The Sword of Damocles: A Story of New York Life

"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 substituting 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 noble 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 glass. "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 glass, "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 compass. 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 mass of human frailty and woe which has been accumulating 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 space 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, God 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 noble 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 – "

"You can, nothing appeals to the heart of crime like the glance of perfect innocence. If evil walks the world, God's ministers walk it also, and none can tell in what glance of the eye or what touch of the hand, that ministry will speak."

It was her turn now to take his hand in hers. "O how good, how thoughtful you are; you have comforted me and you have taught me. I thank you very much."

With a look she did not perceive, he drew his hand away. "I am glad I have helped you, Paula; there is but one thing more to say, and this I would emphasize with every saddened look you have ever met in all your life. Great sins make great sufferers. Side by side came the two dreadful powers of vice and retribution into the world, and side by side will they keep till they sink at last into the awful deeps of the bottomless pit. When you turn your back on a man who has committed a crime, one more door shuts in his darkened spirit."

The tears were falling from Paula's eyes now. He looked at them with strange wistfulness and involuntarily his hand rose to her head, smoothing her locks with fatherly touches. "Do not think," said he, "that I would lessen by a hair's breadth your hatred of evil. I can more easily bear to see the shadow upon your cup of joy than upon the banner of truth you carry. These eyes must lose none of their inner light in glancing compassionately on your fellow-men. Only remember that divinity itself has stooped to rescue, and let the thought make your contact with weary, wicked-hearted humanity a little less trying and a little more hopeful to you. And now, my dear, that is enough of serious talk for to-day. We are bound for a reception, you know, and it is time we were dressing. Do you want me to tell you a secret?" asked he in a light mysterious tone, as he saw her eyes still filling.

She glanced up with sudden interest.

"I know it is treason," resumed he, "I am fully aware of the grave nature of my offence; but Paula I hate all public receptions, and shall only be able to enjoy myself to-night just so much as I see that you are doing so. Life has its dark portals and its bright ones. This is one that you must enter with your most brilliant smiles."

"And they shall not be lacking," said she. "When a treasure-box of thought is given us, we do not open it and scatter its contents abroad, but lay it away where the heart keeps its secrets, to be opened in the hush of night when we are alone with our own souls and God."

He smiled and she moved towards the door. "None the less do we carry with us wherever we go, the remembrance of our hidden treasure," she smilingly added, looking back upon him from the stair.

And again as upon the first night of her entrance into the house, did he stand below and watch her as she softly went up, her lovely face flashing one moment against the dark background of the luxurious bronze, towering from the platform behind, then glowing with faint and fainter lustre, as the distance widened between them and she vanished in the regions above.

She did not see the toss of his arm with which he threw off the burden that rested upon his soul.

XVII

GRAVE AND GAY

"No scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope." – Sheridan."Stands Scotland where it did?" – Macbeth.

"Who is that talking with Miss Stuyvesant?" asked Mr. Sylvester, approaching his wife during one of the lulls that will fall at times upon vast assemblies.

Mrs. Sylvester followed the direction of his glance and immediately responded, "O that is Mr. Ensign, one of the best partis of the season. He evidently knows where to pay his court."

"I inquired because he has just requested me to honor him with a formal introduction to Paula."

"Indeed! then oblige him by all means; it would be a great match for her. To say nothing of his wealth, he is haut ton, and his red whiskers will not look badly beside Paula's dark hair."

Mr. Sylvester frowned, then sighed, but in a few minutes Paula observed him approaching with Mr. Ensign. At once her hitherto pale cheek flushed, but the young gentleman did not seem to object to that, and after the formal introduction which he had sought was over, he exclaimed in his own bright ringing tones,

"The fates have surely forgotten their usual rôle of unpropitiousness. I did not dare hope to meet you here to-night, Miss Fairchild. Was the ride all that your fancy painted?"

"O," said she, speaking very low and glancing around, "do not allude to it here. We had an adventure shortly after you parted from us."

"An adventure! and no cavalier at your side! If I could but have known! Was it so serious?" he inquired in a moment, seeing her look grave.

