The Second Generation Part 31

"That hadn't struck me," said Adelaide amiably. "But he's a well-meaning, good-hearted little man, and, of course, he feels as at home in the surroundings he's had all his life as a bird on a bough. Who doesn't?"

"But when you know him better, when you know him as I know him--" Janet's expression disclosed the secret.

"But won't you be lonely--away off here--among--foreign people?"

said Adelaide.

"Oh, I should _love_ it here!" exclaimed Janet. "It seems to me I--he and I--must have lived in this very chateau in a former existence. We have talked about it, and he agrees with me. We are _so_ harmonious."

"You've really made up your mind to--to marry him?" Adelaide had almost said "to buy him"; she had a sense that it was her duty to disregard Janet's pretenses, and "buy" was so exactly the word to use with these people to whom money was the paramount consideration, the thought behind every other thought, the feeling behind every other feeling, the mainspring of their lives, the mainstay of all the fictions of their aristocracy.

"That depends on father," replied Janet. "Mother has gone to talk to him about it."

"I'm sure your father won't stand between you and happiness," said Adelaide.

"But he doesn't understand these aristocratic people," replied she. "Of course, if it depended upon Aristide and me, we should be married without consulting anybody. But he can't legally marry without his father's consent, and his father naturally wants proper settlements. It's a cruel law, don't you think?"

Adelaide thought not; she thought it, on the contrary, an admirable device to "save the face" of a mercenary lover posing as a sentimentalist and money-spurner. But she merely said, "I think it's most characteristic, most aristocratic." She knew Janet, how shrewd she was, how thoroughly she understood the "coa.r.s.e side of life." She added, "And your father'll come round."

"I wish I could believe it," sighed Janet. "The Saint Berthes have an exaggerated notion of papa's wealth. Besides, they need a good deal. They were robbed horribly by those dreadful revolutionists. They used to own all this part of the country. All these people round here with their little farms were once the peasants of Aristide's ancestors. Now--even this chateau has a mortgage on it. I couldn't keep back the tears, while Aristide was telling me."

Adelaide thought of Charles Whitney listening to that same recital, and almost laughed. "Well, I feel sure it will turn out all right," she said.

"Your mother'll see to that. And I believe you'll be very, very happy."

Theatricals in private life was Janet's pa.s.sion--why should she not be happy? Frenchmen were famous for their politeness and consideration to their wives; Aristide would never let her see or feel that she bored him, that her reverence for the things he was too intelligent and modern not to despise appealed to him only through his sense of humor. Janet would push her shrewd, soulful way into social leadership, would bring her children up to be more aristocratic than the children of the oldest aristocrats.

Adelaide smiled as she pictured it all--smiled, yet sighed. She was not under Janet's fixed and unshakable delusions. She saw that high-sounding t.i.tles were no more part of the personalities bearing them than the ma.s.s of frankly false hair so grandly worn by Aristide's grand-aunt was part of the wisp-like remnant of natural head covering. But that other self of hers, so reluctant to be laughed or frowned down and out by the self that was Hiram Ranger's daughter, still forced her to share in the ancient, ignorant allegiance to "appearances." She did not appreciate how bored she was, how impatient to be back with Dory, the never monotonous, the always interesting, until she discovered that Janet, with her usual subtlety, had arranged for them to stay another week, had made it impossible for her to refuse without seeming to be disobliging and even downright rude. They were to have returned to Paris on a Monday. On Sunday she wrote Dory to telegraph for her on Tuesday.

"I'd hate to be looking forward to that life of dull foolery," thought she, as the mossy bastions of Besancon drifted from her horizon--she was journeying up alone, Janet staying on with one of the Saint Berthe women as chaperone. "It is foolery and it is dull. I don't see how grown-up people endure it, unless they've never known any better. Yet I seem unable to content myself with the life father stands for--and Dory." She appreciated the meaning of the legend of the creature with the two bodies and the two wills, each always opposed to the other, with the result that all motion was in a dazing circle in which neither wished to go. "Still," she concluded, "I _am_ learning"--which was the truth; indeed, she was learning with astonishing rapidity for a girl who had had such an insidiously wrong start and was getting but slight encouragement.

