The Business of Life

He stepped forward to aid her, but she passed him lightly, avoiding his touch, and sped across the corridor. In a few minutes she returned and they descended the stairs together, and entered the empty library. She leaned back against the table, both slender hands resting on the edge behind her, and gazed out at the sparrows in the snow. And she did not even appear to notice his arm, which ventured around her waist, or his lips resting against the lock of bright hair curling on her cheek, so absorbed she seemed to be in her silent reflections.

After a few moments she said, still looking out of the window: "I must tell you something now."

"Are you going to tell me that you love me?"

"Yes – perhaps I had better begin that way."

"Then begin, dearest."

"I – I love you."

His arm tightened around her, but she gently released herself.

"There is a – a little more to say, Jim. I love you enough to give you back your promise."

"My promise!"

"To marry me," she said steadily. "I scarcely knew what I was saying yesterday – I was so excited, so much in love with you – so fearful that you might sometime be unhappy if things continued with us as they threatened to continue. I'm afraid I overvalued myself – made you suspect that I am more than I really am – or can ever be. Besides, I frightened you – and myself – unnecessarily. I never could be in any danger of – of loving you – unwisely. It was not perfectly fair to you to hint such a thing – because, after all, there is a third choice for you. A worthy one. For you could let me go my way out of your life, which is already so full, and which would fill again very easily, even if my absence left a little void for a while. And if it was any kind of pity you felt for me – for what I said to you – that stirred you to – ask of me what I begged you to ask – then I give you back your promise. I have not slept for thinking over it. I must give it back."

He remained silent for a while, then his arms slipped down around her body and he dropped on one knee beside her and laid his face close against her. She had to bend over to hear what he was saying, he spoke so low and with such difficulty.

"How can you care for me?" he said. "How can you? Don't you understand what a beast I was – what lesser impulse possessed me – "

"Hush, Jim! Am I different?"

"Good God! Yes!"

"No, dear."

"You don't know what you're saying!"

"You don't know. Do you suppose I am immune to – to the – lesser love – at moments – "

He lifted his head and looked up at her, dismayed.

"You!"

"I. How else could I understand you?"

"Because you are so far above everything unworthy."

"No, dear. If I were, you would only have angered and frightened me – not made me sorry for us both. Because women and men are something alike at moments; only, somehow, women seem to realise that – somehow – they are guardians of – of something – of civilisation, perhaps. And it is their instinct to curb and silence and ignore whatever unworthy threatens it or them. It is that way with us, Jim."

She looked out of the window at the sky and the trees, and stood thinking for a while. Then: "Did you suppose it is always easy for a girl in love – whose instinct is to love – and to give? Especially such a girl as I am, especially when she is so dreadfully afraid that her lover may think her cold-blooded – self-seeking – perhaps a – a schemer – "

She covered her face with her hand – the quick, adorable gesture he knew so well.

"I —did ask you to marry me," she said, in a stifled voice, "but I am not a schemer; my motive was not self-interest. It was for you I asked it, Jim, far more than for myself – or I never could have found the courage – perhaps not even the wish. Because, somehow, I am too proud to wish for anything that is not offered."

As he said nothing, she broke out suddenly with a little sob of protest in her voice: "I am not a self-seeking, calculating woman! I am not naturally cold and unresponsive! I am – inclined to be – otherwise. And you had better know it. But you won't believe it, I am afraid, because I – I have never responded to – to you."

Tears fell between her fingers over the flushed cheeks. She spoke with increasing effort: "You don't understand; and I can't explain – except to say that to be demonstrative seemed unworthy in me."

He put his arms around her shoulders very gently; she rested her forehead against his shoulder.

"Don't think me calculating and cold-blooded – or a fool," she whispered. "Probably everybody kisses or is kissed. I know it as well as you do. But I haven't the – effrontery – to permit myself – such emotions. I couldn't, Jim. I'd hate myself. And I thought of that, too, when I asked you to marry me. Because if you had refused – and – matters had gone on – you would have been sorry for me sooner or later – or perhaps hated me. Because I would have been – been too much ashamed of myself to have – loved you – unwisely."

