That was the last Kedzie saw of Skip. She did not miss him. She hated him for annoying her pride and she hated the law that she used for her divorce, because it required her to wait three months before the interlocutory decree should become final. The time was hazardously long yet short, in a sense, for her alimony was to end at the end of three months if she married again, and marrying again was her next ambition. The judge had fixed her alimony at $30,000 a year, and an allowance for costs. Beattie tried to make a huge cost settlement, but McNiven knew of Kedzie's interest in the Marquess and he refused the bait. So Kedzie got only $7,500. She found it a ruinously small capital to begin life as a Marchioness on—she that had had only two dollars to begin life in New York on! The Marquess was very nice about it, and said he didn't want any of Dyckman's dirty money. But Kedzie thought of life in England with alarm, especially as she had the American comic-opera idea that all foreign peers are penniless. She dreaded to think what might happen in that three months' interregnum between husband II and husband III. Enough was happening in the rest of the world.

The annus miserabilis 1917 had begun with the determination of the German Empire to render the seas impassable and to withdraw the pledge to President Wilson that merchant ships should not be sunk till the passengers and crew had a chance to get into open boats. On January 31, 1917, "Frightfulness" began anew, and the undersea fleets, enormously increased, were set loose in shoals. Having no commerce of her own afloat, it was safe for Germany to sink any vessel anywhere.

Kedzie began to wonder if she would ever dare to sail for he future ancestral home, and if she did how long her ship would last.

On February 3d the U-53, which had sunk Strathdene's ship off Newport, sank an American freighter bound from Galveston to Liverpool. Other American vessels followed her into the depths. On February 27th the Laconia, of 18,000 tons burden, was torpedoed and twelve passengers died of exposure in the bitter weather. In one of the open boats a Catholic priest administered the last rites to seven persons.

Mrs. Hoy, of Chicago, died in the arms of her daughter and her body slipped into the icy waves, to be followed by her daughter's a few minutes later.

These seemed to make up a sufficient total of American women drowned, and on the next day the President declared that the long-awaited "overt act" had been committed. He asked Congress to declare that peace with Germany was ended. Her ambassador was sent home and ours called home.

In March the British captured Bagdad and the Germans suddenly retreated along a sixty-mile front in France; then the Russian revolution abruptly changed the almighty Czar into a weeping prisoner digging snow. And the vast burying-ground of Siberia gave up its living dead in a sudden apocalypse of freedom. Fifty thousand sledges sped across the steppes laden with returning exiles, chains stil dangling at many a wrist from the dearth of blacksmiths to strike them off.

Kedzie did not value the privilege of living in times when epochs of history were crowded into weeks and cycles completed in days. The revolution in Russia disturbed Kedzie as it did many a monarch, and she said to her mother:

"What a shame to treat the poor Czar so badly! Strathie and I were planning to visit Russia after the war, too. The Czar was awfully nice to Strathie once and I was sure we'd be invited to live right in the Duma or the Kremlin or whatever they call the palace. And now they've got a cheap and nasty old republic over there! And they're talking of having republics everywhere. What could be more stupid? As if everybody was born free and equal. Mixing all the aristocrats right up with the common herd!"

Mrs. Thropp agreed that it was simply terrible.

"Do you know what?" Kedzie gasped.

"What?" her mother echoed.

"I've just had a hunch. I'll bet that by the time I get married to Strathie there'll be nothing left but republics, and no titles at tall. His people came over with Henry the Conqueror and his title will last just long enough for me to reach for it, and then—woof! Wouldn't it be just my luck to become plain Mrs. Strathdene after all I've had to go through! Honestly, m'mah, don't I just have the dog-on'dest luck!"

"It's perfectly awful," said Mrs. Thropp, "but bad luck can't go on forever."

On April 2d the future Mrs. Strathdene was cheered by an extraordinary spectacle—newspapers in the Metropolitan Opera House! Kedzie was there with her waning Marquess. The occasion was rare enough in itself, for an American opera was being heard: "The Canterbury Pilgrims," with Mr. Reginald De Koven's music to Mr. Percy Mackaye's text.

