ALICE BROWN (continued 2)

There isn't much to tell you about camp. I do many of the same old things. Perhaps I shall go to you; for sometimes I think you will not want to come back. Pierre misses you.

To the Unknown Friend

I hate vulgarity! Mrs. Montrose seems to be a very good woman, but she is vulgar. Why, when women are middle-aged and portly, do they feel at liberty to make rude personal speeches? She said to me yesterday:—

"If you want to marry Zoe, marry her soon." I was angry; I could only look at her. She laughed, but she did flush. "Don't glare at me, Ingomar," said she. "I'm speaking for your good. It isn't well for you to marry her, but somehow you're the kind of a child I want to see pleased. So keep on the spot. Captain Morton has come back, and he knows Zoe has had some money left her. Be on the spot!" I walked away without a word. Since then I have hardly seen Zoe. It is insulting to go near her. As if I did not trust her! As if I would be "on the spot!"

Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume

I can't wait to tell you! so this goes round to you by messenger. You couldn't guess it out in a lifetime. I am rich, truly rich! Uncle Obed has died. He was a miser, God bless him! and he's left it all to me. Did you ever hear of anything so absurd? Now I can buy myself elegant leisure, as if it were something to be found at the shops. I can give myself time to write my plays. I can even bring them out. Of course, though I lead the horse to water I can't make him drink; and though I were Midas I can't force the public to listen. Stay! is it impossible? Go to! there shall be souvenir nights, and the newspapers shall be fully primed. Actresses shall pose as injured wives, and scandals shall be described in flaming headlines. All print is open to us. We are rich, rich! I'm quite delirious with it.

Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose

Love,—You bewilder me. I didn't know you cared. Money? I didn't know you wanted it. I believe we have a great deal. My father told me I need not stint. Don't use yours. Please don't use it. Marry me to-morrow, and take mine.

Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume

Don't use it? Why, I want to use it! You might as well ask a new-crowned king to go and make a visit in central Africa, and pick up all the gold he could carry. Be patient. I'll come to Africa by and by. But just now I want to take mine ease in the opulence of my mind. I'm having a new dress made of a queer dull green and blue, and I'll buy a set of turquoises, God wot, and present them to myself from my dearest friend. Uncle Obed lived and died in South America. I won't wear mourning—I won't! I won't! Perhaps green and blue are mourning there.

Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose

Dearest lady,—Will you write me—just a word, only a word? You see I could not get a whisper from you last night, and you were so brilliant and sparkling, like a shining gem. Call me a baby, if you like. I don't mind. Only say you love me. Just the three words, dear? And will you take these little blue stones? I can see how they would look against your skin; I held them near a pinkish rose, and then I saw you in my mind and I threw the rose aside. Dear, the three words? I feel very humble, very much of a beggar. Will you?

Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume

Now you are not sleeping, as I said when I saw the hollows coming under your eyes, or you wouldn't fail in tact. It isn't like you. I want to buy my turquoises myself. Don't you see how I am luxuriating in the sense of unfamiliar power? It will pass, and then I'll take your gift. Of course—the three words—of course; but I can't be always writing them. They look so bathetic. Now I've seemed brutal and ill-tempered, all in one letter. But why will you be faultless and appealing, and why won't you see I am a child of the earth (the street-earth—paving-stones ground up and mixed with champagne) and go home to your birds and trees?

Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume

You were not interesting last night, and Captain Morton was; therefore I sat out with him. But you should not have turned white and frozen in a corner. That sort of docile remonstrance in you rouses my aunt to a height of righteousness which nature itself cannot endure. I mean my nature. She says you are perfection, and that I don't deserve you. The maxims are unimpeachable; I agree to both. Go, if you like, or stay and be agreeable. I forgot to tell you that I am going to New York to visit Alice May, Captain Morton's cousin. Auntie is angry. Are you angry, too? Is all the world suspicious, and of Othello's complexion? If the primitive passions do rage just as furiously even though we speak Victorian English, tell me, what's the use of development? We are simply more trammeled and less frank. Having blown off the steam of my wrath, I'll condescend to say that the invitation from Alice just reached me, and that I have decided quite suddenly. Again, does it make you angry? Would you rather have me fettered to your wrist by a nice, neat little chain with your monogram on it and a jeweled pad-lock?

Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose

Angry because you are going away? My lady, heart of me, you know me better. You are free from everything but my love. It follows you everywhere, poor pensioner. It has nothing to claim, nothing to exact. Give it place in your suite, and be patient with it; for it would hide away rather than break in upon your mood. All your moods are like crystal bubbles, no more to be shivered than one of God's beautiful worlds. I love you; but you are infinitely sacred, infinitely precious to me,—above all, and above measure, free. Go, dearest lady; be happy. Think of me when the thought is an added pleasure, and then—come back to me.

Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume

Dear,—O, at moments like this I feel as if I could repay you so royally! You are a knight peerless. Remember, whatever comes between us, that I knew this of you. I shall always think of you with reverence. If you were here, perhaps I should be perverse and willful, and prick your offered hand with some tempestuous thorn; but I do meet you with one half my soul—perhaps with all my real soul. I send you a kiss. Come to the station if you like; but it will be to see the outer me, the worldly one.

To the Unknown Friend

She is gone. There is nothing to do for a week—a month, perhaps—but prowl about this dismal city, looking in the faces of men. At the theatres there is heavy comedy played by buffoons. So I stay away and watch my kind, and wonder what I'm going to do to make a man of myself. Write? What? Worldfuls of thought are creating themselves within me, but as yet they are only star-dust. I doubt if they will be anything more. There is a strange ache in my throat, a strange failing within me. Is it what children call homesickness? I heard little Ethel Wynne, the other day, talking about her first visit from home:

"They put me to bed, and I cried and cried all alone, and I was sick at my stomach, and I pitied me."

"Poor Mother Bunch!" said her father. "Homesick!"

And I believe I "pity me," too. I must be a weak sort of a fellow. All the men I meet are absorbed in something—horse—college—games. I am sick for the unknown. Not the camp. I believe the loneliness there would kill me now. O, why talk of it, for the sole use of spending myself on paper! I am sick for her—her! Heavens—whatever that means—how terrible it is to love a woman! Yet it seems so simple. If she loved me—oh, she does love me, but she has her moods. She is compact of fire and air and dew, and her path is like the swallow's. How should I find her?

Francis Hume to Ernest Hume

I am taking violin lessons, as you suggest; also French. The verdict, in each case, is that I have been wonderfully well taught. I begin to know you for a genius. How have you managed to do so many things to perfection? The Frenchman, Dr. Pascal, is stirring my brain more than anything has yet succeeded in doing. So far I have felt like a muddy pool in which the stars and gas lamps try to reflect themselves and get only broken gleams in return. He is unsparingly critical of our American civilization, and feels at liberty to say so to me, because I am primeval man, fresh from my woods. He tells me such marvels of the French. According to him, they are the creators of form: form in art, in language, in mechanism. If I could reproduce his thought, it would be to tell you that, as we are the youngest of nations, so, too, are we the crudest. We are eaten up by an infinite complacency. Because we are big, we fancy we blot out the sun whenever we choose to turn our bulk. We submit to a thousand public abuses because we are too drenched in our own fatness to criticise or disturb ourselves. The individual is rampant, and all are enslaved. Consequently, this is not the land of liberty, but of license, overrun by a wild chase of "every man for himself." We worship our wealth, and not what it brings us. We adore display; it tickles us more to scatter money broadcast in blazonry than to live in chaste democracy and erect monuments to our public good. To beauty we are almost totally blind and deaf; and what wonder, when there is no milieu! We do not breathe an æsthetic atmosphere. Our public buildings are atrocious, and—and—I could go on for pages, but I spare you. The worst of it is that it may be true. You know how much my opinion is worth. I might as well be a boy of ten for all I can say, judged by experience and comparison; but to me everything in this city is small, disappointing, unbeautiful. Nothing, except the music, fills my ideal of what I thought life would be when I pictured it in my tent. Is life small? Are men pygmies? Or are my judgments naught?

