The Pace That Kills: A Chronicle

They happened to be sitting alone in a corner of the verandah. From within came the rhythm of a waltz; some dance was in progress, affectioned by the few; Mrs. Metuchen was discussing family trees with a party of Philadelphians; the air was sweet with the scent of pines and of jasmines; just above and beyond, a star was circumflexed by the moon.

"I am sorry if I have offended," he made answer to her complaint. "Do you mind if I smoke?" Without waiting for her consent he drew out a cigarette and lighted it. "I have not intended to," he added. "To-morrow I will go."

"But why? You like it here. You told me so to-day."

With a fillip of forefinger and thumb Roland tossed the cigarette out into the road. "Because I admire you," he answered curtly.

"I am glad of that."

The reproof, if reproof there were, was not in her speech, but in her voice. She spoke as one does whose due is conceded only after an effort. And for a while both were mute.

"Come, children, it is time to go to bed." Mrs. Metuchen in her fantastic fashion was hailing them from the door. Already the waltz had ceased, and as Mrs. Metuchen spoke, Justine rose from her seat.

"Good-night, Don Quichotte," the old lady added; and as the girl approached she continued in an audible undertone, "I call him Don Quichotte because he looks like the Chevalier Bayard."

"Good-night, Mrs. Metuchen, and the pleasantest of dreams." But the matron, with a wave of her glove, had disappeared, and Justine returned.

"At least you will not go until the afternoon?"

"Since you wish it, I will not."

She had stretched out her hand, but Roland, affecting not to notice it, raised his hat and turned away. Presently, and although, in spite of many a vice, he was little given to drink, he found himself at the bar superintending the blending of gin, of lemon-peel, and of soda; and as he swallowed it and put the goblet down he seemed so satisfied that the barkeeper, with the affectionate familiarity of his class, nodded and smiled.

"It takes a Remsen Cooler to do the trick, don't it?" he said.

And Roland, assenting remotely, left the bar and sought his room.

The next morning, as through different groups he sought for matron and for maid, he had a crop under his arm and in his hand a paper.

"I have been settling my bill," he announced.

"But are you going?" exclaimed Mrs. Metuchen.

"I can hardly take up a permanent residence here, can I?" he replied.

"Oh, Justine," the old lady cried, and clutched the girl by the arm, "persuade him not to." And fixing him with her glittering eyes, she added, "If you go, sir, you leave an Aiken void."

The jest passed him unnoticed. He felt that something had been said which called for applause, for Mrs. Metuchen was laughing immoderately. But his eyes were in Justine's as were hers in his.

"You will ride, will you not? I see you have your habit on." And with that, Justine assenting, he led her down the steps and aided her to the saddle.

There are numberless tentative things in life, and among them an amble through green, deserted lanes, where only birds and flowers are, has witcheries of its own. However perturbed the spirit may have been, there is that in the glow of the morning and the gait of a horse that can make it wholly serene. The traveller from Sicily will, if you let him, tell of hours so fair that even the bandits are coerced. Man cannot always be centred in self; and when to the influence of nature is added the companionship of one whose presence allures, the charm is complete. And Roland, to whom such things hitherto had been as accessories, this morning felt their spell. The roomy squalor of the village had been passed long since. They had entered a road where the trees arched and nearly hid the sky, but through the branches an eager sunlight found its way. Now and then in a clearing they would happen on some shabby, silent house, the garden gay with the tender pink of blossoming peach; and at times, from behind a log or straight from the earth, a diminutive negro would start like a kobold in a dream and offer, in an abashed, uncertain way, a bunch of white violets in exchange for coin. And once an old man, trudging along, saluted them with a fine parabola of hat and hand; and once they encountered a slatternly negress, very fat and pompous, seated behind a donkey she could have carried in her arms. But practically the road was deserted, fragrant, and still.

And now, as they rode on, interchanging only haphazard remarks, Roland swung himself from his horse, and, plucking a spray of arbutus, handed it to the girl.

"Take it," he said; "it is all I have."

