A Reputation for a Song

Prologue

NOT longer ago than yesterday or the day before, we bade farewell to a false sentiment which had found favour with a preceding age, and welcomed with acclamation a more vigorous mental atmosphere destined to take its place. Sickly self-sacrifice and morbid self-less-ness — a latter-day coinage, this ! — are now frankly decried by a consensus of opinion healthier in its ethical tone and possessed of a wider understanding of the eternal fitness of things and of that duty which a man owes to himself as well as to his neighbour. The duty to our neighbour remains — to love him as ourself, neither more nor better ; to be to him as tender and as kind — not kinder at the expense of ourself. For sacrifice is not always beautiful ; sometimes it is meaningless and absurd ; again, sometimes, it is mere hysterical self-advertisement : it can, I think, be criminal on occasion.

There is yet a class of sacrifice which survives to day: the sacrifice of noble women to bad husbands, of faithful men to worthless wives, of devoted parents to ungrateful children, of dutiful children — these also ! — to parents who are neither good nor wise ; but sacri fices such as these are laid upon the homely and not soul-frenzying altar of duty, and those who sacrifice upon that altar are not of the company who expect by so doing to secure for themselves either a newspaper panegyric or a martyr's crown. When we hear as we do hear sometimes despite the shrill screaming of factory whistles, when we see as we do see once in a while despite the indecent glare of the electric light, a man or woman sacrificing his or her life for the good or the possible advantage of another, we are a little sceptical, even a little shocked.

" High falutin'," " morbid," " unhealthy," " unnatural " ! These adjectives are borne on the wings of a mocking wind while we assert — vehemently, almost angrily assert — that what is not a normal attitude of mind betokens an abnormal condition of body, and that which is abnormal is surely not far distantly allied to disease. This man or woman must be hysterical, a dreamer, an ascetic, a fanatic, or worse. The worst or perhaps the best of it is that in the maj"ority of cases the general opinion is probably not far wrong. For who shall deny that upon each one of us is bestowed the gift of life to live as best he can, to make the best and the most of through each succeeding day and month and year? Who shall assert that it is right or admirable or justifiable for him deliberately to throw away that gift in its entirety, to refuse the enjoyment of all he may find to enjoy, to deny to his talents their fullest development, — whether these make for happiness, or success, or experience, or achievement, or merely content, for the sake of benefiting, doubtfully benefiting, mark you, some other man or woman ?

And yet ... I knew a man once, neither hysterical, nor an ascetic, nor a dreamer, who did this thing because .... well, I cannot tell you why a man, in part selfish, in part worldly, neither romantic nor a saint, should have been persuaded to sacrifice his liberty and his dearest hopes for the sake of obliging a friend. Possibly the wisest of us do not always choose well in moments of momentous decision ; perhaps we are all more susceptible to surrounding influences than we care to allow ; perhaps the besthearted of us are merely fools. But this I know : nearly everyone can be heroic for half an hour, and not many can be consistently, unobtrusively unselfish for a week. I do not praise Guy Jervis for having made a probably superfluous sacrifice to a sick man's whim, — perhaps in my heart I also, think he was a fool, — but I honour him in that I know how, through the years that have intervened, he has tried in his simple, unexalted way to live heroically in an unheroic age.

And while I have been telling the story of a certain episode in his life and in the lives of some other people, my thoughts have reverted often to that initial step which has been the cause of all the trouble, and, thinking of it so much and often, I have come to understand a little how it might be possible for a man to do a thing which he did not want to do, a thing which no one had a right to ask of him, until now at the end I want to set it down as I have dreamed that it came to pass during that sweltering autumn in Milan, — is it seven, or eight, or nine years ago ? — and I will set it down at the beginning of my story as a kind of excuse, if it might be, for a disinterested although mistaken deed. We are a little ashamed of disinterested deeds in these days. And as I write, I fancy I see the snowy Cathedral builded all of fairy fretwork dominating the bare, deserted Place; I seem to hear that quick, firm foot fall ringing on the hot flags beneath the windows of my room.

Chapter I To

and fro, to and fro on the sun-bathed Piazza of the Duomo, paced the solitary figure of a man. The air was stifling, the sun was scorching ; even the beggars had retreated to the grateful shadows, and none but the mad Englishman paced persistently to and fro. The skies — those wondrous, arched, far distant Italian skies — were of an intense, a vivid blue, that made the eyeballs ache at sight of them, and the glare from the white Cathedral was almost as intoler able. He did not look at the skies, this man who walked in the sun ; he did not look at the Cathedral. Heed less of the burning brazen heat, heedless of the city's midday slumber, blind to the wearisome obvious beauty that smiled from the glittering marble, he went with head erect and step that never flagged, looking out of unseeing eyes through ornamented masonry and blank wall and vista'd streets, straight into the vast world beyond.