He stood with head bent, listening; and, as he listened, the comparison between this young girl and himself forced itself into his unwilling mind – how that all she believed and desired ennobled her, and how what had always governed him had made of him nothing more admirable than what he was born, a human animal. For what he began as he still was – only cleverer.

What else was he – except a trained animal, sufficiently educated to keep out of jail? What had he done with his inheritance? His body was sane and healthy; he had been at pains to cultivate that. How was it with his mind? How was it with his spiritual beliefs? Had he cultivated and added to either? He had been endowed with a brain. Had he made of it anything except an instrument for idle caprice and indolent passions to play upon?

"Do you understand me now?" she whispered, touching wet lashes with her handkerchief.

He replied impetuously, hotly; her hands dropped from her face and she looked up at him with sweet, confused eyes, blushing vividly under his praise of her.

He spoke of himself, too, with all the quick, impassioned impulse of youthful emotion, not sparing himself, promising better things, vowing them before the shrine of her innocence. Yet, a stronger character might have registered such vows in silence. And his fervour and incoherence left her mute; and after he had ceased to protest too much she stood quiet for a while, striving to search herself so that nothing unworthy should remain – so that heart and soul should be clean under the magic veil of happiness descending before her enraptured eyes.

Gently his arms encircled her; her clasped hands rested on his shoulder, and she gazed out at the blue sky and sun-warmed snow as at a corner of paradise revealed.

Later, when the household was astir, she went out with him into the greenhouse, where the enchanted stillness of growing things thrilled her, and the fragrance and sunlight made the mystery of love and its miracle even more exquisitely unreal to her.

At first they did not speak; her hand lay loosely in his, her blue eyes remained remote; and together they slowly paced the long, glass-sheeted galleries between misty, scented mounds of bloom, to and fro, under the flood of pallid winter sunshine, pale as the yellow jasmine flowers overhead.

After a while a fat gardener came into one of the further wings. Presently the sound of shovelled coal from the furnace-pit aroused them from their dream; and they looked at each other gravely.

After a moment, he said: "Does it make a difference to you, Jacqueline, what I was before I knew you?"

"No."

"I was only wondering what you really think of me."

"You know already, Jim."

He shook his head slowly.

"Jim! Of course you know!" she insisted hotly. "What you may have been before I knew you I refuse to consider. Anyway, it was you– part of you – and belongs to me now! Because I choose to make it mine – all that you were and are – good and evil! For I won't give up one atom of you – even to the devil himself!"

He tried to laugh: "What a fierce little partisan you are," he said.

"Very – where it concerns you," she said, unsmiling.

"Dear – I had better tell you now; you may hear things about me – "

"I won't listen to them!"

"No; but one sometimes hears without listening. People may say things. They will say things. I wish I could spare you. If I had known – if I had only known – that you were in the world – "

"Don't, Jim! It – it isn't best for me to hear. It doesn't concern me," she insisted excitedly. "And if anybody dares say one word to me – "

"Wait, dear. All I want to be sure of is that you do love me enough to – to go on loving me. I want to be certain, and I want you to be certain before you are a bride – "

She was growing very much excited, and suddenly near to tears, for the one thing that endangered her self-control seemed to be his doubt of her.

"There is nothing that I haven't forgiven you," she said. "Nothing! There is nothing I won't forgive – except – one thing – "

"What?"

"I can't say it. I can't even think it. All I know is that now I couldn't forgive it." Suddenly she became perfectly quiet.

"I know what you mean," he said.

"Yes. It is what no wife can forgive." She looked at him, clear eyed, intelligent, calm; for the moment without any illusion; and he seemed to feel that, in the light of what she knew of him, she was coolly weighing the danger of the experiment. Never had he seen so cold and lustrous a brow, such limpid clarity of eye, searching, fearless, direct. Then, in an instant, it all seemed to melt into flushed and winsome loveliness; and she was murmuring that she loved him, and asking pardon for even one second's hesitation.

"It never could be; it is unthinkable," she whispered. "And it is too late anyway for me – I would love you now, whatever you killed in me. Because I must go on loving you, Jim; for that is the way it is with me, and I know it now. As long as there is life in me I'll strive for you in my own fashion – even against yourself – to keep you for mine, to please you, to be to you and to the world what you wish me to be – for your honour and your happiness – which also must be my own – the only happiness, now, that I can ever understand."

