"He is inordinately vain," said Stanley, "and frightfully extravagant.

Clever. Lazy--awfully lazy. He can sit back in his chair and tell you how to run the New York _Herald_, and he has been able to get nothing profitable into or out of his paper from the time he began until now. He theorizes beautifully; the only thing he can really do successfully is to borrow money and talk to women. He used to amuse me just in the way an actor amuses me. Half the time I think he was deceiving even himself.

I always thought he would do this very thing, one of these days. He used to have what old women call 'spells' now and again, when he found himself hard up for cash, that were really the most curious performances. He would stay away from his office altogether; genius as he was in warding off collectors, he used to prefer not to face them sometimes. There was--I should say there is--a woman, one of the cleverest, most cultured woman in town, who was fond of him in an elderly-sister sort of way, and he used to go to her and borrow money.

Think of it: borrow money from a woman! She saw through him long ago, I know, and yet he used to use such artifice--such tears, and promises of betterment as the men employed!--that she always helped him in the end.

Then he gambled to try to make the big stake that would enable him to run a rich man's paper; the only result is that he got deeper and deeper into the hole. All the time he avoided his office; if he sc.r.a.ped up a banknote or two he would send them along, per messenger boy, to the foreman of the composing-room and have the printers paid, at least. You must pay the printers and the pressmen, you know, even if you let a lot of literary devils starve! And then some guardian angel would send along a college chum, or some fellow with more loyality than discretion, and A.B. Wooton would make a big 'borrow' and be once more the genial, cynical man-of-the-world that the rest of you know. This time I presume the angel refused to come. The end had to come; it was simply a huge game of 'bluff.'"

"How is it you know all this?" asked one of the others.

"My dear fellow," was Stanley's answer, "I have _gambled_ with him. All through one of those periods when he was engaged, ostrich-like, in sticking his head into the sand, I was with him. Besides, I know something of his private affairs. He had sunk all of his own money long ago; for the last year or so the _Torch_ and Wooton have been living on the gullibility of others. It seems strange that this should be possible in this smart American city, but Wooton was not an ordinary bluffer; he was a genius. Owing you hundreds of dollars he could talk to you all day so skilfully on the one especial vanity of your heart that you would feel much more like offering him another hundred than like even so much as mentioning the old debt. I feel sorry for him. He should have a patron, to humor him in all his extravagances; he would be splendid, splendid!"

But Lancaster, whom the news had touched a good deal, declared that it was time he was taking himself off. Belden accompanied him to the door, and spoke to him encouragingly about another position that he thought d.i.c.k could easily obtain. Then Lancaster pa.s.sed out into the night.

CHAPTER V

Carriages lined the sidewalk for blocks in every direction. There was a slight sprinkle of rain falling, and the shining rubber coats and hats of the coachmen caught the electric light in fantastic streaks. Horses were stamping, and chafing the bit. From every direction came a stream of humanity, all making for the Auditorium. Carriages were arriving every moment; the bystanders and ticket scalpers caught glimpses of light hose and dainty opera shoes and skirts that were lifted for an instant. Men in black capes were hurrying about busily. The cable cars emptied load after load of well-dressed men and women. All the world and his wife was going to the opera.

d.i.c.k Lancaster, as he got out of his hansom, looked appreciatively at the picture that all this hurrying throng made, and shaking some of the rain drops off his coat, entered the opera house. As he looked about him at the richly caparisoned human animals all on pleasure bent, at the nonchalance that the mirrors told him he himself was displaying, it came over him with something of amus.e.m.e.nt that there had been decided changes in Richard Lancaster since that young person first came to town.

Impressionable as wax, the town had already cast its fascinations over him; he was in the charmed circle. He had been put up at one of the best of the clubs; he had been made much of, socially, by the select set that allowed the preferences of Mrs. Annie McCallum Stewart to dictate the distinction between the Somebodies and the n.o.bodies; he had been successful enough, professionally, to enable him to move in the world as befitted his tastes. It is to be confessed that his tastes, now that they had been whetted by the approach of opportunities, were not of the most economical. He was fond of all things that show the intellectual aristocrat; he liked to look well, to dine well, to talk well, and to enjoy good music. He liked the comfort, the remoteness from the mere vagaries of the weather, that this town life afforded. Here was a night such as in the country would be dismal unspeakably; yet nothing but brilliance and enjoyment was evident in his present surroundings.

He threw his shoulders back with something of proud pleasure in his own well-being, as he handed his cape and opera-hat to the caretaker. Yes, life was good! It tasted well, and he was young, and there would yet be many long, delicious draughts of it!

Mrs. Stewart was in her box. Several girls, whose low-cut dresses seemed to be longing for something more worth showing, were seated on the chairs that surrounded the central figure, Mrs. Stewart. In the background of this, as of all other boxes, was a phalanx of white shirt-fronts. It looked like the fore-front of an attacking army; first the flash of bayonets, as they are to be found in woman's eyes, and then the heavier artillery, the stolid force of masculinity. In the wide corridors behind the boxes, in the foyers, and up and down the marble stairways, the stream of people flowed back and forth. Presently the conductor of the orchestra took his seat. There was a hastening toward seats and boxes, and the overture of the "Cavalleria Rusticana" floated out in echoes.