Occasionally, as though without pur pose, even without conscious will, he would turn into the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where his quick footsteps called forth the only echo in the still arcade ; then again out into the glassy, glaring, noonday heat, and, always, rapidly pacing to and fro. A tall man, fair, well built, of an essentially English type, a goodly specimen, moreover, of a goodly type : of an utterly alien race, surely, from the indolent olive skinned dreamers who lay here and there drowsing amid the shadows. One watching him closely, more closely than the somnolent beggars watched, might have observed that ever as he reached a certain corner of the Place he would lift his eyes to the upper windows of a house that stood at right angles to the Duomo, expectant it might be of some preconcerted signal or anticipated change.

And it happened that after a time the sign was manifested. A face, pale, sombre-eyed, backed by a disorder of chestnut hair, looked down on him from the second storey, while a white hand beckoned to him to ascend. The man hesitated : almost one might have thought that he was loth to leave the heat and glare of the pavements ; but this could scarcely be, and the hesitation lasted but a moment before he passed through an open doorway and groped, half blinded by the sunlight he had just left, up the shadowy staircase to the second floor. On the narrow landing the woman of the window waited for him ; with one hand leaning on the rough wall, she peered down into the comparative gloom to see him come. A girl of little more than seventeen she seemed, scarcely woman yet to English thinking, although in quick-growing Italy she might have been judged mature.

An English girl this one, for all her slow Southern movements, and the sleeping fire of her eyes, and her slovenly dress consisting in part of the inevitable white cotton jacket in which one might imagine — not unreasonably — that all feminine Italy must live and die. There was promise of beauty in the rich colouring, the statuesque modelling of lips and chin and throat, but the dull red-brown hair was unattractively disordered, the skin was pale, and the eyelids heavy and swollen from want of sleep. The promise of beauty was nevertheless further insisted on when the girl flashed a sudden brilliant smile on the man as he climbed the last steps to join her ; yet there was no answering smile on his close-set lips, only a great weariness in his eyes. " How is he ? " he asked of her, and she shook her head.

" He has slept a little, a very little. It is too hot for sleep : even at the back one gets no air, and what air there is, is hot, so hot. The Sister has been resting, and I have sat with him. Oh, Mr. Jervis, he is not better, not better at all." He, too, shook his head : there was not anything at all to say : he knew only too well that the sick man was not going to get better, and the girl knew it also. " It was kind of you to wait instead of going back to the hotel. You must have found it dreadfully hot ; but it was a comfort to know you were there in case we wanted you. It was dreadful for you, but it was such a comfort to me." " I am glad," said the man quietly, without enthusi asm. " That is what I am here for, you know, to be of what little help I can. Don't distress yourself about me.

I am all right : I am not afraid of the sun." She looked at him curiously. " You are very kind," she said, adding as an afterthought, " But the Italian sun is different : one learns to treat it with respect." He moved nearer to the door, which stood ajar. " Shall I stay with him now while you rest ? " " Oh no ! I do not want to rest, and the Sister is there. It is time for defeftner, indeed it is very late ; but things are all deranged now. Will you come and deje&ner with me ? " She pushed wide open the door, and waited for him to go in. " Thanks awfully ; but I don't want anything, really. I can get something later on at the hotel." She pouted. " Defeitner at the hotel will have been over more than an hour ago : and besides, it is so triste. ... I cannot eat by myself; the food chokes me. ...

It is all so wretched, so utterly wretched." Tears started to her eyes, tears of distress partly and partly of fatigue, with a certain leaven of self pity besides, which is, after all, the chief motive power that makes us weep. Seeing her, the man felt that he had been a brute. " Poor little girl ! Of course I will come, if it will make you eat with more appetite. You have had too much solitude ; it is bad for you, poor child, awfully bad ; but we have all been so anxious about your brother that you have been neglected." He looked at her with attention for the first time. " You are looking white and seedy ; you have had too much nursing and fretting, I expect. I shall take you for a drive this afternoon." Her eyes brightened, seeming to lose their languor : he noticed how they matched the colour of her hair.

