Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/377

351 that household: When Dora broke her arm last summer Adèle happened to be ill; I don't know what was the matter—rheumatism, perhaps; proper thing for a grandmother; but, anyhow, she was really pretty sick. Dora has an uncertain heart, and the doctor was afraid to give her ether, so the setting of the bone was a pretty trying business. Adèle was awfully upset about it, quite hysterical, and no possible good. My dear—Augustine had to stay with her, if you please!—to calm her, while the doctor fixed that poor child's arm. Did you ever hear of such a thing? He really was distracted, poor fellow. O went in that afternoon, and he told me how distracted he had been. 'Poor Mrs. Wharton was so distressed about Dora, I had to be with her,' he said. I felt like—swearing!"

"I should be interested to hear you swear, Jane."

"Well, I did—inside. Now, Henry, did you ever hear of such a thing? And that's the way they live."

"Of course she ought not to live with them," Henry Austin said.

"Of course not," Mrs. Strong agreed; "but how are you going to stop it?"

"Unless she finds another genius, I admit that the prospect is not hopeful," he said.

"Dear me, Henry, I wish you were a genius," old Mrs. Strong said, sighing.

And then she gave him a plump hand and told him to be sure and come to her Thursdays. "You are good-looking still, Henry," she declared, "and maybe I can find a wife for you."

When Henry Austin buttoned his coat and went out into the rainy dusk his face was full of humorous remembrance He had completely forgotten those scars of which he had spoken to old Jane Strong, though when the wounds were fresh they had smarted keenly enough. But he thought about them now as he walked along to the club. It was a dozen years ago that he had fallen in love with this sweet-minded and brilliant Adèle Wharton, then newly a widow. There had been no chance for him She had lived for sixteen years in hell. At the end of that time of bravely borne disgust and shame and pain her tormentor died, and she was free. But the very idea of love-making and marrying was a horror. She could hardly listen to Henry Austin's declaration with decent appreciation of the honor which any good man's declaration of love is to any woman. She had said, hurriedly, her hands clasping and unclasping in her lap: "Oh, please, Mr. Austin! No—no, it can't be. It never can be. I—I do thank you,—but please! No, I can't—love you. I can never love anybody—except Dora."

Henry Austin had listened with downcast eyes and set jaw. Then he got himself together and said, gently, that she must forget it. He would not speak of it again, he said. And he never did. After a while he left town; and later, it chanced that he was called to live abroad—and he was not sorry. After all, if you can't eat your cake, there is no particular happiness in just looking at it. So he settled down in a small consulate in Italy. When his party went out of office he found European life so much to his taste that he stayed on. And he enjoyed himself very well in his way. He certainly was not a blighted being. The wounds had healed. If he had scars, as he said, they never throbbed or stung. They did not throb now as he walked along in the drizzling November twilight, thinking of what Mrs. Strong had told him. In a kindly, impersonal way, it occurred to him that he would like to see Adèle again, and little Dora. Dear little slip of a girl Dora was, with pleasant eyes the color of a November leaf; a gentle, honest child, very adoring of her mother. Well, he would like to see them both again.

"Yes," he said to himself, as he sat down at dinner in his club and opened his napkin, thoughtfully—"yes, Adèle was a charmer. Is, Jane Strong says. And yet she must be fifty. Well, that's the right age for a woman, when one no longer desires to sport with Amaryllis. Charles, you may bring me—the best you've got."

But as he regarded Charles's best, Austin, with comfortable, impersonal interest, continued to reflect upon the story Mrs. Strong had told him. He was inclined to think slightingly of the man who depended upon his mother-in-law for artistic inspiration, and yet he admitted