Young Lancaster reached the Stewart box just as the first bars were streaming forth. Mrs. Stewart leaned her head gracefully back over her right shoulder, and smiled up at him. She stretched up a beautifully gloved hand, and whispered a "Glad you came through the rain, after all.

Awfully disappointed if you hadn't!" at him. He nodded to the other women, and shook hands with Mr. Stewart and some of the other members of the white-shirted, blank-faced phalanx.

"Ah," whispered Mrs. Stewart with a languid show of interest, and putting her lorgnette up, "there is Calve!"

There was a flutter of hand-clappings that went like a light wave from the stalls to the upper balconies. And then began that exquisite, dramatic exposition of rustic jealousy that Mascagni has so wonderfully set to music. As Santuzza, Calve was magnetic. Actress as much as singer she riveted all attention. Her face was the picture of agony the while she was contemplating: the inner vision of her betrayal by Turiddu.

Then, the jealous hatred flashing out at Lola, her rival; and lastly the self-accusing sorrow that covered her when she saw the effect of her tale-bearing against her former lover. In the interval there was the marvellous Intermezzo. Mrs. Stewart leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. When it was over she said, "There is something of the world's joy and something of its pain in that melody. It appeals to me wonderfully."

Lancaster put in, "One of the men at the club declared that it was the only thing that had given him real emotion for--oh, years."

"He must have been a very blase creature," said one of the other women.

"He is," a.s.sented Lancaster.

Their further conversation was interrupted by the rising of the curtain.

When it came down again there was a general movement toward the foyers.

Some of the tall and pale young men strolled out to smoke cigars and talk of the boxing match that was going to come off at the club in a day or so. With much fluttering of fans and swishing of skirts the angular girls betook themselves from Mrs. Stewart's box to see if they "could see any of the other girls." Mrs. Stewart and d.i.c.k Lancaster were left in sole possession. He took a chair beside her and looked over into the stalls.

"Only fair," she said, noting his visual measurement of the size of the audience.

"Yes. These people don't want the New. They want 'Faust' and 'Aida,' and they think 'Tannhauser' is the very last in music. It will be years before they see the gem-like beauty of this new Italian school."

"And yet--it's a return to the old."

"That is why. The old things are the best, if you only go far enough into the past. We are never really modern, we are merely old in a new way."

"Do you know--" she leaned her white elbow on the cushioned chair-back and placed her forefinger just under her ear, so that from the elbow up her arm formed a white, beautiful rest for the attractive face, and looking young Lancaster smilingly in the eyes, tapped her foot caressingly to the floor--"do you know that I think I shall have to cut you off my list very soon? You have--h'm--changed a great deal in the few months I have known you. You occasionally make speeches that sound almost cynical. You were always clever; you always talked brightly, but you never used to believe some of the sharp things you said; now I think you are beginning to. I liked you because you were different; you are not different any more, at least not different in the same way. You will never be as stupid as most of the others; but I am afraid, too, that you will never be quite as genuine as you were."

He sighed as he looked at her. He smiled very faintly as he answered, "Yes, I am afraid you are right. I am not as I was." His gaze swept out over the stalls, the crowded foyer, the brilliance everywhere. "But how could I have done anything else than let all this affect me a little? I am pliable, I suppose, and I bend easily to the wind. I came here to taste life. As soon as I began to sip the cup I found that I was going to like it immensely. I trod the way of the world that I might see what manner of men walk there, and what sort of a road it was. Presently, I found that I liked that path so much that I preferred it to the bypaths of solitude and asceticism. And what has it mattered as long as I have not neglected the work there is for me to do? No one can say I have changed in that respect. I work harder than ever. It's not fair of you to upbraid me. A great deal of it is your own doing."

"Yes?"

"Of course it is. You have been my pilot out of the land of the Narrows.

When I came up here I was narrow. I thought about things dogmatically, and applied hard and fast rules to every sort of conduct. Now I am broader. I know that where the world moves at lightning speed you cannot apply the same tenets that hold good in a village where life is lived at a cripple's gait and where routine is the reigning deity."

"You would not have called it a 'cripple's gait' a little while ago,"

interposed Mrs. Stewart.

He flushed slightly but went on: "I realize now that since we have but one life to live, we should live it as fully as we may. I could not have seen the life that all of you here are living without realizing that it was a fuller life than the one the country afforded me. So, cost what it may, I must needs live it also."

She looked at him curiously. "Yes," she repeated, half to him and half to herself, "cost what it may."

"Besides," he went on, looking away from her, and with something of regret in his voice, "I have grown worldly because I loved a worldly woman. You--you have made me love you."

She lifted her eyebrows a trifle, turned her head, with the eyelids drawn down over her eyes, toward him, and opened the lids slowly, with a smile on her lips. Then she looked past him to where her husband was leaning over a chair in one of the other boxes.

