cout, UL M.
ART. IN FICTION.
Wists Js Sle N DEON
A tovel
Man is not above Nature, but in Nature”
HAECKEL
LONDON
OSGOOD, McILVAINE & CO.
45, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1897
Copyright, 1897, by Haxrur & Brorugrs.
Ad vights reserved.
Printed in New York, U.S.A,
hE SEALS TET TE LET TTB TN RINNE RR ORE RE I A
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rt SOON ER OE BN tn
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G. W. McC.
BOOK I
VARIATION FROM TYPE
OMNE VIVUM EX OVO
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THE DESCENDANT
CHAPTER I
Tue child sat upon the roadside. A stiff wind was ris-
ing westward, blowing over stretches of meadow-land that
had long since run to waste, a scarlet tangle of sumac and
sassafras. In the remote West, from whose heart the wind
had risen, the death-bed of the Sun showed bloody after the
carnage, and nearer at hand naked branches of poplar and
sycamore were silhouetted against the shattered horizon,
like skeletons of human arms that had withered in the
wrath of God.
Over the meadows the amber light of the afterglow fell
like rain. It warmed the spectres of dead carrot flowers,
and they awoke to reflect its glory; it dabbled in the blood
of sumac and pokeberry; and it set its fiery torch to the
goldenrod till it ignited and burst into bloom, flashing a
subtle flame from field to field, a glorious bonfire from the
hand of Nature.
The open road wound lazily along, crossing transversely
the level meadow-land and leading from the small town of
Plaguesville to somewhere. Nobody—at least nobody
thereabouts—knew exactly where, for it was seldom that a
native left Plaguesville, and when he did it was only to go
to Arlington, a few miles farther on, where the road dropped
him, stretching southward.
The child sat restlessly upon the rotten rails that were
4 THE DESCENDANT
once a fence. He was lithe and sinewy, with a sharp brown
face and eyes that were narrow and shrewd—a small, wild
animal of the wood come out from the underbrush to bask
in the shifting sunshine.
Occasionally a Jaborer passed along the road from his
ficld work, his scythe upon his shoulder, the pail in which
his dinner was brought swinging at his side. Once a troop
of boys had gone by with a dog, and then a beggar hob-
bling on his crutch. They were following in the wake of
the circus, which was moving to Plaguesville from a neigh-
boring town. The child had seen the caravan go by. He
‘had seen the mustang ponies and the cowboys who rode
them ; he had seen the picture of the fat lady painted upon
the outside of her tent; and he had even seen the elephant
as it passed in its casings.
Presently the child rose, stooping to pick the blackberry
briers from his bare legs. He wore nankeen trousers some-
what worn in the seat and a nankeen shirt somewhat worn
at the elbows. His hand was rough and brier-pricked, his
feet stained with the red clay of the cornfield. Then, as
he turned to move onward, there was a sound of footsteps,
and a man’s figure appeared suddenly around a bend in the
road, breaking upon the glorified landscape like an ill-
omened shadow.
It was the minister from the church near the town. He
was a small man with a threadbare coat, a large nose, and
no chin to speak of. Indeed, the one attribute of saintli-
ness in which he was found lacking was a chin. An inch
the more of chin, and he might have been held as a saint;
an inch the less, and he passed as a simpleton. Such is
the triumph of Matter over Mind.
“Who is it?” asked the minister. He always inquired
for a passport, not that he had any curiosity upon the sub-
ject, but that he believed it to be his duty. As yet he had
only attained that middle state of sanctity where duty and
pleasure are clearly defined. ‘The next stage is the one in
which, from excessive cultivation of the senses or atrophy
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THE DESCENDANT 5
of the imagination, the distinction between the things we
ought to do and the things we want to do becomes obliter-
‘ated.
The child came forward.
“Tt’s me,” he said. “ Little Mike Akershem, as minds
the pigs.”
“Ah!” said the minister. ‘The boy that Farmer Wat-
kins is bringing up. Why, bless my soul, boy, you’ve been
fighting !”
The child whimpered. He drew his shirt sleeve across
his eyes.
“T—T warn’t doin’ nothin’,” he wailed, ‘ Leastways,
nothin’ but mindin’ the pigs, when Jake Johnson knocked
me down, he did.”
“He's a wicked boy,” commented the minister, “and
should be punished. And what did you do when Jake John-
son knocked you down ?”
“T_T fell,” whimpered the child.
“A praiseworthy spirit, Michael, and I am glad to see it
in one so young and with such a heritage. You know the
good book says: ‘Do good unto them that persecute you
and despitefully use you.’ Now, you would like to do good
unto Jake Johnson, wouldn’t you, Michael?”
“‘J_I’d like to bus’ him open,” sobbed the child. Tears
were streaming from his eyes. When he put up his hand
to wipe them away it left dirty smears upon his cheeks,
The minister smiled and then frowned,
“You've forgotten your Catechism, Michael,” he said.
“T’m afraid you don’t study it as you should.”
The boy bubbled with mirth. Smiles chased across his
face like gleams of sunshine across a cloud.
“T do,” he rejoined, righteously, ‘Jake, he fought me
on o’count 0’ it.”
“The Catechism!” exclaimed the minister. “Jake fought
you because of the Catechism ?”
“It war a word,” said the child. “Jake said it war con-
sarnin’ me an’ I—”
6 THE DESCENDANT
“What word?” the minister demanded. “What did the
word mean ?”
“It war an ugly word.” ‘The boy’s eyes were dry. He
looked up inquiringly from beneath blinking lids. “It war
dam—damni—”
“ Ah! said the minister, in the tone in which he said
“ Amen” upon a Sabbath, “ damnation.”
“ Air it consarning me?” asked the child with anxious
uncertainty.
The minister looked down into the sharp face where the
gleams of sunshine had vanished, and only the cloud re-
mained. He saw the wistful eyes beneath the bushy hair,
the soiled, sunburned face, the traces of a dirty hand that
had wiped tears away—the whole pitiful littleness of the
lad. The nervous blinking of the lids dazzled him. They
opened and shut like a flame that flickers and revives in a
darkened room.
“No,” he said, gently, “you have nothing to do with
that, so help me God.”
Again the boy bubbled with life. Then, with a swift,
tremulous change, he grew triumphant. He looked up
hopefully, an eager anxiety breaking his voice.
“Tt might be consarning Jake hisself,” he prompted.
But the minister had stretched the mantle of his creed
sufficiently.
“Go home,” he said; “the pigs are needing their supper.
What? Eh? Hold ona bit!” For the boy had leaped
off like laughter, ‘‘What about the circus? There’s to be
no gadding into such evil places, I hope.”
The boy’s face fell. ‘No, sir,” he said. “It’s a quar-
ter, an’ I ’ain’t got it.”
“ And the other boys?”
“Jake Johnson war looking through a hole in the fence
an’ he wouldn’t let me peep never so little.”
“Oh!” said the minister, slowly. He looked down at his
boots. The road was dusty and they were quite gray.
Then he blushed and looked at the boy. He was thinking
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THE DESCENDANT 7
of the night when he had welcomed him into the world—a
little brown bundle of humanity, unclaimed at the great
threshold of life. Then he thought of the mother, an awk-
ward woman of the fields, with a strapping figure and a coarse
beauty of face. He thought of the hour when the woman
lay dying in the little shanty beyond the mill. Something
in the dark, square face startled him. The look in the eyes
was not the look of a woman of the fields, the strength in
the bulging brow was more than the strength of a peasant.
His code of life was a stern one, and it had fallen upon
stern soil. As the chosen ones of Israel beheld in Moab a
wash-pot, so he and his people saw in the child only an em-
bodied remnant of Jehovah’s wrath.
But beneath the code of righteousness there quivered a
germ of human kindness.
“ Br—er, that’s all,” he said, his nose growing larger and
his chin shorter. ‘“ You may go—but—how much have
you? Money, I mean—”
“ight cents,” replied the child; “three for blackberry-
ing, an’ five for findin’ Deacon Joskins’s speckled pig as
war lost. Five and three air eight—”
“And seventeen more,” added the minister. ‘“ Well,
here they are. Mind, now, learn your Catechism, and no
gadding into evil places, remember that.”
And he walked down the road with a blush on his face
and a smile in his heart.
The child stood in the white dust of the road, A pale
finger of sunshine struggled past him to the ditch beside
the way, where a crimson blackberry-vine palpitated like a
vein leading to the earth’s throbbing heart, About him
the glory waned upon the landscape and went out; the
goldenrod had burned itself to ashes. A whippoorwill,
somewhere upon the rotten fence rails, called out sharply,
its cry rising in a low, distressful wail upon the air and. los-
ing itself among the brushwood. Then another answered
from away in the meadow, and another from the glimmer-
ing cornfield,
Tne eS EE SEE TR ERETAN AE AE EA TORN Eat 8 OER RET TET
g THE DESCENDANT
A mist, heavy and white as foam, was rising with the
tide of night and breaking against the foot of the shadowy
hills.
The boy shifted upon his bare feet and the dust rose in
a tiny cloud about him, Far in the distance shone the
lights of the circus. He could almost hear the sound of
many fiddles, Behind him, near the turnpike branch, the
hungry pigs were rooting in the barnyard. He started, and
the minister’s money jingled in his pocket, In the circus-
tent were the mustang ponies, the elephant, and the fat
lady. He shifted restlessly. Perspiration stood in beads
upon his forehead; his shirt collar was warm and damp.
His eyes emitted a yellow flame in their nervous blinking.
There was a sudden patter of feet, and he went spinning
along the white dust of the road.
Be I Sa rth AE CETL EE Ae IS
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CHAPTER II
THe circus was over. One by one the lanterns went out;
the tight-rope walker wiped the paint and perspiration from
his face; the clown laid aside his eternal smile.
From the opening in the tent a thin stream of heated hu-
manity passed into the turnpike, where it divided into lit-
tle groups, some lingering around stationary wheelbarrows
upon which stood buckets of pink lemonade, others turning
into the branch roads that led to the farm-houses along
the way.
In the midst of them, jostled helplessly from side to side,
moved that insignificant combination of brown flesh and
blue nankeen known as Michael Akershem. As the crowd
dwindled away, his pace quickened until he went trotting at
full speed through the shadows that were flung across the
deserted road. Upon the face of the moon, as she looked
down upon his solitary little figure, there was the derisive
smile with which crabbed age regards callow youth and
Eternity regards Time.
Perhaps, had he been wise enough to read her face aright,
the graven exaltation of his own might have given place to
an expression more in keeping with the cynicism of omnis-
cience.
But just then, as he trotted resolutely along, the planet
was of less importance in his reverie than one of the tallow
candles that illumined the circus-tent.
The night was filled with visions, but among them the
solar system held no place. Over the swelling hills, along
the shadowy road, in the milky moonlight, trooped the
splendid heroes of the circus-ring. His mind was on fire
with the light and laughter; and the chastened brilliance
fe) THE DESCENDANT
of the night, the full sweep of the horizon, the eternal hills
themselves seemed but a fitting setting for his tinselled vis-
itants. The rustling of the leaves above his head was the
flapping of the elephant’s ears; the shimmer upon tufts of
goldenrod, the yellow hair of the snake-charmer; and the
quiet of the landscape, the breathless suspense of the ex-
cited audience.
As he ran, he held his worn straw hat firmly in his hand.
His swinging strides impelled his figure from side to side,
and before him in the dust his shadow flitted like an em-
bodied energy.
Beneath the pallor of the moonlight the concentration of
his face was revealed in grotesque exaggeration. His eyes
had screwed themselves almost out of vision, the constant
blinking causing them to flicker in shafts of light. Across
his forehead a dark vein ran like a seam that had been left
unfelled by the hand of Nature.
From the ditch beside the road rose a heavy odor of
white thunder-blossom. The croaking of frogs grew louder
as, one by one, they trooped to their congress among the
rushes. ‘The low chirping of insects began in the hedges,
the treble of the cricket piercing shrilly above the base of
the jar-fly. Some late glow-worms blazed like golden dew-
drops in the fetid undergrowth.
The boy went spinning along the road. With the incon-
sequence of childhood all the commonplaces of every day
seemed to have withered in the light of later events. The
farmer and his pigs had passed into the limbo of forgetable
things.
With the flickering lights of the cottage where Farmer
Watkins lived, a vague uneasiness settled upon him; he
felt a half-regret that Providence, in the guise of the min-
ister, had thought fit to beguile him from the unpleasant
path of duty. But the regret was {leeting, and as he crawled
through a hole in the fence he managed to manipulate his
legs as he thought the rope-walker would have done under
the circumstances,
THE DESCENDANT II
From the kitchen window a stream of light issued, falling
upon the gravelled path without. Against the lighted in-
terior he beheld the bulky form of the farmer, and beyond
him the attenuated shadow of the farmer’s wife stretching,
a depressing presence, upon the uncarpeted floor.
As the child stepped upon the porch the sound of voices
caused him to pause with abruptness. A lonely turkey,
roosting in the locust-tree beside the house, stirred in its
sleep, and a shower of leaves descended upon the boy’s
head. He shook them off impatiently, and they fluttered to
his feet.
The farmer was speaking. He was a man of peace, and
his tone had the deprecatory quality of one who is talking
for the purpose of keeping another silent.
“My father never put his hand to the plough,” said the
farmer, and he stooped to knock the ashes from his pipe;
“nor more will I.” ;
He spoke gently, for he was a good man — good, inas-
much as he might have been a bad man, and was not. A
negative character is most often a virtuous one, since to be
wicked necessitates action.
The voice of the farmer’s wife flowed on in a querulous
monotone.
“ Such comes from harborin’ the offspring of harlots and
what-not,” she said. “It air a jedgment from the conde?
The child came forward and stood in the kitchen door-
way, scratching his left leg gently with the toes of his right
foot. The sudden passage from moonlight into lamplight
bewildered him, and he stretched out gropingly one wiry
little hand, ‘The exaltation of his mind was chilled sud-
denly.
For a moment he stood unobserved. The farmer was
cleaning his pipe with the broken blade of an old pruning-
knife, and did not look up. The farmer’s wife was knead-
ing dough, and her back was turned. All the bare and sor-
did aspect of the kitchen, the unpolished walls, the pewter
dishes in the cupboard, the bucket of apple parings in the
12 THE DESCENDANT
corner, struck the child as a blight after the garish color
of the circus-ring. He felt sick and ill at ease, ?
; The monotone of the farmer’s wife went relentlessly on.
A jedgment for harborin’ the offspring of harlots,” she re-
peated. “ God A’mighty knows what mischief he air work-
in’ to-night. He air worse than a weasel.”
From the child’s face all brightness was blotted out
His lips tightened until the red showed in a narrow jines
paling from the pressure as a scar pales that is left from 7
old sabre cut.
The farmer replied soothingly, his hand wandering rest-
lessly through his beard, “He air a young child,” he said
feebly. “TI reckon he air too little to work much.”
Then he looked up and saw the shrinking figure in the
doorway. He shook his head slowly, more in weariness
than wrath,
“You hadn’t ought to done it,” he murmured, reproach-
fully. “ You hadn’t ought to done it.” add
A sob stuck in the boy’s throat. With a terrible revul-
sion of feeling, his passionate nature leaped into revolt
As the farmer’s wife turned, he faced her in sullen deannee!
“T ’ain’t never seed nothin’ afore,” he said, dogged] «]
’ain’t never seed nothin’ afore.” Sah eg
It was the justification he offered to opposing fate,
The woman turned upon him violently,
7 You ingrate!” she cried. ‘“ A-leaving me to do your
dirty work. A-sneaking off on meetin’ night an’ leaving me
to tote the slops when I ought to led the choir. You in-
grate |”
The child looked pitifully small and lonely. He pulled
nervously at the worn brim of his straw hat. Still he
sought justification by facts.
“You are been to meetin’ every Wednesday night sence
I war born,” he said, in the same dogged tone, “an’ I ’ain’t
never seed nothin’ afore.”
Then the impotence of all explanation dawned upon him
and his defiance lost its sullen restraint. He felt the rage
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THE DESCENDANT 13
within him burst like a thunder cloud, The lamplight trem-
bled in the air. The plank floor, the pewter plates, the
chromos pinned upon the wall passed in a giddy whirl be-
fore his eyes. All his fire-tinctured blood quickened and
leaped through his veins in a fever of scarlet. His face
darkened from brown to black like the face of a witch.
His thin lips were welded one into the other, and Nature’s
careless handiwork upon his forehead palpitated like a visi-
ble passion.
He sprang forward, striking at vacancy.
“T hate you!” he cried. “Curse you! Curse you!”
Then he turned and rushed blindly out into the night. A
moment more and he was speeding away into the meadows.
Like a shadow he had fled from the lamplight, like a shadow
he had fled from the gravelled walk, and like a shadow he
was fleeing along the turnpike.
He was unconscious of all save rage, blinding, blacken-
ing rage—a desire to stamp and shriek aloud—to feel his
fingers closing upon something and closing and closing
until the blood ran down. The old savage instinct to kill
fell upon him like a mantle.
A surging of many waters started in his head, growing
louder and louder until the waters rose into a torrent, shut-
ting out all lesser sounds. The sob in his throat stifled
him, and he gasped and panted in the midst of the moon-
lit meadows. Suddenly he left the turnpike, dashing across
country with the fever of a fox pursued by hounds. Over
the swelling hills, where the corn-ricks stood marshalled
like a spectre battalion, he fled, spurred by the lash of his
passion. Beneath him the valley lay wrapped in a transpa-
rent mist; above him a million stars looked down in pas-
sionless self-poise.
When he had run until he could run no more, he flung
himself face downward upon the earth, beating the dew-
drenched weeds into shapeless pulp.
“T hate ’em! I hate ’em!” he cried, choking for speech.
“ Damn—damn—damn them all, I wish they war all in
14 THE DESCENDANT
hell. I wish the whole world war in hell—the farmer and
the missis, and the minister and little Luly! I wish every-
body war in hell—everybody ’cept me and the’ pigs!”
Te ran his hand through his bair, tearing apart the matted
waves, His lips quivered and closed together. Then he
rolled over on his back and lay looking up to where the sky
closed like a spangled vault above him,
“Thate’em! Ihate’em!” he cried, and his cry fell quiv-
eringly against the relentless hills. “TI hate ’em !”
Back the faint echo came, ringing like the answering
whisper of a devil, “ h-a-t-e °e-m—e-m—h-a-t-e !”
Above him, beyond the wall of stars, he knew that God
had his throne—God sitting in awful majesty before the
mouth of hell. He would like to call up to Him—to tell
Him of the wickedness of the farmer’s wife. He was sure
that God would be angry and send her to hell. It was
strange that God had overlooked her and allowed such
things to be. Then he pictured himself dying all alone out
upon the hillside ; and the picture was so tragic that he fell
to weeping. No; he would not die. He would grow up
and become a circus-rider, and wear blue stockinet and gold
lace. The farmer’s wife and the farmer’s ten children, .
their ten braids all smoothly plaited, would come to watch
him ride the mustang ponies, and he would look straight
across their heads and bow when the people applauded.
He saw himself standing before the glittering footlights,
with the clown and the tight-rope walker beside him, and
he saw himself, the most dazzling of the trinity, bowing
above the excited heads of the farmer’s children.
Yes, that would be a revenge worth having.
He sat up and looked about him. The night was very
silent, and a chill breeze came blowing noiselessly across
the hills. The moonlight shimmered like a crystalline liquid
upon the atmosphere,
His passion was over, and he sat, with swollen eyes and
quivering lips, a tiny human figure in the vast amphitheatre
of Nature,
THE DESCENDANT 15
Beyond the stretch of pasture the open road gleamed
pallid in the distance. The inky shadows through which
he had passed some hours ago seemed to have thrilled into
the phantoms of departed things. He wondered how he
had dared to pass among them. Upon the adjoining hill
he could see the slender aspens in the graveyard. They
shivered and whitened as he looked at them. At their feet
the white tombstones glimmered amid rank periwinkle. In
a rocky corner he knew that there was one grave isolated in
red clay soil—one outcast from among the righteous dead.
He felt suddenly afraid of the wicked ghost that might
arise from that sunken grave. He was afraid of the aspens
and the phantoms in the road. With a sob he crouched
down upon the hillside, looking upward at the stars. He
wondered what they were made of—if they were really
holes cut in the sky to let the light of heaven stream
through.
The night wind pierced his cotton shirt, and he fell to
crying softly; but there was no one to hear. :
At last the moon vanished behind a distant hill, a gray
line in the east paled into saffron, and the dawn looked
down upon him like a veiled face. Presently there was a
stir at the farm, and the farmer’s wife came from the cow-
pen with a pail of frothy milk in her hand.
When she had gone into the house the boy left the hill-
side and crept homeward. He was sore and stiff, and his
clothes were drenched with the morning dew. He felt all
alone in a very great world, and the only beings he regarded
as companions were the pigs in the barn-yard. His heart
reproached him that he had not given them their supper.
The turnpike was chill and lonely as he passed along it.
