The romance of Lilies

Chapter I

ME. TOGG’s SUBSTITUTE.

LANTERN hanging in the arch of a gateway on a very dark night and a cheerful fire-light causing a glow in the windows of a corner room on the lower floor, distinguished from the general blackness the house at Surfport which Leander Bathrow had inherited from his father. The broad expanse of the Atlantic separated Mr. Bathrow from his American home; Mrs. Bathrow, his young wife, feeling somewhat ill, had lain down in her chamber; Mrs. Togg, who had been housekeeper in the Bathrow family since the wife of the elder Bathrow died years and years before, had assumed a solicitous position at the bedside of the wife of the younger Bathrow, — and so it happened that the only occupants of the lower part of the house were the youthful

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

"Willard Matlock and that very uncommon genius, Mr. Togg.

The whole rugged coast of Maine that night from Portsmouth to the Bay of Fundy was a line of unseen foam and a roar incessant that no darkness could belittle. The gale of the day had gone, and but for this constant tumult there would have been a hush upon the land. There was a pause in the proceedings of the elements and in that pause Nature held her breath. Young Matlock felt this impression of suspense in the uncanny night when he stepped to the door to see what the weather was. Near at hand in the silent landscape familiar objects presented vague, unmeaning shapes. The trees were marshalled, spectral and motionless, along the way. With startling distinctness he heard the ceaseless pounding of the waves against the shore a half-mile down the lonely road at his right. He turned his face towards the grim sky and something wet smote him on the cheek. And then a living screen trailed down across the murky background and waved its silent folds before him. Even while he looked the ground grew white where the light shone out from the hall at his back and about the solitary lantern that hung from the wooden arch above the gate in

THE ROMANCE OP THE LILIES.

front of him sprung all at once into existence a fantastic tangle of flakes.

When Matlock had shut the door and came back to the corner room, Mr. Togg, a tall, spare man of forty-five, with milky blue eyes and an habitual air of abstraction, was just lighting his pipe by the aid of an ember from the crackling fire in the wide chimney-place. He looked quite old and withered, even with the strong, ruddy light from the fire imparting a fictitious glow to his hollow cheeks, and his hand w r as unsteady. There was a disregard of appearances in his dress which Matlock knew arose not so much from the knowledge that he was secure in the privacy of his own home as from a carelessness of what his neighbors thought of him. He had the inevitable characteristics of the man who has not mingled in society. Despite his professional character of undertaker for the surrounding country, Matlock knew that he had lived much the life of a recluse. Mr. Togg was of the class of unsocial, self-secluded beings who are alone in the midst of a crowd. His heart was not with his calling. He was ever dabbling in some unprofitable or mysterious matter of an impractical, experimental nature, and in the odd den which he called his wareroom were strangely

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

intermingled the furnishings of chemistry and death.

Young Mr. Matlock, who was indeed but eighteen years of age, held this odd character in much esteem and awe. He watched him now with a face which expressed not so much curiosity as a respectful and deferential interest.

The dry lips puffed the smoke; the top of the pipe grew into a glow; Mr. Togg threw away the ember. He sat bent forward in his chair, round shouldered, awkward, looking at the fire. A gray cloud slowly rose up about his head.

"Snowing?” said Mr. Togg, interrogatively.

" Snowing,” said Matlock, affirmatively.

" Thought so,” said Mr. Togg. " Pact, knew so. In for it. Snow all night.”

Mr. Togg carried his peculiarity into his speech. Beside the fact that he talked in an odd jerky fashion was the further fact that in his aversion to conversation he had systematically abbreviated his communications until, in the course of time, by gradually getting rid of all superfluous words and syllables, he had achieved a triumph of brevity. For this reason Matlock was not a little startled

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

to hear Mr. Togg inquiring about the weather ancl he very much feared that his unusual effort upon this topic had rendered him for the balance of the evening quite incapable of further utterance. Still, Matlock made an attempt to interest him.

