The penalty

Front matter

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CORNELL

II

WiLMOT buttoned his coat over fifteen one-thousanddollar bills. Only supreme necessity could have persuaded him to take them, since, although he had not put his name to a paper of any kind, he felt a little as if he had sold himself to the devil. But Blizzard had shown him no deviltry; only kindness and a certain whimsicality of speech and a point of view that was engaging.

The transaction finished, Wilmot was for leaving, but being under obligation to the legless man was at pains not to be abrupt. He lingered then a little, and they talked.

"The first time we met," said the beggar, "you were roller-skating with a pretty child. She was so pretty that I asked you her name. And I have never forgotten it."

He did not add that he had watched that pretty child's goings and comings for many years; that he had lain in wait to see her pass; that he had bribed servants in her father's house to give him news of her; and that the day approached when, fearing neither man nor God, he proposed that she should disappear from the world that knew her, and go down into the infamous depths of that vengeance which had been the key-note of his life. Nor did he add that there were but two contingencies which he felt might thwart his plans : her marriage to Wilmot Allen, or his own imtimely death. And he feared the latter but little. The former, however, had at times seemed imminent to those who spied upon the daily life of the heiress for him, and in lending money to Wilmot he was taking a first step toward making it impossible. For Barbara herself Blizzard had at this time no more feeling than for a pawn upon a chess-board. It pleased his sense of fitness to know she was beautiful; and to be told that she was like sunshine in her father's house.

"What has become of her?" he said.

"Of Miss Ferris?" Wilmot did not care to discuss her with a stranger. But imfortunatdy there were fifteen thousand dollars of the stranger's money in his inside pocket. "She became a great favorite in society," he said, "and then dropped out to study art."

' ' Painting? ' ' The legless man knew perfectly well, but it suited him to make inqmries. "Music?"

"Sculpture," said Wihnot shortly.

"Is she succeeding?"

"She works very hard, and she has talent."

"That is not enthusiastic."

"You mustn't ask me; I'm not an art critic."

"What a pity."

"A pity that I'm not an art critic?"

"No. A pity for a beautiful giri to do anything but exist."

Wilmot's eyebrows went up a little. The beggar's speech surprised him, and pleased him, since it expressed a favorite thought of his own.

"Is any of her work, on exhibition? Having seen her once, one takes an interest, you know."

"I think there is nothing that can be seen," said Wilmot coolly, "except upon special invitation. And I think she is very shy of showing anything that she has done."

"True artists," said Blizzard, who criminally was an artist himself and knew what he was talking about, "live in the future."

Again Wilmot's eyebrows went up a little. Why should a legless beggar be able to make loans of fifteen thousand dollars, and why should he be able to talk like a gentleman?

"I am interested in art," continued Blizzard; "sometimes I have earned a few dollars by sitting for my portrait."

He did not add that he continually put himself in the way of artists in the hope that his fame as a model would reach Barbara, and touch her imagination. He did not add that he haunted Washington Square and McBurney Place, where her studio was, in the hope that his face, which he knew to be different and more terrible than other faces, naight kindle a fire of inspiration in her. He believed rightly that if a woman once looked him in the eyes she would never forget him. But hitherto Barbara had not so much as glanced at him, since she carried her lovely head very high, and looked straight before her as she went. While, as for him, he stood upon the stumps of his legs, a gigantic sort of dwarf, beneath the notice of the proud-eyed and the tall.

Wihnot passed out of the place in deep thought; not even the pretty girls plaiting straw won a glance from him. Coupled with the reUef of being out of present difficulties was a disagreeable sense of foreboding. Suppose the legless man were to ask favors of him before the money could be repaid? Suppose they were favors which a gentleman could not grant? And he determined to find out, from the police if necessary, just what sort of a man it was with whom he had had dealings.

Ill

It seemed to Wilmot that he had not seen Barbara for an age. And indeed a week had passed without their meeting. Therefore, although he had often been forbidden to call during working hours, he had himself driven to 17 McBumey Place and climbed the two flights of stairs to her studio.

It was a disconsolate Barbara who received him. She had on her work-apron, but she was not working. She sat in a deep chair, and presented the soles of her small shoes to an open fire. Wilmot, expecting to be scolded for disobe3ang orders, was relieved at being received with visible signs of pleasure.

"You're just the person I wanted to see," she said, "just the one and only Wilmot in the world."

"Are you dying?" he asked.

She laughed. "I'm discouraged. I've come to one of those times when you just want to chuck everything. And there's a man at the bottom of it."

"Tell me," said Wilmot, "in words of two syllables."

