One of My Sons

"And she was. In a minute or two, as we stood watching, she threw open the door, and in an instant I saw that whatever hope I may have cherished of her creating a good impression in her partially recovered state, was an ill-founded one. She was not in one of her depressed moods, but, what was worse, perhaps, in one of her ecstatic ones. All her genius, and she had much, had taken fire under some impulse of her erratic brain, and she came into the room prepared to conquer in the only way she knew how. Still young, still beautiful in her own way, which was that of no other woman, she glided into our presence in one rapturous whirl, a scarf floating from her neck, and a wreath of wild vine about her head. I rushed to prevent her, but it was too late. She would dance, and she did, while my father, who had never seen her in this glowing state, drew me aside and watched with hard eyes, while she swayed and dipped and palpitated in what would have been a glorious ebullition of pure delight, had she not been my wife, and the man at my side as cold to her charm as the dew which stood out on my wretched forehead. When I could bear no more, I flung my arms about her and she stopped, panting and frightened, like a bird caught in full flight. 'Sing,' I whispered to her; 'sing that air from Ænone'. I thought the tragic pathos of her tones might make her dancing forgotten. And they did in a way. My father had never listened to any such dramatic rendering of a simple song before, and I saw that he was subdued by the feelings it awakened. But I gathered no hope from this. He had too little liking for public exhibitions of this kind on the part of women, for him to be affected long by any singing which was not that of the boudoir; and when, her first ebullition passed, she began to droop under the heavy reaction which inevitably followed these impulsive performances, I drew her into the other room, and shut the door. Then I came back and faced him.

"He was standing in the window of the large but unlovely room, drumming restlessly on the panes before him. As the light struck his head it brought to view the silver rapidly making its way through the dark locks he had been accustomed to pride himself upon, and a pang struck me at this sight, which made me quite dumb for the instant. I felt as if I, and not she, had been dancing over his heart. Then my ever-present thought of the woman I had sworn to cherish returned and held me steady while he said:

"'It is well that I have seen your wife once when the full spell was upon her. Now I know what has come into the Gillespie family. Leighton, do you love this woman?'

"'Enough to bear your condemnation if you choose to condemn us,' I assured him.

"'Then take her away out of my sight and from the possible sight of my growing grandchild. A dancing menad can be no mother to Claire.'

"'I will take her away,' I promised him. 'When this place has done all for her it can, I will carry her where she can offend no one but strangers.'

"'I would suggest an asylum,' he muttered. It was the only unjust thing I ever knew him to propose.

"'She is not insane,' I objected.

"'She is not sane,' he rejoined. 'No opium-eater is. But I will not force your conscience; only – let me never again see her in our home in Fifth Avenue. You will always be welcome.'

"I could not retort that I would enter no house from which she was thus peremptorily excluded. The house in Fifth Avenue was my home, the home of my child; and about it clustered every dear association of my heart save those connected with my unhappy love.

"'A man who marries for a whim must expect unpleasant results,' my father resumed. 'You shall have what money you need for her establishment elsewhere; but this hemisphere is too narrow to harbour both her and myself. Go to Europe, Leighton; there is more room there for your wife to dance in.'

"And I meant to follow this suggestion, but her health was not good enough for me to risk a voyage at this juncture, and we drifted West and put up at a place called Mountain Springs. It was during our stay there, that, so far as the world is concerned, the story of my married life ended. But for me it had only begun. The facts regarding my wife and her connection with that great catastrophe which robbed more than one household of wife and mother differed much in reality from those reported to the world and accepted by my own family. She did not perish in that wreck, though I thought she had, and mourned her loss for many months. She had merely taken advantage of the circumstances to effect another escape. How, I will endeavour to relate, hard as it is to disclose the failings of one so dear to me.