” I suppose Mr. Bathrow is anxiously waiting in London at the present time to hear from my father,” he said, reflectively. “ It is rather too bad that his business should carry him so far from his young wife at a time like this.”

Mr. Togg was looking at the fire.

"Naturally he feels very nervous,” Matlock went on, " though there doesn’t really seem to be any cause for it.”

Mr. Togg shut his eyes.

" It’s my opinion,” Matlock ventured further, " that a seafaring man does wrong to marry unless he has accumulated enough to stay at home, or is resolved to make a sailor of his wife.”

Mr. Togg slowly opened a reflective eye upon the ceiling and closed it again. He seemed to be considering the proposition. This was encouragement. Matlock cast about him for a further stimulant to his dormant sociability. There was a moment of silence. The fire

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

crackled in the chimney-place ; the great clock ticked in the hall; there was no other disturbance near at hand. In the profound cpiiet Matlock felt the dull presence even here, subdued but perfectly distinct, of the surf upon the rocks. There was a slight stirring of the sash in the window frame, as if the silent night had breathed upon it. Something of this ghostly breath wandered through the house, closing a distant door. All at once the pillar of smoke over Mr. Togg's head grew animated and swayed to and fro. Some of it floated in Matlock’s direction. The young man became aware then of a very peculiar odor, strong, penetrating and indescribable.

"Why, Mr. Togg! ” he exclaimed, "this is not tobacco ! ”

Mr. Togg slowly opened both eyes, looked at him with an expressionless face and uttered the explanatory word, —

"Substitute.”

" Not opium, I hope? ” Matlock ventured to say.

" Opium in it,” was Mr. Togg’s reply.

" You astonish me.”

Mr. Togg vouchsafed a grim smile and was kind enough to explain further, —

" New thing. Compounded it myself.”

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

"Indeed! ” said Matlock, greatly interested. " Tell me about it — that is if it isn’t a secret. What's it for? Is it a medicine? What do you call it?”

Mr. Togg drew in a great breath of smoke and let it flow out slowly between his lips. Then he said with unexpected suddenness, K Togg’s substitute,” and relapsed into silence.

Matlock smiled.

" It isn’t funny,” said Mr. Togg, curtly.

Matlock became very grave.

“If the effect is as curious as the odor,” he ventured, " it must be curious indeed.”

"It is,” Mr. Togg condescended to say. "Disagreeable? ”

" Oh, not at all ; only very peculiar. I suppose it is one of the substitutes for tobacco we have read about? Really it seems to me that here is a great field for an ingenious man to make a fortune. That tobacco is a rank poison everybody is agreed. If there could only be discovered something which should possess all the virtues and none of the objectionable qualities of tobacco, everybody might turn smoker and the virtuous crusade against the weed be happily abandoned.”

Mr. Togg seemed much pleased. He took the pipe out of his mouth, carefully wiped the

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

stem on the lining of his coat and passed it to Matlock with a brief invitation to — ” try it.” The young man found ” Togg’s substitute ” surprisingly agreeable. It was more mild than tobacco and left in the mouth a clean and pleasant taste. Matlock was favorably impressed with his introduction to the substitute and when he handed back the pipe he said so Mr. Toggwas clearly delighted and underwent a transient but surprising transformation. He became confidential. He took from his pocket a leathern pouch containing some crisp brownish granules which he cordially invited the young man to keep. Matlock accepted the gift, greatly flattered by this token of Mr. Togg’s esteem. Meanwhile the latter made an unusual effort and produced a speech.

" Everything was all very well but how to make it burn. Got the compound theoretically, but no burn. Worked at it, by spells, eight years. Got it to a science. Perhaps you could help introduce it. When go away take box with you. Let friends try it.”

” And have you actually worked at it for eight years?” asked Matlock, admiringly.

" More,” said Mr. Togg.

" And never told anybody about what you were doing in the mean time, I dare say? ”

" Not word,” said Mr. Togg with an odd chuckle.

" It’s wonderful,” Matlock continued. " You have good ground to hope to make a fortune out of it.”

