The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/The Birthplace/Chapter 7
VII
"Do you remember us?" the gentleman asked and smiled—with the lady beside him smiling too; speaking so much less as an earnest pilgrim or as a tiresome tourist than as an old acquaintance. It was history repeating itself as Gedge had somehow never expected, with almost everything the same except that the evening was now a mild April-end, except that the visitors had put off mourning and showed all their bravery—besides showing, as he doubtless did himself, though so differently, for a little older; except, above all, that—oh, seeing them again suddenly affected him as not a bit the thing he would have thought it. "We're in England again, and we were near; I've a brother at Oxford with whom we've been spending a day, and we thought we'd come over." So the young man pleasantly said while our friend took in the queer fact that he must himself seem to them rather coldly to gape. They had come in the same way, at the quiet close; another August had passed, and this was the second spring; the Birthplace, given the hour, was about to suspend operations till the morrow; the last lingerer had gone, and the fancy of the visitors was, once more, for a look round by themselves. This represented surely no greater presumption than the terms on which they had last parted with him seemed to warrant; so that if he did inconsequently stare it was just in fact because he was so supremely far from having forgotten them. But the sight of the pair luckily had a double effect, and the first precipitated the second—the second being really his sudden vision that everything perhaps depended for him on his recognising no complication. He must go straight on, since it was what had for more than a year now so handsomely answered; he must brazen it out consistently, since that only was what his dignity was at last reduced to. He mustn't be afraid in one way any more than he had been in another; besides which it came over him with a force that made him flush that their visit, in its essence, must have been for himself. It was good society again, and they were the same. It wasn't for him therefore to behave as if he couldn't meet them.
These deep vibrations, on Gedge's part, were as quick as they were deep; they came in fact all at once, so that his response, his declaration that it was all right—"Oh, rather; the hour doesn't matter for you!"—had hung fire but an instant; and when they were within and the door closed behind them, within the twilight of the temple, where, as before, the votive offerings glimmered on the walls, he drew the long breath of one who might, by a self-betrayal, have done something too dreadful. For what had brought them back was not, indubitably, the sentiment of the shrine itself—since he knew their sentiment; but their intelligent interest in the queer case of the priest. Their call was the tribute of curiosity, of sympathy, of a compassion really, as such things went, exquisite—a tribute to that queerness which entitled them to the frankest welcome. They had wanted, for the generous wonder of it, to see how he was getting on, how such a man in such a place could; and they had doubtless more than half expected to see the door opened by somebody who had succeeded him. Well, somebody had—only with a strange equivocation; as they would have, poor things, to make out for themselves, an embarrassment as to which he pitied them. Nothing could have been more odd, but verily it was this troubled vision of their possible bewilderment, and this compunctious view of such a return for their amenity, that practically determined for him his tone. The lapse of the months had but made their name familiar to him; they had on the other occasion inscribed it, among the thousand names, in the current public register, and he had since then, for reasons of his own, reasons of feeling, again and again turned back to it. It was nothing in itself; it told him nothing—"Mr. and Mrs. B. D. Hayes, New York"—one of those American labels that were just like every other American label and that were, precisely, the most remarkable thing about people reduced to achieving an identity in such other ways. They could be Mr. and Mrs. B. D. Hayes and yet they could be, with all presumptions missing—well, what these callers were. It had quickly enough indeed cleared the situation a little further that his friends had absolutely, the other time, as it came back to him, warned him of his original danger, their anxiety about which had been the last note sounded between them. What he was afraid of, with this reminiscence, was that, finding him still safe, they would, the next thing, definitely congratulate him and perhaps even, no less candidly, ask him how he had managed. It was with the sense of nipping some such inquiry in the bud that, losing no time and holding himself with a firm grip, he began, on the spot, downstairs, to make plain to them how he had managed. He averted the question in short by the assurance of his answer. "Yes, yes, I'm still here; I suppose it is in a manner to one's profit that one does, such as it is, one's best." He did his best on the present occasion, did it with the gravest face he had ever worn and a soft serenity that was like a large damp sponge passed over their previous meeting—over everything in it, that is, but the fact of its pleasantness.
