The House of Armour

“No, it is I,” said Vivienne, advancing after an instant of hesitation.

“Oh!” and he listlessly dropped his head on the grass.

“May I come and talk to you?” she asked. “I have longed to see you.”

“Yes, oh yes,” and he raised himself to a sitting posture. “I would get up and find you a seat if I could.”

“I can sit on this rug, thank you,” said Vivienne a little unsteadily.

She placed herself a short distance from him and looked at the sombre trees, the blue sky, the bluer Arm, where a tiny boat was crossing to the other side—anywhere but at the handsome, weary face, with its disfiguring spectacles.

“Have you on a white dress?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And you have your favorite perfume about you,” he said with a half-smile; “or are they real roses?”

“Real ones,” and she put between his fingers a cluster of long, white, rose-shaded Rubens buds.

“You are crying,” he said abruptly.

“Only a little,” she murmured, trying to compose herself. This she could not do; for once she lost all self-control and burying her face in her hands she wept bitterly.

The young man’s face softened as he listened to her. “Stanton has told me that you were breaking your heart about me. It is pitiful, isn’t it? Twenty-five and at the end of everything. But don’t worry; I’ve given that up. At first I raved and beat my head till it was sore against the bars of my bed, but it didn’t do any good. I’ve got to submit,” and with a painful smile he again stretched himself out on the grass.

“This is unpardonable in me,” said Vivienne, resolutely wiping her eyes. “I am ashamed of myself. I shall not offend again. You can see a little, Valentine, can you not?”

“Not a glimmer.”

Vivienne’s lip trembled, but she pressed it with her teeth and went on: “When are you coming up to the house? It is forlorn without you.”

“Never,” he said gloomily. “What do you want of me there?”

“If I can hear your exquisite voice singing words of encouragement I think that I can bear any burden,” said the girl wistfully.

“Oh, you wish me to keep you in good humor.”

“It would be an important mission. I have learned the accompaniments of all your songs.”

“Have you?” and his face grew bright. “I will come up—perhaps this evening. Were you planning to go to church?”

“Yes; but I would rather stay at home with you.”

“Even if Stanton goes?”

“Yes.”

He laughed shortly, and with none of the fierce jealousy of former days said: “We shall be good friends, you and I, when I settle down to this darkness.”

“May I read to you sometime?” asked Vivienne.

“How clever you are,” he said. “You have found out that I hate to have any one do anything for me and you want to wheedle me into getting accustomed to it. No, my dear belle-sœur, you shall not read your Bible and psalm books to me.”

Vivienne smiled hopefully. “Sometime you will allow me to do so, and while we wait for that time there are other books. Now I must return to the house. Au revoir, my brother; God will make you happier.”

“There is no God!” he exclaimed.

She looked down at his mocking face and then up at the serene vault of the sky above them. “No God! Valentine; no Creator of the world! I had hoped that by this time you would think differently.”

“Prove to me that there is one,” he said excitedly, “and I will believe you.”

She stooped and laid a finger on his sightless eyes.

He understood her. “Do you think that your imaginary God has afflicted me willfully?”

“Not willfully, but lovingly.”

“This is infuriating,” he exclaimed, his face flushing violently. “A loving God who casts a created thing into a dark pit!”

“Oh no, no,” said Vivienne sadly; “the creature does that. We cast ourselves into dark pits because we will not see the light of the world shining above us.”

“But we are created with evil propensities that take us pitward, according to you.”

“Evil propensities that we must not follow, for God will also give us strength to overcome them if we ask him.”

“This is Stargarde’s doctrine,” he said sullenly. “I want none of it. You Christians are most illogical people. Primitive traditions, handed down through eighteen centuries and starting among ignorant, unlettered peasants and fishermen, are your rule of life. You can’t prove a single one of your statements to be true.”

“What is proof?” asked Vivienne.

“Proof? Why it is enough evidence about a thing to convince one and produce belief.”

“And you think that Christians do not have that?”

“Decidedly not.”

“I think that you are mistaken. Have you read the Bible through?”

“No.”

“I believe that is often the case with people who criticise it,” she said thoughtfully. “But you are acquainted with portions of it. Can you read without tears the Sermon on the Mount and the account of the crucifixion?”

He made no reply to her, and she continued, “If you take our Bible away, what will you give us to keep our feet from stumbling in the darkness of this world?”

