________________________________________________
_ The next evening Alexander dined alone at
a club, and at about nine o'clock he dropped in
at the Duke of York's. The house was sold
out and he stood through the second act.
When he returned to his hotel he examined
the new directory, and found Miss Burgoyne's
address still given as off Bedford Square,
though at a new number. He remembered that,
in so far as she had been brought up at all,
she had been brought up in Bloomsbury.
Her father and mother played in the
provinces most of the year, and she was left a
great deal in the care of an old aunt who was
crippled by rheumatism and who had had to
leave the stage altogether. In the days when
Alexander knew her, Hilda always managed to have
a lodging of some sort about Bedford Square,
because she clung tenaciously to such
scraps and shreds of memories as were
connected with it. The mummy room of the
British Museum had been one of the chief
delights of her childhood. That forbidding
pile was the goal of her truant fancy, and she
was sometimes taken there for a treat, as
other children are taken to the theatre. It was
long since Alexander had thought of any of
these things, but now they came back to him
quite fresh, and had a significance they did
not have when they were first told him in his
restless twenties. So she was still in the
old neighborhood, near Bedford Square.
The new number probably meant increased
prosperity. He hoped so. He would like to know
that she was snugly settled. He looked at his
watch. It was a quarter past ten; she would
not be home for a good two hours yet, and he
might as well walk over and have a look at
the place. He remembered the shortest way.
It was a warm, smoky evening, and there
was a grimy moon. He went through Covent
Garden to Oxford Street, and as he turned
into Museum Street he walked more slowly,
smiling at his own nervousness as he
approached the sullen gray mass at the end.
He had not been inside the Museum, actually,
since he and Hilda used to meet there;
sometimes to set out for gay adventures at
Twickenham or Richmond, sometimes to linger
about the place for a while and to ponder by
Lord Elgin's marbles upon the lastingness of
some things, or, in the mummy room, upon
the awful brevity of others. Since then
Bartley had always thought of the British
Museum as the ultimate repository of mortality,
where all the dead things in the world were
assembled to make one's hour of youth the
more precious. One trembled lest before he
got out it might somehow escape him, lest he
might drop the glass from over-eagerness and
see it shivered on the stone floor at his feet.
How one hid his youth under his coat and
hugged it! And how good it was to turn
one's back upon all that vaulted cold, to take
Hilda's arm and hurry out of the great door
and down the steps into the sunlight among
the pigeons--to know that the warm and vital
thing within him was still there and had not
been snatched away to flush Caesar's lean
cheek or to feed the veins of some bearded
Assyrian king. They in their day had carried
the flaming liquor, but to-day was his! So the
song used to run in his head those summer
mornings a dozen years ago. Alexander
walked by the place very quietly, as if
he were afraid of waking some one.
He crossed Bedford Square and found the
number he was looking for. The house,
a comfortable, well-kept place enough,
was dark except for the four front windows
on the second floor, where a low, even light was
burning behind the white muslin sash curtains.
Outside there were window boxes, painted white
and full of flowers. Bartley was making
a third round of the Square when he heard the
far-flung hoof-beats of a hansom-cab horse,
driven rapidly. He looked at his watch,
and was astonished to find that it was
a few minutes after twelve. He turned and
walked back along the iron railing as the
cab came up to Hilda's number and stopped.
The hansom must have been one that she employed
regularly, for she did not stop to pay the driver.
She stepped out quickly and lightly.
He heard her cheerful "Good-night, cabby,"
as she ran up the steps and opened the
door with a latchkey. In a few moments the
lights flared up brightly behind the white
curtains, and as he walked away he heard a
window raised. But he had gone too far to
look up without turning round. He went back
to his hotel, feeling that he had had a good
evening, and he slept well.
For the next few days Alexander was very busy.
He took a desk in the office of a Scotch
engineering firm on Henrietta Street,
and was at work almost constantly.
He avoided the clubs and usually dined alone
at his hotel. One afternoon, after he had tea,
he started for a walk down the Embankment
toward Westminster, intending to end his
stroll at Bedford Square and to ask whether
Miss Burgoyne would let him take her to the
theatre. But he did not go so far. When he
reached the Abbey, he turned back and
crossed Westminster Bridge and sat down to
watch the trails of smoke behind the Houses
of Parliament catch fire with the sunset.
The slender towers were washed by a rain of
golden light and licked by little flickering
flames; Somerset House and the bleached
gray pinnacles about Whitehall were floated
in a luminous haze. The yellow light poured
through the trees and the leaves seemed to
burn with soft fires. There was a smell of
acacias in the air everywhere, and the
laburnums were dripping gold over the walls
of the gardens. It was a sweet, lonely kind
of summer evening. Remembering Hilda as she
used to be, was doubtless more satisfactory
than seeing her as she must be now--and,
after all, Alexander asked himself, what was
it but his own young years that he was
remembering?