"Well," said Barbara, "I woke up in the middle of the night out of a dream. I dreamed I'd made a statue of Satan after the fall from heaven, and that everybody said: 'Well done, Barbs, bully for you,' 'Got Rodin skinned a mile' — ^it was you said that —

IS and so forth and so on. I rose, swollen with conceit, and made a sketch of the head I'd dreamed about, so's not to forget the pose, and then I went to sleep again. Next day, early, a man stopped me in Washington Square and begged for a dime. I looked at him, and he had just the expression of the fallen Satan I'd dreamed about — a beast of a face, but all filled with a sort of hopeless longing to 'get back,' and remorse. I invited him to pose for me — ^not for a dime — ^but for real money. Well, he fell for it. And for all that morning he looked just the way I wanted him to look. But the next morning, having had the spending of certain moneys, he looked too tidy and well fed for Satan. And this morning he was hopeless. He looked smug and fatuous and disgustingly self-satisfied. So I gave hun quite a lot of . money, not wishing to hurt the creature's feelings, and told him to go away." She looked up, laughing at herself. "Do you know, I really believed I'd dreamed out a golden inspiration, and then to strike just the face I wanted — and then to have everything foozle out!"

Wihnot walked over to the modelling-table on which, strongly modelled in wet clay but quite meaningless, was the bust of a man.

"I think," said Barbara, "it would look better if you snubbed his nose for him."

Wilmot snubbed the long nose heavenward, and the effect was such as to make them laugh. Barbara recovered all her usual good himior.

"Get some forms out of the kitchen," she said, "and we'll tufn him into mud pies."

For half an hour they diverted themselves, displaying a tremendous rivalry and enthusiasm. And then Barbara announced that there had been enough foolishness, and that if Wilmot would put fuel on the fire, he might talk with her till Ixmch-time and then take her out to lunch.

"Always provided," she said, "that you are not broke at the moment. In which case Barbara will pay and tip."

"I've had a funny adventure," said Wilmot. "I was dreadfully broke. A man I hadn't seen for years and years — and only the once at that — stopped me in the street, told me I was broke, and offered to lend me money. Wilmot accepted, and is now plenty flush enough to blow to limch, thank you!"

Barbara reseated herself in the deep chair, and once more presented the soles of her shoes to the flames. "Look here," she said, "aren't you, just among old friends, rather flitting your life away? I don't think it's very pretty to borrow money from strangers, and to be always just getting into difficulties or just getting out of them. Do you?"

"Well, you know," said Wilmot earnestly, "I don't. When I don't hate myself, I don't like myself any too well. But there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm just lazy. Maybe I lack an impulse. Maybe I'd do better if any single solitary person in this world reaUy gave a damn about me."

His cheerful boyish face assixmed a proper solemnity of expression, and a certain nobility. At the moment he really thought that nobody in the world cared what became of him.

"Nobody," said Barbara, "likes to back a flighty pony. You yourseK, for instance, are always putting money, your own or some one else's, on horses that always run somewhere near form. Of course you have excusesjor yourself."

"I? None."

"Oh, yes, you have. You were brought up to be rich, and you were left poor, and a man has to live and even secure for himself the luxuries to which he has been accustomed. Haven't you ever excused yourself to yourself something like that? "

Wilmot admitted that he had, and went further. "You can't knock livings out of a tree with a stick like ripe apples," he said. "You've either got to use your wits or begin at the bottom and work up. And it seems to me that I'd rather be a little bit tarnished than toil away the best years of my life the way some men I know are doing."

"Yes," said Barbara, "but why not go somewhere where the world is yoimger, and there are real chances to be a man, and real opportunities to make money in real ways? I don't blame you for living on your wits. I bljime you for gambling and never getting anywhere and not caring."

"Not caring? And this from you?"

She changed color under his steady eyes.

"You just give me a certain promise, Barbs, and I give you my word of honor I'll settle to something above-board and make it himi. Look here now! How about it? Who's been so faithful to the one girl for so long? Who understands her so well? Who'd enjoy dying for her so much?"

"Good old Wilmot," she said gently and gave him her hand. He kissed it and would have liked to go on holding it forever, but she took it away from him, and after a silence said, with some bitterness: "I mustn't ever marry anybody. I've learned to know myself too well. And I've no constancy, and I don't trust myself."

"That," said Wilmot with the faith of a fanatic in his god, "is because you've never really cared."

"And besides," she said, "I have what I am pleased to call my career. And 'Down to Gehenna and up to the throne he travels fastest who travels alone.'"

