfire ready-made and go to it with my burning-glass. And Janssen stands
by and looks at me.

"'Do I have to go back, McCarthy?' she asks.

"'You got to go back and face the music, Janssen.' And I lights the fire.

"I get everything ready to board, but the steamer pays no attention. They
go straight ahead. Maybe they think it's just natives, but at any rate they
don't put about or anything. I go to the edge of the water and shout to them.
I go into it up to my waist and whistle and snap my fingers and call to it, as
I would to a dog, but they pay no attention. And then I give up.

"'I 'm sorry, McCarthy,' Janssen says.

"'What are you sorry for?' I asks her. 'You ought to be glad.'

"'I am glad,' she says. 'I 'm glad for myself, but I 'm sorry for your sake,
McCarthy. I 'm really sorry.'

"One night we 're setting by the fire in the moonlight, and I 'm trying to
figure out how the natives build their huts, because I want to build one for
Janssen. There 's a queer sort of rain in these islands. Sometimes in a bright
sky a cloud will pass, very high, very quick, and the rain comes down like
bullets. You can hear it thunder in the leaves, and rattle over the sea like
pistol shots. And it's not so pleasant after a while. It's over in a minute or so,
but Janssen ought to have some place when it comes.

"And Janssen is sitting there as quiet as anything, making figures in the
sand and saying nothing. She turns to me.

"'McCarthy,' she says, 'did I really kill Alec de Vries?'

"'You killed him dead.'

"'It seems like a dream to me, a bad dream in the night.'

"'If you had waited and looked at that corpse, you 'd have known it was
no dream.'

"'And because I killed a man that was no use to any one I 've got to go
back.'

"'You 've got to go back, all right,' I tell her.

"'Well, do you know, it's only fair,' she says. 'You 've called the tune, and
danced it, and you 've got to pay the fiddler. But I 'm scared, McCarthy. I 'm
terribly scared. It would be very easy for me to jump in the water or borrow
your gun some night. Think of it. They put metal on your legs and strap you
into a chair, and they put a cap over your head. And, then a man, as human
as yourself, pushes a switch, and just as if he were putting out a light, he
puts out the light of your life, the same light that's in himself.... And all in
the cold gray morning....'

"'Tell you something, kid—' I had this on my mind for a while. 'I don't
think they 'll burn you. We 'll get you a good lawyer when we go back and
you 'll get off with a long stretch up the river.'

"'But don't you see, McCarthy,' she laughs nervously, 'that that's worse
still? A person does something, as I 've done, because his mind and his—his
self—are full of nooks and crannies, dust and cobwebs, bad feelings,
passions. And he flies away. And maybe in the desert or the mountains a
great wind comes and cleanses him. And he mends the shattered self
together.

"'But the silly judge and the silly police go after him, and they send him
to prison, and he sits there in the darkness and the wheels of his head go
around. And the cobwebs collect again, and the grime from the other people
comes off on him. And in the end he is worse than he was in the beginning.

"'I 'd rather die, McCarthy—die, all in the cold gray morning.'

"A month after this Janssen falls ill. Perhaps it's a gust of rain that's made
her ill. Perhaps it's some of the berries or the fish or something. But at any
rate, there she lies, white and near dead, all the life gone from her. There 's
nothing I can do for her much but try to cheer her up and move her when
she 's tired of lying in one position.

"'You 've got to get well, Janssen,' I say to her. 'You 've got to make an
effort.'

"'But why?' she asks. 'Why shouldn't I die?'

"'That's no way to talk.'

"'What has life got for me?' she asks bitterly. 'The electric chair?'

"'You 've got nothing to worry about,' I say. 'It 'll be only a few years up
the river and then out again, and the good old days.'

"'I won't live for that,' she says.

"'Well, listen,' I joke with her. 'You 're not going to make me come all the
way across the world for you, and then not bring you home. You 're not
going to throw me down, kid; be game.'

"'I 'd like to oblige you, McCarthy,' she smiles; 'but even for that I won't
stay alive. Can't you think of any other reason?'

"'It would be awful lonely, if you were to go,' I say; and I mean it.
'Awful, awful lonely. I 'm getting very fond of you, Janssen.'

"'That's better,' she says, and pats my hand.

III

Without, the gray January dusk had crept into the cañons of New York
and given the narrow streets, the crenelated buildings, the moving trucks,
the pedestrians a semblance of unreality, as though they were being seen
through a mist raised by some necromancer at the call of a wretched man.
Through the windows of the court-room the Tombs were still evident, but
the building had become unreal. It was like some ogre's castle in a fairy-tale
for children, very terrible, but not really there.

The judge, the jury, the attendants, all the court had somehow lost entity
as a court. It was no more a court than a house in a play is a house. It was

just a formula embracing a hundred or so human beings. And one felt also
that this was not in New York. There was no atmosphere of New York. New
York might be a cloak and a disguise, but the minds and personalities of all
were on a golden island on shining seas.

And they didn't see McCarthy in the witness-box, nor Janssen in the
dock, but by the cove where the water was so translucent that one could see,
fathom on fathom deep, the rainbow fish below....

"She gets better day by day, and I 'm so glad I could sing," continued the
officer, speaking more easily as practice came after his seven years of
silence. "She sits on the beach and health comes to her with the wind, and
little by little the flush comes in her cheek, and life ferments, and her hair
that has become dank ripples and flows, as a still sea stirs up with a breeze.
And soon she 's swimming again. But there 's little of the old Janssen left.
All her movements are grave. At times she sits thinking, and her brow is
working with thought. At other times she smiles. Just a dignified little
smile.

"And soon after she gets well, she saves my life a second time.

"This is how it happens. I 'm fishing one day and my line and hook get
caught down in the coral. And I don't want to lose that hook. Hooks are n't
easy to make. So I says: 'I 'll go down after that hook.'

"I shoot in and go swimming down through the water, and I hang on to
the coral with one hand, and unloose the hook with the other. I 'm about
ready to come up when in the water between me and the sun I can see a
shadow like a boat. For a moment I think it's a boat, and come up with a
rush. But half-way up I know it's no boat. And in the warm water I go cold
as ice.

"I 'm more than half-way up, and I have no chance of shouting,
splashing, making a noise, the way you frighten them off. And suddenly I
know the big fellow sees me. I can feel the vibration of his swirl in the
water as he turns off to a point where he can come rushing at me.

"'It's good-by, McCarthy!' I say to myself, and turn to face him. And then
I hear a plung-h into the water the moment he's ready to turn over and come
at me. And Janssen comes shooting down.

"She has a stone or something in her hand drawn back and lets him have
it just on the soft point of the nose, the only place you can hurt those
fellows. One crack! And the big coward turns and slinks off just like a dog
that's been kicked.

"When we get ashore I 'm just as mad as I can be. The idea of her taking
a chance like that!

"'Haven't you got any sense at all?' I bawl her out. 'What do you mean,
taking a chance like that? What do you think a shark is? A mackerel?
Maybe you think he wouldn't touch you? Maybe you think he's a
gentleman? He's not. If brains were money,' I say, 'I don't think you could
buy a subway ticket. Never do that, or anything like that again. Mind your
own business!'

"But she 's crying and laughing together. She walks off, now sobbing,
now laughing. I run after her.

"'Not that from the bottom of my heart I 'm not grateful to you, but you
must never again—'

"But she laughs and she sobs:

"'Go away, McCarthy. Go away. Please go away!'

"All this time I know I 'm very fond of Janssen, and something tells me
Janssen is of me, though God knows why. But we say nothing. At times it's
hard to talk. And I look at her and think. If things were only different, how I
could love that girl! But here she is, a prisoner, and I 'm her keeper. It's a
pity. It's a pity, even, she's changed. It makes it awful hard for me.

"But I can't keep my eyes off her. She stands on the beach, the wind
rustling her green garment, and rippling her hair. Very beautiful. And a little
butterfly, from God knows where, is fluttering about her. Now it's in her
hair, now about her throat. And curiously it comes to light on her lips.

"'You look awfully pretty, Janssen,' I say, 'with that butterfly.'

"She smiles at me, kind of queerly.

"'You 're a brave man, McCarthy,' she says, 'the bravest man I ever knew.
You 're strong. You 're tremendous. Yes, you 're brave. But this little
butterfly, that in all its body has n't the strength of one single hair of your
head, whose brief life is but a single day, is braver than you, McCarthy,
braver far than you.'

"'I don't understand you, Janssen.'

"But I understand her all right.

"And the days roll by, roll by, and nothing changes, nothing comes to us.
Once or twice we see sails. Once a full-rigged ship under bare poles runs
before a gale. And once in the distance we see a schooner heeling to the
breeze.

"We are not speaking much to each other. There is a feeling of
strangeness in the air. And at night I 'm worried-like. The trees rustle. The
waves lap. There is great darkness. And for all we are the only two people
in that island, yet I feel at night somehow we are not alone. Unseen,
shadowy people are about us, in the sea, in the air. Once there were millions
on these islands and now there are few. Once they were a great strong race,
and now they are a timid handful. And I imagine that in the dark of the
moon the brown tribes reassemble and put to sea in their war-canoes, and
walk on the beaches that are so like Paradise.

"And there are great temples on these islands, but their gods are no
more. And may they not too walk in the night-time with terrible, silent

stride?

"The Cross of Christ is between me and all harm. I believe that, and I
know it, and I am not afraid. But I am unquiet, nevertheless.

"And if I am unquiet, what of Janssen, wide-eyed through the night?

"At last one night I take my courage in both hands. Janssen is sitting in
the moonlight by the cove, and for the first time I ever heard her she is
singing a little something. Her voice is somehow like a boy's.

"'Janssen!' I stand and look at her.

"'Yes, McCarthy.' She turns and looks at me.

"'Janssen, when we go back,' I say, 'and when what has to be will be
done, and when all is over, the morning you are free, I 'll be waiting at the
gate for you. I 'll want you to marry me and come to me.'

"'You love me, McCarthy?'

"'Yes,' I said, 'I love you, Janssen.'

"'I love you, too, McCarthy. I suppose you know.'

"All this time she never looks at me, but out on the moonlit cove.

"'But if we never get off this island,' she says after a little while, 'we
never get married.'

"'How can we?' I say. 'There is none to marry us.'

"She is speaking slowly, seriously, in the moonlight, and every word she
says has the weight of sincerity.

"'Do you believe, McCarthy, that the church and all the people there and
the organ and the rice make a marriage? Are all these necessary, McCarthy?
Tell me, please.'

"'No.' I think it out. 'The only one necessary is the clergyman.'

"'Because he is the representative of—God?'

"'Yes,' I say in a minute or so, 'because he is there for—God.'

"'And yet God is everywhere? Knows all? Sees everything? Reads the
inside of our hearts as easily as the clergyman reads our faces?'

"'That is what they say, Janssen. That is—what—we believe—'

"There is silence. Then she sinks to her knees in the sand in the
moonlight.

"'Kneel down, McCarthy, and give me your hands.' I kneel and give her
my hands without protest—her voice is so commanding, so sincere. And
there is a strange thing between us now. All the time before if I touch her I
feel strength flowing from me to her, but to-night when I hold her hands
there is an even level.

"'If God wishes to hear us to-night, then we are married.'

"'But,' I say, 'Janssen, how do we know if He hears us, gives His
consent?'

"Her eyes wander over the island, over the sea. She points suddenly to
the lagoon.

"'See, McCarthy. See, under the moon there, that big turtle. He is
uncertain where to go.' I look and I see the little black head like a dot on the
water and the widening ripple as he swims around. 'See the boatswain bird's
rock.' I saw the flat square surface in the cove. 'If he swims to and mounts
that rock, then it will be a sign we have been heard and—He has given His
consent.'

"'But he will never come to the rock, dear Janssen,' I say. 'He is going
out with the tide.'

"'McCarthy,' she says a little scornfully, 'you are the good man, the
untarnished one, the one who was brought up to believe, and you do not.
And I, the bad woman, the murderess, the worse than Magdalen because I
never loved until now, I believe. I believe and know.'

"And then her belief came to me and I turned to see the great turtle. He
swam around and around and the moon shot the little ripples in gleaming
silk. And at last I could bear it no longer, and I lowered my head; but
Janssen still watched with her head high. And I could feel her hands
tremble, and then crisp, and then tremble, and suddenly grow firm and fine
and powerful.

"'Look, McCarthy, look!' Her voice rang like a bell. 'He is come to—he
is on the rock.'"

"And I raised my head, too, and I saw the Miracle of the Turtle....

"And so we were married, and dwelt as happy as we could be, until the
brig Angela Scofield put in for water and rescued us, and I brought Janssen
back to the bar of justice, as I was bound under oath to do."

Here McCarthy stopped, and all knew he would say no more. Indeed, it
seemed as if he could physically say no more, for the man seemed
overcome. All the tenseness of him was gone and the prisoner and he
looked at each other in a strange, pathetic, and trusting way, smiling with
dry mouths and wet eyes. All in the court-room felt suddenly abashed, as a
cynic might feel before the eyes of a child.

And suddenly in every one's mind there were translated his simple
words, "And so we were married, and dwelt as happy as we could be," into
pictures that were not pictures but chords, harmony and counterpoint, not
for the mind's eye but for the heart's feeling. There they had been by a cove
on Paradise Island, loving each other not joyously but simply and sincerely
and with great strength.

They could see them, strong and fine, by the translucent water of the
cove, under the golden sun on the golden sands, in a place as beautiful as

the garden the Lord God planted in Eden. And as over that first garden, so
over this one did a storm brood like an owl.

What terror she must have gone through, with the prison gate continually
before her! What temptations must he have undergone with his wife by him,
and the thought in his head that one day he must bring her back to stand
trial for the killing of a man!

In God's name, what was the use to them of shining seas and golden
sands, trees green as green banners, moons of Paradise and scented tropic
winds, while tragedy was in the air, electric as a storm?

"You can step down, McCarthy," the district attorney said. And turning
to the court he spread out his hands.

"The case of the people rests."

"The case for Anna Janssen rests," countered Howard Donegan.

For a long time there was a pause, that was accentuated into
uncomfortable drama by the ticking of the court clock. It was as though an
angel of silence were passing. The jury looked uncomfortable. The district
attorney bit his nails. The spectators looked at one another in mental
disorientation. It might have been the first bar of justice with no precedent
to follow, no set of rules, so suddenly had all the machinery stalled. Only
Howard Donegan drowsed an....

The judge was the first to come to himself. He rustled papers. He rapped
for order. He turned to the jury.

"Gentlemen," he began, "the case for the people rests and the counsel for
the prisoner rests his case also. It has now arrived to make a decision.

"You jurymen have only one duty to perform, and a bounden duty it is.
You have got to decide one fact. Did Anna Janssen kill Alastair de Vries?

"Were Anna Janssen before you, the lowest of the low, gutter-soiled,
evil, a menace to the community, and did not kill De Vries, then you would

have to bring in a verdict of 'not guilty,' no matter how much enmity you
felt to her. No matter what she is before you now, no matter what sympathy
you feel for her, you must bring in a verdict of 'guilty' if you are certain she
killed De Vries.

"Now, gentlemen, there can be no reasonable doubt of this. Even the
prisoner herself admits it. So I must instruct you to bring in a verdict of
guilty."

The jury looked at one another, amazed, a little scared. They turned to
the foreman, a fine, florid personage, with a fan-shaped red beard, a man
who ought to be equal to every occasion, so it seemed. They turned to him
as a sheep turns to a bellwether. He rose to his feet.

"But this woman is changed," he objected. "She is not the same—"

"That is not germane to your offices," the judge answered severely. "You
weigh facts. I weigh justice, Your affair is between Alastair de Vries and
Anna Janssen. De Vries is now in the hands of his God. Janssen is in mine.
Though I am the arbiter of legal form, yet also I am the personation of
Equity. God has judged De Vries; I, with the voice of God, shall judge Anna
Janssen. Consider your verdict."

"If we bring in a verdict of 'not guilty—'" the foreman suggested.

"If you do—" the judge was cold as steel—"you have done an
unpardonable thing. You have betrayed the people of New York, whose
representatives you are. You have brought into disrepute the law of your
city. And women will kill men with the hope of obtaining lax verdicts.
Moreover, on legal grounds, I shall declare this no trial. And the prisoner
will go through the ordeal again."

"Well, if that's the way—" The foreman looked around embarrassedly at
the jury. The jury seemed to put implicit faith in him. "We will not have to
leave the box!"

"Clerk of the Court," called the judge....

"Prisoner, look on the jury. Jury, look on the prisoner. What say ye, have
ye arrived at a verdict?"

"We have."

"What say ye: is the prisoner guilty or not guilty?"

"Well, this woman killed De Vries, but—"

"Guilty or not guilty?" judge demanded.

"Guilty!"

"Prisoner—" the judge turned to Janssen—"you have committed a
murder. You have been adjudged guilty of it by a jury of your peers.

"It is now my duty to sentence you to a punishment not fitting the crime
of murder but fitting such circumstances before and after as come within
the scope of the foresight of Equity. You have taken a life and your life is
hostage to the law.

"It now rests with me to decide what I shall do with this life that is in my
hands and forfeit to the justice of the community; not only what is the best
thing for the community, but what is the best thing for you. Shall I
extinguish it, that it shall be no longer a danger to living men, a danger to
your own immortal soul? Or shall I dispose of it otherwise, as my
inspiration directs?

"Prisoner, I give you back that life, but I sentence you to imprisonment
for its natural term."

There was a moment's pregnant silence in the court. Then a quick
bourdon hum of anger. Suddenly came riot. The prisoner wilted. The jury
stood up in protest. The spectators rose on threatening feet.

The judge raised his hand. He was suddenly clothed in the majesty of
Solomon.

"Prisoner, I have made inquiries and there is owing to your husband his
salary for ten years, which he will collect. He will then take you and have
this marriage made legal. He will then take you from the place where you
now are to the place whence you came, to your island down the Pacific, and
you will live there, happy ever after, is the wish of this court of justice."

There came suddenly from the throats of all a mighty cheering. For an
instant the attendants sought to keep order, but they soon desisted,
themselves to join the joyous clamor. The sound bellied from the court-
room and into the street. Pedestrians stopped and horses started. All looked
at one another in amazement. Out of the court-room of tragedy had issued
springtime carnival. One expected at any moment to hear chiming bells.

THE BARNACLE GOOSE

I

He might have been a hundred years away, he thought, as he sped along
the road on the jaunting-car; he might have been a hundred years away
instead of a meager dozen, so strange did everything appear to him. Every
turn of the way, every stone, every smoking farm-house, every green field,
was new. Even the sea to the right of him, beside which he had played for
nineteen years, was dramatically unexpected. Faintly the whole landscape
came back to him; hazily, as though he were seeing for the first time a scene
that had been inadequately described in a book.

First, there was the road itself, broad, undulating, rising and falling, like
an artist's fancy. Then, right and left, fields of delicate blue-green corn, soft
as no carpet could be; and great meadows of hay, sprinkled with white and
red clover; long stretches of potatoes with delicate pink and mauve flowers;
and here and there a gnarled apple orchard. Huge chestnut trees lined the
way, and mellow farm-houses showed cozily, with their dun thatched roofs.

Cows grazed in the distance—shining, mottled Jerseys and stocky Kerrys,
black as ink.

In the background the purple Mourne Mountains loomed like strange
giants; and beside him the sea plashed musically, with a sound reminiscent
of the chiming of bells. It was all surprisingly mellow, surprisingly rich, like
the land which the spies of Joshua reported to lie past the Jordan's banks.
Grant's eyebrows raised in puzzlement.

The brick-faced driver looked at him with a horseman's shrewd eyes.

"I knew you the first time I put eyes on you," he said in his clipped
Ulster accent. "You 're Thomas Grant's son—Willie John—that went away
to America twelve years ago last March. And why should n't I know you?
Many 's the time I drove you when you were that high." He gave the dapper
little mare a flick of the whip. "I suppose you 'll be settling down and
staying at home now?" he asked.

"No; I don't think I will," Grant answered; and he smiled as he heard his
voice slip into the musical singsong it had n't known for many years. "I 'll
be going back in a month or so."

They whipped along past the sea for another mile, the little mare's hoofs
striking the white road as true and as staccato as drumsticks. A strip of salt-
marsh spun toward them. Eastward, over the sea, a flock of birds hove.
Their wings flapped wearily, and as they flew landward they uttered faint
whimpering cries.

"The wild geese." The driver pointed them out with his whip. "They're
coming back to the marsh. They 're queer birds."

Grant watched them as they came. Their cries came sharp and
complaining through the air, high-pitched, querulous, turbulent. And still
there seemed to be something satisfied in them, like the sobbing of a child
who has received what he wants but cannot stop for a moment.

"I often heard my grandfather say—and it's little he did n't know about
birds," the driver went on "that there is n't a queerer bird in the world than

the barnacle goose. The moment they can fly they 'll leave the country. My
grandfather saw them in Egypt, and he saw them in France, traveling all the
time; but they can never get the taste of the Irish marshes out of their
mouths, and they come back. The young ones go and the old ones stay.
Even a bird does n't get sense until it's taught."

They swept from the highway into a narrower road, and Grant's heart
jumped a little, for he recognized it, broader though it was, and greener its
hedges and smoother its surface than he had thought it. The sun was going
down and a soft bronze twilight was beginning to settle. A little river ran
past to the sea through the lush meadowland, and for an instant he saw the
shimmer of a trout as it leaped for a fly. And from everywhere came the
scent of clover.

They had turned, almost before he noticed it, into the yard of the farm-
house, and again the sense of surprise struck Grant like a blow. Of course
he remembered everything now—the long white-washed farm-house,
thatched with golden straw, with the sweet-pea and ivy clustering about its
walls; the massive slated stable and byre; the barn to the rear of that, in the
orchard; the white dairy near the big iron gates with its cinder churning
table; the giant ricks of hay back of it all; the dogs running in the yard—
sheep-dog and setter and greyhound—the two farm-hands stopping to look
at him solemnly as he came through the gates; the thick servant-girl
hurrying out of the front door as she heard the grinding of wheels. It was so
different from what he had thought it was that he caught his breath in
shamed embarrassment.

A tall young fellow with red hair and a humorous twist to his mouth
came strolling from the stables. He wore a tweed coat and riding-breeches
and boots. He stopped short and looked at the car.

"It's Willie John!" he shouted.

He swung across the yard like a flash and grasped Grant's hand in
something that felt like a vise. He slammed his returned brother a terrific
blow on the shoulder.

"Willie John! I 'm glad to see you!"

Grant's father came out of the house, a spare Titan of a man, hair shot
through with gray and a great bronzed hawk's face. He pushed Joe aside and
caught Grant by the shoulders. He was inarticulate for a moment.

"You 're back again, Willie John," he said simply and quietly; but behind
the simple words Grant felt there was a wealth of welcome and of pleasure
that David could not psalm. The elder Grant looked round toward the house.
"Sarah Ann," he called, "here 's Willie John!"

She came out through the door with a quick, trembling step, a very little
woman to be the mother of two such powerful men and the wife of a giant
—a little woman of fifty, with the face of a russet apple, with fine lacework
about the corners of her eyes, hair a delicate gray, like rich silk, and a girl's
mouth and eyes. She had Grant in her arms in an instant, as though he were
no more than a boy. Slowly she looked at him. "My son! Willie John!" she
murmured.

They took him into the house, and they looked at him again; and they
talked to him for hours, the mother with her eyes shining like stars, the
father with that steadfast, proud expression on his face, the brother Joe in
his riotous, loud-voiced way.

It was a welcome that overwhelmed Grant; that took him off his feet,
like a great wave, and sent him spinning; that warmed him with a flame,
setting his heart alight.

But there was something disappointing and strange about it all. They
were just content and happy to have him. He had come back to their hearts
after twelve years. They did n't care where he had been or how he had
prospered. He might have just come from the next townland. He might have
come back a pauper. Their welcome would have been the same warm,
hearty thing.

And he had imagined something so very different! He had pictured the
land he was returning to as a thriftless waste. His own home he had never
thought of as the richly comfortable place it was. He had seen himself
returning in triumph from beyond the seas, laden with treasure, like
Columbus returning with the wealth of Borinquen, or like the legendary

Irish lad who married the Spanish king's daughter and returned to his
impoverished people in a coach-and-four.

He had imagined himself telling them of the wonders of New York,—
tales as marvelous as any of the thousand and one told in Oriental bazaars,
—of the buildings that tower as high as the Irish mountains; of the river of
light that is Broadway; of the shop windows on Fifth Avenue, each of which
holds a king's ransom; of the motley throngs in New York, greater in
number than all Ireland holds; of the struggle and competition in which he,
their son and brother, had won a sound business worth ten thousand dollars.

He wanted to tell them of his own epic. He wanted to be questioned; to
be admired. And they did none of that. They were only glad to have him
back. And he was disappointed!

II

It was after the March fairs, twelve years ago, that he had gone to
America. He had taken over a drove of cattle to Liverpool for his father and
uncles, had delivered them and received the purchase money. There was
one small venture of his own among the lot—a calf that he had raised to be
a personable heifer, and that brought him in nine pounds. Along the docks
he saw a liner bound for New York, a great leviathan, like a city. The thing
hypnotized him by its vastness.

"I 'm going to America," he said out loud on the pier; and in a great glow
he took his passage and sent home the purchase money for the cattle.

He did not know at the time what the impulse was that sent him abroad,
and he did not trouble to analyze it. Later he found a motive, and it was a
false one. He might have asked his father, who had gone in an ancient high
moment to fight as a Papal Zouave against the onrush of the Neapolitan
cohorts on Rome. He might have asked his red- and curly-headed brother
Joe, who had once shipped from Newry to Iceland, and to Archangel, in

Russia, and to Vladivostok, coming home by way of the China Seas. And,
again, he might have asked the downy young of the barnacle goose, who
wing their way down southward when the first black frost comes. All these
could have told him.

He had very little difficulty in finding something to do in New York, for
a stocky, healthy man, with honesty written all over a clean-cut face and
looking unabashed from clear gray eyes, is an acquisition to any employer.
They put him to work on a street-car, conducting and taking in the fares
with assiduous honesty. The ten or twelve dollars a week he made, and what
he got for them, compared very unfavorably with the healthful comfort and
clean sea air of home. But the adventure of the New World held his
attention until home became an affectionate and dull memory. And letters to
and from Ireland were rare.

He stood, in his stocking feet, as fine a specimen of strength and health
as there is outside the ranks of professional athletes; he was good-looking in
an impersonal way; to doubt his honesty was impossible against the
evidence of those gray eyes; but he had been allotted no more than the usual
share of brains. Wherefore, it took three years for the New York idea to get
home, which was to put money in his purse. He went about it in the way
one should expect of him. He sought a position that gave reasonable
promise of advancement. A great chain of grocery stores gave him an
assistantship in one of its shops.

"Hard work, and saving your money," he said to himself, "that's the way
you get on in the world."

And he got on, with his dogged persistence. Six years of that, with the
money he had saved, and he had set himself up in business on his own
account, in an out-of-the-way avenue, on the road to Coney Island—a squat
two-story building with an apartment upstairs and his shop below. A long,
bare street, newly bedded, with grayish-white apartment-houses on each
hand, so new that the mortar still lay in ugly flecks about the sidewalk.

Opposite him a newly fitted chemist's shop showed garishly with its
green and red lights. A valet's store was beside him, and here and there in
the avenue gaps showed where the real-estate men had not yet found

capitalists to erect stores or flats. It was very bleak and new, and somehow
lonely; but in his own store he was happy and busy all day long. He had had
his name put on the glass window—William J. Grant—in angular gold
letters; and inside he and his assistant, a sallow Scotch boy, attended
customers, a lean but constant string. They took loaves from the glass case
on the counter, or dug butter from the cool, moist vat, or ground coffee in
the red mill that suggested a ceremonial vessel in a Hindu temple. He
wished the people in Ireland could see him now.

"Ay!" he would say. "I think this would open their eyes."

He had heard much about Ireland and talked much about it since he
came to America—a great deal more than he had ever heard or talked about
it at home. And in his eyes now it had taken on a dim, distorted shape and
spirit. The physical contours of it he had forgotten—the lush green hillsides,
the fruitful orchards, the kine heavy with fat, the dim, warm houses—all
these were to him as though they had never been. Instead of them, he saw a
frail, worn country, with a vague spiritual light emanating from it, like the
light from the face of a man who knows that death is near him and is
resigned to it. The people about him mentioned it with sympathetic voices.
They spoke of the poverty of it, with a sort of contemptuous affection. And
little by little Grant came to think of it in that way, too, as one thinks of a
poor but worthy relative.

"There 's no doubt to it," he would say to himself; "a man doesn't get a
chance there. He has to come over here." And he would look about his store
with proud satisfaction.

He began to think even of his own home as a place that the poisonous
finger of poverty had touched; and for a year now, and more, he had
thought of returning to see it. Maybe he could do something for the people
at home. A few pounds would come in useful. And, apart from that, he
could tell them some things that would help them along. He would make
them "get a move on," as the New York phrase went. Perhaps he would take
Joe, his brother, out and give him a chance to show what he had in him.
Perhaps they might all come out with him—the father and mother too.

"Ay! Why not!" he would argue. "Why shouldn't they? What's there for
them in Ireland?"

He ruminated over the idea every day as he came from work to the
brown stone boarding-house where he lived, in Schermerhorn Street, a
dingy, unpalatable sort of place that had become a home to him. There were
employees of department-stores there; and an occasional theatrical couple
stayed a week in it, a week electric with criticism. In the summer evenings
the boarders sat on the stoop, and in the winter they congregated inside to
be played to in insufficient light on a tinkling piano. For Grant the place had
a metropolitan quality that others sought in the great hotels.

And, with the same care he had used in mapping out his business career,
he watched for somebody to marry.

He found her in the boarding-house—a trim and rather pale girl, who
acted as though she were twenty and looked twenty-eight, but whom the
Vital Statistics Bureau had registered as having been born thirty years
before. Her hair was black and glossy, and her eyes were big and black and
lustrous; her face, outside those features, was the face of a hundred others.
But what captivated Grant about her was her chicness, her quality of being
up-to-the-minute in dress and deed and word. Grant liked the flare of her
wide skirts and the gray suede shoes lacing up the sides. He liked the faint
powder on her face, and her carefully cultured eyebrows. He liked her talk
of skating and of the new theatrical pieces, and her ability to do the latest
twirls in the one-step. Her name was Miss Levine—Ada Levine.

"It's not every man could have a wife like that!" he told himself; and he
thought of the awe in which his people in Ireland would behold her.

She talked to him interestedly of his prospects and the trend of business
in his direction; and that pleased him, for, what with that interest and with
the training she received in the department-store where she worked, she
would be exactly what he needed to get on in the world. He told her of his
intention of going back home for a month, of putting the store in the care of
a friend of his from the old business where he had worked.

"And when I come back," he said, "I 'd like to say something to you."
She sat on the steps quietly and lowered her eyes demurely. "That is," he
continued, "if nobody gets there before me."

She looked up at him and smiled.

"That's a date," she agreed.

His heart expanded blithely. Everything was settled now. Life showed in
front of him like a straight line. A wife like that! And his thriving business!
Now he would go back to Ireland and show them something!

III

He had been home for a month and he had made no move toward
returning—not that it was ever out of his mind for an instant, but it pleased
him to stay there and savor the ripe mellow ness of everything as he might
savor a fruit. Summer was fairly in and the yellow blossoms had fallen from
the gorse, but roses were blooming in every garden, great creamy ones and
others with the vivid red of an autumn sunset.

The horse-chestnuts were heavy with balloons of white flowers, and
every evening the bees returned drowsy from the heather of the purple
mountains. There was something in it all that he had missed for years and
that he was greedy for.

At first he had gone about, a splendid figure, in the clothes he had
brought with him from America: suits of fine broadcloth, and buttoned
shoes, and a watch that was held in place by a fob. But nobody seemed
impressed by this splendor and a few were covertly amused; and suddenly
he had discarded it in a sort of shame, returning to the rich tweeds of his
own people. He had helped a little about the farm, finding again a lost
aptitude in milking a cow and in handling a horse in a dog-cart. He had
gone to the fairs and put in a shrewd word here and there on the price of a
colt. He had gaped in wonder at the antics of the Punch-and-Judy show and

had listened to the croon of the ballad-singer. He lost sixpences with the
trick-of-the-loop man and with the artist of the three cards. All through it he
tried to keep in his mind and on his face the attitude of a grown-up who is
playing a child's game, a patronizing superiority.

"If they could only see this at Coney Island," he thought, "they would
laugh their heads off."

And he tried to remember as enjoyable the days he had spent there in
search of amusement, returning in the evening a battered and limp and
irritated rag.