"We stand here, you see, in the old living-room, happily still to be reconstructed in the mind's eye, in spite of the havoc of time, which we have fortunately, of late years, been able to arrest. It was of course rude and humble, but it must have been snug and quaint, and we have at least the pleasure of knowing that the tradition in respect to the features that do remain is delightfully uninterrupted. Across that threshold He habitually passed; through those low windows, in childhood, He peered out into the world that He was to make so much happier by the gift to it of His genius; over the boards of this floor—that is over some of them, for we mustn't be carried away!—his little feet often pattered; and the beams of this ceiling (we must really in some places take care of our heads!) he endeavoured, in boyish strife, to jump up and touch. It's not often that in the early home of genius and renown the whole tenor of existence is laid so bare, not often that we are able to retrace, from point to point and from step to step, its connection with objects, with influences—to build it round again with the little solid facts out of which it sprang. This, therefore, I need scarcely remind you, is what makes the small space between these walls—so modest to measurement, so insignificant of aspect—unique on all the earth. There is nothing like it'," Morris Gedge went on, insisting as solemnly and softly, for his bewildered hearers, as over a pulpit-edge; "there is nothing at all like it anywhere in the world. There is nothing, only reflect, for the combination of greatness, and, as we venture to say, of intimacy. You may find elsewhere perhaps absolutely fewer changes, but where shall you find a presence equally diffused, uncontested and undisturbed? Where in particular shall you find, on the part of the abiding spirit, an equally towering eminence? You may find elsewhere eminence of a considerable order, but where shall you find with it, don't you see, changes, after all, so few, and the contemporary element caught so, as it were, in the very fact?" His visitors, at first confounded, but gradually spellbound, were still gaping with the universal gape—wondering, he judged, into what strange pleasantry he had been suddenly moved to break out, and yet beginning to see in him an intention beyond a joke, so that they started, at this point, almost jumped, when, by as rapid a transition, he made, toward the old fireplace, a dash that seemed to illustrate, precisely, the act of eager catching. "It is in this old chimney corner, the quaint inglenook of our ancestors—just there in the far angle, where His little stool was placed, and where, I dare say, if we could look close enough, we should find the hearthstone scraped with His little feet—that we see the inconceivable child gazing into the blaze of the old oaken logs and making out there pictures and stories, see Him conning, with curly bent head, His well-worn hornbook, or poring over some scrap of an ancient ballad, some page of some such rudely bound volume of chronicles as lay, we may be sure, in His father's window-seat."
It was, he even himself felt at this moment, wonderfully done; no auditors, for all his thousands, had ever yet so inspired him. The odd, slightly alarmed shyness in the two faces, as if in a drawing-room, in their "good society," exactly, some act incongruous, some thing grazing the indecent, had abruptly been perpetrated, the painful reality of which faltered before coming home—the visible effect on his friends, in fine, wound him up as to the sense that they were worth the trick. It came of itself now—he had got it so by heart; but perhaps really it had never come so well, with the staleness so disguised, the interest so renewed and the clerical unction, demanded by the priestly character, so successfully distilled. Mr. Hayes of New York had more than once looked at his wife, and Mrs. Hayes of New York had more than once looked at her husband—only, up to now, with a stolen glance, with eyes it had not been easy to detach from the remarkable countenance by the aid of which their entertainer held them. At present, however, after an exchange less furtive, they ventured on a sign that they had not been appealed to in vain. "Charming, charming, Mr. Gedge!" Mr. Hayes broke out; "we feel that we've caught you in the mood."
His wife hastened to assent—it eased the tension. "It would be quite the way; except," she smiled, "that you'd be too dangerous. You're really a genius!"