"Ask Miss Stuyvesant;" said she. "I cannot talk about it any more to-night. Besides the music carries off one's thoughts. It is like a joyous breeze that whirls away the thistle-down whether it will or no."

He gave her a short quick look grave enough in its way, but responded with his usual graceful humor, "The thistle-down is too vicious a sprite to be beguiled away so easily. If I were to give my opinion on the subject, I should say there was method in its madness. If you have been brought up in the country, as I suspect from your remark, you must know that the white floating ball is not as harmless as it would lead you to imagine. It is a meddlesome nobody, that's what it is, and like some country gossips I know, launches forth from a pure love of mischief to establish his prickers in his neighbor's field."

"His! I thought it must be feminine at least to fulfill the conditions you mention. A male gossip, O fie! I shall never have patience with a thistle-ball after this."

"Well," laughed he, "I did start with the intention of making it feminine, but I caught a glimpse of your eyes and lost my courage. I did what I could," added he with a mirthful glance.

"So do the thistles," cried she. Then while both voices joined in a merry laugh, she continued, "But where have we strayed? For a moment it seemed as if we were on the hills at Grotewell; I could almost see the blue sky."

"And I," said he, with his eyes on her face.

"I am sure the brooks bubbled."

"I distinctly heard a bird singing."

"It was a whippowill."

"But my name is Clarence?"

And here both being young and without a care in the world, they laughed again. And the crowded perfumed room seemed to freshen as with a whiff of mountain air.

"You love the country, Miss Fairchild?"

"Yes;" and her smile was the reflection of the summer-lands that arose before her at the word. "With the right side of my heart do I love the spot where nature speaks and man is dumb."

"And with the left?"

"I love the place where great men congregate to face their destiny and control it."

"The latter is the deeper love," said he.

She nodded her head and then said, "I need both to make me happy. Sometimes as I walk these city streets, I feel as if my very longing to escape to the heart of the hills, would carry me there. I remember when I was a child, I was one day running through a meadow, when suddenly a whole flock of birds flew up from the grass and surrounded my head. I was not sure but what I should be caught up and carried away by the force of their flight; and when they rose to mid heaven, something in my breast seemed to follow them. So it is often with me here, only that it is the rush of my thoughts that threatens such a Hegira. Yet if I were to be transported to my native hills, I know I should long to be back again."

"The mountain lassie has wandered into the courts of the king. The perfume of palaces is not easily forgotten."

Her eye turned towards Mr. Sylvester standing near them upright and firm, talking to a group of attentive gentlemen every one of whom boasted a name of more than local celebrity. "Without a royal heart to govern, there would be no palace;" said she, and blushed under a sudden sense of the possible interpretation he might give to her words, till the rose in her hand looked pallid.

But he had followed her glance and understood her better than she thought. "And Mr. Sylvester has such a heart, so a hundred good fellows have told me. You are fortunate to see the city from the loop-hole of such a home as his."

"It is more than a loop-hole," said she.

"Of that I shall never be satisfied till I see it?"

And being content with the look he received, he took her on his arm and led her into the midst of the dancers.

Meanwhile in a certain corner not far off, two gentlemen were talking.

"Sylvester shows off well to-night."

"He always does. With such a figure as that, a man needs but to enter a room to make himself felt. But then he's a good talker too. Ever heard him speak?"

"No."

"Fine voice, true snap, right ring. Great favorite at elections. The fact is, Sylvester is a remarkable man."

"Hum, ha, so I should judge."

"And so fortunate! He has never been known to run foul in a great operation. Put your money in his hand and whew! – your fortune is as good as made."

The other, a rich man, connected heavily with the mining business in Colorado, smiled with that bland overflow of the whole countenance which is sometimes seen in large men of great self-importance.

"It's a pity he's gone out of Wall Street," continued his companion. "The younger fry feel now something like a flock of sheep that has lost its bell-wether."

"They straggle – eh?" returned his portly friend with an increase of his smile that was not altogether pleasant. "So Sylvester has left Wall Street?"

"He closed his last enterprise two weeks before accepting the Presidency of the Madison Bank. Stuyvesant is down on speculation, and well – It looks better you know; the Madison Bank is an old institution, and Sylvester is ambitious. There'll be no reckless handling of funds there."