It was the evening of the Newry Fair when he began to think seriously of
returning. They were all sitting in the great stone-flagged kitchen of the
farm-house. From the long deal table in the middle of the room a huge lamp
filled the space with creamy light, and in the lighted fireplace a kettle
purred, hanging from its crane. The kitchen rafters were black and amber
from the smoke of four generations, and below them hung at intervals long
flitches of bacon. Over the mantel were the guns he remembered from his
boyhood—his father's double-barreled fowling-piece with the long, true
barrels; his grandfather's old musket; and the flintlock his great-grandfather
had borne when he went out with Lord Edward in '98.

His father sat by the table, reading a paper diligently, and he was
surprised to see how hale the old man looked; he was sixty now and looked
fifteen years younger. His mother fussed about with a pannikin of milk,
followed by three mewing kittens, while in a corner of the room Joe was
binding whipcord about the handle of a fishing-rod, occasionally making it
swish through the air with a keen sibilant sound like the hiss of a snake.

"I think I 'll be going back soon," Grant said suddenly. "I think I 'd better
be getting along."

His mother looked at him sharply, but said nothing. Joe lowered his rod.
His father raised his eyes from his paper.

"And what would you be doing that for?" he asked slowly. "Sure, I
thought you were going to stay with us."

"I can't be doing that," Grant answered easily. "I 've got my business
over there. And I 've got to be making my way in the world."

"And why can't you stay and do it here?" the old man went on.

"Ah, sure, what would I be doing here?" Grant began impatiently. "There
's nothing for a man here. On the other side I 've got a place of my own,
made by my own hands in twelve years. That's something, is n't it?"

"There 's no use talking to you," his father said resignedly. "If you must
go, you must go. But if you were wise, Willie John, you would take
whatever money you 've made in America and buy that place of Peter
McKenna's down the road. You 'd get it cheap now. And after I 'm gone the
farm goes to you and Joe. If you have n't got enough money I 'll lend it to
you."

"No, thank you," Grant replied a little surlily. "I 'll get back to my own
place."

"Ah, well—" his father turned back to his paper—"have it your own
way."

Joe sent the rod swishing through the air a couple of times. He turned to
Grant with a quick smile.

"It's not back to your business you want to be getting, Willie John," he
laughed. "You want to be getting back to where the good times are. In a
week or two you 'll be walking up Broadway, looking at the big buildings
you do be telling about. Or going down Fifth Avenue, maybe, riding in a
motor-car. Or hanging round all day drinking highballs with the
millionaires. That's what you will be after. Business!"

Grant turned on him with a sudden gust of anger.

"I want to tell you something, Joe," he whipped back: "I'm up in the
morning at half-past six. I 've got the place open by eight. It's seldom I 'm
through before ten at night—and twelve of a Saturday night. Do you know,
this is the first holiday I 've had for twelve years, barring Sundays and bank

holidays! And on them I 'm too tired to do anything. I 'm as hard worked as
you are."

"I 'm afraid you 're worse," the brother replied. He looked keenly at the
hitch of the whipcord to the haft of the rod. "It's seldom we can't get a day
off when there 's a fair on, or a good horse-race, or a coursing-match. What
would life be if we couldn't?" He swished the rod through the air again.
"And as for your father—" he took a sidelong smiling look at the old man
—"he 's hardly ever at home now since they elected him to the County
Council."

"To get on in the world," Grant said sententiously, "you 've got to work
night, noon, and morning. There's no time for flying round to places of
amusement, and chucking away hard-earned money. That's what's wrong
with all this country."

Joe looked up at the rafters heavy with flitches of bacon; at the kettle
purring on its crane. He glanced through the window to where the full
haggard lay. His ever-ready smile crept about his eyes.

"Oh, I hardly think we 'll starve for a while," he laughed. "Will we,
mother?"

The little old lady with the kittens smiled and shook her head.

"I 'm not saying anything," she said.

There was the sound of a gate clanging and the chime of voices. A dog
growled and then broke into a bark of welcome. The voices came nearer to
the door. Joe rose to open it. The mother put her head on one side to listen.

"Do you know who that is, Willie John?" she asked.

"No," Grant answered, "I do not."

"It 's Eunice Doran," she said. She waited an instant. A smile crept over
her face. "Larry Doran's daughter, from beyond the hill."

"Oh, to be sure; I remember her," Grant smiled back.

Of course he did—a lank, gray-eyed girl, with a habit of staring you out
of countenance. The last time he had seen her she was fifteen, with long
arms and legs that seemed eternally in the way; and he recalled, with a
smile, how in those days he had been a little in love with her, and they had
passed many queer, awkward moments together.

A funny, pathetic thing! And as he thought of it a shutter in his mind
opened and he saw again the girl he had left on the stoop in Schermerhorn
Street, with her chic way and flashing eyes.

He wondered what she would think if she knew he had once had a
boyish affair with this simple thing from his own townland; and he blushed
in imagining her teasing laughter.

He warmed with a glow of pride as he thought of her,—of Miss Levine,
as he somehow always called her to himself,—of her marvelous clothes, of
her manicured hands and wonderful eyebrows, of her appreciation of the
latest effort of a cinematograph comedian, and her up-to-dateness with the
last flivver joke. He smiled, too, as he thought of the wonder with which
this poor country girl would regard the metropolitan divinity.

She came into the room slowly; and, though he could distinguish little of
her features or form, he felt a sense of shock, for somehow he had expected
a lanky, overgrown girl with arms and hands like the awkward legs of a foal
—and what he saw was a tall woman, as tall as he, who moved with the
slow dignity of a queen.

She threw her cloak off and Joe took it from her, and as it fell Grant
caught one instantaneous glimpse of her that effectually wiped the Brooklyn
girl from his mind, like a sponge passing over a chalked slate. He saw first
the great mass of black hair knotted at the back of her head, which seemed
less like hair than a splash of dim, vivid color; and from a side view he saw
the small nose, with the sensitive nostrils, as clearly cut as the nose on an
intaglio; and the line of chin sweeping down, as it were, in one soft, firm
stroke. That was all he saw for a minute—that and the flush on her cheeks.

"How are you?" she said to his mother. "And how are you, Mr. Grant?
And Joe?" She turned to Grant, looked at him for an instant and put out her

hand. "And this is Willie John," she said. "You 've been a long time away,
Willie John."

He saw, as he looked at her, how very gray her eyes were, and how very
deep—like orifices through which light shone—and how very steady. He
noticed that her mouth was firm, and that she seemed to have lived each
instant of her twenty-seven years; and still she was a woman with the first
flush of beauty on her. She turned away to talk to his mother and he saw for
the first time that her servant-girl was with her. So engrossed had he been
with her entry, and so shocked by seeing her beauty, that he had seen only
her.

"I 'm going to have the flax pulled on the ten-acre," she was saying—and
Grant felt every syllable of her low contralto strike him clear and
compelling—"so I 'm asking the neighbors fair and early. My father 's dead,
Willie John—" she turned to Grant for a moment—"and I 've the place on
my hands."

"Ay; I heard that, Eunice," he said. "I was sorry to hear it."

"You 'll be going back soon?" she asked.

"I 'll be going back very soon now," he said. "In a couple of weeks at
most."

"I 've been wanting him to stay and settle down," his father broke in;
"but there 's no use talking to him."

"Ah, there's nothing for a man here," he answered disgustedly. "It's on
the other side a man gets his chance—ay, and a woman, too, for that
matter."

"Is that so?" Eunice uttered; and she caught him with her serious gray
eyes.

"There was Joe Carragher's daughter, from Balleek," he instanced; "you
knew her well. She went over six years ago and now she 's a lady's maid in
one of the big houses on Fifth Avenue. A grand position!"

"Is that so?" she repeated; her eyes had narrowed a little and she was
studying him intently.

"Then there was Patrick Hagan, the brother of the captain in the Dublin
Fusiliers. He 's got a saloon on Third Avenue and does a grand business."

"That's the devil's business, Willie John," his mother said quietly.

It was the first time since he came back that he had seen her without a
smile on her lips.

"It's different on the other side, I tell you," Grant commented with
asperity. "And there's Barney Doyle, that went over before me; he 's head
waiter in one of the big places on Broadway. Do you know that fellow
makes as much as seventy dollars a week in tips? Seventy dollars! Fourteen
pounds!"

"His father was a great lawyer." Old Grant shook his head. "God be good
to him! They called him the Star of the North."

"Fourteen pounds a week—in tips!"

Grant thought he could detect a chill, contemptuous tone in the Doran
girl's voice; but he put the thought out of his head, for why should she be
contemptuous? She drew her blue cloak about her.

"I think I 'll be going," she said.

"I 'll leave you a bit of the road," Grant offered.

They went out and down the loaning. Overhead a great white moon
showed, a great silver plate of a thing whose beams scintillated in minute
gossamer threads. Before them the road ran, as white as the moon, and
everything showed in a faint purple—trees, fields, the singing river on the
left of them, and the hill that rose between them and the sea. A little breeze
was stirring and they could hear a soft soughing from the trees and a
murmur from the beach. Somewhere behind them, on the Yellow Road
probably, a corn-crake was venting its harmoniously raucous cry.

They stopped and looked about them. Beneath them the great plain of
Louth lay, which Maeve of Connaught had once raided at the head of a
hundred thousand men. And as Grant looked at it in the subtle moonlight
the memory of forgotten legends came to him in vague uncoördinated
fragments. There was Slieve Gullion behind him, where Cuala, the great
artificer, hammered on his magic anvil night and day, and up whose slopes
Finn MacCool had pursued the white deer without horns.

And in front of him was the sea, where for thrice three hundred years the
Children of Lir had mourned in the guise of white swans. And on the hill
beside him was the fortress of Bricriu of the poisoned tongue, whose satires
killed men and withered the leaves on the green trees. Suddenly he heard
Eunice's voice addressing him.

"I suppose you 've done well for yourself, Willie John?" she asked.

"Ay; I 've done well," he told her. "I 've got a business over there worth
ten thousand dollars. And I 've built it up in twelve years."

"Ten thousand dollars!" she mused. "Two thousand pounds; that's a good
deal. That's half as much as your brother Joe made, and it's a great deal
more than I have myself."

"Brother Joe made!" he muttered in a tone of amazement.

"Yes—your brother Joe made," she answered naïvely. "He 's made as
much as four thousand pounds trading in cattle between here and England,
and buying horses for the Italian Government."

"Twenty thousand dollars!" Grant said, dumb-founded. "Brother Joe!"

"And you 've more than I have," she continued mercilessly. "The Cliff
Farm is worth only eighteen hundred pounds. That's only nine thousand of
your dollars."

He answered nothing, for a quick sense of shame suddenly suffused him
when he remembered how much he had talked, and the others keeping so
dumb. Something began tumbling very fast about him. They went up the

hill and suddenly the sea stretched before them, sheer through to England, a
vast surface of shimmering ripples, where the moon touched, and here and
there white curling waves. And beneath them it murmured on the beach in a
steady crooning. The breeze blew landward and pressed about them firmly
in a cool, even motion. To the right the Cliff Farm lay, softly white, and a
faint scent came down from its orchard. The servant-girl passed through the
gate and up toward the house.

"America 's a great country!" Grant said aloud.

He did not know why he said it. Perhaps it was because he could find
nothing else to say, and perhaps it was a sort of incantation, conjuring away
the doubts that were rising in his mind.

Eunice made no answer. And as he looked at her, standing there in the
moonlight and the breeze, the old affection he had for her a dozen years ago
rose within him, and he wondered whether he should n't put his arm about
her and kiss her for old times' sake. But the idea left him as soon as it came,
for the thought of trifling with her seemed a desecration.

"It's a great place!" he said again lamely.

She swung around upon him suddenly, savagely, her head tilted, her eyes
flashing. The cloak behind her stood backward with the breeze; and as he
watched her, amazed, petrified almost, the thought of dead ancient Irish
women flashed through his brain—Maeve, the fighting queen of
Connaught; and Deirdre, who dashed herself dead against a rock; and
Grainne, the king's daughter, who fled to follow Diarmuid of the Spears.

"Then why don't you stay there?" she uttered passionately.

"Why don't I stay there?" he repeated blankly.

"Why don't you stay there?" she said again. "You come back here—you
and your like—with a smile on your mouth and a sneer in your eye. You
come back here in your fine clothes, that you 've sweated day and night for,
and taken charity to get—ay, charity! What's tips but charity?—And you

lord it round for a while and tell us what fools we are—and patronize us.
Patronize us!"

She swung round and fronted the low-lying land with the faint blue heat
haze of summer over it, touched into silver in the June moon. The muscles
of her throat were throbbing. She was poised on her feet like a bird ready
for flight.

"Look down there at your father's farm," she told him. Her hand
stretched toward it and her gray eyes blazed in his face. "Look at it well!
Look at the corn that's green, and the rye ripening, and the stacked haggard.
Look at the trees in the orchard and the fruit hanging from them, and the
river alive with trout, and the mountain with its grouse and hares. And then
go back to your grand business and fumble the halfpence in your greasy
till!"

He said nothing. Mechanically his eyes followed her hand where it
pointed, and every word ate its meaning into his brain as if etched by strong
acid.

"Ay!" he said dully.

"Have you eyes to see, man?" She bent toward him with her hands
outstretched and her face aflame with anger. "Or have you ears to hear? Or
has groping for coppers made you blind like a mole? Or the tinkle of
tuppences deafened you the like of a bat?"

"I 've got eyes," he answered sullenly.

"Use them, then!" she snapped. "And when you go back to your grand
business, stop making a poor mouth about Ireland. Don't whine the like of a
beggar in the street. Stop your talk about poverty-stricken Ireland, and
oppressed Ireland and lazy Ireland. We 've got money here as well as you,
for all your grand business; and we've got pride; and we 've got strength.
And we don't want anybody talking about our sorrows, and the nations
pitying us in the four corners of the earth."

He said nothing, but his face had gone white; and every now and then he
winced, as though he had been caught by a whip. He wished to Heaven she
would stop; and still, back in him, something had awakened that yearned to
be lashed into life.

"I heard you wanted your father and mother to go back to America with
you and partake of the grand business. Look at that farm-house again. Your
grandfather built that with granite hewn from his own quarry. And you want
them to leave that and to go off with you and grub in a huckster's booth!
God's glory and the blue sky over us!"

There was the rapid flapping of wings and they saw a wedge of birds in
the moonlight. Suddenly they caught the shrill clamor of the barnacle
goose.

"Even the birds," she uttered with scorn, "even the birds have sense.
They 're happy when they get back from roving. Not like you and your like,
Willie John. If you want to go, go! And God go with you! If you want to
stay, stay—and you're welcome. But don't come back for a while, croaking
like a magpie chattering over a ruined hearth."

She turned to him, and the agitation and passion seemed to leave her by
a great effort of will. Her hands unclenched and her voice grew calm, with
even a queer crooning melody in it; but her bosom heaved tumultuously.

"I liked you once, Willie John," she said. "I thought there was the
makings of a big man in you. I mind the time at the football, and you
running down the field like a hare, and no one to catch or trip you. And at
the fairs I mind you putting the horses through their paces like a jockey
born. And at throwing the weight there was no one of your size or years that
could best you. Ay! I mind you, and your dogs following you, and your
head high up in the air. I thought well of you that time, Willie John. I
thought there was no one like you." She raised herself to her full height and
looked at him squarely. "But now," she said, "I 'd rather have a stray tinker
that does be traveling the roads."

And scornfully she left him.

IV

He came into the kitchen, two evenings later, from the parlor. His father
sat by the table, reading his paper. His mother pottered about the turf fire,
teasing it into flame. In a corner Joe sat, polishing the barrel of a breech-
loading fowling-piece with an old rag. His father caught the glimpse of
paper in his hand.

"Were you writing, Willie John?"

"Ay," Grant answered; "I was writing a letter to America."

He moved toward the fireplace and turned slowly about again to his
father.

"You were saying," he asked, "that that place of McKenna's was for sale.
I wonder how much he 'd want for it."

"He 'd take four thousand pounds," his father answered. "Maybe less."

"I 'm afraid I have n't got that much." Grant shook his head. "I 've only
two thousand."

"We can lend you the difference, Willie John," Joe broke in. He squinted
down the barrel of the rifle. "Can't we, Dad?"

"Ay sure!" his father answered.

"I 'm much obliged to both of you," Grant said.

He reached for his hat.

"Are you going out, Willie John?" his mother asked.

"I thought I 'd go up and call on Eunice Doran," Grant answered her. "I
might as well be neighborly."

He went out, and there was silence in the kitchen for a few minutes. Joe
clicked the lock of the gun.

"Do you mind that wild gander I put a ring on three years ago?" he asked
his father. "It's back again. I saw it over the marshes to-day."

"It 'll take a mate and settle down in the marsh now." His father nodded.
"It took it three years to find out that home is a good place. It's a queer, silly
bird—the barnacle goose."

A little ripple of laughter came from the mother's lips as she stood over
and poked the turf. The elder Grant looked up, astonished.

"What are you laughing at, Sarah Ann?" he inquired.

"I was thinking," she answered.

"What was it you were thinking about?" he pursued.

"Oh nothing!" she parried. "I was just thinking."

And she went on teasing the fire, while a subtle, affectionate smile
played about the corners of her eyes.

BELFASTERS
"Oh, I'll go down unto Belfast to see that seaport gay."—A COUNTRY POET.

To him the whole conversation, the whole setting, the whole event, was
unreal as ghosts are unreal, or objects on a foggy night. Here was this
woman, who had been so nigh to him, and to whom he had been so much,
talking of leaving him, in as matter-of-fact a manner as though she were
speaking of taking a street-car. Here was the murk of a February evening in
Belfast, the minute rain yellowing the street-lamps; the cable-cars rushing
by brusquely and short-temperedly, a "get out of the way and be damned to
you!" in their crashing, abrupt passage. She was thinking of leaving him,
she was thinking of leaving him for good, all because of a strike, mind you!
just for nothing more than a strike!

"Well, I 'd best be going," she said.

"Well—" He shifted from one foot to the other. "I think it's very foolish
of you," he said.

She smiled, as he looked at her, that strange secret smile of hers that
meant she had drawn into herself. He knew every expression on her face—
for a year now.

"What is it you want me to do?" he asked for the fourth time.

"Give the workers in the mill what they want. They ask only bare justice.
A couple o' shillings a week! What is it to you?"

"I will not." He shook his head. His great red beard shook too.

"You 're a hard man, Aleck," she said softly. "You 're no' exactly human.
And you 're getting on, Aleck. You 're no' young any more. Be a wee bit

soft, man. It's no shame."

"I will not."

"Ah, well!" She stepped toward the curb, ready to signal a car. He
followed her with his look. Of all the women in his life she had been most
to him:—she, just a working-girl! He was fond of her. He was more than in
love with her. His feeling towards her was no phenomenon but an accepted
fact. He admired her, too, which was more than he did any woman, though
she had been more to him than any but a wife should be. He admired her for
that too—she had gone into the relation so calmly, so open-mindedly, so
fearlessly. He admired her; in her was no slight, common blood.

"But, Jennie, I can't leave you like that."

She turned to face him. He was abashed by her steadfast brown eyes.

"Why for no'?" she asked. "Aleck, I 'm no lassie that's been fooled. What
is between us, Aleck, is because I liked you and I knew you liked me. Don't
let that bother your head. I 've done you no hurt, Aleck, nor you me. That's
our own affair."

"But why break like this? What for?"

"For this, Aleck. You 're the owner and the master. I 'm a worker. I 've
always been a worker. You mind I 've never taken a thing from you, Aleck. I
'm one of the people you 're fighting, Aleck, and I stick by my folks. While
this fight's on, Aleck, you and I are finished. That's the way I feel, Aleck. I
can't change it."

"You're foolish!"

"I don't think I am." This time she signaled the car. It stopped with its ill-
tempered, hurried air.

"When'll I see you again?"

"When you do what my folks ask in justice, Aleck, and not before." And
she was gone.

He stood for a few minutes in the rain. A touch of panic seized him. For
a year he had not been so lonely. He felt he was on the verge of doing a
foolish thing.

"I will not!" he said doggedly.

He turned down the road sullenly. A great desire was on him to catch the
next car and intercept her at a changing-station.

"Stop making a fool o' yourself," he said to himself. "You 'll do no such
thing."

He plugged on steadily, unmindful of where he was going. He was aboil
with perturbation.

"I ha'e gi'en them a couple o' raises this year a'ready!"

He was blind to everything but the action of the workers of his mill, of
his father's mill, of his grandfather's mill, defying him openly and
stubbornly. And now they had to take Jeanie Lindsay from him, the only
woman he had liked wholly in all his days.

"To hell with them!" he said savagely. His red beard bristled.

He stopped suddenly. He shook his fist at an arc-lamp.

"I 'll close the mill," he muttered aloud. "I 'll close down. I will so. I 've
just had enough o' it. They ha'e no softie in Aleck Robe'son. I 'll close it. Be
damned but I will! I will! I will so!"

From Aleck Robertson's earliest infancy he had been bred to the mill, as
his father had been by his father before him. It is a small, compact building,
off the Falls Road, the Robertson mill is, harboring not more than four
hundred employees. But their fame is not in Belfast alone. Many the royal
house in Europe before the war had its bride's linen from the Robertson
factory. It is a small mill, as it should be, with a small door, and on a by-
street is the lintel with the name "Robert Robertson & His Son, Founded
1803."

A queer family, these Robertsons of Belfast, very solid, very stubborn. In
five generations there has been but one son to the family, and no daughters.
"The Scottish weaver-bird, laying but one egg," some dry doctor dubbed
them. So they be. They are a tall, solid dynasty, marrying toward middle
age a bride solid as themselves. Young Aleck, red-bearded and rangy, could
remember his father, as tall and rangy as he, and bearded, too, as his
grandfather was, both silent, speculative men, students of the Shorter
Catechism, and shrewd observers of life, possessors of the trust of glossy
linen. They had their duties: to mind their own business; to take care of the
mill, and to make fine cloth.

"They can see the linen in the flax, they Robertsons!" a workman of
theirs once boasted, and it was true.

At Portrush golf-club you may hear about him. "The championship of
Ireland," they tell me, "Captain Macneill got it then and he held it for three
years and then your Uncle Simon for a year, and then Mr. Campbell o'
Kilkee, and then—who was it, then?—the linen man of Belfast—what the
deuce is his name? Robson? Robinson? Robertson, that's it! You'd hardly
remember him; he was not a showy player, not an affable man, but sound!
Ah, damned sound!"

At his school they have difficulty in recalling him. The president
remembers him vaguely as a solemn youth with freckles and gigantic
hands.

They seem to have gone through life, he and his mill, with one object in
the world—to produce linen that is the pride of Ulster. They have each their
worthy, definite place in the world. On him there rests the mill, a legacy as
important and dynastic in its way as one of the former German
principalities. He toured Ireland studying flax. He saw it raise its bluish
green stems in spring, soft as down. He saw it rise and the wind ruffle and
bend it, like still water. He saw the strange blue flower break out on it, as
blue as a near star. It was plucked from the ground in summer time, acres
and acres of it plucked carefully by a numerous population, and stacked like
corn. And the nights after the flax-pulling there would be great joy-making
in the villages, dancing and singing and drinking and love-making under the
inscrutable Irish stars. It was taken then to the dikes and left rotting in the

water, while mephitic gases rolled over the country-side. It was then
scutched in the scutch-mills, where wheels run by water, by men with
querulous dispositions and hacking consumptive coughs. To him and his
like it came then, in soft, glossy, whitish strands, like the hair of
Scandinavian women. He turned it over to his operatives, weavers and
throwsters and pickers, men hunchbacked from bending over their looms,
and women very free in their ways and not often pretty. Now it covered the
stubborn hills of Ulster and soon it covered the groaning tables of kings.

"It's an unco thing, the flax!" his Scots-Irish workmen used to say. Aleck
Robertson had the same thought, when he considered, though he never
phrased it, that the prosperity and good fame and management of his linen-
mill was his religion.

Life for him flowed by in a groove as regular and as well fitting as one
of the bands on his own looms. Since his father died, ten years ago, he had
been following the same routine, getting up in the morning, in the club
where he stayed, and going to work, taking a street-car—though the
Robertson firm was famous, it was not rich—attending to the work, and
coming back in the evenings to spend the time with a few friends over a
tumbler of Scotch.

"Why for do you no' take a wife and settle down, Aleck?" an occasional
friend asked him.

"Och, I 'm all right as I am," he would answer.

Life at thirty-eight had become for Aleck Robertson a succession of
minor hedonisms. He liked the sting of the shower-bath in the morning, the
goodly taste of breakfast. He liked to hear the bustle and rumble of the
works as he entered. He liked his lunch. He enjoyed his game of golf, and
his occasional holidays in Scotland, or France, where he patronized the
bathing-beaches, and played for small stakes at petits chevaux. Every week
he attended a music-hall, and occasionally he was seen as escort to a minor
actress.

"Aleck!" some of his cronies said. "He's a card!"

He had, for such girls as were not frightened by his beard and his
position, a queer, provocative glint in his eye, which they would savor and
giggle at.

"He 's a pleasant fellow, Mr. Robertson," they agreed. "He could be fine
and pleasant to a girl he liked, I 'll warrant you! They do say—" and here
some immaterial scandal was told.

It was strange how he ran across Jean Lindsay, for he made it a rule to
have nothing to do socially—if one could call it socially—with the girls in
the mill. He had noticed her a few times about the place—a stately sort of
girl with calm brow and eyes. He admired the fine figure she had—the
shapely arms and rich bosom. A woman, that! None of your fragile dolls!
And twice he had seen her leave the works at quitting time, a figure in a
Paisley shawl and skirt and blouse, none of the cheap finery of the mill
worker.

"Yon 's a fine girl!" he thought, and forgot her.

It was one night on Cave Hill he discovered her again, a soft June night
with a half-moon in the sky. He had been out for a tramp and sat down to
watch the city beneath him. He heard a rustle in the heather beside him. He
got up immediately.

"I beg your pardon." He noticed suddenly a girl looking at him, seated
not ten yards away. "I did n't know there was any one here."

"It's all right, Mr. Robertson." The voice was calm and self-possessed as
that of any woman of the great world. He had to look a few instants before
he recognized her.

"You 've seen me at the works," she explained.

"Why, of course I have," he remembered. "What are you doing here all
alone?"

"Oh, I like to come up of an evening among the heather," she told him.
"It's a bonny wee flower. I don't wonder the bees love it. The Danes," she

added slowly, "used to make a heather ale, but that's gone now. It must have
tasted fine."

"It's a queer hour to come here."

"It's a lot of other time I have," she replied, "and I tending your weavers
from all but dawn until the fall o' day! I like it this time, though, for you see
things now you would n't see in the daytime. You can hear the plover at
night, calling like children. And just now a badger passed me, gray as a
gaffer. I bees waiting, too," she said, and she smiled, "when the moon
comes up to see the fairies dancing on the hillside. There must be a lot o' the
child in me," she explained, "because I do be thinking long."

"There's not many girls come up here their lonesome."

"There 's none think me beauty enough to come with."

"Thon 's a town of blind men." And they both laughed.

"Maybe I 'm not missing much."

"By God! You are!" And he leaned forward and kissed her.

That night when he went home, thinking over the kissing and the
laughing and the gentle caresses, the thing that impressed him most was
how natural it all had been. She had received it all, and he had given it, as
though it were just like the scented heather, and the wind and the moon. He
met her another night by careful chance, and again there was all of the child
in her, eagerness and pensiveness and artless kissing and bubbling laughter.
He could feel her eyes laugh.

He met her a third time on the great hill above the town, and this time it
was by appointment. She had become a great pleasantness to him, a greater
pleasantness than he could ever have imagined before, there was something
so apart from the world. The thought of meeting that night made his great
chest heave involuntarily.

That night he sensed, when he met her, she was all woman, not child
alone. He kissed her and they sat down in the springy heather bells. She was
silent.

"It's been a long day," she said at length, "a long, long day." She looked
at him and smiled.

He turned to catch her up to him. She held him at the length of her arm.

"What is your name?" she asked. "Your first name?"

"Aleck."

"Do you mean true, Aleck?" Not only her mouth, but her eyes, her whole
being was questioning. "Aleck, do you mean true?"

"Ay! I mean true."

And he had became her lover, her secret lover.

For one whole year she was a delight and a mystery to him. There was
not in him, though, the whirling passion that makes for love epics. It was
just good for him to know her. Had he been twenty he would have married
her, nor been content until he had her bound by candle, book, and bell. But
he was in his thirties now, and steady and solid and wise. She asked nothing
of him. She accompanied him here and there, to Bangor, to Antrim Glens,
dressed in modest decency. Their relation she accepted with dignity. She
was not possessive, as a commoner woman might be. She was not fulsome
in her affection for him. It was very restrained.

"I like you well, Aleck," was all she uttered. "I like you fine, my big red
man."

At the works she never noticed him, nor he her. Once, indeed, he had
wanted her to leave and take a little house somewhere, but her eyes had
flashed terribly at the first words.

"I 'm sorry, Jeanie," he faltered. "I 'm queer and sorry."

"You hurt me," she confessed. "You did so." She relented at his distress.
"Ah, sure, don't take on about it. A wee word—it comes out so easy. I
should not have looked so fierce. But I know you did n't mean to belittle
me, Aleck."

He could never quite understand her. No woman in his life had ever
acted so. There had been venal women, and foolish women, and women
whom other women would instinctively recognize as evil. But Jean was a
mixture of the opposites of these things, and she was also Jean.

He loved to stand and watch her. She reminded him of a picture he had
once seen—one of a series of four depicting the seasons; and Jean
resembled the one called "Autumn," a figure of a woman in a purple
Grecian robe walking through a wood of falling leaves, a mature woman,
with kindliness and wisdom in her eyes, and a certain proud grace to her.
Jean often looked like that.

She thought, too, in a simple way. Her opinions were definite as rocks.

"It's no' right, Aleck!" She would raise her brown eyes calmly and
fearlessly to him, discussing a manner of trading or a phase of municipal
politics.

She had only one fault to find with him. She would pat his head and say:

"There 's only one thing about you, Aleck, you 're not exactly human.
There 's a wee thing missing somewhere, red fellow. They workers of yours,
they 're no more in your eye than the machinery they handle. I 'd like to
have you a wee bit softer, Aleck. I would so."

"I 'm soft enough toward you," he would object.

"It's no' the same thing, mannie. You 're soft toward me because I 'm
close to you. But outside that you 're hard. You don't see people. You must
n't think with the head, Aleck. You must think a wee bit wi' the heart. Na,
na! Toward every one, I mean."

He often regretted, in his club at night, after leaving her, that she was not
the sort of person he could marry. It would be so pleasant to have a house
with her in it, the fine big woman, with the wise head and the warm heart,
with the temperament rich as wine. She would go well in a house of her
own, fitting in it naturally, as some fine old clock would, or some mellow
furniture of long ago. And to be greeted by her in the evening—

"It would be queer and pleasant," he thought in his stilted Belfast idiom.
"Och, ay! It would that!"

But she was not the manner of woman the Robertsons married. His dead
fathers would turn in their graves were he to pick a wife from out the mill-
hands.

The august and chaste and cold assembly of the Robertson wives had no
room in it for anything as warm and handsome and as plebeian as Jean. The
wives the Robertsons chose were of their own rank, meager spinsters with a
little money, with the accomplishments of gentlewomen, the playing of
certain tunes on the piano, the knitting of afghans, the speaking of a prim
English instead of Belfast Scots—an acidulous gentility.

Ay! If it hadn't been so!

The interview with the foreman had been stormy. It became furious. It
had ended disastrously, so disastrously he did n't care a tinker's curse.

"I ha'e gi'en you two raises a'ready, and here you 're back for more. Be
damned to it, men, is it the king's mint you take me for?"

"Ay, you ha' gi'en us the raises, Mister Aleck, but the rents ha' raised
again. There 's no place to flit to tha' 's cheaper. The price o' food is
unchristian—"

"Is that my fault?"

"Na! Na! It's no' your fault. It's just the times. And there 's childer
comin'—"

"Is that my fault?"

"Ah, Mister Aleck, be reasonable! We got to live. Down at Richardson's
mill they 're gi'en the third raise. And at the United—"

"Now, listen to me, men," he roared like a maddened bull. "You 've got
to make a choice. Either get on with what you have, or I 'll close the mill. I
swear to my God I 'll close the mill."

"We 've got to live," the men said sullenly. An old workman stepped out.

"Mister Aleck," he pleaded, "I 've worked for your da all my life, and I
was a wee nipper when your grandfa'er was here. I mind him well. You 've
got neither chick nor child, and if you have n't, the mill goes wi' you—"

Good God! So it did. He had never thought of that.

"—so it is n't as though you wanted the money—"

"I will not!" One part of his brain formulated the reply and his lips
uttered it. The other part was busy on this new discovery, that with him the
mills died. Of course they did.

"Well, then, be damned to you! Close your mill!"

"Be damned to the whole lot of you! Take your week's notice from the
day. Saturday week the mill closes, and I swear to my God it never opens
again."

Why should it, he asked himself when they were gone, why should it?