His horse had wandered on a step and was nibbing at the grass, and, as he stood looking up at her, for the first time it occurred to him that she was fair. However a girl may seem in a ball-room, if she ever looks well she looks best in the saddle; and Justine, in spite of his criticism, did not sit her horse badly. Her gray habit, the high white collar and open vest, brought out the snuff-color of her eyes and hair. Her cheeks, too, this morning must have recovered some of the flush they had lost, or else the sun had been using its palette, for in them was the hue of the flower he had gathered and held.

She took it and inserted the stem in the lapel of her coat.

"Are you going?" she asked.

"What would you think of me if I remained?"

"What would I? I would think – "

As she hesitated she turned. He could see now it was not the sun alone that had been at work upon her face.

"Let me tell. You would think that a man with two arms for sole income has no right to linger in the neighborhood of a girl such as you. That is what you would think, what anyone would think; and while I care little enough about the existence which I lead in the minds of other people, yet I do care for your esteem. If I stay, I lose it. I should lose, too, my own; let me keep them both and go."

"I do not yet see why?"

"You don't!" The answer was so abrupt in tone that you would have said he was irritated at her remark, judging it unnecessary and ill-timed. "You don't!" he repeated. "Go back a bit, and perhaps you will remember that after I saw you at your house I did not come back again."

"I do indeed remember."

"The next day I saw you in the Park; I was careful not to return."

"But what have I done? You said last night – "

"Why do you question? You know it is because I love you."

"Then you shall not go."

"I must."

"You shall not, I say."

"And I shall take with me the knowledge that the one woman I have loved is the one woman I have been forced to leave."

"Roland Mistrial, how can you bear the name you do and yet be so unjust? If you leave me now it is because you care more for yourself than you ever could for me. It is not on my account you go: it is because you fear the world. There were heroes once that faced it."

"Yes, and there were Circes then, as now."

As he made that trite reply his face relaxed, and into it came an expression of such abandonment that the girl could see the day was won.

"Tell me – you will not go?"

Roland caught her hand in his, and, drawing back the gauntlet of kid, he kissed her on the wrist. "I will never leave you now," he answered; "Only promise you will not regret."

"Regret!" She smiled at the speech – or was it a smile? Her lips had moved, but it was as though they had done so in answer to some prompting of her soul. "Regret! Do you remember you asked me what I would think if you remained? Well, I thought, if you did, there were dreams which do come true."

At this avowal she was so radiant yet so troubled that Roland detained her hand. "She really loves," he mused; "and so do I." And it may be, the forest aiding, that, in the answering pressure which he gave, such heart as he had went out and mingled with her own.

"Between us now," he murmured, "it is for all of time."

"Roland, how I waited for you!"

Again her lips moved and she seemed to smile, but now her eyes were no longer in his, they were fixed on some vista visible only to herself. She looked rapt, but she looked startled as well. When a girl first stands face to face with love it allures and it frightens too.

Roland dropped her hand; he caught his horse and mounted it. In a moment he was at her side again.

"Justine!"

And the girl turning to him let her fresh lips meet and rest upon his own. Slowly he disengaged the arm with which he had steadied himself on her waist.

"If I lose you now – " he began.

"There can be no question of losing," she interrupted. "Have we not come into our own?"

"But others may dispute our right. There is your cousin, to whom I thought you were engaged; and there is your father."

"Oh, as for Guy – " and she made a gesture. "Father, it is true, may object; but let him. I am satisfied; in the end he will be satisfied also. Why, only the other day I wrote him you were here."

"H'm!" At the intelligence he wheeled abruptly.

Already Justine had turned, and lowering her crop she gave her horse a little tap. The beast was willing enough; in a moment the two were on a run, and as Roland's horse, a broncho, by-the-way, one of those eager animals that decline to remain behind, rushed forward and took the lead, "Remember!" she cried, "you are not to leave me now."

But the broncho was self-willed, and this injunction Roland found or pretended it difficult to obey; and together, through the green lane and out of it, by long, dismal fields of rice, into the roomy squalor of the village and on to the hotel, they flew as though some fate pursued. Justine never forgot that ride, nor did Roland either.