Gedge looked at her hard, but yielding no inch, even though she touched him there at a point of consciousness that quivered. This was the prodigy for him, and had been, the year through—that he did it all, he found, easily, did it better than he had done anything else in his life; with so high and broad an effect, in truth, an inspiration so rich and free, that his poor wife now, literally, had been moved more than once to fresh fear. She had had her bad moments, he knew, after taking the measure of his new direction—moments of readjusted suspicion in which she wondered if he had not simply embraced another, a different perversity. There would be more than one fashion of giving away the show, and wasn't this perhaps a question of giving it away by excess? He could dish them by too much romance as well as by too little; she had not hitherto fairly apprehended that there might be too much. It was a way like another, at any rate, of reducing the place to the absurd; which reduction, if he didn't look out, would reduce them again to the prospect of the streets, and this time surely without an appeal. It all depended, indeed—he knew she knew that—on how much Grant-Jackson and the others, how much the Body, in a word, would take. He knew she knew what he himself held it would take—that he considered no limit could be drawn to the quantity. They simply wanted it piled up, and so did everybody else; wherefore, if no one reported him, as before, why were They to be uneasy? It was in consequence of idiots brought to reason that he had been dealt with before; but as there was now no form of idiocy that he didn't systematically flatter, goading it on really to its own private doom, who was ever to pull the string of the guillotine? The axe was in the air—yes; but in a world gorged to satiety there were no revolutions. And it had been vain for Isabel to ask if the other thunder-growl also hadn't come out of the blue. There was actually proof positive that the winds were now at rest. How could they be more so?—he appealed to the receipts. These were golden days—the show had never so flourished. So he had argued, so he was arguing still—and, it had to be owned, with every appearance in his favour. Yet if he inwardly winced at the tribute to his plausibility rendered by his flushed friends, this was because he felt in it the real ground of his optimism. The charming woman before him acknowledged his "genius" as he himself had had to do. He had been surprised at his facility until he had grown used to it. Whether or no he had, as a fresh menace to his future, found a new perversity, he had found a vocation much older, evidently, than he had at first been prepared to recognise. He had done himself injustice. He liked to be brave because it came so easy; he could measure it off by the yard. It was in the Birthroom, above all, that he continued to do this, having ushered up his companions without, as he was still more elated to feel, the turn of a hair. She might take it as she liked, but he had had the lucidity—all, that is, for his own safety—to meet without the grace of an answer the homage of her beautiful smile. She took it apparently, and her husband took it, but as a part of his odd humour, and they followed him aloft with faces now a little more responsive to the manner in which, on that spot, he would naturally come out. He came out, according to the word of his assured private receipt, "strong." He missed a little, in truth, the usual round-eyed question from them—the inveterate artless cue with which, from moment to moment, clustered troops had, for a year, obliged him. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes were from New York, but it was a little like singing, as he had heard one of his Americans once say about something, to a Boston audience. He did none the less what he could, and it was ever his practice to stop still at a certain spot in the room and, after having secured atention by look and gesture, suddenly shoot off: "Here!"
They always understood, the good people—he could fairly love them now for it; they always said, breathlessly and unanimously, "There?" and stared down at the designated point quite as if some trace of the grand event were still to be made out. This movement produced, he again looked round. "Consider it well: the spot of earth———!"
"Oh, but it isn't earth!" the boldest spirit—there was always a boldest—would generally pipe out. Then the guardian of the Birthplace would be truly superior—as if the unfortunate had figured the Immortal coming up, like a potato, through the soil. "I'm not suggesting that He was born on the bare ground. He was born here!"—with an uncompromising dig of his heel. "There ought to be a brass, with an inscription, let in."
"Into the floor?"—it always came. "Birth and burial: seedtime, summer, autumn!"—that always, with its special, right cadence, thanks to his unfailing spring, came too. "Why not as well as into the pavement of the church?—you've seen our grand old church?" The former of which questions nobody ever answered—abounding, on the other hand, to make up, in relation to the latter. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes even were at first left dumb by it—not indeed, to do them justice, having uttered the word that produced it. They had uttered no word while he kept the game up, and (though that made it a little more difficult) he could yet stand triumphant before them after he had finished with his flourish. Then it was only that Mr. Hayes of New York broke silence.
