Phases of an Inferior Planet

"I wish to ask how Mrs. Gore is to-day?" he said to the maid, giving his card.

She motioned him into the drawing-room and went up-stairs. In a few minutes she returned to say that Mrs. Gore would receive him, if he would walk up.

On the first landing she opened the door of a tiny sitting-room, closing it when he had entered. He took a step forward and paused. Before the burning grate, on a rug of white fur, Mariana was standing, and through the slender figure, in its blue wrapper, he seemed to see the flames of the fire beyond. She had just risen from a couch to one side, and the pillows still showed the impress of her form. An Oriental blanket lay on the floor, where it had fallen when she started at his entrance.

For a moment neither of them spoke. At the sight of her standing there, her thin hands clasped before her, her beauty broken and dimmed, his passion was softened into pity. In her hollow eyes and haggard cheeks he saw the ravage of pain; in the lines upon brow and temples he read the records of years.

Then a sudden tremor shook him. As she rose before him, shorn of her beauty, her scintillant charm extinguished, her ascendency over him was complete. Now that the brilliancy of her flesh had waned, it seemed to him that he saw shining in her faded eyes the clearer light of her spirit. Where another man would have beheld only a broken and defaced wreckage, he saw the woman who had inspired him with that persistence of passion which feeds upon the shadows as upon the lights, upon the lack as upon the fulfilment.

Mariana came forward and held out her hand.

"It was very kind of you to come," she said.

The rings slipped loosely over her thin fingers. Her touch was very light. He looked at her so fixedly that a pale flush rose to her face.

"You are better?" he asked, constrainedly. "Stronger?"

"Oh yes; I have been out twice – no, three times – in the sunshine."

She seated herself on the couch and motioned him to a chair, but he shook his head and stood looking down at her.

"You must be careful," he said, in the same forced tone. "The weather is uncertain."

"Yes. Dr. Salvers is sending me South."

"And when do you go?"

She turned her eyes away.

"He wishes me to go at once," she said, "but I do not know."

She rose suddenly, her lip quivering.

He drew back and she leaned upon the mantel, looking into the low mirror, which reflected her haggard eyes between two gilded urns.

"I was very ill," she went on. "It has left me so weak, and I – I am looking so badly."

"Mariana!"

She turned towards him, her face white, the lace on her breast fluttering as if from a rising wind.

"Mariana!" he said, again.

He was gazing at her with burning eyes. His hands were clinched at his sides, and the veins on his temples swelled like blue cords.

Then his look met hers and held it, and the desire in their eyes leaped out and closed together, drawing them slowly to each other.

Still they were silent, he standing straight and white in the centre of the room, she shrinking back against the mantel.

Suddenly he reached out.

"Mariana!"

"Anthony!"

She was sobbing upon his breast, his arms about her, her face hidden. The heavy sobs shook her frame like the lashing of a storm, and she braced herself against him to withstand the terrible weeping.

Presently she grew quiet, and he released her. Her face was suffused with a joy that shone through her tears.

"You love me?" she asked.

"I love you."

She smiled.

"I will stay near you," she said. "I will not go South."

For a moment he was silent, and when he spoke his voice rang with determination.

"You will go South," he said, "and I will go with you."

Her eyes shone.

"South? And you with me?"

He smiled into her upturned face.

"Do you think it could be otherwise?" he asked. "Do you think we could be near – and not together?"

"I – I had not thought," she answered.

He held her hands, looking passionately at her fragile fingers.

"You are mine," he said – "mine as you have been no other man's. Nature has joined us together. Who can put us asunder?" Then he held her from him in sudden fear. "But – but can you face poverty again?" he asked.

"What will matter," she replied, "so long as we are together?"

"You will leave all this," he went on. "We will start afresh. We will have a farm in the South. It will be bare and comfortless."

She smiled.

"There will be peach-trees," she said, "all pink in the spring-time, and there will be the sound of cow-bells across green pastures."

"I will turn farmer," he added. "I will wring a living from the soil."

She lifted her glowing eyes.