Ernest Hume to Francis Hume

You are right in distrusting your judgments. I should not trust them, either, because, as you say, you have no standard of comparison. But I think this may truly be said. America is young, and therefore you must not expect of her a full artistic development. She has done some of the greatest moral work imaginable. There her instinct was unspoiled, just as that of youth should be. She came "trailing clouds of glory." But art is not the flower of the moment. Neither is it to be borrowed from other lands; though thus may we obtain the technique which teaches appreciation. A few geniuses seem to be born full-fledged; I doubt if a nation could be. A man, even a genius, has to learn to use his tools. So does a people. The French are form-mad. I don't wonder. Outer beauty is a subtile poison. Once taste it and you never lose the craving. It is a beautiful zeal, but not always the best zeal. I've been a coward and an absentee about life myself, but I'd rather trust some of those vigorous old pirates like Sir Francis Drake, who went about picking up new worlds like huckleberries, than a carpet-knight on tiptoe at the apex of civilization. But don't misunderstand me. My pen ran away. I don't under-value your Frenchman. I only say, Be patient with America. She is so young, poor girl! The only discouraging thing about it is, as he says, that she doesn't know it. If she would learn of her grandams and great-aunts, she would burn her fingers and tear her frock less often. Her lovers must simply be patient and wait till she grows to her task. Perhaps when she really is older and stronger, and has lifted her straw a day, she'll be capable of carrying this burden of government. No, she hasn't solved her problem yet; democracy is the highest form of government, but she does not yet know how to administer it. I find I am not so far out of gear with civilization as I thought, for I have strong ambitions for you. I find I want you to take up the fardel of public life; not to be a pessimistic complainer, standing aside with your hands in your pockets, but a citizen. And if you can do something, too, for art—but after all, I shall be content if you keep your soul clean.

Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume

Dear laddie,—I have a great deal to say to you, and I am utterly incapable of saying it. So the only resource I have is to be short and trust to your intuitions. You can supply my remorse, and my grief that life is what it is. We are blind instruments of blinder fate. Captain Morton came here soon after I did. You knew that. He says plainly that he came to see me. More than that, he came to see me because he loved me. If there is anything in love, isn't it this power of one creature over another? Are we responsible? Are we true to ourselves if we fight against it? I, at least, could not fight. If my bond to you had been a thousand times more strong, I should have snapped it like twine. I told him I would write you that it is broken. I wish life might be good to you, though I cannot be. And I wish I might never see you again, now, or after my marriage. I don't say, Forgive me. You can't yet, but some time perhaps you will.

Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose

Dear lady,—Since your letter reached me, I have written you a great many answers. None of them are worth sending. This is all I tried to say. You are just as much loved as before, and you are free,—perfectly, entirely free. It must be for you exactly as if you had never been bound. And you shall never see me.

To the Unknown Friend

There must be some outlet for this, or I shall be talking to people in the street. They will think I am crazy, and that will be the end of it. So I'll put it all down, madness and all. So Francis Hume came up to town, did he? And lost his love! He was well enough, poor fool, down in the woods; but the Great Ones that plague us for their sport sent him a mirage, and it dazzled him, and he sailed after it. No! no! no! It was not mirage. It was true—a true, true vision. She is real, and sweet, and sound, my lady with the merry laugh and seeking eyes. I had her; I have the vision of her. I wish I did not remember such piercing lines: "My good days are over!" And poor Thekla,—

Here's a supposition. Is a woman betrayed more lost than a man's soul when it is rejected and thrown back to live alone? Perhaps there is a difference. But this lonesomeness of the heart! If I died, should I still live and be I, bearing my wormwood with me? A life shattered so early! "You have broken my globe! you have broken my globe!"

They have come back to Boston, he and she. They came together, and I saw them. I watched him go up the steps with her, and heard him laugh when they went in. I sat on a seat in the mall, and watched. He wears a strange significance for me. I suppose I hate him, really; and yet, because she loves him, he holds a new and awful interest. It is really as if I loved him. I think of him with her thoughts; how strong he is, how black those eyes, how white his hands, how round his voice. And every thought poisons me, and I roll in my nettles and sting myself deeper.

... I loved a woman—O God! betrayed! betrayed! Not by her. O God, save her from punishment and remorse! She was deceived. She shall not suffer.

... I do not know what God is. I sat thinking of Him an hour in the dark, last night. All I know is that mankind has made Him. He is the cry raised by their united voices when they wail. He is the uttermost anguish of their hearts. They had to call it something, this wail of terror and grief, and so they called it God. I call it God, too. I lift up my voice with theirs, and cry, God! God!