"True," said Wilmot, "he arrives soonest, but all tired out, and the house is empty, and there are no children in it, and only paid servants. And it may be very showy to live for fame, but it isn't good enough. When we turned that bust you began into mud pies, we did a wise thing. We amused ourselves, and we said the last word on art as opposed to life. The best thing in this world is to be children and to have children — and the next best thing is nowhere."

"Would you," said Barbara, and her eyes twinkled a little, "really rather be a parent than a Praxiteles?"

"It looks to me," said Wilmot sadly, "sometimes — in moments of despondency — as if the honorable gentleman was never going to be either. But then again," and he spoke in a strong voice, "I believe in my heart that after you've done handling the book of life and admiring the binding, you'll open it at chapter one, and read, ^ Young Wilmot Allen '"

"Lunch-time," said Barbara, and she rose from the comfortable chair with sharp decision. "I vote for a thick steak, being famished. Is my hair all mussy?"

"No," said Wihnot dejectedly. "I wish it was. And I wish it was my fault — and yours."

IV

"I've done enough for you more than once," said the legless man; "you're big enough and strong enough to work, but you're a born loafer."

"I had a job." The speaker, a shabby, unshaven man with a beastly face, whined dolefully. "And I done right; but I got the sack."

"What was the job and why were you sacked?"

"I got a job as a artist's model. I sits in a chair while the lady makes a statue out of my face, and then she gives me money, and I goes and spends it. The third day she gives me more money, and tells me I looks too well fed and happy to suit her, and sends me away."

The legless man was astonished to learn that his heart was beating with unaccustomed force and rapidity. "Who was the artist?"

" She's a lady name o' Ferris."

The legless man steeled his face to express nothing. "Ferris," he commented briefly.

"Say," said the unshaven man, "what's all that about the devil falling out of heaven and fetching up in hell?"

"Why?"

"That's how she says I looks. And she wants to make a statue of him, just when he comes to and sits up, and looks up and sees how far he's feU. She says my face has all the sorrers and horrors of the world in it."

"And then, you fool," said the legless man, "you spoiled her game by high living. You ate and you drank till you looked like a paranoiac bulldog asleep in the sun. Where was the lady's studio?"

"Seventeen McBvurney Place."

"And she wants to do a Satan, does she?"

The unshaven man drew back from the expression of the legless man, in whose face it was as if all the fires of hell had suddenly burst into flame. The unshaven man covered the breast of his threadbare coat with outstretched hands as if to shield himself from some suddenly bared weapon. His eyes blinked, but did not falter.

"Say," he said presently, after drawing a deep breath, "if she could see you once."

"If I don't know," said the legless man, "how Satan felt after the fall, nobody does. The things I've been — the things I've seen — ^back there — down here— the things I've lost— the things I've found! Hell's Bell's, Johnson! what is it you want — ^food? — drink? — a woman?"

The unshaven man's eyes shone with an unholy light.

"What would you do for twenty-five dollars?"

The unshaven man said nothing. He looked everything.

"Do you know the Mclver woman?"

"Fanny?"

The legless man grunted. "Yes. Fanny. She'll look at you if you've got money."

"She'd crawl through a sewer to find a dune."

"Quite so," the legless man commented dryly. "Well, it wouldn't matter to me if she went on a tear and was foimd dead in her bed."

"It's worth fifty." Something in the unshaven man's voice suggested that he had once been remotely connected with some sort of a business.

The legless man shook his head. "Judas Iscariot," he said, "betrayed the Lord God for thirty. Fanny Mclver's scalp isn't worth a cent over twenty-five. You're just a broken-down drunk. It takes a bigger bluffer than you to make me put an insult on Christendom. Fifteen down. Ten when Fanny's had her last hang-over."

"Why don't you do some of your dirty work yourself?"

"I do all I can," said the legless man simply; "I can't find time for everything."

The unshaven man shifted imeasily on his shabby feet. In his stomach the flames which only alcohol can quench were burning with a steady gnawing fury. "How about a little drink?" he said.

"Fifteen down," said the legless man; "ten when the job's done, and a ticket to Chicago."

"With a reservation? I'll feel like the devil; I couldn't sit up aU night."

"I'll throw in an upper," said the legless man.

Still the unshaven man resisted. "What's Fanny done to you?"

"None of your business."

As if that settled the matter, and removed all obstacles and moral scruples, the unshaven man sighed, and held out his hand for the money which was to bind the contract.

Twelve hours later, Fanny Mclver's death was being attributed by the authorities to the insane, jealous rage of a lover. But as she had lately changed her name and address, she lay for a while in the morgue awaiting identification. It was the legless beggar who performed that last solemn rite. He was quite unmoved. Her death mattered no more in his scheme of life than the death of a fly.

