Chambers Robert William
Ailsa Paige
Colonel Arran's forefinger slowly outlined the deeply carved horn of plenty.
"I am not perfectly sure that I ever met Mr. Berkley's father."
She sat, elbows on the table, gazing reflectively into space.
"He is a—curious—man."
"Did you like him?" asked Colonel Arran with an effort.
"Yes," she said, so simply that the Colonel's eyes turned directly toward her, lingered, then became fixed on the sunlit damask folds behind her.
"What did you like about Mr. Berkley, Ailsa?"
She considered.
"I—don't know–exactly."
"Is he cultivated?"
"Why, yes—I suppose so."
"Is he well bred?"
"Oh, yes; only—" she searched mentally—"he is not—may I say, conventional? formal?"
"It is an age of informality," observed Colonel Arran, carefully tracing out each separate grape in the horn of plenty.
Ailsa assented; spoke casually of something else; but when Colonel Arran brought the conversation around again to Berkley, she in nowise seemed reluctant.
"He is unusually attractive," she said frankly; "his features, at moments, are almost beautiful. I sometimes wonder whether he resembles his mother. Was she beautiful?"
"Yes."
"I thought she must have been. He resembles her, does he not?"
"Yes." "His father was—is—" She hesitated, looked curiously at Colonel Arran, then smiled.
"There was something I never thought of when I first met Mr. Berkley, but now I understand why his features seemed to me not entirely unfamiliar. I don't know exactly what it is, but there seems to be something about him that recalls you."
Colonel Arran sat absolutely still, his heavy hand gripping the horn of plenty, his face so gray that it was almost colourless.
Ailsa, glancing again at his profile, saw nothing now in it resembling Berkley; and, as he made no response, thought him uninterested. But when again she would have changed the subject, the Colonel stirred, interrupting:
"Does he seem—well?"
"Well?" she repeated. "Oh, yes."
"He—seems well . . . and in good spirits? Contented? Is he that type of young man? Happy?"
"I don't think he is really very happy, though he is cheerful and—and amusing. I don't see how he can be very light-hearted."
"Why?"
She shook her head:
"I believe he—I know he must be in painfully straightened circumstances."
"I have heard so," nodded Colonel Arran.
"Oh, he certainly is!" she said with decision. "He lost everything in the panic, and he lives in a most wretched neighbourhood, and he hasn't any business except a very little now and then. It made me quite unhappy," she added naively.
"And you find him personally agreeable?"
"Yes, I do. I didn't at first—" She checked herself—"I mean I did at the very first—then I didn't—then I did again, then I—didn't—" The delicate colour stole into her cheeks; she lifted her wineglass, looked into it pensively, set it back on the table. "But I understand him better now, I think."
"What, in him, do you understand better now?"
"I—don't—know."
"Is he a better kind of a man than you thought him at first?"
"Y-es. He has it in him to be better, I mean. . . . Yes, he is a better man than I thought him—once."
"And you like him–"
"Yes, I do. Colonel Arran."
"Admire him?"
She flushed up. "How do you mean?"
"His qualities?"
"Oh. . . . Yes, he has qualities."
"Admirable?"
"He is exceedingly intelligent."
"Intellectual?"
"I don't exactly know. He pretends to make fun of so many things. It is not easy to be perfectly sure what he really believes; because he laughs at almost everybody and everything. But I am quite certain that he really has beliefs."
"Religious?"
She looked grave. "He does not go to church."
"Does he—does he strike you as being—well, say, irresponsible—perhaps I may even say reckless?"
She did not answer; and Colonel Arran did not ask again. He remained silent so long that she presently drifted off into other subjects, and he made no effort to draw her back.
But later, when he took his leave, he said in his heavy way:
"When you see Mr. Berkley, say to him that Colonel Arran remembers him. . . . Say to him that it would be my—pleasure—to renew our very slight acquaintance."
"He will be glad, I know," she said warmly.
"Why do you think so?"
"Why? Because I like you!" she explained with a gay little laugh. "And whoever I like Mr. Berkley must like if he and I are to remain good friends."
The Colonel's smile was wintry; the sudden animation in his face had subsided.
"I should like to know him—if he will," he said absently. And took his leave of Ailsa Paige.
Next afternoon he came again, and lingered, though neither he nor Ailsa spoke of Berkley. And the next afternoon he reappeared, and sat silent, preoccupied, for a long time, in the peculiar hushed attitude of a man who listens. But the door-bell did not ring and the only sound in tile house was from Ailsa's piano, where she sat idling through the sunny afternoon.
The next afternoon he said:
"Does he never call on you?"
"Who?"
