Ainslee's Magazine/The Woman With a Past/Will o' the Wisp
XII.—WILL O' THE WISP.
This body had no soul before, but slept
Or stirred, was beauteous or ungainly, free
From taint or foul with stain, as outward things
Fastened their image on its passiveness:
Now, it will wake, feel, live
IT was hot and noisy in the restaurant, and Philippa was as bored as she was weary.
The usual summer-night crowd filled the brightly lighted room. Gayly dressed groups were coming through the revolving doors in an endless stream—from roof gardens, musical comedies, and out-of-town motor trips.
The women all looked alike. There is a peculiar and exotic type of woman that blooms in New York during the summer months, and never appears at any other time. She is almost always charming to look at, if a shade artificial, and her gowns are startlingly similar in general effect, out-Parising Paris, and of the “newest” cut and shade. Is she a provincial or a Western product, proving—what old New Yorkers know full well—that Manhattan is the queen of summer resorts? Is she of an obscure working stratum, one that can afford to show herself and dress smartly only during those months in which pretty clothes are cheap and festivities informal? No one knows, but any one who has spent a summer in town will tell you that she is a familiar figure; that apparently she belongs neither to the great world nor to the half world, but, like some vivid tropical flower, blossoms for a single season, or a month, or a night—and is seen no more.
Pippa Carpenter was having supper with a few bohemian friends, and in another mood would have enjoyed the carefree and occasionally witty chatter, and have appreciated the very excellent things that they were having to eat. But to-night she was restless; the lights and the voices chafed her nerves. The stringed instruments in the corner playing Viennese waltzes irritated her, even while she found herself following the haunting melodies, and remembering vague associations and impressions that they called up. In fact, Pippa was out of tune with the time and the place. Her purple-gray eyes were somber, and the characteristic little droop of her lovely mouth was even more appealing than usual.
“Oh, well,” said one of the women in a resigned tone, “if Pippa's going to be in one of her 'moods,' we might all just as well go home at once, and be done with it!”
“Try some champagne, Mrs. Carpenter,” suggested Max Curtis, the newspaper man.
He spoke as one offering the one sure panacea for all earthly ills, but Pippa shook her head.
“It's too hot,” she said. “Look at those two women over there. They're scarlet with the heat—especially the big one. I never saw so many awful, miserable, uninteresting-looking people in all my life!”
Her tone was slightly indignant, as if she resented the fact.
The others laughed at her.
“Wait, Mrs. Carpenter, I'll challenge that statement!” said Curtis suddenly. “Look at the table near the window—over there, just beside that big palm. There's a girl in blue with her back to us, and, opposite, a man”
Pippa looked—and then looked more attentively.
“Yes,” she said, after a minute. “He does look interesting—and odd. Who is he?”
“Larry Monahan, the cleverest Irish lad in America,” rejoined the newspaper man; “a lovable, scatter-brained imp, who can tell a yarn or write a column that'll win the heart out of your breast—if he likes, which he usually doesn't!”
“A reporter? He looks such a boy!”
Pippa was still regarding the little table by the palm.
“He is rather a boy, both in nature and in years, as a matter of fact, but he's a first-class reporter for all that, when he happens to feel like working! I don't know whether he has a job now or not. He gets them and loses them with about equal speed.”
“He must have money to be as independent as that.”
“Larry?” Curtis laughed. “Not a red cent! But it's little that troubles him—as he'd put it himself. He lives like the birds of the air, I think. Sometimes when I run across him he's as thin as a rail and as shabby as a tramp; and then again—like to-night, for instance—he seems to be in a prosperous vein, and spends his money like a true vagabond. Either it means a particularly big and successful 'story,' or that he's hocked his watch! Look at that Celtic smile, will you!”
“I think that I should like to meet him some time,” said Mrs. Carpenter, with the imperious simplicity of a beautiful and charming woman who has only to pick and choose, among the men she meets, which one she will honor by a word or a look.