He held her in his arms, smoothing the bright hair, touching the white brow with his lips at moments, happy because he was so deeply in love, fearful because of it – and, deep in his soul, miserable, afraid lest aught out of his past life return again to mock her – lest some echo of folly offend her ears – some shadow fall – some phantom of dead days rise from their future hearth to stand between them.

It is that way with a man who has lived idly and irresponsibly, and who has gone lightly about the pleasure of life and not its business. For sometimes there arrives an hour of unbidden clairvoyance – not necessarily a spiritual awakening – but a moment of balanced intelligence and sanity and clear vision. And when it arrives, the road to yesterday suddenly becomes visible for its entire length; and when a man looks back he sees it stretching away behind him, peopled with every shape that has ever traversed it, and every spectre that ever has haunted it.

Sorrow for what need not have been, regret and shame for what had been – and the bitterness of the folly – the knowledge, too late, of what he could have been to the girl he held now in his arms – how he could have met her on more equal terms had he saved his youth and strength and innocence and pride for her alone – how he could have given it unsullied into her keeping. All this Desboro was beginning to realise now. And many men have realised it when the tardy understanding came too late. For what has been is still and will be always; and shall appear here or hereafter, or after that – somewhere, sometime, inevitably, inexorably. There is no such thing as expunging what has been, or of erasing what is to be. All records stand; hope lies only in lengthening the endless chapters – chapters which will not be finished when the sun dies, and the moon fails, and the stars go out forever.

Walking slowly back together, they passed Herrendene in the wing hall, and his fine and somewhat melancholy face lighted up at the encounter.

"I'm so sorry you are going to-day," said Jacqueline, with all her impulsive and sweet sincerity. "Everybody will miss you and wish you here again."

"To be regretted is one of the few real pleasures in life," he said, smiling. His quick eye had rested on Desboro and then reverted to her, and his intuition was warning him with all the brutality and finality of reason that his last hope of her must end.

Desboro said: "I hate to have you go, Herrendene, but I suppose you must."

"Must you?" echoed Jacqueline, wistful for the moment. But the irresistible radiance of happiness had subtly transfigured her, and Herrendene looked into her eyes and saw the new-born beauty in them, shyly apparent.

"Yes," he said, "I must be about the business of life – the business of life, Miss Nevers. Everybody is engaged in it; it has many names, but it's all the same business. You, for example, pass judgment on beautiful things; Desboro, here, is a farmer, and I play soldier with sword and drum. But it's all the same business – the business of life; and one can work at it or idle through it, but never escape it, because, at the last, every soul in the world must die in harness. And the idlest are the heaviest laden." He laughed. "That's quite a sermon, isn't it, Miss Nevers? And shall I make my adieux now? Were you going anywhere? You see I am leaving Silverwood directly after breakfast – "

"As though Mr. Desboro and I would go off anywhere and not say good-bye to you!" she exclaimed indignantly, quite unconscious of being too obvious.

So they all three returned to the breakfast room together, where Clydesdale, who had come over from the Hammertons' for breakfast, was already tramping hungrily around the covered dishes on the sideboard, hot plate in hand, evidently meditating a wholesale assault. He grinned affably as Jacqueline and Desboro came in, and they all helped themselves from the warmers, returning laden to the table with whatever suited their fancy. Other guests, to whom no trays had been sent, arrived one after another to prowl around the browse and join in the conversation if they chose, or sulk, as is the fashion with some perfectly worthy souls at breakfast-tide.

"This thaw settles the skating for good and all," remarked Reggie Ledyard. "Will you go fishing with me, Miss Nevers? It's our last day, you know."

Cairns growled over his grape-fruit: "You can't make dates with Miss Nevers at the breakfast table. It isn't done. I was going to ask her to do something with me, anyway."

"I hate breakfast," said Van Alstyne. "When I see it I always wish I were dead or that everybody else was. Zooks! This cocktail helps some! Try one, Miss Nevers."

"There's reason in your grouch," remarked Bertie Barkley, with his hard-eyed smile, "considering what Aunt Hannah and I did to you and Helsa at auction last night."