“Let us rely on ourselves,” he said proudly. “Man needs no surer guide than his own internal conviction of right and wrong. That is better than trusting to a fable.”

“I do not think that we get on well when we take charge of ourselves,” she said gently.

“I don’t set myself up for a pattern,” he said hastily; “I’ve been bad—you don’t know how bad I’ve been.”

“Poor Valentine,” she murmured.

“You need not pity me. I was perfectly happy. You goody-goody people talk a lot about sinners’ consciences troubling them. They don’t. One isn’t afraid of anything but being found out.”

“If a conscience sleeps, how can it guide?”

“Well, I intended to let mine wake up some day, then I would sober myself and lead a steady life. Don’t go yet. Tell me more about your beliefs.”

She cast a pitying glance at his restless, unhappy face, and again sat down beside him. “I cannot argue learnedly with you, Valentine. I can only say that I believe in God and in his Son our Saviour, who will forgive our sins if we ask him, and that I believe in the Bible as his revealed word, and that I know I shall go to him when I die. It is a very comfortable belief.”

“Comfortable! yes, for you; not so comfortable for the poor fellows whom you damn.”

“‘God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved,’” repeated Vivienne.

“An attractive myth,” he said lightly; “and you Christians won’t expose it.”

“Why should one doubt a thing that one is sure of?” asked the girl with a puzzled face. “Here is proof enough for me: our glorious faith has been the light of the world; apostles, prophets, and martyrs have died triumphantly for it; Christians are the salt of the earth, and if you had your way and cast every Bible into the sea, our land would become a dreary wilderness of shame and confusion.”

“Fanaticism!” said Valentine; “the Mohammedans talk as wildly as you do.”

“Do not compare Mohammedanism with our holy religion. Christ came with peace on his lips, Mohammed with a sword in his hand. And what has Mohammedanism done for the countries where it is even now decaying?”

“It solidified them,” said Valentine lightly. “So I have read. And all Mohammedans don’t live up to the precepts of the Koran, you know.”

“Mohammedanism is rent by frightful quarrels, and if you have read about it you know the immorality of many of its religious teachers–”

“So are Christians immoral.”

“That is because they do not live up to the teachings of our divine model. But I do not know that it is of very much use to argue with you, Valentine. You misunderstand so sadly. I have heard you reasoning with others—notably, one evening when you spoke of the crucifixion. You said that Jesus Christ could not have died in six hours on the cross, that he was only unconscious when they bore him away to the tomb. I wished to say, his broken heart—broken by the sins of the world; you forget that—but I was too much agitated. I think that we can only pray for you–”

“I do not wish your prayers,” he said quickly; “and I am not unhappy as you think I am—that is, about religious matters. You mistake me.”

“If you think that my religion is a delusion my prayers will not affect you,” said Vivienne; “but have you not a lingering belief in the creed of your forefathers?”

“No,” he said stoutly, “I have not.”

“Stanton has,” she murmured happily; “I could not marry him if he had not.”

“You are young,” pursued Valentine; “do you ever feel a horror of death? What do you think would become of you if a thunderbolt should fall from the sky and strike you dead ten minutes from now?”

“What do you fancy would become of me?” she asked softly.

“I do not know.”

“But I know,” said the girl, looking with joyful eyes on the splendor of the setting sun. “I know whom I have believed, and I do not fear death, because I know that when my soul leaves this body there is prepared for it a dwelling more glorious than anything I can imagine. That is the end of my belief, ‘I know,’ and the end of yours is, ‘I do not know.’”

He turned his blind face toward hers and pictured to himself its transfigured expression.

“Will you not come to the house now?” she said quietly. “Stanton will be delighted to find you there for tea.”

“I suppose you think that I am too wicked to be left alone,” he said as he stumbled to his feet and put his hand in hers.

“No, I do not,” she said.

“You and Stargarde are as much alike as a pair of twin doves,” he grumbled as he moved slowly along beside her.

Stanton, returning home half an hour later, stopped short in the hall, struck by the long unheard sound of music in the drawing room.

“Cast thy burden upon the Lord and he shall sustain thee,” came welling on a soft sweet volume of song through the house.