"No!" What was there in that no that made the other look up? "I'm not acquainted with Sylvester myself. Has he much family?"

"A wife – there she is, that handsome woman talking with Ditman, – and a daughter, niece or somebody who just now is setting all our young scapegraces by the ears. You can see her if you just crane your neck a little."

"Humph, ha, very pretty, very pretty. How much do you suppose Mrs. Sylvester is worth as she stands, diamonds you know, and all that?"

"Well I should say some where near ten thousand; that sprig in her hair cost a clean five."

"So, so. They live in a handsome house I suppose?"

"A regular palace, corner of Fifth Avenue and – "

"All his?"

"Nobody's else I reckon."

"Sports horses and carriage I suppose?"

"Of course."

"Yacht, opera box?"

"No reason why he shouldn't."

"What is his salary?"

"A nominal sum, five or ten thousand perhaps."

"Owns good share of the bank's stock I presume?"

"Enough to control it."

"Below par though?"

"A trifle, going up, however."

"And don't speculate?"

The way this man drawled his words was excessively disagreeable.

"Not that any one knows of. He's made his fortune and now asks only to enjoy it."

The man from the West strutted back and looked at his companion knowingly. "What do you think of my judgment, Stadler?"

"None better this side of the Pacific."

"Pretty good at spying out cracks, eh?"

"I wouldn't like to undertake the puttying up that would deceive you."

"Humph! Well then, mark this. In two months from to-day you will see Mr. Sylvester rent his house and go south for his health, or the pretty one over there will marry one of the scapegraces you mention, who will lend the man who don't engage in any further ventures, more than one or two hundred thousand dollars."

"Ha, you know something."

"I own mines in Colorado and I have my points."

"And Mr. Sylvester?"

"Will find them too sharp for him."

And having made his joke, he yielded to the other's apparent restlessness, and they sauntered off.

They did not observe a pale, demure, little lady that sat near them abstractedly nodding her dainty head to the remarks of a pale-whiskered youth at her side, nor notice the emotion with which she suddenly rose at their departure and dismissed her chattering companion on some impromptu errand. It was only one of the ordinary group of dancers, a pretty, plainly dressed girl, but her name was Stuyvesant.

Rising with a decision that gave a very attractive color to her cheeks, she hastily looked around. A trio of young gentlemen started towards her but she gave them no encouragement; her eye had detected Mr. Sylvester's tall figure a few feet off and it was to him she desired to speak. But at her first movement in his direction, her glance encountered another face, and like a stream that melts into a rushing torrent, her purpose seemed to vanish, leaving her quivering with a new emotion of so vivid a character she involuntarily looked about her for a refuge.

But in another instant her eyes had again sought the countenance that had so moved her, and finding it bent upon her own, faltered a little and unconsciously allowed the lilies she was carrying to drop from her hand. Before she realized her loss, the face before her had vanished, and with it something of her hesitation and alarm.

With a hasty action she drew near Mr. Sylvester. "Will you lend me your arm for a minute?" she asked, with her usual appealing look rendered doubly forcible by the experience of a moment before.

"Miss Stuyvesant! I am happy to see you."

Never had his face looked more cheerful she thought, never had his smile struck her more pleasantly.

"A little talk with a little girl will not hinder you too much, will it?" she queried, glancing at the group of gentlemen that had shrunk back at her approach.

"Do you call that hindrance which relieves one from listening to quotations of bank stock at an evening reception?"

She shook her head with a confused movement, and led him up before a stand of flowering exotics.

"I want to tell you something," she said eagerly but with a marked timidity also, the tall form beside her looked so imposing for all its encouraging bend. "I beg your pardon if I am doing wrong, but papa regards you with such esteem and – Mr. Sylvester do you know a man by the name of Stadler?"

Astonished at such a question from lips so young and dainty, he turned and surveyed her for a moment with quick surprise. Something in her aspect struck him. He answered at once and without circumlocution. "Yes, if you refer to that spry keen-faced man, just entering the supper-room."