He sat back after they had left him and for an instant the magnitude of
the thought that there would be no successor shook him physically, left him
all of a tremble. He had never thought of it before, incredible as that may
seem.

"No! There'll be no other. I'm the last." He lighted a match to put to his
pipe, but he let it go out. "I 'm the last."

All his life, at this moment, seemed shattered—the comfortable running
order of it junked into a grotesque and cold puzzle, as a complicated engine
will be ruined by a thunderbolt. The mills were gone, for he would not give
in to any raise, and Jeanie Lindsay too—she was so much to him, so much
that she obtruded herself on every thought he had.

For the first time in his existence, sitting on the ruin, it occurred to him
after all what a poor thing this complicated mechanism had been. He could
remember his boyhood, a drear Sabbatical term of years, spent with a
bearded father and a thin, acidulous mother. At school he had not been
liked.

"It was no' so pleasant, now that I come to think of it."

And he was supposed to approach a strict spinster in marriage, that the
destiny of the Robertsons should be accomplished; to be intimate with a
frigid stranger, that another lonely and not-liked boy would be brought into
the world, between a dour father and a mother of marked gentility, in a
house that was cold no matter how warm the summer, and dark though the
sun shone.

"I will not!"

The face of the Lindsay girl came between him and the tepid vision he
had conjured, as in some motion-picture device. And he saw her warmth
and bonniness, her slow laughter, her calm eyes. Why, under God's name,
must she be born in a region where the Robertson tradition did not pick?
Why must she be so desirable, and eligible wives so insipid?

"Ah, be damned to her!" he snapped viciously. "The whole thing can go
to the de'il. It's a dog's life, that's what it is, and I 'm through. Ay, I am so."

For a year he wandered across Europe, and to and fro in it. He saw
Denmark and Jutland, and though he had sworn good-by to linen, he could
not help examining the quality of the flax grown there, and he did n't think

much of it—as no good Belfast man should. He visited Holland and
approved the industrious population, but adjudged them "o'er pleased wi'
themsel's." Paris he knew before, but it palled on him now. One of his old
dreams had been to go there with Jeanie Lindsay. "It's kind o' empty," he
thought. England rather irritated him. People there, knowing he came from
Ireland, wished to know what he thought of Home Rule and were shocked
when they heard it. He went north to Scotland for golf, and the flat Scot
accent made him homesick for Belfast.

"I think I 'll just run over to see how the old town 's getting on." The
truth was, though he would n't acknowledge it to himself, he wanted to get
news of Jeanie Lindsay. How was she? And was she the same as ever? And
was she—the thought stabbed him strangely—laughing her slow laugh and
looking her calm look for some other than he?

News he got of her quickly and with a vengeance. Going across Donegal
Place he was tapped on the arm.

"I 'd like a wee word wi' you, Mr. Aleck Robertson."

He saw beside him a compact figure with a set jaw and savage eyes. He
was mostly cognizant of the eyes. They blazed at him with unconcealed
hatred.

"And who may you be?"

"You 'll know me fine afore I 'm through with you, Aleck Robertson. I 'm
Tom Lindsay, Jeanie Lindsay's brother."

Robertson forgot the eyes in the question that jumped to his lips. He held
out his hand.

"I ha'e heard her speak o' you. You 're the one that went to Newcastle, to
the shipbuilding. And how 's Jean?"

Lindsay struck the proffered hand down.

"She 's the way you left her, wi' this difference: There 's a bastard o'
yours on her arm this four months. And do you know what I 'm going to do
to you for that, Aleck Robertson? I 'm going to kill you!"

"Wi' a baby!"

"Wi' a baby o' yours!"

"Wi' a baby o' mine!" Robertson was plainly dazed.

"You were no' expecting that, maybe?"

"No! I was no' expecting that." The big man tried to pull his faculties
together.

"And where is she now? She 's no' gone away, is she?"

"No! She 's no' gone away. And she 's not where she might be, for all you
did—in the poor-house! Nor tramping the streets, selling matches! No! She
's at home. In her father's house—"

"At home, you say?"

"She 's at home." Tom Lindsay put himself in Robertson's way. "And,
now, listen to me—"

The red-bearded man shoved Tom aside as though he were a
troublesome bush in the path.

"Will you get to hell out o' my way," he roared, "afore I gi'e you a clout
on the lug?"

He started at breakneck speed down the street. The brother looked after
him silently, his jaw loose with wonder.

He pushed aside the little gate in front of the garden and though he
knocked at the door, he tried it, so impatient was he for entry, and finding it

on the latch, he opened it as a gust of wind might. In the hall he met her
coming to answer the knock, and suddenly as he saw her, all the bluster and
the heartiness went out of him, and his knees turned to water and there was
a great catch in his throat. He wanted to see her only, but the baby she had
on her arm was she also, both of them one. It suddenly occurred to him that
he too was a part of her, all three of them one. And he felt suddenly as Saul
must have felt when, going toward Damascus, he was stricken to the earth.

She smiled at his perturbation. "I 'm glad to see you, Aleck." Calmly she
shifted the child to her left arm. She put out her hand to him and he caught
it and held on to it as a foundering sailor hangs on to a thrown line. She led
him to the parlor.

"Have you no word," she smiled, "for me and this wee fellow o' yours?"

He looked at the both of them, she more like Ceres, the autumn spirit,
than ever, buxom and wise and calmly happy, and the little thing of down
and fluttering life in her arms, soft as a newly hatched chick, he sensed.

"When," he asked, and his voice in his own ears was hoarse as the
cawing of a rook, "when are you going to marry me?"

"I 'm no' so sure," she said calmly, "that I 'm going to marry you at all."

"You 're going to marry me, Jeanie, and I 'll start the mill again, and we
'll all be fine—"

"And you 'll gi'e the working people the raises they're entitled to?"

"I will not," he flashed out suddenly, as of old. "They 're entitled to
nothing."

"Then I'll ha' nothing to do wi' you." She looked at him calmly. "Nor will
this wee fellow. I 'm a working-woman, Aleck, and he 's a working-
woman's son. We 're no' your kind."

He saw the baby's face now, crumpled with sleep. Very like an old man's
face it seemed to him, and yet there was something indefinably pulling

about it.

"The wee workin'-fellow!" There was such a pathetic touch to the idea.

"By God!" he blurted suddenly. "I'll gi'e them the mill!"

She smiled again. "The wee thing then was missing in you, Aleck—I
think you got it now. And I 'll marry you, Aleck, just when you say. It's no'
too soon," she added simply.

For a minute he was sunk in abstraction while she patted his hand with
the old, familiar gesture. He raised his head and spoke with conviction.

"You know, Jeanie, you know, it's queer to think that an hour ago I had
no idea of all this. You and thon wee fellow, and the mill's working again
and a' right between me and the men. I had made an end, and now there 'll
be no end. You know, it seems ordained in a manner of speaking. Ay, as it
were, ordained. It does," he said. "It does that. Ay, indeed. It does so."

THE KEEPER OF THE BRIDGE

I

Every time he came back, after a brief visit in the South American
capital, to the gorge where he was building the great bridge, Lovat's heart
would throb and his throat swell with pride as he looked at the great stone
structure spanning the Andean chasm. First the little train would come
puffing and straining up the grade, on the iron path between the lavish
tropic greenery. Then there were the peaks of mountains, daring the sky,
their tops lightly muffled with snow. Nevada, went the Spanish word, soft
as the snow itself. Then, imminent, one felt, was the drop of the gorge, a
dramatic descent that stopped the heart in its rhythmic beating. "Here is the
end!" one said. And then the bridge!

Soaring, splendid, slender, strong, its arches spanning the tumbling river
beneath, the great bridge ran like a rainbow from mountain to mountain.
Lovat thought of it, with its lightness, its perfection, its spurning of the
ground, as a spirit that crossed with winged unwetted feet the challenging
river beneath. It suggested, somehow, Artemis in the dusk, with a tongue of
fire above her proud brow.

The wonder and the miracle of it never failed to thrill him. All the harsh
practical details of his work, details of thrust and strain, of fitting springer
to pier, and voussoir to springer, of the curve of intrados, of the strength of
abutments, never took away from him the sense that he had done, was
doing, a great and practical thing. These mountains, that composition of
jungle, that smashing drop to the turbulent river, the snarling waters
themselves—all these were the work of the Great Mason, the detail of his
Divine Hand. So they were when and so they had remained since the
heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them, and He rested
on the seventh day from all the work which He had made.

But a day would come, the Master of the Masons knew and had
ordained, when the welter of passionate nature would subside, and the small
race of mankind He had fashioned would reach a place of progress in their
journey when this would have to be bridged. Then one of His prentice men
would do it. And Lovat experienced a sense of holiness that he had been the
chosen one.

Lovat looked at the bridge with wonder and with pride each time he
returned, but each time he returned he felt somehow that the bridge had
been jealous of his absence, resented it, became temperamental as a woman.
Whilst he was there everything was right. There were accidents, of course,
but they were the recognized risks of a great venture, the ordinary failure of
the human factor in a Titanic equation. But when he was away strange
things happened. Now an unaccountable error in laying this or that, now a
sudden collapse of machinery, now a terrible accident to the native
workmen. But when he was there, all was well. It seemed as if the bridge
demanded all his time, all his talent, all his attention.

It occurred to him there was a sort of contest between him and the
bridge, a sort of quiet, deadly fight, as between a man and a spirited horse

he is riding in a steeplechase. He felt, too, that all the strange things about
him knew it—the surly river, the whispering jungle, the majestic mountains,
the cold observant stars. These could tell him what it was, for they had
observed all things, seeing history begin and peoples fade and nations rise.
They had seen great prehistoric animals flap wings terrible and dark as a
demon's. They had seen these things die and be forgotten. They were of
nature and knew humanity, and they could tell him, if they wished.

But they told nothing. They observed the cruel law of silence, which all
nature knows and dead men learn. The business was his and the bridge's.
Let the twain fight it out.

"I 'm getting morbid, up here in the mountains," Lovat complained, and
he turned abruptly to think of a month from now, when Cecily would come
south from New York to marry him in Cartagena, and to be with him for the
last days before the bridge was opened. Her dark, serious eyes and cloudy
hair and serious smiling mouth were before him, but the shadow of the
bridge rose between him and the vision of her like a barred door....

II

There were two mysteries in Simon Lovat's life. One was how he, a poor
Highland Scots-born boy, reared in abject poverty, had ever come to be the
great architect he was. And the other was how he had become engaged to
Cecily Stanford, Gamaliel Stanford's only daughter, and Gamaliel Stanford
was a millionaire.

He hated to think of his infancy in the little Argyle town where he was
born. He hated even to think of his boyhood in New York. People, he felt,
would n't understand it. They might talk of being hungry, but did they know
what hunger for years was, abject hunger, malnutrition? Did these well-fed
men who talked of hardship know, could they conceive of a family to whom
for years a nickel meant the difference between butter on bread and dry
bread? They talked of slums, and dirt, and poverty, but he kept his mouth

closed. Were he to tell them what he knew of these—he himself—might
they not draw back from him as they would draw back with a shudder from
a man who had been close to lepers? Fine words mean so little in this
world.

All his life until seven years ago, when he was twenty-five, had been a
succession of cold ill-fed days, relieved by the magic thrill of bridges.

There had been a viaduct here, a railroad span there, an Egyptian arch
somewhere else in Argyle that would vibrate some chord within him. A
rainbow would flush him with sudden beauty. And in New York the wonder
of the bridges made up for heartburnings and disappointments. The
gossamer span to Brooklyn affected him like a long note on a hunting-horn.
At times human weaknesses would boil within him, as when he thought
with rage that other boys and men must be uplifted by the prizes and
scholarships they won, feeling the pride of combat and of victory, but to
him they meant only the wherewithal to live for himself and his mother and
sisters. Other boys were welcomed with feastings when they had achieved
success, but success meant to him only the filling of famished hands—not
that he grudged it, God knows! but one hungers for a little praise, a little
recognition, as one hungers for food. And then had come the days of
obscurity, working for others until Gamaliel Stanford, the big, bluff builder,
had recognized his genius and given him his chance. He did fine work for
Stanford.

Stanford, the self-made millionaire, wished after the fashion of his kind
to patronize the genius he had found, and so he brought him here, brought
him there, to his club, to golf-links, to his house. And there Lovat met
Cecily, Stanford's daughter....

III

At thirty-one Lovat met people with ease, for they meant little to him,
men or women. Men, outside his own profession, were mere figures to him.

They did n't count. He spoke to them in the chit-chat of the day, and when
they mentioned architecture, he changed the subject deftly. The
alembication of engineering and art they could n't understand, so why talk
of it? Women he didn't mind so much. They had a soft place in his heart,
because they had been good to him as a boy and child whom there had been
few to care for.... And he had had his little love-affairs, natural as the phases
of the moon—calf-love, sentiment, adoration, passion. They had loitered,
knocked, passed by. None had ever touched that inmost self of him to
whom God had once called and said seriously: "You are to build bridges."

And then he saw Cecily Stanford coming toward him with her serious
shining eyes.

IV

She did not say to him the ordinary, obvious things a woman says when
she meets a man. She held his hand for an instant and looked at him.

"When I saw the bridge you built at Indian Ford," she told him, "I was
afraid to meet you. Afraid I might be disappointed in what you were. You
might have been a chunky, merry man who treats his genius as a favorite,
halloing to it when needed, proud of it, patronizingly modest. Or you might
have been an angular, unsure man, jealous of his talent's fame, comparing it
as one compares horses. But you are just you, Simon Lovat, and your
bridge is you, and you are your bridge. I 'm blessed to see you this day."

As he watched her he seemed to be watching not a woman but some fine
spirit that struck a silver note in its movement. Like a silver flame in the
dusk she appeared to him. There was so much spirit to her that nothing else
really mattered. The strain of Highland mysticism in him gave him an
uncanny power of seeing people as they were, not as they seemed to the
outward eye. He could look at a certain man and say to himself with
certainty, "At death that man dies," or at some sweet-faced woman,
repressed, waiting, and know, "At death this woman's life begins." He saw

Cecily Stanford and said: "This woman endures forever. She lives now and
she will live always."

And then from the spirit within his eyes went to the body without, as one
might look first at some gracious womanhood and be all eyes for her
presence, forgetting for the nonce the queenly satins that clothed it. He saw
her hair, like a blue cloud. Her eyes he knew. He saw the skilful symmetry
of face, a little, longish face with lips half open, eagerly. He sensed the
littleness of her figure, the long, firm line from knee to ankle, the small
bosom, the loveliness of arms. He saw the firm, sensitive hands.

And yet she might have been nothing to him but a gracious memory, as
of some splendid day, but that she was whole-heartedly interested in and
understood the importance of bridges. Some generous arch, or some line of
a writer's might have turned her heart that way once, and set her on that
broad masonic road the charm of which endures a lifetime. A book may
trouble or a picture inspire one, but those are of the spirit. But a bridge is of
spirit and body. One sees the architect, one sees the art, one sees the
courage and grandeur and beauty. A history of bridges is a history of the
world, of its wars, its commerce, its progress. And the thoughts about it are
without end.

And she could speak of all that to him. She understood the mystic errand
of the builder of bridges, which is to be the servant of unborn men. Old
wisdom that had been lost was reborn in her. She could feel why the heads
of a great religion should call themselves proudly sovereign pontiffs—
pontiff, pontifex, builder of bridges. She could understand the reverence that
stirred in Highlanders when they crossed a bridge and removed their
bonnets. "God bless the builder of the bridge!" their prayer went.

She could understand the ideals of an ancient age, when a community of
monks called themselves the Pontist Brothers, the Frères Pontifes. Modest,
white-robed, they built bridges of great fame, they operated ferry-boats,
they fed and housed pilgrims. But their greatest care was the building and
upkeep of bridges. Before Pius II suppressed them, they built the Pont
Saint-Esprit over the Rhone, one of the largest stone bridges in the world; a
thousand meters long, it is, with twenty-six great arches. Surely their spirits
guard it still!

She could understand the arrogant cry of the Roman architect when he
finished the great Alcantare over the Tagus. "Pontem perpetui mansurum in
saecula mundi," Lacer smiled. "It shall see the end of the world." The
Saracen trampled and Charles V rebuilt it. Wellington's troops blew it up,
and the Carlists fought on its Titanic arches. All these causes are forgotten
now. But the bridge, the bridge remains.

And because she understood these things, she understood Simon Lovat,
and got close to his heart, which none had ever been near.

V

Lovat told her his fear that never again would great stone bridges be
built. The days of beauty in bridges were past, like the days of chivalry.
Long steel suspension bridges, with their infinity of metal triangles, or
marvels of carpentry, such as the Portage Bridge over the Genesee. But
never again would they build bridges such as the Romans did, like the
dreadful Pont du Gard at Nîmes.

"They will, Simon," she told him. "You will build like that."

"Never, Cecily. Never again!"

"Yes, Simon. I know."

"All those days are gone, Cecily."

"Not for you." The conviction would shine from her eyes. "I know it
here—" she touched her head—"and here—" she touched her bosom.

And he was persuaded somehow that she was right, though his head told
him she could not be, for cement and steel are cheaper and quicker, and
only cheapness and rapidity obtain now that people no longer dream of to-
morrow. And the soldier's honor and the sailor's courage, and the writer's
fire and the builder's genius—yes, and the dreams of great merchants, too,

Lovat grimaced—are curbed and roweled by the huckster's purse.
Impossible! But somehow because she believed it, the thought took form
and substance in his heart, that one day he would build a great bridge—of
stone.

How they came so close to each other, neither knew. It was just as
natural as a tree growing out of the green ground. They came so close that
they could be silent, each with the other, for a long time, each knowing,
feeling what the other thought. Then they would smile at each other with a
strange seriousness....

One afternoon, in the December dusk, his heart opened suddenly, and all,
all the horror of his early years came rushing like a flood from a broken
dam. Why he told her he didn't know. He didn't believe it possible to tell
any one. Yet here he was, standing by the window of the drawing-room,
looking out at the street glistening with fog, while she sat huddled in a great
arm-chair by the log fire. And out of his lips in harsh staccato sentences
came the sordidness of his infant days....

"... We were pleased when we found it. And Joan took it under a shawl
and went out. But we had forgotten that the pawnbroker closed at six. So
there was nothing to eat until he should open in the morning.... We all
cried...."

He was interrupted by her terrible fit of sobbing. Suddenly he came out
of his tragic vision.

"I 'm sorry I should have horrified you," he said, aghast. "I don't know
what came over me to tell such things. I 'll go."

But she was in his arms, weeping bitterly. "To think that you and I
should have been in the same city! And I had everything, and you nothing.
You hungry! Cold! Oh, Simon! Simon!" Though they were as close as this,
as close as birds in a nest are, yet there had never been between them any
talk of marriage, any talk of life other than they were leading that week. He
knew he loved her tremendously, but fear of refusal and Scots pride because
he was poor kept the question in his heart. And she, because she was
modest as she was brave, never said anything, though she knew, she knew...

At last the miracle happened. Two South American commonwealths,
with the hearts of children and the bravery of men, decided to span the
Andes with an immense bridge. They saw only peaceful progress in front of
them, not war. The bridge was to be of stone, because stone was plentiful
and labor cheap, and to bring steel up the mountain gorge would be a
wasteful undertaking. First a German architect was to have the work, for
they had the foothold there, and then an Englishman stepped in confidently.
But old Gamaliel Stanford had his friends in New York, heads of great fruit
companies and immense agricultural-machinery syndicates, and banks
powerful as nations. So Simon Lovat was chosen.

When he and Cecily were told, he was dumb. She said nothing, but her
shining eyes spoke, and she sat and watched the proud throw of his head as
he thought of arches as powerful as the Romans', of great spans one
hundred and fifty feet in width, of voussoirs weighing each eighty tons of
stone. Suddenly he knew her eyes were showering him with joy and
confidence, and he put out his hand fearfully.

"When this is done, Cecily—" he was red as a school-boy—"would you
—could you—will you marry me?"

"Whom else could I marry, dearest one?" she answered simply.

VI

Now they were married and moved into their house, a cool bungalow on
the green hills. Love and passion abode with them, silent and strong and
clean as the winds on the great bridge below. Above them of nights was the
immense mosaic of the stars—the stars of the North, and the stars
Northerners knew not; the Southern Cross, the false cross and the True, and
an infinity of little worlds to southward yet unnamed, and which mariners
had marked with quaint Greek letters in their charts. When the moon arose
it was tremendously near, as near as Africa, so they could distinguish the
immense blue mountains and the dips and whorls of her to whom poets had

given fanciful, colorful names: the Bay of Rainbows, the Green Lagoon.
And all about them at night were movement and mystery,—the screeching
of parakeets, the chattering and whistling of monkeys,—and in the dark
green jungle there was rustling, as of pied serpents, and crackling, as of
jaguars with limbs of flame.

And then the dawn would come, and the earth, a mysterious womanhood
by night, would enter with the sun as a gracious lady. Clothed in glistening
green, and jeweled with humming-birds and the sheen of parrots, she was
like some barbaric princess of ancient days, such as Balkis, Queen of
Sheba, must have been when she went forth from Arabia Felix to view the
magnificence of Solomon the king.

There was mystery at night and there was majesty in the daytime, and
that all of nature, and then a little path of the mountainside, a little turn, a
pace a big man could make, and there arose suddenly concentration and
genius, the bridge. One felt stunned at seeing it; a man might catch his
breath and swear, a woman might cry, so great was its drama. Arch by white
arch it spanned the tropic gulf, and above it, straight as an arrow, ran the
line of roadway. Superb and splendid and slender, it joined the green-clad
mountains, as the web of a master spider joins two branches of a tree. Very
high it was, "so high that it was dreadful," the words of Ezekiel came to
one's mind, and beneath it now swirled, now weltered the tropic river, on its
way to join the Amazon, greatest of waters.

And yet somehow the bridge loitered, refused to be finished, brooded,
sulked. So much did it fight against him that had it not been for his wife
Cecily, time and time again Lovat would have lost heart.

But she was there with him, and in some hidden mystical way she had to
do with the bridge. One look at her, one touch of her, and he regained
courage and patience. Silently and strong she moved by his side, by day in
her man's breeches and gaiters and sport coat, by night in her dark-blue
garment with its rolling collar of white, somehow like a monk's but of line
and beauty. Very like a flower she was, a Northern flower, straight and
slender and supple and velvety, and strong. Yes, she had to do with the
bridge, for he had only to look into her serious smiling eyes, and to him,
through her, out of somewhere, flowed strength and wisdom.

Yes, she had to do with the bridge, he knew. Her being here was not
fortuitous. That she was a young bride on her honeymoon in an enchanted
land, was not, as it is to most women, the only thing in the world. They
were two lovers, but they were oblivious of all things, sympathized with by
all things. The bridge was there. And between him and her and the bridge
there existed some strange link of destiny. There were three of them. Two of
them were happy, but the bridge was sullen. Two of them were uncertain,
but the bridge was sure.

VII

Out of dumb rock and lifeless iron the bridge arose. First these were only
amorphous objects, and then through the fire of genius was evoked an
entity. The bridge had a personality strong as a man's, as houses have
personalities, and some trees. It rose there strong and slim and beautiful and
of use to men, but terrible as an army with banners. And though Simon
Lovat and his wife Cecily said nothing to each other about it, yet there arose
in both their minds that the bridge demanded and needed something. And
ancient lore of bridges came to them in lightning flashes of memory—old
stories of terror that told of human sacrifice before a bridge would stand.
What ancient mysticism made the priests of the Pons Sublicius of olden
Rome throw dummies of human beings into the Tiber on festal days? What
horror of old made British Vortigern build his castle over the dead body of a
murdered boy? Even in China of to-day, a pig was thrown into the river in
times of flood, that the bridge should hold. And gnarled old masons told
tales....

Old wives' tales! Ancient vile superstition! And yet, what wisdom had
departed from the world since ancient days! Not spiritual wisdom alone but
material wisdom. How were the great blocks of the pyramids raised? We
were n't certain of that! The mighty things of Easter Island, yes, and the
great stone legacies of the Incas! We did n't know. And the progress of the
world was not spiritual. It was material. And we were n't even certain of
material things.

Why did they do it, Lovat pondered! Was it a sacrifice to the bridge
itself? A tribute to the idol they had made with their own hands? Hardly!
For that would be the idea of barbarians, and barbarians never built great
bridges. Was it a sacrifice to the cruelty of the great elements that might
endanger the bridge? Possibly. And yet storm was so powerful and so cruel
when it felt that way that nothing would hinder it. What was it? He did n't
know.

And yet the bridge demanded, needed something.

Cecily felt it,, too, he knew, for she spoke one evening in the lamplight,
with averted eyes.

"Dearest one, it sounds a silly question, but why are you building the
bridge?"

"Because it's my work, Cecily, to build bridges." He felt what she meant.

"Dearest one, if the bridge were to fall, you would be heartbroken,
would n't you?"

"I 'm afraid I should, Cecily."

"Why, dearest one? Is it because you are proud of your bridge? That you
want generations to remember you by your bridge?"

"No, Cecily," he thought seriously, "it is n't that. I—I 'm just a helper of
the Master Mason, and if the bridge were to fall, I should feel I was a poor,
an unworthy helper. That's how I feel, Cecily. That's why I should be heart-
broken."

She put down the sewing work she was doing, and came to him, her eyes
misty. She took his hands. She knelt by his side.

"I know, my lover," she whispered, a little huskily, "but your bridge will
never fall. Believe it, dearest one. Believe it night and day."

But the bridge bothered him. And all her wise courage could not still its
silent clamor. He could watch the ant-like battalions of men as they laid

stone on stone, chanting in the guttural Chibcha as the bridge-builders of
Persia chanted when they built the Perl-i-Khaju at Ispahan. But above their
voices came the silent voice of the bridge, loud as thunder. Until he could
stand it no longer.

"What is it you want? In God's name what do you want?"

"You know."

"I don't know."

"Ta-wak knew when he builded the great wall of China."

"I don't know."

"King Cheops knew when he builded his great pyramid at Ghizeh."

"But I don't know."

"The Romans knew when they raised the bridges of Gaul. You know,
building me."

"I don't know. I won't know." Lovat broke from the place, his forehead
damp with perspiration. And as he went toward his cottage, it seemed to
him that the jungle and the mountains and all the creatures of the wilds
were watching with their inhuman apathetic eyes the Titanic struggle
between himself and the thing he had conceived into being, out of lifeless
iron and dumb stone.

VIII

For two days in the South American city Lovat now raged like a
madman, now was limp and gray as if all life had left. The storm crashed
like artillery. The wind swirled in terrific outshoots of uncontrolled power.
Rain whorled like a water-burst. And all the time there ran through Lovat's

head the unending, pounding rhythm: "The bridge! The bridge is down! Is
down! The bridge! The bridge is down!" Statesmen and ministers looked at
him in pity, forgetting the country's loss in the great grief of the artist.

Cecily he was n't worried about. He knew she was all right. There was
an army to take care of her there, and their home was solid, would last
against the deluge.

Three days ago and no warning of this cataclysm.

And now, to-day! To-day was like the Day of Judgment. To be sure, a
half-crazy astronomer had predicted the end of the world, and sane
scientists had pooh-poohed it, saying that there might be bad weather from
the stellar conjunctions, but outside of that—nothing. And then, suddenly,
this immensity of flood. Down in the lowlands, on the shore of the
Caribbees, there had been havoc past imagining. Whole towns were swept
away. There had been no chance of getting in touch with the bridge. All
telegraph wires were down.

Now it was Wednesday, and on Sunday he had left to discuss some
details of the opening with the ministry and he had asked Cecily to come
with him, but she would not go.

"Lover, no," she had said; "I would rather stay here by the bridge."

"But, Cecily, you have n't been away from here in two months. Would n't
you like to come to the city? There 'll be clothes to buy and people to see,
and an opera from Madrid. Come, Cecily."

"Dearest one, no!" she had refused. She smiled. "One of us must stay by
the bridge."

"But, Cecily—"

"No! No!"

She loved the bridge as much as he.

On the little platform of the working railroad station he had said good-by
to her. The train started and she ran alongside.

"Stop the train!" she cried.

He pulled the emergency cord.

"What is it, Cecily? Changing your mind?"

"Dearest one, I just want to kiss you again before you go. Just once
more. I 'm a silly woman."

"Come with me, Cecily. Come as you are. We can get you clothes in
town."

"No, lover. I must stay and take care of your bridge. I don't mind who 's
looking, lover. Just—kiss me again."

Had she some premonition of the disaster? Did that spiritual wisdom
which we call intuition, tell her of ruin that was hovering like a hawk? Poor
Cecily! How heartbroken she'd be. Her eyes, her poor eyes, would be burnt
with crying. Poor Cecily! Perhaps he could make her believe it did n't
matter. Nothing mattered so long as he had her. Ah, but it did! He would
never build another bridge. He might do mighty structures of iron and
cement, immense feats of engineering, but never a great stone bridge again.
Never again!... Poor Cecily!

IX

He had steeled himself to see it all, and on Saturday when the storm had
subsided, and the little train started up the mountainside, his face was a gray
mask, and the nearer the top he came, the more impassive, the grayer was
his face. A little turn of a boulder and he knew he 'd see the ruin. A few piles
and the welter of the swollen river attacking them. His eyes were open, but
he saw nothing. The official beside him suddenly screamed.

"My God! Excellency! The bridge!"

"Yes, I know. The bridge is down."

"The bridge is there. Excellency, the bridge is there!"

All Lovat could do was to laugh, a vacant laugh. Yes, it was there. But it
was so impossible. The sun suddenly flashed behind it, and he saw the
arrogant white structure soar like a bird, joining green hill to green hill.
Beneath it rolled an unknown river, not the tumbling, snarling river of a
week before, but a brown concave current, become gigantic, flying
northward to the greatest of waters and carrying on its thewed back death
and desolation. There was something that looked like a man and then an ox.
And here was the wreckage of a homestead. And there was a jaguar and
here was a great serpent of the jungle, and now a horse and here a gigantic
tree. But the bridge spurned the river, floated on it like a swan. Lovat
jumped off on the platform.

"It holds! It stays!" he cried exultantly. He rushed toward the house.
"Cecily, it holds!"

But he felt, as he flung open the door, that the house was empty.

"Cecily! Where are you, Cecily?"

There was no one there but a weeping, terrified maid.

"Where is Madame? Where is your señora?"

But she only wept and wrung her hands. Lovat, half crazy, yanked her to
her feet, and shook her.

"Where is Madame?

"Cecily! Cecily!"

He ran outside. It suddenly occurred to him that all his men had made
way for him from the station, with silent pitying eyes. Why, they should
have been cheering, too, but for something—

"Cecily! Cecily!" He ran around the little house.

One of the big Inca foreman detached himself from a standing group,
and stood in front of the frenzied man.

"Excellency," he said, "there's no good calling Madame. Madame has
left us."

"Left us? What do you mean?"

"Excellency—" the big Indian threw his hands toward the river—"the
bridge is there, but Madame has left us. Don't you understand?"

With numbing force the blow descended on Lovat.

"The bridge took her, you mean."

"No, señor. She left us."

Lovat suddenly straightened up.

"Mason, what do you mean?"

"Señor, when the wind came and the flood, the men quit. The wind
shrieked through the arches. The river rose and attacked the piers. And the
bridge groaned, and we left. It was the will of God, we thought. He did n't
want this chasm joined.

"And I came up toward your house, señor, to see if everything was right
there. I met Madame on the path. She had her big black cloak on.

"'You had better go back, señora,' I said.

"'I am going to the bridge,' she said.

"'But it is growing black as night, señora; you had better go back.'

"'Stand aside, Vicente,' was all she said. And there was something in her
eyes that made me give way. She went on.

"Excellency, I loved Madame, as did every one here. And she liked me.
And I was your man. I followed her down the path. I caught up to her at the
bridge. It was blue dark, like twilight. The bridge was quivering. I caught
the edge of her cape.

"'What are you going to do, señora?'

"'Stand aside, Vicente.'

"'You are crazy, señora!' I cried out.

"'No, Vicente, I am wise.'

"'You must n't, señora!'

"'I must, Vicente.'

"'Let me, señora,' I pleaded.

"'Vicente,' she said, 'you 've done your work on the bridge. Now I must
do mine.'

"I could n't stop her, Excellency. Something in the face, in the eyes—I
don't know—I dropped on my knees. She moved over the bridge.

"Excellency, from the time she was on it the bridge stopped quivering,
the wind hushed. I saw her drop her cloak as she stood in the center. I saw
her step forward, sure, unafraid. And for an instant I saw her, like a blossom
in the wind....

"And so, Excellency, the bridge stands, will always stand...."

X

So there it was, all finished, all done, and for the last time Lovat looked
at it, saw the green mountains, the tumbling river, the white span of the
bridge. But the bridge and he were finished now. His work was done.

The little Latin-American official touched his elbow deferentially.

"Excellency, the train!"