Suddenly, in the entr'acte the unheard-of thing—the newspapers—appeared in the boxes and about the house! People spread evening extras on the rails and read excitedly that President Wilson had gone to Congress and asked it to declare that a state of war existed and had existed.

The Italian manager directed the Polish conductor to play "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the three thousand men and women of the audience made a chorus on the obverse side of the curtain.

Mr. Gerard, lately returned from Germany, called for "Three cheers for President Wilson," and there were loud huzzahs for him and for the Allies.

"You and I are allies now," Kedzie murmured to the Marquess. She thought a trifle better of her country.

The Austrian prima donna fainted and could not appear in the last act, and everybody went home expecting to see the vigor of Uncle Sam displayed in a swift and tremendous delivery of a blow long, long withheld.

The vigor was displayed in a tremendous delivery of words far better withheld.

It was a week before Congress agreed that war existed and over a month passed before Congress agreed upon the nature of the army to be raised. Nearly four months passed before the draft was made.

Jim Dyckman was almost glad of the delay, for it gave him hope of settling his spiritual affairs in time to be a soldier. He was determined to marry Charity as soon as the three months' probation term was over. But Charity said no! Cowering in seclusion from the eyes of her world, she cherished a dream that when the war broke and the dead began to topple and the wounded to bleed, she might expiate the crime she had not committed, by devoting to her own people her practised mercies. She was afraid to offer them now, or even to make her appearance among the multitudinous associations that sprang up everywhere in a frantic effort to make America ready in two weeks for a war that had been inevitable for two years. Not only a war was to be fought, but a world famine.

Charity was ashamed to show her white face even at the Red Cross. She busied herself with writing checks for the snow-storm of appeals that choked her mail. Otherwise she pined in idleness, refusing more than ever the devotion that Jim offered her now in a longing that increased with denial.

She suffered infinitely, yet mocked her own sufferings as petty trifles. She contrasted them with what the millions on millions of Europe's men were enduring as they huddled in the snow-drenched, grenade-spattered trenches, or agonized in all their wounds out in the No-Man's Land between the trenches. She told herself that her own heartaches were negligible, despicable against the innumerable anguishes of the women who saw their men, their old men, their young men, their lads, going into the eternal mills of the war, while hunger and loneliness and toil unknown to women before made up their daily portion.

She accused herself for still remaining apart from that continental sisterhood of grief. All America seemed to be playing Hamlet, debating, deferring, letting irresolution inhibit every necessary duty.

Since her country had disowned her and refused her justice or chivalry, she was tempted to disown her country and claim citizenship among those who could fight and could sacrifice and could endure.

It was not easy to persuade a captain to take a woman passenger aboard his ship, now that the German ambition was to sink a million tons a month, but she resolved again to go if she had to stowaway.

First she would finish her affairs, make her will, and burn her letters. She had neglected to change the testament she had signed when she became Peter Cheever's wife, and took a pride in making him her sole heir. It would be ridiculous to make him such a post-mortem gift now, now that he had not only money enough, but a wife that satisfied him, and a child.

She wondered whom to leave her money to. Jim Dyckman's name kept recurring to her and she smiled at that, for he had more money than he could use. Besides, the mention of his name in her will would confirm the public belief in their intrigue. She had nobody to inflict her inheritance upon but a few relatives, mostly rich enough. She decided to establish a fund for her own orphans, the children of other women whom she had adopted.

Making a will is in sort a preliminary death. Making hers, Charity felt herself already gone, and looked back at life with a finality as from beyond the grave. It was a frightful thing to review her journey from a lofty angel's-eye view.

Her existence looked very petty. Now that her hope and her senses were ended, she felt a grudge against the world that she had got so little out of. She had tried to be a good woman, and her altruism had won her such a bad name that if Dr. Mosely should preach her funeral sermon he would feel that he had revealed a wonderful spirit of forbearance in leaving it unmentioned that she was an abandoned divorcee.

If she had been actually guilty of an intrigue with Jim Dyckman Dr. Mosely would have forgiven her even more warmly, because it was a woman taken in actual adultery who was forgiven, while Charity had tactlessly fought the charge and demanded vindication instead of winsomely appealing for pity.