But as he held up his hand and swore that the identity of the corpse was such and such, he remembered how graceful she had been at sixteen, how affectionate, how ready to forgive. He remembered with a certain admiration that during the heyday of her earning powers she had always trusted to his generosity, and had never tried to hold any of her earnings back. Prison and drink had destroyed all that was honest in her, aU that was womanly. So a drop of acid wiU eat out the heart of the freshest and loveliest rose. She became a very evil thing — fuU of evil knowledge. There was even a certain danger in her — not much — nothing definite — ^but enough. She was better dead.

He turned and swung out of the morgue into the sunlight. And he wondered whatever had become of the child that she had borne him.

It woiild have been easier for Wilmot Allen if he could have come into Barbara's Hfe for the first time. She was too used to him to appreciate such of his qualities as were fine and noble at their true value. And contrarily it was the same familiarity which limned his faults so clearly and perhaps exaggerated them. She often thought that if she could see him for the first time she would fall head over ears in love with him, and be married to him out of hand. Was it not better therefore, since the man's character had its disillusionments, that their life-long friendship precluded the idea of marrying in haste and repenting at leisure? "It's almost," she said to herself, "as if I had married him long ago and found out that I had made a mistake."

But she hated to hurt him in any way. And it caused her a genuine sorrow sometimes to say no to him. He had proposed to her many times a year for many, many years, and always with a passion and sincerity that made it appear as if he was proposing for the first time in his Hfe. Twice, the strength and devotion of his physical presence had seemed to remove every doubt of him from her mind, and she had said that she would marry him, and had been ecstatically happy while he kissed her and held her in his arms. And each time better knowledge of herself, a sleepless night, and the unsparing light of morning had filled her with shame and remorse, and made it quite clear that she had made one more mistake, and must tell him so, and eat himible pie. And exact a promise that he would never make love to her again. But she could never get him to promise that. And she could never keep him from kissing things that belonged to her when she was looking, and when she wasn't. And if, as he sometimes threatened in moments of disappointed and injured feelings, he had gone far away, so that he could never cross her path again, she would have missed him so much that it would almost have killed her. And so it is with all human beings — they care little enough about their dearest possessions imtil the fire by night consumes them, or the thief walks off with them. Then the silver and the jewels, and this thing and that, assume a sort of humanity — and are as if they had been dear friends and vmutterably necessary companions in joy and sorrow.

To Wilmot a little encouragement was a great thing, a foundation upon which to undertake pyramids. Having intruded upon Barbara's working hours without being scolded, Wilmot began to picture for himself a delightful life of intruding upon ihem every day. He hoped that if she was really working, she would not actually send him away, but let him sit in the deep chair by the fire and wait till she was through, and ready for talk and play. As much almost as he loved her, he hated her ambitions, if only because they interfered with him, and because he foimd it impossible to take them seriously. Her work seemed surprisingly good to him — ^not surprisingly good for a genuine sculptor who exhibited in salons, but for a girl of his own class whom he had always known. In this estimate he did not do Barbara justice. She had a fine natural talent and she had been well trained. People who knew what they were talking about, shock-headed yoxmg fellows with neighboring studios, prophesied great things for her, partly because she was beautiful, and partly because her work, as far as she had gone in it, was really good. What she lacked, they said, was inspiration, experience, and knowledge of life. When these things came to her in due time, her technique would be quite equal to expressing them.

Wilmot's dream of being much in Barbara's studio proved negotiable only as a dream. Barbara began a fountain for her father's garden at CloveUy, and dxuing the modelling of the central figure the studio was no place for a modest young man. He had one glimpse through the half-open door of a girl with very red hair and very white skin, and he turned and beat a decided retreat, blushing furiously. He did not repeat his visit to her studio until Barbara assured him that the nymph had put on her clothes and gone away. Then, much to his disgust, he foxmd there a young fellow named Scupper, who smoked a vile pipe and had dirty finger-nails and was allowed to make himself at home because he had recently exhibited a portrait bust that everybody was praising (even Wihnot) and because he had volunteered during a deHghtful contemplation of Barbara's face to do her portrait and tell her all that he had learned from his great master, Rodin.