All the phantoms had taken wings unto themselves and
flown. Upon the rail-fence the dripping trumpet-vine hung
in limp festoons, yellow and bare of bloom. He paused to
gather a persimmon that had fallen into the road from a
tree beyond the fence, but it set his teeth on edge and he
threw it away. A rabbit, sitting on the edge of a clump of
16 "THE DESCENDANT
brushwood, turned to glance at him with bright, suspicious
eyes. Then, as he drew nearer, it darted across the road
and between the rails into the pasture. The boy limped
painfully along. His joints hurt him when he moved, and
his feet felt like hundredweights. He wondered if he was
not going to die shortly, and thought regretfully of the blue
- stockinet and tinsel which he could not carry with him into
an eternity of psalm-singing.
Reaching the house, he seated himself upon the step of the
porch and looked with miserable eyes at the kitchen window,
The smell of steaming coffce floated out to him, and he
heard the clinking of cups and saucers, Through the open
window he beheld the bustling form of the farmer’s wife.
‘Then, with a cautious movement, the door opened and
the farmer came out upon the porch. He glanced hesi-
tatingly around and, upon secing the boy, vanished precip-
itately, to reappear bearing a breakfast-plate.
The child caught a glimpse of batter-bread and bacon,
and his eyes glistened. He seized it eagerly. The farmer
drew a chair near the doorway and seated himself beneath
the bunch of red pepper that hung drying from the sash.
He turned his eyes upon the boy, They were dull and
watery, like the eyes of a codfish,
“Vou hadn’t ought to done it, sonny,” he said, slowly.
“Vou hadn’t ought to done it.”
Then he drew a small quid of tobacco from his pocket
and began to unwind the wrapping with laborious care,
“Tt war a fine show, I reckon,” he added.
‘The child nodded with inanimate acquiescence. It all
seemed so long ago, the color and the splendor. It might
as well have taken place in ancient Rome,
The farmer reached leisurely down into the pocket of his
jeans trousers and drew out the old pruning-knife, Then he
cut off a small square of tobacco and put it in his mouth,
“Sence it war a fine show,” he said, reflectively, “I wish
I’d ha’ done it myself,”
And he fell to chewing with a sigh,
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TOA RCE LET SRT TES
CHAPTER III
Tue child grew apace. He shot upward with the im-
provident growth of a weed that has sprung in a wheat-
field. The changing seasons only served to render his hold
upon life more tenacious and his will more indomitable.
And, by-and-by, the child became the youth and waxed
strong and manly, At nineteen he was lithe and straight
as a young pine. Slightly above the average height, he
had the look of a sturdy, thickset farmer, but with more
than a farmer’s breadth of brow. The dark hair still grew
in a tangled mat upon his head, his features had rough-
ened, and the lines in his face were deeply hewn. His jaws
were strongly marked, and he had thin, flexible lips that _
quivered with reserve or paled with passion. Beneath the
projecting brows his eyes were narrowed by a constant
blinking.
Between himself and his little world there was drawn an
invisible circle. The shadow that moved before or followed
after him was a moral plague spot to the vision of his
neighbors. If, with a spasmodic endeavor, they sought oc-
casionally to rescue this stray brand from the burning, the
rescue was attempted with gloved hands and a mental
pitchfork. In periods of relaxation from personal purifica-
tion, they played with the boy as children play with fire. It
was the only excitement they permitted themselves.
As for the brand himself, he made the mistake of re-
garding the situation from a personal standpoint. Feeding
the flame as he did, he naturally was unable to appreciate
the vantage-ground of those who were only singed by it,
and consequently in a position to enjoy that thrill of possi-
ble danger which is only enjoyable because the danger is
18 THE DESCENDANT
not possible at all. Being insensible to any danger, he
failed to experience the thrill.
But what he did experience was a silent rage that in the
end froze into a silent bitterness. As we all look upon life
through the shadows which we ourselves cast upon it, So
the facts of organic existence shape themselves in our hori-
zon conformably with the circumstances which have shaped
our individual natures. We see large or small, symmetrical
or distorted forms, not according to external forces which
have played upon external objects, but according to the ad-
justment of light and shade about our individual lenses.
Truth is only truth in its complexity ; our convictions are
only real in their relativity. But Michael had not learned
this. He still believed in his own ability to make plain
the crooked ways of his neighbors’ consciences. Socrates
believed this, and where had arisen a greater than Soc-
rates? Perhaps the one thing which Socrates and Michael
had in common was a faith in the power of truth and the
impotence of error; but then, Socrates and Michael each
followed a different truth, Only the name of their divinity
was the same—his face was different.
So Michael saw the village doors close upon him, and
laughed. He saw the girls pass him by with averted mod-
esty and turn to look after him, and laughed again. Iie
saw them, one and all, watching with a vulgar interest for
the inheritance to creep out and the blood to show —and
he sneered outwardly while he raged within.
Ile was a bright lad. ‘The school-master had said SO,
and the school-master was right. Easily he outstripped all
the hardy farmers’ louts in the class, and easily, in the end),
he had outstripped the school-master himself. Then the
minister had taken him in hand, and before long he had
tripped the minister.
ees are my books,” the minister had said, “make use
of them.” And he had looked over his shoulder to see
that blue-eyed Emily was afar, He was a bright lad, but—
well, blood is blood.
Serena rem
THE DESCENDANT 19
And Michael had made use of the books. He had fed
upon them and he had laid up a store of capital. One and
all, he had read them and absorbed them and pondered
over them, and one and all he had disbelieved them.
The minister handed him “The Lives of the Saints,”
and the next day he had brought it back, throwing it down
upon the table.
“A lot of pig-headed idiots,” he said, with his lip curling
and his grating laugh, “who hadn’t enough sense to know
whether they were awake or asleep.”
The minister shuddered and recoiled.
“ Be silent,” he said. “If you have no respect for me, at
least show some for God and the holy men who represent
Him.” :
‘‘ Fiddlesticks !” said Michael. “They were so befud-
dled that they got God and the devil mixed, that’s all.”
But he laid the book aside and helped the minister
about his copying. He was not without a wayward regard
for worth. He was only warm with his fresh young blood
and throbbing with vitality. ‘The restless activity of mind
could not be checked. The impassioned pursuit of knowl-
edge was sweeping him onward, Self-taught he was and
self-made he would be. The genius of endurance was fit-
ting him to struggle, and in the struggle to survive.
So he drew out the minister’s dog-eared sermon and set
about the copying. He had copied such sermons before,
and it was a task he rather enjoyed, given the privilege of
making amendments— which the minister good-naturedly
granted, As for the minister himself, perhaps he remem-
bered the occasions upon which the boy had written ser-
mons as compositions, and how he had delivered them as
substitutes for old ones of his own which had worn thread-
bare. In his simple-minded search for divine purposes,
the cleverness of the lad appeared inexplicable. That the
hand of the Almighty should have overreached a flock of
his elect to quicken with consuming fire the mind of an
Ishmaelite seemed suspiciously like one of those stumb-
THE DESCENDANT
20
ling-stones to faith which we accept as tests of the blind-
ness of our belief.
‘hat Michael knew more philosophy than he, he had ac-
knowledged cheerfully, and now he was fast beginning to
harbor a suspicion that Michael knew more theology as
well.
Ile heaved a perplexed sigh and went to interview a con-
sumnptive concerning his spiritual condition, while Michael
dipped his‘pen in the inkstand and fell to work.
It was a moment such as he enjoyed, when his intellec-
tual interests were uppermost and his mind eager to seize
an abstract train of thought. He remembered such exalta-
tions during the long winter nights when he had sat up
with a tallow candle and attacked the problems of politi-
cal economy. He had spent plodding hours in mastering
them, but mastered them he had, The dogged endurance
of mind had perhaps served him better than any natural
quickness.
The remembrance of those winter nights turned the
channel of his thoughts, and from the minister’s sermon he
passed to larger premises and wider demonstrations. Push-
ing the paper aside, he leaned back against the cushioned
back of the minister’s chair and allowed his gaze to wander
from the sheets before him to the flower-beds in the garden
below, and then, past the wood-pile, where the hickory chips
had rotted to mould, to the jagged line of purple mountains.
The landscape was radiant with color. As the sunlight fell
over them the meadows deepened in opalescent tints, pur-
pling with larkspur, yellowing with dandelion, and whitening
to a silver sweep of life everlasting.
Across Michael’s lips a smile passed faintly, like the
ripple of sunlight upon a murky pool, He put up his hand
and brushed a lock of hair from his brow. He looked sud-
denly younger and more boyish, Then his reverie was
broken by a sound of footsteps. The lattice door in the
passage opened and shut, and a shadow passed across the
chintz curtain at the window. He heard voices, at first
*
THE DESCENDANT 21
broken and indistinct, and then clearer, as his mind left its
cloudy heights and returned to commonplaces.
: One was the gentle voice of the minister’s wife. ‘And
if you can help me out with the custard-spoons,” it said
“T’ll be mightily obliged. I have a dozen of mother’s to
be sure, but, somehow, I don’t just like to use them. If yor
can let me have ten, I reckon I can manage to make out
with them and some tin ones Aunt Lucy sent me last
Christmas.” ;
The other voice was sharper and brisker.
“T reckon I can piece out a dozen,” it returned, with the
ringing emphasis of one eager to oblige. “If I can’t, Pl
just borrow them from old Mrs. Cade without saying what
I want with’em. And I'll send all the things over by Tim-
othy as soon as I get home—the custard-spoons, and the
salver for the cake, and the parlor lamp. If that glass
stand for butter ain’t too badly cracked, I’ll send that along
too; and I’ll be over in plenty of time to help you set the
tables and fix things.”
A murmur of thanks followed’ in the gentle tones, and
then the brisker ones began.
“You'll have a first-rate evening for the party,” they ob-
served. ‘When I got up this morning the wind was in the
east, but it has shifted round again. Well, I’ll send the
things ail right.”
“I’m mightily obliged,” responded the minister’s wife, in
her repressed manner. “I hope it warn’t any trouble for
you to bake the cake—our stove draws so poorly. It seems
a heap of work to go to, but the minister never can deny
Emily anything; and, after all, a birthday tea ain’t much to
do for her. She’s a good child.”
The other voice chimed in with cordial assent. “If a
little party makes her happy, I reckon you don’t begrudge
the work. She won’t be sixteen but once, I say, and it’s
just as well to do what we can.”
“Tf it makes her happy,” added the gentle voice, and
then it sighed softly. ‘There's always a cloud,” it said.
22 THE DESCENDANT
“To be sure, this is a very little one, but, as I told the
minister, it was the prophet’s little cloud that raised the
storm.”
It was silent for a moment and then spoke sadly.
“Tt’s about Michael,” it said.
The brisker tones drooped.
“That boy !”
“Well, the minister’s compassions are great, you know,
and he can’t feel just easy about not asking him. Of
course, we must consider the other young folks, but the
minister says it don’t seem to him human to leave him
out.”
“ Of course, I ain’t as fit to judge as the minister, but I
know I shouldn’t like to have him around with my Lucy.
And it seems to me that it ain’t right to encourage him in
familiarity—with his birth, too.”
“Yes,” assented the soft voice, deprecatingly, “but the
minister can’t feel easy about it. He says he knows Christ
would have had him.”
The brisk tones rose in an ejaculation.
“But the Lord never lived in such times as these !”
“TI can’t help its worrying me,” continued the minister’s
wife, “and Emily is just like her father—all tenderness and
impulse. It does seem hard—” ‘Ihen the voice changed
suddenly. “Oh, you wanted the nutmeg grater,” it said.
“T forgot all about it.”
And the lattice door opened and shut quickly.
When the minister came in a while later he found Mi-
chael standing beside the desk, his clenched hand resting
upon the lid. At his feet lay the uncopied sermon, It
was crumpled and torn, as if it had been held in a brutal
erasp. The boy’s lips were pale and a yellow rage flickered
in his eyes. As the minister paused, he confronted aim,
‘‘T hate these people!” he cried. “I hate them! I hate
everybody who has come near this place. I hate my father
because he was a villain. I hate my mother because she
was a fool.”
nnn ee etree
THE DESCENDANT 23
He said it vehemently, his impassioned glance closing
upon the minister. The minister quavered. The genial
smile with which he had entered faded from his face. He
had faced such storms before and they always stunned
him, 3
“TI feel for you,” he stammered, “but—” and he was
silent. The boy stood upon other ground than his, and he
could not follow him; he saw with other eyes, and the light
blinded him, In his veins the blood of two diverse natures
met and mingled, and they formed a third—a mental hy-
brid. The spirit that walked within him was a dual one—
a spirit of toil, a spirit of ease; a spirit of knowledge, a
spirit of ignorance; a spirit of improvidence, a spirit of
thrift; a spirit.of submission, a spirit of revolt.
“‘T hate them all!” repeated Michael.
His scorching gaze blazed through the open window and
seemed to wither the beds of flowering portulacca in the
garden, ‘I hate these people with their creeds and their
consciences. ‘They dare to spit upon me, that I am not as
clean as they. I hate them all!”
From without the full-throated call of a cat-bird floated
into the room. Then it grew fainter and was lost in the
graveyard, Michael’s face was dark and ugly. All the in-
growing bitterness of his youth was finding an outlet.
“What have I done?” he cried, passionately. ‘What
have I done? Is it my fault that the laws of nature do not
wait upon marriage banns? Is itmy—” He paused sud-
denly.
“TJ am sure that you misjudge them,” said the minis-
ter. “Iam sure that—”
The door opened, and his own pretty Emily, her blue
eyes all alight, darted into the room. Michael’s eyes fell
upon her, and, unconsciously to himself, they softened.
The minister saw the softening, and he stammered and
grew confused. He fell back as if to shelter the girl from
the look, pushing her hastily into an adjoining room.
“ Go—go, my dear—your mother wants you, I am sure of
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24 THE DESCENDANT
it.’ Then he turned and took up his speech, “I—I
am—” and his conscience stung him and he blushed and
stammered again. Michael laughed shortly. There was
something brutal in the sound of it.
“Vour daughter is safe,” he said. “I will turn my eyes
away.”
And the minister blushed redder than before.
There was something masterful about the boy, and he
had the brow of a genius, but—well, girls will be girls, and
there’s no telling.
Michael walked to the window and stood looking at the
flower-beds in the garden. Then he turned and faced the
minister, all the bitterness of his warped and sullen nature
in his voice.
“T want to get away,” he said. “ Anywhere that I am
not known—anywhere. I can work. I can work my fingers
to the bone—but I must get away.”
The minister thought for a moment.
“T could help you a little,” he said, slowly. “Say, lend
you enough to pay your passage to, and a week’s board in
New York. Such a bright fellow must find work. And,
by-the-by, I’ve a cousin in the grocery business there ;
perhaps he could get you a job—”
He said it honestly, for he wished well to the boy; and
yet there was a secret satisfaction in the chance of getting
rid of him, of losing the responsibility of one stray sheep.
God, in his wisdom, might redeem him, but the minister
felt that the task was one for omnipotent hands to under-
take. It was too difficult for him. If the Lord could un-
ravel the meshes of Satan, he couldn’t, and it shouldn’t be
expected of him.
“T’ll go,” said Michael. He said it with determination,
bringing his quivering hand down upon the table, “Til
go. I’d rather die anywhere clse than live here—but I
won’t die. J’ll succeed. [Il live to make you envy me
vere
A sudden flame had kindled in his eyes. It shot fitfully
\
ne
THE DESCENDANT 25
forth between the twitching lids, He became infused with
life—with a passionate vitality, strong to overcome.
“J’ll go to-morrow,” he said.
He left the minister’s house, walking briskly down the nar-
row path leading to the whitewashed gate. At the gate he
paused and looked back. In a patch of vivid sunshine that
fell upon an arbor of climbing rose he saw the blue flutter
of pretty Emily’s skirts. She put back the hair from her
eyes and stood gazing after him, an expression of childish
curiosity upon her face. All the joy of life at that moment
seemed filtered through the sunlight upon her head.
He sighed and passed onward. Upon the steps of the
farmer’s cottage sat a plump child in a soiled pinafore. It
was little Luly, the youngest of the farmer’s ten children.
As he entered the house she rose and trotted after him on
her plump little legs.
In the deorway he was met by the farmer's wife. She
held a pan of watermelon rinds in her hand, “ Take these
here rinds to the pig-pen,” she said, “an’ then you kin draw
some water fur dinner. There ain’t none left in the water-
bucket.” The boy looked at her silently. He was debat-
ing in his mind the words in which he would renounce her
service. Fie had often enacted the scene in imagination,
and in such visions he had beheld himself rising in right-
eous wrath and defying the farmer’s wife with dramatic
gestures. Now, somehow, it all seemed very stale and
flat, and he couldn’t think of just what to say. The woman
was harder to confront in real life than she had been in his
dreams. He wished he had gone away without saying any-
thing to anybody.
At last he spoke with a labored emphasis.
“J won't feed the pigs,” he said, and his voice sounded
half apologetic, ‘and I won't draw the water ; I am going
away.”
At the dinner-table the farmer was sitting before a plate
of cabbage. He removed his knife slowly from his mouth
and regarded the boy with mild amazement.
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26 THE DESCENDANT
“ An’ the crops ain’t in,” he murmured, reproachfully.
The farmer’s wife set the pan on the table and wiped her
face upon the corner of her gingham apron,
“Vou ain’t goin’ fur good, I reckon?” she suggested.
Michael stood awkwardly before her. He had expected
vituperation, and when it did not come he felt curiously
ashamed of his resolve.
“Ves” he said, with a long pause between his words,
“yes; I am going for good—I am not coming back ever
any more. I am going for good.”
A stifled wail broke from little Luly. ‘An’ you ’ain’t
made my water-wheel,” she cried. ‘“ You’ain’t made my—”
Her mother silenced her, and then looked at Michael in
rising anger.
“You kin go as fast as you please,” she said. “It'll be
a good riddance. I won’t hev my children mixin’ with the
offspring of har—”
But Michael had flung himself ont of the room.
CHAPTER IV
Tur Old Dominion steamed slowly into the New York
wharf, and her passengers made a precipitate rush for the
gangway. Among those who left the third-class cabin
there was an awkward youth in an ill-fitting suit of clothes
and a cheap straw hat. From his right hand was suspend-
ed a small bundle which held all his earthly possessions of
a tangible quality. His capital he carried in his brain.
As he stepped from the gangway to the wharf he hesi-
tated and fell back, confused by the din of traffic.
“Step lively there!” called some one from behind, and
the young man collected himself with a shake and started
down the long wharf amidst a medley of boxes, trucks, and
horses’ feet.
“Tf you air looking for New York I guess you won't find
it in that direction,” remarked a laborer who was winding a
coil of rope at some little distance.
Michael turned, his face reddening, and retraced his steps
to his starting-point, from whence he made a fresh venture.
The tumult bewildered him. He was feeling strangely
homesick, and there was a curious weakness in the pit of
his stomach. It was as if he were passing to a scaffold of
his own erecting. He wondered how so many people could
ever have come to New Vork. Surely, if he had known
what it was like, he would have remained where his lines
had fallen until death had readjusted them. He had never
heard so much noise in his life, not even in Arlington on
court day.
But when at last the shipping district lay behind him
and he turned into Sixth Avenue, his youth and energy com-
bined to reassure him, and a flush of excitement revived
suite :
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THE DESCENDANT 173
But as he turned to go he looked back at her as she
stood in the doorway. “Some day,” he said, “will you
explain ?”
And she answered: “ Some day—perhaps.”
A child had come to the door—a slight, crippled girl,
who leaned upon acrutch. Anna Allard stooped and lifted
her in her arms, and he saw her head resting upon the
child’s upturned face. Then the door closed upon them,
and he went out into the night.
Miss Allard’s personality was an enigma to him. There
was a depth that he could not fathom, for all its limpid
serenity —some indefinable attribute which he failed to
grasp. It was not the fact of her evident disapprobation—
thousands showed that: he had been harried by the news-
papers and assailed from all the pulpits in the land. Nor
was it that she was reasonable in her disapproval ; liberal-
ity, though uncommon, was not impossible, and he had en-
countered it occasionally.
But his impressions were fleeting; he concluded that
Miss Allard was a good young woman with a fine carriage
and a healthy interest in life, and so forgot her and her
grave arraignment,
Fate deals largely in small circumstances. Like life, if
she ignored the infinitesimal she would go a-begging for
the infinite. Her puppets are impelled onward in a given
line ; following the rhythm of motion, they circle through
time, and but for the attraction of existing forces might cir-
cle indefinitely. But the curl of an eyelash, the turn of an
ankle, a moment’s vanity, and lo! the circle is broken and
a collision has come. ‘Then the combination of gases goes
to pieces, and from the chaos another combination rises,
phcenix-like, and passes into space, And the littleness and
the greatness are in no wise diminished,
Michael dropped in at Semple’s one afternoon, and as
he was leaving Mrs. Semple handed him a note,
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186 THE DESCENDANT
tainty. Weakening in his own, stability of convictions in
another he recognized wonderingly. e
They had turned into Mulberry Street, and the density
of the atmosphere oppressed him, The old loathing, the
old intolerable disgust for poverty seized upon him, and he
longed to flee to cleanliness and space.