"Yes, the train," Lovat repeated mechanically. His companion looked at
him with grave sympathy. Only three months ago Lovat was a young and
happy bridegroom. To-day the builder was a grave gray-haired man.

Yes, the bridge was done, Lovat knew. A little while ago it was just the
product of his hand and genius and will, a thing of himself. But now it was
a fulfilled entity, with its own duties, its own uses, its own destiny. Over it
went trains joining country to country and sea to sea. Over it went the
loping Latin people. Over it went the little patient burros, pannier-laden. In
confidence all went over it.

"It will stand." Lovat knew. "It will always stand."

But there was no high note of proud achievement in his thought. It
would not stand because of skill in building or strength in masonry. But
because there guarded it one whose pleading sacrificial fingers would
unclench the angry hand of God. Flood and thunder and immense winds
would spare it because of that guardian like a white flame, to whose
unselfishness selfish nature must do reverence.

The official ventured to recall him:

"Excellency!"

"Just one more moment!"

He had a vision of her for the moment, and his throat quivered and his
eyes were uncertain. He saw her in her white, billowing gown, with her
dark head and face like a flower. Two brown shy little children were
standing fearful of the bridge, and she knelt to them. "Come, darlings," he

could hear the deep remembered voice. She led them confidently across his
bridge, and as she led them she smiled to him.

Well, he must go. There was other work to be done, other bridges to
build, until the time the Master of the Masons told him to rest. He must be
about his work.

"All our life is work," he said to himself as he boarded the train. "All our
love is comradeship."

Well, there was work to be done, and there was comradeship. She would
always be with him now, being dead....

IN PRAISE OF LADY MARGERY KYTELER

I

All those things I dreamed about, and I thousands of miles away, are
there still: the house, half farm-house and half castle, at one end an ancient
military tower, at the other a thatched cottage; all the trees—the ash, the
elms, the chestnut with the dark-green foliage and the prickly bulb
containing the polished mahogany fruit, the rowan-trees with the gallant red
berries, bitter as death, the copper beech with the foliage of lace and the
fuzzy brown nuts, the apple- and pear-trees, and the trees of cherries that
the birds do be ever after.

The lawns that were once shaven so closely are now rectangles of high
sweet grass where the bees are seeking. And the tennis-courts, where once
was the laughter of young girls—those, too, are knee-high in grass, swaying
in the soft Irish wind. And here and there is a gallant yew-tree, blackly
green. Roses still cling to the wall, and around all the walls are riots of
flowers.

The low greenhouses are still there, under whose glass roofs grew great
purple grapes, and where row on row of exotic flowers grew and delicate
ferns whose names are unknown to me, so much closer are men and horses
to me than flowers and ferns. Ivy is on the walls, soft-looking as velvet, and
the winds and rains have been kind to the lodge and the stables. The walls
are still white and a little moss is on the slates of them, and a soft and gentle
grass is between the cobbled stones.

And the deep well is there. And everywhere are birds and bees. The bees
are wild now, who once lived in skips of yellow straw, and their nests are in
the long grass, and there, too, is the meadowlark, and under the eaves the
swallows flit. And here the robin is safe with his impudent eye, and the
blackbird of the yellow bill. And everywhere the throaty murmur of the
wood-pigeons, the thrum of their wings.

Eh! There it is all still, at the foot of the soft and purple mountains—the
Sugarloaves, the Big Sugarloaf and the Little, and the hill called Kitty
Gallagher's, and the Scalp with its slender tower and the sweet shoulder of
Three Rock Mountain. And below—one could pitch a stone nearly—is
Dublin, the abiding city. There the Liffey, rippling gently to the sea. And
one can almost see St. Patrick's, where great Swift was Dean, and Trinity,
where poor Goldsmith and fearless Burke were students. The broad streets,
the princely squares. And there Robert Emmet was hanged for treason
against our Sovereign Lord the King, His Crown and Majesty, and Lord
Edward, the rebel Geraldine, was stabbed. And there is Clontarf, where
Brian the High King fought the red Danes, fought and died, but fought and
conquered. And there Howth, where Iseult, the Dublin princess, sailed to
marry Mark in rugged Cornwall, sailed with Tristram....

Eh! There from Mount Kyteler one can see it all—the soft dreaming
mountains, the sad weeping city. And here where was once the laughter of
young women, the barking of dogs, the neighing of horses, the shouting of
lads—here is silence, but for the husky note of the wood-pigeon, the little
thunder of his wings, and the droning of the seeking bees. All, all are dead,
but here is no desolation. There is the sweet gentleness of remembered
twilights, and the copper beech rustles, and the rowan nods, and the apple-
trees murmur with their antique boughs: "Is it yourself is in it, Ronnie? Is it

yourself, long lad? And it is long you've stayed away from us in foreign
lands and bitter seas. And it's Lady Margery you 're looking for? And Paddy
the Pipes? You mind him, do you so? And Jacky Sullivan—ah, the great
lad! Sure, they 've just left this minute, laughing fellow. Gone to see the old
earl, they have. Sure, you'll be following them, and seeing them all soon.
Over the mountains they went, a wee ways. You 'll see them all soon, very
soon, a wheen of years...."

Not for long will be this sweet silence, this soft, dim loneliness. Soon
will be business of courts, justices sitting in wig and gown. And Mount
Kyteler will die, and its name be forgotten. Sad history will pass and affairs
proceed in their inexorable ordinance. And where once great Norman
fighters charged in mail, and Elizabethan nobles ruffled, and the old red-
faced earl swore when the gout was on him, and of late Lady Margery
moved over lawns and walks with her sweet, sad-faced dignity, will be
three or four little farms, their smoke blue against the purple of Three Rock
Mountain. And the lawns will turn to fields of blue corn, and fat cattle will
graze where once was a maze of flowers.

And all the crops will prosper there. And the children that are born of the
farmer folk will be happy as the birds in the trees. There will be no blight
on the milk the cows give, and there will be great luck on the stock of the
kindly land. Always will there be prodigal bees and the dancing of
swallows.

There are houses and lands that are kindly, and places that are sinister,
fields that are surly, meadows that are sweetly generous. Old things, if we
watch them, have a very human quality, and that is because they have been
intimately connected with people who have these qualities themselves. One
influences one's surroundings so much. Whirling sparks of personality fall
from us and charge what we have usually by us. On all the estate came such
a current of sweetness that even the thieving wood-pigeons grew generous,
leaving the young trees alone.

Will she ever come back here when Mount Kyteler is gone, and the little
whitewashed farmhouses are an outpost against the heather of Three Rock
Mountain? I think she will. She will have so much beauty to know, now she
is dead, that she will not begrudge the loss of the flower gardens and the

courts where tennis was played. Apple-trees and flowers will be hers
wherever she is, and perhaps the same ones—who can say no? Yet I can see
her come to visit the whitewashed houses in the hushed summer twilight,
when the daisies have tucked in their modest heads and only the great foam
of the hawthorn billows over the country-side. On some warm little breeze
from Three Rock Mountain she will come. And horses in their stalls will
know her, and the kine will turn their heads to her, lowing gently, and the
dogs will bark joyously, and some little child on the floor will stand up
suddenly and run forward, its arms outstretched, bubbles of laughter beating
from the tiny lips....

II

Now when the last Lord Kyteler died, there was very little fuss made.
Another poverty-stricken Irish peer gone. He had n't been rich enough to
own an estate large enough for tenants to squabble on. A few farms here and
there through the country, Mount Kyteler itself, not worth a tremendous
amount. He was the last lord of one of these very, very old families who had
been lost in the back-wash of Irish history. Once Kytelers had fought in the
Holy Land under Richard the Lion-Hearted and had fought later under Irish
viceroys against the O'Bernes and O'Tooles and O'Moores of the Wicklow
hills; and antiquarians remembered that Dame Alice Kyteler was the most
sinister witch of all Ireland, and was burned at the stake in Kilkenny many
centuries before. But it was a matter of politics more than demonology,
though undoubtedly Dame Alice was second only to Gilles de Rais,
murderer and Marshal of France, in worship of evil idols and in sinister
sacrifice....

It was one of these old names that should have died out, when the
medieval chivalry of Europe died, Knights Templar and sporting Norman
bishops and morbid medieval ladies. But it existed, as many things exist in
Ireland and are forgotten in Europe and never known in America,—strange
Christian customs, strange pagan beliefs,—and "It" the most horrible of all
horrible ghosts.

They were a poor family, as poor is understood in Ireland. That is, they
had money enough for all necessities and many luxuries. They had money
enough for food, for clothes, for a few good horses for conveyance and
hunting, and they could go to the viceregal court at Dublin Castle and be
decent figures there. But they could not keep racehorses, which is really a
great hardship if you are Irish, and they could not afford to live in London
as an Irish nobleman should live, which should be as a very great nobleman
indeed. They were as well off as a rich farmer, and they had a title, and they
were not intolerably proud.

If you were to meet a very red-faced man in tweeds and with a heavy
stick, at the Curragh races, betting modest sovereigns, and were told that he
was the Earl of Mount Kyteler, you would feel that there was something
wrong. He had not that terrible courtesy of the earls and better sort of dukes
which makes you feel like a clodhopper, no matter from which particular
Irish king you claim direct descent. He was too human, too decent an old
skate; you chuckled when you thought of a coronet cocked rakishly over
that red, weather-beaten face.

Oh, but Lady Margery! that was different!

Her appearance I could describe to you: the close-bound black hair, the
face like some rain-washed flower, the dark luminous eyes and laughing
lips, the balanced neck, the body that was half boy's and half young
woman's. All that means nothing, but if I say that when she appeared there
was a chime like an old silver bell, such antique sweetness came upon the
air ... the feet that never seemed to touch the ground, her long, white, quiet
hands. How that old-world title fitted her, described her! Not demure miss,
not buxom mistress, but the Lady Margery Kyteler.

How important it is for me to bring her back, to have her real for an
instant in the clear air! But not as a necromancer under the glittering stars,
with circle and acolyte, fire, sword, and crown, saying terrible words—Here
be the symbols of secret things, the flags and banners of God the
Conqueror, the weapons to compel the aerial potencies—and have that
sweet face come white and fearful in the gray dawn. I would have her seen
with her merry smile, her feet that moved lightly, as to hidden music, her
long quiet hands. For all her boyish strong body, there was such harmony

and light, one knew that beyond the body was something that would not die
with the years—no more than the sun dies when it drops into the sea, or the
sweet, friendly moon. To see her was more than miracles; she convinced
better than the fathers of the church.

Very unconsciously she did all this. And very embarrassed she would
have been and a little mad she would have thought one, had she been told
she was an argument for eternity. Know her to be eternal, but see her
playing with a terrier, pulling its tail, its ears, and clipping it deftly under
the jaw as it snapped playfully. Or stroking the sleek neck of a horse, and
talking to it as horses love to be talked to, or kneeling to comfort some
crying child of the people, and wooing it back to happiness by being very
happy herself....

III

Now by the ordinance of time and nature the old earl was quietly
gathered to his forbears—to Gilles de Kyteler, who came over to Ireland
with Strongbow; to Piers Kyteler, who could run against a horse for five
miles; to Dame Alice Kyteler, whose name is still used to frighten little
children; to Fulke, or the bastard Kyteler, who joined with Silken Thomas
in rebellion; Hugh, who lost the family money in the South Sea Bubble; to
another Pierce, who backed Boxer Donelly, the Irishman, against the
English champion, Cooper, for a thousand pounds—and won!—to Hugh,
who grew rare tulips, and to Patrick, of whom it was said he was the
stupidest man in Ireland. Some one has written a book about the family;
possibly it's worth reading, probably not.

And now of the family of the Earls of Mount Kyteler there was only one
left, the Lady Margery Kyteler, and she was alone in the world.

Except for the ordinary natural grief for the old earl, whom she loved
and liked, she did n't mind being alone. Mount Kyteler had now only seven
servants, an ancient cook and two equally ancient maids, a gardener so

ancient as to need an assistant, who was himself so verging on the ancient
that it was a puzzle as to what assistance he could give. There were a couple
of lads in the stable, lads of fifty, a groom, and a coachman, the coachman
assuming the livery of butler on great occasions, such as in Horse Show
Week. Ancient grumbling people they all were, who were united only in
this, that they loved her. Among themselves there were always ancient
grudges, present fights. And instead of her ruling them, they ruled her with
a terrible tyranny.

The old cook below-stairs was forever complaining of the great work to
be done, and refusing to have any help given her.

"Is it bringing in another you 'd be and me here child and woman for
fifty years? Twelve years old I was when they brought me into the pantry
and set me to cleaning knives, and now it's on top of me you 'd be bringing
some streel you 'd be getting out of a register's office, a woman does be
following the tinkers to the Country Wicklow, mad with love. Och, to think
of the insult put on me this day! Wirra, is thrue!"

"Sure, it 's only to help you, Peggy."

"And what help would I be needing, me that's the fine, supple woman, in
the prime o' my years! Ne'er a day over sixty I am, and thirty hard years'
work in me still."

"But you were complaining, Peggy."

"Sure, 't was only to keep my mind active I was."

The old gardener could be terrible, with his face like an apple and his
bent back. He watched her as he might watch a thieving boy.

"Now, if it's a thing you 'd be wanting chrysanthemums, my lady, would
n't it be the right and proper thing for you to be coming to me, that's the
head gardener of this garden, and if it's a thing there 's chrysanthemums in
it, you 'll get them, and if it's a thing there 's no chrysanthemums in it, you
won't."

"I thought I 'd save you trouble, Darby."

"And what trouble would you be saving me, my Lady, by destroying the
symmetry of the design? All the work that 's on me, and ne'er a hand's turn
do I get from the young fellow that's the assistant. Devil the hand's turn he 's
done in all the forty-three years he 's been here, barring playing the
bagpipes in the greenhouse and talking about the good ould times. I mind
the time your grandfather was in it, my Lady—a real gentleman him. He
would n't put a hand on an apple, or a gooseberry itself, without asking the
head gardener's permission."

Also were the two ancient maids problems in their way. They were
forever sniffing at each other, and complaining of each other to Margery.

"If your Ladyship would be so kind as to give Rose Ann a tip about her
conduct, 't would be a mercy so. For the queer way she does be acting with
the postman is no credit to this house at all. New ribbons in her cap, indeed,
looking for love, when she ought to be making her peace with God and
man."

But Rose Ann had the same story.

"If your Ladyship pleases, a wee word to Ellen would not be out of the
way. 'T is the postman, your Ladyship, has been complaining bitterly.
'Ma'am,' says he to me, 'would you be telling a secret?' 'If so be as I know
it,' says I, 'I will.' 'Is that one,' says he, 'right in her head?' 'Is it Ellen you
mean?' says I. ''T is that same,' says he. ''T is that has been puzzling myself,
but why do you ask?' say I. ''T is the dirty look she has in her eye,' says he,
'and the queer conversation is at her. "'T is the world's wonder you never
married," she does be telling me, "and you the fine lad you are."' Your
Ladyship should speak to her. You should so."

"I will, Rose Ann."

But worst of all were the quarrels between the coachman and the groom.
The coachman was a fine, florid man, and the groom was a wizened little
troll who had once been a jockey. The coachman was always in decent
black, the groom in corduroys. They were forever arguing on everything,

from politics to horses. Once Lady Margery had come into the yard to see
the groom stepping around like a bantam boxer, his hands up, his feet
tapping the ground like a dancer's.

"Put up your hands!" he was shouting. "Put up your hands!"

"Go 'way t' the divil out o' that!"

"Come on if you 're fit! Come on if you 're man enough! I 'll give you a
beating you 've been spoiling for for the last thirty years."

"Go 'way t' the divil out o' that!"

"I will not go 'way out o' that. It's fight I want. I 'm boiling mad for one
clout at your ugly gob."

"Will you whisht!" The coachman had seen Lady Margery.

"I will not whisht. Put up your hands! I 'll not stop till I 'm dug out of
ye!"

"Kelleher, Brady, what's this?"

The groom dropped his fighting attitude and pulled off his cap.

"'T is just a foolish wee argument we were having, m'lady. I was telling
this bloody old cod—begging your pardon, m'lady, for giving him his right
name—that Lynchehaun the murderer was by rights a cousin to my mother's
people, and he said that it was n't in either side of my family to produce a
fine murdering man like the same Lynchehaun. So I up and gives him a tip
about himself and his drunken old mother...."

"Kelleher!"

"Not that I know anything about her, m'lady, but I just thought that if he
had any pride, it would cut him to the quick!"

IV

Nobody in the world but herself, she thought often, could have kept
them. But if she sent them away, where would they go? The old gardener—
could he last away from the soil he had tended with the care of parents?

And the maids would be lost in a modern world. And for all that the two
men in the stable fought, they loved each other in a strange way. She
couldn't pension them off; and, also, they got their work done in a
surprisingly efficient manner.

And, besides, she could not see new servants in the old house. The maids
were as much part of the place as the portraits of dead Kytelers on the
walls. They had blended into a mellow composition. They all loved her in
their queer selfish way, depended on her for vitality. She could hardly go on
visits any more, so much did they grumble. "Sure, it is n't to England you 'd
be going, my lady, and the grand house you have of your own!" And not
only the servants but the old drowsing dog, Sheila, the little Scottie bitch,
who was drawing on fourteen years old and nearly blind, and the foxhound
puppies, who waited for her when she was n't there, and ancient Fenian, the
old steeplechaser, who was near ending his days. All these laid imploring
hands on her.

Her mother she had not known, the countess dying when Margery was
not yet two; and the earl had never married again. But the house had been a
mother to her. The deep drawing-room, the heavy formal dining-room, the
little sitting-room so bright. There was no place in the world so comfortable
as the drawing-room of Mount Kyteler in the winter evenings, with the
portraits blinking in the light of candles in their silver sticks and the
glimmer of the sea-coal in the grate. And her own room at night, on
moonlight nights, whence she could see Dublin Bay shine silver and the
dark trees bending in the breeze from Three Rock Mountain.

Every tree she knew; every tree had for her a personality. The copper
beech was friendly and kindly, the rowan-trees aloof but kindly, the oaks
majestic but clumsily kindly; the apple-trees were smiling. All the flowers
she knew, all the shrubs. They had seen her stumble as a child of two, they

had seen her rollick as a child of seven, they had seen her dream at ten, and
grow ugly at twelve, and grow pretty in her late teens, and at twenty
beautiful, and now beautiful and assured.

In no other country than Ireland, in no other city than Dublin could such
beauty and grace exist alone in an old house. They would have fêted her,
made merry with her, married her. A young beauty in an ancient house with
grizzled servants. But in Ireland a great beauty has so many competitors for
the songs of the poets, the passion of the young men. There is the biting
excitement of treason, politics charged with lightning. There are the far
places of the world calling to Irish adventurers. There are careers calling for
vitality and ambition. And what young woman dare presume to bother poets
when there are great purple mountains to enthrall them, and wooded glens
and the crashing sea? And winds like wine. The crooning of great romantic
ghosts. And an Irish poet is not a pale man to be comforted by women, but a
lithe, muscular man with a sword.

Also, in Ireland is little marriage or giving in marriage, if we except the
peasantry and the very poor. The young men spread their wings to go
abroad, and when they return it is usually with a foreign bride, so that there
are convents innumerable in that country, also many mad women at large,
as in politics. Unless a girl is very rich she has little chance of a happy
marriage. A title may help her, curates and captains in the army having a
belief that the daughters of earls will help them to preferment; also, it
sounds well, they think—the Reverend Septimus and Lady Jones, Captain
and Lady Plantagenet Murphy. There are sadder things in Ireland than the
weeping skies.

But though the right of marriage may be often denied them, young Irish
girls have always their inalienable right of dreams. Soft winds and nodding
flowers and sun going down on the western hills, and with the twilight
comes always a love. Out of the blue twilight and soft wind they weave a
magical life of love that will be always young, of a world that will be ever
kind, of little dark children and loyal friends, of the pageantry of foreign
cities, of triumphs for their own beauty and the lover's ability. The skies are
always blue in their dreams, and tragedies there are none, nor any
sordidness. And they grow old so peacefully in their dreams, so gracefully,

and death comes so gently, so kindly—the lover always by, always young,
always loving.... Out of the blue twilight and soft wind they dream their
dreams, and they never notice that the blue of the twilight has become a
threatening black, and the soft wind has withdrawn in itself with the set sun,
as a flower does, and all of a sudden it has grown cold, damp, and lonely
and cold.

The dream of Margery was around Mount Kyteler. It seemed to her that
the house, and the garden and the trees, and the old servants, and the
drowsing dogs, and the ancient steeplechaser out to grass were all part of
the French nursery, "La Belle au Bois Dormant," "The Beauty in the
Sleeping Wood." And one day the princely lover would come, breaking
through the hedge of Irish stillness, and Mount Kyteler would bloom again.
The backs of the gardeners would straighten and the maids become young
again. And by some strange magical process the steeplechaser would again
win races, and the old dog win ribbons, and children would stumble under
the tall trees, as she had stumbled twenty years before. All this would
happen with the coming of the prince, all this she could see, but his features
she could not plainly see. Only she knew this, that his face would be
shining with love and smiles.

V

So that when she met him she did not recognize him at first, nor for
many days afterward. On his face were puzzlement and a frown. A clean-
cut, red-headed man, he was standing in the road on a frosty November
morning, when she was out walking a brace of foxhound puppies. The
puppies seemed delighted at the sight of him, all but tearing the leash from
her hand.

"Could you tell me," he asked, "where Tallaght is?" He pulled the ears of
the foxhound puppies.

"You 're in Tallaght," she said.

He looked incredulously at the scattered houses.

"Is this—"

"Yes. Is there any place in particular you 're looking for?"

"No," he said, "just Tallaght."

"Well, you have Tallaght." She laughed a little at his rueful expression.
"You seem surprised."

"I am," he laughed. "For many years, when I was a child, I have been
hearing about Tallaght, until it had assumed tremendous proportions for me,
and now—"

"Abroad?"

"Yes."

"Australia?"

"No. America."

"What are you looking for? The old homestead?"

"No," he said; "I don't think there ever was an old homestead. There
might have been a little cabin somewhere, but it was n't here." He laughed.
"I 'll tell you. My father was an old Fenian, and he was at Tallaght when
they gathered to descend on Dublin, but for some reason or other the battle
was not fought, nor the enemy driven into the sea, nor anything. And my
father, with a lot of others, fled to America. But I had an impression of a
mountain pass and camp fires and great guns."

"It rained all night, did n't it? Did your father say?"

"No, he never mentioned the rain."

She liked this man, she told herself directly. The big, clean look of him,
his gray eyes and red hair, his splendid teeth. Also there was something

about him so easy. He was Irish; no mistaking that. But pleasant, fine Irish.
It was not always you met them pleasant and sincere. And this man was
sincere. This man was not inimical. They would make a nice pair, she
thought simply, he big and clear-eyed and red, herself slim and dark.

"Could I bother you again?" he asked. "How do I get to the railway
station?"

"I 'm going that way, if you care to come."

There was a nice chivalry about him; she felt that as they walked
together. Was that American? she wondered.

"May I ask you something? Are most Americans like you?"

"Yes," he said, "of course."

She was puzzled. She had an impression that all Americans were called
"Silas" and twanged, "I guess." Also, they chewed gum. There was
something wrong.

"You are n't called Silas, are you?"

"No; Richard. Did you think all Americans were called Silas?"

"Something like that," she admitted. And they looked at each other and
laughed. She had a joyous feeling that the maids at home would disapprove
of this strongly. And that the old gardeners would tremble with rage. But the
dogs approved.

"What sort of time are you having in Ireland?"

"Not so good," he admitted. "I 've been here a week, and the only friends
I 've made are cab-drivers. Also, I have a bowing acquaintance with a head
waiter."

"Cab-drivers are good fun," she ruminated.

They were at the station now.

"Look here," she said suddenly as she was leaving: "if you are having a
rotten time like that in Dublin, and know nobody, it must be lonely! I
wonder—" She looked at him fearlessly. "Look here: if you 'd care to, come
out and see me at Mount Kyteler—my name 's Kyteler. There are dogs and
horses and an old house you might like to see."

"May I? Thanks. My name's O'Conor. I 'll come, then, Miss Kyteler."

"Lady Margery Kyteler."

"Do I call you all that? Lady Margery Kyteler?"

"No. Just Lady Margery."

"Lady Margery! That's nice."

When he came, he came with a great armful of flowers, which Margery
received with a smile and courtesy, and turned over to Rose Ann. He
seemed scrubbed, so glistening was he. How like an old friend he was, with
his firm handshake and laughing eyes.

"Now," he said, "I 'd like the worst over."

"What is the worst?"

"Oh, meeting people. Your relatives. The Lady This and the Lady That,
and the countess, and the duke. Above all, the duke."

"There are none," she said. "I live here by myself."

"All by yourself, in this big house?"

"Yes."

"Might I ask, are you married?"

"No-o-o," she pondered. "Um, no."

He looked at her incredulously. He had never in his life seen any one so
beautiful, he thought. The small face, the soft and sweet and smiling dark
eyes, the hair like a perfumed dark cap on a head whose sweet shape he
could imagine. And the supple figure in the frock that was close in the
bosom and belled like a dancer's from the waist down.

"Well, that beats—" he murmured.

"Beats hell, doesn't it?" She finished for him.

"These old pictures, some of them are good." She smiled. "That's Gilles
de Kyteler—not the one who came with Strongbow but a later one. And
that's Fulke Kyteler, who rebelled with Silken Thomas, and tried to burn the
Archbishop of Cashel in his own cathedral. They were very disappointed
when they found the archbishop had slipped out. And that—" she pointed to
a polished oval of black stone, framed in antique silver—"is Dame Alice
Kyteler's magical mirror. She was the greatest of the Irish witches."

She gave him tea and listened to him talk of America and of his work
there. He was some sort of engineer, building bridges. She got an
impression of him standing on an artifice of some kind, with plans in his
hand, directing a whole crowd of workmen. He had been in Brazil and in
China.

"You must be a good engineer," she said in her direct way.

"I 'm supposed to be a very good engineer," he laughed.

"Do you make a great deal of money?"

"A good deal. Not a great deal."

"I 'm glad," she said. He looked at her in surprise. She was dusting her
fingers daintily, but her eyes smiled. She was really glad. And he said to
himself, "My soul! we 're friends."

She took him into the garden, and he laughed.

"And I brought you flowers." There was a little shade of disappointment
in his laugh.

"Indeed and indeed—" she looked him in the eyes and lied sweetly
—"'Twas I needed them, for it's the devil and all for me to get any flowers
out of my own garden. My two old gardeners are that mean! Darby 'd
begrudge me a daisy for fear it 'd leave an unsightly gap in the grass. There
he is, watching me for fear I 'll pull a leaf. Darby, this is Mr. O'Conor, and I
'm showing him the garden."

"If he 'd come fifteen years ago, your Ladyship, or even ten years ago, he
'd have seen the like would have made his heart glad. But in the latter years,
with the bad weather that's in it, now too much rain and now not enough
rain at all, and the wind that nothing is a shelter against, and the soil that's
growing poor, for all the time that's spent on it, till it's hard to rear anything,
even a head o' cabbage itself—m'lady, will you for God's sake leave off
pulling at that hedge?"

She took him to see old Fenian in the paddock, and she liked the way he
pulled the jumper's ears, ran his firm hand down the fetlocks.

"Was he a great horse?"

"Nearly the greatest of his day," she answered. "He never won a Grand
National, but was third twice and second once. He had a great heart. No
horse tried harder. The people loved him.... Kelleher, this is Mr. O'Conor,
from America."

"From America, is it, your Ladyship? Oh, sure, they 've fine horses over
there. But they 've got to come to us for the hunters. Begging your
Ladyship's pardon, but was your Honor ever in Kansas City?"

"I was."

"D' your Honor ever meet a man named Hannigan out there? Red
Hannigan, they called him, a holy terror for bloody murder, the same man
was."

"I don't think so."

"He was n't as red as your Honor—begging your pardon—but sandy
like. And he carried his head on one side on account of a belt in the gob he
got in a wee argument out at the Lamb Doyle's."

"He must have gone when I got there."

"He must have, your Honor, or you 'd have met him. A genius for horses,
the same Red. 'T was he cured Colonel Nolan's charger of biting. 'Roast a
leg of lamb,' he told them, 'and take it out of the oven mad hot, and when he
offers to bite,' says he, let him bite into that. By God! he 'll never bite again.'
And he never did."

Came at last the time for leaving.

"I wonder," he ventured, "I wonder if I could get you to come in and
have dinner and go to the theater. I don't know what kind of a theater it is,
but would you?"

How like a flower she herself was, he thought—the white stalk of her
dress, the sweet face, the dark head! She frowned. His heart sank.

"I don't see how I could," she said. "I 've got to get back here. I usually
take the dinners and theaters in a quarterly debauch of one week. No, I don't
see how ..."

His heart sank a little farther. Was this definitely good-by?

"No, but I 'll tell you what you could do, if you 'd care to. Come out on
Saturday and take me to the Leopardstown races. I 'm sick of going alone."

His heart rose.

"And come back and have dinner with me instead."

His heart sang.

Came now a day of wonder. Day of Leopardstown, frosty morning and
road glistening like pewter, and the grass crackling underfoot, stiff with
hoar. The little race-course at the foot of the mountains. Crowds stamping in
the friendly cold. The horses jibbing, curving under their jockeys at the
starting-wire. Flash of jockeys' colors, gold and green, red and white, all
sorts of blue—sky, sea, St. Patrick's. The drop of the flag. The flying wedge
of stretching mounts and huddled riders. Thunder of hoofs coming to
jumps, hurdling, lightning spring and over, larruping canter toward the next,
smack of crop, over, by Heaven! The hedge now and the five-barred gate,
and the stretch toward the judges' stand. A mad cheering and the clanging of
a great bell. The favorite 's won!

A little hush, a rush to the ring to see the horses for the next race. She
wore a great frieze coat, like a man's, and a riding-hat, like a man's too. At a
little distance she seemed like a boy in clothes too big for him, and as one
came nearer, one noticed, between the collar and the brim of the hat, the
sweet narrow neck and the hair gathered up like some very little girl's.
There was something heart-pulling in it, like a child's curled fingers. And
then she turned, and her face showed, pointed like a cub fox's. The cheeks
flushed with the cold, the lips with a merry smile, her eyes with a deeper
smile—there were so many there who knew her, and to whom O'Conor was
presented, including an Irish duchess, with a voice like a saw, who rasped;
"H' a' yo?" and then wailed, "My God! D' yo' ever see such a God-forsaken
bunch o' mokes in all your life?" And a tall, thin baronet who asked him
was he one of the O'Conors of Baltimore, to which he replied, no, that he
was one of the O'Conors of Forty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. "Ah,
yes! Ah, yes!" There was a French cavalry officer buying horses in Ireland,
a dark, thin man with a heavy mustache, who looked more like a New York
plain-clothes policeman than a hero of Algiers. Also, there was Mr. Kelly.

Margery had noticed a great rangy gelding in the ring. He looked to have
the power of a steam-engine.

"See?"

O'Conor nodded.

"Flying Fish."

A large red-faced man with a stout ash plant was passing.

"Oh, Mr. Kelly!"

"Ah, sure, Lady Margery!"

"Do you know anything of Flying Fish?" She lowered her voice. "Is he a
good horse?"

"He is. And he is n't."

"Might he win this race?"

"He might. And he might n't."

"You 're not telling me much."

"I am," he looked wise, "and I am n't," he looked wiser.

"Good enough," she said. "Come," she told O'Conor.

Bookies crying raucously in the little ring. Signaling of touts. Milling of
people.

"I 'll lay two to one the field," a booky was shouting. His eyes were all
but out of his cheeks. His shoulders hunched with effort. His voice
exploded as though thrown against a wall, and he atomized a fine spray
before him. "I 'll lay three to one bar one; I'll lay four to one bar two. I'll lay
even money Munster Pride. Even money Irish Dragoon. Four to one Little
Dorrit. Seven to two Carnation. Here, four to one Carnation. Eight to one
Murderer's Pet. Twelve to one Irish Gentility. I 'll lay twenty to one—twenty
to one Thunderbolt. Twenty-five to one Flying Fish—"

"How much, Joe Jack?"

"Is it you, Lady Margery? God love you. I'll lay you thirty to one Flying
Fish. How much will you take?"

"Ten pounds' worth."

"Three hundred and ten pounds Flying Fish, Lady Margery Kyteler. I
hope you win, m'lady. I do so there I 'll lay two to one the field. I 'll lay
three to one bar one. I 'll lay four to one bar two—"

Dropping of flag and clatter of bell. There they were in the distance,
flying down the regulation. They rise to the ditch, three abreast. Canter
again—the water jump. The lump becomes a line. And who's ahead? Can
you see? Carnation! Ah, my jewel Carnation! And now the bank. There's a
horse down. Thunderbolt! Ah, be damned to the same Thunderbolt! Is that
the gray ahead? It is so! Is it Flying Fish is in it? Flying Fish it is, and he
running like a hare! 'T is win in a canter he will. They 're coming to the
hedge. Ah! what is it, Mister? Flying Fish it is, and he stopping dead. A
dead stop he 's made, and the jockey pasting the ribs out of him. Ah, he 's on
now, but in the heel of the hunt he is! Carnation wins. Carnation—ah, my
sweet wee lady!

