The Letter of the Contract

th him alone. He had seen her, of course. She had been at Mountain Brook-which was the name of Emery Bland's place in New Hampshir

nimate in her, and articulate; but her claim to recognition had never gone beyond the necessity for a hand-shake or a smile. When he did take her hand-on arriving, or on coming down-stairs in the morning-he received an impression of something soft and slim and tender; but the moment of pleasure was always too fleeting for conscious registration. Similarly

d had something to do with his tendency to treat her as a negligible quantity. Mrs

We don't know who she is. She doesn't even know herself. Since you insist," she continued, as though Chip had been pressing for information, "

had a dog," Ch

e only stipulation I made was that she should call us uncle and aunt. I couldn't bear to be called mother by a chi

ithout the bore of reading the papers. As a self-made woman she also looked the part, dressing for breakfast as she would like to be found in the afternoon, with but slight variation for dinner. In her full panoply of plum or dove color she suggested one of those knights eternally in armor who decorate baronial halls. Chip considered it probable that Emery Bland would never have chosen her as the life-long complement to himself had he not taken that step while he was still an obscure "up-state" country lawyer, and she the dignified young school-teacher who stood for "cultivation" in their little town. Cultivation had always been to Mrs. Bland what hunting is to the rider to houn

eloquent, and arresting to ear and eye. He was one of those men who overlook nothing that can be counted as self-expression, from their dress to the sound of their syllables. Superficially genial, but essentially astute, he had made everything grist that came to his mill, flourishing on it not only in the financial sense, but also in that of character. It was said that he knew as many life histories as a doctor or a priest, and generally the more dramatic ones. The experience had clearly made him cynical, but tolera

s an offset to Aunt Emily. If the results of this move were indirect-since Aunt Emily had won the victory-they became apparent in time. They became apparent w

y, and which he could garnish with anecdote ad libitum. It was a kind of conversation of which Chip, who had been brought up partly in England, rarely got a taste in New York, and for which Bland, on his side, didn't often find an interested listener. Something like an intimacy thus sprang up, but an intimacy of the kind common among men who have little or no point of contact out of office hours or away from the neutral ground of the club. Within these limits the meetings had a

are you g

he seat opposite Chip as the latter lunched

so

That's what

roof or expostulation. Chip kept

at do you

give it a name. I hear

say-since you seem to wa

ought to know. Th

ir of a bad boy. "They can

ry about that. But I rather think that yo

s there any better than blazes for me to go to? Besi

can imagine a man of your type doing a

e que l'on peut. I had three resources left to me-wine, woman, and song. For song

nough left to cast about for a set of alternatives. Why, I've seen

was it of

as a hell of th

the word. It's a hell of my own ma

en if it is hell, you do

Kind of penance. I like it as mediev

ld. See here, Walker, why don't you come up and spend the weekend with me in New Hampshire? My wife would li

and a street in the Thirties, dedicated to the use of well-to-do bachelors. It had been a slight mitigation in the collapse of life as he had built it up, that rooms in so comfortable a refuge sho

There was an hour or an hour and a half to pass before he could think of going to bed. Any such interval as that was always the hardest feature in the day for him. But what smote him specially now was the air of emptiness and loneliness. It met

tie beside it. The soiled shirt he had thrown off lay on the couch, a sleeve dragging on the floor. On the mantelpiece, which he had at first consecrated as a shrine for the photographs of Edith and the children, and flanked by two silver candlesticks like an altar, there had intruded an open box of perfectos, an ash-tray

He always sat down in the midst of it, helpless, but with a sense of inner misery. And so he sat down in it now. "My God!"

the subject only left him the more hopelessly bewildered. If she hadn't loved him her course might have been explicable. As it was, he found hims

spirit?-and he had kept the spirit sacredly. Of course he had done wrong. Who in thunder, he asked, impatiently, ever denied that? But how many men had not done wrong in the same way? Very few, was his answer. The answe

ot because he liked drinking, but because it dulled his brain, his heart. It didn't excite him; on the contrary, it brought him to a state of lethargy which, if he was at the club, made him willing to go home, or, if he wa

emselves to death; and except in the last dreadful stages it hadn't been so bad. They had certainly got their fun out of it, even if in the end they paid high. He was paying high-and perhaps getting nothing at all. Wouldn't it be better if he went off this minute somewhere, and made a night of it?-made a night which would be but the beginning of a long succession

p his imagination in the task to which he had set it, but he remembered that the cigar suggested a whisky-and-soda to go with it, and there was a bottle of Old Piper in the cupboard. He fell back into his seat again with the longin

of putting it into execution. He could do this or that. He could go here

d have to go, the people he would have to consort with. He knew just enough of them to be sickened in advance. It was with a sens

st the clear sky, every tree-top on the indented ridges stood out like a little pinnacle, till with a long, downward curve, both gracious and grandiose, the mountainside fell to the edge of a gem-like, broken-shored lake. It was a world extraordinarily green and clean. Its cleanness was even more amazing than its greenness. The unsullied freshness of a new creation seemed to lie on it all day long. It was a world which suggested no past and boded no future. Its transparent ai