Through swarms of Italian women, deep-bosomed and
heavy of tread, they passed rapidly, The broken, guttural
tones, robbed of their native melody, grated upon Michael’s
ears; the stale odors of decaying vegetables stored in reek-
ing cellars offended his nostrils. He hated it all, hated the
squalor, the filth, the inevitable degradation. It was an
everlasting reminder of the destiny that he had missed by a
slip of the cup.
Anna Allard passed along with healthy indifference, her
skirts held slightly aside, her brows unbent. Agaia her per-
sonality impressed him in its forcible uprightness. She
possessed, in a great measure, that illusive quality called
goodness, which so few good people possess, and which
may be defined as a mean between spiritual unsophistica-
tion and worldly wisdom. It was said of Miss Allard that
she was good, implying that a persuasive sanctity was one
of her attributes—a sixth sense, as it were, conveying re-
ligious impressions. Whether the impression conveyed was
as potent as the manner of conveying it or not is a subject
for dispute, and one upon which my profane pen need offer
no suggestion.
But Michael felt, without defining, the attraction. It was
not Miss Allard’s indomitable rectitude that caused him to
become conscious of a state of moral inanition; it was the
charm with which she managed to endow that rectitude. A
Mulberry Street missionary, possessing a withered profile
and a shrinking manner, might have been doubly virtuous
with but slight success. And, after all; there are few of us
capable of dissociating the attraction of virtue from the at-
traction of the earthly habiliments which it chooses to
adopt. ‘They left Mulberry Street, and she took him into
,
THE DESCENDANT 187
several tenements, bringing him face to face with the powers
of poverty and dirt. A terrible pity took possession of him
a pity prompting him to sit in his office chair and hurl edi-
torial thunderbolts at the oppressors of the poor. There
was no desire to speak to them or to touch them; there
was a sensitive shrinking from the crippled man upon his
pallet bed, and from the little red-eyed seamstress in her
curl- papers and her soiled gown. He started when Anna
Allard lifted an unwashed baby in her arms. And yet the
memory of her as she stood there clung to him and followed
him far into the night. A young Madonna, the straight and
supple figure, the outstretched arms, the wonderful tender-
ness upon her fresh-hued face, the wonderful, wonderful
halo of her hair; and, above and beyond it all, the rays of
sunshine falling, white and holy, into the squalid room, fall-
ing like a benediction upon woman and child, wrapping in
a luminous stillness child and woman—an eternal symbol
of an eternal motherhood.
At that moment he realized the emptiness of ambition
the futility of reward. Was he who loathed pain the one
to close the gaping wound? He who shrank from filth the
one to purge from uncleanliness?
And ambition? What a petty thing it is in the midst of
a world of men, living, begetting, and passing into dust!
“For fame is a thing devoid of judgment, and after-
fame oblivion, and a name is but sound and echo.”
He walked the streets that night pursued by his self-dis-
trust. He despised himself that he had fought for the sake
of fighting, not for the sake of the cause; for what men
might say of him he had wrestled for the things that were
baptizing his battle-field with bloody sweat. For a name
he had given his salvation.
“ And a name is but sound and echo.”
Onward before him in the night, against the blackness
of drawn clouds, moved the memory of Anna Allard, the
holy of holies in her eyes, her eyes upon the young child.
What was it that brought that.look into a woman’s face?
188 THE DESCENDANT
What might a man not sustain, smiling, for the sake of such
a look?
Then, like a flash, one word broke upon his thoughts,
and he paused and stood still as if he hearkened to a
spoken name— Rachel!”
Could it be that he had forgotten Rachel? Rachel who,
he had told himself, was the breath of his life! Rachel whom
he had loved with the passion of his youth and the strength
of his manhood!
He went to her studio, and found her light still burning.
As he entered she gave a little cry, and ran towards him
with outstretched hands.
“Why, Mike, you bad, bad boy, where have you been ?”
Her gladness, her trust, her utter lack of suspicion,
touched him, and he stooped to kiss her with a poignant
sense of remorse.
As she looked up at him a sudden fear, vague and illu-
sive, flamed in her face, and she spoke quickly :
“Mike, is there anything wrong?”
“Wrong! No, dear.”
And then.a sudden cowardly shame took possession of
him, for he had noticed the details of her toilet, and con-
trasted the careless drapery, the wind-blown hair, with
Anna Allard’s dainty trimness. Rachel was beautiful just
then, but, to do him justice, he was not a man to be over-
borne by physical beauty ; it was only an attribute to him,
not a thing desirable for its own sake.
It was cowardly to criticise Rachel; he had never done
so before; and yet at that moment the fall of her gown
seemed careless, the loosened coil of her hair a trifle un-
kempt. We hated himself for the thought, but the thought
would not be shut out.
Then he started, for the girl, who had been watching him,
suddenly threw herself upon him with a breathless sob.
“Love me! love me! Jove me!” she cried. “I care for
nothing but you—nothing but you! Let the world despise
me, but you—you love me!”
THE DESCENDANT 189
Her eyes, deep and solemn, like the heart of a storm,
bound him by a spell; the slim white hands clung to him
and would not let him go.
With a swift repentance he caught her to him. “My
star!” he said.
Still her eyes cast over him their wonderful spell. “ Swear
that you love me—swear it!”
“T swear it!”
She threw back her head with one of her impetuous
movements, her face gleaming whiter in the dim light, a
rapturous worship thrilling in her voice.
“T adore you!” she said.
Again the cursed thought: Would a good woman have
loved him as Rachel loved him? Was not the worship she
offered up to him a proof of her own unworthiness? Nay,
a good woman sees ever between herself and the man she
loves the inviolable shield of her own honor!
Ah, the thrice-accursed thought! Would it never let him
rest?
It was the old, old expiation that Nature has demanded
and woman paid since the day upon which woman and de-
sire met and knew each other.
Ah, the old, old expiation !
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CHAPTER VIII
“ HELLO, Shem !”
Akershem looked up. =
“Your entrance is rough on nerves,” he remarked, irri-
tably.
Driscoll leaned in the doorway, surveying the world in
general and the editor in particular with his accustomed
complacency.
t say, Shem, what is the matter with Zze Lconoclast (e
Akershem shifted uneasily, running his hand impatiently
through his hair. He looked worn and harassed, and the
lines upon his forehead had deepened. i
“ Matter?’ he echoed. ‘“ Why, nothing.
Driscoll shook out a folded paper and held it towards
him. |
“For the past fortnight who has served us with edito-
rials?” he asked. ‘Not yourself, my good fellow; and
don’t tell me that this is Kyle’s work, for I know better.
Why, here are two whole columns, and not an abusive epithet
?
to speak of. Who’s your man So
Michael kicked the paper viciously under the desk.
“To tell the truth, I got Springer to do it, He’s one of
our reporters, you know—a sensible fellow—
“That fool! Why don’t you do the work yourselt
“ Confound your catechizing! ll not have it!
Driscoll gave a long, low whistle. “Well, of au the
dashed impudence !” he said; then added, amiably, “ I’m off
to Java, you know.”
“To Javaty ;
“Qh, the reports of Dr, Dubois and his Pleistocene dis-
covery made me feverish. I am convinced that only crim-
2)
ORECAST
THE DESCENDANT 1gI
inal negligence has prevented our verifying Darwinism by
producing the bones of our ancestors. I'll satisfy myself
in regard to the Java find, and then I’ll get up an anthropo-
logical expedition for the purpose of making explorations
in tropical Asia. I am inclined to believe that man origi-
nated thereabouts, and I intend to search for the exact
spot.” His eyes were glowing with enthusiasm, his face
flushed, The old restless spirit was in possession. He
pursued the dangerous, sweet divinity—change,
Akershem was devoid of sympathy. ‘What a pity you
weren't born a beggar!” he said; “you might have accom-
plished something.”
Perhaps of the affections of Michael’s life the affection
for John Driscoll was the strongest; certainly it was the
steadiest. And yet when Driscoll had gone he felt vaguely
relieved; he half wished that the Java scheme would ma-
terialize. For the past two weeks he had been undergoing
a curious revulsion from his old nature, and the presence
of Driscoll seemed a living reproach. And with his new-
born sensitiveness he dreaded reproach; he craved not only
self-esteem, but the esteem of his fellow-men,
Impatiently he rose, and paced up and down the uncar-
peted floor, He felt feverish, alert—eager to sweep the past
aside, and to start, unfettered, in pursuit of the future.
With the past he knew that Rachel was associated;
KKachel, who had given him life when he was famished,
sympathy when he was sore beset; Rachel, who had been
passionately content to cast her art and ambition as a step-
ping-stone before his feet, and who, when upon that step-
ping-stone he could not reach the goal, had raised it by the
throw of her own heart.
The morning sunlight flitted across the floor, bringing to
his memory the flitting figure of Rachel—Rachel, with lumi-
nous eyes, with tender, quivering lips, the Love who had
been offered up upon the altar of his own divinity.
Upon the scales of his judgment his life and his life’s
ambition were found wanting when weighed in the balance
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Ne TE SETI Ie Te LO: Po
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THE DESCENDANT
192
with Rachel’s. And yet, though Rachel was fair, Rachel be-
longed to the past—to the past, with his old bitterness that
needed a balm, his old ambition that craved a ballast.
In his future Rachel had no place. Now he wanted
more—far more—than Rachel could give. He wanted the
one thing that she had not. He wanted the honor of good
men and good women. He wanted a clean future, unbe-
smirched by any blot upon the closed pages of his past.
Then, dimly, as one who sces through a glass darkly, he
felt that the respect he wanted was the respect of Anna:
Allard, the homage of her fearless rectitude, her implacable
honor. To him, in his limited experience, the esteem of
Anna Allard meant the esteem of the other half of the
world—the better half, with its trust and purity and faith,
He knew then, and he had always known, that the desire
for Anna Allard was not the desire for love. Love in his
nature must hold ever a secondary place—must serve ever
as the handmaid of ambition. And with love he had been
surfeited—but honor lay still unattained.
And he felt no remorse before the memory of Rachel.
It seemed to him but natural that she should fill the part
which she had chosen in his life. If she was to be buried,
a victim to his discarded theories, it was because she had
accepted those theories, discarding upon her side the laws
of her conscience. And the thought again: A pure woman
would have spurned passion for the sake of principle!
Ah, the old, old expiation !
A man is never so merciless as to a dead desire, never
so implacable as to the woman whom he has once loved
and loves no longer. In the whole course of his life Mi-
chael had never been so severe as he was to Rachel Gavin,
never so unmerciful as when he held himself most just.
And he judged her as he had never judged himself, be-
cause with himself the wrong had not been of his own be-
getting, but had descended to him in place of a name, But
Rachel—with Rachel it had been love, not mistaken prin-
ciple, and it was for that love that he judged her.
}
THE DESCENDANT 193
“Please, sir, will you speak to me?”
With a start he turned to meet her brimming glance, She
stood before him, dressed as he had first seen her—in the
artist’s blouse and cap, with a drawing-block in her hand
and her hand outstretched. At the apparition he fell back,
surprised into a quick remorse; then he looked at her, and
his heart hardened. Had he found her overburdened with
a sense of her own unworthiness it might have been differ-
ent, At a word of serious realization, he told himself, his
anger would have melted. But, alas! poor Rachel; respon-
sibility sat restlessly upon her—all eyes are not dimmed by
tears.
What was life to her, he asked himself, if she met it so
lightly? Had she not played with ambition as with a toy,
and might not love be as frivolously dealt with? Why
should he fan the waning embers of his remorse for the
sake of a pain that would be over and done with in the
curl of an eyelash? And his heart hardened, and he drew
back,
“T forced an entrance,” said Rachel; “a guard in the
guise of a reporter tried to stop me, but I told him that I
had important news about the murder trial, so he let me in.
Aren’t you glad he did?”
She laughed, and by that laugh she lost her kingdom. A
well of merriment overflowed and rippled upon the air;
laughter was in her deep, gray eyes, where the tears were
hardly dry, laughter was upon her lips, laughter dimpled
across cheek and brow; she was all laughter. The little
cap upon her head slipped jauntily aside, and the dark line
of hair was sharply defined upon her white, blue-veined
forehead. She was the old, audacious Rachel, whom he
had met and pondered over some two years ago—a charm-
ing Rachel, but a Rachel whose day was done.
“ Aren’t you glad?” she repeated, and she rested her
hands upon his shoulders and looked into his face. ‘ Don’t
you want those items dreadfully ?”
“T am busy,” he answered.
13
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ep a a Lay HO MeN Ae IR RRC At et th en ARETE I Sp Gan
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at TR ch alata a cre nat in teeta Dg onrmme fname ee a nate, Suey 5 Spek ote
Neca
eo
‘
THE DESCENDANT
194
“ Aren’t you glad to see mc >” she questioned, lightly, as
i i 31 As s yoke she gave
if forcing a foregone conclusion. As she spok ge
him a little shake.
“1 am busy.”
“ Busy | Nongeteél Why, you were walking up and
down this blessed floor as idle as—as that reporter, What
were you thinking of?”
*« Many things.” c
«What? Was I among them?
ENCES
“Really? Then if you have time to think of me, why
: es
haven’t you time to talk to mc ?
“TJ was thinking seriously.” -
“ Well. I never! And can’t you talk seriously, too?
?
“To you?” he asked, and smiled, ‘Why, you look like
an escaped sunbeam.”
Zs What a pretty speech! But shall I look like a cloud ?”
And she bent her heavy brows upon him, closing her eyes
until only the smutty purple shadows under them were visl-
ble. “Do you like me now?”
“Tt does not suit you.”
“What is the matter? Are you angry?” Something
tender and childish aboat her smote him suddenly with a
sharp pain. How young she looked ! “
“Oh no!” he answered ; “not that, dear.
“Am I good?”
“Ves,”
“Am I pretty?”
AVS
\
“Then what is the matter? Why can’t you become nice
and good-humored ?”
Then like a flash all the gayety vanished; a wondering
look settled upon her face, and the sweet, fresh merriment
fled. Fee
“ There is something wrong, dearest ; what is 1t:
He shook his head; but, with a sudden, passionate inten-
sity, she spoke :
THE DESCENDANT 195
“Flow dare you say nothing is wrong when you look
like that? Something ¢s wrong, and I will know! I will
know!”
“What will you know?”
“Why you look like this—why you wish me to go—what
it all means. Tell me!”
He took her hands very gently. What slender hands they
were !
“There is nothing wrong that I can tell you, Rachel;
nothing is wrong. Shall I go out with you for a walk?”
cat .
All the slumbering force of her nature had awakened, and
thrilled in her voice. For a moment she was silent; then,
drawing her hands from his grasp, she stood white and
straight before him. The words came slowly:
“For some time, Mike, I have felt—_I mean I have
thought—that—that something had come between us. I
tried not to see it; but one cannot shut one’s eyes, and—
and I fear that it is so.”
“ Rachel !” :
“What it is Ido not know. Ihave thought and thought
until my head ached, and I could think of nothing that I
had done or said that could have made the difference.”
Her voice was clear and steady now. “It may be that I
am mistaken. If I have been unjust, forgive me. I know
you have many things to do in life besides to love; and yet”
—then she looked at him, her solemn eyes summoning him
to judgment—“‘is it true?” she said.
“Rachel!” A note of pity softened his voice, and, like
a flash, it told upon her. He almost held his breath at
the change. A warm light leaped to her face; the flame in
her eyes blinded him as they swept over him, hot with pain.
She drew back, straightening herself to her full height as to
withstand a charge, and throwing back her head with a
gesture of resistless pride.
“Because I have loved you,’
that I cannot forget you.”
» she said, “do not think
See a Re RMON IRE IR CE AEA SN TEESE AEA
Sa ef
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NA,
196 THE DESCENDANT
He moved forward, but the coldness of her voice checked
him, and he stood still. Ss
“Tf we have played with love,” she said, “we have played
with it together, and neither of us has been wounded in the
farce, I need no pity. I chose to love you, and, when [
choose, I can forget you.”
Then her voice broke, and she fell to trembling as he
reached forward and caught her in his arms. ‘“ My dear!
my love!” he cried, “forgive me! Iam only a poor blun-
dering fool; forgive me ie
But her vehemence had died away, leaving her weak and
sobbing upon his breast. “ I—I lied,” she said. ‘‘I love
you—and I did not choose to love you—and—and I caw t
forget you.”
Ee loved her still, he told himself. He did not tell him-
self, but perhaps he dimly felt, that it was a love from which
reverence was slipping away. What he could not tell him-
self was that this mental revolution, which shadowed Rachel,
was the result of an illumination cast for him by Rachel
herself upon human life—and human fulfilments. His love
for her had been born of a desire for the unattainable, and
had fed upon sympathy; and that sympathy failing to ex-
tend to changed conditions, he found that mere love was of
all things frail the frailest.
He kissed her and cursed himself; and, with sobs still
echoing in her voice, she (eft him and went into the street.
At first she walked heavily, feeling wretched and undone.
But the air was so fresh, the sky so blue, the world so pul-
sating with energy, that one must put aside borrowed cares
and be glad with nature. And, after all, it had been a mis-
take—he loved her, she was sure he loved her, and what
mattered all else? So she quickened her steps and walked
briskly along the crowded streets, shooting soft, luminous
glances from beneath her drooping lids, putting away doubt
and distrust.
Then as she reached her door she caught sight of an
organ-grinder with a monkey upon his back, and she called
‘
THE DESCENDANT 197
to the man, taking the grinning little animal from him and
caressing it in her arms. It was so cunning and so ne ;
oe ee: : climbed upon her shoulders and laid ean
aah Sie cap she forgot her depression and bubbled
cree eee a ible dear,” she said to the man—“ such a
¢ f j
ees ittle dear.” And she gave him the change in her
Then the man, who was an Italian and ski i ¢
done his battered hat. “The Lord Bisco ote aes
face, he said; and he made the monkey practise his aie
lous little tricks, while the sunshiny face shone upon hi
and the sweet laugh rang out. Steet
A passer-by, one who was once young but was now old
and whose youth and age had been spent in the ways that
lead to the getting of wealth, heard the laugh and ae
to see from whence it came. He saw, and his withered
heart grew green again at the sight, and he forgot, for the
moment, that joy was vain and gold the only good BAS
happy woman,” he said, and smiled enviously. ,
And yet where the laughter sparkled in the deep, gra
eyes the tears were hardly dried; in the rippling jad i if
one listened, one heard the echo of a sob, and Beene ue
mirth, in her heart, a heaviness was weighing her down
Alas, poor Rachel! all eyes are‘not dimmed by tears,
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CHAPTER IX
SyatmmeR had come—throbbing, passionate summer, when
Nature had ripened into the fulness of maternity. The
earth had quickened joyously into fertility ; not a meadow
but teemed with emerald verdure, not a barren space but
rew pregnant with life.
: In aeae the fog of soot and smoke hung heavily 7 the
sweet, glad sunshine, reaching the tenement roofs, shifted
in leaden rays as if robbed of the essence of its gladness.
Summer in the country, with its free, wide stretches of
purpling moors and its ecstatic insight into the sacred
heart of things, is as unlike the city summer, with its palpi-
tating humanity and its tainted atmosphere, as life is unlike
death. The one is the world as God planned it; the other
as man has made it.
Rachel Gavin fretted and pined in her fifth-story front.
She kept close during the long, hot days, and only stole
out, wan and white, in the twilight for a breath of evening.
In imagination she saw herself roaming over tangled fields
and in shadowy woodland ways, her sketch-book and camp-
ing-stool strapped upon her arm. But the city fenced her
in, and her straitened means, the result of her idleness,
had to be lengthened by stringent economy. She had not
allowed Michael Akershem to give her so much as a paint-
brush, and the stratagems to which she resorted in her
fnancial straits were many and varied. Once he had
brought her a diamond ring, and she had turned upon him
like a flame, ‘How dare you?” she had cried, passion-
ately. ‘Do you wish to insult me? And I despise dia-
monds!” He had been a little vexed and a great deal
startled. ‘I shall be beholden to no man,” she had said.
\
THE DESCENDANT 199
“J will take nothing from you, do you hear? Nothing!
nothing !”
“Torgive me,” he had answered; ‘‘it is as you will.”
But he had grown dimly conscious of a Jack of compre-
hension. The delicacy of Rachel’s decision had been be-
yond his power of perception. As some visions are unable
to grasp, in a certain color, minute variations of shade, so
in a wide survey of a fact, subtle distinctions were lost
upon Michael Akershem. ‘That Rachel’s determination
was the one salvation to which her pride adhered he did
not suspect, and he would have failed as utterly in an at-
tempt to distinguish between the position as she now saw
it and as she should have seen it had she arrayed herself
in his diamonds. To his mother, toiling in the harvest-
fields, a nicety in point of morals could not have been more
incomprehensible.
But Rachel said, “I have accepted your convictions for
your sake; you may also abide by mine.” And he was
silenced.