He crossed back to Westminster, went up
to the Temple, and sat down to smoke in
the Middle Temple gardens, listening to the
thin voice of the fountain and smelling the
spice of the sycamores that came out heavily
in the damp evening air. He thought, as he
sat there, about a great many things: about
his own youth and Hilda's; above all, he
thought of how glorious it had been, and how
quickly it had passed; and, when it had
passed, how little worth while anything was.
None of the things he had gained in the least
compensated. In the last six years his
reputation had become, as the saying is, popular.
Four years ago he had been called to Japan to
deliver, at the Emperor's request, a course of
lectures at the Imperial University, and had
instituted reforms throughout the islands, not
only in the practice of bridge-building but in
drainage and road-making. On his return he
had undertaken the bridge at Moorlock, in
Canada, the most important piece of bridge-
building going on in the world,--a test,
indeed, of how far the latest practice in bridge
structure could be carried. It was a spectacular
undertaking by reason of its very size, and
Bartley realized that, whatever else he might
do, he would probably always be known as
the engineer who designed the great Moorlock
Bridge, the longest cantilever in existence.
Yet it was to him the least satisfactory thing
he had ever done. He was cramped in every
way by a niggardly commission, and was
using lighter structural material than he
thought proper. He had vexations enough,
too, with his work at home. He had several
bridges under way in the United States, and
they were always being held up by strikes and
delays resulting from a general industrial unrest.
Though Alexander often told himself he
had never put more into his work than he had
done in the last few years, he had to admit
that he had never got so little out of it.
He was paying for success, too, in the demands
made on his time by boards of civic enterprise
and committees of public welfare. The obligations
imposed by his wife's fortune and position
were sometimes distracting to a man who
followed his profession, and he was
expected to be interested in a great many
worthy endeavors on her account as well as
on his own. His existence was becoming a
network of great and little details. He had
expected that success would bring him
freedom and power; but it had brought only
power that was in itself another kind of
restraint. He had always meant to keep his
personal liberty at all costs, as old MacKeller,
his first chief, had done, and not, like so
many American engineers, to become a part
of a professional movement, a cautious board
member, a Nestor de pontibus. He happened
to be engaged in work of public utility, but
he was not willing to become what is called a
public man. He found himself living exactly
the kind of life he had determined to escape.
What, he asked himself, did he want with
these genial honors and substantial comforts?
Hardships and difficulties he had carried
lightly; overwork had not exhausted him; but this
dead calm of middle life which confronted him,--
of that he was afraid. He was not ready for it.
It was like being buried alive. In his youth
he would not have believed such a thing possible.
The one thing he had really wanted all his life
was to be free; and there was still something
unconquered in him, something besides the
strong work-horse that his profession had made of him.
He felt rich to-night in the possession of that
unstultified survival; in the light of his
experience, it was more precious than honors
or achievement. In all those busy, successful
years there had been nothing so good as this
hour of wild light-heartedness. This feeling
was the only happiness that was real to him,
and such hours were the only ones in which
he could feel his own continuous identity--
feel the boy he had been in the rough days of
the old West, feel the youth who had worked
his way across the ocean on a cattle-ship and
gone to study in Paris without a dollar in his
pocket. The man who sat in his offices in
Boston was only a powerful machine. Under
the activities of that machine the person who,
in such moments as this, he felt to be himself,
was fading and dying. He remembered how,
when he was a little boy and his father
called him in the morning, he used to leap
from his bed into the full consciousness of
himself. That consciousness was Life itself.
Whatever took its place, action, reflection,
the power of concentrated thought, were only
functions of a mechanism useful to society;
things that could be bought in the market.
There was only one thing that had an
absolute value for each individual, and it was
just that original impulse, that internal heat,
that feeling of one's self in one's own breast.
When Alexander walked back to his hotel,
the red and green lights were blinking
along the docks on the farther shore,
and the soft white stars were shining
in the wide sky above the river.
The next night, and the next, Alexander
repeated this same foolish performance.
It was always Miss Burgoyne whom he started
out to find, and he got no farther than the
Temple gardens and the Embankment. It was
a pleasant kind of loneliness. To a man who
was so little given to reflection, whose dreams
always took the form of definite ideas,
reaching into the future, there was a seductive
excitement in renewing old experiences in
imagination. He started out upon these walks
half guiltily, with a curious longing and
expectancy which were wholly gratified by
solitude. Solitude, but not solitariness;
for he walked shoulder to shoulder with a
shadowy companion--not little Hilda Burgoyne,
by any means, but some one vastly dearer to him
than she had ever been--his own young self,
the youth who had waited for him upon the
steps of the British Museum that night, and
who, though he had tried to pass so quietly,
had known him and come down and linked
an arm in his.
It was not until long afterward that
Alexander learned that for him this youth
was the most dangerous of companions.
One Sunday evening, at Lady Walford's,
Alexander did at last meet Hilda Burgoyne.