"Mr. Berkley."
"I—asked him," she replied, flushing faintly.
"He has not come, then?"
"Not yet. I suppose—business–"
The Colonel said, ponderously careless: "I imagine that he is likely to come in the late afternoon—when he does come."
"I don't know. He is in business."
"It doesn't keep him after three o'clock at his office."
She looked up surprised: "Doesn't it?" And her eyes asked instinctively: "How did you know?" But the Colonel sat silent again, his head lowered and partly averted as though to turn his good ear toward her. Clearly his mind already dwelt on other matters, she was thinking; but she was mistaken.
"When he comes," said Colonel Arran slowly, "will you have the kindness to say to him that Colonel Arran will be glad to renew the acquaintance?"
"Yes. . . . Perhaps he has forgotten the street and number. I might write to him—to remind him?" Colonel Arran made no answer.
She wrote that night:
"DEAR MR. BERKLEY:
"I am in my own house now and am very contented—which does not mean that I did not adore being with Celia Craig and Estcourt and the children.
"But home is pleasant, and I am wondering whether you might care to see the home of which I have so often spoken to you when you used to come over to Brooklyn to see me [me erased and us neatly substituted in long, sweeping characters].
"I have been doing very little since I last saw you—it is not sheer idleness, but somehow one cannot go light-heartedly to dinners and concerts and theatres in times like these, when traitors are trampling the nag under foot, and when thousands and thousands of young men are leaving the city every day to go to the defence of our distracted country.
"I saw a friend the other day—a Mrs. Wells—and three of her boys, friends of mine, have gone with the 7th, and she is so nervous and excited that she can scarcely speak about it. So many men I know have gone or are going. Stephen was here yesterday, wild to go with the 8d Zouaves, but I promised his father to use my influence—and he is too young—although it is very fine and chivalrous of him to wish to go.
"I thought I would write you a little note, to remind you that I am at home, and already it has become a letter. Please remember—when you think of it at all—that it would give me pleasure to receive you.
"Sincerely yours,
"AILSA PAIGE."
Toward the end of the week she received a heart-broken note from Celia Craig, which caused her to hasten over to Brooklyn. She arrived late; the streets were continually blocked by departing troops, and the omnibus took a circuitous course to the ferry, going by way of Fourth Avenue and the Bowery.
"Honey-bee! O Honey-bell!" whispered her sister-in-law, taking Ailsa into her arms, "I could have behaved myse'f better if Curt were on the side of God and Justice!—But to have to let him go this way—to know the awful danger—to know he is going against my own people, my own home—against God and the Right!—O Honey-bird! Honey-bud! And the Charleston Mercury says that the South is most bitter against the Zouaves–"
"Curt! With the Zouaves!"
"Oh yes, yes, Honey-bee! The Third Regiment. And he—some wicked old men came here yesterday and read a speech—right befo' me—here in this ve'y room—and began to say that they wished him to be colonel of the 3d Zouaves, and that the Governor wished it and—other fools! And I rose straight up f'om my chair and I said, 'Curt!' And he gave me one look. Oh, Honey-bud! His face was changed; there was that same thing in it that I saw the night the news came about Sumter! And he said: 'Gentlemen, my country educated me; now it honours me.' And I tried to speak again and my lips were stiff; and then he said: 'I accept the command you offer–'"
"Oh, Celia!"
"Yes, he said it, darling! I stood there, frozen—in a corner of my heart I had been afraid—such a long time!—but to have it come real—'this terror!—to have this thing take my husband—come into our own home befo' I knew—befo' I dreamed—and take Curt!—take —my—Curt!"
"Where is he?"
"With—them. They have a camp near Fort Hamilton. He went there this morning."
"When is he coming back?"
"I don't know. Stephen is scaring me most to death; he is wild to go, too. And, oh—do you believe it? Captain Lent has gone with Curt to the camp, and Curt means to recommend him for his major. What a regiment!—all the soldiers are mere boys, they say—wilful, reckless, hair-brained boys who don't know—can't know—where they're going. . . . And Curt is so blind without his glasses, and Captain Lent is certainly a little mad, and I'm most distracted myse'f–"
"Darling—darling—don't cry!"
"Cry? Oh, I could die, Ailsa. Yet, I'm Southern enough to choke back eve'y tear and let them go with a smile if they had to go fo' God and the Right! But to see my Curt go this way—and my only son crazy to join him—Oh, it is ha'd, Honey-bee, ve'y, ve'y ha'd."
"Dearest!"
"O Honey-bud! Honey-bud!"
And the two women mourned, uncomforted.
