A Most Extraordinary Case

“OH, IT’S the same old story,” said Birkton, impatiently. “They’ve all come home to roost, as usual.”

He glanced at a heap of typewritten pages which lay on the shabby desk at his elbow; then, pushing back his chair, he began to stride up and down the length of the little bedroom in which he and Helfenridge sat.

“All the good ones—every one. Nobody wants poetry nowadays. One of the editors told me the other day that it ‘was going out.’”

Helfenridge picked up the sheet which lay nearest him and began to read, half to himself, half aloud, with a warmth of undertoned emphasis which made the lines glow.

Neither of the men was far beyond twenty-five. Birkton, the younger of the two, had the musing, irresolute profile of the dreamer of dreams; while his friend, stouter, squarer, of more clayey make, was nevertheless too much like him to prove a useful counterpoise.

“I always liked ‘The Old Odysseus,’” Helfenridge murmured. “There’s something tremendously suggestive in that fancy of yours, that tradition has misrepresented the real feelings of all the great heroes and heroines; or rather, has only handed down to us the official statement of their sentiments, as an epitaph records the obligatory virtues which the defunct ought to have had, if he hadn’t. That theory, now, that Odysseus never really forgot Circe; and that Esther was in love with Haman, and decoyed him to the banquet with Ahasuerus just for the sake of once having him near her and hearing him speak; and that Dante, perhaps, if he could have been brought to book, would have had to confess to caring a great deal more for the pietosa donna of the window than for the mummified memory of a long-dead Beatrice—well, you know, it tallies wonderfully with the inconsequences and surprises that one is always discovering under the superficial fitnesses of life.”

“Ah,” said Birkton, “I meant to get a cycle of poems out of that idea—but what’s the use, when I can’t even get the first one into print?”

“Queer!” protested Helfenridge. “If I were an editor—now this, for instance, is so fine:

“Circe, Circe, the sharp anguish of that last long speechless night

With the flame of tears unfallen scorches still mine aching sight;

Still I feel the thunderous blackness of the hot sky overhead,

While we two with close-locked fingers through thy pillared porches strayed,

And athwart the sullen darkness, from the shadow-muffled shore,

Heard aghast the savage summons of the sea’s incoming roar,

Shouting like a voice from Ilium, wailing like a voice from home,

Shrieking through thy pillared porches, Up, Odysseus, wake and come!

“Devil take it, why isn’t there an audience for that sort of thing? And this line too—

“Where Persephone remembers the Trinacrian buds and bees—

“what a light, allegretto movement it has, following on all that gloom and horror! Ah—and here’s that delicious little nocturne from ‘The New and the Old.’

“Before the yellow dawn is up,

With pomp of shield and shaft,

Drink we of night’s fast ebbing cup

One last delicious draught.

“The shadowy wine of night is sweet,

With subtle, slumberous fumes

Pressed by the Hours’ melodious feet

From bloodless elder blooms.

“There—isn’t that just like a little bacchanalian scene on a Greek gem?”

“Don’t say that,” Helfenridge rebuked him. “It’s like disowning one’s own children. But if they say that mythology and classicism and plastik are played out—if they want Manet in place of David, or Cazin instead of Claude—why don’t they like ‘Boulterby Ridge,’ with its grim mystery intensified by a setting of such modern realism? What lines there are in that!

“It was dark on Boulterby Ridge, with an ultimate darkness like death,

And the weak wind flagged and gasped like a sick man straining for breath,

And one star’s ineffectual flicker shot pale through a gap in the gloom,

As faint as the taper that struggles with night in the sick man’s room.

“There’s something about that beginning that makes me feel quietly cold from head to foot. And how charming the description of the girl is:

“She walked with a springing step, as if to some inner tune,

And her cheeks had the lucent pink of maple wings in June.

“There’s Millet and nature for you! And then when he meets her ghost on Boulterby Ridge—

“White in the palpable black as a lily moored on a moat—

“For the grave is deeper than grief, and longer than life is death.

“And what comes next? Ah, that strange sonnet on the Cinquecento. Did you ever carry out your scheme of writing a series of sonnets embodying all the great epochs of art?”

“It seems a pity, after such a fine beginning. Now just listen to this—listen to it as if it had been written by somebody else:

“Strange hour of art’s august ascendency

When Sin and Beauty, the old lovers, met

In a new paradise, still sword-beset

With monkish terrors, but wherein the tree

Of knowledge held its golden apples free

To lips unstayed by hell’s familiar threat;

And men, grown mad upon the fruit they ate,

Dreamed a wild dream of lust and liberty;

Strange hour, when the dead gods arose in Rome

From altars where the mass was sacrificed,

When Phryne flaunted on the tiaraed tomb

Of him who dearly sold the grace unpriced.

And, twixt old shames and infamies to come,

Celline in his prison talked with Christ!

“There now, don’t you call that a very happy definition of the most magical moment the world has ever known?”

“Don’t,” said Birkton, with an impatient gesture. “You’re very good, old man, but don’t go on.”

