is Munich – you are sure to love that city.” He hated Munich; he hated Germany. The entire land, and everything that was in it, was odious to him; but for the moment he forgot. He would have said more, even to praises of Berlin, but the girl raised her ringless hand and shook her head wearily.
“No, Lenox, it may not be. Did I go with you, in a year – six months, perhaps – we would both regret. It would be not only expatriation; it would, for me at least, be isolation as well, and, though I would bear willingly with both, you would not. You think so now, perhaps, I do not doubt” – and a phantom of a smile crossed her face – “and I thank you for so thinking, but it may not be.”
Her hand fell to her side, and she turned listlessly away. “You must forget me, Lenox – but not too soon, will you?”
“Never, sweetheart – never!”
“Ah, but you must. And I must learn to forget you. It will be difficult. No one can be to me what you have been. You have been my youth, Lenox; my girlhood has been yours. I have nothing left. Nothing except regrets – regrets that youth should pass so quickly and that girlhood comes but once.”
Her lips were tremulous, but she was trying to be brave.
“But surely, Maida, it cannot be that we are to part forever. Afterwards – ” the word was vague, but they both understood – “afterwards I may see you. Such things often are. Because you feel yourself compelled to this step, there is no reason why I, of all others, should be shut out of your life.”
“It is the fact of your being the one of all others that makes the shutting needful.”
“It shall not be.”
“Lenox,” she pleaded, “it is harder for me than for you.”
“But how can you ask me, how can you think that I will give you up? The affair is wretched enough as it is, and now, by insisting that I am not to see you again, you would make it even worse. People think it easy to love, but it is not; I know nothing more difficult. You are the only one for whom I have ever cared. It was not difficult to do so, I admit, but the fact remains. I have loved you, I have loved you more and more every day, and now, when I love you most, when I love you as I can never love again, you find it the easiest matter in the world to come to me and say, ‘It’s ended; bon jour.’”
“You are cruel, Lenox, you are cruel.”
“It is you that are cruel, and there the wonder is, for your cruelty is unconscious, of your own free will you would not know how.”
“It is not that I am cruel, it is that I am trying to do right. And it is for you to aid me. I have been true to you, do not ask me now to be false to myself.”
If at that moment Mrs. Bunker Hill could have looked into the girl’s face, her suspicions would have vanished into air. Maida needed only a less fashionable gown to look like a mediæval saint; and before the honesty that was in her eyes Lenox bowed his head.
“Will you help me?”
“I will,” he answered.
“I knew you would; you are too good to try to make me more miserable than I am. And now, you must go; kiss me, it is the last time.”
He caught her in his arms and kissed her full upon the mouth. He kissed her wet eyes, her cheeks, the splendor of her hair. And after a moment of the acutest pain of all her life, the girl freed herself from his embrace, and let him go without another word.
CHAPTER V.
A YELLOW ENVELOPE
There is a peculiarity about Baden-Baden which no other watering-place seems to share – it has the aroma of a pretty woman. In August it is warm, crowded, enervating, tiresome as are all warm and crowded places, but the air is delicately freighted and a pervasive fragrance is discerned even by the indifferent.
In the summer that succeeded Maida’s marriage Baden was the same tame, perfumed zwei und funfzig that it has ever been since the war. The ladies and gentlemen who were to regard it as a sort of continuation of the Bois de Boulogne had departed never to return. Gone was Benazet, gone, too, the click of the roulette ball. The echoes and uproars of the Second Empire had died away, as echoes and uproars ever must, and in place of the paint and cleverness of the dames du-lac had come the stupid loveliness of the schwärmerisch Mädchen.
But though Paris had turned her wicked back, the attitude of that decadent capital in no wise affected other cities. On the particular August to which allusion is made, interminable dinners were consumed by contingents from the politest lands, and also from some that were semi-barbaric.
In the Lichenthal Allée and on the promenade in front of the Kursaal one could hear six languages in as many minutes, and given a polyglottic ear the number could have been increased to ten. Among those who added their little quota to this summer Babel were Mr. and Mrs. Incoul.
The wedding had been very simple. Mrs. Barhyte had wished the ceremony performed in Grace Church, and to the ceremony she had also wished that all New York should be bidden. To her it represented a glory which in the absence of envious witnesses would be lustreless indeed. But in this respect her wishes were disregarded. On a melting morning in early June, a handful of people, thirty at most, assembled in Mrs. Hildred’s drawing-room. The grave service that is in usage among Episcopalians was mumbled by a diligent bishop, there was a hurried and heavy breakfast, and two hours later the bride and groom were on the deck of the “Umbria.”
The entire affair had been conducted with the utmost dispatch. The Sunday Sun chronicled the engagement in one issue, and gave the date of the wedding in the next. It was not so much that Harmon Incoul was ardent in his wooing or that Miss Barhyte was anxious to assume the rank and privileges that belong to the wedded state. The incentives were other if equally prosaic. The ceremony if undergone needed to be undergone at once. Summer was almost upon them, and in the code which society has made for itself, summer weddings are reproved. There was indeed some question of postponing the rites until autumn. But on that Mrs. Barhyte put her foot. She was far from sure of her daughter, and as for the other contracting party, who could tell but that he might change his mind. Such changes had been, and instances of such misconduct presented themselves unsummoned to the woman’s mind. The fish had been landed almost without effort, a fish more desirable than any other, a very prize among fishes, and the possibility that he might slip away and without so much as a gill awry float off into clearer and less troubled seas, nerved her to her task anew.
In the interview which she enjoyed with her prospective son-in-law she was careful, however, to display no eagerness. She was sedate when sedateness seemed necessary, but her usual attitude was one of conciliatory disinterestedness. Her daughter’s choice she told him had met with her fullest approval, and it was to her a matter of deep regret that neither her husband nor her father – the late Chief Justice Hildred, with whose name Mr. Incoul was of course familiar – that neither of them had been spared to join in the expression of her satisfaction. Of Maida it was unnecessary to speak, yet this at least should be said, she was young and she was impressionable, as young people are apt to be, but she had never given her mother cause for the slightest vexation, not the slightest. “She is a sweet girl,” Mrs. Barhyte went on to say, “and one with an admirable disposition; she takes after her father in that, but she has her grandfather’s intellect.”
“Her beauty, madam, comes from you.”
To this Mrs. Barhyte assented. “She is pretty,” she said, and then in the voice of an actress who feels her rôle, “Do be good to her,” she pleaded, “she is all I have.”
Mr.