... I have taken to following them about the town. They went to the theatre last night. I sat in the gallery, and looked down on them. How familiar she seems—how truly mine! Can anybody steal what is mine? After the theatre I slept a little, and dreamed that we were on a shore, a silver strip of sands, with the sea black before us. I dragged her from him, and when I had struck him down, she turned to me, with a glad, low cry, and clung to me, all warm. She was glad! And I have been warm about the heart all day, for the remembrance dwells with me. How beautiful it would be to kill him, if after it was all over she would turn to me and rest here in my arms!

Once I could have lived through this. There would have been horse and hound and battle-axe—sword and lance—all the rest of it. I could have gone away to the wars and worked off some of this horror. And now, like a rat in a trap, I've got to sit still here and go mad.

Mrs. Montrose to Ernest Hume

Dear friend,—We have made a wretched botch of it among us, with your poor boy. Zoe has jilted him. We might have guessed it. He has simply disappeared. He left a card here, and quietly changed his lodgings. At the Tremont House, they either don't know where he has gone or refuse to say. I am worried about him. Poor boy! poor boy! he won love everywhere, but he didn't want it. Only hers; and Captain Morton could have conjured her into a black cat any time these three years, if he had chosen. Don't blame me. There's a fate in things; and if you wanted your boy to escape tragedy, you shouldn't have given him that face.

Ernest Hume to Francis Hume

Dear boy,—Could you come down and see me a bit? I'm having a series of colds, and they keep me in bed and make me melancholy-stupid. Then, when you go back, perhaps I can go with you. Where are you now? From your giving the address of a post-office box, I fancy you have left the Tremont House. When will you come?

Francis Hume to Ernest Hume

Dear father,—I will come soon. I can't quite yet. I am sorry you are not well. I will come soon.

To the Unknown Friend

The voices of people about me do hurt me so. I won't see a soul I know, but the waiters asking for orders—O they hurt me so! I shall be like a woman, and scream. I can't see my father yet—not yet. I couldn't bear his face, or his voice. They would be so kind. I must be alone. Yet it is awful for crazy people to be alone. They are so beset by dreams—and faces. I don't think they are real, but still there are faces.

... My God! what have I seen to-day! I went walking—fast, fast—and I took the poorest streets, so that I might not meet any one I know. And all the animal-people—hog, rabbit, fox, cat, and the rest—kept coming toward me as I walked; for now there seems to be a sort of mist in the air, and one face flares out of the mist and then another. And it rushed over me suddenly how they must ache and suffer and languish to be so poor and so ignorant and vile. There is a dropping inside my heart, all the time, as if the blood that ought to nourish me were falling and falling and wasting itself in pain. And I began to look into the faces, and it seemed to me as if these people, too, were all of them bleeding. The ground was red and soaked. And then I learned that all this great world is in pain just like my own. I did not seem so much alone then—not quite. They were like me, all of them. I began to see how some might love them; and the more hideous they were, so much the more could one love. Who was Jesus Christ?

... I went to the Passion Music, and sat alone in a little crowded corner, afraid of being seen. It crucified my soul. I felt as if the violins were bowing on my brain, sawing the little gray strings that are my nerves. And then it came upon me like an overwhelming sea. This Man—this God-man—loved the whole world and was rejected by it. I loved one; and because she cast me off, I am as I am. True or not—His story—but is it true?

... Yet I cannot stop loving her. I love her to-day more, more, a thousand times more, if that can be. Is it true I have no right to love her? Then I have no right to breathe. I had no right to be born.

Ernest Hume to Francis Hume

Dear Francis,—Won't you come down for a day or two? If not, I think I shall go to you. Write me a word.

Francis Hume to Ernest Hume

Dear father,—Try to be patient with me. I'll come soon, truly soon. I'm not very good company. I'm thinking things out.

Telegram to Francis Hume

Concord, N. H. Ernest Hume sick here with pneumonia. Come.