At the verandah steps Mrs. Metuchen was in waiting. "I have a telegram from your father," she called to Justine. "He wishes you to return to-morrow."

"To-morrow?" the girl exclaimed.

"Thorold has learned I am here, and has told," her lover reflected. And swinging from his saddle he aided the girl to alight.

"To-morrow," Mrs. Metuchen with large assumption of resignation replied; "and we may be thankful he did not say to-day."

And as Roland listened to the varying interpretations of the summons which, during the absence of her charge, Mrs. Metuchen's riotous imagination had found time to conceive, "Thorold has told," he repeated to himself, "but he has told too late."

After a morning such as that, an afternoon on a piazza is apt to drag. Of this Roland was conscious. Moreover, he had become aware that his opportunities were now narrowly limited; and presently, as Mrs. Metuchen's imaginings subsided and ceased, he asked the girl whether, when dinner was over, she would care to take a drive.

Protest who may, at heart every woman is a match-maker; and Mrs. Metuchen was not an exception. In addition to this, she liked family-trees, she was in cordial sympathy with good-breeding, and Roland, who possessed both, had, through attentions which women of her age appreciate most, succeeded in detaining her regard. In conversation, whenever Justine happened to be mentioned, she had a habit of extolling that young woman – not beyond her deserts, it is true, but with the attitude of one aware that the girl had done something which she ought to be ashamed of, yet to which no one was permitted to allude. This attitude was due to the fact that she suspected her, and suspected that everyone else suspected her, of an attachment for her cousin Guy. Now Guy Thorold had never appealed to Mrs. Metuchen. He was not prompt with a chair; when she unrolled her little spangle of resonant names he displayed no eagerness in face or look. Such things affect a woman. They ruffle her flounces and belittle her in her own esteem. As a consequence, she disliked Guy Thorold; from the heights of that dislike she was even wont to describe him as Poke – a word she could not have defined had she tried, but which suggested to her all the attributes of that which is stupid and under-bred. Roland, on the other hand, seemed to her the embodiment of just those things which Thorold lacked, and in the hope that he might cut the cousin out she extolled him to her charge in indirect and subtle ways. You young men who read this page mind you of this: if you would succeed in love or war, be considerate of women who are no longer young. They ask but an attention, a moment of your bountiful days, some little act of deference, and in exchange they sound your praises more deftly than ever trumpeter or beat of drums could do.

But because Mrs. Metuchen had an axe of her own to grind was not to her mind a reason why she should countenance a disregard of the Satanic pomps of that which the Western press terms Etiquette. And so it happened that, when Roland asked Justine whether she would care to drive, before the girl could answer, the matron stuck her oar in:

"Surely, Mr. Mistrial, you cannot think Miss Dunellen could go with you alone. Not that I see any impropriety in her doing so, but there is the world."

The world at that moment consisted of a handful of sturdy consumptives impatiently waiting the opening of the dining-room doors. And as Roland considered that world, he mentally explored the stable.

"Of course not," he answered; "if Miss Dunellen cares to go, I will have a dogcart and a groom."

With that sacrifice to conventionality Mrs. Metuchen was content. For Justine to ride unchaperoned was one thing, but driving was another matter. And later on, in the cool of the afternoon, as Roland bowled the girl over the yielding sand, straight to the sunset beyond, he began again on the duo which they had already rehearsed, and when Justine called his attention to the groom, he laughed a little, and well he might. "Don't mind him," he murmured; "he is deaf."

In earlier conversations he had rarely spoken of himself, and, when he had, it had been in that remote fashion which leaves the personal pronoun at the door. There is nothing better qualified to weary the indifferent than the speech in which the I jumps out; and knowing this, he knew too that that very self-effacement before one whose interest is aroused excites that interest to still higher degrees. The Moi seul est haïssable is an old maxim, one that we apprehend more or less to our cost no doubt, and after many a sin of egotism; but when it is learned by rote, few others serve us in better stead. In Roland's relations with Justine thus far it had served him well. It had filled her mind with questions which she did not feel she had the right to ask, and in so filling it had occupied her thoughts with him. It was through arts of this kind that Machiavelli earned his fame.