So it was not only her watch that was pawned this sum-
mer; a pink coral necklace of her great-grandmother’s lay
unreclaimed for several months in the glass case of one
Israel Meyerbeer, and her guitar passed under those gold
balls never to return—at least, into her possession. She
suffered silently, however, for her pride set a seal upon her
paling lips. She packed Madame Laroque and her belong-
ings off to the seaside, watching her depart with smiling
eyes; and when the old flower-woman at the corner clapped
her withered hands, where the chilblains were barely healed,
and declared that she felt the summer in her bones, Rachel
answered with her ringing laugh. She had lost her watch
and her great-grandmother’s necklace and her peace of
mind, but, outwardly, she had not lost her frank good-
humor,
Rachel was not the only one who sighed in spirit, tortur-
ing her imagination with visions of the country-side. The
heat had penetrated into the office of Ze Lconoclast, and
Lah
en Rae at eR Rt PIN A a i i em inet, Rts TA OC eR ts te Risen” et op
I tema AAPOR on nd EN A AP Ae eC i en RF ORE A Te = te NAT ne: ete renee tt tat” temas ns tien es hinen Prone
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200 THE DESCENDANT
the printer’s devils groaned themselves blue, while in the
composing-room the foreman mopped his streaming brow
and thundered maledictions after the recreant editor.
Michael was out of town. For the first time in his nine
years of journalistic work he had taken a vacation, It was
Hedley Semple who had borne him off for a fortnight’s
shooting in the White Mountains. Mrs. Semple was en-
sconced with the children and several friends.ip a dilapi-
dated farm-house which she had purchased near North
Conway, and Akershem had been drawn into the party.
Like a bit of untried life to him was this happy-go-lucky
holiday, spent in the midst of the mountains, with Hedley
Semple’s enthusiastic sportsmanship and the frank cordi-
ality of Mrs. Semple’s large and pervasive presence. It
was a pleasant fortnight, and Michael entered into the
high-spirited informality with a boyish zest, grasping at the
youth which he had missed. For the first time he was
thrown with a crowd of wholesome, unaffected young people
—girls who had no theories and no missions but the general
theory that life is pleasant enough in its way, and the mission
to endeavor to make it more so, It was refreshing to him;
it robbed him of half his cynicism, and knocked the life out
of his fundamental maxim of social depravity.
When he returned to the city he was in excellent health
and it was with a masterful determination that
and spirits,
in—the work that he was begin-
he took up his work aga
ning to hate.
One day in September, as he worked in the composing-
yoo, a sudden disgust for his employment swept over him,
and, rising, he walked rapidly up and down the room.
“Mr, Akershem,” said the foreman, “can you let me
have those three sticks of copy ae
Michael sat down again, taking up his pen with an air of
supreme self-mastery.
There came a peal from the telephone bell, and he looked
up impatiently. “That is the twentieth time in the last
half-minute,” he said.
Sheahan eNO
| Ce BAER NON SORE ABER ee
sia ch AEN AA meet Nn NEI SNE
THE DESCENDANT 201
The telephone boy turned, the trumpet still at his ear.
Cockril & Holmeson,” he said, “say that in your account
of the strike at their works you put the wages the strikers
were receiving at half a cent too low.”
He looked at the foreman as he spoke, but Michael ut-
tered an exclamation and returned to his work.
The bell rang again. The boy looked up. “ Mr. Coggins
says we made him say that Anarchism was not an unnatu-
ral outcome of—”
“Pshaw! I don’t care what he said.”
Michael sighed. ‘That infernal telephone again!” he
exclaimed.
“Please, sir’—the telephone boy addressed vacancy and
looked dejected—“ Miss Caroline Houston, of Thirty-first
Street, says if we don’t retract that libel concerning her in
to-day’s issue she’ll—she’ll—she didn’t say what she'd do
but she’s coming up in a few minutes.”
“ And the last form going to press,” muttered the fore-
man, helplessly, while Michael cried : “Tell the next person
to go to the devil !”
For a moment there was silence. Michael tossed a cov-
ered sheet aside and took up a blank. A reporter looked in
at the door, and, seeing the state of affairs, cautiously looked
out again,
_ The telephone rang sharply, imperatively, with a finish-
ing snap at the end.
‘Please, sir,”
No answer.
“Mr. Akershem !”
epee 3)
“A gentleman to speak to you.”
“Tell him he can’t.”
The words were shouted through the telephone,
“ He says he must speak to you, sir.”
“Tell him to go to thunder.”
“ Please, sir, he says he won't, and he won’t budge till he
speaks to you.”
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202 THE DESCENDANT
In a rage Michael rose and strode to the trumpet.
“Who, in the devil’s name, are you ?” he shouted,
“ Hello, there!” came Driscoll’s voice. “I’ve something
to say to you.”
“Can't say it. Iwish you'd find some other amusement.
We're going to press.” é
He gave an angry jerk and left the telephone, picking up
his papers from the table. {le cast a sympathetic look at
the foreman, who held his head in one hand as he took
down notes with the other. His tone softened wonderfully.
The better side of his nature came out to his fellow-work-
man. “Come into my room, if you like, Jenkins,” he said ;
“Pll give you this in twenty minutes.”
And he passed into his office.
It was not until some hours later that he recalled Dris-
coll and his urgent desire for an interview, and shortly after
dinner he went to hunt him up.
He found Driscoll in his sitting-room, waiting patiently
for the last of the dinner things to be removed from the
small table.
“ fello!” he said. ‘Draw up and have some coffee and
a cigar, “You'll find that box of Havanas to your right
first-rate.” Michael sat down and glanced about him.
There was an air of solid comfort about Driscoll’s rooms
which never failed to impress him, and which he had striven
long and unavailingly to copy.
“How comfortable you look!’ remarked Michael, “I
wish I could reach your degree of perfection in that line.”
“ My greatest talent,” returned Driscoll, with complacent
assurance. ‘JI tell you, there is more real science in mak-
ing life pleasant than in tracing its origin.”
“ Was it Tertullian who said that to be happy is to flaunt
one’s self in the face of the Creator? And there is some
truth in it. I am never particularly cheerful that I don’t
wonder what particular misfortune Providence has pre-
pared next in order. But you had something to say to me.”
“And I have. I met Splicer, managing editor of Zhe
1
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i
RETO ERO om I ce SCE SH
THE DESCENDANT 203
Journal of Economics, you know. Well, his health has failed,
and he has to quit work. He thought he might get me into
his place. It’s a pretty responsible position, you see, but I
told him political economy was too stagnant for my taste,
and took the liberty of suggesting yourself. He was wild
in your praise, said in controversy you hadn’t your match.
Indeed, he magnified your ability considerably. You know
you scored him once on the sanitary advantages of ash
barrels, which accounts for it.. He said he would have been
glad to use his influence for you had you been less unsound,
and I ventured to hint at the moderation of your views.”
“Tt is not so. My views have not altered. I shall not
leave Zhe Lconoclast.”
“Oh, well, suit yourself. It’s a pretty good chance, how-
ever, if they offer it to you, which isn’t likely. I thought I
might as well prepare you—”
“T shouldn’t accept it,” returned Michael, insistently.
But as he walked home, after leaving Driscoll, he knew that
his determination had been but momentary, and that he
was already beginning to waver in his allegiance to Zhe
Jconoclast. In view of the foreseen contingency, his present
work became more distasteful. It was uncongenial; not
enough so, perhaps, to cause him to throw it aside with no
immediate opening in view, but uncongenial enough to war-
rant his exchanging it for an equally successful and more
respectable position.’ And even if he was not sufficiently
quixotic to sacrifice his future to his principles, still he was
sufficiently ambitious to attempt, were it possible, to gratify
principle and ambition at a single stroke. Yes; after all,
if the position were offered he would consider an accept-
ance. In his primitive disregard of consequences he over-
looked the difficulties of his reversion, By an open and
barefaced desertion to pass from his own party to the
front ranks of his opponents seemed, in its way, feasible
enough, That his party might resent his desertion did not
occur to him.
Cheerfully sanguine with regard to the opportunity he de-
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fe ene. cre ewan eed tt nae
PSE POE
NS
a a A ne
eee ee Me nega 2 alee
sitalnati “ ERA Re Cn wT i ee a one
St hb eI PTET RS A he eT EL AN Fr 9 ert pA i a hf he RE ep cen,
AE Begs eee HE BARI Ma
naa roger trai tebe mommy ener mek nected, Se Se
eer as
204 THE DESCENDANT
v4
sired, he went home and smoked a peaceful pipe in the sat-
isfaction of his decision. With the thought of his changed
position had awakened the thought of Anna Allard. Fora
moment he allowed himself to indulge in a soothing reve-
rie. Ue saw her beside him, bending above his chair—the
keeper of his home and his heart—her serene judgment sus-
taining him through life, He saw her grave smile illumined
by the glory of her hair; saw her bend above. him with his
image in her eyes; saw them threading together, through
youth and through age, into eternity, the pathway of their
lives. He thought of her calmly, with not one quiver of his
pulse. He desired her mentally. She personified the pro-
prieties of life—nothing more. From his wine husks he
was preparing to return to virtue, and virtue wore the hair
and eyes of Anna Allard.
Then he put the thought from him angrily, and fell to
thinking of Rachel.
The next day, going to his office, he found Kyle awaiting
him. The young fanatic had grown more fanatical of late ;
his appearance had become generally unkempt, and there
was a strangely lurid light in his eyes.
“We needed copy,” he began; “and as you left none I
ventured to look into your desk. I found an article upon
“ Tyrannicide” which I made use of. It suited us exactly.”
A flame kindled in Michael’s eyes.
“TJ consider it officious,” he said. “The thing was writ-
ten two years ago and not intended for publication. I shall
have it recalled.”
“Tt is too late,” returned Kyle, doggedly; “I have given
it to Jenkins. I had no idea you’d cut up so. I shouldn’t,
in your place.”
One of his rare smiles flashed across Michael’s face,
giving him a brilliantly youthful look.
“JT don’t believe you vould,” he said, frankly. “I beg
your pardon, Kyle; I was hasty.”
“And there is something else,” continued the other.
“Paul Stretnorf was here. He wishes you to deliver your
\
THE DESCENDANT 205
lecture upon Russian Nihilism before his society. I told
him I was sure he might count upon you, It is important,
you know.”
Michael started. The smile passed from his face, leav-
ing a harassed expression.
“You are getting me into a peck of trouble, Kyle. I
can’t do it.” :
“Vou must,” persisted Kyle, passionately. “I as good
as gave my word for you. The demand is imperative.
Why, one would think that you were—” He checked him-
self.
“That I were what?” demanded Michael.
“ Nothing, old man; but we must have the lecture.”
“That I were what?”
Kyle threw back his head and fixed his lurid gaze upon
him. “That you were playing trimmer!” he said, in a
passionate undertone.
For a moment Michael looked at him, growing white to
the lips. He realized in a flash that his part was less easy
than he had believed it, that what he called principle other
men would call perfidy, and that because of that principle
or perfidy he should have to reckon with Kyle.
“Do this for me, Akershem,” said Kyle.
Michael hesitated, his gaze abstracted, the vein upon his
forehead growing livid from contraction, his eyelids twitch-
ing nervously. Then he reached forward and laid his
hand upon Kyle’s shoulder.
“Vou believe in me, Kyle?” he said, and there was a
certain wistfulness in his voice.
“Unto death,” responded the other.
The old brilliant smile illumined Akershem’s face as he
spoke, “I will deliver the lecture,” he said.
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CHAPTER I
To Rachel Gavin the days seemed crowding past like
gray gnomes glutted with presage of evil. With passion-
ate incredulity she blinded her eyes, feeling in the darkness
their leering presences around her.. Then she looked and
understood. She understood that the way upon which she
had walked was the way of a quicksand; that the things
upon which she had looked were but phantasmagoric noth-
ings; that the rock upon which she had anchored had crum-
bled, as rocks will, ‘There remained only the end.
“But I will be happy!” cried Rachel, in all the passion
of her vehement youth—“T will be happy!” And she had
grown beautiful from the assumption of omnipotence, as if
an infusion of fresh blood stained the white of her skin
with its scarlet flame. Against the tenacity of her will
what power could prevail? In her eyes happiness had
clothed itself in the image of Michael Akershem. As he
was the one thing needful to her existence, so the vigor of
the desire with which she desired him redeemed the shrink-
ing value of her self-esteem. The buoyancy of her belief
in him had exalted her above conventions; but despised
conventions avenge themselves as inevitably as despised
truths, It may be that we have never clearly defined
wherein lies the difference betweén them.
But if Rachel suffered now, she made no sign. If she
missed the intensity of Michael's first affection, she missed
it silently. If the carefully acquired courtesy with which
he treated her showed pale beside the flaming memory of
that turbulent devotion, who was the wiser?
Before her always, sometimes shrouded by unnatural leth-
argy, sometimes veiled by a natural sanguineness, loomed,
14
“ = : ‘ é SEES So et : Bess = : Seas e —~ eons
AA NE A cis lil Ra BO ER a LAER SOAR A LS LO Sah LC APD 5 ERO ee A ALL IE ce Sa Aig GP te IGM EE. iG BE aN RPA ae cit td A nats tetas et rae RG AAO Sh FL Rt a Oe
Fr cman oer on tree Anan.
A a ele tener aa EP Ta NN a tenella Bat
St a en gee ARR A AN tn ti gn Ee RN mae ee ye yf tir ame
: saa Pete eh renee 2 eae cae me
2 2 saceerasapahmiebstaipanre nts ~
SAS PTI BORN LATS EO INNO AC TN ASPET INR AONE, RRO EAS NA A ROO Et RSE tee: A A ene
ees
ee
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Sn TO san, a entrain cing a,
re SORES S
RR RIT, i ee SF CS BEL
THE DESCENDANT
210
in a terrible obscurity, the dread of entering upon that val-
ley of humiliation which is found at the end of the way of
false ideals. She resented the gentleness with which Mi-
chael treated her; she resented the superlative considerate-
ness of Michael’s friends, and, most bitterly, she resented
the ill-concealed compassion of her former companions,
She who had renounced art scoffed at them that they re-
gretted the renunciation.
When Driscoll came one day and lounged about her
studio, and talked to her in that deferential manner which
she had observed closely of late, it stung her like the sting-
ing of a lash. She writhed in the nervous tension of her
exasperation.
“T wish you wouldn’t treat me as if I were insane or in a
fever,” she remarked, irritably.
Driscoll’s mouth dropped in astonishment. He walked
to the window and stood gnawing his mustache abstracted-
ly. His back expressed an amicable forbearance, his face
a prophetic gloom. The silence was oppressive. There was
a lack of sprightliness about the passers-by that savored
of dejection.. He shook himself resignedly and glanced at
Rachel from the corner of his eye, after which he beat an
almost inaudible tattoo upon the window-pane with the fin-
gers of one hand. He quoted, gravely:
***T never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one ;
But this PH tell you, anyhow,
I'd rather sce than be one,’”
With an energy born of boredom he descended to over-
tures. “Well, he remarked, placidly — “well, as we were
* saying, the wind sits in the cast.
cts ing to say,” continued Rachel, witl
“Tf you have anything to say,” continued Rac hel, with
asperity, “please say it, and have it over. I hate skirmish-
ing !” .
Driscoll’s mouth dropped a degree lower, and his eyes
grew wider.
THE DESCENDANT 2IT
“But I haven’t anything to say,” he protested, “so how
can I say it?” Then he grew hopeful. “I can quote you a
line or two if it will answer,” he added.
Rachel was not to be mollified, ‘I don’t know the rea-
son,” she said, ‘but I wish you didn’t always look as if you
were thinking things.”
“I assure you,” retorted Driscoll, with solemnity, “my
mind is a perfect blank.”
Rachel laughed nervously, her glance flashing brilliantly
through the dark shadows encircling her eyes. She inter-
laced her fingers restlessly. ‘Perhaps I am insane,” she
said; “perhaps that is why you are so civil.” And she
added, with the recklessness of desperation, “I see no other
reason.”
He regarded her contemplatively. “I£ you will know,”
he returned, with a whimsical disregard of her earnestness,
“I was thinking that the abolition of slavery has more to
answer for than is written in history.” Then he became
suddenly serious. ‘ And I was also thinking,” he added,
slowly, “that not one of us is worth your putting out your
hand to; but it is like you to do it, and it is more like us
to want you to.”
Rachel started, and the scarlet fled from her face, leaving
it like marble. Her lips trembled; the stars were lost be-
hind the rain-clouds in her eyes. She tore at the em-
broidered edge of her handkerchief nervously, “I—I am
so childish !” she said, and burst into tears.
He watched her quietly, pale to the lips. “Don’t!” he
said, at last, stammering awkwardly. ‘Don’t!’ Then he
spoke quickly.
“Rachel,” he said, “if it had only been—” He checked
himself; the word was never spoken. It was the restraint
of a man in whom passion had long since been throttled.
He regarded Rachel as he regarded the world, with hon-
est cynicism, and a quizzical acknowledgment of what she,
as well as the world, might have been to him and was
not,
eat ge tS eA YG a iS I tl ik AAR AS AES RL tg erly ms, aes AC ORES GR FARE fT ig ai ag EM Png?
oy Et RO Em “alin ER Mp cA tl Sip I SSOP Tha RI Le PARI ZO PEE PING
ta
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i eSCENDANT
212 THE DESCE
When she looked at him he was conscious only of her
—tragic eyes, haunted by tears.
Fey ane she said, “I am porcedy, happy.” alba
was a pitiful refutation in her voice. It is only my work
that troubles me,” she added, and looked into his pace and
saw that the lie was as naught. “It is my work,” she re-
Boe course!” assented Driscoll, heartily — “ of course!
What else could it be? Asa friend of mine used to remark,
‘What with your confounded advantages auc your cursed
attractiveness, you lack only common-sense } Not at
intentionally cast any aspcrsions | upon your See at ie
added, hastily, ‘‘ for you will take it up again and I shall yet
icture.
we Paget bron.” Rachel wavered. in her answer. Then
she stood up, and her glance met his as he isaiato! above
her. A wave of color flooded her face. at the thought
of Akershem she reddened before Akershem’s friend. A
flash of her old iridescence illumined her,
“TJ have chosen to Zive/” she said. r
“ Ag we have all chosen,” he answered, simply. I as
well as you, and the world as well as ourselves.” And he
took the hand that lay in her lap with a gesture that ie
half consolatory. ‘And like most choices, we regret It, he
Sale tree think,” asked Rachel of Akershem that
night, “how different life would have been for us both had
2 2 ed 2”?
Be eR ee ea truthfully, “I have thought.”
She flashed a brilliant glance upon his face. The light-
ness of her voice drowned the pain beneath. “ Tow bare
it would have been, and how cold!” she said.
“ How brilliant for you!”
“But how cold!”
“Cold! With Fame?”
“Tt does not warm.”
He grew tender.
THE DESCENDANT 213
“Does this?” He put his arm about her, and, as she
lifted her head, kissed her lips.
She warmed, a glow overspread her face, and that vivid,
illusive flame, at which he had so often marvelled, wrapped
her from head to foot.
She laughed softly with happiness. “So you aren’t
sorry?” she asked,
“ Sorry ?”
“Not sorry that I failed ?”
‘Vou did not try.”
The old haunting jealousy of her work was gone, and it
pained her.
“YT might have been an honor to you,” she said, with
rash audacity, “to leaven the lump of your reputation.”
His brow wrinkled and grew harassed; the twitching of
his lids increased. The superficiality of her manner per-
plexed him; he knew not of the unguessed depths that lay
below. He knew only that the recklessness of speech which
had at first attracted now repelled him.
‘““My reputation is not so black as you are pleased to
suppose,” he retorted.
She laughed provokingly.
“You contrast it with mine,” she said, “which, I doubt
not, outrivals the raven’s wing.”
“Don’t, Rachel!” he pleaded. “One must consider
such things.”
“As ebon reputations?” she inquired. “ Mine is at your
service.” Then she made him a mocking courtesy. “Sir
Respectability, may your shadow never be less !”
She stood in the falling firelight, a vivid, elastic figure,
all the supple curves emphasized by the strenuous motion.
From her straight, white brow to her agile feet she was all
energy and action. A scintillant charm, born of her spirit
and the genial firelight, sent for an instant the swift blood
to his brain, But half smiling he turned from her to the
ruddy coals, which seemed inert and lifeless. There was
nothing vital save herself.
i a Oe ne es Bl Pa pol Ins ih ma, Sy
ATL AEE SR AOR ROT rN tonnage ea SP I ne men nec papel ast
att ce PO ee nt ON Hee me ne tt Rene ra rR tg,
fe ane en perrntene
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Otter % ne
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226 THE DESCENDANT
“ How cold you are!” she said, speaking rapidly from a
feverish dread of silence—“how very cold! Sit down,
No, not there. You never liked that chair, you know,
This one suits you. So you came early, as z said. ies:
there is something to be discussed. Why is it that the
word discussion always reminds me of a dissecting-room?
1 feel that when a person is discussed he is morally dis-
Sette she
sected and pulled to pieces. But we sha’n’t dissect any
p? i
one but ourselves, shall we!