They passed the post, Flying Fish bringing up the rear with a
supercilious arrogance.

"Fish!" Margery wrinkled her nose in disgust. "Fish was good."

And "There goes my new hat!" she wailed. And who should pass by but
Mr. Kelly. Out of his red face peered an inquisitive gray eye.

"You didn't?" he said.

"I did."

"How much?"

"Ten pounds."

"Ah, well," he decided cruelly; "It'll teach you." And he passed on.

"Well, the devil scald you!" she called after him, "and your thick
ignorance!"

Last race and the end of the day. He swung her lightly to the side-car.
Firm elbows, rounded arms, and how light she was, elastic! A woman in a

shawl and a battered sailor-hat stood with folded arms and began a street
ballad:

"Bold Robert Emmet, the darling of Ireland!
Bold Robert Emmet, he died with a smile!
Farewell, my company-ions both loyal and loving!
A hero I 'll die for the Emerald Isle."

Margery was grinning above the press of the people, O'Conor turned and
dug his hand in his pocket. Threw the woman a large silver coin.

"Well, may God keep and preserve you, my fine noble red-headed man!
And the sweet lady beside you—may God bless her! And may you live
comfortable and die happy, the both of you, and leave behind you a dozen
of the finest children."

"Drive on! Drive on!" O'Conor implored.

"Is it over the heads of the decent people you 'd have me drive, then?"
asked the jarvey, in abrupt horror.

"And of the twelve may six of them be like yourself, fine and red-
headed, and six like herself, sweet and dark. Ah, 't is the fine man you have,
my sweet mistress!"

O'Conor saw the scarlet of her face against the black hair. Eh, Lord, how
beautiful she was!

VI

The click of the wicket-gate and he was gone, and down the frosty road
his firm step was echoing. She stood at the long drawing-room window and
listened. Eh, what a moon! And to-night the hare would be out on Three
Rock Mountain, and the red fox pad toward the chicken-coops—the rogue

of the world! And on the mountain lakes southward there would be a lid of
mist hovering, blue mist and dark mountains and the white moon!

And under the moon her own garden, her own house lay so quietly
sleeping. Crisp lawn and the graveled paths and the high wall and the
greenhouses glistening, and the yew-trees against the wall. And the bigger
trees of the garden, the oak and ash, and the rowan-trees—the mountain-
ash, they called it in England—all the trees that were silent now, even the
wind being still. The low dining-room that spread out at right angles, and
was thatched like an old-time cottage—how sweet it seemed from here!
And the stables, where the horses were in their stalls, and the coachman and
groom slept. The little lodge where the gardeners were, a huddle of ivy. Oh,
the sweet domain!

It seemed to her, when the old place and the servants slept, and the dogs
were curled up sleeping, and the horses in their stalls, that she somehow
was the guardian and protector of all this. The old servants were not afraid
because a Kyteler still lived, and they knew they would be cared for, their
whimsies understood. There being no strong man to stand against the
encroachments of the world, what was better than her own sweet virginity?
She could conceive of nothing harming the place or people when she was
there. Even the spirits of the hills would pass it by gently; the dark Irish
things that frighten folk in their sleep, the rumble of the death-coach, the
wailing banshee, the thud of the Pooka's terrible hooves—none of them had
power while she was there.

Would she always protect it—or would there be some one else? she
mused. A big man. She turned from the window and went toward the fire.
The face she had seen all day in reality was with her now in vision of the
fire—the face with the strong jaw, the gray eyes, bronzed head, and red
curls. How every one had looked at him, she remembered proudly, at the
race-course to-day! How fine he was! How strong, too! She had been a
feather to him when he swung her up on the car. And when his hands had
caught her elbows and her feet left the ground, her heart jumped,
fluttered....

And how nice he was! When the old rip of a battered singer had wished
them a multitude of children, he had blushed like a girl.

And when he had lifted her from the car, he had held her for the fraction
of a second in the air. He had thought she did n't notice it—and she had
been afraid he would hear her heart beating, so loudly did it hammer in her
breast. When she had turned him over to Rose Ann, to take to her father's
old room and turned and gone into her own, she had closed her door and
leaned against it, and said to herself, "Margery, this man 's in love with
you!" and then, in a lower, hushed tone, "And, Margery, you 're in love with
him!"

And all by herself she had blushed terribly and felt in a wild panic. "He
will see it," she said; "he will know." But then she said, "No, he will not; I
won't let him." And a song had come into her heart. A great pride and
wonder filled her. She felt she should be dressed in soft scarlet robes, in
some symbolic vestment of wonder and joy. But she came down to dinner
in a demure white frock, her hair done very demurely, her eyes demure. And
all the time her heart was bubbling with sweet, low laughter, and saying,
"Do you know, Margery, this man 's in love with you, and he does n't know
you know it. And you 're in love with him, and he does n't know that either.
And we won't tell him, Margery, will we? We 'll let him find out for
himself."

All through dinner and after, she got him to talk of where he had been—
Brazil and China—and of New York, where he was born and which he
loved. She watched him over the sullen saffron candlelight, and she
thought, "He 's got a noble head," and again irrelevently, "You could n't
muss that hair of his, no matter how much you tried. Those short red curls
would spring back. I 'd like to try." And again she wondered, "Will he try to
kiss me when he says good night? And what shall I do? Shall I kiss him
back, or give him a piece of my mind? And if I give him a piece of my mind
he may never come again. And if I kiss him he 'll think very little of me. It's
awfully hard." And again, "Ah, he won't try," she said. "He would n't in my
own house. And, besides, he 's really in love. I know it."

And he had only shaken hands with her, and said he was going soon, and
might he come to see her before he went? And her heart sank, and she said,
yes, she 'd be very sorry if he did n't. And he said, When? And she pondered

over a possible engagement that did n't matter at all, and said, Tuesday,
then, and her heart murmured disconsolately. Two long days.

Through dinner and after she thought she had only been thinking of his
strong, eager face, but now he was gone, all he had said she remembered.
And she thought of hot China, and the sun-baked South, and the yellow
rivers. And of Brazil with all its forests, and the speckled snakes, and the
whistling monkeys, and the egrets standing by the fountains, and the little
armadillo lumbering across the roads. And of New York, the vital city, with
its houses challenging the thunder of summer skies, its explosion of light
when evening came, its hurrying myriads, keen-eyed, alert. Against all
these backgrounds she could see his clean-cut, gray-eyed face, and she
could see herself small and slight, looking up at him in wonder and pride.

"I could go with him anywhere," she whispered.

And then something seemed to call: "Margery!"

She looked up. There was nothing there, but the dimmed loved room
obtruded itself upon her, and through the moonlit window she could see the
antique trees, and the silver glint to the greenhouses, and in a clairvoyant
instant she could see the old men sleeping after the day's work, and the
ancient maids, and Fenian in his paddock, and poor Sheila, and the
foxhounds. She knew what called.

"Margery!"

"Yes, dears."

"Oh, Lady Margery!"

"Hush, now. It's all right."

She had thought that to-night she would sleep as a child sleeps, and try
to recapture the magic day in dreams. And be so happy. But the voice of the
trees, and the murmur of the old house, and the pleading eyes of dog and
horse, and the wailing tyranny of the sleeping aging folk shocked her into

the knowledge that there was a sterner thing than dreaming before her. To-
night she would not sleep.

"Margery! Lady Margery!"

"Yes. Yes."

"You couldn't, little mistress, you couldn't.'

"Hush, hearts, hush. I will not go away."

VII

He was very handsome, very erect, very noble there, standing by the old
fireplace. He was not merry to-night, so he was going to ask her to marry
him, she knew. And in the black and white of evening things, bronzed face
and curling hair, he looked the equal of any old Kyteler on the wall. And he
had more than they had, she felt—abounding energy. She was very pretty
herself to-night, too, she knew, and stately a little.

He was hurting, hurting her badly, for he was speaking now of South
Africa, where he was going. And he was carefully telling her how
wonderful he had heard that country was: the mass of Table Mountain and
the rolling hills, the great acres of grapes, the miles of veldt with the white
Boer farmhouses, the sun forever shining, hunting such as she had never
dreamed of, great, majestic storms.

"You 'd like it; you 'd like it ever so much."

"Oh, I don't know," she lied. "Ireland is a lot to me."

He was telling her clumsily, shamefacedly of another thing—of a lucky
chance he had had in Brazil many years ago, a chance he had taken
laughingly, and that had made him indecently rich, and he still a very young
man. She understood.

She moved away, and began hunting for a piece of music, so that her
back was to him.

"Did you ever think," she said, "of settling down in Ireland? You 're
Irish, you know.

"And it's not a bad place," she went on before he answered. "It's a sort of
sportsman's paradise. Fishing and hunting and race-courses. And sailing.
And if you get tired you can run over to London, or Paris, or Madrid.

"Oh, damn!" she said, "I can't find that thing at all!" She was trembling
from head to heel. "Why don't you marry some nice Irish girl and settle
down?"

"Oh, I could n't settle down in Ireland."

"No?"

"There 's my work to do."

"But you just said you were rich."

"That's no excuse for not working."

"I thought—I don't know."

"No, I 'd be a very poor sort," he laughed, "if I stopped work because I
was rich. I 'd have no self-respect—"

"No?" she said dully. The trembling had passed now. She was just numb,
numb and dead.

"But as to marrying an Irish girl, Lady Margery—Margery—"

She stood up and turned about. She was smiling quizzically.

"You 're not proposing to marry me, are you?"

"Yes."

"Don't. Don't, O'Conor," she said. "Please don't."

"Why?"

"Because of this—" she looked at him squarely—"I like you. I like you
immensely. To me you 're everything a man should be, but just—I don't
seem to see you that way. I don't love—do you see? And I don't think I ever
could. No. I never could."

"Well, that's straight. Thanks."

"Are we friends still?"

"Of course, but—" He smiled. "Do you mind if I go?"

"I 'll see you out myself.

"O'Conor," she half whispered in the hall, "I'm an awful son of a gun. I
should love you—you 're so fine, so decent, so—so everything—but I don't.
I 'm sure I could never love any one. I 'm a very selfish woman, I sometimes
think. It wouldn't have been worth while marrying me."

"You're not selfish, and you're very sweet, Margery."

"No, no! Shall I see you again?"

"I 'm afraid not. To-morrow I go to London, and from there to Africa."

"O'Conor, will you do something for me because we are friends?"

"Yes."

"Will you send me pictures of South Africa, and an occasional one of
you, because we are friends?"

"Yes, Margery."

"And, O'Conor, if twenty years from now you want to settle down, come
to me and let me find you a nice girl to marry—oh! the nicest girl in the

world—or if you are sick or crippled, come."

He smiled.

"Promise me."

"All right, Margery. I will." He put out his hand.

"O'Conor," she said. Again she was trembling, but her voice—thank
God!—her voice was all right. "I know you 're disappointed, and—O'Conor,
would it help if you kissed me?"

"No," he said, "I 'm afraid it would hurt more. So I won't."

"I suppose it would hurt more." She stepped forward and put out her
hand. "I am always your friend, O'Conor, your assured friend. And good-by
now, O'Conor, and God bless you wherever you go!"

"And you too, Margery."

"You 'll come back, O'Conor, if you 're sick or hurt, or want to settle
down, and talk to me about it—your friend, O'Conor, your little Irish friend.
You won't forget?"

"I 'll never forget."

He walked down the path under the cloud-touched moon. Would he look
back? No, he would n't. He did n't. Oh, there went a man!

VIII

She heard the wicket-gate close, and in her heart she knew that she
would never again see him. No gray eyes any more, nor curly hair. Her face
had become now a white and quivering mask. She snatched a cloak up and,
wrapping it round her, she went blindly into the garden.

She began to shake with great silent sobs. Her face was wet now, and she
could n't see. She sank at the roots of the mountain-ash.

"Rowan-tree, rowan-tree!" she cried, "I shall never see him any more!"

And as she sobbed, a little breeze came from the Three Rock Mountain,
and all the trees in the garden murmured gently. The great ash unbent, the
elm swayed, and the little apple-trees nodded with compassion. All the
shrubs in the garden rustled.

Hush—hush! Hush—hush! Hush—hush!

"Oh, rowan-tree! rowan-tree!"

Hush—hush! Hush—hush!

The moon came gently from behind a great saffron-edged cloud and
seemed to bend toward her. Its rays poured sweetly toward the dark head. A
rabbit had come somehow into the garden and sat up near her, its ears lop,
its pink nose twitching.

See—see! See—see! See—see! The trees were like kindly muses. The
sobbing ceased as she watched, as a child's sobbing might.

It scampered off now, for in the kennel the foxhound puppies had
wakened—her step or some cry of hers, maybe—and were snuffling and
whining to get at her. And from the stables came the rap-rap of Fenian's
hoofs, uneasy in his stall.

"I must go in," she said.

Her hand patted the bark of the rowan-tree, and she turned to go into the
old house that had been there so many centuries and was there still,
sheltering the complement of aging, tyrannous servants in their peaceful
sleep, and was beckoning her, she felt, beckoning her to its wide lap....

REYNARDINE

I

The big gray hunter caracoled under him, and with a vicious twitch of
curb and snaffle Morgan brought him to stand. He smacked the croup and
touched the gelding's fore thigh with the toe of his riding boot until the
great hunter stood like a horse in an illustration. Then Morgan turned
around.

About him was the cold gray of an Irish morning in November. Woolly,
dull, frost on the roads and a touch of easting to the wind—a perfect day for
hunting. Forward of him a hundred and fifty yards the hounds were circling
around the copse, while the leaders were inside, raising the red fox.
Through the gray branches of the wood, gaunt as witches' arms, the pink of
the whipper-in's coat showed like a Hallowe'en candle back of a screen.
And here and there were knots of the hunt, talking to one another as
neighbors talk. There were the women's fluting voices; there was the men's
deep laughter. All were friendly, toward one another, toward the world,
toward the red fox himself, friendly toward every one except Morgan. Well,
to blazes with them, Morgan swore to himself. What the blazes did he care
about them—a crowd of country squires and young army men, of stray
farmers, and an occasional doctor or parson. What did they amount to,
anyway? he 'd like to know.

And yet, he had thought they would be different. It had all been twenty
years ago, and he 'd been away all that time, and he 'd been only two days
back. But they 'd never forgotten. What haters they were, these Irish! What
implacable enemies! What brought him back, anyhow? He could have been
happy in America. Or hunting in England. What he 'd come back for was
the red Irish fox.

"Steady, blast you!" he warned the big hunter.

"There he goes!" some woman cried, and "No, Janet, no!" a friend
laughed. Janet! That would be Janet Conyers. And Janet Conyers must be
forty now, and here she was still riding to hounds. Yes, he recognized a full

dozen of them. Good Lord! Did people live as long as that? There was old
Sir John Burroughs, spare as a lance, and old McGinty, who owned the Mill
Farm. Yes, and the Master of Munsterbeg was there, red-faced, hale, all of
sixty. And that Grecian profile—was n't that Di Connors, who was now
Baroness Rothlin? And the big gaunt man with the hook nose, was n't that
Ian More Campbell of the Antrim glens? Poet and soldier and horseman.
Morgan felt a tremor of fear before the great Ulster Scot.

There was the yelp of a foxhound and a roar of anger. The thundering
master of the hounds was turning on an inoffensive stranger.

"What the—what the—what the blazes do you mean, sir, riding over
hounds in that manner? What hunt do you belong to, anyhow?"

"I don't belong to any hunt."

"Well, what the—what did you come out here for, anyhow?"

"My medical man told me I needed fresh air and exercise, and I thought
—"

"You thought! You thought! Why in blazes don't you buy a bellows and
stick it up your nose? You 'd get all the fresh air and exercise you want, but
—"

There was a roar of laughter from the field, and above it rose Morgan's
deep basso, like the bourdon note of an organ. But the instant the field noted
his laughter, their laughter died.

Morgan smothered a curse and moved fifty yards down where he could
get a flying start away from the rush of hunting. How they hated him,
resented him, he felt, and yet he had killed no man, stolen no money,
betrayed no woman. They hated him as much as they had loved and
admired his wife Reynardine. Queer! Queer! He was the one they should
love and she was the one they should have felt aloof toward. For he was the
steeplechaser, the horseman, the hunter of foxes, and she was of a family
whose tradition it was never to hunt or harry a fox, but to protect and aid it.
You would have thought it would be the other way around; that they would

have liked him and been cool or indifferent toward Reynardine, these
hunting women, these sporting men. But no!

And that was twenty years ago, and they hated still. Twenty years! War
and famine and pestilence had raged through the world. But they remained
the same, these Irish gentlefolk. Yes, it was all of twenty years, nearly to a
day, since he had left for foreign parts, and Reynardine, his wife, had died.

II

"Cop forard away!" went the ringing formula of the huntsmen. "Cop
forard away!" A long wail on the horn. The covert had been drawn blank.

Two sharp notes and a halloing. "Yo ho, Tinker! Yo ho! Tim! Forard,
hounds, forard!" And the pack of hounds began to move like a slow wave
toward the distant woodland. The hunt followed at a slow trot....

Her name had been Petronilla, but through the country-side she was
known as Reynardine, partly because of the Irish folk-song she could sing
so well, with its haunting minors, its suggestion of superhuman music. He
could see her slight form still, spiritual, virginal in the Irish twilight. He
could hear her pulsating contralto voice:

"If by chance you look for me
Perhaps you 'll not me find,
For I 'll be in my castle—
Enquire for Reynardine."

No, he would n't look for her, though he knew where she was. She was
in her castle, for sure! Her deep and narrow castle in the ancient, disused
Cistercian monastery where the Fitzpauls buried their dead. Tier on tier the
old Norman-Irish family lay, with their strange names, Fulke and Gilles,
Milo, Tortulf, Bertran. There they lay with their carved effigies, dogs at

their feet and swords at their side—old Crusaders. There they lay, ancient
harriers of the Irish clans, Arnold and Eudo. There they lay, old peers of the
Irish parliament, Robert, Gerald and Byssak. There lay the newer landlords,
Jenico and Maurice. There they lay, dead as their tradition. There they lay,
and be damned to them, Morgan thought! All there was left of them now
was one daughter, his and Reynardine's, whom he had seen only once, in
swaddling-clothes, and whom, he trusted, he would never see again.

"If by chance you look for me," her song had gone. "Look for you,"
Morgan sneered. "I 'll be in my castle!" "Well, you can stay there, wife!" he
sneered.

He 'd never look for her, even though he could see the monastery where
she slept from where he sat on his horse's back....

They had come to a woodland upwind and the hunt had slowed down to
a walk. The hounds were being urged in by the pink-coated huntsman. He
heard the short note of the huntsman to wake the fox, saw the pack pour in
like a stream....

III

He had come out this morning, his second morning in the country, to
hunt, to kill the fox, to enjoy the sport he loved with what had become a
mania. And now his day was being spoiled by old black memories. Perhaps
it was the Abbey where Reynardine slept that nudged him with ghostly
concentration, perhaps it was the field that ignored him as though he did not
exist, perhaps it was the proximity of the fox itself—he had n't seen or
hunted an Irish fox for twenty years. But he was troubled as a man is
troubled by imminent disaster. He wished they 'd get on.

"Wind him, boys. Wind him. Yooi, get him out. Joyous! Tinker! Marvan!
Leu in!"

But there was naught but the crash of whins, and the whirring of
pheasants as they rose. There rose the huntsman's clear call:

"Yo hote back. Yooi over try back!" And the blast of the horn as he
turned to draw the woodland again.

Twenty years ago! Could it have been only twenty years ago that he had
met and married and parted from Reynardine? It was so misty, so vague, he
had come to think of it as centuries before. He had come north from Dublin,
a boy of twenty-two, just out of Trinity, son of old Jasper Morgan who had
made a half-dozen fortunes in remounts for the South African War,
grandson of Ed Morgan who had been ostler and stableman and later livery-
keeper at Kingstown. And because he rode hard and well he was admitted
everywhere. There is no democracy as open as that of the Ulster clans. A
baron from William the Conqueror's invasion, or an Irish chieftain whose
ancestors were Druidists yields precedence to any man who can do a thing
better than he.... At a hunt ball young Morgan met Petronilla Fitzpaul, who
was known through the country as Reynardine.

She was just at the momentous instant when a girl turns woman, that
strange first of three tides in a woman's life. And the first tide breathlessly
waited, curled, flowed in as he came. Very slight, very dark-haired, very
deep-eyed, she was spared the ancestral Norman traits. She had n't the eagle
beak of her brothers, or their intent scowling brows. She was a little thing of
kindliness and deep emotions. One felt it in the face, somehow like a pansy,
one felt it in her eyes, one felt it in her hands....

She liked him. He was new to her. She liked his dash. She liked, as
gentlewomen will, the faint flavor of vulgarity in him. It was new to her.
She liked the dash of his clothes. His assurance overcame her. She liked
him. And she was at the mystic tide of her life. She thought she loved him.

And what intrigued Morgan was the spirit within. Some faint conception
of her beauty and mystery penetrated to him. No man is interested in a
woman bodily, no matter how much he thinks he is. He is interested in
cosmic womanhood, or in the one spiritual entity that actuates the body.
And before Morgan was a thread of flame that might lead him now down a
formal garden, rhythmic with the murmur of bees, now through a woodland

where the thrush sang in the branches, now through a Roman crypt,
mysterious and sanctified. He was like a barbarian who has found a great
jewel, topaz or opal or sapphire, the light of which enthralls him, but of
whose value and use he is ignorant....

Her brothers and her father were not inclined to view a marriage
between them with favor. It was not because of his lack of lineage, but
because the points of view were so different. They saw a gulf. But
Reynardine dissuaded them.

"Brothers dear and my father, cannot I, cannot we all—" she put her
hands out toward them—"make him see our way, take our things to his
heart?"

They were all great hulking men, her father and her brothers, Ulick,
Garrett, Gilchrist, Kevin, and she was the only woman of them—her mother
had died so long ago!—and she was so little, so pleading! They were as
wax in her hands.

"You know, dears—" she hung her head—"I love this man."

"Do what your heart says, Reynardine," they gave her the precept they
obeyed themselves with such success and chivalry. And they frowned the
family frown. "If she can do so much with us, what can't she do with him!"
they reasoned in their simple way. Alas! poor gentlemen!

There was an immensity of pride in Morgan's heart, apart from pride in
his young wife, to be allied to a family such as the Fitzpauls. Twice they
had refused duchies. They were so old they went back into the mists of
Norman tradition. They had the quaint customs of their sort, and strange
superstitions, such as all Irish families have—superstitions being but
ancient mystic conceptions of nature, and customs observed so often
through the centuries that their shadows became facts.

But of all quaint customs, their friendship to the fox was strangest of all.
Their crest was a fox courant, and over no square foot of their lands could a
fox be hunted. Great horsemen they were, but none had ever followed the
hounds in a hunt. Perhaps some old Fitzpaul, seeing all people concentrated

on ridding the land of the fox, had pitied the little red hunted one, and given
it protection. Perhaps by some accident of border warfare a fox had
deflected the chase from a hunted Fitzpaul and so earned the family
gratitude. Perhaps this. Perhaps that. What did it matter?

Yes, a quaint observance, this trait of the Fitzpauls. An idiosyncrasy, a
person might put it, such as a woman's objection to mice, or the energy of
Henry Bergh—God rest him!—who fought that the law should protect
horses from maltreatment. But what was queerer still, was their power over
the foxes. Foxes greeted a Fitzpaul joyously, barking and wagging their tails
like dogs—foxes, the most suspicious of all animals of the field. The
Fitzpauls had some strange rhythmic power over foxes, as some people
have over dogs. And yet, though this was mysterious, it was not so
immensely mysterious. Some trainers are born with power over man-eating
tigers, some men can handle snakes, some can sooth stampeding cattle.
Morgan remembered hearing his father speak of Whistler Sullivan, who
was called in when all hope of breaking a horse was gone. A mean, ferret-
faced man, he would steal into the stall where a man-eating horse was tied
and hackled, closing the door behind him, and a half-hour later he would
bring the horse out. The horse would be coved and dripping with sweat, and
never afterward would it balk or bolt or rear. And the Whistler had never
laid a hand on him. He had only talked or hissed. People were afraid of the
Whistler; the peasantry declared he had bargained his soul with the devil;
but he had only power over horses, as the Fitzpauls had over the foxes of
the field.

Well, that was all explicable, within the range of human knowledge. It
was extraordinary, but that was all. But there was an eerier thing yet about
that family. Other families had their banshees, their ghostly pipes, their
drummers on battlements to portend or announce approaching death. But
when a Fitzpaul died,—so went the tradition, so it had been attested by
living men, so it had happened within a wheen of years,—the lawns were
peopled with foxes at the dusk of day. Not spectral things, but foxes of the
field and wood who gathered to bid their protectors God-speed on their
strange, strange journey. They knew of death as bee-keepers say bees know.
They made no sound but for the rustle of the grass and the faint thudding of

their pads. But they were there. And a passing peasant might see them and
raise his hat.

"God be good to the Fitzpauls," he would pray. "'T is they are good to
the poor!"

A strange thing that of the foxes, a thing not understood. How little, after
all did we know of animals! But to blazes with that! Morgan swore.
Animals were n't here to be understood. Animals were here to be used, a
horse to be ridden; a hound to hunt with; a fox to be chased to the death—as
he was here to ride and hunt and chase to-day; as he had done always; as he
had done when Reynardine, his wife, lived....

A bird rose shrieking from the copse, and suddenly a hound gave tongue,
and then another, and then the pack cried as one dog. There was a blast of
the horn.

"Gone away!" came the cheer of the huntsman. "Away! Away!"

Then fifty horses thundered.

IV

First there was the minute red flash of the fox, slipping through the furze
like a serpent, then the dappled flood of hounds, tails up, giving tongue like
bells, then the master of the hunt on his great brown steeplechaser, then the
huntsman, gay in pink, leather-faced with puckered eyes, on his little black
mare. Then came the bunched hunt, the crash of ditches, the crackle of
brambles, the thunder over turf, the splosh-splosh over plowed land. There
was the cheering of the country-side.

There a woman was down at a fence and men stopped to help her. There
a riderless horse went by, mane tossing, stirrups flying. Now a groan, now a
curse. The country-side flew by as in a motion picture. Patch of brown,
patch of green, patch of gray, like a crazy-quilt. The crack of hunting crops,
the ppk of spurs. "Tally-ho, boys! tally-ho! On hounds! On!"

Morgan with certainty crept ahead of the field, not a hundred yards
behind master and huntsman. Beneath him the great gray moved like a
steam-engine. A little steadying forward, a rush and a thud, and they were
over. Now a ditch was taken with a clatter, now a fence cleared nicely, now
through a blackthorn hedge, Morgan's arm up to protect his eyes. Five
minutes! Seven. Eight minutes! Nine. Ten, by the Lord Harry! And
suddenly they were at Kyle na Maroo—Dead Men's Wood. And the hounds
were sniffing, wailing, at check.

An old earth-stopper, wizened, purple-lipped, like a grave-digger of
"Hamlet," appeared like a troll.

"Into the wood he went, your Honor," he addressed the master. "Into the
wood the Red One went, your Honor, like a man diving into his own
house."

"Are all the holes stopped, Mickey Dan?"

"Stopped is it, your Honor. Sure they 're stopped as if they were the
burrows of the devil himself and the saints to be out hunting him on the
judgment-day. Stopped is it? Sure, a worm itself could n't get in or out of
them the way I 'm after stopping them with interest and grand care—"

"All right, Mickey Dan!" The master interrupted. "Hoick in!" He ordered
the huntsmen.

"Leu in, boys, leu in. Tinker! David! Dermot! Ranger! Tally in, beauties!
Tally in!"

Morgan pulled up his hunter and turned around to watch the field come
up, no longer bunched, but straggling now. The burst to check had been too
much for them. His horse was still fresh, his seat easy. He had done a
notable thing, following so closely on the master's mount—the great racer
that had won the Grand National—and the huntsman's mare, fleet as a
greyhound, with so little weight up. Morgan desired a word of
commendation, even a look of envy. But they took no notice of him. He
might have been some old fox-hunter, invisible, long dead, riding a specter
horse, over some well-remembered run, for all the attention they paid him.
To them he was n't there; he did n't exist.

And because of Reynardine.

And what had he done to Reynardine? It was n't his fault. It was hers.
She was in love with him, and then she turned and was not. Was it his fault
that a woman was fickle?

Yes, she was in love with him. He could even yet see her dark
murmuring eyes in the golden light of the candles, as she set there in her
white frock and sang to him, her beautifully cut ivory hands plucking
haunting melody from a pianoforte as from some old-time clavichord.

"Sun and dark I followed her,
Her eyes did brightly shine:
She took me o'er the mountains,
Did my sweet Reynardine.

If by chance you look for me
Perhaps you'll not me find—"

Oh, damn! What did she ever come into his life for, anyway! She didn't
want a man. She wanted a poet. Crazy! That's what she was, crazy as a coot.
He supposed her daughter—their daughter—was as crazy as she!

First of all there 'd been the trouble about the hunting. She never said a
word about it, but her face had blanched the first morning he saddled up for
the Lonth. She had expected him, he laughed, to have the same crazy
notions as her family. And her face had been drawn with pain when he came
back in the evening. And she had said nothing. Too proud. Too damn crazy
and too proud!

That evening he had asked her to play "Reynardine"—not that he liked
the tune; he'd rather have had something popular, something with body to it,
none of your blasted wailing folk-songs. But he just thought it might please
her to have him ask. She shook her head, and plunged into Chopin.

"I don't think I could play—'Reynardine'—to-night," she said.

And she had never played or sung "Reynardine" to him again.

She and her folk had such darn queer notions. They thought more of a
horse under them than themselves. They went to infinite pains and immense
time to train a green horse or break in a dog where another person with a
flick of spurs or, a crack of the whip could do it in half the time. True, they
did it well. But, after all, you did n't make human friendships with animals.
You made them do what you wanted to; or if they did n't— That was a
man's way.

But people are queer, some of them. One man is proud that his horse
whinnies in the stall when he hears the beloved footstep. And some men
give friendship to dogs they never give to women, and their hearts break
when a hound dies. And to some folk the birds of the air will come and eat
out of their hand, so confident are the birds. And the death of a rabbit is a

great tragedy to children. There is a virgin glade in nearly all folks' hearts
where neither blood nor marriage wander, but the love of animals possesses.
It is some mystic link in the chain of creation.

But he never had it. Never could understand it, Morgan thought. After
all, man is the lord of creation, Morgan decided—that's true isn't it?—and
all living things were for him to use. He had all rights over them, even to
life and death. That was how some folks looked at it—not crazy people like
the Fitzpauls.

And Reynardine did n't like the way he broke horses. Reynardine did n't
like the way he shot pheasants. She was a queer girl, but—God!—she was
very beautiful!

Well, that was the whole story of it; they did n't get on. There grew a gulf
between them, and was that his fault? he asked. Was it his fault he was n't
insane? Was it his fault he was too much of a man for her?

And when she was to have a child, she expected so much of him. She
never asked of course—oh, no! She would never ask for anything, but she
followed him with dumb eyes. What did she expect, anyhow? It was no
man's job to hang around a gravid woman all the time, holding her hand. A
million women in the world were bearing children. What was there to it,
after all? Every one did it.

And then she had run home. Let her run. Crazy coot!

And when she was dying and sent for him, did he refuse to go and see
her, as many a man would have done? No, he went. He remembered well
the soft April twilight; the dim white figure in the great bed, with the
haunting eyes. And her four big brothers standing around with set, grim
faces.

"My husband," she had said, "for anything I did to you here, for any way
I hurt, will you please forgive me?"

"That's all right, Reynardine," he said. "We were just not suited. And I
forgive you." Then, awkwardly: "I'm sorry to see you this way,

Reynardine."

A light had gone out of her face:

"Then—good-by!" Her hand unclasped from his.

"Good-by!" he had said uncomfortably, and turned to go. He noticed
three of the brothers look at the senior, Gilchrist, meaningly. Gilchrist
turned to go after him. A cold shiver had gone down Morgan's spine. His
knees trembled. And then came the very soft voice:

"Gilchrist, and brothers dear, in a minute maybe I 'll have gone with the
twilight, and I shall not be able to talk to you again, ever again, with these
human lips. And I 'm going to ask you just one more favor, brothers dear,
my brothers. Please do it for your sister. Let my—let this man go!"

Then Gilchrist threw open the door.

"This is no place for you," he had said. "Go!"

