himself all the time. I remember he was a sixteenth-century duke
in Florence once for weeks together."
"Oh, that's Adriance," chuckled Everett. "He is himself
barely long enough to write checks and be measured for his
clothes. I didn't hear from him while he was an Arab; I missed
that."
"He was writing an Algerian suite for the piano then; it
must be in the publisher's hands by this time. I have been too
ill to answer his letter, and have lost touch with him."
Everett drew a letter from his pocket. "This came about a
month ago. It's chiefly about his new opera, which is to be
brought out in London next winter. Read it at your leisure."
"I think I shall keep it as a hostage, so that I may be sure
you will come again. Now I want you to play for me. Whatever
you like; but if there is anything new in the world, in mercy let
me hear it. For nine months I have heard nothing but 'The
Baggage Coach Ahead' and 'She Is My Baby's Mother.'"
He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him,
absorbed in his remarkable physical likeness to his brother and
trying to discover in just what it consisted. She told herself
that it was very much as though a sculptor's finished work had
been rudely copied in wood. He was of a larger build than
Adriance, and his shoulders were broad and heavy, while those of
his brother were slender and rather girlish. His face was of the
same oval mold, but it was gray and darkened about the mouth by
continual shaving. His eyes were of the same inconstant April
color, but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance's
were always points of highlight, and always meaning another thing
than the thing they meant yesterday. But it was hard to see why
this earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric,
youthful face that was as gay as his was grave. For Adriance,
though he was ten years the elder, and though his hair was
streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so mobile
that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words.
A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal
methods and of her affections, had once said to him that the
shepherd boys who sang in the Vale of Tempe must certainly have
looked like young Hilgarde; and the comparison had been
appropriated by a hundred shyer women who preferred to quote.
As Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the InterOcean
House that night, he was a victim to random recollections. His
infatuation for Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been
the most serious of his boyish love affairs, and had long
disturbed his bachelor dreams. He was painfully timid in
everything relating to the emotions, and his hurt had withdrawn
him from the society of women. The fact that it was all so done
and dead and far behind him, and that the woman had lived her
life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and
loss. He bethought himself of something he had read about
"sitting by the hearth and remembering the faces of women without
desire," and felt himself an octogenarian.
He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his
stay at his brother's studio when Katharine Gaylord was working
there, and how he had wounded Adriance on the night of his last
concert in New York. He had sat there in the box while his
brother and Katharine were called back again and again after the
last number, watching the roses go up over the footlights until
they were stacked half as high as the piano, brooding, in his
sullen boy's heart, upon the pride those two felt in each other's
work--spurring each other to their best and beautifully
contending in song. The footlights had seemed a hard, glittering
line drawn sharply between their life and his; a circle of flame
set about those splendid children of genius. He walked back to
his hotel alone and sat in his window staring out on Madison
Square until long after midnight, resolving to beat no more at
doors that he could never enter and realizing more keenly than
ever before how far this glorious world of beautiful creations
lay from the paths of men like himself. He told himself that he
had in common with this woman only the baser uses of life.
Everett's week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no
prospect of release except through the thing he dreaded. The
bright, windy days of the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters
and telegrams came urging him to hasten his trip to the coast,
but he resolutely postponed his business engagements. The
mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord's ponies, or fishing
in the mountains, and in the evenings he sat in his room writing
letters or reading. In the afternoon he was usually at his post
of duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive
notions about the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene
changes and the compensation varies, but in the end we usually
find that we have played the same class of business from first to
last. Everett had been a stopgap all his life. He remembered
going through a looking glass labyrinth when he was a boy and
trying gallery after gallery, only at every turn to bump his nose
against his own face--which, indeed, was not his own, but his
brother's. No matter what his mission, east or west, by land or
sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother's
business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the
shining current of Adriance Hilgarde's. It was not the first
time that his duty had been to comfort, as best he could, one of
the broken things his brother's imperious speed had cast aside
and forgotten. He made no attempt to analyze the situation or to
state it in exact terms; but he felt Katharine Gaylord's need for
him, and he accepted it as a commission from his brother to help
this woman to die. Day by day he felt her demands on him grow
more imperious, her need for him grow more acute and positive;
and day by day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her his
own individuality played a smaller and smaller part. His power
to minister to her comfort, he saw, lay solely in his link with
his brother's life. He understood all that his physical
resemblance meant to her. He knew that she sat by him always
watching for some common trick of gesture, some familiar play of
expression, some illusion of light and shadow, in which he should
seem wholly Adriance. He knew that she lived upon this and that
her disease fed upon it; that it sent shudders of remembrance
through her and that in the exhaustion which followed this
turmoil of her dying senses, she slept deep and sweet and
dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old Florentine
garden, and not of bitterness and death.
