Crucial Instances Part 12

_Mrs. Dale (triumphantly)_. Because _I_ want them for mine!

_Ventnor (in a changed tone)_. Ah--. _(He moves away from her and leans against the mantelpiece. She remains seated, with her eyes fixed on him.)_

_Mrs. Dale_. I wonder I didn't see it sooner. Your reasons were lame enough.

_Ventnor (ironically)_. Yours were masterly. You're the more accomplished actor of the two. I was completely deceived.

_Mrs. Dale_. Oh, I'm a novelist. I can keep up that sort of thing for five hundred pages!

_Ventnor_. I congratulate you. _(A pause.)_

_Mrs. Dale (moving to her seat behind the tea-table)_. I've never offered you any tea. _(She bends over the kettle.)_ Why don't you take your letters?

_Ventnor_. Because you've been clever enough to make it impossible for me. _(He picks up the key and hands it to her. Then abruptly)_--Was it all acting--just now?

_Mrs. Dale_. By what right do you ask?

_Ventnor_. By right of renouncing my claim to my letters. Keep them--and tell me.

_Mrs. Dale_. I give you back your claim--and I refuse to tell you.

_Ventnor (sadly)_. Ah, Helen, if you deceived me, you deceived yourself also.

_Mrs. Dale_. What does it matter, now that we're both undeceived? I played a losing game, that's all.

_Ventnor_. Why losing--since all the letters are yours?

_Mrs. Dale_. The letters? _(Slowly.)_ I'd forgotten the letters--

_Ventnor (exultant)_. Ah, I knew you'd end by telling me the truth!

_Mrs. Dale_. The truth? Where _is_ the truth? _(Half to herself.)_ I thought I was lying when I began--but the lies turned into truth as I uttered them! _(She looks at Ventnor.)_ I _did_ want your letters for my memoirs--I _did_ think I'd kept them for that purpose--and I wanted to get mine back for the same reason--but now _(she puts out her hand and picks up some of her letters, which are lying scattered on the table near her)_--how fresh they seem, and how they take me back to the time when we lived instead of writing about life!

_Ventnor (smiling)_. The time when we didn't prepare our impromptu effects beforehand and copyright our remarks about the weather!

_Mrs. Dale_. Or keep our epigrams in cold storage and our adjectives under lock and key!

_Ventnor_. When our emotions weren't worth ten cents a word, and a signature wasn't an autograph. Ah, Helen, after all, there's nothing like the exhilaration of spending one's capital!

_Mrs. Dale_. Of wasting it, you mean. _(She points to the letters.)_ Do you suppose we could have written a word of these if we'd known we were putting our dreams out at interest? _(She sits musing, with her eyes on the fire, and he watches her in silence.)_ Paul, do you remember the deserted garden we sometimes used to walk in?

_Ventnor_. The old garden with the high wall at the end of the village street? The garden with the ruined box-borders and the broken-down arbor?

Why, I remember every weed in the paths and every patch of moss on the walls!

_Mrs. Dale._ Well--I went back there the other day. The village is immensely improved. There's a new hotel with gas-fires, and a trolley in the main street; and the garden has been turned into a public park, where excursionists sit on cast-iron benches admiring the statue of an Abolitionist.

_Ventnor_. An Abolitionist--how appropriate!

_Mrs. Dale_. And the man who sold the garden has made a fortune that he doesn't know how to spend--

_Ventnor (rising impulsively)_. Helen, _(he approaches and lays his hand on her letters)_, let's sacrifice our fortune and keep the excursionists out!

_Mrs. Dale (with a responsive movement)_. Paul, do you really mean it?

_Ventnor (gayly)_. Mean it? Why, I feel like a landed proprietor already! It's more than a garden--it's a park.

_Mrs. Dale_. It's more than a park, it's a world--as long as we keep it to ourselves!

_Ventnor_. Ah, yes--even the pyramids look small when one sees a Cook's tourist on top of them! _(He takes the key from the table, unlocks the cabinet and brings out his letters, which he lays beside hers.)_ Shall we burn the key to our garden?

_Mrs. Dale_. Ah, then it will indeed be boundless! _(Watching him while he throws the letters into the fire.)_

_Ventnor (turning back to her with a half-sad smile)_. But not too big for us to find each other in?

_Mrs. Dale_. Since we shall be the only people there! _(He takes both her hands and they look at each other a moment in silence. Then he goes out by the door to the right. As he reaches the door she takes a step toward him, impulsively; then turning back she leans against the chimney-piece, quietly watching the letters burn.)_

THE REMBRANDT

"You're _so_ artistic," my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Of all Eleanor's exordiums it is the one I most dread. When she tells me I'm so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the last literary obscurity of the moment: a trial to be evaded or endured, as circ.u.mstances dictate; whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather's Marc Antonios. Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of Eleanor's; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was no refuge from her beneficent despotism. It is not always easy for the curator of a museum to abandon his post on the plea of escaping a pretty cousin's importunities; and Eleanor, aware of my predicament, is none too magnanimous to take advantage of it. Magnanimity is, in fact, not in Eleanor's line. The virtues, she once explained to me, are like bonnets: the very ones that look best on other people may not happen to suit one's own particular style; and she added, with a slight deflection of metaphor, that none of the ready-made virtues ever _had_ fitted her: they all pinched somewhere, and she'd given up trying to wear them.

Therefore when she said to me, "You're _so_ artistic." emphasizing the conjunction with a tap of her dripping umbrella (Eleanor is out in all weathers: the elements are as powerless against her as man), I merely stipulated, "It's not old Saxe again?"

She shook her head rea.s.suringly. "A picture--a Rembrandt!"

"Good Lord! Why not a Leonardo?"

"Well"--she smiled--"that, of course, depends on _you_."

"On me?"

"On your attribution. I dare say Mrs. Fontage would consent to the change--though she's very conservative."

A gleam of hope came to me and I p.r.o.nounced: "One can't judge of a picture in this weather."

"Of course not. I'm coming for you to-morrow."

"I've an engagement to-morrow."

"I'll come before or after your engagement."

The afternoon paper lay at my elbow and I contrived a furtive consultation of the weather-report. It said "Rain to-morrow," and I answered briskly: "All right, then; come at ten"--rapidly calculating that the clouds on which I counted might lift by noon.