"My wife, whose natural longings had been modified rather than extinguished by her experiences at the sanitarium, soon awakened to the old sense of restraint and a desire to enjoy again the irresponsibilities of her early Bohemian life. But having gained wisdom by her past experiences, she allowed no expression of her feelings to escape her; and, relying on the effect produced upon me by her apparent content, merely asked the privilege of enjoying the sports indulged in by the other boarders. Fearing to cross her too much, I gave her all possible liberty, but when she begged to go on a certain excursion – the excursion which ended so disastrously for all concerned – I felt forced to refuse her, for I had made an arrangement that day which would prevent me from accompanying her. However, after repeated solicitation, I yielded to her importunities and gave her my consent, at which she showed much joy, and lavished many expressions of fondness upon me. Had my suspicions not been lulled by the undisturbed peacefulness of the last few months, these open demonstrations of affection might have occasioned me some alarm, for they were not without a suggestion of remorse. But I mistrusted nothing; I was too happy, and when I parted from her it was with the full intention of sacrificing for her pleasure the first real business engagement I had ever entered upon. But I did not carry out this impulse; I merely made arrangements for the train to stop for me at the little station on the mountains where my affairs led me. But I did not confide this plan to her till I was upon the point of leaving. Then I told her she might look for me on the train immediately after passing Buckley, and while I wondered at the way she received my words, I thought the embarrassment she showed was due to surprise. Alas! it sprang from much deeper sources. She had planned to leave me again, this time forever; and, baffled as she thought in the attempt, she succumbed for a little while to despair. Then her fertile brain suggested an expedient. Two trains left Mountain Springs that morning, one north and one south. She would take the southern train, and lest she should be prematurely discovered in her flight and so be followed before she had found a refuge, she prevailed upon a girl over whom she had some influence, to exchange garments with her and take her place among the excursionists. She little dreamed what lay before those excursionists. As little did I realise that it was in behalf of a stranger I entered upon that mad chase after the runaway cars I had seen slip from the engine and go crashing down towards the train on which I believed my wife to be. I knew those cars to be loaded with dynamite, for it was in connection with this fact I had come to this place, and the thought that they were destined to prove the destruction of the life I so much prized maddened me to such an extent that it was a mere matter of instinct for me to leap upon the engine I saw bounding to her rescue. Had time been given me to think, I might not have shown such temerity, for I knew nothing of a fireman's duties or what would be expected of me by the engineer. But I did not pause to think; I only stood ready to hazard my life for the woman I loved, – the woman whom I believed to be on the train I even then could see advancing up the valley. Of that ride, its swirl and whirlwind rush, I remember little; every thought, every fear, was engrossed in the one question, How were we to save that train? But two methods suggested themselves to me in my ignorance and isolation from the brave engineer. Either we must overtake the cars and by coupling to them stay their downward rush to the main track below – a trick I did not understand – or we must crush so fiercely into them as to explode the dynamite with which they were loaded before they had a chance to collide with the advancing train. That the latter catastrophe did not happen was not owing to any precaution on my part, for I do not remember that I had the least dread of personal destruction. As I have just said, my one thought, my only thought in that dizzy descent, was to save her. And I failed to do it; or so I had reason to think. As you remember, all our efforts were in vain; the unspeakable occurred, and wreck, death, and disaster met my eyes when, after a period of blank darkness, I rose from the ground where I had been hurled by the force of that dynamite explosion. Amid this wreck, in face of this death, I plunged in my search for her, and, as I believed, found her. A loving husband cannot be deceived in his wife's clothes, and the fragments I handled told their tale, as I thought, only too well. But, as you now know, it was not my wife who wore these clothes, though we buried her as such, and I mourned my lost love as no one who has not fixed his whole heart upon one object can possibly understand.

"My father, whose relief at this release can be readily imagined, endeavoured to calm my grief, not by sympathy, for that he could not feel, but by an unvarying kindness which assured me that, now that this obstacle to a right understanding between us had been removed, I might hope for the establishment of more cordial relations between us. I was older now, and he more considerate of my many uncongenial ways and habits; besides, Claire made a tender bond between us, and with one of her baby smiles healed many a breach that might otherwise have separated us.

