The Hermit and the Wild Woman

PAUL AMBROSE did not die and leave his fortune to Halidon, but the following summer he did something far more unexpected.  He went abroad again, and came back married.  Now our busy fancy had never seen Paul married.  Even Ned recognized the vague unlikelihood of such a metamorphosis.

“He’d stick at the parson’s fee—­not to mention the best man’s scarf-pin.  And I should hate,” Ned added sentimentally, “to see ’the touch of a woman’s hand’ desecrate the sublime ugliness of the ancestral home.  Think of such a house made ’cozy’!”

But when the news came he would own neither to surprise nor to disappointment.

“Goodbye, poor Academy!” I exclaimed, tossing over the bridegroom’s eight-page rhapsody to Halidon, who had received its duplicate by the same post.

“Now, why the deuce do you say that?” he growled.  “I never saw such a beast as you are for imputing mean motives.”

To defend myself from this accusation I put out my hand and recovered Paul’s letter.

“Here:  listen to this.  ’Studying art in Paris when I met her—­“the vision and the faculty divine, but lacking the accomplishment,” etc. . . .  A little ethereal profile, like one of Piero della Francesca’s angels . . . not rich, thank heaven, but not afraid of money, and already enamored of my project for fertilizing my sterile millions . . .’”

“Well, why the deuce—?” Ned began again, as though I had convicted myself out of my friend’s mouth; and I could only grumble obscurely:  “It’s all too pat.”

He brushed aside my misgivings.  “Thank heaven, she can’t paint, any how.  And now that I think of it, Paul’s just the kind of chap who ought to have a dozen children.”

“Ah, then indeed:  goodbye, poor Academy!” I croaked.

The lady was lovely, of that there could be no doubt; and if Paul now for a time forgot the Academy, his doing so was but a vindication of his sex.  Halidon had only a glimpse of the returning couple before he was himself snatched up in one of the chariots of adventure that seemed perpetually waiting at his door.  This time he was going to the far East in the train of a “special mission,” and his head was humming with new hopes and ardors; but he had time for a last word with me about Ambrose.

“You’ll see—­you’ll see!” he summed up hopefully as we parted; and what I was to see was, of course, the crowning pinnacle of the Academy lifting itself against the horizon of the immediate future.

It was in the nature of things that I should, meanwhile, see less than formerly of the projector of that unrealized structure.  Paul had a personal dread of society, but he wished to show his wife to the world, and I was not often a spectator on these occasions.  Paul indeed, good fellow, tried to maintain the pretense of an unbroken intercourse, and to this end I was asked to dine now and then; but when I went I found guests of a new type, who, after dinner, talked of sport and stocks, while their host blinked at them silently through the smoke of his cheap cigars.

The first innovation that struck me was a sudden improvement in the quality of the cigars.  Was this Daisy’s doing? (Mrs. Ambrose was Daisy.) It was hard to tell—­she produced her results so noiselessly.  With her fair bent head and vague smile, she seemed to watch life flow by without, as yet, trusting anything of her own to its current.  But she was watching, at any rate, and anything might come of that.  Such modifications as she produced were as yet almost imperceptible to any but the trained observer.  I saw that Paul wished her to be well dressed, but also that he suffered her to drive in a hired brougham, and to have her door opened by the raw-boned Celt who had bumped down the dishes on his bachelor table.  The drawing-room curtains were renewed, but this change served only to accentuate the enormities of the carpet, and perhaps discouraged Mrs. Ambrose from farther experiments.  At any rate, the desecrating touch that Halidon had affected to dread made no other inroads on the serried ugliness of the Ambrose interior.

In the early summer, when Ned returned, the Ambroses had flown to Europe again—­and the Academy was still on paper.

“Well, what do you make of her?” the traveller asked, as we sat over our first dinner together.

“Too many things—­and they don’t hang together.  Perhaps she’s still in the chrysalis stage.”

“Has Paul chucked the scheme altogether?”

“No.  He sent for me and we had a talk about it just before he sailed.”

“And what impression did you get?”

“That he had waited to send for me till just before he sailed.”

“Oh, there you go again!” I offered no denial, and after a pause he asked:  “Did she ever talk to you about it?”

“Yes.  Once or twice—­in snatches.”

“Well—?”

“She thinks it all too beautiful.  She would like to see beauty put within the reach of everyone.”

“And the practical side—?”

“She says she doesn’t understand business.”

Halidon rose with a shrug.  “Very likely you frightened her with your ugly sardonic grin.”

“It’s not my fault if my smile doesn’t add to the sum-total of beauty.”

“Well,” he said, ignoring me, “next winter we shall see.”

But the next winter did not bring Ambrose back.  A brief line, written in November from the Italian lakes, told me that he had “a rotten cough,” and that the doctors were packing him off to Egypt.  Would I see the architects for him, and explain to the trustees?  (The Academy already had trustees, and all the rest of its official hierarchy.) And would they all excuse his not writing more than a word?  He was really too groggy—­but a little warm weather would set him up again, and he would certainly come home in the spring.

He came home in the spring—­in the hold of the ship, with his widow several decks above.  The funeral services were attended by all the officers of the Academy, and by two of the young fellows who had won the travelling scholarships, and who shed tears of genuine grief when their benefactor was committed to the grave.

After that there was a pause of suspense—­and then the newspapers announced that the late Paul Ambrose had left his entire estate to his widow.  The board of the Academy dissolved like a summer cloud, and the secretary lighted his pipe for a year with the official paper of the still-born institution.

After a decent lapse of time I called at the house in Seventeenth Street, and found a man attaching a real-estate agent’s sign to the window and a van-load of luggage backing away from the door.  The care-taker told me that Mrs. Ambrose was sailing the next morning.  Not long afterward I saw the library table with the helmeted knights standing before an auctioneer’s door in University Place; and I looked with a pang at the familiar ink-stains, in which I had so often traced the geography of Paul’s visionary world.

Halidon, who had picked up another job in the Orient, wrote me an elegiac letter on Paul’s death, ending with—­“And what about the Academy?” and for all answer I sent him a newspaper clipping recording the terms of the will, and another announcing the sale of the house and Mrs. Ambrose’s departure for Europe.

Though Ned and I corresponded with tolerable regularity I received no direct answer to this communication till about eighteen months later, when he surprised me by a letter dated from Florence.  It began:  “Though she tells me you have never understood her—­” and when I had reached that point I laid it down and stared out of my office window at the chimney-pots and the dirty snow on the roof.

“Ned Halidon and Paul’s wife!” I murmured; and, incongruously enough, my next thought was:  “I wish I’d bought the library table that day.”

The letter went on with waxing eloquence:  “I could not stand the money if it were not that, to her as well as to me, it represents the sacred opportunity of at last giving speech to his inarticulateness . . .”

“Oh, damn it, they’re too glib!” I muttered, dashing the letter down; then, controlling my unreasoning resentment, I read on.  “You remember, old man, those words of his that you repeated to me three or four years ago:  ’I’ve half a mind to leave my money in trust to Ned’?  Well, it has come to me in trust—­as if in mysterious fulfillment of his thought; and, oh, dear chap—­” I dashed the letter down again, and plunged into my work.