By a roundabout road of self-surrender she had come to the same destination that she might have reached by the straight path of self-indulgence. She was perilously near to resolving that she had been a fool not to have taken happiness, physical happiness, first. A grand red passion seemed so much more beautiful than a petty blue asceticism.

When she got home from the will-making session with McNiven she began to go over her papers and close the books of her years. She attacked old heaps of bundles of her husband's letters and telegrams, and burned them with difficulty in her fireplace.

She felt no temptation to glance over them, though her lip curled in a grimace of sardonic disgust to consider how much Peter Cheever had been to her and how little he was to her now. The first parcels she burned were addressed to "Miss Charity Coe." How far off it seemed since she had been called "Miss"!

She had been a girl when Cheever's written and spoken words inflamed her. They blazed now as she had blazed. Into that holocaust had gone her youth, her illusions, her virginity, her bridehood, her wifely trust. And all that was left was a black char.

She came upon letters from Jim Dyckman, also, a few. She flung them into the fire with the rest. He had had nothing from her except friendship and girlish romance and a grass-widow's belated affection. Crimson thoughts stole through her dark heart like the lithe blazes interlacing the letters; she wondered if she would have done better to have followed desire and taken love instead of solitude.

She knew that she could have made Jim hers long ago with a little less severity, a less harsh rebuff. The Church condemned her for openly divorcing her husband. She might have kept him on the leash and carried on the affair with Jim that Cheever accused her of if Jim had been complacent and stealthy. Or, she might have kept Jim at her heels till she was rid of Cheever and then have married him. She would have saved him at least from floundering through the marsh where that Kedzie-o'-the-wisp had led him to ultimate disaster.

And now that she had taken stock of her past and put it into the fire, she felt strangely exiled. She had no past, no present, and a future all hazy. Her loneliness was complete. She had to talk to some one, and she telephoned to Jim Dyckman, making her good-bys an excuse.

It was the first time he had been permitted to hear her voice for weeks, and the lonely joy that cried out in his greeting brought warm tears to her dull, dry eyes.

He heard her weeping and he demanded the right to come to see her. She refused him and cut off his plea, hoping that he would come, anyway, and waiting tremulously till the door-bell rang with a forgotten thrill of a caller, a lover calling.

Her maid, who brought her Jim's name, begged with her eyes that he should not be turned away again. Charity nodded and prinked a little and went down-stairs into Jim's arms.

He took her there as if she belonged there and she felt that she did, though she protested, feebly:

"You are not unmarried yet."

They were in that No-Man's-Land. She was neither maid, wife, nor widow, but divorcee. He was neither bachelor, husband, nor widower; he was not even a divorce. He was a Nisi Prius.



CHAPTER XV

The childish old fates played one of their cheapest jokes on Jim Dyckman when, after they had dangled Charity Coe just out of his reach for a lifetime, they flung her at his head. They do those things. They waken the Juliets just a moment too late to save the Romeos and themselves.

Jim had revered Charity as far too good for him, and now everybody wondered if he would do the right thing by her. Prissy Atterbury in a burst of chivalry said it when he said:

"Jim's no gentleman if he doesn't marry Charity."

Pet put it in a more womanly way:

"Unless he's mighty spry she'll nab him. Trust her!"

Among the few people who had caught a glimpse of Charity, no one had been quite cruel enough to say those things to her face, but Charity imagined them. Housed with her sick and terrified imagination for companion, she had imagined nearly everything dismal.

And now, when, by the mere laws of gravitation, she had floated into Jim Dyckman's arms for a moment, she heard the popular doom of them both in the joke he attempted:

"Charity, I've got to marry you to make you an honest woman."

She wrenched free of his embrace with a violence that staggered him. He saw that she was taking his effort at playfulness seriously, even tragically.

"No, no, Jim!" she gasped. "I've brought you enough trouble and enough disgrace. I won't let you ruin your life by marrying me out of pity."

"Pity! Good God!" Jim groaned. "Why, you don't think I meant that, do you? I was just trying to be funny, because I was so happy. I'll promise never to try to be funny again. It was like saying to Venus, 'You're a homely old thing, but I'll let you cook for me'; or saying to—whoever it was was the Goddess of Wisdom, 'You don't know much, but'—Why, Charity Coe, you're Venus and Minerva and all the goddesses rolled into one."