overawed. All the hilly woodland was smiling and friendly-but remote. Man might buy a piece of ground and camp on it; but if he had sensibilities he would remain conscious of an es

hence he could look far into green depths, with nothing in the way of excrescence but a tile-paved open-air dining-room at one end, and a shady spot of similar construction at the other, getting his effects from proportion. Something in the way of lawn and garden he was obliged to have, and Mrs. Bland had insisted on a pergola. He fought the pergola for a year or two, but Mrs. Bland had had her way. A country house without a pergola, she said, was something she had never heard of. A sine qua non was what she called it. So beyond the square of lawn with its

his green, cool world, with its quality of interpenetrating purity. He took a volume of some ambassador's "Recollections" from his host's shelves of Victorian memoirs; but he never opened it. He also took a cigar, but he didn't smoke. He only looked-looked without effort, almost without consciousness-up into the high wonder

s during this last visit that the girl who had been to him hitherto no more than the living elem

with him, therefore, a fact of which he was scarcely aware till he saw her in possession of the pergola. With a book in her hand she had established herself in a chair not far

d, looking up at him with simple dir

too fleeting to show the color of the eyes, but he knew they must be blue. Her hair had been striking to him from the first, chiefly because it was of that hue for which there is no English word, but which the French call cendré-ashen-something between flaxen and brown, but with no relation to either-tha

s into which, like the Spirit of the Mountain, her life seemed to be withdrawn. What it could be he was unable even to guess at.

same simple directness. "It's

d hardly have supposed that you coul

n't mind my speaking

t. Say anythi

ow Miss Mag

r, throwing one leg over the other. He seemed to shr

ing was undisturbed. "I've g

he note of resentment o

o die. She thinks so herself. She want

ite like the act of cowering. It was long before he spoke. When he did so the

clearly now. She talks of it continually, in her dreamy way-but a way

she hesitated. "Well?" The tone was as

u'd forg

st deep into pockets. "No." If the word had been louder

weet reasonableness. "I don'

much-that I

your situation any better, while

e woman deliberately wrecked my life

y, Mr. Walker. She did it because she co

atiently. "Ah, what

rdinary only when, later, he thought it over. "I dare say it isn't a very high ki

en why she should have

lt for love to keep itself where it b

she had roused all his emotions on his own behalf, as well as a faint subconscio

tell me. I read it first in the papers-you remember there was a lot of talk about it in the papers-and then every one was talking

that

him for it when I found that I-

you want to go and see he

n the soft luster of her skin as a tint of sunset m

en you." In further self-defense she added: "Uncle Emery didn't disapprov

hy

n the sister she lives with-you knew we'd got her to live with her sister, didn't you?-isn't very kind to her. It's just the money

n the whole bad business th

y imagination, probably." She made nothing clearer by adding:

nod

her was. But whoever she

," he said, kindly; "and until you know you're right I

l, I don't feel superior to her. It's like being a gipsy-George Eliot's Fedalma,

o bear on her. "I assure you you're not

and yet when she could do something

same question which but a few weeks before Noel O

thday on the date on which Uncle Emery and Aunt

band's affections but what was stolen from herself; and then, the extraordinary freak of marital loyalty that could keep a man like Emery Bland, with his refinement and his knowledge of the world, true to a woman whom he had once loved, no doubt, in a youthful way, but who was now his inferior by every token of character. A good enough woman she was of her kind; but it was no more her husband's kind than it was that of the gods immortal. What was the secret that kept these unequal yoke-fellows together, sympathetic, and tolerably happy, when he and Edith, who were made for each other, had by some force of mutual expulsion been thrust apart? Bland himself was of the type which, in the language that was almost more familiar to him than English, Chip would have called charmeur; and yet he deferred to this second-rate woman, and considered her, and even loved her in a placid, steady-going way, subm

ring the two or three minutes in which there was no sound about them but the murmur of the

imbre of his voice again growing h

uppose it could be described mo

on't say that," he cried

t if it didn't ans

he declared, in sharp aggr

now; but what she has is concentrated on that point-that you were not to blame in

y. "Then if her heart's

d that the poor soul must long ago have reached a point wh

is body of something that had fastened on it. "I nev

t make any difference. Love gives itself. It doesn't wai

nto the tuneless, almost inaudible, whistling Edith used to know so well. "I

it was something you just said to yourself and ab

mutter. "I said

for asking. I shouldn't, only t

wasn't exactly a promise. My wife said-" He sto

y that. Of cour

'd let twenty women d

r. Walker. I've given you the message I was charged with.

he said in a tone of complaint,

at I do. The whole thing is too sacred to your own inner life for me t

ed me," he crie

r all the respons

wer. Before Chip could begin to stammer out an explanation that would give his point of view she was p

he long thin hand, that already had the chill of the grave in its limp fingers, into his own. As for kissing those bloodless lips, so eager, so strained, which he could see was what she wanted him to do, he was unable to bring himself to it. Luckily he was not obliged to talk, since her mind couldn't follow coherent sentences. It

r years had been so closely associated with his thoughts it was as if his own death had begun. He grew uneasy, morbid. Such occupations as he found to fill the hours when he was not at work grew insufficient. He came to hate the clubs, t

eriod in which he weighed the advantages of "going to the bad" with all sails set against a life of useless respectability. Going to the bad had the more to recommend it since he knew tha

the club toward the taxi that had been called for him, he met Emery Bland, who was coming up. He would have dodged the lawyer without

stammer: "Edith's in New York.