“Well,” he repeated, “I can’t understand it. But the tide’s got to turn, Maurice—it’s got to. Don’t forget that.”

“Not one; at least nothing to speak of,” said Birkton, reddening. “I’ve had one offer, but what do you suppose it was? Do you remember that idiotic squib that I wrote the other day about Mrs. Tolquitt’s being seen alone with Dick Blason at Koster & Bial? The thing I read that night in Bradley’s rooms after supper?”

“Well, I’m sorry I read it now. Somebody must have betrayed me (of course, though no names are mentioned, they all knew who was meant), for who should turn up yesterday but Baker Buley, the editor of the Social Kite, with an offer of a hundred and fifty dollars for my poem.”

“Hang you, Helfenridge, what do you take me for? I told him to go to the devil.”

There was a long pause, during which Helfenridge relit his pipe. Then he said, “But the book reviews in the Symbolic keep you going, don’t they?”

“After a fashion,” said Birkton, with a shrug. “Luckily my mother has had a tremendous lot of visiting lists to make up lately, and she has written the invitations for half the balls that have been given this winter, so that between us we manage to keep Annette and ourselves alive; but God knows what would happen if one of us fell ill.”

“Something else will happen before that. You’ll be offered a hundred and fifty dollars for one of those,” said Helfenridge, pointing to the pile of verses.

Helfenridge rose, picking up his battered gray hat, and slipping his pipe into his pocket. “I’m not an editor and I’m no good at all,” he said, mournfully.

“Don’t say that, old man. It’s been the saving of me to be believed in by somebody.”

Their hands met closely, and with a quick nod and inarticulate grunt Helfenridge turned from the room.

Maurice, left alone, dropped the smile which he had assumed to speed his friend, and sank into the nearest chair. His eyes, the sensitive eyes of the seer whom Beauty has anointed with her mysterious unguent, traveled painfully about the little room. Not a detail of it but was stamped upon his mind with a morbid accuracy—the yellowish-brown paper which had peeled off here and there, revealing the discolored plaster beneath; the ink-stained desk at which all his poems had been written; the rickety washstand of ash, with a strip of marbled oilcloth nailed over it, and a cracked pitcher and basin; the gas stove in which a low flame glimmered, the blurred looking glass, and the bookcase which held his thirty or forty worn volumes; yet he never took note of his sordid surroundings without a fresh movement of disgust.

His mother and sister slept in the next room, which opened on an air shaft in the center of the house, and beyond that was the kitchen, drawing its ventilation from the same shaft, and sending its smells with corresponding facility into the room occupied by the two women.

The apartment in which they lived, by courtesy called a flat, was in reality a thinly-disguised tenement in one of those ignoble quarters of New York where the shabby has lapsed into the degraded. They had moved there a year earlier, leaving reluctantly, under pressure of a diminished purse, the pleasant little flat uptown, with its three bedrooms and sunny parlor, which had been their former home. Maurice winced when he remembered that he had made the change imperative by resigning his clerkship in a wholesale warehouse in order to give more leisure to the writing of the literary criticisms with which he supplied the Symbolic Weekly Review. His mother had approved, had even urged, his course; but in the unsparing light of poverty it showed as less inevitable than he had imagined. And then, somehow, the great novel, which he had planned to write as soon as he should be released from his clerical task, was still in embryo. He had time and to spare, but his pen persisted in turning to sonnets, and only the opening chapters of the romance had been summarily blocked out. All this was not very satisfactory, and Maurice was glad to be called from the contemplation of facts so unamiable by the sound of his mother’s voice in the adjoining room.

“Maurice, dear, has your friend gone?” Mrs. Birkton asked, advancing timidly across the threshold. She had the step and gesture of one who has spent her best energies in a vain endeavor to propitiate fate, and her small, pale face was like a palimpsest on which the record of suffering had been so deeply written that its orignal lines were concealed beyond recovery.

“If you are not writing, Maurice,” she continued, “I might come and finish Mrs. Rushingham’s list and save the gas for an hour longer. The light is so good at your window.”

“Come,” said Maurice, sweeping the poems into his desk and pushing a chair forward for his mother.

Mrs. Birkton, as she seated herself and opened her neat blankbook, glancing up almost furtively into her son’s face.

“None,” said Maurice, briefly. “I tried the editor of the Inter Oceanic when I was out just now, and he likes ‘The Old Odysseus’ and ‘Boulterby Ridge’ very much, but they aren’t exactly suited to his purpose. That’s their formula, you know.”

Mrs. Birkton dipped her fine steel pen into the inkstand, and began to write, in a delicate copperplate hand:

Mrs. Albert Lowbridge, 14 East Seventy-fifth Street.

Mrs. Charles M. McManus, 910 Fifth Avenue.

The Misses McManus, 910 Fifth Avenue.

Mr. & Mrs. Hugh Lovermore, 30 East Ninety-sixth Street.

She wrote on in silence, but Maurice, who had seated himself near her, saw a glimmer of tears on her thin lashes as her head moved mechanically to and fro with the motion of the pen.

