“I only said willing,” I interjected.
“The wish soon ripens to frenzy. Presently the lady and I were betrothed. I was a passionate lover. You would not think it to look at me now, with this coat and these clodhopper shoes.” He forced a smile.
“Shaggy jackets and thick shoes with an orchestral creak are de rigueur for lovers now,” rejoined I, trying to lighten the growing gloom of Churm’s manner.
“We wore smooth black, and paper soles,” said he. “Ah, well! I was a loyal, undoubting heart. I loved and I trusted wholly.”
He paused, and drew his cigar to a fresh light. Then, as he remained silent and grew moodier, I recalled him to the subject, and asked, “You lost her? By death?”
“By death, Byng? Yes, by the death of my love. She stabbed it. Shall I tell you how? Poor child! one single poisoned look of hers, one single phrase that proved a tainted nature, stabbed and poisoned my love dead, dead, dead.”
Again he was silent. Pity would not let me speak.
“This may seem disloyalty,” he by and by resumed. “But she is dead and pardoned long ago. I must be loyal to the living. You may run the risk I ran. I give to you, to you only, to you peculiarly, the warning of my misery. If you are ever harmed as I was, you will owe the same to your son, or your friend.”
I was full of youthful, unshaken self-confidence. I saw no danger, anticipated no wound. I could not make the personal application Churm suggested. I listened, greatly touched and interested, but without foreboding.
“A look and a word,” Churm began again, “seemed to flash upon me the conviction that the woman I loved was sullied. A foul-minded man may do foul wrong by such a fancy. My mind was pure. My first impulse was to rebel against the agonizing doubt, and be truer and tenderer than before. You comprehend the feeling?”
“Thoroughly. Your impulse would be mine.”
“ ‘Love,’ said I to myself, ‘tests love,’ ” Churm continued. “ ‘I mistrust, because I do not love enough. I must beware of being personally base and cruelly unjust to her. My suspicion shall be the evanescent dream of an unwholesome instant,—like Ophelia’s song.’ But still the anguish and the dread stayed in my heart. What could I do? Wait? Watch? Make myself a spy to examine this seeming sully, and find it an indelible stain? Uncover the bad side of my nature, apply it to hers, and study the kind and degree of the electricity evoked by the contact! Should I protect myself by any such baseness? While these thoughts were tangling in my brain, an outer force cut the knot.”
“Someone spilt the philter,” said I, thinking of the scene over Densdeth’s wine.
“Denman was my unconscious ally,” Churm continued, without noticing the interruption. “Denman saved me from the worst, the bitterest fate that can befall a true man,—to marry a woman whose truth and purity he can allow himself to doubt.”
“Bitter indeed! A blight of all the bloom and harvest of a life!” said I;—so fancy had taught me.
“Ah, yes! as the ‘marriage of true minds’ alone gives fragrance and ripeness. I have missed the harvest, I escaped the blight. Denman, rich and handsome, with life clear before him, came back from Europe. Wealth had illusions for Emma Page. She was new to it. I was not poor; but my wealth was only in posse.”
“Few divine a young man’s posse, I fear,” said I, as he paused to whiff.
“Posse must be put into a pipe and blown into an illustrious bubble, before the world perceives the esse,” he rejoined. “But inventive power is the best capital. Mine has made me far richer than Denman. Well; he arrived at the moment of my agonizing doubt. Miss Page was The Beauty of our day. He was charmed. His cruder vision admired the rose and did not miss the dew-drop. She presently allowed me to perceive that he was to be my substitute. I will not tire you with the detail of the stranding and wreck of our engagement.”
“No?” said I. “I begin to identify myself strangely with your story.”
“No. No detail! To recall talks and looks and tones would be more tragedy than I could bear, even to make my story sharper. So our engagement ended. That slight perfidy was nothing. My wrong was deeper.”
“Ah, poor Emma!” he continued, “forgiven long ago! That stain of hers, whether it were taint of being, or fault of nurture, or rash or sober sin, killed faith and hope in me for a time.”
He paused again, and the blank seemed to symbolize a blank in his life.