The boy was as strange and as fascinating to watch as a young faun. Even his eyebrows slanted slightly, carrying out the suggested likeness to some sprite of the pagan woods. He was darker than most Irishmen—his hair was black, and, even seen from a distance, it was obvious that his eyes were dark, too. The mouth, whimsical, bowed, with deep dents at the corners, was well cut; but in it, as in the eyes, was some odd lack. What was it that should have been in his face and was not there? Philippa could not make up her mind. Sentiment? Spirituality? Stability? Perhaps all of these, and something else.
While she was studying him from afar, he glanced up, as if answering the magnetic call of her eyes. Yet his look did not rest on her for more than a second, but flashed brilliantly to Curtis, who sat beside her. Blithe recognition lighted the thin, dark face, and he flourished his napkin in greeting with the enthusiastic gesture of a lad.
A sympathetic smile softened Curtis' own rather severe lips. It was impossible not to respond when Larry Monahan smiled. The older man beckoned, and Monahan, with a hasty word to his companion, jumped up, and came striding impetuously toward them between the bright, crowded little tables.
“The top o' the night to you, Max Curtis! he exclaimed, with a rich, Irish intonation, clapping a slim, muscular brown hand on Curtis' shoulder. “I'm after wanting the sight of you these many moons!”
“Larry, you're a lucky young devil!” said the older man, with affectionate sternness. “Here are three charming ladies who want to meet you!”
Larry bowed with inimitable gayety and grace.
“Faith, I was hoping so, indeed!” he said. “for what else would I be coming over here, sure? Not to see you, you sour-tempered old sinner—never think it!”
“Can't you sit down?” invited Pippa softly, after the introductions.
The boy's eyes darted to hers a look of admiration so frank as to be quite inoffensive.
“Sure, and I wish I could!” he said fervently and regretfully. “But I can't very well leave my lady over yonder. 'Tis Molly, you know, Curtis.”
“Yes, I know,” said Curtis rather dryly. “Well, give her my respects, lad.”
“Well, now, and couldn't you be making it your love?” suggested Larry light-heartedly.
“Not I,” said Curtis. “If I know Miss Molly, she'd rather have respect than love any day in the week.”
Larry laughed indifferently, and turned, with a sort of rapid, swinging motion, toward Mrs. Carpenter.
“I'll be seeing you again,” he said, not as one putting a question, but as one stating a fact.
Larry Monahan evidently dared many things that other and wiser men never would have dreamed of. Pippa smiled, but did not answer this audacity. The next moment, with a little swift, general bow of good-by, Larry had left them.
“A fool or an angel!” growled Curtis half humorously. “Mrs, Carpenter, are you going to let the impudent young puppy call?”
“Why not?” said Philippa tranquilly. “He is interesting, and I am often bored. And he is not the sort to be—silly.”
“Don't be too sure,” said Curtis. “I don't think myself that Larry has much heart, but”
He stopped discreetly. He deeply admired Mrs. Carpenter in his uncommunicative way, and she knew it.
“Your Irishman is attractive, Max,” said one of the other women. “Don't you think so, Mabel?”
Mabel, who was little, and nervous, and temperamental, shrugged her shoulders.
“He will be,” she returned, “when he gets a soul!”
Pippa started.
“That's it!” she said slowly. “I was wondering what it was that he ought to have and hasn't. Mabel is right. He hasn't any soul—yet. Children, I am tired, and I want to go home.”
They began to collect gloves and vanity boxes.
“And who is 'Molly'?” asked the woman who thought Larry attractive.
“His cousin, I believe; some relative, anyway. Her mother looked out for him when he was a kid, and Larry's devoted to her. He's very good to the girl, too—trots her about, as you see—an unengaging little creature, who hasn't an idea beyond paper patterns, and Coney Island, and the best place to get things dyed; a real little bourgeoise—not even a healthy peasant type! Larry, now, is one of nature's aristocrats.”
Before she slept that night Mrs. Carpenter had written a note to Larry Monahan, at an address that Curtis had laboriously unearthed from an old pocketbook filled with tumbled and dirty scraps of paper.
“Heaven knows whether it will reach him or not,” he warned her. “You stand about as much chance of catching Larry in care of the man in the moon as anywhere else.”
It did reach him, however, for two days later he arrived in time for afternoon tea.