Charity shook her head.

He roared: "If it's pity you're talking about, isn't it about time you had a little for me? Life won't be worth a single continental damn to me if I don't get you."

Charity had needed something of this sort for a long time. It sounded to her like a serenade by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Her acknowledgment was a tearful, smileful giggle-sob:

"Honestly?"

"Honest-to-God-ly!"

"All right, as soon as you're a free man fetch the parson, for I'm pretty tired of being a free woman."

Jim had learned from McNiven that a part of his freedom, when he got it, would be a judicial denial of the right to surrender it for five years. He had learned that if he wanted to marry Charity he must persuade her over into New Jersey. It did not please Jim to have to follow the example of Zada and Cheever, and it hit him as a peculiar cruelty that he and Charity had to accept not only an unearned increment of scandal in the verdict of divorce, but also a marriage contrary to the laws of New York.

New York would respect the ceremonies of New Jersey, but there would be a shadow on the title. Still, such marriages were recognized by the public with little question, just as in the countries where divorce is almost or quite impossible society of all grades has always countenanced unions not too lightly entered into or continued. In such countries words like "mistress," "concubine," and "morganatic wife" take on a decided respectability with a touch of pathos rather than reproach.

Jim had come to beg Charity to accept a marriage with an impediment. He had expected a scene when he proposed a flight across the river and a return to Father Knickerbocker with a request for pardon. But her light suggestion of a religious ceremony threw him into confusion. He mumbled:

"Is a parson absolutely necessary?"

Charity's lips set into a grim line.

"I'll be married by a parson or I'll not be married at all. The Church has enough against me on account of my divorce and this last ghastly thing. To get married outside the Church would cut me off entirely from everything that's sacred. There won't be any difficulty about getting a parson, will there?"

"Oh no, not at all!" Jim protested, "only—oh no, not at all, except—"

"Only what? Except what?"

"You'll have to go to New Jersey to be married."

"Why should I?"

"Entirely on my account, honey. It's because I'm in disgrace."

This way of putting it brought her over that sill with a rush. To be able to endure something for him was a precious ability. She hugged him devoutly, then put his arms away.

When he left her he had a brilliant inspiration. He thought how soothing it would be to her bruised heart, what carron-oil to her blistered reputation, if he got Doctor Mosely to perform the ceremony. Jim was so delighted with the stroke of genius that he went immediately to the pastor's house. The dear old man greeted him with a subdued warmth.

"This is an unusual privilege, dear boy. I haven't seen you for—oh, ever so long. Of course, I have read of you—er—that is—what—to what am I indebted for—"

"You perform marriages, don't you?"

"That is one of my perilous prerogatives. But, of course, I can't guarantee how well my marriages will wear in these restless times."

Jim braved a flippancy: "Then, being an honest dealer, you replace any damaged article, of course?"

"I am afraid I could hardly go so far as that."

"Could you go as far as New Jersey?"

"In my time I have ventured into Macedonia. But why do you ask?"

"You see, in a day or two, I'll be free from my present—that is, my absent wife; and I wanted to know if you could come over and marry me."

"But I thought—I fear—do you mean to say you are marrying some young woman from over there?"

"I'm marrying Charity Coe."

"My dear, dear boy! Really! You can't, you know! She has been divorced and so have you."

"Yes, all quite legally."

"And you ask me to join your hands in holy matrimony?"

"No, just plain legal matrimony. I was joined in holy matrimony once, and I don't insist on that part of it again. But Charity wants a clergyman and I don't mind."

"Really, my son, you know better than to assume this tone to me. You've been away from church too long."

"Well, if you want to get me back, fasten me to Charity. You know she's the best woman that ever lived."

"She is a trifle too rebellious to merit that tribute, I fear."

"Well, give her another chance. She has had enough hard knocks. You ought to go to her rescue."

"Do you think that to be the duty of the Church?"

"It used to be, didn't it? But don't get me into theology. I can't swim. The point is, will you marry Charity to me?"

"No!"

"Wouldn't you marry her to any man?"

"Only to one."

"Who's that?"

"Her former husband."

"But he's married to another woman."

"I do not recognize that marriage."

"Good Lord! Would you like to see Charity married to Cheever again?"

