The Sword of Damocles Part 17

"What kind of a looking man was he?" said that gentleman as he crossed to the window.

"Well, as nearly as I can describe, he was tall, dark and seedy, with a shock of black hair and a pair of black whiskers that floated on the wind as he walked. He was evidently of the order of decayed gentleman, and his manner of talking, especially in the profuse use he made of his arms and hands, was decidedly foreign. Yet his speech was pure and without accent."

Mr. Sylvester's face as he asked the next question was comparatively cheerful. "Was the other man with whom he was talking, as dark and foreign as himself?"

"O no, he was round and jovial, a little too insinuating perhaps, in his way of speaking to ladies, but otherwise a a well enough appearing man."

Mr. Sylvester bowed and looked at his watch. (Why do gentlemen always consult their watches even in the face of the clock?) "Ona, you are right," said he, "it is time you were dressing for dinner." And concluding with a word or two of sympathy as to the peculiar nature of Paula's adventures as he called them, he hastened from the room and proceeded to his little refuge above.

"He has not asked me what became of the child," thought Paula, with a certain pang of surprise. "I expected him to say, 'Shall we not try and see the little fellow, Paula?' if only to allow me to explain that the child's father would not tell me where they lived. But the later affair has evidently put the child out of his head. And indeed it is only natural that a business man should be more interested in such a fact as I have related, than in the sprained arm of a wretched creature's 'little feller.'" And she turned to a.s.sist Ona, who had arisen from her couch and was now absorbed in the intricacies of an uncommonly elaborate toilet.

"Those men did not mention any names?" suddenly queried that lady, looking with an expression of careful anxiety, at the twist of her back hair, in the small hand-mirror she held over her shoulder.

"No," said Paula, dropping a red rose into the blonde locks she was so carefully arranging. "He expressly said he did not know the name of the person to whom he alluded. It was a strange conversation for me to overhear, was it not?" she remarked, happy to have interested her cousin in anything out of the domains of fashion.

"I don't know--certainly--of course--" returned Mrs. Sylvester with some incoherence. "Do you think red looks as well with this black as the lavender would do?" she rambled on in her lightest tone, pulling out a box of feathers.

Paula gave her a little wistful glance of disappointment and decided in favor of the lavender.

"I am bound to look well to-night if I never do so again," said Ona.

They were all going to a public reception at which a foreign lord was expected to be present. "How fortunate I am to have a perfect little hairdresser in my own family, without being obliged to send for some gossipy, fussy old Madame with her stories of how such and such a one looked when dressed for the Grand Duke's ball, or how Mrs. So and So always gave her more than her price because she rolled up puffs so exquisitely." And stopping to aid the deft girl in subst.i.tuting the lavender feather for the red rose in her hair--she forgot to ask any more questions.

"Ona," remarked her husband, coming into the room on his way down to dinner--Mrs. Sylvester never dined when she was going to any grand entertainment; it made her look flushed she said--"I am not in the habit of troubling you about your family matters, but have you heard from your father of late?"

Mrs. Sylvester turned from her jewel-casket and calmly surveyed his face. It was fixed and formal, the face he turned to his servants and sometimes--to his wife. "No," said she, with a light little gesture as though she were speaking of the most trivial matter. "In one respect at least, papa is like an angel, his visits are few and far between."

Mr. Sylvester's eye-brows drew heavily together. For a man with a smile of strange sweetness, he could sometimes look very forbidding. "_When_ was he here last?" he inquired in a tone more commanding than he knew.

She did not appear to resent it. "Let me see," mused she. "When was it I lost my diamond ear-ring? O I remember, it was on the eve of New Year's day a year ago; I recollect because I had to wear pearls with my garnet brocade," she pettishly sighed. "And papa came the next week, after you had given me the money for a new pair. I have reason to remember _that_, for not a dollar did he leave me."

"Ona!" exclaimed her husband, shrinking back in uncontrollable surprise, while his eyes flashed inquiringly to her ears in which two n.o.ble diamonds were brilliantly shining.

"O," she cried, just raising one snowy hand to those sparkling ornaments, while a faint blush, the existence of which he had sometimes doubted, swept over her careless face. "I was enabled to procure them in time; but for a whole two months I had to go without diamonds." She did not say that she had bartered her wedding jewels to make up the sum she needed, but he may have understood that without being told.

"And that is the last time you have seen him?" He held her eyes with his, she could not look away.

"The very last, sir; strange to say."

His glance shifted from her face and he turned with a bow towards the door.

"May I ask," she slowly inquired as he moved across the floor, "what is the reason of this sudden interest in poor papa?"

"Certainly," said he, pausing and looking back, not without some emotion of pity in his glance. "I am sometimes struck with a sense of the duty I owe you, in helping you to bear the burden of certain secret responsibilities which I fear may sometimes prove too heavy for you."