Pippa felt more than ever that she was entertaining a faun or a sprite of the groves, as she chatted with him in her pretty hotel parlor, pouring for him cup after cup of tea. Orange pekoe seemed a ridiculously tame beverage to offer a radiant being like this. What were fauns and satyrs accustomed to drink, she asked herself fantastically. Rich purple wine, and honey, and nectar, and
But she gathered her wandering thoughts to listen more attentively to Larry's eager account of a lost dog—a story that he had just been “covering” for his paper. He flung into the simple little recital so much that was whimsical and quaint that it stood out, delicious, delicate, and complete as a miniature engraving. The touch of pathos, too, was not lacking, but it was the elementary, almost unconscious, pathos of a little boy. Pippa realized suddenly that with a little more insight into the pitifulness of the things that he described, Larry would make them less pitiful. His effects were entirely instinctive.
When he had talked vividly for two hours—and drunk four cups of tea, highly sugared—he departed abruptly. Philippa looked at the door as it closed after him, and began to laugh.
“What a boy! What a queer, queer boy!” she said to herself, but the laugh was close to being a tender one.
After that Larry came oftener and oftener. Pippa could not tell whether he admired her as a woman, or merely as an understanding spirit to whom he could pour out his erratic fancies and half-formed poet's dreams. She loved to hear him talk. Undeveloped as his nature was still in many ways, he was intrinsically poetical, and she found many of her own early ideals and visions resurrected in him. So had she, too, cried for the moon when she was yet a girl.
He seldom spoke of his personal life, save in an indirect way. It was nearly a month before he suddenly and brusquely broached the subject of his family.
“Aunt Mary,” he said, “wants me to give up the newspaper game and go into business. Faith, I don't know what I'd be good for, tied up to a desk.” His grimace was rueful. “But Aunt Mary's a saint, God rest her! And she's been a mother to me, and that's the truth. If I could, I'd do what she wants, I'm thinking.”
“How absurd!” exclaimed Pippa, feeling really annoyed by the proposition, much as she would have resented the thought of using a beautiful race horse to draw a truck. The very idea of turning this fantastic, dream-filled young creature into a common clerk was monstrous! “You were made for much bigger things than keeping accounts, and filing letters,” she said to him sincerely. “Why don't you write? Really write, I mean—not newspaper stuff.”
Larry grinned at that.
“'Newspaper stuff!' he repeated, mimicking very delicately her disdainful tone. “Faith, pretty lady—for so he always called her—“there's quite a bit of real writing in newspaper stuff.” Suddenly his face grew more sober. “But there's something in it—what you say,” he went on, frowning slightly, as if he were trying to express a very fugitive and intangible thought. “About my being able to do—something—bigger—I don't know. Sometimes I feel that way, and the heart of me seems too large for my body, and the head of me's on fire, and I want to sing—glory be to God, you've never heard me sing!—and dance, and shout, and Those are my big times! And then, all at once, it's gone! And I'm just Larry Monahan again, off to interview an alderman or an actress. I can't explain it, but it's as if something I was looking for were always just out of reach. Is it understanding me you are, pretty lady?”
“Yes,” said Pippa gently.
Mabel's words in the restaurant came back to her, and she leaned forward and touched his arm with light fingers.
“It's your soul, Larry,” she said, calling him so for the first time, and hardly knowing that she did so. “It's your soul that you've never reached yet, but that one day you will find.”
“Faith, then, 'tis a queer, cranky soul,” flashed Larry, with his lightning-like smile, “to be leading me the dance it does! A very leprechaun, or a taisch of a soul!”
“What's a taisch?” asked Pippa, smiling, too, in spite of herself.
“A ghost, like—or spirit.”
A sudden idea came to her.
“Will-o'-the-wisp!” she exclaimed. “The goblin flame that flits over the marshes—always just out of reach! That's what your soul is, Larry! And that's what I'm going to call you after this, I think—Will-o'-the-wisp! I'm sure that Will-o'-the-wisp was a kind of—what did you call it?—taisch.”
Larry threw back his handsome head and began to sing, with a great deal of breath, and no tune to speak of:
“By the ocean dreary
Like a taisch went I,
Thin, weak, and weary
“Don't you know the old Irish song, lady?