"Yes."

"To Peter Cheever?"

"Yes."

"Whew! Say, Doctor, that's going it pretty strong."

"I do not care to discuss the sacraments with you in your present humor."

"Did you read the trial of that woman last week who killed her husband and was acquitted? Mrs. What's-her-name? You must have read it."

"I pay little attention to the newspaper scandals."

"You ought to—they're what make life what it is. Anyway, this woman had a husband who turned out bad. He was a grafter and a gambler, a drunkard and a brute. He beat her and their five children horribly, and finally she divorced him. The law gave her her freedom in five minutes and there was no fuss about it, because she was poor, and the newspapers have no room for poor folks' marriage troubles—unless they up and kill somebody.

"Well, this woman was getting along all right when some good religious people got at her about the sin of her divorce and the broken sacrament, and they kept at her till finally she consented to remarry her husband—for the children's sake! There was great rejoicing by everybody—except the poor woman. After the remarriage he returned to his old ways and began to beat her again, and finally she emptied a revolver into him."

"Horrible, horrible!"

"Wasn't it? The jury disagreed on the first trial. But on the second the churchpeople who persuaded her to remarry him went on the stand and confessed—or perhaps you would say, boasted—that they persuaded her to remarry him. And then she was acquitted. And that's why the civil law has always had to protect people from—"

Doctor Mosely turned purple at the implication and the insolence. He scolded Jim loftily, but Jim did not cower. He was upheld by his own religion, which was Charity Coe's right to vindication and happiness.

At length he realized that he was harming Charity and not Doctor Mosely. Suddenly he was apologizing humbly:

"I'm very much ashamed of myself. You're an older man and venerable, and I—I oughtn't to have forgotten that."

"You ought not."

"I'll do any penance you say, if you'll only marry Charity and me."

"Don't speak of that again."

He thought of his old friend and attorney, money. He put that forward.

"I'll pay anything."

"Mr. Dyckman!"

"I'll give the church a solid gold reredos or contribute any sum to any alms—"

"Please go. I cannot tolerate any more."

Jim left the old man in such agitation that a reporter named Hallard, who shadowed him, feeling in his journalistic bones that a big story would break about him soon, noted his condition and called on Doctor Mosely. He was still shaken with the storm of defending his ideals from profanation, and Hallard easily drew from him an admission that Mr. Dyckman was bent upon matrimony, also a scathing diatribe on the remarriage of divorced persons as one of the signs of the increasing degeneracy of public morals.

* * * * *

Hallard's paper carried a lovely exclusive story the next morning in noisy head-lines. The other newspapers enviously plagiarized it and set their news-sleuths on Jim's trail. The clergy of all denominations took up the matter as a theme of vital timeliness.

Jim and Charity were beautifully suited to the purposes of both sorts; the newspapers that pulpiteered the news and wrote highly moral editorials for sensation's sake; and the pulpiteers who shouted head-lines and yellow journalism from their rostrums, more for the purpose of self-advertisement than for any devotion to Christly principles of sympathy and gentle comprehension.

Jim was stupefied to find himself once more pilloried and portraited and ballyhooed in the newspapers. But he tightened his jaws and refused to be howled from his path by any coyote pursuit.

His next thought was of the New Jersey clergyman who had married him to Kedzie. He motored over to him.

Jim had told Dr. Mosely that clergymen ought to keep up with the news. He found, to his regret, that the New Jersey dominie did.

He remembered Jim well and heard him out, but shook his head. He explained why, patiently. He had been greatly impressed by the action of the House of Deputies of the Protestant Episcopal Church convened at St. Louis in October, 1916. A new canon had been proposed declaring that "no marriage shall be solemnized in this Church between parties, either of whom has a husband or wife still living, who has been divorced for any cause arising after marriage."

This meant that the innocent party, as well as the guilty, should be denied another chance. The canon had been hotly debated—so hotly that one preacher referred to any wedding of divorced persons as "filth marriage," and others were heard insisting that even Christ's acceptance of adultery as a cause for divorce was an interpolation in the text, and that the whole passage concerning the woman taken in adultery was absent from some ancient manuscripts. A halt was called to this dangerous line of argument, and one clergyman protested that "the question of the integrity of the Scriptures is more important than the question of marriage and divorce." Another clergyman pleaded: "An indissoluble marriage is a fiction. What is the use of tying the Church up to a fiction? It is our business to teach and not to legislate." Eventually the canon was defeated. But many of the clergy were determined to follow it, anyway.