She gave a little rippling laugh that only sounded hollow to the image listening in the gla.s.s. "You choose strange times in which to be struck," said she, holding up two dresses for his inspection, with a lift of her brows evidently meant as an inquiry as to which he thought the most becoming.

"Conscience is the chooser, not I," declared he, for once allowing himself to ignore the weighty question of dress thus propounded.

His wife gave a little toss of her head and he left the room.

"I should like Edward very much," murmured she in a burst of confidence to her own reflection in the gla.s.s, "if only he would not bother himself so much about that same disagreeable conscience."

"You look unhappy," said Mr. Sylvester to Paula as they came from the dining-room. "Have the adventures of the day made such an impression upon you that you will not be able to enjoy the evening's festivities?"

She lifted her face and the quick smile came.

"I do not like to see your brow so clouded," continued he, smoothing his own to meet her searching eye. "Smiles should sit on the lips of youth, or else why are they so rosy."

"Would you have me smile in face of my first glimpse of wickedness,"

asked she, but in a gentle tone that robbed her words of half their reproach. "You must remember that I have had but little experience with the world. I have lived all my life in a town of wholesome virtues, and while here I have been kept from contact with anything low or base. I have never known vice, and now all in a moment I feel as if I have been bathed in it."

He took her by the hand and drew her gently towards him. "Does your whole being recoil so from evil, my Paula? What will you do in this wicked world? What will you say to the sinner when you meet him--as you must?"

"I don't know; it's a problem I have never been brought to consider. I feel as if launched on a dismal sea for which I have neither chart nor compa.s.s. Life was so joyous to me this morning--" a flush swept over her cheek but he did not notice it--"I held, or seemed to hold, a cup of white wine in my hand, but suddenly as I looked at it, it turned black and--"

Ah, the outreach, the dismal breaking away of thought into the unfathomable, that lies in the pause of an _and_!

"And do you refuse to drink a cup across which has fallen a shadow,"

murmured Mr. Sylvester, his eyes fixed on her face, "the inevitable shadow of that great ma.s.s of human frailty and woe which has been acc.u.mulating from the foundation of the world?"

"No, no, I cannot, and retain my humanity. If there is such evil in the world, its pressure must drive it across the path of innocence."

"And you accept the cup?"

"I must; but oh, my vanished beliefs! This morning the wine of my life was pure and white, now it is black and befouled. What will make it clean again?"

With a sigh Mr. Sylvester dropped her hand and turned towards the mantle-piece. It was April as I have said, and there was no fire in the grate, but he posed his foot on the fender and looked sadly down at the empty hearthstone.

"Paula," said he after a s.p.a.ce of pregnant silence, "it had to come. The veil of the temple must be rent in every life. Evil is too near us all for us to tread long upon the flowers without starting up the adders that hide beneath them. You had to have your first look into the cells of darkness, and perhaps it is best you had it here and now. The deeps are for men's eyes as well as the starry heavens."

"Yes, yes."

"There are some persons," he went on slowly, "you know them, who tread the ways of life with their eyelids closed to everything but the strip of velvet lawn on which they choose to walk. Earth's sighs and deep-drawn groans are nothing to them. The world may swing on in its way to perdition; so long as their pathway feels soft, they neither heed nor care. But you do not desire to be one of these, Paula! With your great soul and your strong heart, you would not ask to sit in a flowery maze, while the rest of the world went sliding on and down into wells of destruction, you might have made pools of healing by the touch of your womanly sympathy."

"No, no."

"I cannot tell you, I dare not tell you," he went on in a strange pleading voice that tore at the very roots of her heart, and rung in her memory forever, "what evil underlies the whole strata of life! At home and abroad, on our hearthstones and within our offices, the mocking devil sits. You can scarcely walk a block, my little one, without encountering a man or brushing against the dress of a woman across whose soul the black shadow lies heavier than any words of his or hers could tell. What the man you saw to-day, said of one unhappy being in this city, is true, G.o.d help us all, of many. Dark spots are easier acquired than blotted out, my Paula. In business as in society, one needs to carry the white shield of a n.o.ble purpose or a self-forgetting love, to escape the dripping of the deadly upas tree that branches above all humanity. I have walked its ways, my darling, and I know of what I speak. Your white robe is spotless but--"

"O there is where the pain comes in," she cried; "there, just there, is where the dagger strikes. She says she was once like me. O, could any temptation, any suffering, any wrong or misfortune that might befall me, ever bring me to where she is! If it could--"

"Paula!" This time his voice came authoritatively. "You are making too much of a frenzied woman's impulsive exclamation. To her darkened and despairing eyes any young woman of a similar style of beauty would have called forth the same remark. It was a sign that she was not entirely given up to evil, that she could remember her youth. Instead of feeling contaminated by her words, you ought to feel, that unconsciously to yourself, your fresh young countenance with its innocent eyes did an angel's work to-day. They made her recall what she was in the days of her own innocence; and who can tell what may follow such a recollection."

"O Mr. Sylvester," said she, "you fill me with shame. If I could think that--"