They went together into the small " furnished apart ment " where the girl and her brother lodged, — a small dark ante-chamber, which served as dining-room ; a dingy salon looking on to the Duomo, with carefully closed shutters to exclude the sun ; the girl's room, also facing the Piazza ; and at the back, in the merciful shade, the service quarters, and yet another bedroom, wherein an Englishman lay dying. They sat down in the ante-chamber to a simple meal of macaroni and stewed tomatoes, and strange little sausages which neither had the courage to taste, and salad and fruit and bread, and rough red wine in delightful country - fashioned, straw -flanked flagons. The man ate, surprised to find that after all he was hungry, and the girl had appetite also, perhaps because he was there. He watched her eat ; he watched the expression of her face, the promise of beauty in every line : he watched coldly, almost with dislike, and he was angry with himself for the cold ness, for the dislike.

His self-anger made him strive to throw more warmth into his manner, greater kindli ness into his tones: when the meal was ended, and the girl led the way into the darkened sitting-room, her step seemed less heavy, there was a dawning smile in her red-brown eyes. They sat smoking cigarettes in comparative silence. When they interchanged a few words these referred only to the invalid, his symptoms, his temperature, what sleep he had secured, the doctor's visit of the morning, and it occurred to the man more than once that for all the sister's affection, for all her solicitude, she knew little of the practical details of the illness ; she seemed to depend for all her information on the Sisters of Mercy who filled the place of trained nurses, and filled it right well and nobly. The afternoon was oppressive, and there was not anything to do but to wait in the darkened room, listening to every sound in the street below, or within the silent house.

Presently the cigarette dropped from the girl's fingers, her head fell back upon the tawdry pillow that supported it, and she slept that untroubled, trance-like sleep of the quite young and the quite healthy. He could just see her where she sat, and he watched her with a curious pained expression : he was striving, oddly enough, to fix her good points on his attention, striving to find her more attractive than he really did. Seldom has a man, the oft-quoted " average sensual man," and not an ascetic, looked upon so lovely a vision of budding womanhood and felt so little emotion. She is so young," his thoughts kept insisting again and yet again. " She is so young to be left alone: she wants taking care of, she wants protect ing ; she cannot be left to herself. God ! what is to happen? Is there no way out, no way at all?"

He had a feeling that he was being hemmed in by adverse circumstance — circumstance beyond his control, which would force him to do this thing that he was resolved not to do. He would not marry this girl, he would not, he would not, and yet he had a horrible conviction that this was exactly what he would have to do. Inaction was intolerable : he rose from his chair, moving softly to the shuttered window, and trying to see the hands of his watch by the darts of dust-danced radiance that filtered through the chinks : his foot steps reached her in sleep-land, she stirred. " I am going for a drive with Guy," she murmured, smiling in her dreams. But Guy Jervis did not smile : on the contrary, he cursed — cursed deep and low, and with a heartiness that had done justice to a worthier cause. It seemed to him that hours passed before the door was opened from without, and one of the Sisters of Mercy showed like a black and white phantom in the opening.

She signed to him, and he went across on tiptoe to her, closing the door upon the sleeping girl. The Sister whispered to him that the sick man wished to see him : he inquired if talking would over tire him. The woman opened out her hands. "Tire him? Ah, well, signor, even so, it is his wish, and it will make so little difference really." " You mean ? " " That the good God will release him soon : to morrow, or the next day, or the next. // dottore says perhaps a week : it is not for me to say different from him with all his learning, but ... I have seen so many die, so very, very many : one comes to know, one hears the angel's wings before the rest, one is so used to listening. I think the good God will have mercy and not delay another week." " It has gone on so long," said the man doubtfully.

" So long that one can hardly believe in the release." " Yes, that is so," she agreed. " The body would have failed long since but for the will, the strong will that refuses to die until . . . until . . . Signor, I think that the poor gentleman is troubled, his mind is not at rest, he cannot consent to die. Signor," she paused with her fingers on the hasp of the bedroom door, " if by chance you can do anything, say anything, to give the poor gentleman peace, I pray you say it quickly, quickly, and let his thoughts be fixed on higher things." The man's face hardened ; he glanced uneasily at the door behind him : the Sister saw the glance. " Ah yes, it is sad, and she so young, so young and so beautiful. There are so many pitfalls for the young and beautiful. God will provide, of course, of course, but yet it must be hard to die and to leave all in uncertainty like this."