"And we will begin over again," she said – "begin from the beginning. Oh, my love, kiss me!"

He stooped and kissed her.

CHAPTER XIII

When Anthony descended Mariana's brown-stone steps the afterglow had faded from the west, and far down the street the electric lights shone coldly through frosted globes. He walked with a springing step, lifting his head as if impatient of restraint. His future was firm. There was no hesitancy, no possibility of retrenchment. In one breath he had pledged himself to break the bonds that held him, and this vow there was no undoing. He had sealed it with his passion for a woman. Already his mind was straining towards the freedom which he faced. The years of insincerity would fall away, and the lies which he had uttered would shrivel before one fearless blaze of truth. Fate had settled it. He was free, and deception was at an end. He was free!

In the effort to collect his thoughts before going to dinner he crossed to Broadway, walking several blocks amid the Saturday-evening crowd. He regarded the passing faces idly, as he had regarded them for twenty years. They were the same types, the invincible survivals from a wreck of individuals. He saw the dapper young fellow with the bloodless face, pale with the striving to ascend a rung in the social ladder; he saw the heavy features of the common laborer, the keen, quick glance of the mechanic, and the paint upon the haggard cheeks of the actress who was out of an engagement. They passed him rapidly, pallid, nervous, strung to the point of a breaking note, supine to placid pleasures, and alert to the eternal struggle of the race. When he had walked several blocks he turned and went back. The noise irritated him. He winced at the shrill voices and the insistent clanging of cable-car bells. He wanted to be alone – to think.

In the quiet of the side-street his thoughts assumed more definite shape. The mad thrill of impulse gave place to a rational joy. He possessed her, this was sufficient. She was his to be held forever, come what would. His in wealth and in poverty, in sickness and in health. His for better or for worse – eternally his.

He set his teeth sharply at the memory of her tear-wet face. He felt the trembling of her limbs, the burning pressure of her lips. Broken and worn and robbed of youth – was she not trebly to be desired? Was his the frail passion that exacts perfection? He had not loved beauty or youth; he had loved that impalpable something which resists all ravages of decay – which rises triumphant from death.

Yes, trebly to be desired! He remembered her as he had first seen her, lifting her head from her outstretched arms, her eyes scintillant with tears. He recalled the tremulous voice, the plaintive droop of the head. Then the night when he had held her in the shadow of the fire-escape, her loosened hair falling about him, her hands hot in his own. She had said: "I am yours – yours utterly," and the pledge had held. She was his, first and last. What if another man had embraced her body, from the beginning unto the end her heart was locked in his.

All the trivial details of their old life thronged back to him; struggle and poverty, birth and death, and the emptiness of the ensuing years yawned, chasm-like, before his feet. He was like a man suddenly recalled from the dead – a skeleton reclothed in flesh and reattuned to the changes of sensations. Yes, after eight years he was alive once more.

He entered the rectory, and in a few moments went in to dinner. To his surprise he found that he was hungry, and ate heartily. All instincts, even that for food, had quickened with the rebirth of emotion.

He drank his claret slowly, seeing Mariana seated across from him, and the vision showed her pale and still, as she had come to him the night of the storm, the snow powdering her hair. Then he banished the memory and invoked her image as he had seen her in the afternoon, wan and hollow-eyed, but faintly coloring and tremulous with passion. She would sit opposite him again, but not here.

He had a farm in the South, a valueless piece of land left him by a relative of his mother. It was there that they would go to begin life anew and to mend the faith that had been broken. He would till the land and drive the plough and take up the common round of life again – a life free from action as from failure, into which no changes might ring despair.

He left the table and went into his study, seating himself before the fire. The little dog, with that subtle perception of mental states possessed by animals, pressed his cold nose into the palm of his master's hand, whimpering softly, a wistful look in his warm, brown eyes. Then he lay down, and, resting his head upon his paws, stared into the fire – seeing in the flames his silent visions.

