"Miss Willoughby----?" she inquired.
Now, how in heaven's name, could a cloistered Fairhaven have surmised his intention of proposing on the first convenient opportunity to handsome, well-to-do Anne Willoughby? He shrugged his wonder off. "Oh, people will talk, you know. Let any man once find a woman has a tongue in her head, and the stage-direction is always 'Enter Rumor, painted full of tongues.'"
Pauline did not appear to have remarked his protest. "Yes,--in the end you will marry her. And her money will help, just as you have contrived to make everything else help, toward making John Charteris comfortable. She is not very clever, but she will always worship you, and so you two will not prove uncongenial. That is your real tragedy, if I could make you comprehend."
"So I am going to develop into a pig," he said, with relish,--"a lovable, contented, unambitious porcine, who is alike indifferent to the Tariff, the importance of Equal Suffrage and the market-price of hams, for all that he really cares about is to have his sty as comfortable as may be possible. That is exactly what I am going to develop into,--now, isn't it?" And John Charteris, sitting, as was his habitual fashion, with one foot tucked under him, laughed cheerily. Oh, just to be alive (he thought) was ample cause for rejoicing! and how deliciously her eyes, alert with slumbering fires, were peering through the moon-made shadows of her brows!
"Well----! something of the sort." Pauline was smiling, but restrainedly, and much as a woman does in condoning the naughtiness of her child. "And, oh, if only----"
"Why, precisely. 'If only!' quotha. Why, there you word the key-note, you touch the cornerstone, you ruthlessly illuminate the mainspring, of an intractable unfeeling universe. For instance, if only
You were the Empress of Ayre and Skye, And I were Ahkond of Kong, We could dine every day on apple-pie, And peddle potatoes, and sleep in a sty, And people would say when we came to die, 'They _never_ did anything wrong.'
But, as it is, our epitaphs will probably be nothing of the sort. So that there lurks, you see, much virtue in this 'if only.'"
Impervious to nonsense, she asked, "And have I not earned the right to lament that you are changed?"
"I haven't robbed more than six churches up to date," he grumbled. "What would you have?"
The answer came, downright, and, as he knew, entirely truthful: "I would have had you do all that you might have done."
But he must needs refine. "Why, no--you would have made me do it, wrung out the last drop. You would have bullied me and shamed me into being all that I might have been. I see that now." He spoke as if in wonder, with quickening speech. "Pauline, I haven't been entirely not worth while. Oh, yes, I know! I know I haven't written five-act tragedies which would be immortal, as you probably expected me to do. My books are not quite the books I was to write when you and I were young. But I have made at worst some neat, precise and joyous little tales which prevaricate tenderly about the universe and veil the pettiness of human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is not the actual world they tell about, but a vastly superior place where the Dream is realized and everything which in youth we knew was possible comes true. It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once, and have not ever entered, and have not ever forgotten. So people like my little tales. . . . Do they induce delusions? Oh, well, you must give people what they want, and literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors."
She said soberly, "You need not make a jest of it. It is not ridiculous that you write of beautiful and joyous things because there was a time when living was really all one wonderful adventure, and you remember it."
"But, oh, my dear, my dear! such glum discussions are so sadly out-of-place on such a night as this," he lamented. "For it is a night of pearl-like radiancies and velvet shadows and delicate odors and big friendly stars that promise not to gossip, whatever happens. It is a night that hungers, and all its undistinguishable little sounds are voicing the night's hunger for masks and mandolins, for rope-ladders and balconies and serenades. It is a night . . . a night wherein I gratefully remember so many beautiful sad things that never happened . . . to John Charteris, yet surely happened once upon a time to me . . ."
"I think that I know what it is to remember--better than you do, Jack. But what do you remember?"
"In faith, my dear, the most Bedlamitish occurrences! It is a night that breeds deplorable insanities, I warn you. For I seem to remember how I sat somewhere, under a peach-tree, in clear autumn weather, and was content; but the importance had all gone out of things; and even you did not seem very important, hardly worth lying to, as I spoke lightly of my wasted love for you, half in hatred, and--yes, still half in adoration. For you were there, of course. And I remember how I came to you, in a sinister and brightly lighted place, where a horrible, staring frail old man lay dead at your feet; and you had murdered him; and heaven did not care, and we were old, and all our lives seemed just to end in futile tangle-work. And, again, I remember how we stood alone, with visible death crawling lazily toward us, as a big sullen sea rose higher and higher; and we little tinseled creatures waited, helpless, trapped and yearning. . . . There is a boat in that picture; I suppose it was deeply laden with pirates coming to slit our throats from ear to ear. I have forgotten that part, but I remember the tiny spot of courtplaster just above your painted lips. . . . Such are the jumbled pictures. They are bred of brain-fag, no doubt; yet, whatever be their lineage," said Charteris, happily, "they render glum discussion and platitudinous moralizing quite out of the question. So, let's pretend, Pauline, that we are not a bit more worldly-wise than those youngsters who are frisking yonder in the Gymnasium--for, upon my word, I dispute if we have ever done anything to suggest that we are. Don't let's be cowed a moment longer by those bits of paper with figures on them which our too-credulous fellow-idiots consider to be the only almanacs. Let's have back yesterday, let's tweak the nose of Time intrepidly." Then Charteris caroled:
"For Yesterday! for Yesterday! I cry a reward for a Yesterday Now lost or stolen or gone astray, With all the laughter of Yesterday!"
"And how slight a loss was laughter," she murmured--still with the vague and gentle eyes of a day-dreamer--"as set against all that we never earned in youth, and so will never earn."
He inadequately answered "Bosh!" and later, "Do you remember----?" he began.
Yes, she remembered that, it developed. And "Do you remember----?" she in turn was asking later. It was to seem to him in retrospection that neither for the next half-hour began a sentence without this formula. It was as if they sought to use it as a master-word wherewith to reanimate the happinesses and sorrows of their common past, and as if they found the charm was potent to awaken the thin, powerless ghosts of emotions that were once despotic. For it was as if frail shadows and half-caught echoes were all they could evoke, it seemed to Charteris; and yet these shadows trooped with a wild grace, and the echoes thrilled him with the sweet and piercing surprise of a bird's call at midnight or of a bugle heard in prison.
Then twelve o'clock was heralded by the College bell, and Pauline arose as though this equable deep-throated interruption of the music's levity had been a signal. John Charteris saw her clearly now; and she was beautiful.
"I must go. You will not ever quite forget me, Jack. Such is my sorry comfort." It seemed to Charteris that she smiled as in mockery, and yet it was a very tender sort of derision. "Yes, you have made your books. You have done what you most desired to do. You have got all from life that you have asked of life. Oh, yes,