"There is no uncertainty," said the man, almost roughly. " His friends will take care of her." " Ah yes," the other answered meekly. " Care, ah yes ! but when one is young the care of friends is so cold a thing. One misses the sheltering arms of those who loved, and one feels alone, oh, so alone ! while the dear arms lie cold and useless in the tomb." She opened the door of the sickroom : Guy Jervis went in alone. The Sister stood for a moment in the ante-chamber, shaking her much-bestarched head-dress. " Ah well, ah well ! " she murmured. " One can always pray, and the dear Virgin has a good heart." When the sleeping girl awoke later in the afternoon, the Sister was sitting near her, occupied in saying her beads. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, and looked about her, wondering vaguely why to-day seemed different from the other days — those endless other days that stretched in melancholy vista far behind.

She smiled as she remembered that Guy Jervis had promised to take her for a drive. " Where is he, Sister ? " she asked, breaking in upon the other's devotions. " Where is he ? I am going for a promenade with him. Tell me, surely he has not gone without me." The signor had not gone : the woman pointed in the direction of the sickroom, while the girl heaved a sigh, a sigh of great content. " He is going to take me for a promenade',' she repeated, leaning forward in her chair, her elbows on her knees, her chin resting in her hands. " I wonder where we shall go : somewhere outside, away from the stifling streets." " Ah yes ! " the nun smiled indulgently. " Outside in the country, where there are fewer people, where the solitude is sweet." The girl blushed faintly, pouting her lips. " Solitude, bah !

He would never know if there were one person or fifty: it is all the same to him : he behaves always as though he were addressing me across a crowded room." She sprang up, and moving across to the older woman, settled herself on the bare boards at her feet. " Cara Sorella," she whispered, " will he ever care for me, do you think ? And I who love him so devotedly, so madly ! " " If the good God wills," anwered the other sedately. " I have prayed much, I pray always, and you, you have given candles to the Virgin, have you not ? She will listen, she always listens, my child." " Even to a heretic," the girl protested. " Ah ! but you will not always be a heretic. When you get your heart's desire, you will love the blessed Virgin as we love her, we who know. I have told her many times that if she will but listen she will save a soul for Christ."

" Oh yes, I have put up candles," the girl blushed and laughed, as though half ashamed of herself : " many candles, more than I could afford; but I do not see much good in it, you know." " Have patience, my child ; and see, you are going for a. promenade to-day." " Yes, that is something, is it not ? He looked at me to-day ; I think he never looks if he can help it : he noticed that I was pale ; he said he had not con sidered me enough ; he said he should take me for a drive." She smiled dreamily. " He did not say he should like to take me out, he did not say would I come, but he said simply, masterfully, that he should take me. It did not seem to occur to him that I would not go : in truth, it did not occur to me that I would not go." The nun looked down kindly into her flushed face. " Ah, carissima, it will all come right ; the dear Virgin will not forget, never fear.

And for a beginning you go for a. promenade to-day. Oh yes, it all comes right ; I say so, and I know." " You know ! What do you know? " " Oh, I know something too. Long ago, one, two, three weeks ago, or is it more ? when I first saw how it was with you, I told the signor your brother. Nay, do not start. My duty here is to tend the sick and to pray, but when like this, one remains two and three months in the same household, one is not only the nurse, one loves the family beside. And the signor, too, was anxious, cara, anxious about you ; he told me, so then I said that it would all be well, for that you loved the fine English signor with the fair face, and how he would take care of you when the dear brother went to ... " She broke off abruptly : she had almost said heaven, but remembering that he was an heretic she felt that it was perhaps kinder to leave the sentence unfinished.

" Oh, Sister, you should not have done this." " But yes, but yes, it is well, very well. I told the dear signor he was not to fret, and now to-day, after all this time, he is calmer. I will tell you, my child, for hope is good and makes the flowers lift up their heads in spite of the sun, thinking of the dews of evening : to-day he has told me that he is more content, for he hopes to see you betrothed to the English signor before he dies." " Oh, hush ! hush ! " She had buried her face in the nun's coarse skirt, ashamed almost of the sudden rush of colour to her cheeks, of the wild beating of her heart. " And what did he say to you at dfy'eimer, my child ? " The girl awoke from her wild dreams. " What did he say to me at defeitner? Why, he said nothing at all." " Ah ! speech is not easy when the heart is full.