“O shule, slule”
“Oh, please!” laughed Pippa. “You said you didn't want me to hear you sing, you know!”
But Larry trolled on:
“O shule, shule,
O shule, aroon!
“That means: 'Come, come, darling—come to me.”
There was something in the last words that brought the color to his own face, and made him stop suddenly. His eyes startled Philippa. She sat motionless for a moment, staring at him. Then she said, in rather a strained voice:
“Run away, now, like a good boy. I have some letters to write.”
Larry got up immediately. Indeed, for once he appeared glad to go. He hardly looked at her as he muttered good-by, and he left the room with the impulsive energy of one making an escape.
Pippa sat a long time without moving. The thing was incredible, of course, and yet—and yet—in her heart were stirring light wings such as young dreams wear. So she had felt in the time of youth and springtime, but she had long believed that that rainbow radiance had passed for her forever. She was not in love with Larry Monahan—not yet, but he seemed awakening in her the power to love, a power that she had believed dead—killed beneath the gray weight of sorrowful years. His youth called to her; it knocked at the door of her empty heart; and besides
“If it should be I,” said Pippa softly, looking straight in front of her, with wide, wondering eyes, and speaking to the empty room, “who should be able to give him—his soul?”
In the week that followed they kept far from personalities, and Pippa avoided the quicksands of sentiment scrupulously. She held Larry to the subject of his interests and ambitions. These were, of course, sporadic and unformed, but there was a fire in them that she believed would grow marvelously under fostering.
With his Celtic intuitiveness, he had an extraordinary grasp of the emotions of the masses. Sometimes a swift-flung phrase or a shrewd home truth startled her with its pertinence. He admitted that in his “big times” he was “a bit of a socialist,” and dreamed of helping and electrifying the people.
“You'll not do that, Will-o'-the-wisp,” said Philippa, “till you find your soul.” And she added. rather ruefully: “And I'd rather have you a poet, anyway!”
It was late one evening, and she was just about to go to bed when the telephone rang. Larry's voice, impetuous and imperative, came over the wire:
“You've got to come out with me—somewhere. Now! To-night! I've got to see you. You can walk with me for ten minutes, if you are tired. I tell you I'll go crazy if I don't talk to you. This minute. Yes! I'll be at the door as soon as you're down. Good-by!”
And he rang off, giving her no time to speak.
Five minutes later they were walking through the restless, throbbing city night, with a far silver moon floating over their heads, and the low thunder of the unsleeping town in their ears. The moonlight was not strong enough to show Pippa the full expression of Larry's face, but as they passed beneath a flaring arc light, the tense young features leaped into sight, etched violently in black and white—somber eyes, brows knitted and lowering, and rigidly set mouth.
“What's the matter, Will-o'-the-wisp?” she asked softly, after they had walked several blocks in silence.
The boy gave a sort of groan, and flung out his hand.
“That's it!” he muttered incoherently, yet to her quite intelligibly. “It all began with that damned taisch and leprechaun business. You know— 'Shule, shule, shule, aroon!' And before I knew it—I was—meaning it! You understand?”
“Perhaps.” There was a little catch in her voice.
“I've wondered a lot about—love!” said Larry Monahan, with a rush. “Wondered why it was that I'd never felt it—really, I mean; not the—the—the will-o'-the-wisp kind, like, but the big thing. Maybe 'twas because, as you're after saying, I'd no soul on me as yet.” Larry grew more and more Irish as he was moved. “Well—is it thinking you are that I'm getting me a soul at last, pretty lady?” he whispered.
As he turned his face toward her, she could see that the hard tenseness was melting into quivering lines. The boy's breath came fast. As if he had no consciousness of where they were, as if the city streets were ancient woodways, screened from the world. he reached out and caught her hand in a hot, tight grasp.
“And will you be giving me my soul—aroon?”
Trembling, shaken, yet keeping a fast hold upon herself—most of all upon her sense of responsibility for him—Pippa drew her hand away with a quick, soft movement.
“Wait!” she murmured. “You—we—must wait It isn't fair to you—or to me—to plunge ahead like this. It isn't fair to—life. You mustn't hurry fate.” She paused, steadying her voice. “Listen, Larry; I am going away to-morrow No! Not on your account, you foolish boy! It's a house party in the country; I've promised Mabel Carstairs a fortnight for months.”