Mrs. Montrose to Zoe Morton

I am glad you got off so well, and that the sun shone at last. Ever so many presents have come since you left. Mrs. Badger sends a Turkish rug, hideous, I think, and abominably dirty. I smelled cholera, and in five minutes sent the thing to be cleansed. Cousin Robert, in his usual forethoughtful way, brought a silver service, unmarked, so that you can exchange it if you like. Do you read the papers? Do you know about Francis Hume? I found out casually from Bellamy Winthrop, who chanced to go up with him in the train. Bellamy is a ferret; that you know. He could get news out of a stone—or Francis. It seems Mr. Hume was very ill, started to come down here, was taken worse in a Concord hotel, and died there before Francis could reach him. The boy took his body and carried it to that awful camp for burial. I desire never to set eyes on the place again. I wrote to him, but he doesn't answer. Good luck to you both. Regards to Captain Morton. I suppose I am to call him Ned? What with the wedding and this last nightmare, my nerves are quite unstrung.

Francis Hume had gone back. It was the spring now, and a visit to the spot at that same time last year reminded me that the grass would have been thick and tall before the door, and that the linden was in bloom. I had found old Pierre in the village, and asked him to row me over; but though his arms were still like whipcords, he declined. He seemed to think the visit an intrusion upon the two who had evidently made something as holy and unapproachable in his own life as the legends of his saints. On the other hand, he was jealously unwilling to trust me there alone; and when I found another man to row me, Pierre came of his own will and took a place in the boat. The day was a heaven of May, the lake untouched. Our oars made its only ripple. It was a strange, still progress. Pierre, dark, silent, a man of thought and experience, brooded all the way, as over vanished things; and the other man evidently held him in too much awe to speak. They landed me without a word. I walked about the spot where the log-cabin had stood, now a blank in the vegetation. I lingered by the Point, to catch the little ripples there; and I visited the spring where the two men used to drink. Pierre had followed me, with the cat-like tread of the woods. He touched my sleeve, and pointed through a forest path.

"There," he said. "That is the grave."

I understood. Ernest Hume had been buried there. I walked in a few steps, and Pierre pointed. A forest of maiden-hair strove and fluttered greenly. This was the grave. There was no stone to mark it; but at that moment it seemed to me very rich in peace to lie down so and to be absorbed into the life of the forest, throwing back no foolish outcry, "Here I lie! Remember."

When Pierre found that I was going back without disturbing even a leaf of his shrine, his heart opened a little to me, and he told me a few facts of the burial. Francis Hume had brought back his father's body, and they two had dug the grave and laid him within it. Francis had never spoken. He looked like the dead. He had no mind. Pierre repeated it: he had no mind.

I could understand. He was beside himself. His soul had been reft away into merciful dulness, somewhere outside his body. When the burial was over, Francis had dismissed him and walked away into the woods. Pierre followed, silently. All that day they walked, Francis unconscious that he was not alone. Then Pierre began to realize that they were going in a great circle, and that they were coming back to the grave. Night fell, and they were still walking, now away from the grave again, but always in a circle. The moon came out, and Pierre, very hungry, yet not daring to lose sight of Francis, approached him and tried to speak; the boy's eyes were wide open, unwinking, luminous. Pierre began to talk of food, and Francis struck out at him, and walked on. Pierre followed. They continued still in the same dull circle, all night long, Francis walking like a cat undeterred by branches and avoiding pitfalls with the cleverness of the insane, and the guide, wearied and stumbling. Just as the latter darkness of night came on, Francis paused, wavered a little, and Pierre caught him as he fell. He drew him upon his shoulder, and toiled back to camp with him. There he laid him upon a couch in the cabin, and poured brandy between his lips. All that day the boy slept, only stirring when Pierre roused him to administer milk or brandy; but at twilight time he moved and opened his eyes. Pierre knew he had "come back." Then the old man placed bread and meat beside him and went silently out. He had much experience, I judged, of the dignity of the soul; much knowledge, gained from lonely living, of her needs. He knew when she must be alone. Yet he watched all night in the grove, his quick ears strained for a movement of the creature within. What came next, Francis Hume only can tell.