In any case, not only was Charity divorced, but she had been involved in Jim's divorce, and Jim, as the New Jersey preacher pointed out to him, was denied remarriage even by the civil law of New York. The appeal to New Jersey was plainly a subterfuge, and he begged Jim to give Charity up.

"You don't know what you ask," Jim cried. "I'll find somebody with a heart!" And he stormed out.



CHAPTER XVI

Jim reported to Charity his two defeats and the language he had heard and read. Charity's conscience was so clean that her reaction was one of wrath. She pondered her future and Jim's. She could not see what either of them had done so vile that they should be sentenced to celibacy for life, or more probably to an eventual inevitable horror of outward conformity and secret intrigue.

She knew too many people whose wedlock had been a lifelong tolerance of infamy on the part of one or both. Some of the bitterest enemies of divorce were persons who had found it quite unnecessary. She felt that to forgive and to forget became so anti-social a habit in matrimony that no divorce could be worse.

She was afraid of herself, too. She dared not trust herself with life alone. She was too human to be safe. Marriage with Jim would protect him and her from each other and from the numberless temptations awaiting them. Finally, there were no children in the matter.

All arguments prove too much and too little, and in the end become simply our own briefs for our own inclinations. Charity's mood being what it was, she adopted the line of reasoning that led to her own ambition. She spent much time on her knees, but communed chiefly with herself, and rose always confirmed in her belief that to marry Jim Dyckman was the next great business of her existence.

Jim, too, had grown unwontedly earnest. The marriage denounced by the religious had taken on a religious quality. He was inclined to battle for it as for a creed, as the clergymen had battled vainly for the new canon.

He, too, felt a spirit of genuflexion and wanted to speak to God personally; to appeal to Him by a private petition as to a king whose ministers denied mercy.

By his bed he sank down and prayed. He was very solemn, but too uncertain of the solemn voice to use it. He half whispered, half thought:

"O God, I don't know how you want me to act. I only know that my heart keeps on calling for Charity and a home with her, and children some day. There'll never be any children for either of us if we obey the Church. Forgive me if I doubt what these preachers tell me, but I just can't believe it to be your voice. If it is not your voice, what is it that makes me feel it such a sin not to marry Charity? I'm going to, God, unless you stop me. I may be making a big mistake, but if I am you'll understand. You will not be mad at me any more than I am mad at my dog when he misunderstands me, for I know he is a good dog and wants to do what I want him to if he can only learn what it is. If it is not your will that I should marry Charity tell me now so that I can't misunderstand, for if you don't I'm going ahead. If I have to take the punishment afterward, I'll take it rather than leave that poor soul alone. Bless her, O God, and help me. Amen."

And now both Charity and Jim were ready for battle. She set her hand in Jim's and said that she would marry him in spite of all, but that she would not give up her hope of being married by one of her own faith until she had canvassed the entire clergy.

And then began one of the strangest quests ever undertaken, even in this transitional period of matrimony as an institution—a quest so strange that it would seem impossible if it had not actually happened. Jim and Charity hunted a preacher and the press hunted them.

While the journalists waited for the United States to enter the war with soldiers, the reporters kept in practice by scouting after Jim Dyckman and sniping him whenever he showed his head. He succeeded only in getting his resignation from his regiment accepted. He planned to sail for France and fight for France as soon as he had married Charity.

When he failed to secure a minister by letter or telegram he set forth to make personal visits. Sometimes Charity went with him so that there should be no delay or time for a change of mood.

From city to town they went, from village to city, searching for an Episcopalian clergyman to say the desired words. Jim offered any bribery that might suffice, but ahead of him went his notoriety.

Many a warm-hearted clergyman felt sympathy for Jim and Charity and longed to end their curious pilgrimage, but dared not brave the wrath of his fellow-preachers or accept the unwelcome fame that awaited his blessing, and the discipline that would be meted out to him.