The little beast had the assurance of the devil. He praised, blamed, patronized, puffed his pipe, and dwelt with superiority on topics which are best left alone, until Wilmot wanted to kick him downstairs. Scupper, aware of Wilmot's dislike for him, and thoroughly cognizant of its causes, did his best to goad the "young prude" (as he chose to consider him) into open hostility. He strutted, boasted, puffed, and talked loosely without avail. Wilmot maintained a beautiful calm, and the more he raged internally the more Chesterfieldian and gorgeously at ease his manners became. Barbara enjoyed the contest between the terrier and the Newfotmdland hugely. Personally she disliked Scupper almost as much as she liked Wilmot, but artistically she admired him tremendously and felt that his judgments and criticisms were the most valuable things to be had in the whole city.

Wilmot not only kept his temper, but outstayed his antagonist. The latter gone, he turned upon Barbara, and she in mock terror held up her hands for mercy; but Wilmot was not in a merciful mood.

"When you imagine that you are uplifting the cause of art, Barbs, are you sure that you aren't debasing it? You won't marry a man who has always loved you. Art. You put marble and bronze higher than littie children. Art. You allow disreputable, unwashed men ta talk in your presence as that man talked. Art. You hire people of bad character to sit for you, and people of no character. All art. You treat them in a spirit of friendliness and camaraderie. You affect to place art above all considerations; above character, above morals; worse, you place it above cleanliness.

"A man — ^yes, take him for all and all, a man — eats out his heajt for you; desires only to live for you, only to die for you, only to lie at your feet afterward — that is nothing to you. You do not even care to listen. You would rather hear through a braggart, indecent mouth that ought to be sewed up what Rodin said about Phidias. It seems finer to you to be an artist than a woman, and you so beautiful and so dear!"

Barbara made no answer. She looked a little hurt, possibly a little sullen. She had a way of looking a little sullen (it did not happen often) when she could not hit upon just the words she wanted to express her thoughts. She felt that her attitude toward life was ahnost entirely right, almost entirely justifiable, and she wanted to explain exactly why this was thus, and couldn't. So after a silence she said:

"Oh, I'm just a little pig. Why bother about me? And besides, it's no use."

"Don't say that, Barbara. There must be use in it. Don't you know in your heart that some day you are going to marry me? "

"No," she said. "Sometimes I've thought so, but I don't know it." She selected an arrow from her quiver, touched the point with venom, and because she had not enjoyed being scolded shot it into him. "And at the moment I don't think so."

Wilmot spoke on patiently. "Every true lover. Barbs," he said, "comes in time to the end of his patience and the end of his endurance."

"And then he ceases from loving — and troubling."

"He does not. When he knows as I know what is best for her happiness and for his, and when he finds that himibleness, and begging, and gentleness, and persuasion are of no avail — ^why, then if he's a man he makes her love him, makes her marry him."

"I hope, my dear Wilmot," she said, "that you are speaking from a very limited experience."

"From the experience of ten million years. I have only one life to live. Somehow I will make you love me, make you belong to me. Just because I eat with a fork, do you think my heart is really any different from that of the cave-man from whom it descended to me, or that your heart is any different from that of the girl he wanted, who kept him guessing and guessing until he couldn't stand it, and then turned and ran and ran through the woods, and swam rivers and climbed trees and jmnped down precipices imtil he caught her? "

There was something in Wilmot's lowered brows, a certain jerking, broken quality in his utterance, that was new to Barbara — that at once frightened her a little, and caused her heart to beat with a sort of wild triumph. But she did not guess that the old cave-man was at that moment actually looking out through her old friend's eye-places, and that ten thousand years of civilization are but a thin varnish over the rough and splendid masterpiece that God made in his image.

There was a knock at the door. It was Scupper returning. He had left his beloved pipe (on purpose). His shrewd, bloodshot little eyes took in the situation at a glance. In two beats his little heart was wild with jealousy.

"I beg everybody's pardon," he said. "I didn't know. I — er — ^wouldn't have knocked — I — er — mean I would have knocked just the same."

Wilmot took one slow step toward the famous sculptor, then smiled, picked up the fellow's pipe, and returned it to him. "I saw you put it down just before you left," he said. "I think there is nothing else you have forgotten, is there? If there is I think it will be best not to come back for it until I have gone. Meanwhile you will have time to shave and bathe and make yourself presentable."

Scupper, sure that he was not actually going to be hit, escaped with an ease and jauntiness which he was far from feeling. And Barbara, the high tension relieved, burst out laughing.

It was Wihnot's turn to look sullen. He had felt that the sheer animal force of his love was holding and even moulding Barbara to his will, as no tenderness and delicacy had ever done. But at the sculptor's entrance, the honest if brutal cave-man had fled, like some noble savage before a talking-machine, and left in a state of civilized helplessness a young gentleman who could not find anything to say for himself.