And what did you say to him ?" " I said nothing," she made answer ; " but it was nice to see him there." "Stella," called Guy Jervis from the doorway an hour later, " I am going now. I have promised to come back in the evening, late, and stay with him through part of the night." Only the Sister heard him, for Stella was dressing in her room, and the Sister could not understand English ; still, she perceived that the Englishman had not come to stay. " And the vetturino ? " she asked staidly. " The vetturino to take the signorina for a drive. It will do her good ; she needs a little distraction, povera 1 " The man's face changed in expression. " I had forgotten," he said slowly. " You are quite right, though ; she does want a change. Tell her I will go and find a carriage, and will come back for her soon."

A tete-a-tete drive in a hired carriage drawn by a miserable, broken-down, half-starved horse — this was what Stella had joyfully anticipated, even in her dreams. A drive through close-smelling streets and suburbs and ugly, squalid quarters of the poor, to the parched flat country beyond. They scarcely exchanged a dozen words on the way thither. At the start, Jervis had asked her if she wanted to talk, and her smiling negative had been a relief to him who was in no mood for speech. There was so much to be thought of before night should fall, before he must return to keep watch beside his dying friend. The streets were almost empty of vehicles, and the pedestrians went as by common consent in the road way, perhaps to escape the hot exhalations from the houses on either hand. The horse was weary, and moved at a funeral pace ; and the city, with the single exception of the Cathedral, its one priceless ornament, appeared to Jervis both unlovely and, in its insistent prosperity, even sad.

But then for him the times were out of joint, for the trouble that went with him darkened and distorted all. Once he nearly called to the driver to stop, thinking he would like to go and look again at Leonardo's fresco — that incomparable fresco which is slowly fading away ; but it was hardly worth while explaining what he wanted, and the girl would probably expect to go with him, and would make remarks and talk art jargon, and besides, Englishmen are afraid of owning to a suspicion of sentiment even to themselves. Yet he felt a certain pity for the peoples unborn whose eyes would never be gladdened with a sight of it ; pity for the master whose work was not eternal ; pity also for the work itself, as though it had been a pulsat ing, sentient thing, in that it was doomed to pass away. He thought of the central Figure at that supper, waiting calmly, with foreknowledge absolute, His self appointed end.

It seemed to him as though there were between them some affinity to-night, as though the silent, faded Christ might understand. It had been the laying down of His life, the seeming failure of His mission, that saddened the Giver of the feast, as it was the sacrifice of his— Guy Jervis' — life, the failure of his high hopes that were required of him this day. It is not pleasant to contemplate in cold blood the laying down of one's life. "I wonder how He liked the prospect," he said grimly, and the girl opened her eyes and looked her surprise. On and on, at a slow, jogging pace, over jolting pave ments and smooth, through endless unlovely streets, narrow and wide. Flaunting posters shrieked and mouthed at them from high hoardings as they drove by. Vauntings of soap and sewing-machines con tributed their English quota of vulgarity amid ragged remnants of once soul-stirring advertisements of the Wild West of Buffalo Bill that had visited the city in the early spring.

He would perhaps have stopped at the Campo Santo had he been alone, but he could scarcely invite Stella to visit the settlement where so soon her brother would have his narrow allotment, and the carriage had already passed the entrance gates, and still they jolted painfully along, while things grew ever more visionary, more unreal — all things save the sun which moved relentlessly westward, all too eager to end the day which Jervis wished might end never. When the carriage had been turned round on the way home, Stella roused herself from her Nirvana : she wished to live a little also, and to talk. " I feel so much better," she said pleasantly. Jervis told her he was glad : he did not look in her direction, and the girl was conscious of the omission. " It is lovely to drive," she pursued. " If I had my way, I should never walk : it must be lovely to have a carriage of one's own."

He did not answer : often he kept silence when an answer was not imperative, for he had not a ready command of words. " It is all so ugly : " she waved toward the burnt-up Lombardy plains. " England is so much prettier than this : I should like to see England again." " I thought you liked Italy," he remarked. " Oh yes, I like it, of course ; but one gets tired of places one likes, and these last months have given me a horror. I liked it well enough before ; besides, I was so busy singing I had little time for anything else." " You care for your singing ? " " Oh yes ! " her eyes gleamed. " Care ? Yes, indeed, I care. I used to care for nothing else in the world." " And now? Is that another thing you have tired of?" She glanced at him from under her lowered lids. Certainly he lacked the little graces of even the second class Italians she had met, and yet she liked him all the better for his blunt speech.