"I began to be content, when, having some business in a strange quarter of the city, I chanced to walk down East Fourteenth Street. It was a holiday of some kind and there had been a procession. The stir in the streets was just what usually follows the breaking up of long lines of people. But this did not disturb me. Claire had been unusually engaging that morning, and I was just rejoicing in the memory of her innocent prattle, when the band in the far distance broke out into a merry strain, and I saw on the sidewalk before me a cluster of people separate into a sort of ring, in the middle of which a woman stood poised with swaying arms, so like the image that was day by day receding farther and farther into the deep recesses of my memory, that a species of faintness came over me and I drew back, sick and half-blinded, directly in the path of the people pressing in my rear. This caused me to receive a push from behind which effectually roused me and gave me strength to look again at one who could recall my lost Mille-fleurs. I expected – how could I expect anything else? – to be met by a strange face and an unknown smile. But it was her face, her smile; and the figure, clad in such clothes as I had never, even in my worst dreams, associated with the woman to whom I had given my name, was hers. Had God made two such women? Two with such eyes, such hair, such instincts, and such genius? Was this a sister of Mille-fleurs; a twin of my lost darling, of whose existence I had never heard? God grant not! I had buried Mille-fleurs, and with her, memories which this creature would only bring back to the destruction of my peace. I dared not give way for one instant to the thought that this likeness was anything but a passing illusion which the next moment would dispel. I dared not for my life. And yet I stood staring; hearing and not hearing the shouts of wild applause rising around me, and was looking, yes, looking directly into her eyes, when they suddenly turned my way in startled recognition. It was Mille-fleurs! Mille-fleurs! The woman I had buried was a stranger, and she who was making pastime for the passing crowd was my wife!

"I made no scene. I accepted the fact as we accept any unforeseen catastrophe that comes upon us unawares, tearing up our peaceful present and making a chaos of the future. As she was still dancing, though fitfully and with curious breaks, I stopped her by my steady look and held her so, till the crowd had melted away sufficiently for me to take her by the hand and lead her under the cover of the first small shop we came to. Then I questioned her closely, and, when I understood all, asked her if she would go with me and be clothed and fed. She answered with a startled look. 'I cannot!' she cried, and wearily drooped her head. 'I am not worthy.'

"God knows what passed through my mind then. I stood there in the wretchedness of this low shop, beside a counter from which the smell of stale tobacco rose in nauseous fumes, together with the sickening smell of partially decayed fruits – a flower in my button-hole (put there by little Claire), and before me this woman, loved as few of earth's best and worthiest have been, telling me with trembling lips what explained her rags, the degradation which had fallen on her beauty, and the whole pitiable downfall of a womanhood which once struck my heart as ideal and worthy of a man's unselfish worship.

"Drawing the flower from my button-hole, I crushed it in my hand. If I could have donned the clothes of some of the men lolling about us in greedy curiosity, I would have done so at that moment, if only the contrast between our outer selves might have been less apparent. But this was impossible, and I could only stand in silence in face of this wreck of bygone delights, and in one moment and under the gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes peering from behind the counter and gaping in at the doorway, live down my bitter humiliation at this untoward resurrection of a love I had learned to rejoice in as buried. For this was no wretched waif of the streets I could pity and leave. This was my wife, the mother of my child; the woman whom I had once vowed to hold in honour to the end, and to succour, no matter what her need or to what degradation she might come. Besides, there was an appeal in her drooping attitude and quivering mouth which touched my heart in spite of my judgment. I felt her misery as I had never felt my own; a misery all the more pronounced because of the joy so openly preceding it; and, feeling a fresh thrill in the old cord of union that had made our hearts one, I quietly asked her if she had lost all love for me. She gave me one quick look; and I saw her eye quicken as she softly faltered, 'No. Only,' she made haste to add, 'I cannot live in big houses under the eyes of people who think my ways odd and wrong. If you take me back to him I cannot help going wrong again. But I would like something pretty to wear and something good to eat.'