A crazy breed! He had never heard from them again. Never had they
asked him to see or support his daughter. He had even forgotten her name.
But he did n't want to see her. He wanted to see no more of the Fitzpaul
blood. She was living in the old place, he understood, which was hers now.

Well, let her—

But—funny! He could never get out of his mind's eye the vision of his
wife sitting by the great piano, plucking out the ancient melody:

"If by chance you look for me
Perhaps you 'll not me find,
For I 'll be in my castle—"

The hounds shifted, grew keen. "Ay! Ay!" came the tongue of the finder.
Scent was picked up again. "Ay! Ay! Ay!" went the pack, heads up, tails
straight. There was a red flash ahead in the grassy field.

"Come up, Finn!" the master shoved his great horse onward.

"Ay! Ay! Ay!" They were off. "Ay! Ay! Ay!" Seventy hounds and forty
horsemen. "Ay! Ay! Ay!" And one red fox running for his life. "Ay! Ay!" A
dead fox or a broken neck! "Ay! Ay! Ay!"

V

For years he had been looking forward to this first fox-hunt in Ireland,
and now with the red speck ahead of him, and the flood of hounds
following it, and the great gray between his knees, it occurred to him that he
was not enjoying it. Never was a morning better for hunting, never a keener
scent, never a better pack; never had he pushed as powerful, as sure-footed
a horse at a fence. Behind him the field fell, was blown, dropped out, until
there were hardly a half-dozen left. And he was close on the master of the
hunt, close on the huntsman, close on the pack. Yet there was something in
it that took the thrill away and left a leaden depression instead.

She would n't go out of his mind, would Reynardine. What was that
daughter of hers—and his—like? Like her mother, he 'd be bound, every
inch of her a Fitzpaul. Hardly any of his blood there. His only were the
mechanics of procreation; she was not his daughter. Nothing lifeful of him
had fused with the soul of Reynardine to perform the ineffable miracle. No,
she would be all her mother—all Fitzpaul.

God! how he hated that name of Fitzpaul! How he hated Reynardine,
who had made him feel like a cur, though he wouldn't admit it! How he had
hated those four big brothers, who had made him feel afraid—an
unforgivable thing!

Well, they were dead, he laughed, all dead. Gilchrist had died on
Nevison's expedition to the pole, and he lay somewhere in the immaculate
Arctic snows with the inscription his comrades had written on a simple
cross: "Here lies a very gallant Irish gentleman." And Kevin had died

fighting the Turks in Asia. And Ulick! Ulick was somewhere in the depths
of the Irish sea, where he went out with the coast-guards to rescue a vessel
in distress. And Garrett was funniest of all. He was killed defending a
woman of the people from her drunken husband in a Dublin slum. All dead!
Serve them right, too. They were always doing something that never got
them anywhere. Fools!

He had hated them in life, and he hated them in death. But now their
bodies were in dissolution, there was nothing concrete to hate, and, by some
strange symbolism, he had come to hate what in his mind was most closely
allied to the family, the fox that was their crest, the fox that had their
protection. He hated it. He hunted it. He wanted to kill it. The day on which
a fox was killed was to him a red-letter day. He felt somehow that he had
killed a Fitzpaul.

Foxes took on for him now a strange, sinister entity. By thinking much
of them, he had come to think of them as a quasi-human, supernormal race.
There was something strange about them, anyway. Cleverest of all the
beasts of the field, with their cunning they outwitted men. They were
strange in their likes and dislikes. Their only friend was the dull-witted
badger, a dark personality, too, whose burrows they used, with whom they
often lived. They would eat fruit and shellfish. And though they killed birds,
they would not touch a dead bird of prey. They had tabus as strict as a
Maori's. Strange, mystical laws.

Very sinister they seemed to Morgan. Once in America he had seen
Michi Itow, the Japanese, dance his dance of the fox. And there was
something terrible in it, something so mysteriously awful that he all but rose
in his seat, the cry of the pack ringing from his throat: "Ay! Ay! Ay! ... Ay!
Ay!"

And he had a dreadful waking dream, of an acre of foxes watching him
in the twilight, never moving, still on their pads. Just their pointed muzzles,
their baleful, luminous eyes....

He had hunted foxes everywhere since he left Ireland. In Canada, where
he had many a good kill. In England, where the sport was too ladida, too
much of a social gathering to please. In America, in Maryland, where they

hunted the gray fox, with hounds stag crossed with fox, but seldom killed.
He could n't stand their way of hunting. The Marylanders did n't care to kill,
and they had dubbed their favorite foxes with endearing nicknames. No!
That was ridiculous! What he wanted was an Irish hunt—fine horses and
good riders, and keen hounds, and a dead fox at the end of the day.

He looked up from the pack as they swung through a plowed field. The
fox had swung in a circle and was running to where it had started. There
was Cashelshane, King John's castle. There was Owana Ma ach Meg, the
river of the little trout! There was Crock Na Mero, the hill of the querns!
There was—there was the abbey where the Fitzpauls, where Reynardine
slept.

"If by chance you look for me
Perhaps you 'll not me find,
For I 'll be in my castle—"

A great castle that, he laughed, six feet underground.... Damn it! Were
those hounds checked again?

VI

A piece of bog in process of reclamation—there the fox had taken
refuge. He might be lying in some clump of grass. He might have slipped
into one of the many drains the strong farmer had made in his attempt to
make arable land of what was morass. Here and there were green patches,
still dangerous, where a whole hunt might be engulfed. Neither the master
nor the huntsman cared to chance their mounts in that treacherous sward.
They halloed the hounds to and fro.

"Leu in, lads, leu in! Ranger, Rambler, Tinker, Tim! On to him, beauties,
on to him!"

But the hounds were at fault, utterly. They howled with baffled desire.
They went to and fro, sterns twitching, noses aground. Two or three beaten
hunters turned up, their horses gone, their fire quenched, sitting dully in the
saddle, thankful for the respite of check.

"We 've overrun," the huntsman grumbled.

"I 'm afraid so, Willie John," the master nodded. But some secondary
sense told Morgan the fox was there. He had gone to ground and the hounds
had failed to mark him.

"Try a short up-wind cast," the master directed.

The hounds were halloed out, and as they swung to the left, Morgan
noticed the red shadow flit along a ditch, slip through a hedge. He spurred
his horse in excitement.

"Yoi doit!" Morgan called. "View halloo!" But some trick of wind
muffled his voice. Behind him three hundred yards away the hounds were
following the huntsman about, heads up.

The fox was tired, his brush heavy with mud and dragging as he ran.
Behind him Morgan thundered alone. He damned the huntsman. He damned
the hounds.

"They 're going to miss, blast their stupid heads!" But he kept on. His
hope was that the fox would turn, and the huntsman and hounds see him,
and coming up, finish the day's work.

But the fox kept onward. Now across a plowed field, now across fallow
land. Here a fence, here a ditch, here a hedge. What was the use of
following him, with no hounds? But a mania arose in Morgan's brain, and
he could n't bear to drop the chase now, so near to completion. A vast anger
arose in him. He felt he had been betrayed. Never was a huntsman so
stupid. Never hounds so bad.

The fox ahead of him put on a new spurt, and Morgan dug his heels into
his horse's flanks. Where was it heading for?

He looked up for a moment and saw the four-foot crumbling wall of the
old abbey. So there 's where it thought sanctuary might be found. The fox
sought the protection of the Fitzpauls, even now they were dead.

A sinister grin passed over Morgan's face. Of a sudden he felt diabolical.
Others might respect that sanctuary, but not he! He was n't crazy with
sentiment. A hunter, he! He 'd hunt it over the legions of dead Fitzpauls. He
'd hunt it over Reynardine's grave, by God! How would she like that? Eh?
He 'd kill that fox if he had to run it blind and throttle it with his bare hands.

"I 'll get you," he laughed.

The fox gathered itself for a last effort. He saw the whirl of its brush,
saw it leap, disappear....

Morgan steadied his hunter for an instant. Suddenly gave it reins and
spurs. Looked up, as it flew toward the wall.

From his height he could see within and his hair rose in a dreadful chill.
For standing there was a white figure, with a book in her hand. Against the
white dress the red fox cowered. The face was the face of Reynardine. The
years were the years of Reynardine. The eyes were the eyes of Reynardine,
black, deep, dilated with fear.

"Reynardine! Reynardine!" A cry of terror broke from him.

An immense panic seized him, and his hands checked the horse as it rose
to the jump—a savage jerk on curb and snaffle. The gray was already in the
air. Its hind legs came down uncertain. Its great bulk fell backward. Fear
flooded him like cold water. In an instant he knew his neck would be
broken like a dry twig. Christ! There it went! Snap!

VII

"Dark childeen, what is wrong with you? What is wrong? There was a
wing in my heart until I saw you coming."

"Nurse Ellen, there 's a man dead at the abbey. I saw him die, with my
two eyes."

"O alanna veg! Is it any one we know? It isn't the master, is it, or Sir
Maurice?"

"No, Nurse Ellen, no! It's no one I know. I was sitting reading by
Mother's grave, and a wee red fox, a wee hunted fox, ran up to me for help.
And then the man came jumping the wall, and his horse reared and he was
killed. I never saw him before, but we know him, Nurse Ellen. I know we
do."

"Why dotey child? Why do you say so?"

"He saw me and he took me for Mother, Nurse Ellen. He called,
'Reynardine!'"

"Was he a dour, black man, child of grace? Would you be afraid of him,
and he alive?"

"Yes, that's he, Nurse Ellen. Who is it we know?"

"It's no one we know, a lanna. No one at all."

"But he called, 'Reynardine!'"

"You only think so, dark childeen, you trembling there and standing by
your mother's grave. A trick your mind played you, machree dheelish. He
was no one you know, or nothing to you. Only a strange man was it, a
strange bad man."

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

I

It must be for the thousandth time now he was sitting down at the neat
table looking out on the little lawn, and trying to get his ideas together,
trying to get something new, something startling, that would awaken these
hard-boiled men who had control of theaters, magazines, publishing houses
to the sense that he was alive, worth while, valuable. If he could only think
up a new detective, or—or something.

Any other than he would have given up the game long ago, but he knew
he had talent—he would n't go quite so far as to say genius, but great talent.
It was no use their turning him down all the time. He was certain they never
read the stuff.

He was certain, too, there was some trick, some knack he had n't
discovered. Just some little trick. These men of national, international fame
—he could see from their faces they had no especial brains, any more than
he had.

But just some little trick he could n't get.

He had taken courses in writing, gone to schools of journalism, and here
were all his manuscripts with neat rejection slips; here was what he thought
the great American novel battered and dog-eared, a study of the temptations
of a girl in the great city; and here was his crook drama, that some filthy
reader had marked with the rim of a coffee cup. It was enough to make a
man quit.

But he would n't quit. He 'd be as big as the biggest of them. He, too,
would have his pictures in the papers, not gaunt and bitter as most of them
seemed, but pleasant, dignified, literary. And his picture would look like an
author's, with its well-marked features, its masculine little mustache, its
intellectual glasses. And he, too, would be interviewed. And he, too, would
sign contracts involving great sums of money. And there would be gossip

about him, too, in the papers, where in Florida he was spending the winter
vacation, what he was doing in summer.

He would n't quit. Had n't they all said at school and college he was cut
out to be a writer? Had n't he gone to Europe for six months? And, what
was more, had n't he the money his father, the hardware man, had left him?
Had n't he his home? He could stick it out.

His home! His wife! If instead of these few trees, this lawn, the outlook
of the quiet sound, if instead of here he lived somewhere in the welter of
affairs, wouldn't he be better? Somewhere things changed, where one did
not have to go three quarters of an hour in a train to the theater. Down town
in New York. Only trees and grass and water and sky here. Nothing to write
about.

And his wife, Berenice—oh, she was a sweet girl, a nice girl, but—
hadn't he perhaps made a mistake? She was so good and wholesome! Too
much? Would n't it have been better to be married to—to an actress, or a
sculptress, or—or something. Some one who could feel things; who would
n't smile, and be nice. Berenice was all right, but—

And his mother. She was a nice, darling person, but—she did n't just
understand. She was just a mother, like anybody's mother: If she could feel
the great complex things! But she was just loving, and everything he did
was right.

Berenice, and his mother ... the trees, the water ... essential barrenness of
life ... nothing to write about ... so unfair.

II

Because Barry had hinted it annoyed him to have her in the house while
he was trying to write, Berenice had decided to go out for an hour or so, to
give the poor lad a chance. And for a few minutes it bothered her to be
idling, whereas there were so many little things that needed her attention. A

house became so weary. It needed a flick of the hand here and there, a touch
to flowers. But the white road, and the arching blue-green trees, and the
drift of the dogwood—a cloud, not a flower, did it seem, so delicately
balanced was it in the May air—all these took her eyes, and the immense
miracle of spring drew her thoughts from the gracious artifice of the house.
How gently, how imperceptibly it came, a little curling wave of the west
wind, and the clearly pitched note of an adventuring bird! It was like the
moon, spring was; a clear thin line of silver in the gray sky, like the minute
green of the waking willow-tree, and it grew ... under your eyes was its
sweet benevolence. And it was hard to go to sleep at night, so much was
being accomplished, for fear you would miss some phase of the return of
beauty. Oh, the little birds ... so fussy, so intense about their nests. The
showers like great sheets of silver; and after each the slim trees were more
like pretty ladies, and the great thick trees like pleasant stalwart men. And
the flowers came shyly, demurely, just as young girls might come; just as
she herself, Berenice, felt, acted when she was fifteen, and was brought into
a roomful of strange people.

And she stopped for an instant at the dark pool where the little turtles
were busy, swimming to and fro, a clear-cut, fine line on the dusky water, a
minute head with crystalline beads of eyes, just showing ... and if they
thought you were watching them they dived—a flick and they were gone—
and if you saw clearly enough you could notice their flippers waggle slowly
as they made for the downy bed of the pool. And some kept fearfully quiet,
sitting on stones, or on logs, and at any quick movement you made, they
plumped like stones. And the great trees around so much alive, so patient...
She could understand how poets of an older, simpler age saw dryads in
them. Pan she could not understand, nor satyrs, but dryads were sib to her,
young shy women in garments of apple-green. You could tell a good picture
of a tree from a bad one that way: some had dryads in them and some were
only wood.

So many thoughts were in her, so keenly did she feel a kinship with the
trees, with the singing birds, with the west wind that cleared the air, that she
wished she had some one to speak to about it. But a great shyness... And
perhaps, even, it could n't be said in words, perhaps music. Well, hardly
even that. She had tried to speak to Barry about it. But Barry had kissed her

and thought her a moonstruck kid, as he said. Poor Barry! Directors of
periodicals were so hard on him! It was dreadful to hurt him that way.
Though she confessed the treason with a shock to herself, she found it hard,
well-nigh impossible, to read what he wrote. It was hard for her to
understand artificial women and noble men. All she knew was nature, and
that was not artificial. Nor was it noble, either, she thought; it had just a
sweet, harmonious kindliness. There could be nobility only where ignominy
existed too—and in nature was no ignominy. She wished she knew more
about men and women, for Barry's sake, to understand these matters he
wrote of, passion and crime. But dramatic passion seemed so needless in
her eyes, and crime was so sickly; she just felt a pity for it, a sense that they,
poor people, must be crazy to do such things. Oh, she wished she
understood—could help him! She remembered when, over a year ago, a
little periodical had decided to print one of his writings, the letter came as
the first snowflakes fell. And she could not feel excited with him, because
in her heart, beyond her control, was some strange rhythm. The snow, the
soft and harmonious snow ... and in her head was a picture of nursery days,
of pine-trees under a delicate white weight, and old Saint Nicholas, whom
little children called Santa Claus, driving through a fleecy world ... his red
cheeks, his white beard, his reindeer with the silver tinkling bells. And
reindeer brought the thought to her of squat, hairy Laplanders, fishing
solemnly near the Pole, through a little hole they had cut in the ice, while
away in the background ambled a great polar bear. A very terrible animal it
must be, but one always thought of it as gentle as some big old dog.

Oh, she wished she were a better woman, a woman who had her
husband's interests at heart! People said a woman could make a man. She
wondered how. And it was said of some that their husbands owed their
careers all to them. How? But how? And even if she knew, her terrible
shyness... She could be intimate with dogs, and horses, and solemn, aloof
kine. But words did n't come to her somehow. It was such a drawback!

And when he was disappointed, she stood there, dumb as a stone.
Nothing would formulate. All she could think of was to lift his hand and
kiss it quietly, and oftentimes a tear would come because he was hurt. But
she could say nothing that would make things seem easy. All she could
think of would be to take him out in the dusky night, and look in silence at

the stars. All the immensity of gleaming worlds ... so scattered, so varied,
and not one ugliness. And one felt drawn out of oneself toward the
beautiful, terrific heavens, and all the worries and troubles seemed of less
consequence than the droning of a bee. A little sum of money lost, a petty
ambition frustrated, a cheap man's jibe, those hurt for a moment, but how
little they mattered under the clouds of stars!

And if she could take him out and be silent with him, while the crickets
sang and the little frogs croaked their funny dissonant harmony, and earth
rolled along eastward under the arching heavens... But maybe he was right
—she was only a funny dreaming kid.

She had come to the sound now, and quiet as a lake the broad stretch of
water was before her. And here and there was a steamer, and southward a
spluttering tug pulling a line of barges rigged with square auxiliary sails.
Her mind leaped forward to eight weeks from then, when the regattas would
begin, and from all parts of the sound, from north of it, Marblehead even,
the boats would come with white curving sails to fight for supremacy. Great
forty-footers, and the smaller thirties, and the fast P-boats with their
immense Bermuda rigs, and little handicap sloops, and cat-boats manned by
boys in bathing-suits, all scurrying, swishing, all in turn jibing, coming
about, jockeying to go over the line with the gun.

And then, too, soon the great blind porpoises would come gamboling,
shining like negroes, follow-my-leader. And the bluefish would run. And on
the rocks the querulous bird population would screech and chatter. And one
would look out for the boats going to New Bedford and to Fall River ...
their calm progress like a steady horse's, and their lights. And the great
lumber schooners would come down from Nova Scotia, with their blue-
eyed, taciturn sailors, to anchor at City Island.

A little quiver underneath her heart reminded her. How should she tell
Barry she was going to have a little baby? When should she tell him, and
what should she say? She must be careful. She must n't disturb his work.
And would he be happy about it? Or would he—would he—she bit her lips
suddenly—would he not be pleased?

III

It seemed to her that it was all one with the coming of the springtime, the
budding of the flowers, and the westward wind—the miracle of the baby.
One was first one's own sentient self, bending to the wind with the trees,
breasting the curling waves of summer, and patiently listening to the song
of some ambitious bird, and, before you knew how, a little thing had come
nestling under your wing. The flowers had made you sister, and the wind
protected you, and the grass was careful lest your foot should touch a stone.
Whence did it come, the little life that was delicate as the petal of the apple-
blossom, soft as a little bird asleep in a nest? In summer one felt it had
come over the bending grasses and between the gentle rains, and the robins
did it reverence. And in spring it was borne on the first generous, delicate
wind, and the trees nodded their highest, newest boughs. And in autumn the
Brown Woman of the Woods brought it, while the little chipmunks stared.
In winter it came with a shaft of the loud, aggressive sun. However?
Wherever? But one moment you were yourself, alone, with only your own
problems. And suddenly you had been trusted with something softer than
flowers, more precious than diamonds, a little molecule of life itself. Such a
trust!

Every woman had a little dream about her child. A woman of the
tenements might see in a little parcel of flesh and blood a one-day president
of her great republic. And another might see in him a minister of God
bearing a light to thousands. And a third would see in a little daughter a
voice that would gush forth in immense harmony. And some who knew the
bitter tooth of want would dream of their children as powerful merchants,
with great cars and yachts. Such rosy stories do women think in their heads.

But all Berenice could imagine was the little daughter of fair tresses in
her small bed at the close of day, when the short Occidental twilight
hovered like a bird, and night came trudging westward with dun feet. Below
in their drawing-room people would be assembled for dinner or for the
playing of cards, laughter and candle-light, and the glow of an open hearth,

and tobacco sending up bluish-gray smoke from little tubes. But Berenice
would be alone with the fair child in the dim nursery, putting her to sleep
and teaching her the rhyme that is a child's first prayer and, at the same
time, a charm against evil spirits; against great bulks in the darkness that
make little children scream; against strange gray women who take small
humans from the warm beds mothers put them in and whisk them to deep,
underground burrows where trolls and misshapen demons are, replacing
them with wizened, ill-natured changelings. Against all the powers of
darkness the little prayer was potent:

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take!"

And then, reverently:

"Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
Guard the bed that I lie on!"

And when the small eyes were closed and the minute mouth had taken
on the sweet smile of sleeping, and the hands had relaxed into white, starry
flowers, she would steal downstairs to her guests, to the gracious room
where sleek, well-bred women and kindly, burly men were gathered to dine
in company or to play cards, where the bluish smoke rose in whorls from
the white tubes of tobacco, and there was soft candle-light and tinkling
glass. And she would feel happy there, secure. There would be no
apprehension in her. For above, at the four corners of the bed where the
minute humanity slept were four figures of great power, four lumbering
grizzled fisherman—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John!

IV

The old lady watched Berenice walk down the road, pausing for a
moment in her beautiful needlework to admire her young daughter-in-law's
slim, willowy figure, the eager pose of her head, her brown, beautifully
plaited hair. The apple-green of her dress and the blue-green of the trees—
she made such a beautiful picture, and the old lady shook her head and
sighed.

And one might imagine the old lady saying: When I was young I was as
lissome as that, as pretty, had as eager a head. Time flies, and we grow old.
Ah, the fine days of young womanhood!

But that was not in her mind at all: she shook her head because she knew
the heartaches, the difficulties, the terrors the young girl must go through
before she attained to the reward of women—wisdom and peace.

For they all came to that in the latter end, the old lady thought—the girls
who started out dancing, and the girls whose eyes were troubled with
thought, and the girls deep as rivers, and the shallow girls who angled for a
honeyed word. And life, like some deft schoolmistress, caught them and
taught them and put wisdom in their heads, and in their hearts little modest
flowers, like forget-me-nots. And the sad girls learned laughter from little
children on the floor, and the wayward ones learned loyalty from trouble,
and great emotional currents put depths into the shallow ones. And life
seemed so hard, the present so brutal, the future terrible as an army with
banners—but one day it was gone. All was past. And in retrospect it seemed
so little pain to have had, to learn such a great lesson, to come to such a
sweet place! If one came through it, it was so much worth while.

The hazards one made so much of ... Oh! Did n't she know!

It seemed to her as she looked back now very strange that all the little
tragedies of her life appeared to have faded and all the happiness
intensified; and this was peculiar, for at the time the pain seemed so
poignant and the happiness so diverse, so hard to grasp. A night at a theater,
for instance, twenty years ago, and a dinner before it, and a supper
afterward—how queer one could remember all that! Even the tunes the

orchestra played, the clothes one wore, what this man said, how this woman
looked. And one thought of the night young Barry, below, writing, was so
near to death; and the utter terror, the tragedy of that time had faded. And
one remembered only how pretty he looked, how kind the doctor was, how
Mr. Valance, her husband, had put his hand on her shoulder in his big,
kindly way.

If young people knew how these things came out, they would n't worry
so much, but there was no use telling them. They would have to find out for
themselves.

She had never been one to admire nature, had the old lady, but one thing
she did know: she knew people and she knew life. Berenice was all right, a
very fine girl for all her romantic thoughts, but Barry worried her
occasionally. He was so intense about his career of writing. And she felt in
her heart that if was not going to be a success. One knew, somehow. For
instance this: she could tell whether or not a novice was going to be a great
pianist, because she could see him as a master, if he were ever to arrive; his
power, his aloofness, his concentration. She could see a merchant. She
supposed it was a gift, just feeling what people were.

And her son Barry below—she could not see him. And she was n't going
to tell him, either. Men were queer. They bore grudges, even to their
mothers. It was better to let him fight himself out, and be conquered, drop;
and then pick himself up, and think it over, and go to something else, with a
pang and more wisdom. And month by month the disappointment would
pass, until the ramping of his early days was no more to him than a quaint
gesture. And years later he would meet some great author for a moment,
and be very courteous, a little shy with him. But he would never tell him of
the struggle on his own account, never mention a word—ah, she knew, she
knew!

Barry would be all right. Only—only he must be broken. All humans
must be broken, as Mr. Valance, her husband, had said horses are. And some
horses are great race-horses, and some are hacks, and some hunters, and
some just simply for use. But all have to be broken. And they are nearly all
kind, nearly all good, as human beings are. For nearly all men and women
are good, the old lady thought. One had to know their hearts,—their

appearance, their gestures meant nothing,—and their hearts ought to have a
chance to grow. And then they would all be good. Those who were n't had
had the growth of their hearts stunted somehow. And they were n't to be
hated, but pitied, poor things.

If any one, any young person, were to know what her thoughts were—
the old lady smiled—she would say she had known no trouble in life, was
shallow, did not understand the tragedy of things.

Well, she had had her share of life; her troubles as well as the rest of
them. She had been a very sensitive girl. When she married Mr. Valance,
her husband, she had hardly known him,—for such was the custom in her
day, that he should satisfy her parents of his affection rather than herself,—
and when the day came to leave her father and mother and her four brothers
and her sisters, to leave the house she had known since she was born, to
leave her own virginal room, and go away with a strange, terrifying,
fascinating man—why, it was like jumping into the sea without knowing
how to swim. In those days young girls did not know, were scared. And yet
everything had been all right. She loved Mr. Valance, her husband. No two
could ever have been closer than she and he. And she smiled at the terror of
her leaving the home.

And before Barry was born—oh, the ghastly nights, the ghastly, ghastly
nights, of lying awake and fearing, fearing, and the hideous unimaginable
dreams! And the birth itself, the surge of pain like some cruel, driving knife,
and strength ebbing in a fast flood! And came kind unconsciousness, and
when she woke there was a sort of white peace in her, and the little dark-
haired boy, by some beneficent magic, was on the nurse's broad lap. And
the strange miracle of how she had forgotten all the pain so soon ... how
little it seemed, how natural! And how ready she would have been again. A
little daughter, she had thought—how nice it would be! But it was n't to be.

And when Mr. Valance, her husband, had died, for her had come, she
thought, the end of the world. Yet now all she could remember were the
peace and trust in his quiet face, when all had gone. And into the room
where she was alone with him there came the quiet message that all was
well. And the hearts of people were so warm. The doctor himself, who had
seen so many die one would have thought he would have become callous,

was so unaffectedly kind. Even people one had thought were enemies—or
not enemies but just careless of one—showed a warmth, an understanding.

And she had thought it impossible for her ever to be on the world alone;
but somewhence strength had come to her, and poise; and all the fears she
had when Mr. Valance, her husband, was alive, were dead now, she a
widow. Lonely and down in grief at times, but afraid never!

And she thought to herself, with a queer little smile, of the times when in
the dark of the night, by the eerie Long Island waters, she had gone out,
crying in a little misery, praying, wishing that Mr. Valance, her husband,
would appear to her, that she might once more hear the beloved voice, sense
the big dignity, perhaps feel the kindly hand upon her shoulder. But she
waited in vain. Nothing came to her cries, her prayers, her wishes. But
when she came in again, she felt she had emptied her heart of longing and
loneliness, and all the familiar furnishings of her rooms spoke to her
tactfully and friendly.

She smiled, because now she recognized—however she did it she did not
know—that what she wanted could not possibly be granted. Just for her
alone an exception could not be made against the seemingly cruel,
tremendously wise law that the dead should be silent. Everything was so
wise, so ordered. And if one were to know exactly, the merchant would
leave his shop, the seamstress her broidery, the workman his lathe. So it
was kept a curtain of mystery, with a little hedge of terror before it.

All was well. Life and death, all in good hands.

She had often thought to herself, sitting there, as an old person might,
that things did not seem as well as they were in her young days. But on
second thoughts she discovered they were just the same. Life was a
constant, as Mr. Valance, her husband used to say of things. Oftentimes
while she sat in a corner and heard young people talk, she was amused, for
they seemed to think she knew nothing of modern life. And life could not be
modern or ancient. Life was a constant, as Mr. Valance, her husband, used
to say. They had only manufactured new terms, discovered new angles. She
smiled as she thought of their talks of psychoanalysis; of how one was very
complex; and how one must get rid of obsessions by discovering them and

talking about them to a specialist. One did the same in her day. One called
the obsessions troubles, and on one's knees one poured one's heart out to
God. And their talk of psychic things—why, when she was a grown woman,
did n't they have the queer Eddys in Vermont, and that strange Russian
woman, Madame Blavatsky, and Home, the medium, who floated through a
window, feet first! And she was sure that when she was young there was
just as intricate card games as bridge. And their talk of Socialism and man's
rights! Did they forget that Lincoln freed the slaves? Ah, the young!

She remembered a man saying—an old man—that what was wrong with
the new generation was this: they left nothing to God. They wanted to do
everything their own way. Fifty years ago, he said, every one was cognizant
of God.

But were they? pondered the old lady. Yes, they went to church. But did
n't they go just because one went, as nowadays one goes to the movies? A
habit. And did the rounded sentences of the ministers mean anything to the
young? No. And the hymns—they were just melodies. One sang them, as
young boys sang college songs. It was only when one was grown, man or
woman tall, and the great wolves of the world harried one, harried until one
could sense their white teeth, their red slavering mouths, and there was a
blank wall and no escape—it was only then one felt the Immense Hand.
And rarely afterward did one speak of it. It seemed like a strange secret
order, being initiated to God. She was sure that it was like that to-day, as it
was fifty years ago, as it must ever have been, as it must ever be.

Looking up from her sewing an instant, she saw Berenice coming toward
the house. It must be later than she thought. It must be lunch-time. They
must make Barry, poor boy, stop now. Brain work was so fatiguing and he
should n't overdo it.

She paused for a breath, watching the brown head, the apple-green dress.
She knew the girl's secret, though Berenice had never said anything, hinted
at all about a baby. But the little exalted look in the eyes—

"I must say a prayer to-night," thought the old lady.

He got up from the desk. No! it was no use. Nothing would come to-day.
Another fruitless morning. If he could only find the trick those fellows had!

Yes, but they all had something to write about, and he had nothing: this
wretched urban setting, this calm, uninteresting sound. And he knew
nobody. There was no encouragement, no inspiration. His mother, dear old
lady—she knew nothing, could tell him nothing. And his wife—she was a
dear girl, and he loved her, but— Oh, there was nothing to write about; no
drama; no people of drama.

WISDOM BUILDETH HER HOUSE

I

Whilst her great train was picking its way carefully from the mountain-
tops of Abyssinia, eight thousand treacherous feet of height, to the littoral of
the Red Sea, the slim brown queen had experienced only impatience. In the
cool quietness of her mountain home it had seemed the most natural thing
in the world to arise and visit the young king of the Jews. On every step of
the long journey downhill it had seemed natural. In her own country it
seemed right she should do as she had chosen. But now they had left
Abyssinia, left the great tropical forests with the gigantic candelabra trees,
left the arid cactus-covered plains, left the pleasant green valleys where
water trilled and the boxwood trees and wild roses and water cress grew,
and had come to arid Ailet by the Red Sea. And here were great stretches of
sand and mimosa, here half-naked, cunning black men, here a heat like a
pall, here the brooding mystery of Egypt, that knows all things and is silent
to questioning.

A different world, and in the different atmosphere there came a faltering,
a waver into the heart of Balkis. Was she a fool? For two miles her royal
train stretched. First, the fighting men in their short white robes, graceful,
powerful as cats; then the line of laden camels with tinkling bells; then the

great black elephants with their gleaming black skin, their gleaming white
tusks, their painted trappings; then the litters of her women; then her own
litter; a welter of attendants, bearing the provisions of the journey and the
present she was bringing to Solomon, the young king of the Jews: spices;
and gold of Ophir; and large diamonds from the Abyssinian mines; apes—
great red-faced baboons that had the strength of ten men, and delicate blue
monkeys, pretty as birds; and peacocks that outdid precious stones in the
shimmer of their colors; and tusks of ivory, large as the branches of great
trees.... Her heart wavered, and for an instant it occurred to her in panic to
go back. But if she returned now, she would be dissatisfied all her life, and
grow inward, and become maybe hard as a stone, and that was against
nature, for all things grow outward, as a tree grows outward, to fill up the
empty spaces of Death....

"No! no! I shall go on."

Up in the cool mountains decision had seemed so natural, action so easy.
But below in humid Egypt subtleties of thought seemed native to the weak
Nilotic breeze, and she could see herself as though she were another
woman. She could see her orphaned childhood, when the care of all her
counselors was to have her gracious and kind, and sweet as a small bird's
song. They had instructed her that queens are not made by crowns, but by
graciousness and strength and courtesy, so that any beholder might know
she was a queen were she dressed in the garments of her humblest slave.
And she had grown older into young maidenhood, and wise old heads had
helped her govern and take care of her wild mountain folk, and came a few
years more and she was twenty-two, and the counselors were too old to
counsel, being either querulous old men or dotards, living in forgotten days,
and Balkis herself had to rule, being queen. To be queen alone would have
been simple.