Anthony leaned back upon the cushions, and the face of Mariana looked at him from the vacant chair on the hearth-rug. The reddish shadows from the fire flitted across her features and across the slim, white hand that was half outstretched. He saw the slippered feet upon the rug and a filmy garment in her lap, as the work had fallen from her idle hands.

The maid came in with his coffee and he lighted his pipe. In a moment the bell rang and Ellerslie entered, his face flushed, his hands hanging nervously before him. He sat down in the chair, still warm from the vision of Mariana, and Father Algarcife looked at him with a sudden contraction of remorse. For the first time he winced before the glance of another – of a girlish-looking boy with a tremulous voice and an honest heart. He was looking into the fire when Ellerslie spoke.

"I want you to meet my mother," he said. "You know she is coming to town next week. She is very anxious to know you; I have written so often about you."

The other looked up.

"Next week – ah, yes," he responded. He was thinking that by that time he would have passed beyond the praise or blame of Ellerslie and his mother – he would be with Mariana.

The younger man went on, still flushing.

"She often sends you messages which I don't deliver. She has never forgotten that illness you nursed me through five years ago."

Father Algarcife shook his head slightly, his eyes on the flames that played among the coals.

"She must not exaggerate that," he answered.

Ellerslie opened his mouth, but closed it without speaking. His shyness had overcome him.

For a time they were silent, and then Father Algarcife looked up.

"John," he said.

"Yes?"

"If – if things should ever occur to – to shake your faith in me, you will always remember that I tried to do my best by the parish – that I tried to serve it as faithfully as Father Speares would have done?"

Ellerslie started.

"Of course," he answered – "of course. But why do you say this? Could anything shake my faith in you? I would take your word against – against the bishop's."

Father Algarcife smiled.

"And against myself?" he asked, but added, "I am grateful, John."

When Ellerslie had gone, a man from the Bowery came in to recount a story of suffering. He had just served a year in jail, and did not want to go back. He preferred to live straight. But it took money to do that. His wife, who made shirts, and belonged to Father Algarcife's mission, had sent him to the priest. As he told his story he squirmed uneasily on the edge of Mariana's chair, twirling his shapeless hat in the hands hanging between his knees. The dog crouched against his master's feet, growling suspiciously.

Father Algarcife rested his head against the cushioned back, and regarded the man absently. He believed the man's tale, and he sympathized with his philosophy. It was preferable to live straight, but it took money to do so. Indeed, the wisest of preachers had once remarked that "money answereth all things." He wondered how nearly the preacher spoke the truth, and if he would have recognized a demonstration of his text in the man before him with the shapeless hat.

Then he asked his caller a few questions, promised to look into his case on Monday, and dismissed him.

Next came Sister Agatha, to bring to his notice the name of a child on East Twentieth Street, whom they wished to receive into the orphanage. He promised to consider this also, and she rose to go, her grave lashes falling reverently before his glance. After she had gone he pushed his chair impatiently aside and went to his desk.

On the lid lay the completed sermon, and he realized suddenly that it must be delivered to-morrow – that he must play his part for a while longer. At the same instant he determined that on Monday he would deed over his property to the church. He would face his future with clean hands. He would start again as penniless as when he received the vestments of religion. Save for the farm in the South and a small sum of rental, he would have nothing. He would be free!

There was no hesitancy, and yet, mixed with the elation, there was pain. Beyond Mariana's eyes, beyond the desire for honest speech, he saw the girlish face of young Ellerslie, and the grave, reverential droop of Sister Agatha's lashes. He saw, following him through all his after-years, the reproach of the people who had believed in him and been betrayed. He saw it, and he accepted it in silence.

Raising his head, he encountered the eyes of the ancestor of Father Speares. For an instant he shivered from a sudden chill, and then met them fearlessly.

CHAPTER XIV

Through the long night Mariana lay with her hands clasped upon her breast and her eyes upon the ceiling. The electric light, sifting through the filmy curtains at the windows, cast spectral shadows over the pale-green surface. Sometimes the shadows, tracing the designs on the curtains, wreathed themselves into outlines of large poplar leaves and draped the chandeliers, and again they melted to indistinguishable dusk, leaving a vivid band of light around the cornice.