"Aunt Hannah will live in luxury for a year on it," added Cairns maliciously. "Doesn't it make you happy, Stuyve?"

"Oh – blub!" muttered Van Alstyne, hating everybody and himself – and most of all hating to think of his losses and of the lady who caused them. Only the really rich know how card losses rankle.

Cairns glanced banteringly across at Jacqueline. It was his form of wit to quiz her because she neither indulged in cocktails nor cigarettes, nor played cards for stakes. He lifted his eyebrows and tapped the frosted shaker beside him significantly.

"I've a new kind of mountain dew, warranted to wake the dead, Miss Nevers. I call it the 'Aunt Hannah,' in her honour – honour to whom honour is dew," he added impudently. "Won't you let me make you a cocktail?"

"Wait until Aunt Hannah hears how you have honoured her and tempted me," laughed Jacqueline.

"I never tempted maid or wifeOr suffragette in all my life – "

sang Ledyard, beating time on Van Alstyne, who silently scowled his displeasure.

Presently Ledyard selected a grape-fruit, with a sour smile at one of Desboro's cats which had confidently leaped into his lap.

"Is this a zoo den in the Bronx, or a breakfast room, Desboro? I only ask because I'm all over cats."

Bertie Barkley snapped his napkin at an intrusive yellow pup who was sniffing and wagging at his elbow.

Jacqueline comforted the retreating animal, bending over and crooning in his floppy ear:

"They gotta stop kickin' my dawg aroun'."

"What do you care what they do to Jim's live stock, Miss Nevers?" demanded Ledyard suspiciously.

She laughed, but to her annoyance a warmer colour brightened her cheeks.

"Heaven help us!" exclaimed Reggie. "Miss Nevers is blushing at the breakfast table. Gentlemen, are we done for without even suspecting it? And by that – that" – pointing a furious finger at Desboro – "that!"

"Certainly," said Desboro, smiling. "Did you imagine I'd ever let Miss Nevers escape from Silverwood?"

Ledyard heaved a sigh of relief: "Gad," he muttered, "I suspected you both for a moment. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Every man here would have murdered you in turn. Come on, Miss Nevers; you've made a big splash with me, and I'll play you a game of rabbit – or anything on earth, if you'll let me run along beside you."

"No, I'm driving with Captain Herrendene to the station," she said; and that melancholy soldier looked up in grateful surprise.

And she did go with him; and everybody came out on the front steps to wish him bon voyage.

"Are you coming back, Miss Nevers?" asked Ledyard, in pretended alarm.

"I don't know. Is Manila worth seeing, Captain Herrendene?" she asked, laughingly.

"If you sail for Manila with that tin soldier I'll go after you in a hydroplane!" called Reggie after them, as the car rolled away. He added frankly, for everybody's benefit: "I hate any man who even looks at her, and I don't care who knows it. But what's the use? Going to night-school might help me, but I doubt it. No; she's for a better line of goods than the samples at Silverwood. She shines too far above us. Mark that, James Desboro! And take what comfort you can in your reflected glory. For had she not been the spotlight, you'd look exactly like the rest of us. And that isn't flattering anybody, I'm thinking."

It was to be the last day of the party. Everybody was leaving directly after luncheon, and now everybody seemed inclined to do nothing in particular. Mrs. Clydesdale came over from the Hammerton's. The air was soft and springlike; the snow in the fields was melting and full of golden pools. People seemed to be inclined to stroll about outdoors without their hats; a lively snowball battle began between Cary Clydesdale on one side and Cairns and Reggie Ledyard on the other – and gradually was participated in by everybody except Aunt Hannah, who grimly watched it from the library window. But her weather eye never left Mrs. Clydesdale.

She was still standing at the window when somebody entered the library behind her, and somebody else followed. She knew who they were; the curtains screened her. For one second the temptation to listen beset her, but she put it away with a sniff, and had already turned to disclose herself when she heard Mrs. Clydesdale say something that stiffened her into a rigid silence.

What followed stiffened her still more – and there were only a few words, too – only:

"For God's sake, what are you thinking of?" from Desboro; and from Elena Clydesdale:

"This has got to end – I can't stand it, Jim – "

"Stand what?"