“Well,” he said, trying for a more cheerful note, “your literary productions are always in demand, at all events. Mrs. Stapleton’s ball ought to bring you in a very tidy little sum. Someone told me the other day that she was going to send out two thousand invitations.”

“Mr. Seymour Carbridge, Mrs. Stapleton’s uncle, died yesterday, and the ball is given up.”

“The stars in their courses fight against us!” he exclaimed. “I’m afraid this will make a great difference to you, won’t it, mother?”

“It does make a difference,” she assented, writing on uninterruptedly. “You see I was to have rewritten her whole visiting list, besides doing the invitations to the ball. And Lent comes so early this year.”

Maurice was silent, and for some twenty minutes Mrs. Birkton’s pen continued to move steadily forward over the ruled sheets of the visiting book. The short January afternoon was fast darkening into a snowy twilight, and Maurice presently stretched out his hand toward the matchbox which lay on the desk.

“Oh, Maurice, don’t light the gas yet. I can see quite well, and you had better keep the stove going a little longer. It’s so cold.”

“You extravagant boy! When it gets really dark I shall take my writing into the kitchen, but meanwhile it is so much pleasanter here; and I don’t believe Annette has lit the kitchen stove yet. I haven’t heard her come in.”

“At her confirmation class. Father Thurifer holds a class every afternoon this week in the chantry. You know Annette is to be confirmed next Sunday.”

“But she must have come in by this time,” Mrs. Birkton continued, with a glance at the darkening window. “Go and see, dear, will you?”

Maurice obediently stepped out into the narrow passageway which led from his bedroom to the kitchen. The kitchen door was shut, and as he opened it he came abruptly upon the figure of a young girl, seated in an attitude of tragic self-abandonment at the deal table in the middle of the room. She had evidently just come in, for her shabby hat and jacket and two or three devotional-looking little volumes lay on a chair at her side. Her arms were flung out across the table, with her face hidden between, so that the bluish glimmer of the gas jet overhead, vaguely outlining her figure, seemed to concentrate all its light upon the mass of her wheat-colored braids. At the sound of the opening door she sprang up suddenly, turning upon Maurice a small disordered face, with red lids and struggling mouth. She was evidently not more than fifteen years old and her undeveloped figure and little round face, in its setting of pale hair, presented that curious mixture of maturity and childishness often seen in girls of her age who have been carefully watched over at home, yet inevitably exposed to the grim diurnal spectacle of poverty and degradation.

“Annette!” Maurice said, catching the hand with which she tried to hide her face.

“Oh, Maurice, don’t—don’t please!” she entreated, “I wasn’t crying—I wasn’t! I was only a little tired; and it was so cold walking home from church.”

“If you are cold, why haven’t you lit the stove?” he asked, giving her time to regain her composure.

As he spoke his eye fell on the slim little volumes at her side, and he picked up one, which was emblazoned with a cross, surmounted by the title: Passion Flowers.

“And so you are going to be confirmed very soon, Annette?” he asked, his glance wandering over the wide-margined pages with their reiterated invocations in delicate italics:

O Jesu Christ! Eternal sweetness of them that love Thee,

O Jesu, Paradise of delights and very glory of the Angels,

O Jesu, mirror of everlasting love,

O King most lovely, and Loving One most dear,

impress I pray Thee, O Lord Jesus,

all Thy wounds upon my heart!

Annette’s face was smoothed into instant serenity. “Next Sunday—just think, Maurice, only three days more to wait! It will be Sexagesima Sunday, you know.”

“Oh, Maurice! I have waited so long—some girls are confirmed at thirteen.”

“Because Father Thurifer thought it best,” she answered, humbly. “You see I am very young for my age, and very stupid in some ways. He was afraid that I might not understand all the holy mysteries.”

“Oh, yes—as well as a girl can presume to. At least Father Thurifer says so.”

“That is very nice,” said Maurice. “Now run away and I’ll light the fire. Mother will be coming soon to sit here.”

He went back to his bedroom, where Mrs. Birkton’s pen, in the thickening obscurity, still traveled unremittingly over the smooth pages.

“Mother, what’s the matter with Annette? When I went into the kitchen I found her crying.”

“Poor child!” she said. “After all, Maurice, she is only a child; one can’t be too hard on her.”

“You see,” continued Mrs. Birkton, who invariably put her apologies before her explanations, “she would never have allowed herself to think of it if we hadn’t been so sure of the Stapleton ball.”

“Her white dress, Maurice, her confirmation dress. At the Church of the Precious Blood all the girls are confirmed in white muslin dresses, with tulle veils and moire sashes. Father Thurifer makes a point of it.”

“I thought I might, dear, when Mrs. Stapleton decided to give her ball. You see there is a very large class of candidates for confirmation, and I knew it would be very trying for Annette to be the only one not dressed in white—and at such a solemn time, too. But now, of course, she will have to give it up.”

“Yes,” said Maurice, absently. He stood with his hands in his pockets, his unseeing eyes fixed upon the yellow gleam of the gas stove, which was now the only point of light in the room.

“Poor child,” murmured his mother, deprecatingly; “it is such a solemn moment, Maurice.”