Ailsa remained for three unhappy days in Fort Greene Place, then fled to her own house. A light, amusing letter from Berkley awaited her. It was so like him, gay, cynical, epigrammatic, and inconsequent, that it cheered her. Besides, he subscribed himself very obediently hers, but on re-examining the letter she noticed that he had made no mention of coming to pay his respects to her.
So she lived her tranquil life for another week; and Colonel Arran came every day and seemed always to be waiting for something—always listening—gray face buried in his stock. And at the week's end she answered Berkley's letter—although, in it, he had asked no question.
"DEAR MR. BERKLEY:
"Such sad news from the Craigs. Estcourt has accepted the command of one of the new zouave regiments—the 3d, in camp near Fort Hamilton. But, being in his office, I suppose you have heard all about it from Stephen. Poor Celia Craig! It is peculiarly distressing in her case; all her sympathies are with her native state, and to have her husband go under such unusually tragic circumstances seems too dreadful. Celia is convinced that he will never return; she reads some Southern paper which breathes awful threats against the Zouaves in particular. Besides, Stephen is perfectly determined to enlist in his father's regiment, and I can see that they can't restrain him much longer. I have done my best; I have had him here and talked to him and argued with him, but I have made no headway. No appeal moves him; he says that the land will need every man sooner or later, and that the quicker he begins the sooner he will learn how to look out for himself in battle.
"The regiment is almost full; to-day, the first six companies are to be mustered into the United States service for three years or for the war. Captain Barris of the regular army is the mustering officer. And on their departure I am to present a set of colours to the regiment. It is to be quite solemn. I have already bought the lances, and they are beautiful; the spears are silver gilt, the rings gilded, too, and the flags are made of the most beautiful silk with tassels and fringe of gold bullion. There are three flags: the national colours, the state flag, and a purple regimental flag lettered in gold: '3d Regt. N. Y. Zouaves,' and under it their motto: 'Multorum manibus grande levatur onus.' I hope it is good Latin, for it is mine. Is it?
"AILSA PAIGE."
To this letter he made no reply, and, after a week, his silence hurt her.
One afternoon toward the middle of May Stephen was announced; and with a sudden sense of foreboding she hastened down to the drawing-room.
"Oh!" she cried. "You—Stephen!"
But the boy in his zouave uniform was beside himself with excitement and pride, and he embraced her, laughing, and then began to walk up and down the room gesticulating.
"I couldn't stand it any longer, and they let me go. I'm sorry for mother, but look at other men's mothers! They're calling for more and more troops every week! I knew everybody would have to go, and I'm mighty fortunate to get into father's regiment—And O Ailsa! It is a fine regiment! We're drilling every minute, and now that we've got our uniforms it won't be long before our orders come–"
"Stephen—does your mother–"
"Mother knows I can't help it. I do love her; she knows that perfectly well. But men have got to settle this thing–"
"Two hundred thousand are getting ready to settle it! Are there hot enough without you?—your mother's only son–"
"Suppose everybody thought that way, where would our army be?"
"But there are hundreds of regiments forming here—getting ready, drilling, leaving on boats and trains every day–"
"And every regiment is composed of men exactly like me! They go because the Nation's business is everybody's business. And the Nation's business comes first. There's no use talking to me, Ailsa. I've had it but with father. He saw that he couldn't prevent me from doing what he has done. And old Lent is our major! Lord, Ailsa, what a terrible old man for discipline! And father is—well he is acting as though we ought to behave like West Pointers. They're cruelly hard on skylarkers and guard runners, and they're fairly kicking discipline into us. But I'm willing. I'm ready to stand anything as long as we can get away!"
He was talking in a loud, excited voice, pacing restlessly to and fro, pausing at intervals to confront Ailsa where she sat, limp and silent, gazing up at this slender youth in his short blue jacket edged with many bell-buttons, blue body sash, scarlet zouave trousers and leather gaiters.
Presently old Jonas shuffled in with Madeira, cakes, and sandwiches, and Stephen began on them immediately.
"I came over so you could see me in my uniform," he explained; "and I'm going back right away to see mother and Paige and Marye and Camilla." He paused, sandwich suspended, then swallowed what he had been chewing and took another bite, recklessly.
"I'm very fond of Camilla," he said condescendingly. "She's very nice about my going—the only one who hasn't snivelled. I tell you, Ailsa, Camilla is a good deal of a girl. . . . And I've promised to look out for her uncle—keep an eye on old Lent, you know, which seems to comfort her a good deal when she begins crying–
"Oh. . . I thought Camilla didn't cry."
"She cries a little—now and then."
"About her uncle?"
"Certainly."