It is two o'clock in the morning, and I am writing here in the cabin door-way. I have no light, yet I can see what I am writing. That, I remember, is not what ordinarily happens; but it seems quite natural. I must write in haste, for, as I judge, I have been crazy, and now I am sane; and I must put down something to remember, lest madness should come on again. I must have something to hold to, if I am to fall back into the great confusion and trouble of mind that have been sweeping me down like a sea. For I have learned something. It is most precious, and I must be sure to keep it. There is no doubt that I have killed my father. I was not by to tend him. When his soul was going forth, I let it go alone. I brought upon him the sharpest pangs of his mortality. But even that is well. Can I write what has befallen me, to recall it to my later mind when the vision has faded, as it may? I cling to it. I must try. First, I went down into hell. I do not know much about that. It is confused. And hell is not very important. We dig it for ourselves. Let me remember only the things of God. Then I awoke, and Pierre was feeding me. He went out, and I saw the twilight shaft of light strike across the cabin where it used to fall. But I knew everything was changed. The cabin was not real. Only I was real—and Pierre. My soul—was it my soul?—went out of the cabin, and swept across Lone Mountain to the sea, and over the sea and back again. She saw the great earth swing in space. She knew there are many worlds beside. She felt an awe of the vastness of things, and she began to be healed. Then she came back to me, and I took her in, like a dove with dew upon her wings, and she comforted me. Me? Was it she who went, or I? What is she? I do not know. But I was comforted. Then, as I lay there, vision after vision began to throng upon me, and the cabin walls lifted up, and let me see the world. And I looked upon the great balances wherein we are held, and millions of souls, uncounted souls, in myriads, like little points of light, fleeing home to God. That was it—God. That was what I had sinned and suffered for, to know Him. I saw the souls going toward Him, and an ineffable delight took hold on me because I felt that I was going, too; not my body, not even the Me that stayed in the cabin, though every impulse of me was tending fast that way. I knew a flower's feeling when its fragrance meets the sun. This was love; and immediately I understood everything that it was necessary for me to understand. I comprehended His perfect well-wishing toward us. I knew one blood ran from His heart through ours. I knew how small a thing it is to say "I suffer." I? What is I? A mote in the whole, an aching nerve in one great plexus. And the whole will some day be nourished, and we shall be healed. I do not know whether I can believe this when I read it by day; but the cabin is thronged with—radiances. I have not learned what to call them, but they are infinitely beautiful, patient, strong, and they uphold me. I cannot think they suffer with me; their wisdom is too great. But they crowd about me silently, forbearingly, divinely. They are incarnate love. I stretch out my hands to them. While they stay, I am almost happy. I do not see them, yet they shed a lustre and the soul perceives it. I have learned—what have I learned? Obedience. I must not strive nor cry. I must serve. What? I do not know. But I must serve, even in the dark and enchained. I am content to grope, with my eyes bandaged. Content? No, this is joy. I have tasted God. I drink no other spring.

I have read this over. It is all wrong, all poor and pale; I have told nothing. Yet the visions—they are in my soul. I throw my arms about them and hold them fast. Perhaps even they must be withdrawn. Perhaps it is a part of my service to lose my way. Even that I accept. I reach my hand for the cup—thirstily. I drink, and to the Unknown God. What is He? I am contented not to know. What am I? It is His will I should not know. Only this: the soul is perfect, indestructible, and she goes to lave herself in Him.

The next morning, said Pierre, Francis made swift preparations for going away. They were few, for he wished to retain nothing belonging to his former life. He took last long looks about the walls, he studied the pictures as if he would learn them by heart, and laid his hand upon one and another of the things that had been dear to him. Then he touched fire to the building, and stood by outside, waiting while it burned. Pierre very plainly understood why he did it, though he could not tell. He seemed to distrust the quality of my intelligence because I asked primitive questions. Was it because Francis feared marauders? Was it some idea of sacrifice to his father's memory? Was it because he felt himself unworthy to retain the precious surroundings of a life to which he had been false? As I became insistent, Pierre grew dumb. The cabin burned, he said. Francis watched it. Then he went away. He never came back.

In the old man's countenance I fancied I could trace, under a veiling patience, the lines of an immortal grief. Francis, I could understand, had been the child of his heart, his one human love. It had taken all the great austerity of the forest to teach him to bear that loss. Yet you could see from his face, as in the faces of so many who suffer with dignity, that he was not destitute of hope.