“Yes, yes—I know. That’s just it. That’s why I don’t understand—Annette is a very religious girl, isn’t she?”

“Father Thurifer tells me that he has never seen a more religious nature. He said that it was as natural to her to believe as to breathe. Isn’t that a beautiful expression?”

“And yet—yet—at such a solemn moment, as you say, it is the color of her dress that is uppermost in her mind?”

“Oh, Maurice, don’t you see that it is just because she has so much devotional feeling, poor child, that she suffers at the thought of not appearing worthily at such a time?”

“As if Mrs. Stapleton should ask me to lead the cotillion at her ball when my dress coat is in pawn?”

“I beg your pardon, mother; I didn’t mean that; forgive me. But it all seems so queer—I don’t understand.”

“Annette is a very good girl,” said Mrs. Birkton, gathering up her pen and papers. “After the first shock is over she will bear her disappointment bravely; but don’t tell her that I have spoken to you about it, for she would never forgive me.”

“Poor little thing,” Maurice sighed, as his mother groped her way to the door.

He sat still in the darkness after she had left, companioned by the dismal brood of his disappointments, until half an hour later Annette’s knock told him that their slender supper was ready.

When he re-entered the kitchen his sister’s face had grown as smooth and serene as that of some young seraph of Van Eyck’s. She had tied a white apron over her dress and was busy carrying the hot toast and fried eggs from the stove to the table, which had meanwhile been covered with a white cloth and neatly set for the evening meal.

Maurice sat down between her and his mother, listening in silence to their talk, which fell like the trickle of a cool stream upon his aching nerves. They were speaking as usual of church matters, in which the daughter took an eager and precocious, the mother a somewhat ex-official interest; it seemed to Maurice as though Mrs. Birkton, who had resigned herself to getting on without so many things, had even surrendered her direct share in the scheme of redemption, or rather tacitly passed it on to her child. But what more especially struck him was the force of will displayed in Annette’s demeanor. Her disappointment, which he felt to be very real, was impenetrably masked behind a mien of gay activity; and Maurice, knowing his own facile tendency to be swayed by the emotion of the moment, marveled at the child’s self-control.

The next morning he went out earlier than usual. As he opened the hall door he turned back and called to his mother, who was washing the breakfast dishes in the kitchen:

“Mother, if Helfenridge comes you can say that you don’t know when I shall be back. Say that I may not be in all day.”

“Very well, dear,” she replied, with some surprise; but her son’s face forbade questioning, and she went on silently with her work.

Maurice, as it happened, returned in time for their one o’clock dinner. His mother thought that he looked pale and spiritless, and feared that he had endured another defeat at the hands of some unenlightened editor.

“Yes,” Mrs. Birkton answered. “He stopped on his way downtown just after you had gone out. He was very sorry not to find you, and said that he would come again tomorrow evening.”

“I think I hear her step now,” Mrs. Birkton replied, and at the same moment the kitchen door opened, admitting the young girl, whose small face was touched with a frosty pink by the cold.

As she entered Maurice went up to her, extending something in his hand with an awkward gesture.

“Look here—will that buy you a white dress like the rest of the girls?” he said, abruptly.

Annette grew red and then pale; her lips parted, but she made no motion to take the roll of bills which he held out to her.

“Maurice!” his mother gasped. “Have they accepted something? What is it? What is it to appear in?”

Her small features, flattened into lifelong submission to failure, seemed almost convulsed by the unwonted expression of a less negative emotion.

“Why don’t you take it, Annette?” he said, a tinge of impatience in his voice.

“Annette! Annette! why do you stand there? Can’t you speak? Why don’t you thank your brother?” Mrs. Birkton cried, in a storm of exultation.

Annette held out her hand, but as she took the bills her face again grew crimson.

“Maurice, how did you know about the dress? Mother, you promised not to tell him!” Then, glancing at the roll of money, “But what have you given me, Maurice? A hundred dollars—a hundred and fifty dollars? Mother, what does he mean?”

“Well,” said Maurice with a laugh, “Isn’t it enough to buy your dress?”

Annette stood, trembling, between sobs and laughter; but her mother’s tears overflowed.

“Oh, my boy, my son, I’m so happy! I knew it would come. I knew it must—Mr. Helfenridge said so only this morning. But I didn’t dream it would be so soon!” She lifted her poor, joy-distorted face to his averted kiss. “Oh, it’s too beautiful, Maurice, it’s too beautiful! But you haven’t told us yet which poem it is.”

“Not yet—not now. I’ve forgotten something. I’m going out,” he stammered.

“Nonsense, mother. I shall be back presently. Annette, keep some dinner for me.”

“But, Maurice,” the girl cried, springing forward, “you mustn’t leave all this money with me.”

“I’ve told you it’s yours,” he said, with a violence which made the women’s startled eyes meet.

“Why, Maurice, you must be joking! A hundred and fifty dollars? I oughtn’t to keep a penny of it, with all the things that you and mother need.”