Dory, of course, was helping her, but not as he might. Instead of bringing to bear that most powerful of influences, the influence of pa.s.sionate love, he held to his stupid compact with his supersensitive self--the compact that he would never intrude his longings upon her. He constantly reminded himself how often woman gives through a sense of duty or through fear of alienating or wounding one she respects and likes; and, so he saw in each impulse to enter Eden boldly a temptation to him to trespa.s.s, a temptation to her to mask her real feelings and suffer it.

The mystery in which respectable womanhood is kept veiled from the male, has bred in him an awe of the female that she does not fully realize or altogether approve--though she is not slow to advantage herself of it. In the smaller cities and towns of the West, this awe of respectable womanhood exists in a degree difficult for the sophisticated to believe possible, unless they have had experience of it. Dory had never had that familiarity with women which breeds knowledge of their absolute and unmysterious humanness. Thus, not only did he not have the key which enables its possessor to unlock them; he did not even know how to use it when Del offered it to him, all but thrust it into his hand. Poor Dory, indeed--but let only those who have not loved too well to love wisely strut at his expense by pitying him; for, in matters of the heart, sophisticated and unsophisticated act much alike. "Men would dare much more, if they knew what women think," says George Sand. It is also true that the men who dare most, who win most, are those who do not stop to bother about what the women think. Thought does not yet govern the world, but appet.i.te and action--bold appet.i.te and the courage of it.

CHAPTER XIX

MADELENE

To give himself, journeyman cooper, the feeling of ease and equality, Arthur dressed, with long-discontinued attention to detail, from his extensive wardrobe which the eighteen months since its last accessions had not impaired or antiquated. And, in the twilight of an early September evening, he went forth to settle the matter that had become the most momentous.

There is in dress a something independent of material and cut and even of the individuality of the wearer; there is a spirit of caste. If the lady dons her maid's dress, some subtle essence of the menial permeates her, even to her blood, her mind, and heart. The maid, in madame's dress, putting on "airs," is merely giving an outlet to that which has entered into her from her clothes. Thus, Arthur a.s.sumed again with his "_grande toilette_" the feeling of the caste from which he had been ejected.

Madelene, come herself to open the door for him, was in a summer dress of no pretentions to style other than that which her figure, with its large, free, splendid lines, gave whatever she happened to wear. His nerves, his blood, responded to her beauty, as always; her hair, her features, the grace of the movements of that strong, slender, supple form, gave him the sense of her kinship with freedom and force and fire and all things keen and bright. But stealthily and subtly it came to him, in this mood superinduced by his raiment, that in marrying her he was, after all, making sacrifices--she was ascending socially, he descending, condescending. The feeling was far too vague to be at all conscious; it is, however, just those hazy, stealthy feelings that exert the most potent influence upon us. When the strong are conquered is it not always by feeble forces from the dark and from behind?

"You have had good news," said Madelene, when they were in the dim daylight on the creeper-screened back porch. For such was her generous interpretation of his expression of self-confidence and self-satisfaction.

"Not yet," he replied, looking away reflectively. "But I hope for it."

There wasn't any mistaking the meaning of that tone; she knew what was coming. She folded her hands in her lap, and there softly entered and pervaded her a quiet, enormous content that made her seem the crown of the quiet beauty of that evening sky whose ocean of purple-tinted crystal stretched away toward the sh.o.r.es of the infinite.

"Madelene," he began in a self-conscious voice, "you know what my position is, and what I get, and my prospects. But you know what I was, too; and so, I feel I've the right to ask you to marry me--to wait until I get back to the place from which I had to come down."

The light was fading from the sky, from her eyes, from her heart. A moment before he had been there, so near her, so at one with her; now he was far away, and this voice she heard wasn't his at all. And his words--She felt alone in the dark and the cold, the victim of a cheat upon her deepest feelings.

"I was bitter against my father at first," he went on. "But since I have come to know you I have forgiven him. I am grateful to him. If it hadn't been for what he did I might never have learned to appreciate you, to--"

"Don't--_please_!" she said in the tone that is from an aching heart.

"Don't say any more."

Arthur was astounded. He looked at her for the first time since he began; instantly fear was shaking his self-confidence at its foundations.

"Madelene!" he exclaimed. "I know that you love me!"