She sat down near him, keeping upon the edge of her
i i leat ds him.
chair and turning her profile towar
“Why dissect ourselves?” he asked. ‘ Unpleasant com-
* ”
lications are likely to ensue.
me Oh, but it is necessary,” she answered, quickly. “You
see, we have been living, as it were, under false pretences.
We have pretended to be happy when we were not happy
at all, You pretended to me, and I pretended to you. It
has been just like a game we used to play when we were
‘ . ° 9 *
children, which we called ‘ making believe,’ and in which we
made believe we were something that we were not. Now we
must stop making believe. I don’t feel like playing any
longer; I want to return to my real self. So here Tam.”
He regarded her fixedly, his eyes narrowing until his
waze seemed as a stream of light thrown from a lantern
dS :
upon her excited face. '
“So here you are,” he repeated.
“So here I am.” She moved restlessly on the edge of
her chair. “And this means that it is all over—all over,
do you hear? You go back to your work and I go back i
mine; and we will both look upon this as a little game o
‘make-believe.’ ” :
‘But it was earnest,” he said.
She started at his unconscious use of the past tense, oe
walked hastily to the window; then she came back, ae
played with the cups upon the tea-table. She cree :
lump of sugar in the tongs, but it dropped before it reachec
the cup. She smiled as he looked at her.
THE DESCENDANT 227
‘Ts there any superstition about sugar?” she asked.
“Only that foolish one about ‘Many a slip,’ I suppose.”
She poured the tea very carefully, and handed the cup to
him. As he took it from her he noticed that her hands
were trembling,
“Rachel,” he protested—“ Rachel, I can’t understand.”
She filled a cup for herself. Her throat was parched,
and she swallowed a little before replying, ;
“Not understand !” she exclaimed, with that lightness of
manner which had once been natural. “ Well, be quiet, and
let me explain. I was always good at explaining things, you
know. It means just this: you and I have been very good
friends, but friendship isn’t the only thing in the world, and
we have found it out; and it means—well, you understand.”
In a moment she went on again: “Perhaps, after a long
time, when we are very, very old people, and have gotten as
much fame as our hands can hold, we will sit down again
and talk it quietly over. By that time it will all seem very
amusing,” she added. She lifted the cup to her lips again,
He surveyed her in baffled silence; then, rising, he stood
before her.
“Is it possible,” he asked, slowly, “that you have ceased
to love me?”
With a soothing gesture she put her hand to her throat,
it felt so strained and drawn. :
“So many things are possible,” she replied, “that one
can’t be sure of anything.”
He felt vaguely aggrieved, Then he looked into his own
heart and his faith in impossibilities weakened. If his love
could burn out, why not Rachel’s. And yet—
‘‘Y do not believe it!” he cried, hotly.
She flushed angrily. “You were always sceptical,” she
rejoined. She looked at him firmly. The struggle had
come, and she knew it; and with the knowledge a nervous
excitement quickened her to combat. The thought that he
would yield easily maddened her; but she was not a cow-
ard, and she faced that as she had faced the rest.
a Se ee a eae
—
Ee OOO ne ee
Ee
mr a eS
tea repre
SS epee
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STR TOOT ti eM OR
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228 THE DESCENDANT
tood before her,
In all the years that
he looked that moment
the cut of his
With vivid intensity his figure, as he s
was photographed upon her brain.
came it was Michael Akershem as
that she remembered, The maze of hair,
_ coat, the ink-stains upon his finger-tips, the very pattern of
his cravat—these dwelt in her mind then and forever after,
He himself was half angry, half humbled.
As Rachel stood there, wrapped, as in a t.antle, in her
indomitable pride, he realized, as he had never realized be-
fore, the wealth of her nature, the immensity of the love
with which she had loved him. And then a tide of relief
swelled within him that the crisis was to be faced and the
suspense at an end.
Stung by a quick suspicion, he s
he said, “is there some one else?”
A wave of resentment swept over her, staining her cheek;
a wrathful light leaped to her eyes. She grew icy. “Why
not?” she demanded, insolently. And he, remembering
Anna Allard, was silent.
He stretched out his hand without replying. “At least
we are friends,” he said.
Her hand closed upon his with nervous tension. “Not
yet,” she answered ; “after a time—perhaps.”
She swayed and leaned lightly against him, her head rest-
ing against his arm. Then by an effort she held herself
erect, and, lifting her heed, kissed him once. “ It was a
poke harshly. “Rachel,”
very nice game,” she said.
In a sudden forgetfulness of all save her and what she
had been to him, he held her from him, trying to read de-
nial in her eyes.
“ Little comrade,” he said, ‘can’t we throw up the game?
Can't we settle down into commonplaces and matrimony at
last ?”
The laugh that broke from her was a reaction from her
passionate self-control, but he did not know it.
“What a prosaic ending to our theories!” she said.
“No; it is better so.”
eaten Bt CR
ea SOs a ARETE RARE AOR AROTROESR PT URIS HA “eitaome, seine
pes i AR A late
ns ies dsl iN BE ao
ct isch che ihe ia Ne Rn Ae NN Ne
asia aa
THE DESCENDANT 229
He ioe from her towards the door. On his way out
ne upset her work-table, scattering a pile of 1 si
iacnuheganes ; g a pile of colored silks
“T beg your pardon,” he sai i
ae ee 5 id, bluntly, stooping to gather
“ Don’t trouble yourself,” she i
answere
Pema ; ? red, looking up. “It
And he went out. :
Rachel stood beside the table as he had left her. She
eaned over the bowl of nasturtiums, crushing a flaming
osson between her fingers ; its blood stained her hand:
It would all be so ridiculous,” she said, “if one could onl
see the humorous side.” 2
Her glance fell upon the shrouded canvas, and she went
over to it, drawing the curtain hurriedly aside. Taking
down her palette, she emptied a tube of yellow ochre upon
it, squeezing it out with lavish haste, after which she stirred
it absently with a camel’s-hair brush.
“There is always something left,” i
eft,” she said, and, looking
up, found that the twilight had crept inupon her id
Ipon h i
her palette aside. ae
: A: See dark to work,” she said, “so it won’t matter if
cry a little.’ And she laid her head i
ee upon her arm and
ape
SS ES Re
ee EL ee aE ea sane
: PY shee neous helene
nero RTS ‘i
aS Se
=
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aa
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Reece eee ee
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Say
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CHAPTER III
MicuHaEL walked along the corridor, and pressed the
electric button summoning the elevator. As he stood wait-
ing he straightened himself with the gesture of one relieved
of a grievous weight. “So that is over,” he said.
The conviction of its finality was impressed so forcibly
upon his brain that, when he reached the ground-floor, he
was surprised to find himself wondering what course he
should pursue in view of a possible reconciliation. The
climax having been precipitated by Rachel, she, he told
himself, was alone responsible. But with the sudden re-
moval of suspense, and the passing of the jubilant revulsion
succeeding it, a gnawing doubt of his own sincerity assailed
him.
He left the house, walking along Eighteenth Street, and
turning into Broadway at the corner.
“So that is over,” he repeated, in a vehement endeavor
to reassure himself.
Then he threw back his head with the impatience of a
horse that resents the curb.
“Hang it all!” he exclaimed. “ What is the matter with
me?”
A moment before he would have sworn that freedom was
the one thing needful; and perhaps it was, but he felt no
freer to-day than he had felt yesterday or the day before.
The fact that Rachel had annulled the unspoken contract
was insufficient. A slow consciousness that he, not Rachel,
was responsible for the annulment oppressed him with stub-
born insistence. Vainly he sought to intimidate the con-
sciousness by undue influence; he might obscure it by san-
guine assurances, but when the assurances were hushed he
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THE DESCENDANT 231
knew that it would rise and confront him. He admitted
dimly that six months ago such words from Rachel would
have had no power to release herself or him from their vol-
untary obligations. He was aware, although he refused to
acknowledge it, that for him to retrace his steps and to ac-
cuse Rachel of the treachery of which he was unwilling to
accuse himself would be to virtually reseal their broken
faith. And yet—
“Tt is her choice.” And the rising conviction that he
lied irritated him unbearably.
In his uncertainty he walked the streets until midnight,
when he returned to his rooms. As he opened his door he
spoke. “It is over,” he said. As he struck a light he
spoke again. ‘I will see her to-morrow,” he said.
That a personal interview indicated a truce to hostilities
he admitted, and with a sinking confidence in his own good
faith he shrank from clinching matters so irrevocably— ~
upon the side of Rachel. With the cowardliness which
he would have derided in another, he compromised. Stand-
ing beside the mantel, he drew out his note-book, and, tear-
ing a leaf from it, scribbled a line:
“Vou cannot mean it; I refuse to consider this final. If
you loved me, you would not let me go.”
This he kept by him until morning, when, before going
to his breakfast, he sent it to Rachel’s room. In a mo-
‘ment the messenger returned. There was no answer, he
said.
Vehemently Michael demanded whom he had seen, and,
when he had learned that it had been Rachel herself, was
divided between anger and astonishment.
In a fit of anger, which was increased by a sleepless
night, he went to his office without breakfasting, The dis-
order upon his desk annoyed him, and he spoke sharply to
a reviewer who inquired for a missing volume. He found
himself unable to concentrate his attention, and the task of
pruning one of Kyle’s leaders was so irksome that he gave
it up in disgust. The editing of a paper he felt to be a
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232 THE DESCENDANT
species of refined damnation. Suddenly he rose, pushing
all the papers upon his desk into a confused jumble.
“ Kyle,” he called, “ Ive given out! Take charge of this
confounded stuff, will you?”
Kyle looked up sympathetically, ‘ Overwork, Aker-
shem,” he said. ‘I should advise your secking medical
advice.”
“ Advice is the kind of rot that comes unsought,” re-
turned Akershem, crossly. ‘I want quiet. Pll go off
somewhere.”
Kyle laughed softly. “‘Phe city editor’s lot is not an
easy one,” he remarked, But Michael had left the office,
The possibility of encountering. Rachel if he returned to
his apartments occurred to him, and he went to a restaurant
for dinner. Then, with a feeling that New Vork and the
tumult of New York maddened him, he took the ferry, buy-
ing a ticket in Jersey City and boarding the first train he
came upon. Action of any kind was better than inertia,
and to be rushing to hell preferable to standing still.
He settled himself, throwing his overcoat upon the seat
facing him, and surveying with an angry glance his fellow-
passengers. Before the train pulled out from the station he
was thrown in a nervous rage by the sounds without—by
the hurry in the station-yard, by the equanimity of the por-
ters, and by the steam from an engine upon the track be-
side him. A frail lady carrying a milliner’s box took the
section in front of him, and he felt an instantaneous dislike
for her, for the bundles beside her, and for the crimps of
her hair, A stout gentleman, entering from the rear, paused
beside him to remove a silk hat and don a travelling-cap,
and he disliked the stout gentleman even more than he had
disliked the frail lady. At the end of the car a baby cried,
and he felt that he disliked the baby most of all.
Then with a jerk that irritated him the train started.
The relief of motion was so great that for a moment the
strain seemed lifted.
An agent passed with an armful of books, He took the
THE DESCENDANT 233
first that was handed him, running the leaves idly through
his fingers. It was Mr. Chambers’s King in Yellow, and the
head-lines caught his eye, conveying an impression without
an idea: “The Repairer of Reputations.” Why should not
reputations be repaired? ‘The Yellow Sign.” Why yel-
low? And then “The Studio” staggered him with the sud-
denness of a blow. Irom the page before him, suggested by
the words, the familiar room dawned gradually: the glow of
the fire in the grate, the faded carpet upon the floor, the
Eastern pottery in one corner, the pictures on the wall, the
plaster casts above the door, the marble statue of “ Hope”
upon a little table, the bust of Michael Angelo upon her
desk, the hangings at the windows, the paints, the brushes,
the canvases—all the objects upon which she had im-
pressed her vivid personality. The recollection was not
pleasant ; it was by a mechanical predominance of memory
over will that it prevailed.
Striving to banish the real by the ideal, he followed the
page upon which his eye had fallen :
“He said: ‘For whom do you wait?”
“ And I answered: ‘When she comes I shall know her.’”
He threw the book aside. For whom did he wait ? Then—
“T am a man,” he said, ‘‘and I will face it.”
What it was that he thus determined to confront he did
not know. To himself he admitted no possible reason for
Rachel’s decision. He accepted it mentally, as he had ac-
cepted it the evening before, viewing the facts of his life
through a discolored veil.
The flickering lights of the train reflected upon the win-
dow-pane dazzled him, the swaying motion seemed the re-
sult of intoxication. He stared into the obscurity with un-
seeing eyes, ‘The landscape stretched in a sombre weird-
ness that was as a triumph of the supernatural. A dim
line of pearl-colored clouds in the distance suggested a pos-
sible horizon to the blackness—blackness broken only by
shrouded outlines of leafless trees and barbed-wire fences,
speeding rapidly past, their places being as rapidly refilled.
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THE DESCENDANT
234
He brushed the frown from his brow with a single gesture
of his hand. Desire had so long guided him in the guise
of reason that it was no great difficulty to follow where it
led, deeming himself secure. It was as if his whole being
sprang forward, drawn by some magnetic force, seeking,
however dimly, a loadstar in the distance. What that load-
star signified he dared not question. He even put its ex-
istence angrily aside; and yet, ignore it as he would, a calm
presence shone as through a nebulous vista, far beyond the
tumult of the present, and—ignore it still more doggedly—
that presence was Anna Allard. be
The severe recoil from the sinking reefs of his fanaticism
served as an impetus which impelled him towards conven-
tions, His nature strained towards that decent ambition
of decent people—respectability. Love and notoriety were
his for the asking, but not honor and—Anna Allard.
Beyond the difficulties investing the path that led to the
accomplishment of his desire rose the objects desired, the
more alluring to his combative nature because unattainable.
And yet— Why unattainable? Only yesterday he had
noticed the altered looks bent upon him, Only yesterday
his hand had been grasped by a man whom he had long
held as an opponent—an apostle of respectability. It had
been a new experience and a pleasurable one. Now that
his mind was purged from passion, he could look upon men
as they were, not as his discased imagination had distorted
them. He saw that in his old enmity against the world he
had pursued a course devoid of policy, .
To get the best that the world can give and hold it
grudgingly is a surer revenge than squandering one’s birth-
right of ability in the waging of a fruitless war. It was not
that he had grown fonder of the world or of those men
who called themselves his brothers, but that he realized
that the revolt of the one against the many is an ineffectual
revolt; that to take all life can offer is wiser than offering
one’s self a victim upon the sacrificial altar of conventions.
Yes; he wanted the opportunities that men open only to
THE DESCENDANT 235
men who are like themselves. He wanted his reputation
repaired. What an excellent thing it was that one had
the power to repair one’s reputation! In a flash he re-
membered the appointment of which Driscoll had spoken.
He knew that a word from Driscoll would procure it, and
he also knew how gladly Driscoll would speak that word.
Driscoll! Why was it that the name of the man whose es-
teem he most coveted was linked in his mind to the name
of the woman who he now knew had hindered his career?
Why was it that in facing Driscoll he must face Rachel
also? Were they in league against him? Was Driscoll
that some one whose existence she had not denied? Then
even to his prejudiced eyes the subterfuge showed too weak
to stand, Absurdity was bald upon the face of it.
He ground his teeth as one in torture. What was it that
haunted him? Without was the blackness of night, within
the glare of swinging lamps.
What was it? Passionately he strove to collect himself,
but that something—that intangible something, for which
he had no name and no acknowledgment—rose from the
chaos of thought and confronted him. All the accumulat-
ed experience of years, the lingering effects of which acted
as his conscience, grouped themselves one by one about
him. His sense of gratitude, which served him for a sense
of duty, awoke. All the little kindnesses that men had
done unto him and forgotten were resurrected from the
dust in which they had lain, grouping about a light and
gracious vision that glimmered in the night without.
His nature still strained onward through that pale vista
leading ahead, but something which fettered him like a
chain held him back; and that chain was formed by links
of the little kindnesses of men.
In the chain came the farmer in his rusty suit of jeans,
turning to look at him with his watery eyes, and passing
him the supper which he had saved from his own. Why
did that link him to Rachel?
The minister, with his great nose and short chin; the
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236 THE DESCENDANT
books which he had loaned him; the seventeen cents jin-
gling in his pocket, as he, a little outcast, darted along the
dusty road that evening ; his very enjoyment of that circus—
why did that link him to Rachel?
The woman who had held his head that night in the pub-
lic park, the softened look in her eyes as she chafed his
forehead, the dime that she had slipped into his hand—why
did that link him to Rachel?
And Driscoll? Driscoll, as he sat in his office chair
looking with cynical eyes upon life; Driscoll, who had
stood as a pillar of fire to his mental night — why, above
all, did Driscoll link him to Rachel?
Goaded to frenzy, he raised the window, leaning out into
the night, watching the train as it rounded a curve, speed-
ing with fiery eyes into blackness. A hot air laden with
cinders blew into his face.
“Will you kindly lower that window? I am subject to
neuralgia.”
The frail lady was speaking. He looked at her blankly,
and she was forced to repeat her request before he com-
plied. The lady retired into her berth, and soon the cur-
tains were put up along the aisle.
A man took the seat beside him, turning to follow drow-
sily the movements of the porter. It was the stout gentle-
man with the gray travelling-cap. He folded a single sheet
of The Herald into a narrow strip, tapping his nose reflect-
ively. Unusually chilly for this season,” he remarked.
Michael stared at him absently. “ It is hot,” he replied;
“or is it cold ?”
The stout gentleman bestowed upon him that pleasant
smile with which we favor those less gifted than ourselves
in the matter of intellect, “Well, cold, rather,” he respond-
ed, amiably. Then he continued: “We are having trouble
out West again, I see.”
“Yes,” said Michael, turning his dazed eyes to the win-
dow. “A blizzard, was it not?”
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THE DESCENDANT 237
was alluding to the strike,” he answered. “The blizzard
happened yesterday. We don’t take account of yesterday’s
news in Chicago, We take to-day’s, and grumble because
we can’t get to-morrow’s.”
The gentleman departed to his berth, and Michael put
up his hand te screen his eyes from the glaring lamps.
The porter touched him upon the arm, “TI shall sit up,”
he said, surlily.
And in the morning, when, upon reaching Richmond,
he found himself in time for the returning train, he took
it. The trip had saved him from insanity, and decided
nothing.
That night he spent at a hotel, and the next morning,
drawn by very indecision, he returned to his rooms. On
the way he passed Rachel’s studio, and from a sudden im-
pulse knocked at the door. There was no answer. Open-
ing it, he was startled by blank walls; the firelight, the
hangings, the canvases, the casts, the pictures —all were
gone, and Rachel with them. In the haste with which she
had deserted her accustomed spot he read a feverish shrink-
ing from himself; in the bare wall and the sacrilegious
sacking of this her temple he saw the overthrow of those
passionate divinities of the past. It was as one who enters
a cathedral that has been suffused with the purple mysti-
cism of mediaval ages to find it naked to the cold, raw
light of modern thought. The last shred of romanticism,
draping the altar before which he had knelt, was swept
aside, Rachel’s spirit, that light, elusive essence of mod-
ernism, the outcome of an effete civilization, crumbling to
dust upon the soil from which she, an untranslatable mixt-
ure of the past and the future, had sprung, had escaped as
a vapor from the place thereof.
In an agonizing perplexity he left, going to his office.
There he found disorder and excitement. Mr. Mushington,
the man of money, awaited him, He had a complaint to
lodge, and he lodged it with emphasis.
“The paper is going down,” he said. “There is a mad-
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238 THE DESCENDANT
ness about the editorials which amounts to insanity. Can
you explain it, sir?”
Akershem looked into his red and bloated face with in-
solent eyes.
“T cannot,” he answered. It was his first revolt from
the service of Mammon.
“Then, sir, you know precious little about your busi-
ness!”
In sudden fury the Gordian knot was severed.
“And will know still less about it in future. Expect my
resignation.”
He would let this infernal nonsense go. He was sick of
fanaticism and women. By one stroke he had cut himself
adrift from his old life, ridding himself forever of the past
and of the present. Only the future remained.
He remembered Driscoll and the appointment. That
was his chance, and he would make it good.
As he rushed from the office a group of reporters, as-
sembled about the door, drew back.
“What’s up with Akershem?” asked one. “He’s as
mad as a March hare.”
The sleeplessness, the perplexity, had fed upon him, pro-
ducing an agony that was almost insanity. He felt his
blood coursing like fire through his veins, and a dull pain
started at the base of his brain. Lights flickered and
danced before his eyes.
The primitive lawlessness of his nature, aggravated by
the swaddling-bands of the hot-bed of civilization, rose in
a tempestuous desire to assert itself. Conventions which,
acting like a moral strait-jacket, curb the normal man, in-
flame the abnormal. But conventions are created and
stamped with the Divine signature, not for the one, but for
the many.