Ailsa looked down at her ringless fingers. Within the week she had laid away both rings, meaning to resume them some day.
"If you and your father go, your office will be closed, I suppose."
"Oh, no. Farren will run it."
"I see. . . . And Mr. Berkley, too, I suppose."
Stephen looked up from his bitten seedcake.
"Berkley? He left long ago."
"Left—where?" she asked, confused.
"Left the office. It couldn't be helped. There was nothing for him to do. I was sorry—I'm sorrier now–"
He checked himself, hesitated, turned his troubled eyes on Ailsa.
"I did like him so much."
"Don't you like him—still?"
"Yes—I do. I don't know what was the matter with that man. He went all to pieces."
"W-what!"
"Utterly. Isn't it too bad."
She sat there very silent, very white. Stephen bit into another cake, angrily.
"It's the company he keeps," he said—"a lot of fast men—fast enough to be talked about, fashionable enough to be tolerated—Jack Casson is one of them, and that little ass, Arthur Wye. That's the crowd—a horse-racing, hard-drinking, hard-gambling crew."
"But—he is—Mr. Berkley's circumstances—how can he do such things–"
"Some idiot—even Berkley doesn't know who—took all those dead stocks off his hands. Wasn't it the devil's own luck for Berkley to find a market in times like these?"
"But it ended him. . . . Oh, I was fond of him, I tell you, Ailsa!
I hate like thunder to see him this way–"
"What way!"
"Oh, not caring for anybody or anything. He's never sober. I don't mean that I ever saw him otherwise—he doesn't get drunk like an ordinary man: he just turns deathly white and polite. I've met him—and his friends—several times. They're too fast a string of colts for me. But isn't it a shame that a man like Berkley should go to the devil—and for no reason at all?"
"Yes," she said.
When Stephen, swinging his crimson fez by the tassel, stood ready to take his leave, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him.
After he departed Colonel Arran came, and sat, as usual, silent, listening.
Ailsa was very animated; she told him about Stephen's enlistment, asked scores of questions about military life, the chances in battle, the proportion of those who went through war unscathed.
And at length Colonel Arran arose to take his departure; and she had not told what was hammering for utterance in every heart beat; she did not know how to tell, what to ask.
Hat in hand Colonel Arran bent over her hot little hand where it lay in his own.
"I have been offered the colonelcy of a volunteer regiment now forming," he said without apparent interest.
"You!"
"Cavalry," he explained wearily.
"But—you have not accepted!"
He gave her an absent glance. "Yes, I have accepted. . . . I am going to Washington to-night."
"Oh!" she breathed, "but you are coming back before—before–"
"Yes, child. Cavalry is not made in a hurry. I am to see General Scott—perhaps Mr. Cameron and the President. . . . If, in my absence—" he hesitated, looked down, shook his head. And somehow she seemed to know that what he had not said concerned Berkley.
Neither of them mentioned him. But after Colonel Arran had gone she went slowly to her room, sat down at her desk, sat there a long, long while thinking. But it was after midnight before she wrote to Berkley:
"Have you quite forgotten me? I have had to swallow a little pride to write you again. But perhaps I think our pleasant friendship worth it.
"Stephen has been here. He has enlisted as a private in his father's regiment of zouaves. I learned by accident from him that you are no longer associated with Craig & Son in business. I trust this means at least a partial recovery of your fortune. If it does, with fortune recovered responsibilities increase, and I choose to believe that it is these new and exacting duties which have prevented me from seeing you or from hearing from you for more than three weeks.
"But surely you could find a moment to write a line to a friend who is truly your very sincere well-wisher, and who would be the first to express her pleasure in any good fortune which might concern you.
"AILSA PAIGE."
Two days passed, and her answer came:
"Ailsa Paige, dearest and most respected, I have not forgotten you for one moment. And I have tried very hard.
"God knows what my pen is trying to say to you, and not hurt you, and yet kill utterly in you the last kindly and charitable memory of the man who is writing to you.
"Ailsa, if I had known you even one single day before that night I met you, you would have had of me, in that single day, all that a man dare lay at the feet of the truest and best of women.
"But on that night I came to you a man utterly and hopelessly ruined—morally dead of a blow dealt me an hour before I saw you for the first time.
"I had not lived an orderly life, but at worst it was only a heedless life. I had been a fool, but not a damned one. There was in me something loftier than a desire for pleasure, something worthier than material ambition. What else lay latent—if anything—I may only surmise. It is all dead.
"The blow dealt me that evening—an hour before I first laid eyes on you—utterly changed me; and if there was anything spiritual in my character it died then. And left what you had a glimpse of—just a man, pagan, material, unmoral, unsafe; unmoved by anything except by what appeals to the material senses.