She hid her face in her hands--the sight of them, long and narrow and strong, filled him with the longing to seize them, to feel the throb of their life thrill from them into him, troop through and through him like victory-bringing legions into a besieged city. But her broken voice stopped him. "And I thought you loved me," she said.

"You know I do!" he cried.

She was silent.

"What is it, Madelene?" he implored. "What has come between us? Does your father object because I am--am not well enough off?"

She dropped her hands from before her face and looked at him. The first time he saw her he had thought she was severe; ever since he had wondered how he could have imagined severity into a countenance so gentle and sweet. Now he knew that his first impression was not imaginary; for she had again the expression with which she had faced the hostile world of Saint X until he, his love, came into her life. "It is I that must ask you what has changed you, Arthur," she said, more in sadness than in bitterness, though in both. "I don't seem to know you this evening."

Arthur lost the last remnant of his self-consciousness. He saw he was about to lose, if indeed he had not already lost, that which had come to mean life to him--the happiness from this woman's beauty, the strength from her character, the sympathy from her mind and heart. It was in terror that he asked: "Why, Madelene? What is it? What have I done?" And in dread he studied her firm, regular profile, a graceful strength that was Greek, and so wonderfully completed by her hair, blue black and thick and wavy about the temple and ear and the nape of the neck.

The girl did not answer immediately; he thought she was refusing to hear, yet he could find no words with which to try to stem the current of those ominous thoughts. At last she said: "You talk about the position you have 'come down from' and the position you are going back to--and that you are grateful to your father for having brought you down where you were humble enough to find me."

"Madelene!"

"Wait!" she commanded. "You wish to know what is the matter with me. Let me tell you. We didn't receive you here because you are a cooper or because you had been rich. I never thought about your position or your prospects. A woman--at least a woman like me--doesn't love a man for his position, doesn't love him for his prospects. I've been taking you at just what you were--or seemed to be. And you--you haven't come, asking me to marry you. You treat me like one of those silly women in what they call 'society' here in Saint X. You ask me to wait until you can support me fashionably--I who am not fashionable--and who will always support myself. What you talked isn't what I call love, Arthur. I don't want to hear any more about it--or, we might not be able to be even friends."

She paused; but Arthur could not reply. To deny was impossible, and he had no wish to attempt to make excuses. She had shown him to himself, and he could only echo her just scorn.

"As for waiting," she went on, "I am sure, from what you say, that if you ever got back in the lofty place of a parasite living idly and foolishly on what you abstracted from the labor of others, you'd forget me--just as your rich friends have forgotten you." She laughed bitterly. "O Arthur, Arthur, what a fraud you are! Here, I've been admiring your fine talk about your being a laborer, about what you'd do if you ever got the power. And it was all simply envy and jealousy and trying to make yourself believe you weren't so low down in the social scale as you thought you were. You're too fine a gentleman for Madelene Schulze, Arthur. Wait till you get back your lost paradise; then take a wife who gives her heart only where her vanity permits. You don't want _me_, and I--don't want you!"

Her voice broke there. With a cry that might have been her name or just an inarticulate call from his heart to hers, he caught her in his arms, and she was sobbing against his shoulder. "You can't mean it, Madelene,"

he murmured, holding her tight and kissing her cheek, her hair, her ear.

"You don't mean it."

"Oh, yes, I do," she sobbed. "But--I love you, too."

"Then everything else will straighten out of itself. Help me, Madelene.

Help me to be what we both wish me to be--what I can't help being, with you by my side."

When a vanity of superiority rests on what used to be, it dies much harder than when it rests upon what is. But Arthur's self-infatuation, based though it was on the "used-to-be," then and there crumbled and vanished forever. Love cleared his sight in an instant, where reason would have striven in vain against the stubborn prejudices of sn.o.bbism.

Madelene's instinct had searched out the false ring in his voice and manner; it was again instinct that a.s.sured her all was now well. And she straightway, and without hesitation from coquetry or doubt, gave herself frankly to the happiness of the love that knows it is returned in kind and in degree.

"Yes, everything else will come right," she said. "For you _are_ strong, Arthur."

"I shall be," was his reply, as he held her closer. "Do I not love a woman who believes in me?"