But being queen, she was lonely, and being gracious and just, she was
wise, and being wise, questions arose in her like a spring of well water.
Thought rose like a hawk and swept in widening gyres, but arrived
nowhere. Thought and emotion were with her in the red Afric dawn.
Thought and emotion were with her like the flickering lightning and terrible
thunder of the Abyssinian hills. Thought and emotion came with blue

mountainy twilight. And there was none to share them. None to ask. None
to satisfy. Being a queen, there was none she might consort with but kings
and queens, and the kings of the states about her were shrewd political men,
who could not understand what a young girl felt, and her young
womanhood quivering like the jessamy bough.... Their eyes would be on
the riches of Ethiopia; so they were out.... And the queens of Africa, outside
herself, were not queens, but tribal chieftainesses, half priestess and half
prostitute, Amazonian, untutored.... She could not talk to them.

And so she had decided there was nothing for her to do but to govern
justly, to grow old gracefully, to weep a little in private, to find it hard to go
asleep of nights, to look forward to death as a sentry awaits the dawn, until
a swart Egyptian trader had brought word of the new king of the Jews, now
David was gone. A boy he was, they said, a strange dreaming boy, with
none of his father's delight in war, and with a gift of strange inspired
wisdom. She was told the story of two women, that were harlots, and how
they each claimed a certain child as theirs, and of Solomon's judgment.

"And how old is the young king of the Jews?" Sheba asked.

"Twenty-three or twenty-four."

"A year or so older than I."

And she was told how Hiram, King of Tyre, that shrewd man, was a
friend to the young prince, and how the arrogant Pharaoh of Egypt
conceived it worth his while to make a treaty with him.

"And is he married?"

"No, Sheba, he is not married," the trader vouched....

II

The girl in her said: "Go back. They will think you are seeking love.
They will think that with your white teeth, your sloe-black eyes, your color
of fine bronze, your body, lithe and sleek and graceful as a cat's, you want
love from the king of the Jews." And all her face flushed at that thought,
and she debated whether she should send for the captain general of the
fighting men and tell him to face his troops about and return to her Ethiopia.
But the queen in her rose and said: "What care I what they say? Does Sheba
need the love of any lowland king, or plead for alliance? Sheba is Sheba,
and what Sheba does is Sheba's business." And the woman of her brooded
softly: "I will go on. Somewhere there is an answer to all the questions, and
if he does n't know the answer, perhaps he can help me to find them."

"And perhaps he has questions of his own," she said, "and I can help him
answer those." A sad boyhood, she had heard his was, with his father David
droning psalms in his latter days, busy at his prayers as a potter at his lathe,
calling for mercy for his own soul.... And his mother, the queen, who had
once been wife to Uriah the Hittite, a strange, mad old woman who walked
about the palace, gibbering to herself, her face and fingers twisting, all the
white beauty that had dazzled David upon the roof of the king's house
turned now to an awesome gray rugosity.... A house of fear, Sheba thought,
a house of silence, and she understood how Solomon could have become so
wise, for wisdom comes with the quiet tongue....

Wisdom he had, according to all reporters, but the wisdom she had heard
about was wisdom of the head and of the body. Had he wisdom of the
heart? Did he understand why one was now quiet as a well, now turbulent
as the sea? Did he understand why peace should come in a soft blue
garment, and suddenly irritation rise in angry red? Did he understand what
it was that dragged at the heart so, pulling it, it seemed, toward the
furtherest star? And could he resolve her what she was to do with herself?
Govern she must and govern wisely, but outside of that was she always to
be so lonely—she who was so young and strong and beautiful? The slave
girl with the fatherless baby had more than she, the queen. The housewife
grinding the family corn. Each could escape into some one else, had a
refuge—all but Sheba, the queen....

"I must go on."

And so her great and gorgeous train went on through the desert, crunch
of camels' pads, shuffle of marching men, thud of lumbering elephants,
screaming of peacocks, chattering of apes.... They passed the shimmering
sands, and came to the black high rocks. They passed sluggish Nile, and
came to the roaring cataracts. They came to the city of hawks and the city of
Venus and the city of sacred crocodiles. They came to Thebes with its
gigantic figures, each of a single stone. They came into the desert again,
steering at night by the stars as mariners do. They came to the great Lake
Moeris, which the Egyptians control by locks. They came to Memphis.
They passed the giant labyrinth. They passed the three great pyramids. They
passed the Sphinx. They came to the Great Delta. They crossed to Ais. They
came to Joppa. They wended toward Jerusalem in the cool of the dawn....

III

She was in no wise impressed, somehow, by his ceremonial officers.
They lacked dignity and were familiar. Nor did Solomon's great captains
please her. They were not fighters; they were strategists. They played with
companies as the Persians played chess with pawns. Her own men were her
ideal of soldiers, copper-colored, muscled like panthers; they would crash
into an opposing army like their native lightning, or they would die
doggedly, their backs to the wall, their heads broken, the blood streaming
into their eyes.... Nor did all the magnificence of the king's house please
her.... There was too much, too quickly acquired, and jumbled, no
composition. The Egyptians had more magnificent things, and grouped
them better. Her eyes flickered from the hall to the pale young king on his
throne. Beside him, standing, was Nathan, the principal officer, and the
king's friend, a great frame of a man, fanatical. And there was silence.

"I am Balkis, Queen of Sheba," she said and threw back her veil.
Solomon cast an uneasy glance at the prophet by his side.

"She is come to prove you with hard questions," Nathan spoke.

For an instant Balkis all but laughed. Behind her stood her fighting men,
in exact ranks, rather contemptuous. Around the hall the men of Judah and
Israel fluttered. Winked at, nudged one another. "From Abyssinia she
comes, to ask him questions. See what a king we have! A great people, we!"
It was so like a showman with a marvel to exhibit! "Ask him, ask him
anything you like. Go on. Ask him." The cadaverous prophet! The white,
young king. A swift stab of pathos went into Sheba's heart. Poor lad! Poor
king! Poor mummer!

She smiled in the corner of her veil. She was supposed to ask questions,
he to answer them. Well, let the mummery go on!

"O King," her voice rang out, "what is sweeter than honey?"

"The love of pious children."

"O King, what is sharper than poison?"

"The tongue."

"O King, what is the pleasantest of days?"

"The day of profit on merchandise."

"O King, what is the debt the most stubborn debtor denies not?"

"The debt is death."

"O King, what is death in life?"

"It is poverty."

"O King, what is the disease that may not be healed?"

"It is evil nature."

She was rather ashamed for herself and for him, and her great Ethiopians
were puzzled. But it was so evident that the poor white king's hold on his

people was this trick of wisdom. She must help him. She remembered
quickly what history she knew of his folk.

"O King," she asked, "what woman was born of man alone?"

"Eve was born of Adam."

"O King, what spot of lowland is it upon which the sun shone once, but
will never again shine until judgment-day?"

"The bottom of the Red Sea, which clave asunder for Moses. Then the
sun shone on the bottom and will never again shine until judgment-day."

"O King, what thing was it whose first state was wood and whose last
life?"

"The rod of Aaron, which became a writhing serpent."

She spread her slim copper hands, she bowed her sleek black head, as in
homage.

"It was a true report that I heard in mine own land of thy acts and of thy
wisdom.

"Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came and mine eyes had seen
it, and behold the half was not told me; thy wisdom and prosperity
exceedeth the fame which I heard.

"Happy are thy men, happy are these thy servants which stand
continually before thee and that hear thy wisdom!"

And all through the king's hall went the flutter of his subjects: "Did n't I
tell you? Did n't we say so? A fine king we 've got. All the way from
Abyssinia she came to prove him. And he answered her everything. A great
king! A fine king! Make no mistake!"

She moved toward the troubled young king with a smile.

"I would now commune with you on what is in my heart, great Solomon.
Let us commune alone."

His eyes probed her. He saw her kindliness to him. A fleeting little smile
answered her smile. He rose to meet her. The giant prophet caught him by
the wrist.

"My son, attend unto my wisdom," he whispered fiercely....

"The lips of a strange woman drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is
smoother than oil.

"But her end is bitter as wormwood—"

She caught his whispered words, and her proud head went up, her sloe-
black eyes flashed.

"I am Balkis, Queen of Sheba."

For an instant they regarded each other with hatred in their eyes. Sheba
turned.

"Men," she called to her bodyguard.

The slim brown Ethiopes tensed their statue-like pose. There was a swish
as the short Abyssinian swords came from the oxhide scabbards.

"But I said nothing of you, great Balkis," Nathan suddenly fawned. "I
spoke only of bad women. You are a good woman, Balkis, a virtuous
woman. And a virtuous woman is like a crown, great Balkis, of gold, yea of
fine gold—"

"So!"

IV

They went out alone into the garden of the figs and pomegranates. The
bright sun of early noon came down like a shower of gold. The doves made
their faint thunder. The locust span his tiny wheel. From afar off, where the
temple was a-building, came the clink of hammer on stone, the thud of ax
on wood, the yo-hoing, the grunts, the curses of the workmen as they
hoisted a beam into place.... And Solomon was shy as a girl....

"You are wondering why I came," Balkis said. "Will you sit down with
me?" They sat under a great cedar-tree. The pigeons thundered. The bees
droned among the apricots. The lizard flashed upon the wall. "I wonder
myself.... But you can tell me, Solomon. You are so wise."

"Am I?" There was a little note of bitterness in his voice.

"Are n't you?"

"I don't know," he said. "I—I don't know."

"But all the questions that are put, you answer them. All the matters of
judgment you pass on. Of course you are wise, Solomon."

"It is easy, Balkis, very easy, that sort of wisdom, for Nathan, as far back
as I can remember, has been dinning precepts and examples into my ears.
And at times, when things are difficult, comes a little inspiration, like a little
unpremeditated bar on a musician's psaltery. And the tricks of reading a
riddle are no more than the mason's tricks of arranging stones. If the clouds
be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth: and if the tree fall
toward the south or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth,
there it shall be. And if that is wisdom, then I have wisdom. But I know not
what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her
that is with child."

"Poor Solomon!"

"O Balkis, I wanted to go out with the young men, and to understand
what they all understand and I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the
air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; to hunt and fish with them and know
the way of a ship in the midst of the sea. But I never could, Balkis, for

while still a boy Nathan made of me a man, an old wise man. Woe to thee,
O land, he prophesied, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the
morning! So I 've always been a man, Balkis, a wise old man."

"Dear, poor Solomon! Never were young."

"Never, dear Balkis, never. I must never be young, never do a wild
boyish thing. Dead flies cause the ointment of an apothecary to send forth a
stinking savor; so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and
honor. O Balkis, the long wise days!"

"Poor Solomon! Poor dear Solomon!"

"O Balkis," he cried suddenly, "you came from afar to hear my wisdom,
and you heard a little mouse-like noise. And you wanted to commune with
me on what was in your heart, and I 've shown you my own heart, that is
like a troubled pool. Madness is in my heart while I live, and after that I go
to the dead. O Balkis, all is vanity and vexation of spirit."

"Hush! hush dear Solomon!"

And very suddenly his body broke in sobs, and his dark head fell on her
leaning shoulder. There was a mist in her Arab eyes as she held him, as she
patted him:

"Hush, dear Solomon!"

V

And in the dusk of day, when the master masons and their helpers had
gone, he brought her to the temple he was building to his god, the great
temple that Hiram, the trader king of Tyre, was embellishing for the reward
of twenty cities in the land of Galilee. And Balkis's eyes flashed with anger
at the cunning of the Phoenician king. It was such a shame to take

advantage of the boy! Poor wise-foolish king! He was like a child showing
his toys.

"See these brass bases, Balkis, with the borders of lions and oxen and
cherubim. And the brazen wheels at each base. They say there are cunning
brass-workers in India, but surely there is no more beautiful work than this.
Surely they cannot beat this."

"Of course not, my dearest. Of course not."

"And come with me, Balkis, to where the watchmen are, and I will show
you marvels such as you never saw before: an altar of gold and a table of
gold and ten candlesticks of pure gold with the flowers and the lamps and
the tongs of gold; and bowls and snuffers and basins and the spoons and the
censers of pure gold. Come."

They went toward the king's house. On the way Solomon stopped
suddenly and looked at his temple.

"O Balkis," he asked, "you have come through Egypt. How much bigger
is my temple than the pyramids and labyrinth? I 've heard so much of
them."

"Bigger?"

"Yes, how much bigger?"

She looked at the little building, twenty cubits broad, sixty cubits long.
Twelve paces one way, forty another. For an instant laughter bubbled in her,
but gave way to pathos, and her sloe-black eyes were wet again. O poor lad!

"Is it very much bigger than the pyramids, Balkis?" he asked eagerly.

"Oh, lots bigger. Much."

"Why, Balkis, you are crying. Are you lonely?"

"Yes, a little homesick," she lied again.

He came toward her and kissed her, in kindness, but the touch of lips
fired, startled them both, sent their blood pounding in the soft Syrian gloom.

"O Balkis!" his voice trembled. "O Balkis!"

"Solomon!" she uttered softly. "Dear Solomon!"

VI

Around the king's house the little winds of springtime hovered, the little
moon of May was in the air. Came the rustle of the grasses, and the minor
of the frogs, and the barking of cub foxes. All the constellations hung in a
cloud and the sickled moon was in the west—stars and moon and purple
night sky, like some rude mosaic. And from the king's room came the pale
gold of candles and the murmur of voices in exaltation. And beneath the
king's casement Nathan writhed in fear and anger and pain.

"O Balkis," came Solomon's voice, "you are wonderful. You are like a
company of horses in Pharaoh's chariots.

"Your cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, your neck with chains of
gold."

"O Solomon," her voice half whispered, half chanted, "a bundle of myrrh
are you unto me. My well beloved! He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.

"My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of
Engadi."

"Balkis, you are fair, my beloved; behold, you are fair, you have dove's
eyes ... fair, yea, pleasant...."

"As the apple-trees among the trees of the wood, Solomon, so are you
among the sons of man. I sat down under your shadow with great delight,
and your fruit was sweet to my taste. O dear Solomon, your eyes are

closing. You are drowsy. Sleep, heart. O ye daughters of Jerusalem, I charge
you by the roes and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake
my love, till he please."

"I am not sleepy, Balkis; I am only thinking. O beloved, if we could only
go away from here. Go away together—rise up, my love, my fair one, and
come away.

"For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

"The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is
come; and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

"The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender
grape give a good smell. Arise my love, my fair one and come away."

"O Solomon, if you only would," came Balkis's voice, pleading. "Listen,
my beloved. In Africa I have a great kingdom, and it could be greater did I
want it so. It is on a high mountain and its fortifications are the lightnings
on the hills. And from the hills my men can sweep down on all Africa. And
there is reverence for me from the giant Ethiops and from the pygmies of
the warm forests. Come with me, Solomon, come with me to a cooler, fairer
kingdom. In the lowlands there are vineyards, and the vines flourish, and
the tender grapes appear, and the pomegranates put forth; there will I give
thee my loves.

"And the mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of
pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved.

"O Solomon, come to Africa. Come to Africa with Sheba."

"O Balkis, what of my people, my poor people?"

"They can come, too, Solomon. There is welcome for them. They
crossed the Red Sea once; they can cross it again."

"But my temple, Balkis?"

"O Solomon, listen. I will set the Abyssinian millions against the
Pharaoh of Egypt, and they will make Egypt a waste land, as they did once
before. And they will bring back the Egyptians in bondage, and the
Egyptians will build you a temple, Solomon, a temple worthy of you, for
the Egyptians are cunning builders. They will exceed their pyramids. For
you I will conquer Egypt, Solomon.

"O Balkis, you are beautiful as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem. But you are
terrible, Balkis, terrible as an army with banners."

"That is nothing, Solomon. That is the smallest gage of love. O
Solomon, I have found something in my heart. I have found love. Many
waters cannot quench it, neither can the floods drown love; if a man would
give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

"Come with me, Solomon. Make haste, my beloved. Be like to a roe or a
young hart on the mountains of spices. Come to Africa."

He arose and paced the floor. Without, Nathan could hear the troubled
footsteps.

"I am afraid, Balkis. I am afraid."

"Of what, dearest one?"

"Afraid, just, Balkis. Afraid of Nathan, afraid of the new strange land.
Afraid for the temple. Afraid of God."

"Afraid? Do not be afraid, Solomon. Awake, O north wind," she chanted,
"and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may
flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits."

Solomon stood by the window in distress, eager, afraid.

"Hiram, King of Tyre, will be angry."

"The King of Tyre," Sheba laughed, "will not be angry with me. Hiram is
shrewd. He is a trader, not a fighting man."

"Are you sure, Sheba?"

"Yes, certain."

"Then I will—then I will—"

The voice of Nathan rose under him in an angry whisper:

"There was a young man void of understanding, ... and there met him a
woman subtle of heart.

"And she caught him and kissed him, and with an impudent face said
unto him:

"'I have peace offerings with me....

"'I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works,
with fine linen of Egypt.

"'I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon....'

"With her fair speech she caused him to yield, with the flattering of her
lips she forced him.

"He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as a
fool to the correction of the stocks.

"Till a dart strike through his liver; as a bird hasteth to the snare, and
knoweth not it is for his life...."

"O Balkis, do you hear anything? Do you hear anything without the
window? Do you hear a hissing as of a serpent aroused?"

"I hear nothing, Solomon. I hear nothing but the little murmur of the
trees. Come from the window. Come over here and kiss me with the kisses
of your mouth, for your love is better than wine. Put your left hand under
my head, Solomon, and let your right embrace me—"

"Don't you hear anything, Balkis? Are you sure?"

"There is nothing, Solomon, O white and ruddy, O chiefest among ten
thousand."

"No, there is nothing. I thought for a moment—"

Again the voice of Nathan came like the strokes of a sword:

"... O King, attend to the words of my mouth.

"Let not thine heart decline to her ways, go not astray in her paths.

"For she hath cast down many wounded: yea, many strong men have
been slain by her.

"Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death."

"Oh!" went a long shudder from the king.

"What is it, Solomon? Does anything affright you?"

"No, no, Balkis."

"Then come over to me, Solomon. Come where I can see your face. Your
countenance is like Lebanon, excellent as the cedars. Come."

"Remember your father, David," came the voice beneath the window,
"son of Jesse, turned from wisdom. Remember how his chiefest joy,
Absalom his son, died. Remember how he stood against God, the prophet of
the Lord, and the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel from the morning even
to the time appointed, three days' time; and there died of the people from
Dan even to Beersheba seventy thousand men.

"And the angel of the Lord stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to
destroy it.... Remember!"

"Oh!"

"What is it, dearest? What is wrong? Have I done anything to offend
you, to hurt you?"

"Remember Samson, judge of Israel, and how he loved a woman in the
valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah, and he told her all his heart.

"And remember his end, how the Lord was departed from him, and the
Philistines took him and put out his eyes—"

"O-o-o-o-h!"

"—and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass
—"

"A-a-a-a-h!"

"Solomon, dearest Solomon, why do you cry?"

"—and he did grind in the prison house ... and make them sport...."

With a loud cry the young king burst from the room and fled down the
corridors, his, feet pattering like the feet of foxes on the run, his heart
crying out in sudden terror. "Where are you going, Solomon? Where are
you gone?" came the voice of the young queen. "O head of most fine gold,
O eyes of doves, O cheeks as a bed of spices, whither are you gone? O lips
like lilies, O hands as gold rings, why do you leave me?" So all night long
she cried, and wandered aimlessly. "You called me your sister, your spouse,
your love, your dove, your undefiled," she wept piteously, "and now you are
gone." She went through the garden, while Nathan crouched in the
undergrowth. "You were like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and
frankincense, with all the powders of the merchant, and now you are gone."
She wandered through the dark streets. "O locks that are curly and black as
a raven, where are you now?" And the dawn broke and the shadows fled
away, and still she cried: "O Solomon, where are you, Solomon? Make
haste, my beloved!" But he never came. "Saw ye him whom my soul
loveth?" she asked the watchman. But they drove her away. "O ye daughters
of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, tell him, that I am sick of love..." But
he never came.

VII

Without, there were the grunts of her men as they strapped the packs of
the elephants, the snarl of camels as they rose to their pads and turned to
bite at their loads, the shuffle of the troops as they lined for the long night
march, the quick gruff orders of the captains, the canter of horses. Within,
Sheba stood very erect in the great hall. The poor white king writhed on his
throne. Nathan stood by his side, erect and afraid.

"And I said—" Sheba's voice was quiet—"oh, you who were as my
brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! when I should find you
without, I would kiss you, I would not be despised.

"For I thought I was set as a seal upon your arm, and that your love was
as strong as death.

"I rose and went about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I
sought you, whom I thought my soul loved, but I found you not.

"The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they
wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veils from me—

"Me, Sheba!" Her eyes flashed. Solomon quailed in his seat. The prophet
made a propitiatory gesture.

"Oh, do not fear, Nathan." Sheba smiled. "I came not to conquer, but to
find wisdom. I found it."

She paused an instant.

"Before I go, let me give you, Solomon, called the wise, some wisdom
of the heart. And you, Nathan the prophet, let me prophesy. You might have
had one woman, Solomon, to love you all your life, but the day will come
when you will seek my face among a thousand women, and never have me.
You might have a temple that would have made the pyramids seem like
outhouses, but one day your temple will be a little broken wall. And your
people might have been the conquerors of Africa, but one day they will be
helots in the Babylonian land. You have the wisdom of the shrewd and

pious, Solomon, that can never meet the generous hand with the grateful
heart."

She turned and swept out of the hall. At the gates she stopped and bowed
mockingly.

"O King, live forever!"

VIII

All afternoon the east wind had been blowing, cold, bitter as aloes, and a
great cloud-bank raced after the sun westward, until only a little space in
the western horizon was clear where the sun went down. The voices of the
land were stilled, the minute thunder of the pigeons, the whirring of
crickets. Nor had the leaves of the trees their lively murmur, but stood fast
and flat, like set sails. One could hardly believe that the winter was past and
summer coming, for all was dreary, dreary....

Against the great red mushroom of the setting sun, the last of the homing
caravan of Sheba showed. In the mind's eyes of the young king and the old
prophet as they stood by the unbeauty of stone and brick and gray mortar
that was the unfinished temple, they could see the angry camels, the
lumbering elephants, the dancing horses, the swinging men, and the brown
comeliness of the young queen's handmaidens, the straight backs of her
fighting men. And the wind from the east blew through the land, blew
through the heart of Solomon.... In a minute now they would disappear over
the desert's edge. All seemed somehow tragical, like sailors leaving a great
stricken ship, or glory passing from the land of its abiding....

"Oh, Nathan," pleaded the young king, "tell me she lied. Tell me I shall
not have a thousand women and be a bitter, loose old man."

"O King, you shall find a virtuous woman. And her price will be far
above rubies."

"Will she be as kind as Sheba was?"

"She will arise while it is yet night, and give meat to her household, and
a portion to her maidens.... She will consider a field and buy it: with the
fruit of her hands she will plant a vineyard."

"Will she be as well-favored, as beautiful as—as Sheba was?"

"Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the Lord,
she shall be praised."

"I suppose so. I suppose—you are right, Nathan, but—" The last of the
caravan disappeared over the edge of the desert, and as though it were
accompanying them, being a friend to them, the sun disappeared, too. A
great coldness and darkness and dreariness came over the land, so that
Solomon looked up in surprise. There was no moon....

THE PARLIAMENT AT THEBES

All around us, now, is the occult night of Egypt, and we sense that we
are in a place we have known in dreams and desires, and perhaps seen a
drawing of in some childhood's book. Before us we sense—we do not see,
so little light does the moon behind the rolling clouds give us—an
immensity of sand. In some places there are little hills; and in others billows
as of the sea, and here a rude terrace, and there a minute cliff. Everywhere
is the sand; live sand, not dead. And westward, we know, it rolls onward
like the sea, through the width of Africa, through the Sahara, reaches
Timbuktu, the secret city, and the jungle takes up the land, and rolls to the
Gold Coast, where the Atlantic booms in great, curling surf.

And south of us is Africa, too, the crags of Abyssinia, the great belt of
Rhodesia, and the plains where Kaffirs dig for diamonds, and the great
veldts the Boers have tamed, and Table Mountain, that old navigators know,

and the cape they have called Good Hope. And southward and eastward is
the pearly haze of Madagascar.

And north of us the desert slopes away to where Alexandria was, to
where the still Mediterranean is, which has no tides, and Tyre and Sidon
flourished, that now are dead; and Carthage of the Phoenicians was, whence
black Hannibal set forth against the eagles of Rome—and was conquered
and yet lives, so great his name is. And here was the empire of the Moors,
the slim bronze people who struck Spain in a great shattering wave, and
from whom Charlemagne got glory in battle.

All these are dead now, and the moon shines over dead cities, dead
heroes, and great empires that are dead, and buried under shifting silver
sands. But the land we are in is not dead; eternal Africa, eternal Egypt.

And where we are now, it is old, the events of history being like the
trivialities of a summer day. We sense that Egypt is older than Mohammed,
whose revelation is law there now, and older than the Little Lord who fled
hither from Palestine with Joseph and Mary, older than the painted kings
who sleep in pyramids; older than the pyramids themselves; older than the
Hebrews who helped build them; older than Moses, who revolted and used
black magic against the Pharaoh of his time; older than the tradition of
yellow shaven priests; older than Isis and Osiris whom they worshiped with
polished ritual—older, and younger, than this; eternal.

Above our heads now there is an occasional beam of the moon, and in
front of us the plain of sand that extends to the little hillocks and minute
cliffs the wind has made. And back of us is the broad and shallow Nile,
where we hear an occasional lap of a little wave, and a splash as of some
small fish jumping. And here and there are isolated palm-trees.

And there are no men, anywhere, but there is a sense of men. We know
there are men in the cities to the north of us, men and women dancing in
great blazing hotels, men on great liners going eastward through the canal
De Lesseps made, men south of us at camp fires in the jungle, men west of
us on caravans to Timbuktu. But here, and near here, men there are none.

There is a pocket of clearness in the clouds for a second and the moon
shines through, and we see on the plain before us such assembly of life as
only Noah saw when he took the creatures of the world in seven by seven
and two by two, on board his great ship. In a great orderly gathering they
are there, patient, silent. The bears are there, the brown bear, and the little
black bear. And the moorland ponies, and the deer are there, great elks with
horns like sails, and the little deer of parks, and they of the cat tribe, with
sleek furs and green eyes, and the fox with his brush, and the lanky, wide-
eyed hare, and the rabbit children do be loving. They are all gathered there.

And the kine of the field are there, patient, stupid-looking. And the great
monster of the river, the hippopotamus, and the armored creature that has
the horn on its nose. And the last of the buffaloes. And the great springing
thing of Australia that carries its young in a pouch, it is there. And the
solemn sheep.

And back of that is an infinity of little creatures, the furry little creatures
of the woods, who run when approached. They are there. All, all are silent,
patient, a little puzzled, one fancies.

In front of this gathering, forward and a little apart, is a manner of
deputation. The lion, who pads around a little, and in whose eyes there is
anger. The great black and amber tiger, who is still but for the significant
movement of the immense tail, and the elephant, that seems like some
gigantic carven thing. And the crocodile lies in the sand, like some black
sea-beaten log. And the polar bear is there with black dots for eyes. And the
horse is still as in a stall. And next to the elephant the dog sits.

And they are all there, gathered for some occult reason, in the night of
Egypt, under the thin twilight of the clouded moon.

And another beam of moonlight comes, and we see that the Angel of the
Lord has appeared somewhence and stands before them.

As we see the Angel of the Lord, one of the illusions of our childhood
vanishes. He is not a shining figure armed with terror and majesty. True, he
has wings and a sword and a white robe, and is of stature above mortal. But,
on the other hand, he has a great red beard, and his fingers are gnarled.

There is something shy in his appearance, and kindly. And about him there
is something of disappointment. One gets the impression that once he was a
very great angel indeed, but in latter centuries he has drifted into a sort of
back-water.

If he were a man and not an angel, with his red beard and gnarled fingers
and shy ways, he might be an old-fashioned farmer who cared more for his
land than for the price of corn, and who would allow no tractors or
mechanical appliances on his place, still having faith in the firm hands of
workmen, and the strength and canniness of horses. He is evidently
embarrassed, and not quite at home, and it is easily seen that he is more
accustomed to looking at the crack in a horse's frog, and tending sick ewes,
and herding homeless dogs, than facing emotional tension such as seems to
be present.

He comes forward shyly, his brow wrinkled in an embarrassed smile.
And the dog smiles back at him, opening a laughing mouth and wagging its
tail. And the horse gives a little whinny. But the rest are silent. The elephant
regarding him with a sort of kindly contempt, and the crocodile watching
him with ophidian distrust. But the lion is warm with anger and the tiger
dangerously cold with it. The great white bear is serious.

The Angel of the Lord speaks. His voice is soft and his speech halting.
And we have a sudden chill of horror as we recognize his accent as Irish.
Not quite Southern Irish, and not distinguishably Northern Irish—neutral
Irish.

"Well, now, this is an unusual thing, an out-of-the-way thing, I might
say.... I ... I hope I see you all well?"

There is a rustle of the little creatures back of the deputation. And in the
circle before the angel the dog is wagging his tail, and the horse throwing
up his head. But silence.

"I take it there is something on all your minds, so! Well, let you speak
up, now, and let me hear what it is. It isn't the weather: that's elegant. And it
can't be the crops. I was talking to the Angel of the Crops last night, and
devil a better season has he seen since the night of the big wind."

He gets no answer.

"It's queer and shy you 've got all of a sudden. And why should you be
shy with me? Sure there 's never anything come between us since I was put
over you. And have n't I always been your friend? Let one of you speak up,
now. How about yourself?" He turns to the lion. "The king of beasts, they
call you. Let you be speaking, now, for the crowd."

All around us now is the occult night of Egypt. Live sand and the little
wind among the hillocks, and back of us the antique Nile. Here first was
magic. And here first the half-gods were worshiped under the guise of
beasts; of the cat and of the crocodile, and of others. And here is the
monument of the half-god, the Sphinx, that is woman and animal, beauty
and terror.

And as we listen, the beasts speak, and to our human mechanics the deep
vibrations are translated into human sounds, and the voice of the lion is as
the voice of some great one of our race speaking in anger. And in the deep
rumble we can hear thunder:

"In the place where I live by the great lake there is lately come a man."
So the lion! "He is a trading man. His legs are bandy. He is rarely shaven. In
the morning his eyes are bleary. He blinks at the green light of dawn.

"And in the green glade where he is come he has builded a house. He has
littered the ground with mangled boughs of trees, with papers, with tin cans
which are emptied of his food. And the winds cannot clean that place, nor
the rains wash the obscenity away.

"And all day long this man sits behind his counter in the little shop and
barters with the black man, giving knives and beads and cloth for the skins
of the animals whom it is allotted to the black man to kill. And giving him
white man's liquor.

"And the white man drinks his own liquor, and when his heart is high
with it, he takes his rifle and comes to seek me—for he has to seek me; I
and all the clean things of the land avoid him, so little kin is he to us.

"And if he kills me for his sport, my lioness will come and he will kill
her, too, and what shall become of our little tawny cubs?

"Why should this man come into our clean land, and make unbeautiful
the dells, and stalk me that he may boast to other drinking men: 'I have
killed the king of beasts'?"

"Ay! Ay!" The angel is disturbed. "He does make the place look bad.
And true for you, he does go after you. I understand. I understand fully, but
—"

And now the tiger has arisen, and his speech comes sibilant, with a little
snarl:

"They who come up the Hooghly are not unshaved but clean. They are
precise, languid men. They come for gain in the country. They do not barter
in shops, but gain comes to them. They govern, and for being governed the
brown men of India pay tribute and tax.

"And when the languid men from over the sea grow tired of governing,
they go out to seek adventure. They send out the brown Indian men on foot
to rouse me from the jungle sleep. And they follow with guns on our brother
the elephant, and when I am driven into the open, and stand there dazed
with the sun, they shoot at me from the back of our brother the elephant.

"And was it for this I was made, given great emerald eyes, given amber
skin with great black stripes, given silken muscles, and claws like knives, to
be driven out of my warm green jungle into the blinding sun, and be killed
by languid men?"

"Well, now, you know what they say; if they did n't kill you, you 'd kill
them."

"How many have I killed, except in defense? Is it sport for me to leave
the cool, moonlit glades, and come to the hot cities to kill men? If I want
fighting, are there not the wild boar and my brother the elephant? And if I
want food, is man as succulent as the young kid?"

"Ay, there 's a lot in that. And what is your complaint?" He turned to the
great carven elephant.