"Don't you think John is looking very handsome tonight?" she asked softly.

Lancaster, who had gone red and pale in waves, answered, through set lips, "Very."

Then the curtain went up on "Pagliacci."

It was the first time that Lancaster had heard Leoncavallo's opera. In its novel charm his shame and mortification--shame at having spoken those words to Mrs. Stewart and mortification at the rebuff they had only naturally brought him--were for the time being swallowed up. With eager eyes and attentive ears he watched and listened to the play within the play. First the arrival of the mountebanks. Amid the laughs and rejoicings of the villagers the theater-tent is set. Then the effort of the clown to make love to Canio's wife; the slash of the whip from her, the muttered curses from him. But the woman is fickle, after all; the villager, Silvio, is more successful than the clown was. The sudden approach of Canio, the husband, led hither by the vengeful clown, still smarting under the whip; the escape of Silvio, and the woman's refusal to tell the name of her lover. And so, to the wonderful second act, where tragedy is so dexterously woven into comedy; where, under the guise of a drama that the mountebanks proffer the villagers on their little stage, the greater drama of Canio's jealousy is spun out to its tragic ending. In between the lines of the dialogue intended for the village audience come lines wrung from Canio's heart that sear their way into his wife's breast, spite of her stage-smiles and graces. And when, at the last, Canio, in his baffled rage, would strike her, and Silvio, her lover, rushes from the audience in rescue, only to be stabbed by the finally exultant husband, young Lancaster involuntarily shuddered. There was something griping in the wonderful display of human rage and jealousy that this young tenor gave in Canio; in the final words, full of tragic, double, ironical meaning, "La comedie e finita!" there was something of a sentence of death. And somehow, in Silvio there seemed to be something of himself: that lover's terrible fate was fraught for him, in the conscience-stricken state he found himself in, with warning and protest. While the applause, reaching curtain-call after curtain-call, surged all about him, young Lancaster was lost in reverie. He was changed, yes. He had adapted himself to the manners of the town; but he still had a most nervous conscience, sharp, unblunted. He sat still, with his chin hiding his upper shirt stud.

Mrs. Stewart's voice roused him. Her husband was already engaged in putting her cloak about her shoulders. "Wonderful, wasn't it?" she said sweetly. "We shall see you Wednesday, shall we not?"

He bowed and stammered something, he hardly knew what.

The opera was over.

That night, before he took off his dress' clothes, d.i.c.k sat down and wrote to his mother. It was a thing he had not been so steadfast in of late as once he had been.

In one place he wrote: "You ask me, mother mine, how I like the town now that it is no longer strange to me. Oh, I like it only too well. The old place, the old friends, the sweet gentle tenor of all the old life out there in Lincolnville, all seem like some far-off dream to me. My ears and eyes are full of the many sounds and sights of the town; the multifarious vistas, and the ever-changing face of the street. I like the town and yet I fear it. Sometimes its might oppresses me, and I feel as if I wanted to get out in the woods near our home and lie down at full length on the mossy bank, where the creek sings soothingly and the sun hangs like a golden ball in a clear sky. I want to hear the crickets, and the deep silence of the nights, and the echoes of detached laughter floating over the meadows. I want to watch the sun-light as it comes through the leaves and plays hide-and-seek on the lawn; I want to watch the hawk circling in the air, the chickens scurrying fearfully at the sight of him. And then again the feverish itch to be in the very middle of this maelstrom, the town, seizes me. I long for the very thick and foremost of the struggle, and the picture of Lincolnville fades away. At this present time of the year, though, I can really prefer the town without seeming a slave to it.

"It is in the winter, or in the early spring, when country places are chiefly seas of mud and slush that one most deeply realizes the delights of dwelling in town. Modern invention has put the town dweller beyond the weather's jealous bites. We step into a hansom, we drive to the club, we have dinner; behind club doors, and in club comfort we are above all the slings and arrows of the elements; we drive to the theatre, and the black-and-white splendor of our men, as well as the fur-decked rosiness of our women, is only enhanced by contrast against the frowny murkings of the sky. I have noticed that the finale, the curtain-fall of any important public event, such as a dinner, a dance, or an opera, is always a more picturesque thing when the carriages have to drive away through the sleet. Whereas, the country! The weather is the world and all that therein is; you can't get away from it. Mud is king!

"I am doing something in paint now, just to feed this terrible ambition of mine. The pen-and-ink work is all very-well, and it does bring the bread and b.u.t.ter, but it is not what I want for ever and ever. And I think I am going to have for my subject just such a scene as I wrote of a moment ago: the moment before the carriages drive away through the rain, with everybody in gala attire and scintillant with brightness and insincerity. For the town is insincere, mother, and cruel. Some day, perhaps I, too, will become insincere. I do not know. I pray it may not be so. But I am alarming you causelessly. I am only a little tired and unnerved tonight. I have been to the opera, and it was just a little affecting. So don't mind what I said just now. * * * * I am getting rather tired and will say good-night. * * *"