“Nonsense, keep it all. If it’s too much for your dress, mother can take the rest for herself. I don’t want it. But mind you spend it all on yourselves; don’t use any of it for the household. And remember I won’t touch a penny of it.”

“But, Maurice,” said Mrs. Birkton, “the dress won’t cost twenty dollars.”

“So much the worse,” he retorted; and the door shut on him with a crash that was conclusive.

Helfenridge, whose work (he was a clerk in the same establishment which had been the scene of Maurice’s brief commercial experience) often delayed him downtown long after his dinner hour, did not reach his friend’s house until eight o’clock on the following evening. As he started on his long ascent of the steep tenement stairs someone ran against him on the first landing, and he drew back in surprise, recognizing Maurice in the flare of the gas jet against the whitewashed wall.

“Hullo, Maurice! Didn’t Mrs. Birkton tell you that I was coming this evening?”

“No—no. You’d better come up after all. I’d rather see you now. I’ve got something to say to you.”

“Are you sure?” said Helfenridge. “I’d rather not be taken on sufferance.”

“I want to see you,” Birkton repeated, with sudden force; and the two men climbed the stairs together in silence.

He put a match to the gas burner, and another to the stove, and pushed his only easy chair forward within the radius of the dry, yellow heat, while Helfenridge threw aside his hat and overcoat, which were fringed with frozen snow.

“You don’t look well, Maurice,” he said, taking the seat proffered by his friend.

He opened the door as he spoke, and Helfenridge heard him walk along the narrow passageway to the kitchen; then came the opening of another door, which launched a confusion of soft, gay tones upon the intervening obscurity. “Oh, no, no,” Helfenridge heard a young voice half laughingly protest; then an older tone interposed, gently urgent, mingled with an odd unfamiliar laugh from Maurice; lastly the door of the bedroom was suddenly thrown wide, and Maurice reappeared, pushing before him his sister, clad from head to foot in white muslin, her flat, childish waist defined by a wide white sash, even her little feet shod in immaculate ivory kid.

Above all this whiteness her flushed face emerged like a pink crocus from a snow drift; her lips were parted in tremulous, inarticulate apologies, but no explanatory word reached Helfenridge.

“Why, Miss Annette, how lovely!” he exclaimed at random, questioning Maurice with his eyes.

“There—doesn’t she look nice?” the brother asked, retaining his grasp of her white shoulders. “That’s her confirmation dress, if you please! She’s going to be confirmed next Sunday at the Church of the Precious Blood, and you’ve got to be there to see it.”

“Of course I shall be there,” said Helfenridge, warmly. “But what a beautiful dress! Are all confirmation dresses as beautiful as that?”

“Father Thurifer likes all the girls in the class to be dressed like that,” Maurice quickly interposed. “And now run off before your finery gets tumbled,” he added, pushing her out of the room with a smile which softened the abruptness of the gesture.

“Poor little girl,” said Maurice. “Isn’t it pretty fancy to dress them all in white?”

“I suppose so. I never knew anything about it until the other day—until two days ago, in fact. Then I found that Father Thurifer had requested all the girls who are to be confirmed to dress in white muslin; and we hadn’t a penny between us to buy her a dress with.”

“Annette’s a very good little girl, you know—immensely religious. Father Thurifer says he never saw a more religious nature. And it nearly killed her not to have a white dress—not to appear worthy of the day. She regards it as the most solemn day of her life. Can you understand how she must have felt? I couldn’t at first, but I think I do now. After all, she’s only a child.”

“Well, neither my mother nor I had a copper left. There was no way of getting the dress—and it seemed to me she had to have it.”

“I said the other day that I didn’t know what would happen if one of us fell ill; but in a way it would have been simpler than this. Annette, now—if Annette had been ill we could have sent her to the hospital. My mother is too sensible to have any prejudice against hospitals. But this is different—there was no other way of getting the dress; and it had to be got somehow. I don’t believe her wedding dress will seem half so important to her—there’s so little perspective at fifteen.”

Both men were silent; Helfenridge sat with his hands clenched on the arms of his chair.

Suddenly he said, as if in a flash of remembrance: “You sent that thing to Baker Buley—the thing about Mrs. Tolquitt?”

A long pause followed, in which the thoughts of the two men cried aloud to each other.

At length Maurice exclaimed, “I wish you’d speak out—say what you think.”

“I’m not sure if you have. It seems to me that I’m not sure of anything,” Helfenridge said.

“I am—I’m sure that Annette had to have her dress,” said Maurice, with a defiant laugh.

“It’s out already—it came out this morning. It’s all over town by this time.”

“My mother and Annette? God forbid. Do you suppose they would have touched the money?”

“I told them that was my secret—that they shouldn’t know for the present. Of course the—the thing in the Kite is not signed; and later, if one of my poems ever finds its way into print, they’ll think it’s that—but they’ll have to wait.”

“Why do you go? Because you’re afraid to tell me what you think? You may say what you please—it can’t make any difference. Annette had to have the dress. I’ve been trying to avoid you for two days because I was afraid to tell you, but now I’d rather talk about it—that is if you care to have anything more to do with me. Because, after all, I’m no better than a blackguard now, you know—there’s no getting around that fact. You’ve a perfect right to cut me.”

