Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/196

186 surely as he knew, so was he also known; he stood pilloried in the market-place, his false coin spread out before him for all men—for her—to see.

A man involuntarily turns away from the painful picture of shame confessed; a woman will contemplate it unshrinkingly, either with the condemnation that is utter or with the pity that seeks to console and to restore. Which of the two, depends, of course, upon the nature of the transgression, and may be complicated indefinitely with the sex and personality of the sinner. With the good woman the primal instinct is to heal; the hurt has been sympathetically reproduced in her own being, and Nature insists upon self-preservation. Eve Hasbrouck turned towards Fulke Jarvis and laid her hand ever so lightly upon his sleeve.

"I am sorry," she said, softly. The man pulled himself up stiffly; the sense of his present humiliation had suddenly hardened him.

"Don't!" he said, and looked away.

A servant was offering them the coffee-tray, and young Buller sauntered over from the main group to get himself another cup.

"You've been missing it, you two," he remarked, with a species of tolerant patronage that most people found excessively irritating. "Miss Lansing has been saying such clever things right along. It's like being at the fireworks—eh! What's that? There she goes now." He spoke as though the discharge of a rocket were about to follow—siss—boom—ah!! There was an instant of hushed expectancy in the circle about the clever Miss Lansing; then, in her clear, metallic tones:

"A woman may pardon the boldness that presumes too far; she can never forgive the hesitation that stops just short."

"They say that's the reason she never comes down to breakfast," continued young Mr. Buller, meditatively. "Has to put in the time getting up this sort of thing—enough to last through the day, you know. Lives in a world of epigram; and it must be rather jolly, don't you think?"

"Only it isn't a real world," said Miss Hasbrouck, gently, "and so one behaves there rather differently than is possible in ours."

Miss Lansing came up under full sail. "Where have you been, 'Bully'?" she said, severely. "You were to see about getting out the bridge-table."

"Changed my mind," pleaded young Buller. "It's too nice out here on the terrace."

"Well, I like that!" retorted Miss Lansing. "Everybody knows that your intellectual wardrobe doesn't hold such a superfluity as a change of mind. Right about face, now—march!"

Young Buller, grinning somewhat sheepishly, was led away to the appropriate and inevitable slaughter. The rest of the party had been summoned to the drawing-room, where Jerrold was going to sing, and Jarvis had just an instant left.

"I shall go up to town to-night," he began. He hesitated an instant, and then continued, coldly: "It seems that I have both presumed too far and hesitated too long, and the double offence is naturally unpardonable. The one thing left for me to do is to endeavor to re-establish myself in your esteem. An impossible task, of course, but one attempts the impossible for Miss Hasbrouck. To make something out of myself—that is the idea, I think. Something worth while, if it is worth while—now."

"Why not?" said Miss Hasbrouck, placidly. "Of course you have my best wishes," she added, as though from an afterthought. She put out her hand, and he took it mechanically; then she was gone.

Fulke Jarvis stared after her retreating form a trifle vaguely. He felt as though he had been suddenly tumbled from a lofty pedestal and had landed upon a particularly hard spot in the world of facts. "I wonder, I wonder," he said, under his breath, and then stopped short. Very dimly the thought forced itself upon him that he had made a mistake somewhere in dealing with this secondary situation. He had offered concrete reparation, definite atonement, and she had wanted—what? Who could tell him that for a woman wounded at her tenderest, there is but one possible cure—the full forgiveness of the sinner. But he must ask for the application of the remedy; to assume its unpardonable nature only makes it so.