"Is that the kind of man you suppose me? That is the man I am. And you know it now. And you know, now, what it was in me that left you perplexed, silent, troubled, not comprehending—why it was you would not dance with me again, nor suffer my touch, nor endure me too near you.
"It was the less noble in me—all that the blow had not killed—only a lesser part of a finer and perfect passion that might perhaps have moved you to noble response in time.
"Because I should have given you all at the first meeting; I could no more have helped it than I could have silenced my heart and lived. But what was left to give could awake in you no echo, no response, no comprehension. In plainer, uglier words, I meant to make you love me; and I was ready to carry you with me to that hell where souls are lost through love—and where we might lose our souls together.
"And now you will never write to me again."
All the afternoon she bent at her desk, poring over his letter. In her frightened heart she knew that something within her, not spiritual, had responded to what, in him, had evoked it; that her indefinable dread was dread of herself, of her physical responsiveness to his nearness, of her conscious inclination for it.
Could this be she—herself—who still bent here over his written words—this tense, hot-cheeked, tremulous creature, staring dry-eyed at the blurring lines which cut her for ever asunder from this self-outlawed man!
Was this letter still unburned. Had she not her fill of its brutality, its wickedness?
But she was very tired, and she laid her arms on the desk and her head between them. And against her hot face she felt the cool letter-paper.
All that she had dreamed and fancied and believed and cared for in man passed dully through her mind. Her own aspirations toward ideal womanhood followed—visions of lofty desire, high ideals, innocent passions, the happiness of renunciation, the glory of forgiveness–
She sat erect, breathing unevenly; then her eyes fell on the letter, and she covered it with her hands, as hands cover the shame on a stricken face. And after a long time her lips moved, repeating:
"The glory of forgiveness—the glory of forgiveness–"
Her heart was beating very hard and fast as her thoughts ran on.
"To forgive—help him—teach truth—nobler ideals–"
She could not rest; sleep, if it really came, was a ghostly thing that mocked her. And all the next day she roamed about the house, haunted with the consciousness of where his letter lay locked in her desk. And that day she would not read it again; but the next day she read it. And the next.
And if it were her desire to see him once again before all ended irrevocably for ever—or if it was what her heart was striving to tell her, that he was in need of aid against himself, she could not tell. But she wrote him:
"It is not you who have written this injury for my eyes to read, but another man, demoralised by the world's cruelty—not knowing what he is saying—hurt to the soul, not mortally. When he recovers he will be you. And this letter is my forgiveness."
Berkley received it when he was not particularly sober; and lighting the end of it at a candle let it burn until the last ashes scorched his fingers.
"Burgess," he said, "did you ever notice how hard it is for the frailer things to die? Those wild doves we used to shoot in Georgia—by God! it took quail shot to kill them clean."
"Yes, sir?"
"Exactly. Then, that being the case, you may give me a particularly vigorous shampoo. Because, Burgess, I woo my volatile goddess to-night—the Goddess Chance, Burgess, whose wanton and naughty eyes never miss the fall of a card. And I desire that all my senses work like lightning, Burgess, because it is a fast company and a faster game, and that's why I want an unusually muscular shampoo!"
"Yes, sir. Poker, sir?"
"I—ah—believe so," said Berkley, lying back in his chair and closing his eyes. "Go ahead and rub hell into me—if I'll hold any more."
The pallor, the shadows under eyes and cheeks, the nervous lines at the corners of the nose, had almost disappeared when Burgess finished. And when he stood in his evening clothes pulling a rose-bud stem through the button-hole of his lapel, he seemed very fresh and young and graceful in the gas-light.
"Am I very fine, Burgess? Because I go where youth and beauty chase the shining hours with flying feet. Oh yes, Burgess, the fair and frail will be present, also the dashing and self-satisfied. And we'll try to make it agreeable all around, won't we? . . . And don't smoke all my most expensive cigars, Burgess. I may want one when I return. I hate to ask too much of you, but you won't mind leaving one swallow of brandy in that decanter, will you? Thanks. Good night, Burgess."
"Thank you, sir. Good night, sir."
As he walked out into the evening air he swung his cane in glittering circles.
"Nevertheless," he said under his breath, "she'd better be careful. If she writes again I might lose my head and go to her. You can never tell about some men; and the road to hell is a lonely one—damned lonely. Better let a man travel it like a gentleman if he can. It's more dignified than sliding into it on your back, clutching a handful of lace petticoat."
He added: "There's only one hell; and it's hell, perhaps, because there are no women there."