“At what time does the confirmation take place?” he asked. “Tell Miss Annette that I shall certainly be there.”

On the ensuing Sunday morning, punctually at half-past ten o’clock, a closed carriage from the nearest livery stable drew up before the house occupied by the Birktons. It was snowing hard, and Annette’s spotless draperies and flowing veil were concealed under an old cloak of her mother’s as, sheltered by Maurice’s umbrella, she stepped across the sidewalk, clasping her prayer book in one tremulous, white-gloved hand. Mrs. Birkton followed, her shabby bonnet refurbished with fresh velvet strings, and a glow of excitement on her small effaced features. She and her son placed themselves on the front seat, leaving Annette to expand her crisp robe over the width of the opposite cushions; and the carriage rolled off heavily through the deepening snow.

All three sat silent during their slow, noiseless drive. Maurice was looking out of the window, so that the women saw only his uncommunicative profile. Mrs. Birkton sat wiping away the tears from her flushed face. They were pleasant tears, and she let them roll gently down her cheeks before she dried them. As for Annette, her face was pale, with the candid pallor of an intense but scarce-comprehended emotion. She sat bolt upright, in a kind of Pre-Raphaelite rigidity which accorded with the primitive inexpressiveness of her rapt young features and the shadowless chalk-like mass of her dress and veil.

At length the carriage paused behind a train of others; and after some moments of delay, which seemed to lend a preparatory solemnity to their approach, Maurice, in the wake of his mother and sister, passed from the snowy crudeness of the outer world into the rich and complex atmosphere of the Church of the Precious Blood.

The raw, sunless daylight, mellowed by the jeweled opacity of stained-glass windows, fell with a caressing brilliance across the aisles, streaking the clustered shafts with heraldic emblazonments of gules and azure and leaving the intervening spaces swathed in a velvety dusk. On the altar, with its embroidered hanging, the candle flames hovered like yellow moths over the white lilies rigidly disposed in tall silver vases; while in their midst, relieved against the sculptured intricacies of the reredos of grayish stone, rose the outstretched arms of the great golden crucifix.

The church was already crowded; but a ribbon, latitudinally dividing the central aisle, indicated that the foremost rows of chairs (there were no pews in the Church of the Precious Blood) had been reserved for the candidates for confirmation and their relations. Thither Maurice followed his mother and Annette, passing through a dove-like subsidence of feathery white and a double row of innocent young faces to the seats assigned to them by the verger. Glancing about as he moved up the aisle he had caught a glimpse of Helfenridge seated far back, with his head against a pillar; and the sight lent him some momentary comfort.

Maurice cast down his eyes while Mrs. Birkton and Annette knelt to pray; and when he looked up the long white procession of choristers, preceded by the crucifer, was winding toward the chancel, while the first notes of the hymn

How bright these glorious spirits shine!

Whence all their white array?

Maurice, observing his sister, saw the gravity of her vague young profile intensified to awe as the procession swept past their seats, closed by the sumptuous grouping of the ample-sleeved bishop with his attendant clergy in their embroidered vestments, and seen through the mauve mist of drifting incense fumes. To him it was like fingering the leaves of a missal in some Umbrian sacristy, speculating idly, as he looked, upon the meaning of the delicate miniatures, wherein serene-visaged personages, saintly or seraphic, enacted their mysterious drama in a setting of fanciful white architecture or against a blue background tarred with gold. But to Annette, he perceived, it was something real, as real as physical birth or death. Through the symbolic phantasmagoria, which she perhaps understood still less than he, ran a thread of actuality, linking her timid being to the occult significance of the whole splendid scene; and Maurice saw her tremble with the sense of that august alliance. Perhaps, after all, he reflected, it was the white dress which formed the actual point of contact. At least he was glad to think that it made her a part of the pageant, a conscious factor in the gorgeous sacrifice of praise and prayer.

As he mused thus his unquiet eyes again began to wander; and suddenly they fell upon a lady who sat near by with a little girl in white muslin at her side. The lady’s face was very familiar to him, though he had never before seen it composed into its present expression of devotional repose. It was a pretty face, crowned by abrupt waves of reddish hair just dashed here and there with a streak of gray, and lit by an insinuating, agate-colored glance; but the sight of it burned Maurice’s eyeballs like vitriol, for it was the face of Mrs. Tolquitt.

He had never seen her thus before, with sober lips and modestly meditative lids; nor had he ever seen the small, solemn replica of herself now seated beside her in billows of clean white muslin. The sight was an intolerable rebuke, and he would have given the world to hear her familiar laugh rattle derisively through the high quietude of the aisles. As he gazed she turned her head, fixing upon him an absent look which gradually melted into a subdued smile of recognition. Then she made a slight sideward motion of her eyes, which plainly said, “This is my little girl.”

Maurice noticed that she showed no surprise at seeing him there; she seemed to consider his presence as much a matter of course as her own, and with a shudder he said to himself, “Good heavens, perhaps she thinks I have come to see her daughter confirmed!”