He drew back the portière. Valentine stood leaning on the piano, his face calm and peaceful, his unseeing eyes in their glasses turned toward Vivienne, who sat with downcast eyelids playing for him.

At the close of the song Armour entered the room. “Is it you, old man?” asked the singer. “Your pretty bird lured me here. Don’t be jealous of me,” he continued childishly, and feeling his way toward the place where Armour stood with features painfully composed. “I’m tired of women—except as sisters,” he added with an apologetic gesture in Vivienne’s direction.

“Let there be no talk of jealousy,” said Armour, laying his hand affectionately on Valentine’s shoulder. “You and Vivienne will henceforth be brother and sister.”

CHAPTER XXXVII

ADIEU TO FRISPI

Zilla Camperdown was strutting up and down Hollis Street after the fashion of a small peacock airing itself. Back and forth she went, now in front of the shops, now passing hotels where gentlemen smoking and lounging stared curiously at the well-plumaged little creature in her white and black garments.

She was doing wrong to be parading the streets alone, that she very well knew, but she was enjoying herself so hugely that she made no haste to go home, and continued to complacently spread the tail of her little white dress while sunning herself in the glances of admiration bestowed upon her dark, piquante face.

Her only fear was that her adopted brother might suddenly come upon her. If he did she knew that she would receive a sharp scolding and would probably be sent to bed, but willing to snatch the present moment she did not allow this to interfere with her enjoyment. A strict rule with regard to her was that she must never set foot in the street alone. Her idle, dissolute father still haunted the streets of Halifax, and although he was too wise to attempt any interference with her, knowing that he might stop the supplies of food and clothing that he received from Camperdown, he often lurked about waiting for a chance to hold some conversation with her. Hence the order that she should always be accompanied during her walks abroad.

The child’s punishment came swiftly upon her. Sauntering up the hill from Water Street with his monkey on his shoulder and a troop of children at his heels, Gilberto Frispi suddenly appeared and came face to face with his daughter.

“Ah, little bird,” he ejaculated in Italian patois, while the monkey screamed and chattered in delight and clutched its tiny hands toward Zilla’s lace hat; “is it thou at last? I have longed to see thee, but thou art not allowed to fly far from thy nest.”

Scarcely knowing what she did the girl turned and walked back toward the hotels. Her mortification was intense, and if a glance could have killed the smiling Frispi he would have fallen dead by the side of the daughter whom he presumed to address. She was exasperated too, almost beyond endurance, at the children who were hooting and shrieking with delight at the acrobatic feats of the monkey on Frispi’s shoulder.

“Send them away,” she exclaimed, stopping short.

“Scatta, my children,” said Frispi in English, “go roun’ de corna. I come lata.”

“With your organ?” inquired his expectant youthful followers, to whom an Italian with a monkey and minus an organ partook of the nature of a phenomenon.

“Yes, yes. I got organ,” said the man mendaciously. “Five, six organ. I bring. Go ’long.”

They looked at him as trustingly as if they expected to find musical instruments issuing from his pockets, then went to peep around the corner and listen surreptitiously to the conversation between him and his elegant companion.

“What do you wish?” asked Zilla sharply.

“Oh ze beauty clothes!” exclaimed Frispi spreading his hands over her in delight. Then relapsing into Italian he told her in eager tones of his longing to have her with him. “Could she not leave her fine friends and run away with him?”

“Hold thy tongue,” said Zilla scornfully interrupting him. “I wish no more of thee. Thou must leave this town.”

“No, no, my loved one, not till thou canst go.”

“Thou shalt go alone—at once, never to return,” she said, hissing the words through her pointed white teeth that looked as if they might bite him. “I hate thee and thy poverty; and art thou not a thief?”

“Si, si,” he said blandly; “and thou also?”

“Thou art worse,” she said furiously, but in a low tone, for she was desperately aware that she was being surveyed curiously not only by the children, but also by some of the gentlemen in the hotel windows.

“I am thy father,” said the man with a flash of anger, for he rarely relapsed into a passion unless he had been drinking.

“Who stabbed Constante?” breathed the girl. “Ah, thou startest! I did not always sleep when thou entertainedst thy friends. And if thou dost not leave here, I write at once to the Mafia and thou wilt be declared infamous. A cross will be drawn on thy door,” and she made gestures with her hands signifying the choking of a person.