But at present circumstances had changed. She had placed her hand in his; she had avowed her love. The I could now appear; its welcome was assured. And as they drove along the sand-hills she told him of herself, and drew out confidences in exchange. And such confidences! Had the groom not been deaf they might have given him food for thought. But they must have satisfied Justine, for when they reached the hotel again her eyes were so full of meaning that, had Mrs. Metuchen met her in a pantry instead of on the verandah, she could have seen unspectacled that the girl was fairly intoxicated – drunk with that headiest cup of love which is brewed not by the contact of two epiderms, but through communion of spirit and unison of heart.

That evening, when supper was done, Mrs. Metuchen, to whom any breath of night was synonymous with miasmas and microbes, settled herself in the parlor, and in the company of her friends from School Lane discussed that inexhaustible topic – Who Was and Who Was Not.

But the verandah, deserted at this hour by the consumptives, had attractions for Justine, for Roland as well; and presently, in a corner of it that leaned to the south, both were seated, and, at the moment, both were dumb. On the horizon, vague now and undiscerned, the peach-blossoms and ochres of sunset had long since disappeared; but from above rained down the light and messages of other worlds; the sky was populous with stars that seemed larger and nearer than they do in the north; Venus in particular shone like a neighborly sun that had strayed afar, and in pursuit of her was a moon, a new one, so slender and yellow you would have said, a feather that a breath might blow away. In the air were the same inviting odors, the scent of heliotrope and of violets, the invocations of the woodlands, the whispers of the pines. The musicians had been hushed, or else dismissed, for no sound came from them that night.

Roland had not sought the feverish night to squander it in contemplation. His hand moved and caught Justine's. It resisted a little, then lay docile in his own. For she was new to love. Like every other girl that has passed into the twenties, she had a romance in her life, two perhaps, but romances immaterial as children's dreams, and from which she had awaked surprised, noting the rhythm yet seeking the reason in vain. They had passed from her as fancies do; and, just as she was settling down into leisurely acceptance of her cousin, Roland had appeared, and when she saw him a bird within her burst into song, and she knew that all her life she had awaited his approach. To her he was the fabulous prince that arouses the sleeper to the truth, to the meaning, of love. He had brought with him new currents, wider vistas, and horizons solid and real. He differed so from other men that her mind was pleasured with the thought he had descended from a larger sphere. She idealized him as girls untrained in life will do. He was the lover unawaited yet not wholly undivined, tender-hearted, impeccable, magnificent, incapable of wrong – the lover of whom she may never have dreamed, yet who at last had come. And into his keeping she gave her heart, and was glad, regretting only it was not more to give. She had no fears; her confidence was assured as Might, and had you or I or any other logician passed that way and demonstrated as clearly as a = a that she was imbecile in her love, she would not have thanked either of us for our pains. When a woman loves – and whatever the cynic may affirm, civilization has made her monandrous – she differs from man in this: she gives either the first-fruits of her affection, or else the semblance of an after-growth. There are men, there are husbands and lovers even, who will accept that after-growth and regard it as the verdure of an enduring spring. But who, save a lover, is ever as stupid as a husband? Man, on the other hand, is constant never. Civilization has not improved him in the least. And when on his honor he swears he has never loved before, his honor goes unscathed, for he may never yet have loved a woman as he loves the one to whom he swears.

With Justine this was the primal verdure. Had she not met Roland Mistrial, she might, and in all probability would, have exhibited constancy in affection, but love would have been uncomprehended still. As it was, she had come into her own; she was confident in it and secure; and now, though by nature she was rebellious enough, as he caught her hand her being went out to him, and as it went it thrilled.

"I love you," he said; and his voice was so flexible that it would have been difficult to deny that he really did. "I will love you always, my whole life through."

The words caressed her so well she could have pointed to the sky and repeated with Dona Sol:

"Regarde: plus de feux, plus de bruit. Tout se tait.La lune tout à l'heure à l'horizon montait:Tandis que tu parlais, sa lumière qui trembleEt ta voix, toutes deux m'allaient au cœur ensemble:Je me sentais joyeuse et calme, ô mon amant!Et j'aurais bien voulu mourir en ce moment."