The service rolled on, with its bursts of music and interludes of prayer, its mystical moving of brilliant figures and flitting of lights about the altar; and at length Maurice was aware of a pause, followed by a stirring of the white dovecote in whose midst he sat. He saw Mrs. Birkton glance tearfully at Annette. The girl’s lips and eyelids were trembling, and for a moment she seemed unable to move. At length she looked up, fixing her eyes on the golden crucifix above the altar; then, as if hypnotized by the sight, she rose and glided into the aisle, mingling with the fluctuant mass of white-veiled figures which had begun to move slowly toward the apse.

Presently they were all kneeling together on the chancel step, settling their dresses with the quick motions of a flock of birds; and above them, whitely hovering, Maurice saw the pontifical head and voluminous sleeves of the bishop. Annette knelt so that he could just see her between the intervening piers; but Mrs. Tolquitt’s daughter was hidden from him, lost in the impersonal array of white veils and bowed heads.

The organ murmured a soft accompaniment, above which rose the monotonous cadence of the episcopal supplication, “Defend, O Lord, this thy child.... Defend, O Lord, this thy child....” reiterated like an incantation, as the invoking hands passed slowly down the line of motionless young heads.

Maurice saw the hands sway above Annette’s pale braids, which shone like winter sunshine through her veil; then they moved on, and his eyes turned involuntarily to Mrs. Tolquitt. But she did not see him now; she was crying, not daintily, for the gallery, but in genuine self-surrender, her shoulders shaking, her handkerchief pressed against her face.

There came over Maurice an uncontrollable longing to escape; the smoke of the incense and the strong fragrance of the lilies sickened him, and Mrs. Tolquitt’s sobs seemed to be choking in his own throat.

At length the white line about the chancel swayed, broke, and dissolved itself; the choir burst into another victorious hymn, and the little veiled figures came fluttering back to their seats. In the ensuing disturbance, Maurice rose with a quick whisper to his mother—“Let me pass—I’m going out. I can’t stand the incense”—and while Mrs. Birkton made way for him, startled and disappointed, his glance fell for a moment on Annette’s illuminated face, as she moved toward her seat with fixed eyes and folded hands. Her whole gaze was bent upon the inner vision; she did not even see him as he brushed her dress in passing out.

It was like a new birth to get out into the snow again, and Maurice, after a sharp breath or two, stepped forth rapidly against the wind, courting the tingle of the barbed flakes upon his face.

He did not go home until late that evening, and when he entered the kitchen, he was met by the festal spectacle of the supper table adorned with a cluster of white lilies and a delicate array of fruit and angel cake. Annette, in her habitual dress of dark stuff, looked more familiar and less supernal than before, and though her face still shone, it now seemed to Maurice that he could discern the mingling of a gratified childish vanity with the mystical emotions of the morning.

“I’m so glad you have come, dear,” Mrs. Birkton exclaimed, her countenance still dewy with a pleasant agitation. “Annette, is the chicken ready? We have a broiled chicken for you, Maurice, dear, and a little mayonnaise of tomatoes.”

As she spoke her eye turned toward the supper table, dumbly challenging his praise.

“It is all owing to you, dear,” his mother replied. “We asked Mr. Helfenridge to come to supper, too; we thought you would like to have him.”

“No, he couldn’t, unfortunately. He said he had promised to go to his sister’s.”

They sat down, Annette mutely radiant at the head of the table, with her mother and Maurice at the sides; but to the dismay of the two women Maurice refused to partake of the delicacies which they had prepared. He had a headache, he said; but he sat watching them eat, in spite of his mother’s entreaties that he should go and lie down in his own room.

When supper was over, however, he rose and bade them good night; Annette’s kiss was mingled with an inarticulate whisper of gratitude, but he pushed her gently aside, and the women heard him cross the passageway and shut himself into his own room.

In a few moments, however, he was aroused by a timorous knock, which he recognized as his mother’s.

“Come in,” he called, and Mrs. Birkton stepped apologetically across the threshold.

“I know, dear, and I’m very sorry to disturb you. But here is the rest of this money—I can’t keep it, you know, Maurice. Annette’s dress and shoes and veil, and the carriage and supper, and the new strings for my bonnet, only cost twenty-seven dollars and a half, and I can’t possibly keep the rest unless you will let me use it for the household expenses, as usual.”

“For God’s sake mother, understand me. I don’t want the money—I won’t touch it. I can provide plenty for the household; I haven’t let you starve yet. And this is Annette’s, yours and hers. If you won’t spend it for yourself let Annette put it in the savings bank; or let her throw it into the street; I don’t care what becomes of it—but don’t speak to me of it again. I’m sick to death of hearing about it!”

Mrs. Birkton shrank back, trembling at his unwonted tone. She was afraid that he was going to be really ill, and her one thought was to withdraw without increasing his agitation.

“Very well, dear—just as you please,” she said, deprecatingly. “It was foolish of me to trouble you. Don’t think of it again, but go to bed and try to sleep. I ought not to have disturbed you.”

