Phases of an Inferior Planet Part 36

She seated herself near him, resting one large, fair arm on the table beside her. With the closing of the door upon her guests she had thrown aside the social mask, and a pa.s.sionate sadness had settled upon her face.

"I wanted to go to the sacristy on Friday," she went on, "but I could not. And I am so unhappy."

Brought face to face, as he often was, with the grinning skeleton that lies beneath the fleshly veil of many a woman's life, Father Algarcife had developed an almost intuitive conception of degrees in suffering.

Above all, he had learned, as only a priest and a physician can learn, the measures of sorrow that Fate may dole out to the victim who writhes behind a smile.

The sympathetic quality in his voice deepened.

"Have you gained no strength," he asked, "no indifference?"

"I cannot! I have tried, tried, tried so long, but just when I think I have steeled myself something touches the old spring, and it all comes back. On Thursday I saw a woman who was happy. It has tortured me ever since."

"Perhaps she thought you happy."

"No; she knew and she pitied me. We had been at school together. I was romantic then, and she laughed at me. The tears came into her eyes when she recalled it. She is not a wealthy woman. The man she married works very hard, but I envy her."

"Of what use?"

She leaned nearer, resting her chin upon her clasped hands. The diamonds on her fingers blazed in the lamplight. "You don't know what it means to me," she said. "I am not a clever woman. I was made to be a happy one. I believe myself a good one, and yet there are days when I feel myself to be no better than a lost woman--when I would do anything--for love."

"You fight such thoughts?"

"I try to, but they haunt me."

"And there is no happiness for you in your marriage? None that you can wring from disappointment?"

"It is too late. He loved me in the beginning, as he has loved a dozen women since--as he loves a woman of the town--for an hour."

A shiver of disgust crossed her face.

"I know." He was familiar with the story. He had heard it from her lips before. He had seen the whole tragic outcome of man's and woman's ignorance--the ignorance of pa.s.sion and the ignorance of innocence. He had seen it pityingly, condemning neither the one nor the other, neither the man surfeited with l.u.s.t nor the woman famished for love.

"I cannot help you," he said. "I can only say what I have said before, and said badly. There is no happiness in the things you cry for. So long as self is self, gratification will fail it. When it has waded through one mirage it looks for another. Take your life as you find it, face it like a woman, make the best of what remains of it. The world is full of opportunities for usefulness--and you have your faith and your child."

She started. "Yes," she said. "The child is everything." Then she rose.

"I want to show him to you," she said, "while he sleeps."

Father Algarcife made a sudden negative gesture; then, as she left the room, he followed her.

As they pa.s.sed the billiard-room on their way up-stairs there was a sound of knocking b.a.l.l.s, and Ryder's voice was heard in a laugh.

"This way," said Mrs. Ryder. They mounted the carpeted stairs and stopped before a door to the right. She turned the handle softly and entered. A night-lamp was burning in one corner, and on the hearth-rug a tub was prepared for the morning bath. On a chair, a little to one side, lay a pile of filmy, lace-trimmed linen.

In a small bra.s.s bedstead in the centre of the room a child of two or three years was sleeping, its soft hair falling upon the embroidered pillow. A warm, rosy flush was on its face, and the dimpled hands lay palms upward on the blanket.

Like a mounting flame the pa.s.sion of motherhood illuminated the woman's face. She leaned over and kissed one of the pink hands.

"How quietly he sleeps!" she said.

The child stirred, opened its eyes, and smiled, stretching out its arms.

The mother drew back softly. Then she knelt down, and, raising the child with one hand, smoothed the pillow under its head. As she rose she pressed the blanket carefully over the tiny arms lying outside the cover.

When she turned to Father Algarcife she saw that he had grown suddenly haggard.

CHAPTER III

Father Algarcife withdrew the latch-key from the outer door and stopped in the hall to remove his hat and coat. He had just returned from a meeting of the wardens, called to discuss the finances of the church.

"Agnes!" he said.

A woman came from the dining-room at the end of the hall, and, taking his coat from his hands, hung it upon the rack. She was stout and middle-aged, with a face like a full-blown dahlia beneath her cap of frilled muslin. She had been house-keeper and upper servant to Father Speares, and had descended to his successor as a matter of course.

"Have there been any callers, Agnes?"

"Only two, sir. One of the sisters, who left word that she would return in the evening, and that same woman from Elizabeth Street, who wanted you to take charge of her husband who was drunk. I told her a policeman could manage him better, and she said she hadn't thought of that. She went to find one."