"I took her to an East Side hotel. I bought her clothes and gave her food, over which she laughed like a child. Then I told her what I meant to do for her. I would buy her a home in a pretty country place, where she need not fear intruding eyes. There she should live with some woman I could trust and who would be kind to her. A piano, music, flowers, books – she should have all, and if, in the course of time, she came to wish it, I would bring our child to see her. Did she think she could be contented in a home like this? Wouldn't it be better than the cold and squalor of the streets and these wild dances before unsympathetic eyes?

"She answered with a burst of affection which was real enough at the time; then asked if I was going to let my father know she was living. This brought to light the spectre which had stood over against us ever since I first recognised her as the woman I had sworn to love and cherish. Could I tell my father? Could I bring down again upon myself the old coldness, the old distrust, the old sense of a division that was gall to me because of the reverence and love I naturally felt for him?

"I could not; I recognised the cowardice of it, but I could not. I was ready to give her succour; I was ready to devote time, money, and care to her establishment and well-being; I could deny myself the pleasures and pursuits natural to men of my age, and even the uninterrupted enjoyment of the home I had come to prize, but I could not tell my father that the wild-eyed creature he was forcing himself to forget, still lived, and might any day bring down fresh humiliation upon him.

"She saw my doubt and smiled as in the early days of her untrammelled youth.

"'Better so,' she cried; 'then if I fail to be good it will not so much matter. And I may fail; it is in my blood, Leighton; in my unfortunate Bohemian blood. Oh, why did you ever care for me?'

"Such gusts of feeling and regret over the havoc she had caused were common to her. They made it impossible for me to hope in her ultimate restoration to respectability and a quiet life. But, alas! they were but gusts, and after a few months of peaceful harbourage in the rose-covered cottage I found for her, she fled from me again and was lost for years. But I never ceased searching for her. The unrest of knowing she was restless under the roof I had provided for her was nothing to the restlessness of not knowing where she was and in what misery and under what deprivation she was pining away in the dark holes where alone she could find refuge. I have sat hours under my father's eye, talking of stocks and bonds and railway shares, while my every thought and feeling were with her whom in my fancy I saw wandering from river to river, in dark nights and in cold; – rain on the pavements or slush in the streets, – drawing up to lighted doors for warmth or hiding her brown head with its flying curls under sheds a dog might be glad to fly from.

"It has happened to me often to be in the presence of women, at church or concert or festival, and with their eyes on my face and the perfume of their presence floating about me, to behold in my mind's perspective a solitary figure poised on the edge of some dock, in whose lifted arms and upstrained countenance I read despair, the despair that leads to death; and, forgetting where I was and to whom my words were due, have rushed out to do – what? Wander those down-town streets and the bleak places I had seen in my fancy, in the hope of coming once again upon the being who, unaccountably to myself, still held the cord whose other end was bound indissolubly to my heart. What wonder that I was looked upon as eccentric, moody, strange, or that my father, who naturally explained these freaks according to his own lights, showed displeasure at my unaccountable whims? Yet I went on with my search, and finally the day arrived when my perseverance was rewarded and I came upon her once again.

"She was in a low dance-hall, but she was not dancing. She was simply gazing at another woman attempting those dizzy whirls which, under the sway of her own genius, had once attracted the applause of a different crowd from this. There was infinite longing in her eyes, mixed with the sadness which will sometimes creep over those who are homeless through their own choice. When she saw me, and this was perhaps sooner than was best for either herself or me, I saw the old look of terror rise in her eyes, but mingled with it was a certain recognition of my faithfulness and self-forgetful care for her which melted the ice about my heart and reawakened the old hope for her. But she did not follow me when I beckoned her out; nor could I induce her to do so without risking a scene which would necessarily attract all eyes to us. But she promised, if I gave her money, to return the next day to the little house in New Jersey.