" Great hopes,” said Mr. Togg with a deep breath. "Very great hopes. Get up trademark. Patent it. Sell like Jehu.”

"I’m sure I hope so,” said Matlock, " and indeed you have every reason to be encouraged. You have probably thoroughly tested it. What are its effects ? Is it a narcotic or a stimulant?”

"Narcotic. Soothing. Effect good. Very good. But don’t smoke too much. Same caution as in everything. Eat too much, get dyspepsia. No argument against eating. Too much this might dull mind, impair functions, raise devil. Still, nothing inherently wrong about it.”

Here Mr. Togg having preserved his balance on the pinnacle of speech for an unusual period, suddenly fell off and remained hopelessly down for some time despite Matlock’s frequent endeavors to pull him up again. Gradually he resumed his view of the fire, which was getting into such a cheerful roar that it successfully obscured the feebler pres-

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

ence of the greater tumult on the rocks without. Nevertheless this ominous undercurrent somehow continued to assert itself to Matlock’s consciousness like that other little tender, romantic undercurrent of sadness which was never absent from his mind.

Suddenly Mr. Togg was seized with a convulsion. Matlock was alarmed and cried out, but Mr. Togg turned a contorted face toward him and quieted his fears with a brief explanation, —

" Laughing.”

" Oh ! ” said Matlock, much relieved.

"Queer idea,” said Mr. Togg, with a perfect inspiration of communicativeness. "Very queer idea. Suppose — suppose man had an enemy — man like me, chemist, had an enemy and wanted to be rid of him. Make friends with him. Get up some mixture like this and invite him to a pipe of peace. Smoke together. Enemy enchanted. More solace. Each night sit side by side in chimney-place and smoke together. Chemist’s pipe remains the same; but enemy’s mixture more and more insidious. Enemy must smoke. Opium and all the rest. Habit. Fixed. Unshakable. Then chemist says has discovered mixture to be poisonous. Warns enemy to

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

leave off. Enemy can’t. Even when knows truth, he can’t. Head all gone. Mind completely shattered. Finally death. Could the law make the chemist liable? ”

Mr. Togg’s query was so abrupt and forcible, he entered with so much enthusiasm into the exposition of his " queer idea ” that Matlock actually recoiled. Mr. Togg sat bent toward him, holding his pipe between his fingers looking at him earnestly.

" I should hope so,” exclaimed Matlock when he found words. "If not, it is time we had a new law.”

"Just so,” said Mr. Togg shortly, replacing his pipe and returning at once to a contemplation of the fire.

The reaction was a serious one. Matlock’s subsequent remarks fell on unheeding ears. Mr. Togg became more silent and more deaf than a sphinx. The smoke continued to roll up about his head and make miniature clouds along the ceiling. The air became thick with it. So much of it was certainly disagreeable, — more so than Matlock had imagined when he first met it. The peculiarity of odor seemed to grow stronger and to intensify till it made him quite faint. The premonitions of this sensation stole upon him by degrees, but the

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

sensation itself came abruptly. He arose then to seek the clearer atmosphere across the hall, wondering whether that which had affected him was really the fumes of the substitute, a slight indisposition of his own, or merely his imagination.

THE ROMANCE OF THE T^.IES.

CHAPTER IT.

A BROKEN LILY.

W HEN the youthful Willard Matlock had left Mr. Togg, had crossed the hall and come into the dim and chilly room beyond, he paused perchance at the front window and stood a long time looking out upon the tangle of flakes, through which the lantern, hanging in the arch of the gateway, seemed a shapeless luminary. There was nothing alluring in this finite prospect to make him gaze so long. He saw something more than the lantern gleaming through the snow. His imagination projected a transparent picture upon that mazy background and he beheld a sweet and charming face. It was a common hallucination with him and one which he had made but feeble effort to overcome.

