The Hermit and the Wild Woman

“WON’T you own yourself a beast, dear boy?” Halidon asked me gently, one afternoon of the following spring.

I had escaped for a six weeks’ holiday, and was lying outstretched beside him in a willow chair on the terrace of their villa above Florence.

My eyes turned from the happy vale at our feet to the illuminated face beside me.  A little way off, at the other end of the terrace, Mrs. Halidon was bending over a pot of carnations on the balustrade.

“Oh, cheerfully,” I assented.

“You see,” he continued, glowing, “living here costs us next to nothing, and it was quite her idea, our founding that fourth scholarship in memory of Paul.”

I had already heard of the fourth scholarship, but I may have betrayed my surprise at the plural pronoun, for the blood rose under Ned’s sensitive skin, and he said with an embarrassed laugh:  “Ah, she so completely makes me forget that it’s not mine too.”

“Well, the great thing is that you both think of it chiefly as his.”

“Oh, chiefly—­altogether.  I should be no more than a wretched parasite if I didn’t live first of all for that!”

Mrs. Halidon had turned and was advancing toward us with the slow step of leisurely enjoyment.  The bud of her beauty had at last unfolded:  her vague enigmatical gaze had given way to the clear look of the woman whose hand is on the clue of life.

“She’s not living for anything but her own happiness,” I mused, “and why in heaven’s name should she?  But Ned—­”

“My wife,” Halidon continued, his eyes following mine, “my wife feels it too, even more strongly.  You know a woman’s sensitiveness.  She’s—­there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for his memory—­because—­in other ways. . . .  You understand,” he added, lowering his tone as she drew nearer, “that as soon as the child is born we mean to go home for good, and take up his work—­Paul’s work.”

Mrs. Halidon recovered slowly after the birth of her child:  the return to America was deferred for six months, and then again for a whole year.  I heard of the Halidons as established first at Biarritz, then in Rome.  The second summer Ned wrote me a line from St. Moritz.  He said the place agreed so well with his wife—­who was still delicate—­that they were “thinking of building a house there:  a mere cleft in the rocks, to hide our happiness in when it becomes too exuberant”—­and the rest of the letter, very properly, was filled with a rhapsody upon his little daughter.  He spoke of her as Paula.

The following year the Halidons reappeared in New York, and I heard with surprise that they had taken the Brereton house for the winter.

“Well, why not?” I argued with myself.  “After all, the money is hers:  as far as I know the will didn’t even hint at a restriction.  Why should I expect a pretty woman with two children” (for now there was an heir) “to spend her fortune on a visionary scheme that its originator hadn’t the heart to carry out?”

“Yes,” cried the devil’s advocate—­“but Ned?”

My first impression of Halidon was that he had thickened—­thickened all through.  He was heavier, physically, with the ruddiness of good living rather than of hard training; he spoke more deliberately, and had less frequent bursts of subversive enthusiasm.  Well, he was a father, a householder—­yes, and a capitalist now.  It was fitting that his manner should show a sense of these responsibilities.  As for Mrs. Halidon, it was evident that the only responsibilities she was conscious of were those of the handsome woman and the accomplished hostess.  She was handsomer than ever, with her two babies at her knee—­perfect mother as she was perfect wife.  Poor Paul!  I wonder if he ever dreamed what a flower was hidden in the folded bud?

Not long after their arrival, I dined alone with the Halidons, and lingered on to smoke with Ned while his wife went alone to the opera.  He seemed dull and out of sorts, and complained of a twinge of gout.

“Fact is, I don’t get enough exercise—­I must look about for a horse.”

He had gone afoot for a good many years, and kept his clear skin and quick eye on that homely regimen—­but I had to remind myself that, after all, we were both older; and also that the Halidons had champagne every evening.

“How do you like these cigars?  They’re some I’ve just got out from London, but I’m not quite satisfied with them myself,” he grumbled, pushing toward me the silver box and its attendant taper.