"Thank you, Agnes," replied Father Algarcife, with a laugh. "A policeman could manage him much better."

"So any fool might have known, sir; but those poor creatures seem kind of crazy. I believe they get you twisted with the Creator. They'll be asking you to bring back the dead next. Will you have dinner at eight?"

"Yes, at eight."

He pa.s.sed into his study, closing the door after him. A s.h.a.ggy little cur, lying on the hearth-rug, jumped up at his entrance, and came towards him, his tail cutting semicircles in the air.

"How are you, Comrade?" said the man, cheerfully. He bent over, running his fingers along the rough, yellow body of the dog. It was a vagrant that he had rescued from beneath a cable-car and brought home in his arms. His care had met its reward in grat.i.tude, and the bond between them was perhaps the single emotion remaining in either life.

The room was small, and furnished in a manner that suggested luxurious comfort. It had been left thus by Father Speares, and the younger man, moved by a sense of loyalty, had guarded it unchanged. Over the high mantel one of Father Speares's ancestors looked down from a ma.s.sive frame, and upon the top of the book-shelves lining the four walls there was the marble bust of another. Heavy curtains of russet-brown fell from the windows, and a portiere of the same material hung across the door.

In the centre of the room, where the light fell full upon it while it was yet day, there was a quaint old desk of hand-carved mahogany. On the lid, covered by a white blotter, lay a number of unanswered letters, containing appeals for charities, the ma.n.u.script of an unfinished sermon, and the small black-velvet case in which the sermon would be placed upon its completion. In the open grate a fire burned brightly, and a table bearing an unlighted lamp was drawn into the glow.

The dog, trembling with welcome, curled upon the rug, and Father Algarcife, throwing himself into the easy-chair beside the table, stretched his hands towards the blaze. They were thin and virile hands, and the firelight, shining behind them, threw into relief the lines crossing and recrossing the palms, giving to them the look of hieroglyphics on old parchment. His face, across which the flickering shadows chased, a.s.sumed the effect of a drawing in strong black and white.

Before the intense heat of the grate, a languor crept over him, a sensation of comfort inspired by the firelight, the warmth, and the welcome of the fellow-mortal at his feet. Half yawning, his head fell back against the cushion of the chair and his thoughts stirred drowsily.

He thought of the ruddy reflection dancing on the carving of the desk, of the text of the unfinished sermon, of a pamphlet on the table beside the unlighted lamp, and of a letter to his lawyer that remained unwritten. Then he thought of Mrs. Ryder in her full and unsatisfied beauty, and then of a woman in his congregation who had given a thurible of gold to the church, and then of one of the members of the sisterhood.

He wondered if it were Sister Agatha who had called, and if she wished to consult him about the home of which she had charge. He feared that the accommodations were too crowded, and questioned if the state of the finances justified moving into larger quarters. In the same connection, he remembered that he had intended mentioning to the sacristan the insufficient heating of the church during services. From this he pa.s.sed suddenly to the memory of the face of the woman who had died of cancer that morning. He recalled the dirt and poverty and the whimpering of the blear-eyed child with the chronic cold.

"What a life!" he said, and he glanced about the luxurious room calmly, half disdainfully. His eyes fell on the arm of the sofa which was slightly worn as if from friction, and he remembered that he never used it, and that it was the one on which Father Speares had been accustomed to take his daily nap. He shivered faintly, brushed by that near a.s.sociation with the dead which trivialities invoke.

It seemed but yesterday, that morning eight years ago, when he had fainted in the crowded square. He could close his eyes now and review each detail with the dispa.s.sionateness of indifference. He could see the flaming blue of the sky, the statue of Horace Greeley across the way, and the confused blur of the bulletin-board before the _World_ building.

He could hear the incessant falling of the water in the fountain, and he could feel the old sensation of nausea that had blotted out the consciousness of place. He remembered the long convalescence from the fever that had followed--the trembling of his limbs when he moved and the weakness of his voice when he spoke--the utter vanquishment of his power of volition. He reviewed, almost methodically, that collapse into black despair and the mental and emotional stagnation that had covered all the crawling years. The fever, mounting to his brain, had left it seared of energy and had sapped the pa.s.sion in his blood. It had consumed his old loves, with his old ambitions, and had left his emotions as sterile as his mind.

He remembered the struggle that had come, his resistance and his defeat, and he saw the joy in the older man's eyes when he had laid before him the remainder of his life--when he had said, "I no longer care. Make of me what you will."