Most people smile at the word "fate," as though it had no meaning at all. Yet call "fate" the "chemistry of the universe" and the sceptic"s face a.s.sumes an expression of abject credulity, because the term has a modern ring and smacks of science. What is the difference between the two? We know a little chemistry: we can get something like the perfume of spring violets out of nauseous petroleum, and a flavour of strawberries out of stinking coal-tar; but we do not know much of the myriad natural laws by which our bodies are directed hither and thither, mere atoms in the everlasting whirlpool of all living beings. What can it matter whether we call those rules chemistry or fate? We shall submit to them in the end, with our bodies, though our souls rebel against them ever so eternally. The things that matter are quite different, and the less they have to do with our bodies, the better it is for ourselves.
Colonel Wimpole looked at the miniature and saw that it was a modern copy of a well-known French one, ingeniously set in an old case, to fit which it had perhaps been measured and painted. He looked at the dealer quickly, and the man expressed his despair by turning up his eyes a very little, while he bent his head forward and spread out his palms, abandoning the contest, for he recognized the colonel"s right to advise a friend.
"What do you think of it?" asked Mrs. Harmon.
"That depends entirely on what you mean to do with it, and how much you would give for it," answered the colonel, who would not have let her buy an imitation under any circ.u.mstances, but was far too kind-hearted to ruin the shopkeeper in her estimation.
"I rather liked it," was the answer. "It was for myself. There is something about the expression that pleases me. The lady looks so blindly happy and delighted with herself. It is a cheerful little thing to look at."
The colonel smiled.
"Will you let me give it to you?" he asked, putting it into her hand.
"In that way I shall have some pleasure out of it, too."
Mrs. Harmon held it for a moment, and looked at him thoughtfully, asking herself whether there was any reason why she should not accept the little present. He was not rich, but she had understood from his first answer that the thing was not worth much, after all, and she knew that he would not pay an absurd price for it. Her fingers closed quietly upon it.
"Thank you," she said. "I wanted it."
"I will come back this afternoon and pay for it," said the colonel to the dealer, as the three went out of the shop together a few moments later.
During the little scene, young Harmon had looked on sharply and curiously, but had not spoken.
"How are those things made, mother?" he asked, when they were in the street.
"What things?" asked Mrs. Harmon, gently.
"Those things--what do you call them? Like what Colonel Wimpole just gave you. How are they made?"
"Oh, miniatures? They are painted on ivory with very fine brushes."
"How funny! Why do they cost so much money, then?"
His questions were like those of a little child, but his mother"s expression did not change as she answered him, always with the same unvarying gentleness.
"People have to be very clever to paint them," she said. "That is why the very good ones are worth so much. It is like a good tailor, my dear, who is paid well because he makes good coats, whereas the man who only knows how to make workmen"s jackets earns very little."
"That"s not fair," said young Harmon. "It isn"t the man"s fault if he is stupid, is it?"
"No, dear, it isn"t his fault, it"s his misfortune."
It took the young man so long to understand this that he said nothing more, trying to think over his mother"s words, and getting them by heart, for they pleased him. They walked along in the hot sun and then crossed the street opposite the Schweizerhof to reach the shade of the foolish-looking trees that have been stuck about like Nuremberg toys, between the lake and the highway. The colonel had not spoken since they had left the shop.
"How well you are looking," he said suddenly, when young Harmon had relapsed into silence. "You are as fresh as a rose."
"A rose of yesterday," said Helen Harmon, a little sadly.
Quite naturally, Colonel Wimpole sighed as he walked along at her elbow; for though he did not know that she had ever loved him, he remembered the letter he had written to the man she had afterwards married, and he was too much a man himself not to believe that all might have been different if he had not written it.
"Where are you stopping?" he asked, when they had gone a few steps in silence.
Mrs. Harmon named a quiet hotel on the other side of the river.
"Close to us," observed the colonel, just as they reached the new bridge.
They were half-way across when an exclamation from young Harmon interrupted their conversation, which was, indeed, but a curiously stiff exchange of dry information about themselves and their movements, past, planned, and probable. For people who are fond of each other and meet rarely are first of all anxious to know when they may meet again. But the boy"s cry of surprise made them look round.
"Jukes!" he exclaimed loudly. "Jukes!" he repeated, more softly but very emphatically, as though solely for his own benefit.
"Jukes" was his only expression when pleased and surprised. No one knew whether he had ever heard the word, or had invented it, and no one could ever discover what it meant nor from what it was derived. It seemed to be what Germans call a "nature-sound," by which he gave vent to his feelings. His mother hated it, but had never been able to induce him to subst.i.tute anything else in its place. She followed the direction of his eager glance, for she knew by his tone that he wanted what he saw.
She expected to see a pretty boat, or a big dog, or a gorgeous posted bill. Archie had a pa.s.sion for the latter, and he often bought them and took them home with him to decorate his own particular room. He loved best the ones printed in violent and obtrusive colours. The gem of his collection was a purple woman on a red ground with a wreath of yellow flowers.
But Mrs. Harmon saw neither advertis.e.m.e.nt nor dog, nor boat. She saw Sylvia Strahan. She knew the girl very well, and knew Miss Wimpole, of course. The two were walking along on the other side of the bridge, talking together. Against the blaze of the afternoon sun, reflected from the still lake, they could hardly have recognized the colonel and the Harmons, even if they had looked that way.