He entered a bar-room, drinking a glass of brandy, but
it failed to drive the lights away. It was as if his eyeballs
were on fire,
With an impetuous haste he rushed to Driscoll’s room,
SOS ROAR Ret SE SERENE PERT a ls
THE DESCENDANT 239
and found that gentleman sitting before the fire, a bottle of
brandy at his hand and misery upon his face.
Seeing Akershem, he exclaimed: “The very man! Be-
hold me in the clutches of the devil. He is sawing every
bone in my right side to bits. I leave for Florida to-day.”
Akershem took no notice. ‘Look here, Driscoll,” he
said, excitedly, “I have resigned from Zhe Lconoclast. I
want that credential for Splicer.”.
Driscoll looked at him inquiringly. Then, without speak-
ing, he rose and limped to his desk. As he put his right
foot to the floor his brow contracted with pain. “It is a
temptation never to rise,” he remarked, “and having risen,
it is an equal temptation never to sit.” With pen in hand
he paused. “It’s all right about the place, Shem,” he said.
“But ”—he hesitated a moment—“ Shem, this is a serious
affair—more serious for you than for most men, You see,
you must square up all your accounts. You can hardly re-
adjust your political views until you have made reparation
for your discarded social ones,”
Michael flinched. ‘Those have readjusted themselves,”
he replied, stolidly.
Over Driscoll’s face a warm light broke; a flash of relief
brightened his eyes. “That's right!” he exclaimed, hearti-
ly. “I expected it of you, old fellow. So that explains
why I found Miss Gavin’s studio deserted when I called
there yesterday. Where are you staying?”
A ramifying humiliation shot through Michael’s frame.
It was like the application of an electric wire to raw flesh.
The sensation was so strange that it half startled him.
Never in his life had he felt this slow sense of rising shame
that he felt before Driscoll—the man who believed in him,
A red flush mounted to his brow. Then, with desperate
resolve, he raised his eyes. “I cannot tell where Miss
Gavin is,” he answered, “ because I do not know.”
The keenness of Driscoll’s glance made him wince
sharply. ‘ Why, what does it mean ?”
Michael laughed; it was a harsh laugh, which grated
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240 THE DESCENDANT
from lack of humor. Instinctively he realized the suspicion
in Driscoll’s mind, and it angered him, “It means,” he
retorted, fiercely, ‘that she, like the world, has weighed me
in the balance and found me wanting.”
A flash of perplexity shot from Driscoll’s eyes. “That
she might have done so to her advantage, I admit,” he said ;
“that she has done so, I refuse to believe.”
Akershem flushed hotly. He was exhausted, and the
lights flickered before his eyes. “Then get her to explain,”
he broke in, passionately, “for I am sick of the whole con-
founded thing.”
“But explain you shall. If there is a grain of manliness
left in you you will make good the debt you owe her.
Good God, man! do you know that she has sacrificed more
for you than your salvation is worth?”
The blinking of Michael’s lids grew faster and a yellow
flame shot from his eyes. His face was gray, and upon
his brow that purple vein leaped forth like the brand of
Cain.
“Do I need you to tell me that?” he thundered. “I tell
you I know nothing of her and her vagaries—nothing i
Driscoll’s voice was low and distinct, cutting the passion-
ladened air like steel. “This,” he said, “is a fitting climax
to your conduct of late. Would a man who had acquired
an instinct of honor owe to one woman the debt that you
owed, and turn from her to follow like a spaniel at the heels
of another? Perhaps I shall hear of your engagement in
that quarter,” he added, with untempered irony.
Michael was quivering from head to foot. ‘I love where
I choose, and I marry where I choose!” he exclaimed,
hotly,
And then Driscoll turned upon him, “I had thought
you an honest fanatic,” he said, “ but now I know you are
a damned scoundrel !”
Akershem shivered from the white-heat within him. The
lights in the air before him flamed from blue to green and
from green to scarlet. His eyes flickered like rusty iron
THE DESCENDANT 241
through which a red-hot fire is passing. “I would kill an-
other man for that!” His voice was choked and muffled.
Driscoll laughed sarcastically. Then, with a quick return
of his old manner, he took up his pen. As he did so he
flinched from a twinge of pain, ‘Hold on, if you please,”
he called, for Michael had reached the door, “ Allow me
to give you this,” he continued, with icy courtesy, “and, be-
lieve me, it will give me great pleasure to use my influence,
now and always, for the advancement of your business in-
terests.” :
Michael crushed the paper in his hand convulsively.
Then he threw it from him. He wished that it had been
dynamite, that it might explode, blowing Driscoll, himself,
and the room to atoms. ‘“ ‘Take that for your influence !”
he exclaimed.
As he stood there in his passionate defiance something
of the old Michael whom Driscoll had first known and
loved shone in him, and the fascination which his dominant
nature exerted over all who loved him cast a shadowy spell
over John Driscoll again. He softened suddenly. “Shem,”
he said, with a gesture that was half appealing, “I would
have forgiven you anything else.”
And—“ Damn your forgiveness!” cried Michael, as he
rushed out. :
The rage within him was so great that it stifled him, and
he put up his hand to loosen his collar. A terrible ringing
began in his ears. Every bell in New York seemed to burst
upon him with an infernal din, ringing him out of the city.
He rushed on, almost oblivious of his way. He saw
that he walked upon bricks and they burned his feet. He
saw that people were passing about him, and he longed to
fall upon them, one and all, to do some terrible damage to
mankind or to himself. A newsboy held a paper towards
him and he pushed it aside with an oath. A tiny child
stumbled and fell at his feet, and he strode over it and
went upon his way.
As he ascended the stairs leading to his office an adver-
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242 THE DESCENDANT
tising agent passed him, and he bit his tongue to keep back
a volley of curses. Upon the landing a young lawyer, who
had an office across the hall, was standing, a huge volume
under his arm, and Michael put him aside as he would have
put a child.
Entering his office, he slammed the door violently, When
he saw that he was not alone, that Kyle sat at his desk, he
attacked him vehemently. ‘Can I never have my room to
myself?” he demanded. And Kyle turned upon him, and
he saw that his rage was equal to his own.
Kyle left the desk, and Akershem crossed over and stood
beside it. ‘They regarded each other in silence, as beasts
awaiting a spring. Michael was breathing so heavily that the
labored sound fell harshly upon the stillness of the room,
Kyle spoke first. ‘So this is the end of your princi-
ples >” he sneered, with a snap of his fingers.
Akershem clinched his hand with such force that the
nails grew purple. A lleck of foam whitened his lips.
“Confound you!” he retorted, “ what is it to you?”
“Did you strike a good bargain?” Kyle’s voice rose
jeeringly, “How much was your honor worth oe
With one hand Akershem opened a drawer, closing upon
something. ‘The other he stretched out passionately, as if
warding off Kyle.
“Take care, Kyle!” he shouted, hoarsely—‘ take care!”
“You blackguard! Can’t you name your price?”
There was a sudden flash as of lightning; one report
that rang out sharply upon the silence; a tiny cloud of
smoke wreathing heavenward like the breath of a prayer.
“Oh! cried Kyle, sharply. He coughed a half-choked
cough; a clot of blood rose to his lips, oozing slowly down
upon his shirt, and from his shirt to the floor—drip, drip,
drip. He reached out, clutching at emptiness, and fell
heavily forward.
Akershem threw the revolver from him. It struck the
opposite wall with a dull clank, Then he knelt beside Kyle,
feeling, with white, nerveless fingers, for his heart.
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THE DESCENDANT 243
“Kyle! Kyle!” he called. “Speak! You aren’t hurt!
It can't be! Speak! Call me a blackguard—anything !”
Kyle’s eyes stared at him blankly, barren of all reproach ;
his hand fell limp and relaxed at his side.
In his agony Michael rose, stretching out groping, ago-
nized fingers, clutching, as Kyle had clutched, at emptiness.
“Oh, my God !” he cried.
There was a stir at the door; in a moment it opened
and when his eyes had cleared a group surrounded hin:
They surveyed him curiously. :
Suddenly a man coming in pushed them aside. ‘What
is it?” he cried. ‘ What does it mean ?”
The lawyer with the volume under his arm turned quick-
ly. “Mean?” he answered, with professional exactness,
‘Why, it means manslaughter.”
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turned to wink at his companion.
CHAPTER IV
Tiere was noise and confusion in the depot. A Presi-
dential candidate, after having successfully instilled nee
the ears of the North the fact of his absolute loyalty to that
section, was journeying South for the NEES ae Canoe
ing the voters below Mason and Dixon’s tine of the =e
opposite. As he strolled along the platform uae C cen
arose from the rabble assembled. Above this jubi et ex-
pression of a nation’s confidence sounded the mocking
whistle of out-going trains, and the shouting of aes
hands as they succeeded in demolishing a piece of heavy
baggage.
A gentleman standing upon the outskirts of the throng
“Touching tribute of
public favor,” he remarked; then apologized to some one,
who, in leaving the waiting-room, had stumbled cpa
him, thereby knocking him breathless. “ Pardon me for
existing—” he began, when all irony fled. “John Driscoll,
as Um alive!” he exclaimed, “ What! Seek you the clime
I'm alive !" he exct
of eternal sunshine? ;
Halting suddenly, Driscoll recognized the speaker and
smiled. He looked ill and worn, and acute physical ua
had sharpened his features. As he walked he limpec
lightly.
° i You are looking badly, man,” continued the first gentle-
i Without replying Driscoll tossed his ‘grip to a ae
“ Florida Special,” he said. “ Section six, Look heer
Then he smiled again. ‘You see, its this plagued Theu-
matism,” he explained. “Iam all but pusane If I cant
cut this eternal civilization my mind won't be worth a con-
is NEON Rah ct RONEN A RB OR ona Cael inte
THE DESCENDANT 248
tinental, As long as your bones aren’t crumbling you can
put up with it, but the devil and civilization at one dose
will prepare any man for bedlam.”
“It is annoying,” commented the second gentleman,
motioning to the excited crowd. ‘Witness some of the
faults of our nervous age. Now civilization is—”
“Tommy-rot!” interrupted Driscoll, crossly. “But you
can’t get rid of it,” he complained, irritably. ‘I’ve tried
every spot upon the known world. Even Greenland has
its explorers ; and as for Africa, by Jove! I settled in a jun-
gle once, when who should come along but a missionary
who wanted to convert the apes. And Florida! why, when
I bought my place near Key West there wasn’t a man in
shooting distance, and now, mind you, a German has put
up a cottage across from me with green window-blinds. Of
all the abominations of civilization there is not one that I
abhor so utterly as green window-blinds.”
“ But you return to them.”
“NotI! I am going to buy a little island to myself—
one of those small ones, you know, off Jamaica—and there
I’m going to settle, and I’ll shoot the first thing in clothes
that sets foot upon it—”
‘‘ Hello!” called a man from behind; “that’s Mr. Driscoll,
isn’t it? I say, John, this is a bad thing about Akershem.”
Driscoll scowled silently.
“Why, what has he done now?” demanded the first gen-
tleman. “I thought he had quieted down of late.”
“The mischief! Why, there’s been a row at Zhe Lcono-
clast, Something between Akershem and—what’s his name,
that Irish fellow?”
Driscoll started. “What is it?? he demanded. ‘Who
is it? When didit happen?” |
“They quarrelled—something about the paper, they say
—and Akershem shot him down, Shot him in cold—”
“Here, porter!” called Driscoll, excitedly, “stop my bag-
gage; it can’t go! Confound it, let it go if it wants to!”
And he rushed off,
eee’
sites Sree een
- : BS > =e
abe
oles Et
Sree
4
/
i
RE TE as “pots
a RE ee Mose ene an
ET a ie a et RR te On Ce aS
Sait
246 THE DESCENDANT
At the door some one stopped him inquiringly. ‘“ What's
wrong ?” :
“Oh, Akershem! He’s made a fool of himself at last.
And he passed on. ; 7
“ That’s a weakness of Driscoll’s that I can’t understand,
remarked the first gentleman, with a shrug of his shoulders,
“Nor I,” agreed the second. “I always said SEEM
would come to the gallows. It’s no surprise to me.
“He was always such a—such a cad, you know, added
the third.
In John Driscoll’s mind just then there was only room
for self-reproach. It seemed to him that his own impetu-
osity had been the cause of Akershem’s overthrow. Know-
ing Michael’s undisciplined nature and his own disciplined
one, he told himself that he was a fool to judge him as he
judged himself—or any other man. As the result of con-
flicting circumstances he saw that Michael was but a vic-
tim to disregarded but controlling laws—laws that remain
ignored for generations, and recoil upon the heads of the
children of children. Now that his anger had cooled he
saw in him not the man revolting against the system, but
the abnormal development revolting against the normal.
He beheld in him an expression of the old savage type,
beaten out by civilization, and yet recurring here and there
in the history of the race, to wage the old savage war
against society. And he reproached himself, remembering
Michael as he had seen him last, his nature aroused in all
its primitive ferocity; the seething passion which he, John
Driscoll, had laughed at because he could not understand,
It seemed to him that had he reached forth and drawn him
back, had he ventured one appeal to that better nature
which was overthrown and vanquished, this tragedy might
have been averted, ee
He, the cynic; he, the clear-headed scientist, had been
dolt enough to ignore the force of that unreasoning violence
because the force was opposed to his own. Dolt! Idiot!
And now, when the key turned in the lock and he stood
Si ae canine Rn
ai Ratna td hati
wn NR aC eid sunset Macias
THE DESCENDANT 247
face to face with Akershem, he felt constrained from very
strength of feeling.
Michael, hearing the opening door, turned from the win-
dow of his cell and faced him. The daylight sifting through
the bars showed the intensity that hate and wretchedness
had graven upon his face.
“ Shem !”
“He came slowly forward, and for a moment they stood
with locked hands.
Driscoll ! so it is you!”
Driscoll felt something choke in his throat; he coughed.
“Shem, old man,” he repeated, and it was all that he could
say. There was.so much to feel and so little to express.
Akershem turned from him as if avoiding an expression
of sympathy. He walked restlessly towards the door and
restlessly back again. “So you have heard ?” he said.
usViesi
He went on rapidly: He looked feverish, his face was
flushed, and there was suppressed excitement in his voice;
his eyes emitted a nervous. glare. “To think that it was
Kyle!” he said. “If it had been some one else I don’t
think I should have been so cut up; but Kyle of all men.
Why wasn’t it Mr. Mushington? Why wasn’t it that beast
Van Houne? Why was it obliged to be anybody? I never
hurt anything in my life. I always hated pain. I could
not see a chicken-fight without getting sick. Why did I
do it? Oh, I was mad—mad!_ And yet if I was mad, why
do I remémber it so distinctly? I see him as he stood
there. I see him clutch out. I see the blood that he
coughed up, oozing upon his. shirt. I see him as he lay
there dead—stone-dead.”
Driscoll groaned. “Shem,” he reasoned, “it was in self-
defence. Stop and remember. Surely he would have
struck you.”
Michael threw back his head impatiently. The fever in
his face deepened,
‘No; he only spoke. I remember it well. He held out
ex er
A ta thyme
seentgen
Ache rnp topper serge
a
Ae AR ear Wn ay
SCs Re ERE AD? “nema sa
Sry a es
248 THE DESCENDANT
his hand, but it was his gesture, and I knew it. He was
always dramatic, you know. I tell you he was right ; he
knew me better than I knew myself—” -
‘But he raised hishand. Think; your freedom depends
upon it. He came towards you, he raised his hand.”
“It was a gesture, I tell you, and I knew it. AmTa
fool? Do you want to make a liar of me as well as a mur-
derer? Good God!”
Driscoll looked into his excited face and grew angry.
Did Akershem realize that he was ruining himself? Was
he mad? He felt an impulse to kick somebody — Aker-
shem or himself. Why, after all, should he hold himself
responsible for Michael—for his love affairs and his crimes?
What had he to do with it?
Akershem was silent, his gaze bent upon the floor. He
was wellnigh delirious, and Driscoll, seeing it, was softened.
Suddenly Akershem spoke. ‘Poor Kyle,” he said.
A twinge of rheumatism caused Driscoll to flinch sharp-
ly. The physical pain irritated him. He was provoked by
Akershem’s obstinacy and his own concern. ,
“Do you know,” continued Akershem, “that the only
thing I ever killed in my life was a rabbit? I murdered a
rabbit once—shot it just as I shot Kyle, in cold blood. 1
did it for pure devilment—for the pleasure of it. I was a
fiend then, as I was a fiend yesterday. I wanted blood,
And since I have been sitting here and trying to think of
Kyle, I can’t believe it. It seems to me that I am a boy
and that it is a rabbit. I see it as clearly as I saw it then
—the pasture, the sunrise, and the rabbit in the road. I
see it all alive, and then I hear the cry it gave; I see the
blood on its mouth, and the life has gone out. It is that
horrible feeling of having crushed out life. Why is it that
I can’t get that rabbit out of my head? It was Kyle—
Kyle—Kyle. And Iwas not mad, I was only a devil.’
“For God’s sake, Shem, be quiet! If money and influ-
ence are worth anything you shall be free, but you must
help us.”
ta aan hte
faint tie 4
i nei ROL
THE DESCENDANT 249
But Akershem paid no heed ; he had fallen into a torpor,
and was gazing at the bare walls.
“Unless the New York lawyers are bigger fools, or a New
York jury honester men than those of any other spot, we
will get you off,” added Driscoll. Afterwards he wondered
why Kyle’s death had seemed such a small matter in com-
parison with Akershem’s liberty, and could not say.
On his way out Semple overtook him, and his sympa-
thetic utterances increased Driscoll’s ill-humor. He was
disgusted with the world, with Semple, with Akershem, with
himself. This infernal aching in his limbs—would it never
leave off?
“Our counsel,” said Semple, with accustomed optimism,
“is the best in New York. Akershem will be backed by
wealth and influence, two powers which count. If the
worst comes to the worst, we must remember that justice is
salable. But I wish you’d reason with him, Mr. Driscoll,
when he grows quieter. It is out of all question, the stand
that he takes. Public opinion was never on his side, and
he can’t afford to trifle with it. He'll have to fight preju-
dices enough without adding to them.”
A twinge again. ‘ Hang it all!” broke in Driscoll, irri-
tably. “ Haven’t I reasoned with him until I haven’t a
grain left for my own use? After getting us into this con-
founded mess, Akershem sits up and talks his rot. He
knows it will depend upon us to get him out.”
“Tt is unfortunate,” admitted Semple, his jovial brow
clouding. “He has been reckless, far too reckless. I
feared evil.’
“It is a pity you didn’t fear it a little sooner; then you
might have refrained from instilling your nonsense into him.
He has only lived out the views you play with. Good-
evening.”
Turning a corner he disappeared, leaving Semple trans-
fixed upon the sidewalk.
Between physical and mental pain Driscoll was wellnigh
exhausted. He was tired of humanity in general and
ai
]
St rnin
PER LE EELS SII Oh AEE ENE te Ome omg ner ape “Ee
\
SIE catenin te a eC pee Ciba
SST a a nr etre ree a me Ses >
Ean
ara eee ks
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eo ae
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PRS ESS Ee
a
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=
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Fs
el Fc REP a st Ng PE OLIN te Ri Me
4
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ete nen TO Rtn ey et ite OTS At eta Ete ao Rg eg LIE at tena SLi
I re Sac ener ar
a eed
250 THE DESCENDANT
Hedley Semple in particular. He wanted only to be alone
and to think. As he opened his door a slight sound from
the inside caused him to frown blackly. “‘ More fools,” he
muttered,
Then he entered, and Rachel Gavin rose and came
towards him. She had been sitting before the fire, her
brow resting upon her gloved hand, and at his entrance
had risen hurriedly, her muff falling to the floor. Despite
the pain in her eyes her whole figure was so light and
blooming—so vitally alive—that the contrast between it and
the jaded man whom he had left in his cell jarred Driscoll
painfully. He felt that Rachel and he were at the bottom
of the whole tragedy. ‘Can’t you, at least, keep out of
this?” he demanded.
Rachel stopped suddenly, a slight, startled figure, before
him, Even then he noticed that there was an added dig-
nity in her presence—the dignity of grief. “ Oh, you must
help me!” she cried. ‘ You don’t—you can’t—know what
it means!”
He felt goaded and harassed, ‘The agony in his arm as
he lifted it turned him white. But for these two he would
have left this climate and have found relief. The knowl-
edge that for Rachel’s sake he had put all the passion of
his nature into that last interview—the interview that had
driven Michael to his ruin—hardened him. “ My ignorance
of your meaning I confess,” he said, ironically. “As to
what you are driving at, I suppose it concerns Aker-
shem.”
She grew white; the terror in her eyes was appealing.
“Tell me,” she pleaded, “ how you left him ?”
“Tn excellent health, You can hardly expect his spirits
to be above zero; ours are not.” ;
“But you must help me. I must see him. Won't you
take me?”
He eyed her with irritated displeasure. ‘Are you sure
that he would wish to see you?” he asked, and felt dully the
cruelty of his speech.
si As Sat a A Ae a a I BET Lr
ois er ieeasaacenil
THE DESCENDANT 255
She drew back, shivering slightly as one in pain, From
her face all trace of color had flown. ‘That—that is not
the question,” she faltered.