The question which most perplexed him was, "How much shall I
know? How much does she wish me to know?" A few days after his
first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled his brother
to write
her. He had merely said that she was mortally ill; he
could depend on Adriance to say the right thing--that was a part
of his gift. Adriance always said not only the right thing, but
the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. His phrases took the
color of the moment and the then-present condition, so that they
never savored of perfunctory compliment or frequent usage. He
always caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic
suggestion of every situation. Moreover, he usually did the
right thing, the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing--except,
when he did very cruel things--bent upon making people happy
when their existence touched his, just as he insisted that his
material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon those
near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the
homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer
near, forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance's gift.
Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made
his daily call at the gaily painted ranch house, he found
Katharine laughing like a schoolgirl. "Have you ever thought,"
she said, as he entered the music room, "how much these seances
of ours are like Heine's 'Florentine Nights,' except that I don't
give you an opportunity to monopolize the conversation as Heine
did?" She held his hand longer than usual, as she greeted him,
and looked searchingly up into his face. "You are the kindest
man living; the kindest," she added, softly.
Everett's gray face colored faintly as he drew his hand
away, for he felt that this time she was looking at him and not
at a whimsical caricature of his brother. "Why, what have I done
now?" he asked, lamely. "I can't remember having sent you any
stale candy or champagne since yesterday."
She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between
the leaves of a book and held it out, smiling. "You got him to
write it. Don't say you didn't, for it came direct, you see, and
the last address I gave him was a place in Florida. This deed
shall be remembered of you when I am with the just in Paradise.
But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you didn't know about
it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata, the most
ambitious thing he has ever done, and you are to play it for me
directly, though it looks horribly intricate. But first for the
letter; I think you would better read it aloud to me."
Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window seat in
which she reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He
opened the letter, his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw
to his satisfaction that it was a long one--wonderfully tactful
and tender, even for Adriance, who was tender with his valet and
his stable boy, with his old gondolier and the beggar-women who
prayed to the saints for him.
The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he
sat by the fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was
heavy, with the warm fragrance of the South and full of the sound
of splashing, running water, as it had been in a certain old
garden in Florence, long ago. The sky was one great turquoise,
heated until it glowed. The wonderful Moorish arches threw
graceful blue shadows all about him. He had sketched an outline
of them on the margin of his notepaper. The subtleties of Arabic
decoration had cast an unholy spell over him, and the brutal
exaggerations of Gothic art were a bad dream, easily forgotten.
The Alhambra itself had, from the first, seemed perfectly
familiar to him, and he knew that he must have trod that court,
sleek and brown and obsequious, centuries before Ferdinand rode
into Andalusia. The letter was full of confidences about his
work, and delicate allusions to their old happy days of study and
comradeship, and of her own work, still so warmly remembered and
appreciatively discussed everywhere he went.
As Everett folded the letter he felt that Adriance had
divined the thing needed and had risen to it in his own wonderful
way. The letter was consistently egotistical and seemed to him
even a trifle patronizing, yet it was just what she had
wanted. A strong realization of his brother's charm and intensity
and power came over him; he felt the breath of that whirlwind of
flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and
himself even more resolutely than he consumed others. Then he
looked down at this white, burnt-out brand that lay before him.
"Like him, isn't it?" she said, quietly.
"I think I can scarcely answer his letter, but when you see
him next you can do that for me. I want you to tell him many
things for me, yet they can all be summed up in this: I want him
to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even at the cost
of the dear boyishness that is half his charm to you and me. Do
you understand me?"
"I know perfectly well what you mean," answered Everett,
thoughtfully. "I have often felt so about him myself. And yet
it's difficult to prescribe for those fellows; so little makes,
so little mars."
Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face
flushed with feverish earnestness. "Ah, but it is the waste of
himself that I mean; his lashing himself out on stupid and
uncomprehending people until they take him at their own estimate.
He can kindle marble, strike fire from putty, but is it worth
what it costs him?"
"Come, come," expostulated Everett, alarmed at her excitement.
"Where is the new sonata? Let him speak for himself."
He sat down at the piano and began playing the first
movement, which was indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper
speech. The sonata was the most ambitious work he had done up to
that time and marked the transition from his purely lyric vein to
a deeper and nobler style. Everett played intelligently and with
that sympathetic comprehension which seems peculiar to a certain
lovable class of men who never accomplish anything in particular.
When he had finished he turned to Katharine.
"How he has grown!" she cried. "What the three last years have
done for him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but
this is the tragedy of the soul, the shadow coexistent with the
soul. This is the tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats
called hell. This is my tragedy, as I lie here spent by the
racecourse, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass me.
Ah, God! The swift feet of the runners!"
She turned her face away and covered it with her straining
hands. Everett crossed over to her quickly and knelt beside her.
In all the days he had known her she had never before, beyond an
occasional ironical jest, given voice to the bitterness of her
own defeat. Her courage had become a point of pride with him,
and to see it going sickened him.
"Don't do it," he gasped. "I can't stand it, I really
can't, I feel it too much. We mustn't speak of that; it's too
tragic and too vast."
When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old,
brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could
not shed. "No, I won't be so ungenerous; I will save that for the
watches of the night when I have no better company. Now you may
mix me another drink of some sort. Formerly, when it was not
if I should ever sing Brunnhilde, but quite simply when I
should sing Brunnhilde, I was always starving myself and
thinking what I might drink and what I might not. But broken music
boxes may drink whatsoever they list, and no one cares whether they
lose their figure. Run over that theme at the beginning again.
That, at least, is not new. It was running in his head when we
were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his glass at
the dinner table. He had just begun to work it out when the late
autumn came on, and the paleness of the Adriatic oppressed him,
and he decided to go to Florence for the winter, and lost touch
with the theme during his illness. Do you remember those
frightful days? All the people who have loved him are not strong
enough to save him from himself! When I got word from Florence
that he had been ill I was in Nice filling a concert engagement.
His wife was hurrying to him from Paris, but I reached him first.
I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm. They had taken an old
palace there for the winter, and I found him in the library--a
long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture and
bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room,
looking, oh, so worn and pale!--as he always does when he is ill,
you know. Ah, it is so good that you do know! Even
his red smoking jacket lent no color to his face. His first words
were not to tell me how ill he had been, but that that morning he
had been well enough to put the last strokes to the score of his
Souvenirs d'Automne. He was as I most like to remember him:
so calm and happy and tired; not gay, as he usually is, but just
contented and tired with that heavenly tiredness that comes after
a good work done at last. Outside, the rain poured down in
torrents, and the wind moaned for the pain of all the world and
sobbed in the branches of the shivering olives and about the walls
of that desolated old palace. How that night comes back to me!
There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire which glowed
upon the hard features of the bronze Dante, like the reflection of
purgatorial flames, and threw long black shadows about us; beyond
us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all, Adriance sat staring at
the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eves, and of all
the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one such
life as his. Somehow the wind with all its world-pain had got into
the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up
in both of us at once--that awful, vague, universal pain, that
cold fear of life and death and God and hope--and we were like
two clinging together on a spar in midocean after the shipwreck
of everything. Then we heard the front door open with a great
gust of wind that shook even the walls, and the servants came
running with lights, announcing that Madam had returned, 'and in
the book we read no more that night.'"
She gave the old line with a certain bitter humor, and with
the hard, bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her
weakness as in a glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn
like a mask through so many years, had gradually changed even the
lines of her face completely, and when she looked in the mirror
she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer
and satirist of herself. Everett dropped his head upon his hand
and sat looking at the rug. "How much you have cared!" he said.
"Ah, yes, I cared," she replied, closing her eyes with a
long-drawn sigh of relief; and lying perfectly still, she went
on: "You can't imagine what a comfort it is to have you know how I
cared, what a relief it is to be able to tell it to someone. I