Mainhall had told him that she would probably
be there. He looked about for her rather
nervously, and finally found her at the farther
end of the large drawing-room, the centre of
a circle of men, young and old. She was
apparently telling them a story. They were
all laughing and bending toward her. When
she saw Alexander, she rose quickly and put
out her hand. The other men drew back a
little to let him approach.
"Mr. Alexander! I am delighted. Have you been
in London long?"
Bartley bowed, somewhat laboriously,
over her hand. "Long enough to have seen
you more than once. How fine it all is!"
She laughed as if she were pleased. "I'm glad
you think so. I like it. Won't you join us here?"
"Miss Burgoyne was just telling us about
a donkey-boy she had in Galway last summer,"
Sir Harry Towne explained as the circle
closed up again. Lord Westmere stroked
his long white mustache with his bloodless
hand and looked at Alexander blankly.
Hilda was a good story-teller. She was
sitting on the edge of her chair, as if she
had alighted there for a moment only.
Her primrose satin gown seemed like a soft sheath
for her slender, supple figure, and its delicate
color suited her white Irish skin and brown
hair. Whatever she wore, people felt the
charm of her active, girlish body with its
slender hips and quick, eager shoulders.
Alexander heard little of the story, but he
watched Hilda intently. She must certainly,
he reflected, be thirty, and he was honestly
delighted to see that the years had treated her
so indulgently. If her face had changed at all,
it was in a slight hardening of the mouth--
still eager enough to be very disconcerting
at times, he felt--and in an added air of self-
possession and self-reliance. She carried her
head, too, a little more resolutely.
When the story was finished, Miss Burgoyne
turned pointedly to Alexander, and the
other men drifted away.
"I thought I saw you in MacConnell's box
with Mainhall one evening, but I supposed
you had left town before this."
She looked at him frankly and cordially,
as if he were indeed merely an old friend
whom she was glad to meet again.
"No, I've been mooning about here."
Hilda laughed gayly. "Mooning! I see
you mooning! You must be the busiest man
in the world. Time and success have done
well by you, you know. You're handsomer
than ever and you've gained a grand manner."
Alexander blushed and bowed. "Time and
success have been good friends to both of us.
Aren't you tremendously pleased with yourself?"
She laughed again and shrugged her shoulders.
"Oh, so-so. But I want to hear about you.
Several years ago I read such a lot in the
papers about the wonderful things you did
in Japan, and how the Emperor decorated you.
What was it, Commander of the Order of
the Rising Sun? That sounds like `The
Mikado.' And what about your new bridge--
in Canada, isn't it, and it's to be the longest
one in the world and has some queer name I
can't remember."
Bartley shook his head and smiled drolly.
"Since when have you been interested in
bridges? Or have you learned to be interested
in everything? And is that a part of success?"
"Why, how absurd! As if I were not
always interested!" Hilda exclaimed.
"Well, I think we won't talk about bridges here,
at any rate." Bartley looked down at the toe
of her yellow slipper which was tapping the rug
impatiently under the hem of her gown.
"But I wonder whether you'd think me impertinent
if I asked you to let me come to see you sometime
and tell you about them?"
"Why should I? Ever so many people
come on Sunday afternoons."
"I know. Mainhall offered to take me.
But you must know that I've been in London
several times within the last few years, and
you might very well think that just now is a
rather inopportune time--"
She cut him short. "Nonsense. One of the
pleasantest things about success is that it
makes people want to look one up, if that's
what you mean. I'm like every one else--
more agreeable to meet when things are going
well with me. Don't you suppose it gives me
any pleasure to do something that people like?"
"Does it? Oh, how fine it all is, your
coming on like this! But I didn't want you to
think it was because of that I wanted to see you."
He spoke very seriously and looked down at the floor.
Hilda studied him in wide-eyed astonishment
for a moment, and then broke into a low,
amused laugh. "My dear Mr. Alexander,
you have strange delicacies. If you please,
that is exactly why you wish to see me.
We understand that, do we not?"
Bartley looked ruffled and turned the seal
ring on his little finger about awkwardly.
Hilda leaned back in her chair, watching
him indulgently out of her shrewd eyes.
"Come, don't be angry, but don't try to pose
for me, or to be anything but what you are.
If you care to come, it's yourself I'll be glad
to see, and you thinking well of yourself.
Don't try to wear a cloak of humility; it
doesn't become you. Stalk in as you are and
don't make excuses. I'm not accustomed to
inquiring into the motives of my guests. That
would hardly be safe, even for Lady Walford,
in a great house like this."
"Sunday afternoon, then," said Alexander,
as she rose to join her hostess.
"How early may I come?"
She gave him her hand and flushed and
laughed. He bent over it a little stiffly.
She went away on Lady Walford's arm, and as he
stood watching her yellow train glide down
the long floor he looked rather sullen. He felt
that he had not come out of it very brilliantly. _
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