"And she did; but her stay was short, and it became a common thing for her to drift back there for a day or so, and then to flee away again, to return when the fancy seized her or the devils of discomfort drove her to seek a respite from the horrors which had now become for her synonymous with freedom.

"She always found something to reward her for these visits; some surprise in the shape of a new article or some fresh source of amusement. Money to me was only valuable as it gave me power to rivet another link to the chain with which I endeavoured to hold her to a better life; and though I knew the false construction which might be put upon these expenditures, not only by my father but others, I spared no means, stopped at no extravagance which might add one more allurement to the nest I had made for my weary and bedraggled one.

"The woman who had orders to keep this house in a continual state of readiness for its fitful visitant was as discreet as she was sympathetic. She may have surmised my secret, or she may have supposed all these efforts the result of an ill-conceived philanthropy.

"I could never tell by her manner. But I knew she treated my poor one well. Time after time has she opened the door to a disordered and dishevelled creature, whom next morning I found sitting in a bower of roses, fitted out in dainty cashmeres, and with her long locks combed till they shone and shone again. Nay, I have come upon her on her knees before the bruised and frozen feet upon which she was thrusting slippers of downy softness, which made my darling laugh until their very softness became a burden, and she threw them off to dance. I have never lingered over these sights, but I have imagined them over and over with tear-filled eyes, for, explain it as you will, every backward slip made by my darling toward the precipice I ever saw yawning for her strengthened the hold she had upon my heart, till the pity with which I regarded her filled my whole bosom to bursting.

"But the wild hawk cannot be tamed. She would vanish from our care just when we thought it was becoming dear to her, and my wild pursuit would begin again, to be followed by chance findings and renewed disappointments. She was not to be held, though in the hope of doing so I have spent many stolen hours in the little house, reading to her, talking to her, playing with her, sacrificing my good name and the regard of my relatives just to win back one innocent look to her face and keep her amused and contented without the help of the accursed drug. She slipped away from us in spite of all our efforts, and during this last year returned only once.

"Yet I think she has felt more drawn to me this year than in all the time of our marriage. But she felt her unworthiness more. She had listened to the hymns sung by the Salvation Army on some of the down-town corners, and, being susceptible to impressions of this nature, had followed the singers into their halls and heard some of the good words that are uttered there. Sometimes, I am told, she laughed at what she heard, but oftener was seen to cry, and once she herself sang till, as they said, the very heavens seemed to open. When I heard this, I could not keep away from these meetings, though I never came upon her at any one of them either on the East or West side. She seemed to anticipate my approach there as elsewhere, for often have I been assured that she had just that minute gone out, and must be somewhere near, though I never succeeded in finding her.

"This looked to me then like hate, but now I think it was simply shame; for when she knew that death was upon her she sent for me; and, seeing the old look of forbearance on my face, she threw up her wasted arms, and, panting like a child who has reached its mother's arms at last, turned her tired, tired face towards my breast with a feeble 'Forgive!' and died.

"You cannot know the heart of a man who has followed his lost lamb for years through tangled thickets and by headlong precipices, and it may seem strange for me to pour into ears so hardened and necessarily so unsympathetic the sacred secrets of my soul. But my position is a strange one and my story one that must be told in its entirety for you to understand why that smile upon her face is so much to me that my sole prayer at this time is to be allowed to remain in sight of it for one hour. She has loved me always; not as I loved her, not to the point of saving me one heartache or sparing me one erratic impulse of her ungoverned nature, but still better than I feared; better than her conduct would show. For when I came to lay her head down again upon its pillow, I found tied about her neck and fast clutched in her chilling palm, this.

"Our wedding ring," he murmured. "She might have pawned it for a dollar during any of the many crises of her miserable life."