Maurice had no thought of going to bed. He sank into his armchair, which he had pushed close to the gas stove, and sat staring at the hard yellow brilliance of the polished radiator.

Helfenridge had gone to see Annette confirmed, but he had not been willing to come to supper; and Maurice knew him too well not to penetrate the shallow excuse which had satisfied Mrs. Birkton. Well, Helfenridge was right; no man can handle pitch without being defiled. And once a man’s hand is soiled, why should his friends care to touch it?

After all, no cheap condonation of Helfenridge’s would have helped Maurice now; rather did he feel a tonic force in his friend’s disapproval. It showed Helfenridge to be the better and stronger man; and there was a kind of dispassionate consolation in that. If one had to fail it was better that the other should hold fast than be dragged down with him; and Helfenridge had always been the firmer footed of the two.

So Maurice mused, letting the desolate hours travel on unregarded; till suddenly his vigil was disturbed by a knock, sharp and resolute this time, which made him start to his feet.

Maurice, on seeing him enter, had felt an involuntary thrill of relief, as though he were regaining his moral footing, but the illusion was transient and left him to sink back into profounder depths of self-accusal.

“I thought you weren’t coming. You would have been quite right not to come,” he said, without asking his friend to sit down.

“I didn’t mean to come,” Helfenridge answered, taking off his coat. “Your mother asked me to supper, but I refused. I couldn’t see my way clear at first—even in church that little white seraph didn’t seem to justify it for a moment; but I have been thinking hard all day—and now I’ve come.”

“It’s no use,” he said, heavily. “No amount of thinking will make it right. What’s that in the Bible about doing evil that good may come? That’s what I’ve done. I’ve done evil that good might come—but it hasn’t come—it can’t. The fellow in the Bible was right. You think Annette’s dress was white? I tell you it was black—black as pitch.”

“No, no,” said Helfenridge taking the chair which Maurice had not offered him. “The whole business is horribly mixed up, like most human affairs, but there’s a germ of right in it somewhere, and the best thing we can do now is to nurse that and get it to flower.”

“Oh, stop—drop that inane metaphor. I tell you there’s no excuse for what I did, and what’s worse there’s no reparation. I’d give myself up, I’d go and proclaim the whole thing—but what good would that do? Smother everybody in mud—Annette, and my mother, and that poor woman! Helfenridge—”

“That woman—Mrs. Tolquitt—was in church with her little girl, who was confirmed. Think of it, will you! Her little girl was confirmed with Annette! And they sat next to us—only a few seats off. Helfenridge, I never knew she had a little girl.”

“I don’t suppose we any of us know much about anybody else,” said Helfenridge.

“And there she sat crying—crying, I tell you. Just such tears as my mother’s—glad and proud and sorry all at once!”

They were both silent, Helfenridge seated with bowed head, Birkton stirring uneasily about the room with the thwarted movements of a caged animal.

At length he flung himself down in the chair in front of his desk and hid his face against his arms. Helfenridge heard his sobs.

It seemed a long time before either of them spoke; but finally Helfenridge rose and touched his friend’s shoulder.

“My eyes are clearer than yours just now,” he said, “and I shouldn’t be here if I didn’t see a way out of it.”

“Yes, only it’s no empirical remedy: geschehen ist geschehen. But you spoke just now of the biblical axiom that good can’t come out of evil; well, no generalization of that sort is final. It seems to me, on the contrary, that this good can come out of evil; that having done evil once it may become impossible to do it again. One ill act may become the strongest rampart one can build against further ill-doing. It divides things, it classifies them. It may be the means of lifting one forever out of the region of quibbles and compromises and moral subtleties, in which we who are curious in emotions are apt to loiter till we get a shaking up of some sort. It’s horrible to make a steppingstone out of a poor woman’s anguish and humiliation; but the anguish and humiliation can’t be prevented now; and who knows? In the occult economy of things they may be of some use to her if they help somebody else.”

Maurice flung off his hand with a passionate gesture. “Quibbles and compromises and moral subtleties! What else is your reasoning made up of, I should like to know? It’s nothing but the basest Liguorianism. The plain fact is that I’m a dammed blackguard, not fit to look decent people in the face again.”

Helfenridge for a few moments stood irresolute, as if waiting for his friend to recall him; but Maurice still sat without moving, bowed beneath the immensity of his shame.

Maurice made no reply; his shoulders still shook, although his grief had grown noiseless.

“Remember, Maurice,” his friend conjured him, “that whatever you do your mother and sister mustn’t find out about this business. That’s your first duty now, to hide the whole thing from them.”

Still there came no answer. Helfenridge turned to the door and slowly opened it, glancing back as he did so at Maurice’s downcast head; then he stepped out into the passageway. But as the door closed behind him a new impulse, uncontrollable in its suddenness, made him turn back abruptly and re-enter the room.

“Look here, Maurice, listen to me,” he exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to tell you—but, hang it all, there’s no use in your taking it like this. Blason was waiting for Mrs. Tolquitt outside the church, and I saw them drive away together in her brougham, with the little girl between them.”

THAT GOOD MAY COME