knowing that he almost fe

by a note which bore the signature, Lily Bland. It was a simple note, containing nothing but the request that he should come an

hire, and on the two or three occasions on which he had visited Bland's house in town she seemed to have retreated once more t

, but in Emery Bland's library, with a background of bindings of red and blue and green and gold, a few Brangwyn and Meryon etchings, and one brilliant, sinister spot of color by Fé

décolletée, seemed somewhat lost in the spaciousness of her surroundings. She made no pretense at preliminary social small talk, going straight to her point. She did this by a repetition of the words wi

omething to tell you, and I

the question r

ht herself up at once. "No; not better. Of course, I c

n. She was coming back to him. He was to have his reward for taking pity o

ws-or you wouldn't

ting on the arm of her chair, the hand raised so as to lay a forefinger on her ch

ou've got information to give me. Wh

ve you a great shock; so that I don't wa

od's sake, Miss Bland, what is it? Is one

at this would be a great shock. There's

don't keep me in s

in her lap, looking at him qui

l do it," he said, nervousl

bering beforehand one's own strength-by knowing th

ght; I'll do that.

will

l I

n't knock me down; it can't even stagger me. I'll take it in the highest

now what you're driving at. I promise. Onl

out Mrs.

t what is it? Is she il

smart, but she kept

d as though he would spring at her, warned her that he knew what was coming. She gave him time to get himself in hand by rising and taking the two or thre

er that it should be like this. It was better that it should be like this-with her there to keep him such company as one human being can keep for another at such an hour-better than if he were to learn it in the solitude of his own

ct told her when to speak again. She did it without changing the

forget yo

sick child, or of a person so sunk into wretch

ha

ords. "You won't f

ill vacant-vaca

prom

you're strong enoug

I'm

rushed, stupid attitude, his hands hanging

rn eyes. "Why did y

I was afraid, if any one else

. When he spoke he was like a man who tries to get his wits together

ow yo

as just on a level with his height, bowing his forehead upon them. As he did so she moved away. Seeing his broad shoulders hea

to hide his red eyes and his convulsed visage, he found her at the door of the dini

ake of his head and an i

ed. "It's nice and ho

three gulps, while she, standing likewise, made a feint of pouring a cup for herself. He left

the new situation Old Piper had lost its appeal, from sheer inadequacy to meet the new need. The fact of the marriage he contrived to keep at a distance. He could do this the more easily because it was so monstrous. It was so monstrous that the mind refused to take it in, and he made no attempt to force himself. He asked neither whom she had married nor why she had

spoke of him simply and spontaneously, taking "papa Lacon" as a matter of cou

frequency, through the good offices of Mr. and Mrs. Bland. He soon saw that the arrangements were really in cha

o where he had taken up a position he tried to make nonchalant, standing on the hearth-rug with his hands behind him. He felt curiously culpable before them, like a convict being visited by his friends in jail. He felt c

brother's, who looked about the room. Tom, as the elder, seemed to feel the responsibility of the meeting

lo,

lo,

e of greetings, Chippie al

o, Ch

atened to hang fire there, when the protest in Chip's hot he

u going to

g this demand. His brows went up in an expression of surprise, whic

t might pass as spontaneous, and then throwing his big arms about his young ones in a desperate embrace. After that the ice was broken, and, with the aid of the games and the picture-books prov

't you live wi

have another pap

her papa has

ur real papa, or

the remarks. Tom seemed to understand already that the s

f that winter and whenever they were possible-which was not often-in the summer that followed. It was a joy

turn to town. Tom was hanging on his shoulder, while Chipp

baby sister a

l's paradise were dissolved as mist, revealing a picture he had seen twice already, each time with an upleaping of the primal and the

hed him-Chippie looking up straight into his face, Tom gazing from the distant line of the bookcase, with his habit

pain. Just play by yourselves till Miss Bland comes for you.

en Chippie interrupted him. "W

ere, Chippie, here; and I hope you

is crucifixion never end? Have I deserved it? Was the crime

mind seemed to go blank till as he tramped down the street he

er! She's nothing

d his holy of holies, and left it bare to sacrilege. It gave him a fierce, perverted joy to feel that she whom he would have loved to shield wi

ess and sacrament and Saviour had no place in his speech. Edith had been the holiest thing he knew. She was both shrine and goddess. Now that the shrine had been p

er! Dam

l rooms that he rarely visited at this hour of the day. He was not, howe

ched it blister and writhe as though it had been a living thing. The flame seized on it slowly and unwillingly, biting at the edges in a curling wreath of blue, and eating its way inward only by degrees. But it

had been the semblance of his wife was no more than a little swollen rectangle

n with a voice that might have come from without,

ur love for her? You know you love her, and that you will nev

ke an accusation. The admission of it-when admission came-was