“It was a wide gulf to swim over,” he said. “Dark waters, Robert! Dark and broad! and I have seen many souls of men and women drown, that had not force to buffet through, or patience to drift across. But I escaped, and, having paid the price of suffering without despair, the larger hopes and higher faiths were revealed to me.”
He struck aside the smoke with a strong, swimmer’s gesture of the arm,—a forceful character, as even his motions showed.
“This is sacred confidence, Robert,” he said. “I give it to you, as a father warning a son.”
“And as a son I take and treasure it.”
“Denman,” Churm went on, “did not mind the wrong he might have been doing me, had my love not already perished. Denman never heeds any one between him and his object. He looks at the prospect; what is the fly on the pane to him? He has been walking over others all his life, trampling them if they lifted up their heads. But a selfish man gets himself sent first to Coventry, and then, if he does not mend, to St. Helena. Denman, a great merchant by inheritance, has gained money-power at the cost of moral weight. Our best men look coldly on him. He knows it, and grasps at bigger wealth to crush criticism. It is the old story,—vaulting ambition, the Russian campaign. Denman’s gigantic schemes are the terror, the wonder, and the admiration of Wall Street. But he seems to a cool student a desperate man. It saddens me to meet him now,—aged, worn, anxious, hardly daring to look me in the face, and, as I fear, wholly in the power of Densdeth.”
“Densdeth!” cried I. “Who and what is Densdeth? Does he hold every man’s leadingstrings to the Devil?”
“What is Densdeth? My story will give you a fact or two in answer to the question. I go on with it rapidly.
“Emma Page married Denman.
“She tried splendor for a year. She was the beautiful wife of the richest young man in town.
“At the year’s end, her daughter Emma was born.
“A child is a terrible vengeance to a mother who has ever lowered her womanhood, by thought or act. What tortures she would have endured,—so she now too late thinks,—if she could have purged and made anew the nature she has transmitted to an innocent being! But there it lies before her in the cradle, the embodiment of her inmost thought. There lies the heir, and the waste of his heritage is irreclaimable.”
“Don’t be so cruelly stern,” said I. “You out-Herod Herod, in the converse. You massacre the Innocents because they are guilty. This is the old dead dogma of original sin, redivivus and rampant.”
“No; the dogma is dead, and science handles the facts without the trammels of an impious theory. Life cures, and Death renews. But Life should be a feast, not a medicine.
“Emma’s birth,” he continued, “transformed Mrs. Denman. For a year she was a faithful mother.
“Denman did not like his wife so well in this capacity. They diverged widely. To be handsome for him and showy for the public was his notion of Mrs. Denman’s office. The second year flowed rough.
“At the end of it, Clara was born, the child of a woman chastened and purified.
“A fortnight after her birth, Denman came to me.
“ ‘My wife is desperately ill,’ said he. ‘She wishes to see you.’
“I went calmly to this farewell interview with my old love. The husband seemed to abdicate in my behalf.
“ ‘I am to die,’ she said, almost gayly. ‘I have sent for you, because I trust you wholly. Dear friend, here are my daughters! Befriend them for my sake! I feel that you will understand the yearnings of young souls. Make them what you once hoped of me! Will you not be the father of their
spiritual life? Forgive me, dear friend, for the old wrong, for the old wrongs! Prove that you have pardoned me by loving mine. Good-bye.’ ”
Churm was silent awhile. He lighted a fresh cigar and smoked steadily.
The smoke lifted slowly in the still room, and hung in wreaths overhead. He sat looking vaguely into the shifting cloud.
8
Clara Denman, Dead
I watched Churm, as he smoked.
Love, disloyalty, penitence, death,—were these all unrealities, that he could speak of them in his own history so calmly? Could a man be hurt as he had been, and overlive unscarred? I had heard cool men say, that “the tragedies of this life become the comedies of another, and that we should some time smile to recall our cruellest battles here, as now we smile to watch the jousts of flies in a sunbeam.” Churm’s tragedy was still tragedy to him. He had begun to recite it with evident pain. But the pain of his tone became indifference before he closed; and now he sat there smoking, as if he had related gravely, but without emotion, the mishaps of some stranger.