"Well, if we wanted to see, I think I may say we're quite satisfied. As my wife says, it would seem to be your line." He spoke now, visibly, with more ease, as if a light had come: though he made no joke of it, for a reason that presently appeared. They were coming down the little stair, and it was on the descent that his companion added her word.
"Do you know what we half did think———?" And then to her husband: "Is it dreadful to tell him?" They were in the room below, and the young woman, also relieved, expressed the feeling with gaiety. She smiled, as before, at Morris Gedge, treating him as a person with whom relations were possible, yet remaining just uncertain enough to invoke Mr. Hayes's opinion. "We have awfully wanted—from what we had heard." But she met her husband's graver face; he was not quite out of the wood. At this she was slightly flurried—but she cut it short. "You must know—don't you?—that, with the crowds who listen to you, we'd have heard."
He looked from one to the other, and once more again, with force, something came over him. They had kept him in mind, they were neither ashamed nor afraid to show it, and it was positively an interest, on the part of this charming creature and this keen, cautious gentleman, an interest resisting oblivion and surviving separation, that had governed their return. Their other visit had been the brightest thing that had ever happened to him, but this was the gravest; so that at the end of a minute something broke in him and his mask, of itself, fell off. He chucked, as he would have said, consistency; which, in its extinction, left the tears in his eyes. His smile was therefore queer. "Heard how I'm going it?"
The young man, though still looking at him hard, felt sure, with this, of his own ground. "Of course, you're tremendously talked about. You've gone round the world."
"You've heard of me in America?"
"Why, almost of nothing else!"
"That was what made us feel———!" Mrs. Hayes contributed.
"That you must see for yourselves?" Again he compared, poor Gedge, their faces. "Do you mean I excite—a—scandal?"
"Dear no! Admiration. You renew so," the young man observed, "the interest."
"Ah, there it is!" said Gedge with eyes of adventure that seemed to rest beyond the Atlantic.
"They listen, month after month, when they're out here, as you must have seen; and they go home and talk. But they sing your praise."
Our friend could scarce take it in. "Over there?"
"Over there. I think you must be even in the papers."
"Without abuse?"
"Oh, we don't abuse everyone."
Mrs. Hayes, in her beauty, it was clear, stretched the point. "They rave about you."
"Then they don't know?"
"Nobody knows," the young man declared; "it wasn't anyone's knowledge, at any rate, that made us uneasy."
"It was your own? I mean your own sense?"
"Well, call it that. We remembered, and we wondered what had happened. So," Mr. Hayes now frankly laughed, "we came to see."
Gedge stared through his film of tears. "Came from America to see me?"
"Oh, a part of the way. But we wouldn't in England, not have seen you."
"And now we have!" the young woman soothingly added.
Gedge still could only gape at the candour of the tribute. But he tried to meet them—it was what was least poor for him—in their own key. "Well, how do you like it?"
Mrs. Hayes, he thought—if their answer were important—laughed a little nervously. "Oh, you see."
Once more he looked from one to the other. "It's too beastly easy, you know."
Her husband raised his eyebrows. "You conceal your art. The emotion—yes; that must be easy; the general tone must flow. But about your facts—you've so many: how do you get them through?"
Gedge wondered. "You think I get too many———?"
At this they were amused together. "That's just what we came to see!"
"Well, you know, I've felt my way; I've gone step by step; you wouldn't believe how I've tried it on. This—where you see me—is where I've come out." After which, as they said nothing: "You hadn't thought I could come out?"
Again they just waited, but the husband spoke: "Are you so awfully sure you are out?"
Gedge drew himself up in the manner of his moments of emotion, almost conscious even that, with his sloping shoulders, his long lean neck and his nose so prominent in proportion to other matters, he looked the more like a giraffe. It was now at last that he really caught on. "I may be in danger again—and the danger is what has moved you? Oh!" the poor man fairly moaned. His appreciation of it quite weakened him, yet he pulled himself together. "You've your view of my danger?"