And then in desperation he spoke, knowing that he alone
had the power to save the few shreds that remained of a
reputation that had once been as white as driven snow, and
that for her at least Akershem would not be worth the sac-
rifice.
“We would go together, you and I,” he said, mock-
ingly. ‘The world has a sense of humor, and we should
afford it an opportunity for gratifying it. It would say
that we were beginning to console each other, you
and I.”
Some demon seemed urging him on. Again she shivered,
hiding her face in her hands, and again he felt the brutality
of his words.
When she looked up it was with fresh resolve, Her hat
had slipped aside, and he saw the anguish upon her face.
“ But—but you can’t understand. It is my fault,” she
pleaded, the tear-drops falling from her eyes upon her
gloved hands—‘it is my fault! Oh, how can I bear it!”
The last was a cry of agony, wrung from her by the mem-
ory of his words. He looked at her, and his eyes soft-
ened. “You cannot judge him, nor can I,” she said, and
his heart hardened. How dare she seek to palliate Mi-
chael’s guilt to him! “He is all impulse —all emotion.
Wig
“Yes, you and I are without feeling,” he assented, in grim
irony.
“Oh, don’t! don’t!” she cried, despairingly. “ Pity me!
—at least pity me!”
Rachel”
“JT have made so many mistakes,” she sobbed, “I have
done so much harm, I have ruined him whom I loved.
My purest motive has been at fault. But if you knew all
you would have mercy !”
“Rachel, don’t mind me, Can’t you see that I don’t
eres wer
ga Se gage TE RC RS a RET HS a
re ten rentnrtgiet ws
ep CET EH pS EE RIE ETO So
apne ees Sep Tg ent ae ig Pein EEA Se EE te Nr
cee
252 THE DESCENDANT
mean it? I only seek to spare you—to spare you a useless
sacrifice |”
“Useless
“He thinks only of himself and his—his fault. If you
went to him the whole world would condemn you. It would
spoil all chances of your future life, and—”
“What is that to me? What do I care for my life?”
“ And not help him.” .
“ But—but I must go
‘He has not mentioned you,”
“JT must see him!”
“He does not think of you.”
She looked at him, her hands clasped convulsively.
“ Why—why are you so cruel?” she asked.
The smile that he bent upon her was half sad, half cyni-
cal, “Perhaps I Aave a few sensations, after all,” he re-
plied, “ despite your previous assertion.”
She turned from him hopelessly, then back again. “If
_if he asks for me, will you take me?” she asked.
He looked down upon her and held out his hand.
“Ves,” he said.
She went out silently, but in a moment came back. Her
eyes, as she looked at him, were luminous, “ Forgive me!”
she said. ‘Vou are a far—far better friend to him than I
have been.”
“Rachel! He cried the name sharply. She held out
her hands and he took them in his own,
“You made him,” she said, with a shadow of her old
radiant smile, “and I have unmade him,”
For Rachel yesterday he could have killed Michael; to
Rachel to-day he could speak no word. |
“ Good-bye,” she said, and passed out.
Driscoll stood looking after her. He saw her muff lying
upon the floor where she had left it, and he calculated the
amount of agony that it would cost to stoop and pick it up.
The calculation overbalanced his possible powers of endur-
ance, and he decided to let it lie. Then he turned slowly
y
y?
THE DESCENDANT 253
around. \
S = an ae BESS esate ee ee aelwes Fag nea rg gehen a MRA GIOIA 4 splice GA a ne
ev TN ve ne ee rT een all eet ee Saale ai Pawnee te ve
Stteaet tye gy eee Se
THE DESCENDANT 255
terror that was childlike in its instinctiveness. As a man
entered he stared at him blankly, seeing that it was his
senior counsel, but making no motion of recognition.
The man came forward and stopped. He coughed dep-
recatingly,
“Mr. Akershem.”
Michael looked up inquiringly. -
“Mr, Akershem ”—he pauséd to rub his hands with affa-
ble hesitancy—“ you will understand that, considering the
prejudices your previous career has inspired in the mind of
the public, the verdict was not—er—not unexpected. The
fact that it was lighter than was generally looked for (he
had assumed the tone he employed to the jury) is due, we
believe—if you will allow us to say so—to our personal in-
terest in the case and the tireless efforts of your friends—”
“Ves,” interrupted Michael, “ but—”
“As you know, there has been a refusal to set aside the
verdict.”
Michael returned his gaze with blank regard, and, as the
lawyer paused, stood crumpling the telegrams between his
fingers, his lips twitching slightly. “Cowards, they are
afraid of me!” he muttered, passionately.
The other rubbed his hands sympathetically.
“Ah! ahem!” he began, “believe me, you have my sym-
pathy—my deepest sympathy.” {
Ten years!” said Michael, slowly, and he paced rest-
lessly up and down his cell. ‘Ten years!” he repeated.
The lawyer cast a glance of professional compassion
upon him and departed. At the door he stumbled against
John Driscoll, who was waiting upon the outside. ‘
“Your zeal is commendable, my dear sir,” he remarked,
and hurried off.
Driscoll entered the cell, and stood for a moment with
his eyes upon Michael. Then he came forward, resting
one hand upon his arm. “ Well, old man?” he said. ‘ |
Michael looked at him with nervous intensity. “Ten
years !” he said, in a half-whisper. “Ten years! Did you
PEP eoe Teo
toe soe
2g ee
eye
; =e.
ie na Re GEER Sy ST
pee y
oe ORE Tam eee
Perec Ee a ied Pao ep hse
Cee ee rey
cE SRS aap aoe
ae
a
Th, Senn ae rte tt, SP na attest
—"¥ = ¥
ea
a, OE PRO Eee
Pita * apt Cr a a Nee hee
eit we: ~ © ik gt kaa Peed a ea ae 4 Sec ee yen ge orm eg “el yen al i ¥
“ Loi Di han eS ‘ LN aig nO et ant aE Natnnne ie
: id de rtm A EO LEON teh tn NE TN EAE 2 : =
256 THE DESCENDANT
hear what that fool said, Driscoll? Somehow I did not are
it in before. Ten years! Surely there is some FAIRS
Driscoll, can’t you inquire if there is not a mistake ? a
Something stuck in Driscoll’s throat; he shook his hea
ithout replying. : .
ne Why. ie goa is a lifetime !” continued Michael, breath
less] « I have so much to do, so much to fight for. eine
ten es away, and there will be nothing left. I have hac
oaly teh years. It was ten years ago that I came to ay
York and went into your office and demanded work. :
jas then. I knew as much o
u remember? I was a boy
life as a baby. Since then I have fought hard. fee
worked like a slave, and for what? To do say la ae in
Sing Sing. Good God! I tell you it can’t be! I ae
my life to live. What is anything compared to my ambi
tion? I tell you—” | 5
“Shem, be quiet, for God’s sake!
ae 4 a
A shudder ran through Driscoll’s frame. Something ros
before his eyes and blinded him. He oy See a
: i ing his head upon the table. I
Akershem’s chair, resting on th hm
ime in his li Id have cried like a child.
first time in his life he cou .
eae looked at Michael, standing tall and stalwart oan
him: he saw the haggard brow, the restless limbs, the
whole impassioned frame. Over Bec a ves ee
i had it been in his
swept, and at that moment,
e ss that blasted life, he could have struck Akershem
dead at his feet. The energetic brow, the flaming ne
the whole throbbing vitality of the ar He state a
i Lait oe einea elas! ich
1? O God, the pity of it! a
rete before him as vivid as the writing on ie ee ce
i i in the balance with the evil o
od which weighed in t e
Bleed had been found wanting. cea pee of oe ee
evelation, before his eyes.
v flamed, a fiery revelation, (
ee fearless and elated, Poem. ee ges
i is s hands fighting the cl °
of genius ; saw his strong fightin; run
Bae “eh hemmed him in, and, foiled, still fighting 2
ie face of overwhelming odds, He saw Michael as
\
SiN lt ad SAS es a RAINS cattle nalelce Rc
THE DESCENDANT 257
had first appeared to him, awing him—cynic as he was—
by that vital and dominant nature; saw him standing with
upraised hand against an opposing world, victorious by the
unconquerable force of his blood, a force which, recoiling
upon his single head at last, had played into the hands of
the Philistines.
He saw the impress that one man had stamped upon his
surroundings, He saw himself, satiated with the shams of
life, cleaving unto the one nature which was fearlessly it-
self, sincere alike in good and evil. The ruined waste that,
meteor-like, he had wrought in the lives of others blackened
the sketch of his thought; Rachel, a sacrifice to that force
_ which draws the aberrant body to its allotted orbit 3 Kyle,
a victim to the velocity of the body in its recoil. All the
terrible penalties that man pays to an outraged nature,
these confronted him. And lifting his head he looked at
Michael Akershem, and his heart bled with the pity of it,
“Driscoll,” said Michael, suddenly,
Driscoll smiled sadly. “ Well?” he asked.
“You—you have stood by me like a brick.” It was the
first sign of gratitude Michael had shown, and it pained
. Driscoll,
“Don’t, Shem,” he pleaded. Then, with an awkward
struggle for words, he went on: “ You know that I would
have given my life to spare you. Not that it is worth
much,” he added with a smile, rubbing his ankle; “pain is
its essential principle just now. But for rheumatism I’d
hardly know I was alive.” :
Michael stopped before him. “You go to Florida?” he
inquired, with but little show of interest.
“If this confounded thing doesn’t go to my heart in-
stead,” responded Driscoll. Then his tone changed. “But
T haven’t given up yet, Shem,” he added; “but for the fact
that several honest men had gotten in the wrong place I’d
have settled it, As it is, not many weeks shall pass by that
the Governor doesn’t hear from me, He will yield at last
from sheer exasperation,”
17
Scr eeeatr ie
a SKA
'
i
eas es
a
a
Tne a erent
258 THE DESCENDANT
Akershem shook his head impatiently and continued his
walk. Then he spoke with an outburst of his old bitter-
ness. Unconsciously his adjustment to’ conventions had
failed; he stood once more at odds with the world. “Tam
fortunate to have one friend,” he said.
Catching a subtle inflection, Driscoll turned quickly.
_ “Vou have many,” he answered ; and, “Is there any one in
particular whom you wish to see?”
No answer.
“‘ Shem, don’t let a woman come between us now.”
Akershem smiled. ‘“ Nor any man,” he added.
“‘“Perhaps—’”’ Driscoll hesitated, but only fora moment;
then he began again: “ Have you thought of Miss Gavin?”
Michael laughed mirthlessly ; the bitterness of his speech
stung sharply. ‘Only that she should congratulate her-
self,” he returned. ‘“ Her selection of the proper moment
resembles intuition.”
“You are wrong, man,” said Driscoll, gently ; “ but—but
do you wish to see her?”
A flush rose to Michael’s face. With the old passion
for sympathy was revivified the old passion for Rachel. It
flickered for an instant and went out.
“ Could I?” he asked.
Driscoll rose and limped stiffly over to him. “Shem ”—
he laid one hand upon his arm—‘“ all the women in America
could not make me hard on you, but” —he caught his
breath—“but is it for love of her? Think what it would
mean to her. Do you desire her because you love her or
because she loves you?” He waited patiently, but Aker-
shem did not answer,
And the next morning as Rachel worked in her studio
the door opened and Driscoll entered. She started slight-
ly, looking up from the colors she was mixing. Since he
had last seen her a change had passed over her—something
indefinable, blotting out ail vivid tints of her youth. She
was thinner, and beneath her eyes the purple shadows had
deepened; even her lips had lost their scarlet ripeness.
\
Kasai A tc iil tab Na
oo ceria rea inane aaa eheaaai Ki ah
THE DESCENDANT . 259
Sitting there with a patience which ill became her, toiling
mechanically for the food which she desired not, she ap-
pealed to him as she had not done in all her past radiance.
He lifted a paper from the table, examining it idly. It
was a colored print of Paris fashions, a chromo-like array
of slim-waisted, large-hipped women promenading upon air.
He stared at it wonderingly. ‘ What abomination is this?”
he inquired. ;
Taking it from him, she placed it on the table before her,
a smile breaking the firm lines of her lips.
“‘T shall become quite an authority upon fashions,” she
said, lightly. “Having nothing better to do, I have taken
to copying designs.”
He looked at her in dismay. “And you do this?” he
asked.
At his horror-struck tones she laughed a little, and then
went on with her work, her head sinking lower over the
table. ‘One must live, you know,” she answered.
“Where is your painting ?”
‘Behind you are the remains,” she replied, with a pitiful
attempt at herold animation. “Somehow it isn’t bread and
meat.” Then she added: “I work upon it at odd times.
Some day I shall get back my old power.”
With the words a sudden flush overspread her face, and
he saw that the lingering embers of a great ambition were
still warm.
He pointed to the fashion-sheet in disgust. “And who
pays you for that filth?” he asked,
“Madame Estelle.”
“The modiste ?”
She nodded.
“ But you loathe it?” he said.
“No,” she smiled; “far from it. Indeed, I am growing
rather fond of it; it is so expressionless. I always loved
colors, and here there are colors and nothing else. My
painting sickens me; it is all emotion.”
He glanced at the veiled “ Magdalen” and sighed. Then
SAE SOE SEND
See
4
oP ag RE Tg I at EG er
a a: or ete OL S a i ee ea
THE DESCENDANT
260
he walked to the fireplace and stood looking into the empty
grate. He remembered that she disliked steam-heat, and
her poverty smote him. That she was mak-
ing a struggle to retain these, her old rooms, to which she
had returned, he knew at a glance. One cannot let one’s
hand lie idle for a couple of years without paying the price.
“Vou see, 1 am a cabbage,” continued Rachel, with a
“ All my animal vitality has become ex-
hausted, and I shall stagnate for the balance of my life.
When one only eats and sleeps and. breathes and loses
one’s combativeness one becomes a plant, and when one
grows to enjoy it one becomes a cabbage. I used to hate
cabbages,” she added, slowly.
“Rachel!” She looked up and smiled upon him—her
old bewildering smile. “Is there not some one down South
to look after you?”
An expression of pain crossed her face; she shook her
head, . “Down there they are all dead,” she answered,
And added, quietly, “ And here I am dead.”
He laid his hand upon the back of her chair. “I—I am
a poor party to mother anybody,” he said, “but I can’t
leave you like this.”
She smiled again. ‘It is the only kindness you can do
me,” she answered.
“ But you are so lonely.”
Her lip trembled for an instant and was firm. “ You
can hardly have come to tell me that,” she responded.
“No,” he said, “no. I came to tell you that—that he
had rather not see you.”
For a moment her busy hands lay still, She looked up
at him with dazed eyes that caused him to put out his hand
in pained protest. ‘Then she took up her knife again.
“He had rather not?” she repeated, mechanically, and
went on with her work.
He stood over her an instant, and then held out his
hand. Good-bye!” he said.
She took it idly. “Good-bye,” she echoed.
\
the thought of
humorous smile.
4
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i
j
1
Stine i NaN a icine asa ial
aici si lat a
insane Sd abc aan
cme atid cana
cecilia
aaa Nal Aa rd
THE DESCENDANT 261
He went to the door, looked back a
F t her, moved a ste
forward, looked back again, and passed sre But as .
descended the stairs he heard his name called and lingered.
oe say upon the landing looking after him, her Reade
re) Wath xe . 4 .
os retched. He went up to her, clasping them in his
oe soldier,” he said, “‘ the fight is not over.”
ike a flame her old iridescence. e
ceca nveloped her. She
; & aa sacs not go until—until ”—her hands closed more
rmly over his—“ unti
Bees er his—“ until I have thanked you for sens good-
Misunderstanding her, he winced.
“ Akershem is my friend,” he replied. “I
; ; h
been a cad not to stand by him.” Salk a
A hot flush rose to her brow; the t i
: ears sh
eyes, making them luminous. 3 eee a
‘“‘T_-T did not mean that,” she faltered. “I should not
presume to thank you for your faithfulness t
frignds.” And she left him. ee
When the door had closed u
pon her he turned slowl
and descended the stairs, passing from R y
Rachel’s life, ager Ge a
= Gahginiaiar- eee =~
arraeeenn as
+e
eee paren
ee ow tae pore
Teo eta Py =
sbertcar Sn ar deans
Sec eo
canagyc nang ot meg ectee ag EO
¢
eet,
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5
1.
CHAPTER VI
- Into the Academy a flood of sunshine drifted, illumining
the canvases upon the wall with a golden shimmer dazzling
to the eye of the beholder. It was opening day, and a sup-
pressed excitement weighted the atmosphere, emanating
probably from the natural possessors of the illumined can-
vases. Here and there the spring bonnets of the ladies
showed amidst the sombre-toned gathering like early blos-
soms cleaving brown soil, while the light-hued gowns be-
longing to the wearers of the bonnets lent variegated dashes
of color to the nondescript assembly.
In the corners and about the entrances small groups
clustered, talking in half- whispers, their voices rising in
frequent interjections.
“Qh, do find Clara’s picture!” cried a girl in brown,
breaking suddenly away from her companions. ‘“Some-
body please tell me the name of it. She said it was splen-
didly hung.” No attention being paid to her, she went
rapidly on: “Do you know Geoff Lorrilard sold his ‘ An-
tigone’ for nine hundred? He painted it from the same
model that I am using for ‘Cleopatra.’ Oh, there is a
beauty of Bruce Crane’s! Look at it! The exhibition is
finer this year than it has ever been, they say. Dupont
says American art is looking up, and Dupont despises all
but the French, you know.”
“T hear he has hung a picture which is making a row,”
broke in a young man with a note-book. ‘The painter is
unknown ; I am inclined to think it is Dupont himself. It
savors of the French School decidedly.”
“Dupont could not do anything so strong as that,” re-
marked another of the group; “it is a new hand. That
}
nich adh iain a i: ° ‘ aii - ;
sats on insite in Ss RD ET a EA in Ten
THE DESCENDANT . 263
brush has never dabbled in milk-and-water. What! you
haven’t seen it?” And they passed out.
An elderly gentleman with a very young lady entered
suddenly and paused before an effect in blue.
“ Fello!” exclaimed the gentleman, “here’s one of Nev-
ins’s.” And, glancing up, he caught the eye of that artist
through a gold-rimmed eye-glass.. “‘ How are you, Nevins?”
he inquired. “Still producing babies, I see.”
Mr. Nevins sauntered over to them. ‘“ Well, yes,” he
admitted; “but you will notice they are no longer at the
breast. It has taken me ten years to wean them, and in
ten more I expect to have them adults.”
The gentleman laughed, and the young lady colored and
looked hastily for a number in her catalogue.
“T should think that a grown-up, clothed and in his right
mind, would be a pleasant novelty,” commented the gen-
tleman. “I’m not a baby-fancier myself.”
Mr. Nevins spread out his hands deprecatingly and
shrugged his shoulders. ‘ Nor I,” he protested. “I never
see a baby off canvas without wanting to smash it. It is
by severe self-restraint that I keep my hands off my mod-
els. But the public must be gratified, you know, and a
good half the public are mothers. Babies sell. Nothing
else does. I have tried landscapes, portraits, figures, nude
and draped, and I return to the inevitable baby. I bring
out a baby as regularly as the Season comes.” Then he
smiled broadly. “John Driscoll used to call me the All-
Father,” he added.
The young lady looked up quickly. ‘Oh, do tell me
something about Mr. Driscoll,” she said. ‘We used to be
such friends, but it has been six—no, eight—years—how
time does fly !—since he went away.”
“Bight,” said Mr. Nevins. “It was shortly after that
Akershem affair, but he has been back several times since
then. He has been working to get Akershem out; the only
job he has ever undertaken in which I could not wish him ©
success.”
SENTERO A ENT OP EERE IESE
Peg sae hppa en cheep gre tate ee ge
- Sie wnt tt tgp, RR eg ee
roe
‘ae
Sepals ages
ae a A a OR TS I SE NA : sien re .
SP i LOL TT, PTB
a
ih
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if
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“yt
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ss ahaa
SIS oth
29 Sree ene
264 THE DESCENDANT
“Poor fellow!” sighed the young lady, and was silent.
Then she held out her hand to an acquaintance, “Why,
Mrs. Van Dam,” she said, “this is a pleasure! We may
always count upon Mrs. Van Dam as a patron of true art,
mayn’t we, Mr. Nevins?”
Mr. Nevins thought that upon the whole we might, and
a pale young man in Mrs, Van Dam’s train was convinced
Gfeits :
Mrs. Van Dam had raised her veil, and was levelling her
lorgnettes at the canvases within her line of vision.