I wondered.
He looked through the smoke, caught my wondering eye, smiled soberly, and said: “Such an experience as I have described is like a shirt of Nessus, which one wears until the prickles of its poisoned serge have thoroughly toughened his skin. When it ceases to gall, he strips it off and hangs it by the highway for whoever runs to take; or if he finds some sensitive friend, like you, Robert, he lays it upon his shoulders, and says, ‘Wear this! The edge of its torture is gone. It will harden you for the garment the Fates are weaving for you.’ ”
“Dear me!” said I, shrugging my shoulders. “Have I got to stand haircloth and venom? Well, if that is the common lot, and I cannot escape, I am much obliged to you for trying to make me pachydermatous. But you have not succeeded very well. The story of another’s pain makes my heart softer.”
“Sympathy for others is stout armor for one’s self. But, Byng, you have heard the first tragedy of the series; listen to the second!”
“The second! Is there a third? Is the series a trilogy?”
“The third is unwritten. The march of events has paused while Densdeth was off. And to-day he steps from behind the curtain with you, a new character, half inclined to be his satellite. Perhaps you have a part to play.”
There was a vein of seriousness in this seeming banter.
“Perhaps!” said I, puffing a ring of smoke away. “But pray go on. I am eager to hear the whole.”
“After his wife’s death, Denman said to me, ‘Mr. Churm, Emma told me that you were willing, for old friendship’s sake, to give an eye to my two poor girls’ education. Suppose you take the whole responsibility off my hands. I will make their million apiece for them. You shall teach them how to spend it.’ I gladly accepted this godfatherly post. The girls became to me as my own children.
“I shall say nothing to you,” Churm here interjected, “of Emma.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“You will see her. Judge for yourself! Clara you will never see. Of her I will speak. But first what do you remember of the sisters?”
“They were my pets when I was a school-boy. Emma I recollect as a lovely, fascinating, caressing little thing. Clara was shy and jealous, full of panics that people disliked her for her ugliness. I might have almost forgotten them, except for a sweet, simple, girlish letter they jointly wrote me upon my father’s death. It touched me greatly.”
“I remember,” said Churm. “Clara consulted me as to its propriety. Dear child! sympathy always swept away her reserve. But you speak of her ugliness, Robert?”
“She was original, unexpected; but certainly without beauty. In fact, ugly and awkward, beside Emma.”
“She became beautiful to me by the light that was in her. I could not criticise the medium through which shone so fair a soul. She educated me; not I her. She illuminated for me the new truths, she interpreted the new oracles; and so I have not fallen old and staid among my rudiments, as childless men, with the best intentions, may.”
“You give me,” said I, “a feeling of personal want and personal robbery by her death.”
“Fresh, earnest, unflinching soul!” Churm sadly continued. “How she flashed out of being all the false laws that check the mind’s divine liberty! Not the laws of refinement and high-breeding; they, the elastic by-laws of the fundamental law of love, are easy harness to the freest soul. In another house than Denman’s, among allies, not foes, what a noble poem her life would have been!”
“Foes!” said I. “Was there no love for her at home?”
“Denman admired his daughters. Love remains latent in him. He has not outgrown his passion for the grosser fictions, wealth, power, show.”
“But Emma! The two sisters did not love one another? If not, where was the fault?”
“Nature made them dissonant.”
“Their foster-father could not harmonize them?”
“I did my best, Byng. But young women need a mother. I suppose the mothers in society shrug up their shoulders, when they talk of Clara’s disappearance and death, and say, ‘What could you expect of a young person, whose nurse, governess, and chaperon was that odd Mr. Churm?’ ”
“You were absent when she disappeared?”
“Away from my post. In England. On some patent business.”
“Pity!”
“I curse myself when I think of it. About this misery, Robert, I have not learned to be calm.”
“You did not approve her proposed marriage with Densdeth,—that I am sure.”
“I knew nothing of it.”
“What! your ward, your child, did not write, did not consult you on so grave a matter?”