“You can think of house parties” flashed the boy, childishly angered.
Pippa smiled a little sadly.
“I am older than you, Will-o'-the-wisp,” she said, in her tender voice. “There's a place for house parties in the world, if you only knew it!” After just a moment, she added deliberately: “I shall be back two weeks from to-morrow, and then we can—talk.”
Pippa's train did not go until the fol1owing afternoon. She was having her luncheon in her little upstairs parlor when a card was brought to her. At first she read it without comprehension, then it came to her in a flash. “Miss Molly Reilly”—the name was printed in ornate letters on a small, cheap card—was Larry's cousin, the girl in the blue dress who had been with him in the restaurant that first evening. She asked to have Miss Molly Reilly shown up. What in the world could Larry's cousin have to say to her? And why should her heart be contracting with this sense of apprehension?
Molly Reilly entered with a sullen shyness of air that alternated with a kind of bravado.
“This is nice of you!” she said cordially.
Molly looked at her half resentfully. She could not quite forgive the other woman her easy assurance of manner, and her simple, unaffected graciousness, born—as the girl had the sense to see of a breeding too unmistakable to need parading.
Her eyes were small, but exceedingly bright. She was using them now to appraise Philippa Carpenter from head to foot. Not a detail was lost upon the girl, from the exquisitely simple way in which the shining hair was dressed to the smooth ivory of the hands; from the froth of sheer lace that veiled the soft white negligee to the bronze of the slipper tip that just showed beneath the hem.
“Mrs. Carpenter,” she said abruptly, “I don't want to eat with you. You say that Larry has talked to you about me. If he has, I should think he'd be ashamed. I—I came here to tell you that you've got to give Larry up.”
Philippa stared at her for a moment in genuine surprise. Then she smiled frankly.
“Really?” she queried in her pleasantest manner. “Now, just what do you mean by that?”
Molly flushed all over her sharp little face.
“You know well enough,” she said doggedly. “He's falling in love with you; that's what I mean, and it's got to stop. Larry belongs to me.”
Philippa laughed outright now; but it was not altogether a mirthful laugh. “Really, Miss Reilly,” she said, “you have an original way of announcing your—engagement, is it?”
“Yes, it is. Larry's been engaged to me—sort of—ever since we were children.”
“I see. Engaged—'sort of.' But surely that sort of thing doesn't hold when people are grown up? And in any case, why do you come to me about it?”
“It holds with me,” said Molly Reilly. She had not stirred from the edge of the chair on which she had first seated herself. “And I came to you about it, because I want you to see why you'll have to give him up.”
“And why should you think” Mrs. Carpenter was beginning.
Molly cut her short.
“Larry told me he was in love with you—last night,” she said bluntly. “He says it's to be—settled—two weeks from to-day.”
Pippa drew a long breath.
“Very well,” she said. “Let us talk frankly. I suppose Larry is, as you say, falling in love with me. He—he is very dear to me. I don't feel that a childish understanding with you should stand in his way now that he is a man.”
“But he isn't a man,” said Molly Reilly. “He's a child, just the same as he was then.”
Pippa felt a distinct sense of shock. So Molly, too, had felt it—the will-o'-the-wisp quality? In some subtle way the girl had risen to a different footing; they were two women talking face to face.
Molly proceeded:
“Larry hasn't grown up. Mother and I know that, and we take care of him the best way we can. That's why we want him to go into business; it's a steadier life than writing for the papers. Mother thinks a lot of him. So—so do I.” Again the slow blush. “I guess I think enough of him to give him up if I thought it was good for him. And I guess you don't.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Pippa, strangely stung. “If I do not want to—give him up—it is because I believe that I can help him, and develop him, and”
“No, you can't,” said Molly shortly. “You've done him some good so far, I'll say that. He's more—more”—she sought for a word—“more humanlike—not such a scatter-brain. But that's because he thinks he's in love with you. When that stops,” said Molly Reilly, with the casual cruelty of the unimaginative, “he'll be up in the air again worse than ever. And he'll either go to the devil”
“Or to the very top!” said Pippa quickly. She felt the scent of battle keen in her nostrils. “He is made for great things, Miss Reilly.”