“J am with my daughter,” she explained. ‘She has
lived South since her marriage, you know, but she is so
fond of art. Cornelia, my dear, I want you to know—
Why, where is Cornelia?’, she added. Cornelia not being
forthcoming, she went placidly on, ‘You must come into
the next room,” she said, “and tell me what you think of
that large painting, ‘Mary of Magdala,’ It is the success
of the Season. Dupont exhibits it, you know, and he is
simply wild about it. So is Mr. McDonough, who is an
enthusiast over American art. He proposes presenting it
to the Metropolitan, I hear,”
They passed into the next room, pausing suddenly be-
fore a canvas which hung facing them. At first one noticed
a deep-toned richness that suggested a Leonardo, and then
from the perspective of gray and green loomed the Mag-
dalen, There was a boldness in the drawing which might
have been startling, but was only impressive. In the whole
strong-limbed figure, of which the mud-stained drapery
seemed to accentuate the sensuous curves, a living woman
moved and breathed. In the mire at her feet lay a single
rose, Above her head a full moon was rising, casting a
pale-lemon light upon her garments, falling like a halo
about the head of one scapegoat for the sins of men.
“The painter is a realist,’ muttered the pale young man.
“T don’t like realism.”
The young lady rustled her catalogue, ‘“ How beauti-
ful,” she murmured, “and how strange! Why, those eyes
j
4
asians tau Slits
sn a San nh AA SG i Nm AS AA a lt A SA A iin Aint ninth
a A en a a Ota St aed Sth
THE DESCENDANT 265
are marvellous. There is every emotion in them of which
the human heart is capable—every emotion except remorse.”
Then she looked for the name, “ Merely ‘Mary of Mag-
dala,’” she said. ‘ But who is the artist ?”
“That is Dupont’s secret,” said some one from behind.
‘He is pledged to silence, he says.”
“Tt would be interesting,” remarked Mrs. Van Dam, “to
know the artist.”
“What! you haven’t heard ?” cried a new-comer, with an
air implying the immensity of his own information upon the
subject. “It is an open secret. Dupont won’t tell, but
he’ll hint.”
The young lady interrupted him eagerly. “Why, who is
it?” she asked.
‘Well, there can be no harm in saying, I suppose, that it
is a Miss Gavin. You remember she did some fine work
years ago, but she got under a cloud and was lost sight of.”
“Oh,” sighed the young lady, “how brilliantly she has
reappeared!”
Mrs. Van Dam put up her lorgnettes and surveyed her
disapprovingly. ‘Do you think so?” she said, in an in-
tended undertone, “For my part, I consider that it is add-
ing impertinence to infamy.”
The young lady colored and looked down.
‘““My dear Mrs. Van Dam,” reasoned Mr. Nevins, with
his usual disregard of danger, “remember that the voice of
this democratic people of ours is the voice of God. When
it proclaims ‘famous’ it drowns our ‘infamous,’ ”
The descendant of the Byrds of Westover turned her
gaze upon him.
‘““One may expect anything of democracies,” she said.
With a deprecatory shrug, Mr. Nevins spread out his
hands. “But the Voice,” he insisted.
“I agree with Mrs. Van Dam,” declared the pale young
man. “ After all, the potent voice is the voice of Society.”
Mr. Nevins’s shrug was still more deprecatory. “What!
is Society curtailing vice?” he asked,
Si
Src ete es
eas
Ne
SS or a Ct oie ain
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Frcs com ne een patgnae ig cena een ne el pL LI
266 THE DESCENDANT
“Why, mamma”—a young matron with the face of an
angel slipped her arm through Mrs, ‘Van Dam’s—“ Mr.
Lorrilard is saying that the ‘Magdalen’ is’ Rachel Gavin’s.
Can it be? How did you hear that Rachel was dead ?”
Mrs. Van Dam stiffened. “From the best authority,”
she replied, haughtily.
“But she isn’t. It was all a mistake, and just look at
her work. Why, it is so like Rachel! It makes one think
that Christ saw holiness when our blind eyes beheld only
crime.”
“Why, Cornelia!”
“From the mouths of babes,” remarked Mr. Nevins, in
an audible aside.
The young matron turned back as she was drawn away.
“Tt is as beautiful as Rachel,” she said, “‘and as brave.”
And in her studio, shut in by four walls from the tumult
of the outside city, sat Rachel herself. She had grown thin
and colorless. It was as if the brush of Nature had blotted
out her bloom with a single stroke as she blotted out the
colors upon her canvas. ‘The air of close rooms and the
strain of overwork had destroyed the vividness of her
youth. She was Rachel still—a Rachel that awoke at odd
moments in laugh and voice that chased across her worn
face in fleeting gleams, like the gleams from a sun that has
set.
“So you tell me that I must go to Paris?” she said. She
was speaking to Dupont as he stood beside her, having
taken the brush from her hand.
“Leave this dirty work,” he answered. “Let Madame
Estelle and her gowns go to Hades.” _
Rachel laughed a little bitterly. “This dirty work,” she
answered, “has fed me when I was hungry and clothed me
when I was naked. My painting has not done that.”
“It is your fault,” he answered. “You have been faith-
less. I tell you your ‘Magdalen’ will make you—make
you, do you hear?”
THE DESCENDANT 267
“If the making is more satisfactory than Providence’s, I
shall not complain,” she answered, with a touch of cynicism.
Then she smiled at him, the smile radiating across her
sharpened features. “ Dear master,” she said, “ when one
has earned one’s bread by copying dressmaker’s designs
with a little wood-engraving thrown in, one feels like ane
that bread and digesting it without any special saying of
grace.” ; ee
He stamped his foot, “Only a fool or a woman would
have bartered such a talent for a mess of sour pottage,” he
answered. a
She flushed, and then, rising, faced him. “Iam no longer
young,” she said. “Tam very tired. Art either maddens
or wearies me, When it maddens me I do great things—
a ‘Magdalen’; when it wearies me I do dirty work. If
I might only go on copying designs,” Then her tone —
changed. “TI will do all you wish,” she said.
He looked into her white and wasted face, and beneath
his gaze a slow flush rose, tingeing her cheeks.
“I have won you back to art,” he said.
An infusion of vitality seemed to surge through her veins
*T will do you honor,” she answered. _
sa
—— Re eS et
Sa er a ti Er I i Nn DR 6
ret
CHAPTER VII
TuroucH the crowd which thronged Broadway at six
o’clock a man passed. Amidst the congregate mass of mov-
ing atoms his outline was. ail but imperceptible, presenting
to an observer from a distant height as indistinct an indi-
viduality as is presented to us by the individual in a writh-
ing army of ants. He was an entity, but, surrounded by a
host of greater and lesser entities, the fact of his personal
existence was not conducive to philosophic reflection in
another than himself.
There was a sharp edge to the air as biting as a mid-
winter’s frost. If one could have swept aside all visual im-
pediments one might have seen an April sunset dyeing the
broken west, a track left by the sun as he ploughed his
bloody way across golden furrows.
Above the city the smoke hovered low in a neutral-toned
cloud, obscuring what was still day in the open country.
The crowd in the street moved rapidly, dividing in two
dark lines that passed in opposite directions. As the man
walked he pushed aside with a feverish impatience those
that came within his reach, moving as if indifferent to the
human stream around him. He stooped slightly, as one
who is old or in pain or both, sometimes staggering from
loss of breath consequent upon his haste.
He was of medium height, with a frame that might once
have seemed of iron, the skeleton of which still resisted the
disease that was wasting the flesh away. His features were
rendered larger than their wont by the hollows of cheek
and brow, and the skin drawn loosely over them was dry
and colorless—the burned-out fuel of a hectic fire, Upon
his temples the heavy hair was matted and dashed with
\
THE DESCENDANT
gray, and the hand that he raised impatiently to brush aside
an imaginary lock trembled like the hand of one palsied.
It was as if a gigantic statue, formed for power and for en-
durance, were making a struggle against some insidious
enemy feeding upon flesh and blood. Reaching the corner,
the man paused for a moment, strangling back a fit of
coughing which broke control at last. For the first time he
looked up and glanced about him, It was the corner of
Fourteenth Street, and across the way the words “The
Iconoclast” stared him in the eyes. He remembered that
he had stood at this same corner eighteen years ago, and
had read that sign idly and with ignorance of the part it
would play in the fulfilling of his life. It was new then,
and shiny; now it showed battered and weather-beaten.
It had breasted the years as he had breasted them. Be-
hind him was the warehouse upon which he had seen the
notice of “Men Wanted.” He remembered its oblong
shape, the size of the letters, and the effect of the white
tracing upon the blackboard, and instinctively he felt in his
pocket for the phial of laudanum, Could that really have
been eighteen years ago? Why, it seemed only yesterday.
He glanced up at the office window of Zhe /conoclast's city
editor—Driscoll’s window it had been then, and he almost
expected to find those shrewd eyes looking at him from be-
hind closed blinds. The thought made him nervous, and
he moved a few feet away.
For the last week, since the hospital doctor.had signed
a certificate that secured him his freedom and he had left
the prison behind him, he had been consumed with the
dread of encountering old associations. Driscoll was
South, he supposed, and he was glad of it. Before facing
Driscoll again he must face the world and become rein-
stated in his old Championship of liberty. Through his
wasted limbs his unwasted energy vibrated. He was not
beaten yet.
A policeman touched his arm and motioned him not to
obstruct the crossing, The policeman looked at him as he
Sristee
as
PR, in ins
ee y
Sacre: Sete, nes ak ee Oe |
oe ee
ee eee e :
SF ta I Ean ETL
renee Dt cpr ate amare ee
hg tege veie eset : eee Torts
ae mene Ce pee mm an ry Smt A mE gn f
“
270 © THE DESCENDANT
would have looked at any respectable but obtruding citizen,
but Michael resented the look, and, with a defiant retort,
moved onward. He hated those pugilistic protectors of
the peace.
For days he had roamed the streets as feverishly as he
had done in his youth, drawn as by some impelling force
to his old surroundings, and yet.dreading the sight of a
familiar face, shrinking from the casual glance of che passer-
by. Before he returned to do battle with the world he
must rally his broken forces, must clothe this protruding
skeleton with flesh. Freedom and good food would manage
it, but he must give them time. He remembered the stains
upon his handkerchief yesterday. Pshaw! was he the
man to die from the loss of a drop of blood? There was
itality in him yet.
: At highteenth Street he turned as from habit, and paused
as he found himself facing the Templeton. From the first
floor to the eighth lights shone in the windows, in the very
rooms that he had once occupied. The sight startled him.
It was with a certain wonderment that he found the world
unaltered. He had been in hell for eight years and more,
and not one laugh the less was heard upon the streets, not
one smile the less crossed the faces in the crowd, not one
shadow the more fell over his familiar haunts. It was as
it had been, and as it would be though he perished. How
fleeting is the effect that one man produces:upon his time!
An idol is exalted in the market-place ; it falls, and upon its
crumbling ruins another is raised towards heaven. For
men there are many divinities, and for a fallen idol there is
the mire. cm
Upon the sidewalk he loitered, glancing into the cheer-
ful interiors. Vaguely he wondered if these people knew
that he— Michael Akershem— stood without, In one, a
room suffused with lamplight, a mother sat singing to the
young child upon her breast. The placidity of her ex-
pression annoyed him. He knew that though poverty and
misery stalked in the night at her door she would not
4
cnn lniaskaepc tintin
THE DESCENDANT 271
awaken the sleeping child or cease her soothing lullaby.
In another a woman sat alone. She was lithe and young,
and something in the curve of her shapely head brought
Rachel to his mind, In such warm and soft firelight had
Rachel waited for him in the old days when he was worth
waiting for. Now Rachel had gone back to her art and
was doing great things—things such as she had always
meant to do. One evening in the elevated road he had
heard two artists speaking of her and her future. In his
embittered mind the praise had inspired an aggrieved jeal-
ousy. She, whom he had loved to his own undoing, was
gathering her meed of fame, for the crumbs of which he
was famishing.
The shapely woman in the firelit room warmed him with
memory of the time when a woman had thought the world
well lost for the sake of him. Whatever came to her here-
_after, once every vibration of her heart-strings had been
his—his, a homeless vagrant, with his bones crumbling to
dust.
An acute pain in his chest caused him to start suddenly.
He remembered such a pain in that illness two years ago,
when his breath had been like the agony of travail. Then,
in the madness of delirium, he had called upon Rachel, and
called in vain, Well, that was over and done with.
He turned away from the ruddy isteriors and stood upon
the corner, watching the straggling stream-of passers-by—
a laborer with a tin pail jingling noisily from his hand, a
woman with crimson roses upon her breast and crimson
marks upon her cheeks, another woman, a man, a child, a
man again, a newsboy, a policeman. And then a woman in
a fur coat passed him, turned suddenly, hesitated, and came
back. Beneath the small hat her eyes looked out inquir-
ingly ; under her arm she carried a long roll.
With a tremor he recognized her and drew away. In
the haggard face he turned from her only a woman’s eyes
could have seen Michael Akershem. He cowered into the
shadow, but she came on.
SE rE eo ine eS nt hE
TE ROAST eon pen inl nero cb at nate
‘Keeiteneataennnen eee ste.
- : ———
272 THE DESCENDANT
‘¢ Michael !”
Her voice thrilled him, and he put out his hand, warding
her off.
“‘ Michael !”
She had reached him, her light touch was almost upon
his arm.
“Tam not Michael,” he answered, hoarsely.
But as he lifted his head the electric light fell full upon
him, and they stood in silence regarding each other. In
that silence each looked across the years, and saw the past
and the future drawing as to a point—and that point was
the present. ;
She saw pain and misery and wasted strength; she saw
a dread of her and yet a need of her, a desire for solitude,
like the desire of an animal that seeks the covert, and yet
the longing for a ministering touch; she saw the hand of
Death looming above his face, and the sight made her bold,
as would not the hand of Life.
He saw a woman from whom youth but not usefulness
had fallen; he saw shoulders that had borne strong burdens
and might bear stronger; he saw eyes that had looked
upon life and found it futile, but that burned with his
image as fervently as they had burned in the heat of the
passionate past, and looking into them he saw constancy
made manifest; he saw the love that after years of wrong
and wandering may lead us home at last.
“Michael, I am so glad!” Her hand was upon his arm,
her gaze upon his face.
“Tet me go!” he answered.. “Oh, Rachel! Rachel i
Again he strove to strangle that grating cough, but it
broke loose.
‘No, no,” she said, for he would have passed on. aol
have come to me to be nursed and made quite strong
again!” She tried to speak lightly, but her voice faltered.
“Oh, my beloved, is it not so?” she asked.
He spoke hoarsely ; his arm trembled from the weight of
her detaining hand.
Reap ae nraN Oem? Wr nree Tee Te:
THE DESCENDANT 273
“Tt is nothing,” he answered, but he no longer withstood
her; “it is only a cold—it is chronic,”
“‘T will cure it,” she said. A leaping of his pulses that
was not the leaping of fear stimulated him. At that mo-
ment the memory of the time when Rachel had craved his
love and it had failed her was blotted out. He remembered
only the exuberant passion of his youth,
“Do you care, Rachel? I am not worth it.”
Still clinging to him, she led him on, talking in those
light tones which came at will, drawing him from himself
and to her.
They entered the Templeton, and, because he shrank
from the elevator, mounted the stairs. Her voice was clear
and strong, the result of a nervous tension, warning her
that to pause would be to break down, to discharge her
swollen heart.
“T have been to the baker’s,” she said, as lightly as if
they had parted the day before—“ to the baker’s to buy a
loaf of bread. I have supper in my studio now. I am
tired of restaurants and French cooking. So, like Old
Mother Hubbard, I have my little cupboard, to which I re-
sort, and I have also, not a dog, but a cat—a nice gray cat.”
His labored breathing caused her to pause for a moment.
stooping to fasten the lace of her boot. It took some little
time, and then she resumed her slow ascent, slipping her
hand through his arm.
“T have supper all by myself,” she continued, “and you
shall share it—you and the cat. I have become quite a
good cook, as you shall see. My oysters are the pride of
my life. I haven’t any one to appreciate them except, now
and then, Dupont, because, you see, there isn’t a soul here
now that I care about. The little mother with the twins
moved out West, and Madame Laroque—didn’t I tell you?
—Madame’s husband died and left her property in France,
and his brother came over to see her about it. But Ma-
dame declared that she could not survive the sight of a
Frenchman, so she locked herself in her room. Oh, it was
18
4
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|
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{
274 THE DESCENDANT
so funny! There was the brother-in-law besieging and
Madame relentless. It went on for a couple of weeks,
when, finally, Madame came down, and one day he met her
upon the street, and in a week they were married and sailed
to France.” She paused, and the tears rose to her eyes,
They had reached her landing, and with an energetic
movement she threw open the door of her studio.
“ Here we are,” she said, “and the tea is brewing, and the
fire burning, and the cat waiting.” She drew an arm-chair
to the hearth-rug, laid his hat and coat aside, and piled a
heap of downy cushions at his head. Then she took off
her wrap and set about preparing her supper, talking as she
might have talked ten years ago. It was all so natural, so
much as it used to be—the room, the firelight, the shaded
lamp, the casts, the hangings, the canvases—that the years
seemed but shapeless spectres and his agony a dream un-
fulfilled.
He lay back among the cushions and looked at her, his
brilliant eyes flaming from between the twitching lids like
a slow fire consuming his shrunken features,
Over Rachel herself a radiance that was more than the
radiance of the dancing firelight had fallen, Excitement
crimsoned her cheeks, irradiating across brow and lips. In
her eyes the lustre of her youth shone with its old splen-
dors. All the vivid and evanescent charm that had once
been hers returned for one fleeting moment to envelop her.
He looked at her wonderingly.
“Why, Rachel,” he said, and his tone was querulous,
“vou have not changed !”
She smiled upon him. ‘“ No,” she answered, simply, “I
have not changed.”
She brought the little table and placed it before him,
watching him with anxious eyes as he ate his oysters, and
pretending to eat, herself.
The cat left the hearth-rug and leaped upon his knee,
and he stroked it with a pitiable pleasure in the instinctive
confidence animals had always felt in him, Broken and
nlc sc ii ei ir OR aN ORAS Saisie
nana bs Sct
THE DESCENDANT 275
ill as he was, the little things which he had disregarded in
his strength appealed to him in his weakness. Crushed by
the great things of life, he saw that the little things were good.
Rachel watched him with enraptured eyes. That buoy-
ant interest in the minutia of life which had once irritated,
now soothed him. It was pleasant to be cared for, to have
some one care whether one ate or went hungry, whether one
coughed or was silent. He accepted her services apatheti-
cally, feeling not gratitude but contentment.
When he had finished she pushed the table aside, placed
the dishes upon a tray in the hall, and, drawing a stool to
his feet, sat beside him, resting her cheek upon his dry and
fevered hand.
He spoke pettishly. “Tam a wreck,” he said—‘ a broken
wreck. Look at that wrist; the muscle is almost through
the flesh.’ And he added: “I am a cur that the stones
of mankind have beaten to death. Yes, I am beaten.”
Rachel looked up at him, ‘You are and have always
been my hero,” she answered. “ From the night in that
little French restaurant when I looked up and found your
eyes upon me I have had no hero but you.”
“ A poor hero,” he said, faintly, choking back the cough
in his throat.
He lay still for a while, so still that she fancied him ex-
hausted and asleep. With a passionate tenderness she al-
lowed her eyes to rest upon him, upon the drawn face and
the whole ruined length of him. And then—
“Te is mine,” she thought, exultingly—‘ mine for all
time |”
The broken and wasted remains of a great vitality, the
decay of a towering ambition, querulous complaints in place
of an impassioned reserve, death in place of life—these were
hers. Hers the scattered crumbs from the bread of life,
hers the stagnant slime left of an all-powerful passion, _
She moved gently, loosening her hold upon his hand,
fearing to disturb his rest by an emotion which defied con-
trol. He stirred and turned towards her.
276 ‘/)" (PHE DESCENDANT
“ Rachel,” he said, “don’t let go ie
Leaning above him, she kissed his brow, his eyes, his
lips.
“You want me?” she asked, with passionate compassion.
He strove to raise himself, but she held him back.
“J always wanted you,” he answered, “except when I
was sure I had you.” And he added, slowly: “ You are so
steadfast.”
She kissed his burning hand. It was her reward.
He struggled up, a light flashing in his eyes, his domi-
nant nature, undaunted by failure and death, asserting itself
again.
“Rachel,” he said, breathlessly, “would you fight the
world for me?”
Her eyes caressed him.
“TJ would fight God for you!” she answered.
With a sudden energy he pushed back his chair and rose
to his feet. As he did so a cord within his chest seemed
to strain and snap asunder, loosening the foundations of
life. He put up his hand to force back the paroxysm of
coughing, but it broke forth with a strangled violence, and
with it a thin line of blood rose to his lips, oozing upon the
handkerchief with which he strove to stanch it.
He fell back in the chair, letting the scarlet stream pass
between his lips, and putting aside the arms Rachel had
cast about him.
Then in a moment it was over, and he lay looking up at
her, his face carved in the marble whiteness of pain, his
brilliant eyes unclouded, There was a harder battle to
fight before the end would find him.
In his face the old fearless spirit which could be quenched
but by dust shone brightly.
“Give me half a chance,” he said, “and I will be even
with the world at last!”
But upon his lips was set the blood-red seal of fate.
THE END 1