She did not stir, but she slept little.

In the morning, when Miss Ramsey came to her bedside, there was a flush in her face and she appeared stronger than she had done since her illness.

"Is it clear?" she asked, excitedly. "If it is clear, I must go out. I feel as if I were caged."

Miss Ramsey raised the shades, revealing the murky aspect of a variable day.

"It is not quite clear," she answered. "I don't think you had better venture out. There is a damp wind."

"Very well," responded Mariana. She rose and dressed herself hurriedly; then she sat down with Miss Ramsey to breakfast, but she had little appetite, and soon left the table, to wander about the house with a nervous step.

"I can't settle myself," she said, a little pettishly.

Going up-stairs to her room presently, she threw herself into a chair before the fire, and looked into the long mirror hanging on the opposite wall.

She was possessed with a pulsating memory of the evening before – of Anthony, and of the kiss he had left upon her lips. Then swift darts of fear shot through her that it might all be unreal – that, upon leaving her, he had yielded once more to the sway of his judgment. She did not want judgment, she wanted love.

As she looked at her image in the long mirror, meeting her haggard face and dilated eyes, she grew white with the foreboding of failure. What was there left in her that a man might love? What was she – the wreck of a woman's form – that she could immortalize a man's fugitive desire? Was it love, after all? Was it not pity, passing itself for passion? Her cheeks flamed and her pulses beat feverishly.

She turned from the glass and looked at her walking-gown lying upon the bed.

"I can't wait," she said, breathlessly. "I must see him. He must tell me with his own lips that it is true."

She dressed herself with quivering fingers, stumbling over the buttons of her coat. Then she put on her hat and tied a dark veil over her face.

As she came down-stairs she met Miss Ramsey in the hall.

"Mariana, you are not going out!" she exclaimed.

"Only a little way," said Mariana.

"But it has clouded. It may rain."

"Not before I return. Good-bye."

She opened the hall door. Pausing for an instant upon the threshold, a soft, damp air struck her, and overhead a ray of sunshine pierced the clouds.

She fastened the furs at her throat and descended to the street.

At first she had no definite end in view, but when she had walked a block the idea of seeing Anthony grew stronger, and she turned in the direction of his house. The contact of the moist air invigorated her, and she felt less weak than she had believed herself to be. When she reached the rectory she hesitated a moment with her hand upon the bell, trembling before the thought of seeing him – of hearing him speak. She rang, and the door was opened.

"Can I see Father Algarcife?" she asked.

Agnes eyed her curiously.

"Why, he's at church!" she responded. "He's been gone about a half-hour or so. Is it important?"

"No, no," answered Mariana, her voice recovering. "Don't say I called, please. I'll come again."

"Perhaps you'll step in and rest a bit. You look tired. You can sit in the study if you like."

"Oh no, I will go on. I will go to the church." She started, and then turned back. "I believe I will come in for a few minutes," she said.

She entered the house and passed through the open door into the study. A bright fire was burning, and the dog was lying before it. She seated herself in the easy-chair, resting her head against the cushions. Agnes stood on the rug and looked at her.

"You are the lady that came once in that terrible storm," she said.

"Yes, I am the one."

"Would you like a glass of water – or wine?"

Mariana looked up, in the hope of dismissing her.

"I should like some water, please," she said, and as Agnes went into the dining-room she looked about the luxurious study with passionate eyes.

It was so different from the one at The Gotham, that comfortless square of uncarpeted floor, with the pine book-shelves and the skull and cross-bones above the mantel.

The desk, with its hand-carving of old mahogany, recalled to her the one that he had used when she had first known him, with its green baize cover splotched with ink.

The swing of the rich curtains, the warmth of the Turkish rugs, the portraits in their massive frames, jarred her vibrant emotions. How could he pass from this to the farm in the South – to the old, old fight with poverty and the drama of self-denial? Would she not fail him again, as she had failed him once before? Would she not shatter his happiness in a second chance, as she had shattered it in the first?

