Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/667

615 individuals. It was England's Eastern policy that inflamed him first; he poured his blood into those sonnets. He saw America forswearing her old aloofness, and pitched in. More sonnets, and the essays called 'The Lost Atlantis.' Well, they hated him. The people that spoke his own tongue abjured him. It was a literary ostracism. England was too hot with the heat of battle to hear reproof without calling it traitorous in any man of English speech. America was too fat with money and crude, hurtling power—" She choked, and thoughts came faster than her words. This was as she had imagined herself speaking before audiences that were willing to see him rehabilitated. But great as was the tide within her, it found itself stilled by the extreme quiet of his mother, whom she had meant to comfort. It seemed at the moment as if the other woman had not felt the popular dumbness as she had done. It might even be that she had not felt it at all. But she was speaking:

"He had a following, I think?"

"Oh yes, he had a following of the malcontents that are always on the other side. They liked to call him 'one of us.' But don't you see, mother, his own people, the men of letters, they didn't take the trouble to find out what he was doing. They sat down and bemoaned those little cameos because there weren't more of them. They wouldn't take the trouble to understand him. They clogged his way with their numbing silence, their foolish laughter—"

"You feel this very keenly," said Madam Burton.

This time Constance dared her question: "Don't you feel it?"

But Madam Burton hardly seemed to hear. "You think," she pursued, "he was unpopular because he spoke the truth?"

"Because he spoke the honest truth, as he saw it hour by hour. He wasn't always right. No! But his intention was colossal. He should have been judged by that. But they didn't want to be flagellated and scorched and scarred. They wanted little vest-pocket volumes they could read on the train. People are shy of big intentions. They don't tolerate them, except in the standard classics."

Madam Burton had another question to put, and she essayed it apprehensively. "Did he—" she hesitated. "Do you think he felt this deeply?"

"Not for a moment. He was too big. He was only—what shall I say?—a little wistful over it. Once he did say: 'They mustn't make me self-conscious. They mustn't weaken my sword-arm.' No! he was above the clouds. But I—I wasn't, though it's only since he—since it happened, that I've grown so hot about it. You see, up there with him it didn't seem to matter. Besides, I'd always had a hope they would recognize him at last. When the notices came out, I turned to them for the only comfort life could give me. But I didn't get it. He was a man who had at one time shown promise. That was what they said."

Madam Burton rose and drew her shawl about her. "Let us take a step in the garden," she suggested, and Constance followed her. They went down the path to the long, sweet-smelling enclosure, and paced gravely between borders rich with flowers, the mother leaning on her daughter's arm. Down by the gnarled apple-tree at the foot Madam Burton stopped and pointed out a patch of ladies'-delights in the enfolding sward. "That's Timmie's grave," she said.

"The spaniel?"

"Yes. Blaise buried him himself, and then stole into the house and asked me to come and sing 'Sister, thou wast mild and lovely.' I did it. He piped up too, with his little, clear voice. We never spoke of it afterwards, even when he was grown up. It had gone too deep."

They turned back again, and then Madam Burton suddenly continued, with a bright rallying of spirit that illumined her: "Well, daughter, what are we going to do about it?"

"About him? His memory?"

"Yes."

"There is but one thing for me to do. Write his life, collect his papers, publish them at my own expense. Say to the world, 'This was the man you shut your ears to.

"Would he want you to?"

Constance halted at a spot where the fragrance of honeysuckle scented the air and great red poppies lay around, bursting with bloom.

"No," she said, in frank avowal; "he'd