The man’s olive skin turned to a greenish pallor and he kept his small black eyes fixed pleadingly on her face. “Surely thou wouldst not do that, my daughter. The Mafia is implacable and the companions would consider me a traitor and put me to sleep for what was a mistake. It was not in my heart to kill Constante.”

“Thou hast soft shoes; thou canst walk backward,” said Zilla inexorably. “By sundown if thou art here I write to Guglielmo Barzoni, and thou art doomed.”

“Enough,” replied the man with a gesture of resignation. “Thou art thy mother’s child. Thou canst do all and more than thou promisest. Thou wilt never see me more,” and with no other sign of emotion beyond his unusual pallor, he noiselessly left her and in polite broken English postponed his engagement with the children until the next day, at which time they would return and wait anxiously for the man whose shadow would fall no more on the streets of Halifax.

Zilla began to tremble as soon as he left her. The interview with him had been a terrible strain on her, yet she courageously tried to make her way home. At the street corner she paused and leaned against a house. One of the gentlemen at the window seeing this, left his station there and came slowly sauntering up to her.

“Good-morning,” he said kindly. “Do you remember me?”

“Yes; you are Mr. Patrick Macartney’s brother,” she said, “and I am Dr. Camperdown’s little girl, and that bad beggar-man frightened me.”

“Will you come into the hotel and rest?” he asked, noting in some anxiety that her two small feet were braced against the pavement to keep her from falling.

She drew herself up suspiciously: “No, thank you.”

“There is a ladies’ entrance,” he said, pulling severely at his moustache.

“I am going to see my brother,” she said loftily, and leaving him without a word she, by a severe effort, managed to walk as far as the door having on it the brass plate, “Dr. Camperdown, Surgeon.” Arrived there, she tottered inside and seated herself on the lowest step of the staircase, while Captain Macartney, passing by the open doorway, knew that she would be safe now, and went on his way muttering thoughtfully, “Poor child!”

After she had rested sufficiently Zilla, with lips firmly compressed, climbed the steps to the waiting room and seated herself among her adopted brother’s patients.

The next time Camperdown opened the door he saw her and called her into the inner room. “Now, birdling, what is it? Be quick, for I am rushed this morning. What’s the matter with your cheeks? Have you seen a ghost?”

“I have done a bad thing,” said the little girl deliberately.

“Indeed! An unusual confession for you. I thought that you and the pope had the infallibility of the world between you. Out with it.”

“I have told my father to leave Halifax.”

“H’m—well, yes, that was bad—for you. What was the occasion of it?” and by means of questions he drew from her an account of her meeting with Frispi after she had run away from Mrs. Trotley, who had gone shopping with her.

“What do you know about the Mafia, Zilla?”

With a reluctance that she would not have displayed three months earlier in her career, Zilla gave a child’s account of low brigandage according to her observation of her father and his associates.

“Stop,” said Camperdown at last, when she was describing the disarticulation of the fingers of the “picciotti” so that they might be more expert at stealing, “never mention this again, Zilla. Don’t let a living soul know that you were familiar with such iniquities. The Lord in his mercy has delivered you from them. Now, what do you want me to do about your father?”

The child hung her head. “Tell him to stay, for I do not wish Stargarde to know that I would do so bad a thing. Tears will come in her eyes and she will say: ‘Your father is all that you have; do not send him away as a dog’.”

Camperdown’s thoughts ran back to the day when he had acquainted Zilla with her relationship to Stargarde. The child’s passion of astonishment and joy when she found that she was connected with a woman whom she not only loved and admired, but who was the acme of respectability to her, had not seemed to decrease as time went by. She still loved him more intensely perhaps, but Stargarde was her pride and delight, her own blood relation, and the person in the world for whom she had the most reverence.

“Run home and tell her all about it,” said Camperdown softly. “In the meantime I will look up Frispi,” and patting Zilla’s relieved face, he sent her away.

“Ha, sir, were you addressing me?” said his next patient fiercely, as he hobbled into the room.

Camperdown stared blankly at a choleric old gentleman. “No—was talking aloud as I have a habit of doing. What was I saying?”

“‘Low, stealthy brute,’ sir, you said, ‘and a constant worry to me.’”

Camperdown threw back his head and laughed heartily. “I crave your pardon. I was thinking of a pensioner of my wife’s—a miserable foreigner that I hope has been frightened from the town.”