It was wondrous how, with that note definitely sounded, the air was cleared. Lucid Mr. Hayes, at the end of a minute, had put the thing in a nutshell. "I don't know what you'll think of us—for being so beastly curious."
"I think," poor Gedge grimaced, "you're only too beastly kind."
"It's all your own fault," his friend returned, "for presenting us (who are not idiots, say) with so striking a picture of a crisis. At our other visit, you remember," he smiled, "you created an anxiety for the opposite reason. Therefore if this should again be a crisis for you, you'd really give us the case with an ideal completeness."
"You make me wish," said Morris Gedge, "that it might be one."
"Well, don't try—for our amusement—to bring one on. I don't see, you know, how you can have much margin. Take care—take care."
Gedge took it pensively in. "Yes, that was what you said a year ago. You did me the honour to be uneasy as my wife was."
Which determined on the young woman's part an immediate question. "May I ask, then, if Mrs. Gedge is now at rest?"
"No; since you do ask. She fears, at least, that I go too far; she doesn't believe in my margin. You see, we had our scare after your visit. They came down."
His friends were all interest. "Ah! They came down?"
"Heavy. They brought me down. That's why———"
"Why you are down?" Mrs. Hayes sweetly demanded.
"Ah, but my dear man," her husband interposed, "you're not down; you're up! You're only up a different tree, but you're up at the tip-top."
"You mean I take it too high?"
"That's exactly the question," the young man answered; "and the possibility, as matching your first danger, is just what we felt we couldn't, if you didn't mind, miss the measure of."
Gedge looked at him. "I feel that I know what you at bottom hoped."
"We at bottom 'hope,' surely, that you're all right."
"In spite of the fool it makes of every one?"
Mr. Hayes of New York smiled. "Say because of that. We only ask to believe that everyone is a fool!"
"Only you haven't been, without reassurance, able to imagine fools of the size that my case demands?" And Gedge had a pause, while, as if on the chance of some proof, his companion waited. "Well, I won't pretend to you that your anxiety hasn't made me, doesn't threaten to make me, a bit nervous; though I don't quite understand it if, as you say, people but rave about me."
"Oh, that report was from the other side; people in our country so very easily rave. You've seen small children laugh to shrieks when tickled in a new place. So there are amiable millions with us who are but small children. They perpetually present new places for the tickler. What we've seen in further lights," Mr. Hayes good-humouredly pursued, "is your people here—the Committee, the Board, or whatever the powers to whom you're responsible."
"Call them my friend Grant-Jackson then—my original backer, though I admit, for that reason, perhaps my most formidable critic. It's with him, practically, I deal; or rather it's by him I'm dealt with—was dealt with before. I stand or fall by him. But he has given me my head."
"Mayn't he then want you," Mrs. Hayes inquired, "just to show as flagrantly running away?"
"Of course—I see what you mean. I'm riding, blindly for a fall, and They're watching (to be tender of me!) for the smash that may come of itself. It's Machiavellic—but everything's possible. And what did you just now mean," Gedge asked—"especially if you've only heard of my prosperity—by your 'further lights'?"
His friends for an instant looked embarrassed, but Mr. Hayes came to the point. "We've heard of your prosperity, but we've also, remember, within a few minutes, heard you."
"I was determined you should," said Gedge. "I'm good then—but I overdo?" His strained grin was still sceptical.
Thus challenged, at any rate, his visitor pronounced. "Well, if you don't; if at the end of six months more it's clear that you haven't overdone; then, then———"
"Then what?"
"Then it's great."
"But it is great—greater than anything of the sort ever was. I overdo, thank goodness, yes; or I would if it were a thing you could."
"Oh, well, if there's proof that you can't———!" With which, and an expressive gesture, Mr. Hayes threw up his fears.
His wife, however, for a moment, seemed unable to let them go. "Don't They want then any truth?—none even for the mere look of it?"
"The look of it," said Morris Gedge, "is what I give!"