“Mrs. Carpenter,” said Molly Reilly, and it was as if the girl, feeling herself in the thick of a losing fight, found a sudden desperate ability to meet and control the situation, “Larry doesn't belong to your sort of life. He comes from the same sort of people as mother and me—though he's got a drop or two of better blood from his grandmother's side. If he's ever—great—it'll be a different kind of greatness from what you're thinking of for him.”
Pippa thought of his socialistic dreams, and the “big times” that he talked of, when he seemed so close to the heart of the people. Molly paused for a second, searching painfully for unaccustomed words.
“He'll be happier—down with us,” she said.
It was a homely, and not a particularly felicitous phrase, but it caught Pippa. and gave her a subtle pang. She sat silent for a moment, and that breath of hesitation gave the girl the vital advantage that she needed. She seized on it with a fervor that betrayed her real feelings farther than any word that she had spoken, and her eyes shone with the first softness that Pippa had seen there. The girl actually loved him!
“Maybe he could go to the top, as you say,” she said simply. “But I'd never feel sure, and he might get into trouble, and—and—I'd rather keep him safe at home.”
Pippa got up and walked to the window to hide a quiver of her lips. Her defenses, even her antagonism, had all gone. Was it indeed the better part that she was prepared to rob Larry of? “Safe at home!” Suddenly the world, achievements, ideals, and the other “great things” seemed very cold and lonely. “Safe at home”
Pippa turned back to the girl, her face entirely steady now. Molly had won.
“I will stay away two months, instead of two weeks,” said Pippa. “Will that do?”
It was the beginning of September when she found herself again in her old rooms in New York. The two months in the country had passed slowly and irksomely. She was languid from a long siege of hot weather, and the first quiver of interest for weeks came now as she realized that she would soon know if Larry had really cared—if he had found his soul at last. She had not written to him during the two months, and felt a ridiculous, almost a girlish, hesitancy about sending him word that she was again in town.
The evening paper had come up with her dinner, and she turned to it idly. Something like an electric shock went through her when she read on the very first page:
NEWSPAPER MAN TURNS SOCIALIST,
Laurence Monahan, of the “Star,” Gives Up
His Position to Join the Ranks of Strikers!
Pippa laid down the paper, with a leap of her heart. Larry had gone over definitely to the socialist cause! Larry had given up his work! Larry was going to speak to the people to-night! She could hardly believe this strange thing. It was so utterly out of key with her knowledge and remembrance of the lad. This was man's work—work for one who had brain and heart and—yes, soul! Had Larry found his soul, then, at last?
She knew that, whatever happened, she must go to that mass meeting. She loathed crowds and hot, stuffy halls, but it was Larry who was to speak.
In a sort of dream she found herself in the packed hall, among shabby, eager-eyed people of both sexes, who talked in passionate undertones of “The Cause.” The throb of it got beneath Pippa's surface fastidiousness, and she found herself thrilling to the ardent, earnest speeches that gushed from the platform, one after the other. Then came—Larry.
But it was a new Larry—such a glowing, happy, wonderful Larry, with such a glory of feeling in his dark eyes, such a curve of tenderness about his handsome mouth! He had found his soul! How or through what agency mattered not; he had found it. The will-o'-the-wisp had been captured!
He began to talk, and there was all his own individual charm in what he said, and something else as well. He talked now not as one who dreams, but as one who lives. There was the echo of the song of the world in his voice. His eyes, his frown, his smile seemed somehow expressive of the primitive emotions of all humanity.
Pippa's eyes filled with tears. All thought of herself, and of what she might mean, or might have meant, in his life, had been blown clean away by the blast of a great spiritual triumph. The will-o'-the-wisp was no more; Larry had come into his own, and she was glad and proud.
At the end of his speech, he looked up happily toward one of the boxes, and he smiled.
The woman who leaned forward and smiled back was Molly. And a faint reflection of their smile glimmered in Pippa's wet eyes.
“She may have his soul,” she thought “but I gave it to him!”