It has been surprisingly difficult to follow the after-track of Francis Hume. For those who knew him have only to say that he disappeared. But he disappeared merely by settling down at their own door: the back-door where carriages never come. He selected a very poor and sordid street in the city where he had met his loss, and betook himself there to live; not, I believe, with any idea of work among the poor, but because he had probed life to the bottom in his own experience, and he felt constrained to seek a lower depth. He had acquired that passionate abnegation which is the child of grief; not undervaluing the joys of time, he had learned that they were not for him. Now his life became very simple, very humble, in the expectancy of its attitude; for he leaned upon God, and waited until he should be told what to do. There are strange, vivid memories of him among the people with whom he walked. Evidently he gave munificently, yet from such austerity of life, and with such directness of speech and action, that few presumed to bleed him further. In that same dark region remain to-day strange touches of magnificence and beauty; a great picture here, a glowing curtain there, dowered with a richness the present owners may not understand, although they dimly feel it. He had no formulated idea of charity, no recognition of the fact that there are theories of doing good. All that can be discovered about his later life is that he was much beloved, and that he loved much; the latter, from an aching sense of the pain common to all souls, a sense of spiritual kinship. At least, he was spared many of the tawdry temptations of youth; for grief had touched him so near that she had opened his eyes to the foolishness of vain desires. He could watch the fluttering of the garment of happiness without wondering if happiness were really underneath. He had seen the real; thenceforth, for him, there was no illusion. He simply lived, and shared when the inner voice told him to share; and as it afterwards proved, he made his will, and left his fortune to buy great tracts of pine woods for a camping-ground forevermore. But that does not pertain to his story. Sufficient to know that the trust has been very wisely administered, and that hundreds of squalid creatures were last summer turned loose there.

Meantime Zoe Morton was fulfilling to the letter her own cynical prophecy of an unhappy marriage. There is no doubt whatever about the life she led with Captain Morton. He was a frank materialist. Every man has his price, said he; every woman also. The baser breed of vices are as unavoidable as any other part of the earthly scheme. Eat and drink—and die when you must. He was kind enough to Zoe in the manner of a man who would not wantonly hurt his horse or dog; he would have been kinder had she not rebelled. But after the manner of her sex and nature, when they wed with Bottom, she went hysterical-mad. He got tired—and he rode away. Then, after five years of marriage and two of acute invalidism, thus she wrote Francis Hume:—

I send this to the Boston post-office in the hope of finding you. My aunt thinks she saw you in the street the other day; but I did not need that to tell me you were here. I have guessed it for a long time. I have almost felt you knew how I suffer. I am asking an impossible service. Captain Morton is abroad, and he refuses to come home. I am dying, and he will not believe it. I have written him and cabled him; but I have said I was dying for the last three years. Now it is true. Will you go over there and see him? Make him believe it. Make him come to me. I do not know how—but make him. His bankers are Baring Bros. Perhaps they can tell you where he is.

Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose

Dear lady,—I start to-night. It was generous of you to ask me. He shall come.

But Captain Morton was not to be found, either in England or on the Continent; and so there was much delay which must have tried the soul of the messenger beyond endurance. Through one of the foolish ironies of life, the captain ("rather fat," six years before!) had decided, in a futile blindness to his own limitations, to join an exploring party to the interior of Abyssinia. He had always a childish vanity; perhaps that led him to ignore all the habits of his luxurious past and seek healthier living through the means he had despised. Thus to nourish himself for more vices! So does the bon vivant recuperate at Spas.

Thither, as soon as Francis Hume could get upon his track, he followed him, through danger and delay, through wilderness and night. The difficulties of the journey were a thousandfold enhanced by his ignorance of any definite route; and he made many a maddening detour and experienced tragic loss in the treachery of guides. This, at least, is apparent from some crumpled notes of travel found among his possessions. At length, suddenly, dramatically, he came upon his man. What arguments he used, no one can say. Perhaps Morton had grown sick of his fool's errand, perhaps his heart was really touched, at last; but he did turn about and make all due speed to America. Francis accompanied him only to the fastest steamer route; and then dropped off to take another boat home. His notes keep rigid silence concerning the captain. Did he hate him to the last, or had hatred, like other spawn of evil, sunk, for him, in the unplumbed depths of larger seas? Captain Morton came home and found his wife still living. She died within a week, and there is a strange contradiction in her end. The nurse who was with her says that she moaned for him, like a child, through all those dreary days; and yet when he came into the room she looked at him, turned her face to the wall, and would not speak. It seemed almost as if she had held herself within a bond she loathed, and as if death had really freed her.