Very young men of certain temperament are reputed to be prone to fall in love with women older than themselves. Whether Matlock belonged to tliis romantic fellowship or not, 2 whether he had really loved or really believed himself to have loved is of slight concern to us. It is certain that he had his romance, that its object was older than himself and that his impressionable and ardent nature had clung to it for many months. He was older and graver, far more serious and perhaps a great deal less shallow than the many are at his age. It was already nearly two years since this romance had come into his life and he was still haunted by its winsome presence. A lithe, graceful figure, great blue eyes, fair hair, a face of surpassingbeauty! For its own sake this phantom of delight awoke in him a glow of pleasure. For the sake of her who first stamped the image on his brain it made him melancholy, sick at heart.

Hot that he knew very much about the original. He had not seen her a dozen times. He had scarcely spoken to her. It was improbable that he ever should see her again ; impossible that he should speak to her. She had vanished out of his life ; out of all lives of good repute. It was the vision of her beauty he sought to persuade himself that he cherished. Nothing more.

There were peculiar reasons why he should think of Madeline Perham now and here. He

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

was at Surfport, and Surfport and the lost Lily were inseparable in his mind. It was here that he had met her and only here, and there was just that difference between Surfport bathed in a glory of summer light and verdure and Surfport bare and bleak beneath a gray winter sky that there should have been to be consistent with his emotions on returning to the town again after what had happened.

There was something so superlatively incredible in the story of this fall that he had found it almost impossible to believe it. He had clung to the hope that it might be untrue long after everybody else had accepted it as a sad proof that even the angels are fallible ; he was still loath to surrender that vision of beauty to the hateful monster which they told him had claimed the reality ; even when there seemed no longer any room for doubt he continued to cherish in his heart the fond impression of a personality which had made the grief and scandal of a worthy community. He was not sure that this was right. He was not sure that it was consistent with his instincts, his beliefs and his aspirations, but he felt that he was powerless to change it.

There was a melancholy fascination in a retrospect of all that he had known of her.

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

And now again, to-night, he allowed himself to live over that brief portion of his past in which she figured. He left the window and began to pace the floor, his hands behind him, lost in recollection. He remembered that the young wife who was soon to be a mother, the wife of his father’s friend, Captain Bathrow, in whose house he now was, had been her schoolmate, that he had first heard of her through the captain who talked of her as one of the attractions of Surfport when he had pictured to Matlock’s youthful imagination the charms of his native town in order to induce him to spend his summer vacation at the old homestead. The "Lily of the Valley” he said the townsfolk called her. Young Matlock did not wonder at the name when he saw her. He was very young, barely sixteen, and she was a year or two his senior, lie remembered to have seen her first toward evening upon the rocks with the last glow of sunlight shimmering in her hair, the soft breath from the lazy gray sea fluttering the blue ribbons which she wore and filling the folds of the raiment about her dainty figure with a wanton motion. Fair hair, great blue eyes, a face of surpassing beauty ! Was it any wonder that his fancy had idealized this vision and that it should

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

haunt him afterwards ; that it should make of this human prose a poem ? Was it necessary for him to admit that he loved her in order to account for the place she still occupied in his thoughts ? He thought not. He was very sure not.

He had met her again, here and there, at little social gatherings in the town. He had gone through the formality of an introduction, had spoken to her and had even imagined that he saw breaking through the enamel of her reserve the latent inner spirit of the coquette. He thought her all the more charming for that, no doubt.

The brief summer sung itself away to the music of the waves. The time came for him to go. He may have had foolish thoughts. Undoubtedly he did. But he feared to utter them lest she should laugh at him. They parted with mutual expressions of regret and hope that they should soon meet again; very sincere hopes on his part ; who shall say how much she felt and thought?

Long before the time when in the natural course of events they might have met again his angel had taken wings unto itself and had flown away. The real romance was destroyed, but in its place there came an ideal

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

one upon which fell the magic mantle that the old possessed. When Madeline Perham disappeared her place was taken by a vision of her loveliness, a fair face, a lingering regret, a melancholy recollection, a sudden mistrust in humanity.