The tears sprang to her eyes and scorched her lids. She rose hastily from her chair.

When the servant returned with the glass of water she drank a few swallows. "Thank you," she said, gently. "I will go now. Perhaps I will come again to-morrow."

She passed to the sidewalk and turned in the direction of the church, walking rapidly. She had not thought of his being at church. Indeed, until entering his study she had forgotten the office he held. She had remembered only that he loved her.

As she neared the building an impulse seized her to turn and go back – to wait for him at the rectory. The sound of the intoning of the gospel came to her like a lament. She felt suddenly afraid.

Then several persons brushed her in passing, and she entered the heavy doors, which closed behind her with a dull thud.

After the grayness of the day without, the warmth and color of the interior were as vivid as a revelation. They enveloped her like the perfumed air of a hot-house, heavy with the breath of rare exotics – exotics that had flowered amid the ardent glooms of mediævalism and the colorific visions of cloistered emotions. Entering a pew in the side-aisle, she leaned her head against a stone pillar and closed her eyes in sudden restfulness. That emotional, religious instinct which had always been a part of her artistic temperament was quickened in intensity. She felt a desire to worship – something – anything.

When she raised her lids the colors seemed to have settled into harmonious half-tones. The altar, which had at first showed blurred before her eyes, dawned through the rising clouds of incense. She saw the white of the altar-cloth, and the flaming candles, shivering from a slight draught, and above the crucifix the Christ in his purple robes, smiling his changeless smile.

Within the chancel, through the carving of the rood-screen, she saw the flutter of the white gowns of the choristers, and here and there the fair locks of a child.

Then the priest came to the middle of the altar, his figure softened by circles of incense, the sanctuary lamp burning above his head.

He sang the opening phrase of the Creed, and the choir joined in with a full, reverberating roll of male voices, while the heads of the people bowed.

Mariana did not leave her seat, but sat motionless, leaning against the pillar of stone.

From the first moment that she had seen him, wearing the honors of the creed he served, her heart had contracted with a throb of pain. This was his life, and what was hers? What had she that could recompense him for the sacrifice of the Eucharistic robes and the pride of the Cross?

He came slowly forward to the altar steps, his vestments defined against the carving of the screen, his face white beneath the darkness of his hair.

When the notices of the festivals and fasts were over, he lifted his head almost impatiently as he pronounced the text, his rich voice rolling sonorously through the church:

"For who knoweth what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow? For who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?"

And he spoke slowly, telling the people before him in new phrases the eternal truth – that it is good for a man to do right, and to leave happiness to take care of itself – the one great creed to which all religions and all nations have bowed. He spoke the rich phrases in his full, beautiful voice – spoke as he had spoken a hundred times to these same people – to all, save one.

She stirred slightly. It seemed to her that a wind blew from the altar where the candles fluttered, chilling her flesh. She shivered beneath the still smile of the painted Christ.

The stone pillar pressed into her temple, and she closed her eyes. Her head ached in dull, startled throbs.

As she listened, she knew that the final blow had fallen – that it is not given one to begin over again for a single day; that of all things under the sun, the past is the one thing irremediable.

The sermon was soon over. He returned to the altar, and the offertory anthem filled the church. Pressed against the pillar, she raised her hand to her ear, but the repetition was driven in dull strokes to her brain:

"Thy Keeper will never slumber. He, watching over Israel, slumbers not, nor sleeps."

CHAPTER XV

Several hours later Mariana was wandering along a cross-street near Ninth Avenue. Rain was falling, descending in level sheets from the gray sky to the stone pavement, where it lay in still pools. A fog had rolled up over the city. She had walked unthinkingly, spurred at first by the impulse to collect her thoughts and later by the thoughts themselves. It was all over; this was what she saw clearly – the finality of all things. What was she that she should think herself strong enough to contend with a man's creed? – faith? – God? She might arouse his passion and fire his blood, but when the passion and the fire burned out, what remained? In the eight years since she had left him a new growth had sprung up in his heart – a growth stronger than the growth of love.