I leaned to the flame, and our eyes met as I lit my cigar.  Ned flushed and laughed uneasily.  “Poor Paul!  Were you thinking of those execrable weeds of his?—­I wonder how I knew you were?  Probably because I have been wanting to talk to you of our plan—­I sent Daisy off alone so that we might have a quiet evening.  Not that she isn’t interested, only the technical details bore her.”

I hesitated.  “Are there many technical details left to settle?”

Halidon pushed his armchair back from the fire-light, and twirled his cigar between his fingers.  “I didn’t suppose there were till I began to look into things a little more closely.  You know I never had much of a head for business, and it was chiefly with you that Paul used to go over the figures.”

“The figures—?”

“There it is, you see.”  He paused.  “Have you any idea how much this thing is going to cost?”

“Approximately, yes.”

“And have you any idea how much we—­how much Daisy’s fortune amounts to?”

“None whatever,” I hastened to assert.

He looked relieved.  “Well, we simply can’t do it—­and live.”

“Live?”

“Paul didn’t live,” he said impatiently.  “I can’t ask a woman with two children to think of—­hang it, she’s under no actual obligation—­” He rose and began to walk the floor.  Presently he paused and halted in front of me, defensively, as Paul had once done years before.  “It’s not that I’ve lost the sense of my obligation—­it grows keener with the growth of my happiness; but my position’s a delicate one—­”

“Ah, my dear fellow—­”

“You do see it?  I knew you would.” (Yes, he was duller!) “That’s the point.  I can’t strip my wife and children to carry out a plan—­a plan so nebulous that even its inventor. . . .  The long and short of it is that the whole scheme must be re-studied, reorganized.  Paul lived in a world of dreams.”

I rose and tossed my cigar into the fire.  “There were some things he never dreamed of,” I said.

Halidon rose too, facing me uneasily.  “You mean—?”

“That you would taunt him with not having spent that money.”

He pulled himself up with darkening brows; then the muscles of his forehead relaxed, a flush suffused it, and he held out his hand in boyish penitence.

“I stand a good deal from you,” he said.

He kept up his idea of going over the Academy question—­threshing it out once for all, as he expressed it; but my suggestion that we should provisionally resuscitate the extinct board did not meet with his approval.

“Not till the whole business is settled.  I shouldn’t have the face—­Wait till I can go to them and say:  ’We’re laying the foundation-stone on such a day.’”

We had one or two conferences, and Ned speedily lost himself in a maze of figures.  His nimble fancy was recalcitrant to mental discipline, and he excused his inattention with the plea that he had no head for business.

“All I know is that it’s a colossal undertaking, and that short of living on bread and water—­” and then we turned anew to the hard problem of retrenchment.

At the close of the second conference we fixed a date for a third, when Ned’s business adviser was to be called in; but before the day came, I learned casually that the Halidons had gone south.  Some weeks later Ned wrote me from Florida, apologizing for his remissness.  They had rushed off suddenly—­his wife had a cough, he explained.

When they returned in the spring, I heard that they had bought the Brereton house, for what seemed to my inexperienced ears a very large sum.  But Ned, whom I met one day at the club, explained to me convincingly that it was really the most economical thing they could do.  “You don’t understand about such things, dear boy, living in your Diogenes tub; but wait till there’s a Mrs. Diogenes.  I can assure you it’s a lot cheaper than building, which is what Daisy would have preferred, and of course,” he added, his color rising as our eyes met, “of course, once the Academy’s going, I shall have to make my head-quarters here; and I suppose even you won’t grudge me a roof over my head.”

The Brereton roof was a vast one, with a marble balustrade about it; and I could quite understand, without Ned’s halting explanation, that “under the circumstances” it would be necessary to defer what he called “our work—­” “Of course, after we’ve rallied from this amputation, we shall grow fresh supplies—­I mean my wife’s investments will,” he laughingly corrected, “and then we’ll have no big outlays ahead and shall know exactly where we stand.  After all, my dear fellow, charity begins at home!”