It made them, the others, exchange a look of their own. Then she smiled. "Oh, well, if they think so———!"
"You at least don't? You're like my wife—which indeed, I remember," Gedge added, "is a similarity I expressed a year ago the wish for! At any rate I frighten her."
The young husband, with an "Ah, wives are terrible!" smoothed it over, and their visit would have failed of further excuse had not, at this instant, a movement at the other end of the room suddenly engaged them. The evening had so nearly closed in, though Gedge, in the course of their talk, had lighted the lamp nearest them, that they had not distinguished, in connection with the opening of the door of communication to the warden's lodge, the appearance of another person, an eager woman, who, in her impatience, had barely paused before advancing. Mrs. Gedge—her identity took but a few seconds to become vivid—was upon them, and she had not been too late for Mr. Hayes's last remark. Gedge saw at once that she had come with news; no need even, for that certitude, of her quick retort to the words in the air—"You may say as well, sir, that they're often, poor wives, terrified!" She knew nothing of the friends whom, at so unnatural an hour, he was showing about; but there was no livelier sign for him that this didn't matter than the possibility with which she intensely charged her "Grant-Jackson, to see you at once!"—letting it, so to speak, fly in his face.
"He has been with you?"
"Only a minute—he's there. But it's you he wants to see."
He looked at the others. "And what does he want, dear?"
"God knows! There it is. It's his horrid hour—it was that other time."
She had nervously turned to the others, overflowing to them, in her dismay, for all their strangeness—quite, as he said to himself, like a woman of the people. She was the bare-headed good wife talking in the street about the row in the house, and it was in this character that he instantly introduced her: "My dear doubting wife, who will do her best to entertain you while I wait upon our friend." And he explained to her as he could his now protesting companions—"Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of New York, who have been here before." He knew, without knowing why, that her announcement chilled him; he failed at least to see why it should chill him so much. His good friends had themselves been visibly affected by it, and heaven knew that the depths of brooding fancy in him were easily stirred by contact. If they had wanted a crisis they accordingly had found one, albeit they had already asked leave to retire before it. This he wouldn't have. "Ah no, you must really see!"
"But we sha n't be able to bear it, you know," said the young woman, "if it is to turn you out."
Her crudity attested her sincerity, and it was the latter, doubtless, that instantly held Mrs. Gedge. "It is to turn us out."
"Has he told you that, madam?" Mr. Hayes inquired of her—it being wondrous how the breath of doom had drawn them together.
"No, not told me; but there's something in him there—I mean in his awful manner—that matches too well with other things. We've seen," said the poor pale lady, "other things enough."
The young woman almost clutched her. "Is his manner very awful?"
"It's simply the manner," Gedge interposed, "of a very great man."
"Well, very great men," said his wife, "are very awful things."
"It's exactly," he laughed, "what we're finding out! But I mustn't keep him waiting. .Our friends here," he went on, "are directly interested. You mustn't, mind you, let them go until we know."
Mr. Hayes, however, held him; he found himself stayed. "We're so directly interested that I want you to understand this. If anything happens———"
"Yes?" said Gedge, all gentle as he faltered.
"Well, we must set you up."
Mrs. Hayes quickly abounded. "Oh, do come to us!"
Again he could but look at them. They were really wonderful folk. And but Mr. and Mrs. Hayes! It affected even Isabel, through her alarm; though the balm, in a manner, seemed to foretell the wound. He had reached the threshold of his own quarters; he stood there as at the door of the chamber of judgment. But he laughed; at least he could be gallant in going up for sentence. "Very good then—I'll come to you!"