"I am the wisest, the strongest, the most dignified of all. I live on the
shoots of young trees, and raid sometimes the crops, but I kill nothing
except in terror or defense. And once they sought me out in the secret places
for great ivory teeth, and there was great danger. And it was either kill or be
killed.

"And now they trap me with cunning. Now there are helot elephants
trained to decoy the brethren of the warm woods, and traps to hold us. And
when they have made us fast they starve us cruelly. And they bring us
across waters and exhibit us, and the clown and the yokel pay their copper
pennies to gaze at the wise and strong in captivity. And some greasy man
pouches the wages of our prison. Was it for this we were made wise and
kindly and strong?"

The angel is embarrassed. He looks right and left. He turns in relief to
the great white bear:

"Sure, now, what complaint can you have? There 's nobody going to
shoot at you from the back of the elephant. And there's no man going to
open a shop where you are. Begor, 't is few customers he 'd have barring the
sea-gulls. And whenever you get killed, 't is your own fault. It's your
curiosity brings you to where they can get a shot at you. If you 'd stick
around your icebergs you 'd be better off. Sure, you lead the life of a lord's
lady. What brings you here at all?"

"I come for the little seals, and our sister the whale. They cannot walk.
And they are in great trouble."

"I know. I know. Sure, my heart's just in chains for them."

"The seals huddle on the rocks with their young. They huddle and
tremble, and each sinister boat in the Arctic seas is a menace. And the seas
are wide, and the patrols are few."

"I know. I know."

"The black boats come, and the men with rifles."

"Ah, now, don't be talking! Don't I know!"

"And our sister the whale skulks in black seas—she who once greeted
the sun in the morning. And now seldom appears—who once loved to bask
like a cat. She is haunted in her own ocean until she cannot show her
steaming fountains. And as a people, she is a slender people, and will soon
die."

"A great and terrible loss, surely. Sure, I 'm trying to forget, and you 're
reminding me. And you?"

"I have no complaint," uttered the crocodile. "They rarely kill me with
guns. They seldom capture me. And there are always small black children
bathing in the Nile. And boats get upset often. I have no complaint," he
leered.

"Do you know—" the angel is severe—"I never liked you. And what use
you are on this earth is more than I can see. Do you know," he said, "I 've
half a mind to hoof you back into the river. I have so. Now, here 's one has a
complaint." He turned to the horse. But the horse shook its head.

"No complaint, and you the hardest-worked of them all! And the rest of
these lazy devils doing nothing but lolling around in the sun. And you, my
darling?"

The dog uttered a joyous bark.

"You have no complaints, either."

"Except," the dog pleaded, "that they should n't muzzle me in the heat of
the day."

"Well, now, boys—" the angel was awkward with his hands—"I take it
you 've all got a complaint to make against man. You object, I infer, to his
shooting at you with guns, except, as he is entitled to, in self-defense. And I
take it our friend the elephant also objects to being exhibited. On the whole,

you object to the present attitude of man. Now, what do you want me to
do?"

"We want you," the lion said, "to have God make man stop attacking us."

"Well, now—" the angel shifts from one foot to the other—"well, now,
you 've touched on a very delicate situation. On all subjects, of course, you
'll find God kind—I might say, to a degree. But the subject of Man is just a
wee bit touchy.

"God, you know, is very much interested in Man. He thinks a lot of man,
and He is very much inclined to let man have his own way.

"So whether He 'd listen to a complaint against man or not, I don't rightly
know. Personally, between me and you, I think it might be dangerous to put
it that way.

"But I 'll tell you what I 'll do. I 'll wait until some fine day when they
tell me He 's in good humor, when He's pleased about Man having thought
out some new fine scheme, or made a discovery, and then I 'll tackle Him,
nice and easy.

"Yes, I 'll take it up some day, and I 'll see what I can do. I 'm sure if I
can get Him in a good humor, I can do something. Will that satisfy you?"

"It will not," said the animals.

"Well, then, what do you want me to do?"

"We want you," the tiger's sibilant purr came, "to go from us to God
now, to-night."

"Och! have sense! You don't know what you 're asking. I suppose you
think I 've only got to knock at the door and ask God to come out and talk it
over, and offer Him a pinch of snuff, maybe, and ask Him how the weather
's agreeing with Him. Do you know this wee earth is only one of a million?
Of course you can't comprehend that, being only animals and having no
reason."

There is something like a snort from the elephant. The Angel of the Lord
ventures a timid glance in that direction, but says nothing. The angel is
rather in awe of the elephant, as a mother might be of a genius child. He
switches to a different point:

"Besides, I suppose you think there are only a few angels of us in it—
myself and the Angel of the Changing Seasons, and the Angel of the
Growing Crops, and the Angel of the Rivers and Streams, and the Angel of
the Five Oceans. Well, let me tell you, there's archangels, and there's powers
and dominions, and cherubim and seraphim, and God knows what else. And
there's angels you never heard of: there's the Angel of the Progress of
Education, and there 's the Angel of Economic Conditions, and the Angel of
Atomic Energy. All very clever fellows—geniuses, you might say. And
there 's the Angel of Arts and Crafts, a sloppy-looking lad I would n't be
caught talking to.

"And there 's English angels, all very superior, and Italian angels, slick
as be-damned; and Russian angels are always sighing and groaning and
drinking tea; and American angels, brisk lads would convince a dying man
he was the devil and all for strength and energy. And me nothing but a poor
sort of fellow that knows nothing but animals; you see, I 'd better be
keeping my mouth shut in that kind of assembly.

"I 'll tell you what I will do. I 'll get through my work early, and contrive
to hang around the squares and gardens of heaven, and any one of these
days the Grand Man Himself will be passing by and He 'll see the glint of
my old red whiskers, and He 'll stop the archangels and the powers and
dominions, and come over, so kindly He is."

"'Where have you been hiding yourself, Michael John?' He 'll say. 'And
how's all your care?'

"'They 're fine, Sir. They 're grand,' I 'll say. 'Sure, 't is to the queen's taste
they are—barring a wee bit of trouble that's not worth mentioning.'

"'And, sure, what's troubling you, my poor lad?'

"''T is not worth troubling your Deity about. 'T is not so!'

"'Out with it now, Michael John!' Himself will say.

"''T is that my little people, Sir, do be worrying hard that man is after
them a bit strong, and if Yourself would just direct him to be a wee bit
easy'—and I 'll tell Him what you all say.

"Is n't that the jewel of a plan? Is n't that the great scheme entirely?"

"We think it's rotten!" champed the crocodile.

"Well, that's all I can do," the angel told them. "If you 've got a better
plan—"

"We have decided," the lion rumbled, "that if you could do nothing, we
could. We can stalk man as he stalks us. We will not wait for him to come
out; we will descend upon him. We will lie in wait for him in the way. I
shall come to the villages with my kind and the spotted leopards that purr
like the rumbling of drums, and the striped hissing snakes; and the
rhinoceros shall lumber through the streets, and the great river-horse shall
no longer avoid his frail boats but seek them."

"And my brother the elephant will crush him beneath his terrible knees,"
the tiger snarled, "and trample his little houses. And the wild boar with
tusks like knives will strike at him from the ground. And from the jungle I
will come forth with the moon, and when dawn comes there will be wailing,
if any are left to wail, and the small winged things of the jungle will assault
him night and day, and there will be terror through the land."

"And there will be terror through the sea," the white bear prophesied.
"Our sister the whale will no longer flee but fight, and the sails of ships will
quiver and the bulwarks give. And we will push icebergs in the paths of iron
ships. The millions and millions of herring and cod will help. And the
swordfish will founder the life-boats. And out of the gray-green depths of
the sea the devil-fish will arise, his long, seeking tentacles over the gunnels
—"

"Oh, childer, childer dear!" the angel implored.

"And our cousins the birds will help us," the lion took up the litany. "The
eagle and the hawk in their strength, and even the little sparrows in their
number. They will buffet with wings, they will peck with their sharp beaks,
the innumerable folk of the air."

"And from the North," the tiger promised, "the wolves will come out
with their red eyes, their slavering fangs, and the fox will revolt, with his
teeth sharp as a dog's."

"And the things of the field will revolt," the bear went on, "the patient
kine, the sheep and goats, and the vibrations of battle will put panic on the
horse so that he will smash his traces with his hoofs, and smash men's
heads. And the turmoil will craze the dog, so that he will attack those he
loves."

"For God's sake, children dear, will you stop breaking my heart!"

"Death and terror on the land!" prophesied the lion.

"Death and terror on the sea!" promised the great white bear.

"My dears, will you let me put sense at you? Will you listen to me a
moment?" the angel pleaded. "'T is for your own sakes I ask. Will you just
listen?

"What will become of you if you do all this?

"Don't you know that man will come against you with all his weapons
and mechanical contrivances, his poison gas and his torpedoes, and wipe
you off the face of your own earth? Childer dear, you have no idea of the
terrible fellow he is at all. Myself, angel and all as I am, when I see some of
those fellows coming hell-for-leather in their motor-cars, I leap like a hare
out of their way, I do so. And oftentimes I 'm shaking in the legs for hours
after it. I don't mind telling you. He 'll kill you surely, childer dear."

"He 'll kill us anyway," fluted the elephant. "What matter to-day or to-
morrow or a century from now? We die. What of the Irish elk, with horns
like banners, so proud in his green pastures? What of the great buffalo, lord

of the plains?—where is he? If we die, let us die together, fighting shoulder
to shoulder!"

"Besides, maybe it's worse than man you 'd have."

"What is worse than man?"

"Maybe God Himself would come down against you, maybe," the
angel's voice falls to a sacred whisper; "maybe He will uncover His face!"

There is a movement of awe, or terror among the animals. The silent
multitude back of the speakers rustles like leaves. The lion speaks:

"Even that we will brave, if we cannot have justice."

For a little while they look at one another in awed tension. The animals
are frightened, the angel is frightened. One would think they were terrified
by their temerity, and were awaiting the avenging thunder of God. The
angel plucks up courage. He gives a little nervous laugh.

"Now, here we are, my dear little people, making fools of ourselves as
usual; letting our feelings run away with us. You 'd think it was at a political
meeting you were, with you giving out manifestos and ultimatums, and
wanting to die.

"Let us get down, now, to facts. Let us examine what material we have,
and draw deductions.

"We were all agreed that we are here by the wisdom of God, and being
here in that wise, are subject to his wishes in every way. Even old Go-by-
the-ground—" he looks at the crocodile—"knows that."

"Now, from what I 've heard from the angels who are higher up,—from
them, let me tell you, that are absolutely on the inside,—God designs to
make out of man the perfect being. He intends to combine your bravery—"
he turns to the lion—"and your wisdom—" to the elephant—"with your
beauty"; he is addressing the tiger.

"What about me?" champs the crocodile.

"Och, be damned to you! Man," he goes on didactically, "is essentially a
creature of progress. He is the only being that builds houses—"

From the background comes a shrill squeak from the beaver.

"I mean houses with rooms—"

There is the angry droning of bees.

"What I mean is this: houses with fireplaces and pots and pans and what
not. None of us will deny," he finishes lamely, "the enormous progress of
man."

"I deny it," the lion stormed. "Can I forget the great black armies of the
South, the glistening men with the silver armlets and the short keen spears?
Not even of me were they afraid, those! Their drums resounded through
veldt and plain, They asked only of the earth what they needed for their
good. And when they hunted they hunted fair. They matched their strength
against our speed. And their knowledge against our knowledge. And at
night they sang and they danced beneath the moon.

"And now they are farm servants to the men who come overseas. They
are not clean, as they once were. Their bodies that once were naked and
glistening are caked with mud and covered with rags. And some of them are
driven into the bowels of the earth, and the sunlight and the moonlight they
were born to is kept from them. And they dig diamonds for men who are
not satisfied with the luster of stars. And they who once fought me in the
open with a spear now skulk with a gun."

"I remember an India that was," the tiger snarled, "a land of rajahs and
temples, of brown dancing girls and men who played little flutes. They
grew the green sugar-cane, and cotton they might spin on great wooden
wheels. And their smiths hammered brass into strange antique shapes. And
they worshiped God with singing and dancing in cool temples.

"What are the rajahs now, that once were the wonder of the earth, but
little helot princes? And the ranees—the cinnamon-colored queens with the
minute silver bells upon their bud-like toes—but despised native women?

Are the bazaars filled with the quaint work of smiths? No, but with the
meretricious trinkets of the West. And black-coated men seek to turn them
from native immemorial gods. And the machine that throws pictures the
mummers make, fights against the music and the dancing and the temple
bells.

"The beauty I stand for is passing away."

"In Burma, whence I come," said the elephant, "there are jungles deeper
than the jungle of Africa, or the Indian jungles. Great mossy trees, and
painted flowers, and great brown rivers rolling to the sea. And the men there
are beautiful as women, and the women beautiful as flowers.

"And once they paddled down the great brown river in glistening black
canoes. They wore great gaudy sashes and had a flower in their teeth or a
flower in their hair. Under the shadow of the great trees they paddled. And
when they saw me they made reverence, saying, 'Our lord, the elephant!' On
little reeds they made sweet, plaintive music.

"And now the great ancient trees are being cut down, and floated on the
bosom of the hurt brown rivers. And the peace of the jungle is disturbed
with the cough of the motor-boat, and oil is heavy on the warm jungle
smells. And the men, beautiful as women, are clothed in soiled white
garments; the rounded child-like bodies of the brown women chafe under a
huddle of clothes. And when I am observed, the white man asks, demands,
the help of the little brown men to hunt me, to whom they once did
reverence, and I seem to hear no more sweet, plaintive music.

"From the quiet river I have seen the painted barges of the Pharaohs
move along under the sweeps of the negro slaves. Color and majesty and
dignity. And the shaven priests chanted their litanies at the change of the
moon. And from the Sahara the desert tribes brought tribute and treasure to
Egypt, the men with the white horses and the black tents. And the nodding
dromedaries and camels and their tinkling bells. And the kings raised their
pyramids, and the multitude of men like ants listened at sunrise to the great
masonic prayer. And they left the Sphinx to denote their mystery. And
Cleopatra, who was Lilith reborn, played with Rome for a doll.

"All these things have I seen: the magic of great Moses, and the flight of
the Little God of Galilee; the perfumed Pharaohs; the sinister yellow
priests; the gnarled masons at their secret prayers; and Cleopatra brown as a
berry, magnificent as jewels, venomous as a snake; and the sculptor at work
on the Sphinx.

"And now tourists unwrap the great kings, and hucksters chaffer where
once the trains of the prince-merchants of Tyre passed, and we shall never
see a Cleopatra any more.

"But I am not complaining. Men do not swim as well as in the elder
days, nor handle a boat as surely."

"I know nothing of painted Pharaohs," said the great white bear, "nor
anything of Indian queens. In the North are neither kings nor masons, but
day and night and ice, and a little people. In summer is the great sun, white
light, and grass that is green for a little, and the thunder of breaking bergs,
and in winter no sun but the flaming aurora and the white illimitable miles!

"And the swarthy little people were happy then. In the long nights they
sang, and they bowed to the gods in boulder and stream, and set out in the
little kayaks on the Arctic seas to hunt the great solemn walrus, or they set
off in sledges through the pathless wastes. They were a brave people, a
healthy people.

"And came the boats hunting our sister the whale, and the whales taught
the little swarthy people progress, and everywhere now they are cunning
and degraded and crusted with sin, and a great plague makes them spit
blood, and waste to nothingness, and die."

They all looked at the horse, but the horse was silent.

"Look back in the folds of your memory," the lion prompted. "Look back
well! Can you not remember the great races in the Roman circus? Listen a
little! Can you not hear the trumpets of Agincourt?"

"And you, little brother—" the bear swung his ponderous head toward
the dog—"was there not a time when you lay before a fire in a rush-strewn

hall? And now the houses are too little. They tell me—I do not know. And
did you not once run barking joyously beside man on his horse? And now
horses are out of fashion, are they not, little comrade? And the cars are too
fast for your short legs."

There is another silence, and the angel looks at them piteously.

"I wish to my God I had some of them clever fellows here could argue
with you. I never was much good in an argument, anyway, never having had
the education. But let me tell you there 's angels could prove to you you 're
all wrong. I wish they 'd come here and talk to you, but I don't suppose they
'd care much about us and our wee affairs. But—but how about music," he
hazarded, "and poetry? Ay, and poetry."

"As to music—" the elephant threw up his trunk in a sneer—"what
music can he make comparable to the birds of summer—the sun going
down, and each bird with its separate song, blending into a gently-colored
symphony, and the chime of the waves with it, and the rustle of the
branches in the sundown breeze?"

"Ay, but poetry."

"It will need poetry," thundered the lion, "more poetry than can be ever
written, to equalize the making ugly of earth. The great cliffs shamed by
mean houses, and the splendid glades ruined that a train may pass. And the
mouths of rivers spoiled by the slag of mills. And great noble trees hacked
down. How many an epic to pay for a great forest dying, shepherd? How
many a lyric for a tree where little trusting birds had their home?"

The angel throws out his hands abruptly.

"You have me," he says. "You have me!"

He braces with decision, rises to his full height, and suddenly there is
nobleness.

"Well, which is it to be?" he asked. "Will you follow my plan, or do you
insist I go immediately?"

"We insist."

He pauses an instant.

"Very well. I 'll go," he says. "I 'll go."

He looks all around the gathering. In spite of his decision, and his
bracing, there is a great emotion brewing in him.

"Now, before I go, let me tell some of you something. Do you, Philip—"
he turns to the bear—"be getting back North as fast as you can. You poor
fellow, you must be murdered with the heat entirely, and you with the Arctic
furs on. You 'll catch your death here. And as for you," he warns the
crocodile, "don't be obstinate, there 's a good fellow! Keep to the water, and
you 'll be all right. It's only when you get out, they can get after you. And
my little friends the beavers—where are they? Childer, can you hear me?"

"But what's all this about?" asks the elephant.

"It's just for fear I 'm not coming back."

"But why aren't you coming back?" the lion growls.

"Och, it's just a notion. Are the beavers there at all, at all?"

"No, just a moment!" The tiger is on his feet. "I want to hear more of
this. What do you mean by notion? You aren't thinking of leaving us?"

There is a quick commotion, a little shudder among all the animals in the
background.

"Well, now—" the angel is embarrassed—"it's a hard errand I have
before me, and what will be at the end of the chapter no one knows. I to be
arguing with the Great Man, and demanding your rights, and He to be
losing His temper with me—there 's no knowing. So to be on the safe side, I
'll just say good-by to you now. Many 's the pleasant hour we 've known and
springtime coming, and many's the little day we 've spent together and
winter roaring through the chilly air."

"But He never loses His temper, does he? He 's always mild."

"Oh, childer dear, ye little know! You all know the Black Man, and when
you get the cold wind of his coming you scurry away. He was an angel
once, the greatest of them all. Lucifer, they called him, so I 've heard old
angels say, and the Hebrew or something for Him who does be bearing
light, such a gorgeous angel he was. But one day he and some of his lads
began to argue with the Great Man, and before the words were half out of
their mouths they were tumbling through the blue spaces of the stars,
condemned to eternal hell-fire. Sure, you see them yourselves on
Hallowe'en, and them roaring up and down the world, and screeching fit to
split the sky."

A moan of terror ran through the massed animals. The dog raised his
head and howled.

"And the wee half-god we all know, him with the horns of the goat, that
does the piping in the valleys of spring—sure, he was an angel once. But
something went contrary on him, and now he dare n't show his face on
heaven or earth, but hides in the branches as wild as a squirrel."

And a little shudder of pity arose.

"Ay, and there was others. There was a crowd of reckless fellows in the
days before the flood—or after it; I don't know which—and they came from
heaven to court the daughters of men, such grand women they had in those
days. And the Lord God heard of it, and He stood up and looked at them,
and he said just one word. They 've never been heard of since. One minute
they were there, and the next was emptiness.

"Mind you, I 'm not saying anything like that will happen to me, for
Himself has always been kindness to me. It's always 'How are you, Michael
John?' and 'Don't you ever take a rest at all?' and 'Sometime I 'll have to take
a day and come down and see yourself and the wee ones!' But just, if I don't
come back, don't think I 've taken a better job. Sure, I 'd never desert you,
my wee darlings. It's just maybe I 'm getting a wee bit of discipline."

"I think—" the elephant seemed husky in the throat—"your own plan
might be best—to wait for an opportunity and just suggest."

"Better say nothing at all," growled the lion.

"No, childer dear; I 'd better just go ahead. I will confess it was timid of
me not to go in the first place. It was thinking of my old skin I was, and I
should be ashamed of myself. Sure, there 's no disgrace in asking for fair
play, and you 've been sorely tried. I 'll go."

"No, no, no!" wailed the animals.

"No, your own plan was wise," the elephant insisted. "If anything
happened to you, what would become of us?"

"Yes, what would become of us?" the little ones wailed.

"Do you honestly think my own plan's wiser? You 're not saying that to
save me from trouble?"

"We're not," the lion said. And "Of course not," added the tiger.

"Just slip in a word when you can," from the elephant.

"Honestly, now, it would be best." The angel was relieved. "I can talk
about your loyalty; and, sure, I can remind him of the kine that gave shelter
to the Wee Relative in Bethlehem, and the donkey that was proud to carry
His weight; and I 'll remind Him, too, that I 've never asked a favor yet, and
if He could just see His way—"

"Well," the elephant thought aloud, "I 've got to be getting back to
Burma."

"I 'm going your way," said the tiger.

"There 's nothing to keep me up further," said the lion.

"I 'm very much obliged to you all—" the angel was abashed with
emotion—"for not insisting. And it's lucky I am," said he, "to have decent

beasts to deal with and not man. For man would have insisted I 'd go, and
not given a tinker's curse what would have happened me."

"Ay, man!" sneers the great white bear.

"For God's sake Philip, will you be getting home out of this, before I
have you sick on my hands! And as for you, Go-by-the-Ground, get back to
the river or I 'll sink my foot in your tail. Go on now! Be off with you!"

There is a shuff-shuff-shuff over the sand as the beasts scatter, going east,
north, west, and south. The angel stands watching them as they go. Only the
horse and the dog remain, the horse nudges him on the shoulder with its
mouth, the dog puts a cold nose into his hand.

"Och, my darlings!"

DELILAH, NOW IT WAS DUSK

I

Beneath her balcony, in the delicate spring night, the life of Gaza flowed
gently as a calm river. Eastward the green hills of Canaan were, Delilah
knew, and in imagination she could see the soft blue down of the budding
corn, the clouds of flowers, the piping green of the vines, the darkness of
the olive-trees. And in the west a little moon was, while as yet the sun had
not gone down, a little blade of silver, like one sweet note on a flute. It
made one wish to be young again, to be a child....

The lamps of Gaza were not lighted. None was eager to go within, and
below there was still the jingle of camel bells, the padding of donkeys, the
nervous clatter of some horse's hoofs as a desert rider sought to guide his
mount in the filled streets. Languid, supercilious Egyptians strolled in the
provincial ways; desert men, their eyes suspicious as hawk's, moved warily

hither and thither; her own countrymen, the squat, cheerful Philistines, half
townsman and half mariner, walked briskly; mysterious, aloof Phoenicians;
an occasional strange seaman from Gaul, come eastward with his ship for a
cargo from Asia Minor; and now came the "Hough-hough! Hough-hough!"
of herdsmen, and dappled kine went by, belabored with sticks, and as she
looked, Delilah saw the group of Israelites who owned them.

From the street they saw her, and their eyes blazed fury. They pointed
her out to one another, with quick, wide gestures, and she could hear the
gutturals of their denunciation.... Oh, yes, they remembered Samson, after
twenty years! Remembered him almost as well as she!

II

She had been thinking of him only that minute, too. It was strange, but at
this time, each year, his memory, his image came to her, so that she could
say in winter, "On the second moon of spring there will be flowers, and an
air like wine, and the Mediterranean fishers will overhaul their gear, and I
shall think of Samson," and she was the only person in Philistia who could
remember him clearly.

Some old magistrate perhaps, or captain of civic guard might, their
memory jogged, recall the Hebrew rebel, and say: "Wasn't there a Samson
once, a great red-bearded man, who was supposed to have killed a lion with
his bare hands? Or perhaps I am thinking of some of the black African
giants, wrestlers or circus men. I don't know. But I seem to recall the name."

And about him, among his own people, had arisen a great myth, as will
arise among desert peoples and they telling stories by the fire. The old
guerilla captain had become a national hero to them, and they had
magnified his raids out of all proportion to reality.

And when they thought in the desert tents of the destiny of their people,
and longed for the day when the then rich southwestern country would be

theirs by either conquest or penetration, they said, "If Samson had lived... If
Samson had n't gone wrong..."

And Delilah they cursed bitterly, even after twenty years, and they saw
her not as Samson's wife, but as some strange perfumed woman who had
enticed him and sold him to his enemies. Even the little children were
taught to curse her. And all she had done was to adore him, and love him,
and to care for and pity him when he had grown old and blind and astray in
the head.

Oh well, what did it matter what they said!

Three men there had been in her life: her childhood's sweetheart in her
native valley of Sorek, the slim lad who was to have married her and settled
down in the valley to lead the idyllic life of country lovers. But he had gone
to Egypt, and been infested with ambition, and they had grown apart and
never married. And now in Egypt he was a suave administrator, very close
to the Pharoah, a great man.

And there had been Samson.

And there was her present husband, small, hawk-eyed, taciturn, the
greatest of the Oriental sea-captains, who knew the Mediterranean as other
men knew the lake of Galilee, who had passed through the straits known to
the Greeks as the pillars of Hercules, and been north to Ibernia, the land of
forests and savage, hairy Celts, and bearded druid priests with sinister eyes,
and to other lands where the Phoenicians had great tin mines. A quiet,
efficient man, he!

To her husband she gave admiration and a fond devotion. To the boy of
her youth she had given her heart in a burst of virginal music. But to the
rough Hebrew rebel, a stranger to her race, in religion, in every mode of
life, she had given an immensity of love....

III

In her face now, that once had a proud, singing beauty, were dignity and
power and wisdom. Strands of gray in her hair and shadows near her eyes.
In all Gaza, in all Philistia, there was not one to refuse her reverence,
excepting, of course, the strange gipsy people who contended she had
ruined their champion and lord.

A queer people, they! A strange, inimical folk, who had come into
Canaan out of Egypt, headed by magicians who had cloven the Red Sea—
so they claimed—and their hand was against the dwellers in Canaan. For
centuries now they had been an irritating minor political problem, and when
the question of relations with Egypt sagged, or there was a lull in the
discussion of the great trade route to the East, the matter of the Israelites
always arose. Here they had harried a town; there squatted on a public
common. And war on a large scale was impossible against them. Send
armies to subdue them, and they became separate desert units, like any
other tribes. And before the armies had returned to their garrisons, the
Israelites were back. The Philistines, with their suave Egyptian tolerance,
could only smile. What could one do against a people of that kind?

For centuries now, they had remained turbulent, cunning, breakers of the
peace, with Philistia rather contemptuous of them, rather proud, not
unaffectionate. No nation in the world had a problem quite like them. And
the more kindly, more tolerant Philistia became, the greater the hatred of the
Israelites. For years they would dwell at peace in Philistine cities, then a
strange national pique would come on them, and they would march out into
the desert chanting to their harsh God, blaming themselves cruelly for
having lived in comfort, and prophets would arise among them who said
bitter things, lashing them with a white fury, and agitators would preach
war, and it was then Philistia had to be careful and send troops out, for one
never knew the moment that the young men would make a raid on a
township or an estate of vineyards. A sharp clash, a little guerilla warfare,
and all would be over. Wise old politicians claimed that every time the
Israelites were defeated, they gained a little more ground, but politicians
were always pessimists. And, also, what matter if they did?

Delilah remembered that as a child in her father's house in the valley
Sorek she had been brought up to the belief that all Israelites were riotous,

dissatisfied. They were splendid herdsmen, but beyond that they had no
virtues. And the little Hebrew children were looked down upon, because
they were so poor. Oh! the cruel snobbishness of little children! A race
apart, an inferior race, Delilah thought in her youth, and had smiled at the
thought of their crude, melodramatic god, of whom they walked in fear.
Their god was so limited, so concrete. None of the symbolism of Daigon,
half man and half fish, whom the Mediterranean sailors thanked when the
great silver draughts weighed down their nets; none of Baal, god of the sun,
the fecund divinity who increased the herds of kine, and whose rays
nurtured the soil and brought forth the sweet blue grass; none of the grace
of Ashtoreth, the goddess of the dusky night, the terror and the delight and
the mystery, the goddess of the ripe breasts and great passionate eyes....

So Delilah viewed them with little interest and not a little contempt, a
turbulent, annoying, ignorant, clever people; their quaint folk-songs and
dances, their peculiar religious revivals, their passionate hatreds...
Undependable—that is what they were.

Came her youth and her growing into womanhood.... She wondered
sometimes if he of her young days, for all his closeness to the Pharaoh of
Egypt, his Egyptian palace, his Egyptian wife, ever remembered the warm
green days of Sorek, and how they had grown together from fifteen to
twenty-three.

Nothing had ever been said between them of marriage, but it was
accepted by them that they would marry, as it was accepted that the sun
shines, and with night come the stars. They might have been two girls
together, or they might have been two boys, so sweet was the friendship
between them.

The adventure of life unclosing itself came to them together—all the
beauty of the world, the wild smiling flowers, the sun dropping over the
hills, the clamor of birds in spring as they raided the seeded fields, the little
fish that jumped in the pools when the winds stilled and evening came—all
that was a tremendous bond. Even now when she thought of places in the
valley of her childhood she could picture them only as background for his
calm young face. They seemed natural, the blossoming of apple-trees and
her young lover's face.

And Delilah's dreams—five years of dreaming, of the governing of a
house, and the regiment of maid-servants, of little children. Five years
dreaming! And he had gone into Egypt and had never come back. Only
stories returned, of his success, of his offices, of his wife....

She had thought, being a young woman then, that what was killed with
such a tremendous shock was her love, but she knew now, now that she was
nine-and-forty years, that what had died was a dream. She had been
shocked, disoriented, and her life, which had been so carefully planned,
suddenly had no more meaning.

It had made a woman of her, though, and made her proud. She must have
something to do, to think about. Love and all thoughts of love she put aside.
In order to escape from herself she began to study people, questions of the
day, this, that. It was probably the woman loving the underdog that turned
her eyes on the question of the poor Hebrew, rather than to the glory of
Egypt, or the power of the merchant cities.

She became their friend, and they came to know her. Probably they
robbed her a little, but the cost was so small compared to the luxury of
escape.... All her friends smiled at her hobby and spoke of the Israelites as
"Delilah's Hebrews," and they wondered how a woman of her looks and
standing should bother with these things. Why did n't she get married, they
asked? Or was she becoming queer? One of these strange women who took
more interest in public affairs than a home. So many of them were
becoming that way.

But Delilah only smiled. They were her anodyne. She liked their strange
folk-dances; their wailing, nostalgic songs. And their legends—there was
about them a quaintness and simplicity she loved—Adam and Eve in the
garden; the story of Noah and his ark; the naïve legend of Babel; and the
newer history of the leader who had been found by the Egyptian princess in
the bulrushes—what was his name? Moses! That was it.... How simple they
were, how refreshingly simple, the dear things!

IV

It had often seemed to her a strange thing, as she sat thinking, how all
one labors to learn passes easily away, and what one feels remains,
welcome or no. All the book-learning of her early years had gone, but there
would never go the memory of her first blushing kiss, and though it was
six-and-twenty years since he had gone from her life, yet the thought of the
Philistine boy who was now a grandee of Egypt—that remained.

So, likewise, all she had learned of the Hebrews was gone; now a
legend, now a saying would come back to her, some proverb or a piece of
ritual, but like a bar from a tune one has forgotten. But everything she felt,
everything she had known of great Samson remained with her. One learns
things and one lives things. The things written in the head fade out and die,
but the words on the heart bite deeper and deeper.... She could remember
every kiss he had given, the immense madness he had evoked.... O God,
was it possible that she, so calm now, so respected, so wise, had once
shaken like a leaf at his voice? Her knees had trembled; her heart had
fought in her breast like a caged bird; her throat had gone dry....

Before she met him, she knew him by repute, a huge, turbulent man of
immense strength, who had often been in trouble with the Philistine
authorities.... In the tribal troubles, some years before, his name had been
very prominent. He had married a Philistine girl in Timnath, and there had
been a riot at the wedding, over a question of dowry, or something of the
kind, and some of the girl's Philistine relations had been killed. A sort of
vendetta had arisen and Samson had declared war against the nation. He
had proceeded to burn the corn stacked in the fields; there was a strange
rumor that he had captured an immensity of foxes and, tying burning brands
to their tails, had loosed them among the harvest.

Then, of course, from a family quarrel it had become a national affair
and Samson was proscribed. Prodigious stories were told of his strength and
valor, of his defeating patrols single-handed, and refuging on the rocks of