Long after his usual lunch time Camperdown arrived home to find Stargarde and Zilla waiting for him—the latter hanging about her half—sister with red eyes and glances of suppressed adoration.

“Have been all over the town,” said Camperdown; “there’s no trace of Frispi to be had. He went to his lodging, gathered up his few belongings, and left. The police are on his track–”

“He will not be found,” said Zilla quietly and despairingly. “He knows how to run away.”

“I propose,” said Camperdown, seating himself at the table, “to have something to eat now. Subsequently, to take my wife and Zilla and Mrs. Trotley for a drive to Cow Bay. Don’t carry your bathing suit, Zilla; it’s too late in the day for a plunge in the breakers. We’ll have a run over the sands. Then I propose two weeks hence to take my wife and Zilla vagabondizing—that is, in the earliest sense of the word. We’ll stroll about this continent and see if we can’t pick up some trace of the runaway–”

He was interrupted by Zilla, who precipitated herself into his arms.

“A little girl with a sleeping conscience is rather a ticklish possession, isn’t she?” he said, addressing his smiling wife over Zilla’s bent head. “A little girl with an awakened conscience is something very precious and must be treated with very great care.”

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE GHOST FLOWER

“Me no diggum up,” said Joe decidedly. He stood knee deep in pale green ferns growing among heavy shadows formed by the interlaced branches of trees overhead, his eyes fixed on a group of etherially white flowers springing up from the richest of leaf mould on a mossy bank at a little distance from him.

Vivienne knelt by the wax-like cluster of flower interrogation points in speechless delight, while Armour stood above her saying in quiet amusement, “Why don’t you dig it up, Joe?”

“Callum ghos’ flower,” said Joe doggedly; “spirits angry when touchum. Come ’way, Miss Debbiline.”

His voice was really concerned, but Vivienne looked at him with a gay laugh and continued to touch with caressing finger tips the beautiful, unearthly flower, which was furnished with colorless bracts in place of green leaves.

“If I were to wear a few of these to the ‘drawing room’ my decoration would be unique, would it not?” she said to Armour.

“Decidedly unique,” he said. “Have you ever heard any poetry about this curious flower?”

“No, never.”

“Then let me repeat to you some exquisite lines by a Canadian poet, impressed by observing that the stalks and blossoms form interrogation points. Remember that this determines the cast of the sonnet,” and he recited with great taste:

“Like Israel’s seer I come from out the earth,Confronting with the question air and sky,Why dost thou bring me up? White ghost am IOf that which was God’s beauty at its birth.In eld the sun kissed me to ruby red,I held my chalice up to heaven’s full view,The August stars dropped down their golden dew,The skyey balms exhaled about my bed.Alas, I loved the darkness, not the light;The deadly shadows, not the bending blue,Spoke to my trancëd heart, made false seem true,And drowned my spirit in the deeps of night.O Painter of the flowers, O God, most sweet,Dost say my spirit for the light is meet?”

“Alas, the poor flower!” said Vivienne. “Like some mortals it loved the darkness rather than the light. And yet how touching the final question.”

“Yes,” said Armour quietly, “a regret has been born even among ‘the deadly shadows.’”

“Will you not repeat to me some more of those things that you repeat so well?” asked Vivienne demurely.

Bareheaded and standing with his back against a tree, Armour murmured to her the praises of another fairy glen in far-distant Wales, a place peopled with shy winds,

“Whose fitful plumes waft dewy balmFrom all the wildwood, and let fallAn incommunicable calm.”

Then dropping on his knees on the ground he said, “Give me your clasp knife, Joe.”

“Me no give you big knife,” said the superstitious Christmas; “me ’fraid for Miss Debbiline. Spirits killum if touch ghos’ flower,” and he retreated farther among the ferns.

Armour laughed as he bent his light head over the flower that he was about to wrest from its home among the “sweet wood’s golden glooms.”

“Do you think it will grow if we plant it in the greenhouse?” asked Vivienne, as she watched her lover carefully insinuating a sharp-pointed stone among the decayed leaves of many seasons.

“I scarcely think so, but we can try it,” and Armour carefully carrying the fragile ghost flower in his handkerchief walked by her side down the woodland path to the shore of a tiny cove where Joe’s canoe lay drawn up on the grass.