But at once some premonition seemed to visit her. "Roland," she murmured, "what if we leave our happiness here?"

And Roland, bending toward her, whispered sagely: "We shall know then where to find it."

VI

New York meanwhile, in its effeminateness, had forgotten the snow, and was listening to the sun. And the day after the return from Aiken, as Roland, in accordance with an agreement of which the locus sigilli had a kiss for token, went down to knock at Mr. Dunellen's office door, the sky was as fair as it had been in the South. Yet to him it was unobtrusive. His mind was occupied with fancies that had a birth, a little span of life, and which in passing away were succeeded by others as ephemeral as themselves – thoughts about nothing at all that came and went unnoticed: a man he had met in Corfu, and whom a face in the street recalled; the glisten of silk in a window that took him back to Japan; – but beneath them was a purpose settled and dominant, a resolution to trick Fate and outwit it – one which, during the journey from Aiken, had so possessed him that, in attending to the wants of Mrs. Metuchen or in ministering to Justine, at times he had been quasi-somnambulistic, at others wholly vague. But now, as he gave his card to an office-boy, to all outward intent he was confident and at ease; he picked up a paper and affected to lose himself in its columns. Presently the boy returned, and he was ushered into the room which he had previously visited. On this occasion Mr. Dunellen was not seated, but standing, his back to the door. As Roland entered he turned, and the young man stepped forward, his hand outstretched.

To his contentment, and a little also to his surprise, in answer to that outstretched hand Honest Paul extended his, and Roland had the pleasure of holding three apparently docile fingers in his own; but in a moment they withdrew themselves, and he felt called upon to speak.

"Mr. Dunellen," he began, with that confident air a creditor has who comes to claim his due, "Mr. Dunellen, I have ventured to interrupt you again. And again I am a suppliant. But this time it is of your daughter, not of my father, that – "

He hesitated, and well he might. Mr. Dunellen, who had remained standing, and who in so doing had prevented Roland from sitting down, now assumed the suspicious appearance of one who detects an unpleasant smell; his features contracted, and for no other reason, apparently, than that of intimidating the suppliant in his prayer.

But Roland was not to be abashed; he recovered himself, and continued glibly enough: "The matter is this. I am sincerely attached to your daughter, and I am come to ask your consent to our marriage."

"That is the purpose of your visit, is it?"

"It is."

"My daughter is aware of it, I suppose?"

"She is."

"And she consented, did she?"

"Perfectly."

"H'm! My daughter has made a mistake. I told her as much last night. There can be no question of marriage. You will do me the favor to let the matter drop."

"I am hot a rich man, Mr. Dunellen, but – "

"So I am informed. But that has nothing to do with it. There are other things that I take into consideration, and in view of them I insist that this matter be dropped."

"Mr. Dunellen, I love your daughter; I have reason to believe that she cares for me. We became engaged a few days ago. I came here now to ask your consent. If you refuse it, I have at least the right to ask what your objection is."

"Rather unnecessary, don't you think?"

"I cannot imagine, sir, what you mean." And Roland, holding himself unaffectedly straight, without the symptom of a pose, looked the old man in the eyes.

That look Mr. Dunellen returned. "Take a seat," he said; and, motioning Roland to a chair, he sat down himself.

"All this is needless," he announced; "but since you are anxious for an explanation, I will give it. In the first place, when you were at my house you remember that my nephew Dr. Thorold happened in. The other day I mentioned to him that you were at Aiken. He then informed me of a certain incident in your career, one which you have not forgotten, and of which I do not care to speak. I may say, however, that it utterly precludes the possibility of any further intercourse between my daughter and yourself."

And the old man, still gazing at his guest, added: "This explanation should, it seems to me, suffice." But he made no attempt to rise, or to signify that the interview was at an end, and Roland, who was shrewd, interpreted this in his own favor. "He is not altogether positive," he reflected, "but he can be so to-morrow," and with a show of shame that did him credit he hung his head.

"I had thought the incident to which you refer was forgotten," he murmured, penitently enough.