“Her letters had been constant. They suddenly ceased. Her last had been a pleading cry to me to succor her father against his growing intimacy with Densdeth. I wrote that I would despatch my business, and hasten home. I never heard again. There was foul play.”
“Suppression of letters?”
“Yes; or I was belied to her.”
“Such a woman would not lightly abandon a faith.”
“Only some villanous treason could destroy her faith in me. And such I do not doubt there has been. I make no loose charges. But why was I kept in the dark?”
“No rumor of the marriage reached you?”
“A rumor merely. Do you know Van Beester?”
“That banking snob who tries to be a swell? a fellow who talks pro-slavery and fancies it aristocracy? Yes; I was bored with him once at a dinner in Paris.”
“Van Beester was put in my state-room on board the steamer when I returned. He had been in England, consummating a railroad job. The old story. Eight per cent third mortgage bonds, convertible. Enormous land grant. Road running over Noman’s Land into Nowhere. One of Densdeth’s schemes. Denman also had an interest.”
“A swindle? Something Muddefontaineish?”
“O no! Noman’s Land, the day the road was done, would become Everybody’s Farm. Nowhere would back into the wilderness. Up would sprout the metropolis of Somewhere. Swindle, Robert? Your term is crude.”
“I suppose Van Beester did not offer it to the English gudgeons under that name.”
“It was a mighty pretty bait for them,—two millions in savory portions, a thousand each. I forget whether some large gudgeon’s gills had taken the whole at one gulp; or whether a shoal of small fry had nibbled the worms off the bob. But the whole loan had been stomached in London, and Van Beester was going home in high feather.”
“A blatant nuisance, of course. And you could not abate or escape him.”
“No; unless I shoved him through our porthole, or slipped through myself. Densdeth was the man’s hero. He could never talk without parading Densdeth. ‘Such talents for finance!’ he would exclaim. ‘Such knowledge of men! Such a versatile genius! Billiards or banking, all one to him! Never loses a bet; never fails in a project! Such a glass of fashion! Such a favorite with the fair sex!’ ”
“Pah! ‘Fa
ir sex!’ I can fancy the loathsome fellow’s look and tone,” I exclaimed.
“Then, in a pause of his sea-sickness,” Churm continued, “he spoke of the Denmans. ‘Mr. Denman so princely! Daughters so charming! For his part he admired Emma,’—‘Emma,’ the scrub called her. ‘But then there was something very attractive, very exciting, about Clara, and he didn’t wonder that Densdeth had selected her,—lucky girl!’ ‘What do you mean?’ cried I, appalled. ‘Don’t you know?’ said the fellow, chuckling over his bit of fashionable intelligence. ‘I have it from the best authority, Densdeth himself. Here is his letter. I got it the morning we sailed. He is to be married the twenty-third. Blow, breezes! and we shall get there in time for the wedding.’ ”
“You could interpret her pleading cry, now,” said I.
“I seem to hear it repeated in every blast: ‘Help, dear friend, dear father,—for my mother’s sake!’ A maddening voyage that was! Dark waters, Robert! I shall hate the insolent monotony of ocean all my days. I could do nothing but walk the deck and tally the waves, or stand over the engine and count the turns.”
“People would laugh at a fellow of my age,” said I, “for such conduct. It is lover-like.”
“I loved Clara, as if she were spirit of my spirit. When the pilot boarded us, before dawn on the twenty-third, I was up chafing about the ship. He handed me his newspaper. The first thing I saw was Clara Denman’s name among the deaths.”
“Cruel!” exclaimed I.
“I thanked God for it. Better death than that marriage!”
“There is still something incomprehensible to me in your horror of Densdeth. I only half feel it myself; Stillfleet more than half feels it. What is it? What is he?”
“We will talk of him another time,” Churm replied. “Now I must hasten on. I found, as I said, Clara’s name among the deaths, and inside the paper a confused story of her disappearance and drowning.
“I was so eager to hear more, that I smuggled myself ashore in the health-officer’s gig, and took the quarantine ferry-boat to town, for speed. While I was looking for a hack at the South Ferry, the return coaches of a funeral to Greenwood drove off a boat just come into the slip.
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