Francis returned to Boston on his slow-sailing boat. They were coming up the harbor in the flush of twilight, and the State-house dome stood like a golden beehive against the sky. He had kept very much to himself, said one of the passengers who was strongly drawn to him, and now he stood by the rail, not looking forward with the seeking glance of those whose voyage is done, but musingly into the sea. A little sailboat had been keeping alongside. Two men were in it, and they were plainly drunk. They had a little rough dog, and they were teasing him. The passengers looked on with indignant protest. One or two called out; but the men swore back and bullied him the more. Their last pleasantry was to hold him over the side with a feint of dropping him; and suddenly, in an access of cruelty, they called out that he should swim for it. And then they dropped him. Francis Hume had not followed the entire occurrence; but the passenger who told it happened to glance at him at the moment when the dog was thrown overboard. That he saw. She says he glowed at once with pure anger. His face lighted and flamed; and two seconds after the dog went down, Francis Hume sprang after him. There was an outcry on the instant. A boat was lowered, but some strange clumsiness of execution seemed to overshadow the whole thing; so that Hume had to keep himself afloat for what seemed a long time. In reality, she supposes, it was minutes. That was nothing. Miles of swimming were nothing to a man of his training; but when the boat reached him, he threw the dog into it and himself slipped away. That was all. The event is confused in the minds of everybody present, and no one can wholly account for it. It seemed fatality. He simply went down, and his body was not recovered. The men in the sailboat, shocked into soberness, put about, and left the steamer in all possible haste; and the passenger who told me the story dried the little dog in her shawl and promised him a home. But of this thing every one is convinced. Francis Hume must have gone willingly to his death, but he did not choose it. The sailors of the rescuing boat say that his face showed a strange bewilderment, but no refusal of their efforts; he did not mean to drown. There must have been, said the ship's doctor, some lesion of the heart.

Much as I know of the reality of his life (and it ended not so long ago), it never seems to me to belong to this actual world, this "city by the sea." For me, its mirror lies, strangely enough, in another life of noble ends and uncompleted action: Beauchamp's Career. There is your only parallel, even to the splendid futility of its close. Read this from Meredith's novel, which is, after all, nothing less than vivid biography, and fit it to the end of Francis Hume.

"An old man volunteered the information. 'That's the boy. That boy was in his father's boat out there, with two of his brothers, larking; and he and another, older than him, fell overboard; and just then Commander Beauchamp was rowing by, and I saw him from off here, where I stood, jump up and dive, and he swam to his boat with one of them, and got him in safe: that boy; and he dived again after the other, and was down a long time. Either he burst a vessel or he got cramp, for he'd been rowing himself from the schooner grounded down at the river-mouth, and must have been hot when he jumped in; either way, he fetched the second up, and sank with him. Down he went.'

"A fisherman said: ... 'Do you hear that voice thundering? That's the great Lord Romfrey. He's been directing the dragging since five o' the evening, and will till he drops or drowns, or up comes the body.'

"'O God, let's find the body!' the woman with the little boy called out.

"'... My lord! my lord!' sobbed the woman, and dropped on her knees.

"'What's this?' the earl said, drawing his hand away from the woman's clutch at it.

"'She's the mother, my lord,' several explained to him.

"'Mother of what?'

"'My boy,' the woman cried, and dragged the urchin to Lord Romfrey's feet, cleaning her boy's face with her apron.

"'It's the boy Commander Beauchamp drowned to save,' said a man.

"All the lights of the ring were turned on the head of the boy.... The boy struck out both arms to get his fists against his eyelids.

"This is what we have in exchange for Beauchamp.

"It was not uttered, but it was visible in the blank stare at one another of the two men who loved Beauchamp, after they had examined the insignificant bit of mud-bank life remaining in this world in the place of him."

But those of us who loved Francis Hume do not ask to find his body, even for tender burial. We only pray that in some bright star-passage we may be fortunate, and one day see his soul.