He thought these thoughts now intending to be truthful with himself, but yet he knew that he had never sounded the mystery of the sentiment that had taken possession of him. You may better do that for him when you have heard his tale.

The Perhams were proud people. The father was stern, harsh, uncompromising, Puritanic. The mother of the girl, a sweet woman, had long been dead. The second wife was like the husband. If I were writing a defence of the broken Lily I might say that this home was severe and unattractive. There is no reason why I should plead where man is not the judge. The outraged home did not forgive Madeline Perham. It never has forgiven her to this day while much that was then which might seem harder than a father’s heart has been washed down into the inevitable dust and taken to itself new forms.

This was the winter after the second summer. Duty had taken Mr. Bathrow far from

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

the side of his young wife. His ship lay in the port of London. He had telegraphed to Matlock’s father in Hew York to go to Surfport and secure for him his wife’s signature to certain important legal papers. The elder Matlock, full of the press of business, had sent his son in his place. Young Matlock had done everything that he had come to do and would return on the morrow.

Undoubtedly it was the associations that this quaint place suggested which made the reminiscences that came to him to-night so much more vivid than usual. It was here that he had met her. The sullen roar which found its way into the house came from the very rocks where he had seen her first. If he went out beneath the solitary lantern blurred by the silent storm, turned to his left along the white road, less than an hour’s trudging through snow would take him past the dark house with closed blinds and air of desolation which had been her home; past the door that was shut against her and would never, never open to her again. He knew just how it would look for he had seen it not many hours ago. That house had an expression like a human face. There are many things about this period of his life with which memory has ceased to busy

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

herself. That desolate habitation is not one of those things. As he saw it, grim and unforgiving, on that quiet winter day, he sees it still.

Matlock grew tired of pacing the obscure chamber. Mr. Togg’s substitute, like some other simple-seeming agents, was perhaps more powerful than it appeared. I am not sure that the new compound had anything to do with it or that the effect of the peculiar fumes which had turned him faint in the other room had not by this time wholly departed. The young man sank down for a moment, — he was sure it was but for a moment, — in a chair by the window.

There came in front of him, all at once, a face and figure that he knew too well, — the fair hair, the great blue eyes, the face of surpassing beauty ! — but oh ! so changed ! so miserable, with such a hunted expression! She saw him. She stretched out her arms toward him as if she would appeal to him for one kind word. He started. He felt very cold. He had been asleep. He had sat there but the briefest item of time, but he must have slept. His limbs were stiff. With a strange confusion he stood upon his feet. Out of the window at his side he saw the luminous beacon through

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

the tangle of snow and underneath it some- . tiling dark, stirring vaguely. He watched it curiously but it came no nearer. He went to the door. It took fright and disappeared. Bareheaded, he plunged recklessly down into the blinding whirl; he took a dozen steps, caught the fleeing creature in his arms, turned its face to his — it was she.

She cried out, entreating him to let her go. He could not have held her if he had wished. His arms dropped away from her. They stood while the soft snow-flakes circled about them and the water boomed upon the distant rocks and the dull light shone obscurely — oh, not too obscurely for either her or him ! — and stared each into the other’s face.

” What are you doing here, in this storm? ”

She would not, or could not, answer him. She made a vague gesture with her arm up the road toward the home that had been hers.

” Have you been there? ”

Then she found words to make reply. Her voice was cold, unemotional.

" I have been there. They would not let me in.”

" Where are you going?”

Again she made a vague gesture with her arm, this time toward the din incessant which

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.

filled all the silent valley in which they stood, — that hollow between the hills whose pride, whose fairest flower had borne this face and image.

A hot flood of emotion choked him. He hardly knew what he did. He pointed to the cheerful light which streamed forth from the open door.

"In there, there is a fire,” he said.

"Whether she would have gone of her own accord I cannot say. She staggered and sank down in the snow. When Matlock had lifted her in his arms, as one would lift a child, he saw that she was no longer conscious.

THE ROMANCE OF THE LILIES.