"It"s Sylvia, mother," said Archie, glaring at the girl. "But isn"t she grown! And isn"t she lovely? Oh, Ju-u-ukes!"
His heavy lips thickened outwards as he repeated the mysterious e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, and there was more colour than usual in his dark face. He was but little older than Sylvia, and the two had played together as small children, but he had never shown any special preference for her as a playmate. What struck him, now, was evidently her beauty. There was a look in his eyes, and a sort of bristling of the meeting eyebrows that reminded Helen of his father, and her white lids quivered for an instant at the recollection, while she felt a little chill run through her.
The colonel also saw.
"Shall we cross over and speak to them?" he asked in a low voice. "Or shall we just go on?"
"Let us go on," answered Helen. "I will go and see them later.
Besides, we have pa.s.sed them now. Let us go on and get into the shade; it is dreadfully hot here."
"Won"t you stop and speak to them, mother?" asked Archie Harmon, in a tone of deep disappointment. "Why, we have not seen them for ever so long!"
"We shall see them by and by," answered his mother. "It"s too hot to go back now."
The young man turned his head and lagged a little, looking after the girl"s graceful figure, till he stumbled awkwardly against a curbstone.
But he did not protest any more. In his dull way, he worshipped his mother as a superior being, and hitherto he had always obeyed her with a half-childish confidence. His arrested intelligence still saw her as he had seen her ten years earlier, as a sort of high and protecting wisdom incarnate for his benefit, able to answer all questions and to provide him with unlimited pocket-money wherewith to buy bright-coloured posters and other gaudy things that attracted him. Up to a certain point, he could be trusted to himself, for he was almost as far from being an idiot as he was from being a normally thinking man. He was about as intelligent and about as well informed as a rather unusually dull schoolboy of twelve years or thereabouts. He did not lose his way in the streets, nor drop his money out of his pockets, and he could speak a little French and German which he had learned from a foreign nurse, enough to buy a ticket or order a meal. But he had scarcely outgrown toys, and his chief delight was to listen to the stories his mother told him. She was not very inventive, and she told the same old ones year after year. They always seemed to be new to him. He could remember faces and names fairly well, and had an average recollection of events in his own life; but it was impossible to teach him anything from books, his handwriting was the heavy, unformed scrawl of a child, and his spelling was one long disaster.
So far, at least, Helen had found only his intellectual deficiency to deal with, and it was at once a perpetual shame to her and a cause of perpetual sorrow and sympathy. But he was affectionate and docile enough, not cruel as some such beings are, and certainly not vicious, so far as she could see. Dull boys are rarely mischievous, though they are sometimes cruel, for mischief implies an imagination which dulness does not possess.
Archie Harmon had one instinct, or quality, which redeemed him from total insignificance and raised him above the level of an amiable and harmless animal. He had a natural horror of taking life, and felt the strongest possible impulse to save it at any risk to himself. His mother was never quite sure whether he made any distinction between the value of existence to a man, and its worth to an animal, or even to an insect. He seemed not to connect it with its possessor, but to look upon it as something to be preserved for its own sake, under all circ.u.mstances, wherever it manifested itself. At ordinary times he was sufficiently cautious for his own safety, and would hesitate to risk a fall or scratch in climbing, where most boys would have been quite unaware of such possibilities. But at the sight of any living thing in danger, a reckless instinct to save it took possession of him, and his sluggish nature was roused to sudden and direct activity, without any intermediate process of thought. He had again and again given proof of courage that might have shamed most men. He had saved a child from drowning in the North River, diving after it from a ferryboat running at full speed, and he had twice stopped bolting horses--once, a pair with a heavy brougham in the streets of New York, and once, in the park, a dog-cart driven by a lady. On the first of these two occasions he had been a good deal cut and bruised, and had narrowly escaped with his life. His mother was too brave not to be proud of his deeds, but with each one her fears for his own daily safety increased.
He was never violent, but he occasionally showed a strength that surprised her, though he never seemed to care about exhibiting it. Once, she had fallen and hurt her foot, and he had carried her up many stairs like a child. After that, she had felt now and then as men must feel who tame wild beasts and control them.
He worshipped her, and she saw that he looked with a sort of pity on other women, young or old, as not worthy to be compared with her in any way. She had begun to hope that she might be spared the humiliation of ever seeing him in love, despised or pitied, as the case might be, by some commonplace, pretty girl with white teeth and pink cheeks. She feared that, and she feared lest he should some day taste drink, and follow his father"s ways to the same ruin. But as yet he had been like a child.
It was no wonder that she shuddered when, as he looked at Sylvia Strahan, she saw something in his face which had never been there before and heard that queer word of his uttered in such a tone. She wondered whether Colonel Wimpole had heard and seen, too, and for some time the three walked on in silence.
"Will you come in?" asked Mrs. Harmon, as they reached the door of her hotel.
The colonel followed her to her little sitting-room, and Archie disappeared; for the conversation of those whom he still, in his own thoughts, regarded as "grown-up people" wearied him beyond bearing.
"My dear friend," said Colonel Wimpole, when they were alone, "I am so very glad to see you!"
He held one of her hands in his while he spoke the conventional words, his eyes were a little misty, and there was a certain tone in his voice which no one but Helen Harmon had ever heard.