"Him! And what you are doing!"

"Be careful! Do you want people to overhear us?" he said, in a low voice of concentrated anger.

"Then where – "

"I don't know. Wait until these people leave – "

"To-night?"

"How can we see each other to-night!"

"Cary is going to New York – "

Voices approaching through the hall warned him:

"All right, to-night," he said, desperately. "Go out into the hall."

"To-night, Jim?"

"Yes."

She turned and walked out into the hall. He heard her voice calmly joining in the chatter now approaching, and, without any reason, he walked to the window. And found Mrs. Hammerton there.

Astonishment and anger left him dumb and scarlet to the roots of his hair.

"It isn't my fault," she hissed. "You and that other fool had already committed yourselves before I could stir to warn you. What do I care for your vile little intrigues, anyway! I don't have to listen behind curtains to learn what anybody could have seen at the Metropolitan Opera – "

"You are absolutely mistaken – "

"No doubt, James. But whether I am or not makes absolutely no difference to me – or to Jacqueline Nevers – "

"What do you mean by that?"

"What I say, exactly. It will make no difference to Jacqueline, because you are going to keep your distance."

"Do you think so?"

"If you don't keep away from her I'll tell her a few things. Listen to me very carefully, James. You think I'm fond of you, don't you? Well, I am. But I've taken a fancy to Jacqueline Nevers that – well, if I were not childless I might feel it less deeply. I've put my arms around her once and for all. Now do you understand?"

"I tell you," he said steadily, "you are mistaken in believing – "

"Very well. Granted. What of it? One dirty little intrigue more or less doesn't alter what you are and have been. The plain point of the matter is this, James: you are not fit to aspire seriously to Jacqueline Nevers. Are you? I ask you, now, honestly; are you?"

"Does that concern you?"

She fairly snapped her teeth and her eyes sparkled:

"Yes; it concerns me! Keep away! I warn you – you and the rest of the Jacks and Reggies and similar assorted pups. Your hunting ground is elsewhere."

A sort of cold fury possessed him: "You had better not say anything to Miss Nevers about what you overheard in this room," he said in a colourless voice.

"I'll use my own judgment," she retorted tartly.

"Use mine. It is perhaps better. Don't interfere."

"Don't be a fool, James."

"Will you listen to me – "

"About Elena Clydesdale?" she asked maliciously.

"There is nothing to tell about her."

"Naturally. I never heard the Desboros were blackguards – only a trifle airy, James – a trifle gallant! Dear child, don't anger me. You know it wouldn't be well for you."

"I ask you merely to mind your business."

"That I shall do. My life's business is Jacqueline. You yourself made her so – " Malice indescribable snapped in her tiny black eyes, and she laughed harshly. "You made that motherless girl my business. Ask yourself if you've ever, inadvertently, done as decent a thing?"

"Do you understand that I wish to marry her?" he asked, white with passion.

"You! What do I care what your patronising intentions may be? And, James, if you drive me to it – " she fairly glared at him, " – I'll destroy even your acquaintanceship with her. And I possess the means to do it!"

"Try it!" he motioned with dry lips.

A moment later the animated chatter of young people filled the room, and among them sounded Jacqueline's voice.

"Oh!" she said, laughing, when she saw Mrs. Hammerton and Desboro coming from the embrasure of the window. "Have you been flirting again, Aunt Hannah!"

"Yes," said the old lady grimly, "and I think I've taken him into camp."

"Then it's my turn," said Jacqueline. "Come on, Mr. Desboro, you can't escape me. I'm going to beat you a game of rabbit!"

Everybody drifted into the billiard-room at their heels, and found them already at their stations on either side of the pool table, each one covering the side pocket with left hand spread wide. Jacqueline had the cue-ball; it lay on the cloth in front of her, and her slim right hand covered it.

"Ready?" she asked of Desboro.

"Ready," he said, watching her.

She made a feint; he sprang to the left; she shot the ball toward the right corner pocket, missed, carromed, and tried to recover it; but Desboro's arm shot out across the cloth and he seized it and shot it at her left corner pocket. It went in with a plunk!

"One for Jim!" said Reggie gravely, and, picking up a cue, scored with a button overhead.