This was very well, but it didn't prevent his heart, a minute later, at the end of the passage, from thumping with beats he could count. He had paused again before going in; on the other side of this second door his poor future was to be let loose at him. It was broken, at best, and spiritless, but wasn't Grant-Jackson there, like a beast-tamer in a cage, all tights and spangles and circus attitudes, to give it a cut with the smart official whip and make it spring at him? It was during this moment that he fully measured the effect for his nerves of the impression made on his so oddly earnest friends—whose earnestness he in fact, in the spasm of this last effort, came within an ace of resenting. They had upset him by contact; he was afraid, literally, of meeting his doom on his knees; it wouldn't have taken much more, he absolutely felt, to make him approach with his forehead in the dust the great man whose wrath was to be averted. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of New York had brought tears to his eyes; but was it to be reserved for Grant-Jackson to make him cry like a baby? He wished, yes, while he palpitated, that Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of New York hadn't had such an eccentricity of interest, for it seemed somehow to come from them that he was going so fast to pieces. Before he turned the knob of the door, however, he had another queer instant; making out that it had been, strictly, his case that was interesting, his funny power, however accidental, to show as in a picture the attitude of others—not his poor, dingy personality. It was this latter quantity, none the less, that was marching to execution. It is to our friend's credit that he believed, as he prepared to turn the knob, that he was going to be hanged; and it is certainly not less to his credit that his wife, on the chance, had his supreme thought. Here it was that—possibly with his last articulate breath—he thanked his stars, such as they were, for Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of New York. At least they would take care of her.
They were doing that certainly with some success when, ten minutes later, he returned to them. She sat between them in the beautified Birthplace, and he couldn't have been sure afterwards that each wasn't holding her hand. The three together, at any rate, had the effect of recalling to him—it was too whimsical—some picture, a sentimental print, seen and admired in his youth, a "Waiting for the Verdict," a "Counting the Hours," or something of that sort; humble respectability in suspense about humble innocence. He didn't know how he himself looked, and he didn't care; the great thing was that he wasn't crying though he might have been; the glitter in his eyes was assuredly dry, though that there was a glitter, or something slightly to bewilder, the faces of the others, as they rose to meet him, sufficiently proved. His wife's eyes pierced his own, but it was Mrs. Hayes of New York who spoke. "Was it then for that———?"
He only looked at them at first—he felt he might now enjoy it. "Yes, it was for 'that.' I mean it was about the way I've been going on. He came to speak of it."
"And he's gone?" Mr. Hayes permitted himself to inquire.
"He's gone."
"It's over?" Isabel hoarsely asked.
"It's over."
"Then we go?"
This it was that he enjoyed. "No, my dear; we stay."
There was fairly a triple gasp; relief took time to operate. "Then why did he, come?"
"In the fulness of his kind heart and of Their discussed and decreed satisfaction. To express Their sense———!"
Mr. Hayes broke into a laugh, but his wife wanted to know. "Of the grand work you're doing?"
"Of the way I polish it off. They're most handsome about it. The receipts, it appears, speak———"
He was nursing his effect; Isabel intently watched him, and the others hung on his lips. "Yes, speak———?"
"Well, volumes. They tell the truth."
At this Mr. Hayes laughed again. "Oh, they at least do?"
Near him thus, once more, Gedge knew their intelligence as one—which was so good a consciousness to get back that his tension now relaxed as by the snap of a spring and he felt his old face at ease. "So you can't say," he continued, "that we don't want it."
"I bow to it," the young man smiled. "It's what I said then. It's great."
"It's great," said Morris Gedge. "It couldn't be greater."
His wife still watched him; her irony hung behind. "Then we're just as we were?"
"No, not as we were."
She jumped at it. "Better?"
"Better. They give us a rise."
"Of income?"
"Of our sweet little stipend—by a vote of the Committee. That's what, as Chairman, he came to announce."
The very echoes of the Birthplace were themselves, for the instant, hushed; the warden's three companions showed, in the conscious air, a struggle for their own breath. But Isabel, with almost a shriek, was the first to recover hers. "They double us?"
"Well—call it that. 'In recognition.' There you are." Isabel uttered another sound—but this time inarticulate; partly beacuse Mrs. Hayes of New York had already jumped at her to kiss her. Mr. Hayes meanwhile, as with too much to say, but put out his hand, which our friend took in silence. So Gedge had the last word. "And there you are!"