Jim's picture was so widely published that when he eluded one crowd another posse sprang up wherever he reappeared. His entrance into a town was a signal for the clergy to scurry to cover. Some of them, to put themselves on record and insure themselves against temptation, denounced Jim and his attachee as traveling fiends, emissaries of the devil.

The wealth that was their drag was proclaimed as their weapon.

The storm grew fiercer and the language more unrestrained. Jim and Charity, reading in the papers the terms applied to them, cowered and shuddered.

Charity grew haggard and peevish. Her obstinacy was hardly more than a lockjaw of fright, the stubbornness of a drowning child afraid to let go.

Jim was almost equally sick. The newspaper pursuit covered him with chagrin. His good old name was precious to him, and he knew how his mother and father were suffering at its abuse, as well as for him in his fugitive distress.

Jim's mother was very much mother. She took into her breast every arrow shot at him. When she saw him she held him fiercely in her arms, her big frame aching with a Valkyrian ardor to lift the brave warrior on a winged horse and carry him away from the earth.

It is hard for the best of mothers to love even the best of daughters-in-law, for how can two fires prosper on the same fuel? It had been a little too hard for Mrs. Dyckman to love Kedzie. It was all too easy to hate her now and to denounce her till even Jim winced.

"Don't think of her, mother," he pleaded. "Don't let's speak of her any more. She's only one of my past mistakes. You never mention those—why not let her drop?"

"All right, honey. You must forgive me. I'm only a sour old woman and it breaks my heart to think of that little, common—"

"There you go again," her husband growled, sick with grief, too. "Let the little cat go."

"What's killing me," Jim said, "is thinking of what I've brought on Charity. It makes me want to die."

"But you'll have to live for her sake—and your mother's," said his mother. "Charity's the only woman I know that's worth fighting for. I've known her since she was born and I never knew her to do or say one single petty thing. She hasn't got one of those qualities that women hate so much in women."

"Then why should she have to suffer such persecution?" Jim cried. "My God! is chivalry dead in the world?"

His father flung his arm around him and hugged him roughly. "Not while there's a man like you to fight for a woman like her. I never was so proud of anything as I am of being the father of a big fellow like you, who can make a battle like yours for love of a woman."

"But why should I have to fight for her? Whose business is it but ours that we want to get married decently and live together quietly? Isn't this a free country?"

"Only the press is free," said his father. "And poor Charity is getting nothing more than women have always got who've dared to ask for their own way. They used to throw 'em to the lions, or bowstring 'em in the harems. And in the days of real chivalry they burned 'em at the stake or locked 'em up in convents or castles. But don't you worry, Jim, Charity has you for a champion and she's mighty lucky. Go on and fight the muckers and the muck-rakers, and don't let the reporters or the preachers scare you away from doing the one right thing."

The newspapers kept within the almost boundless limits of the libel law. Jim had publicity enough, and he did not care to add to it by a libel suit, nor could he bring himself to make a personal attack on any of his pursuers. His discretion took on the look of poltroonery and he groveled in shame.

One bitter day he motored with Charity to a village where a clergyman lived who had wearied of the persecution and volunteered his offices. When they arrived his wife told Jim that he was stricken ill. He had fretted himself into his bed.

Jim bundled Charity into his car and set forth again in a storm. The car skidded and turned turtle in a ditch. By some chance neither of them was more than bruised and muddied. The hamper of food was spilled and broken and they had hours to wait by the roadside while a wrecking crew came from the nearest city to right the car.

While they waited, forlorn and shivering, like two tramps rather than like two malefactors of great wealth, their hunger drove them to banquet on their little store.

Jim, gnawing at a crust of suspicious cleanliness, studied Charity where she huddled in the shelter of a dripping tree, like a queen driven forth into exile. And the tears poured from his eyes and salted the bread. He had eaten the food of his own tears. He had tasted life and found it bitter.

When the men came with the ropes and the tackle necessary and slowly righted the car he found that its engine ran again and he had speed and strength once more as his servants. He tried to encourage Charity with a figure of speech.

"They've got us ditched, honey, for a while, but we'll get righted soon and then life will be as smooth as smooth."

She tried to smile for his sake, but she had finished with hope.



CHAPTER XVII

While Jim and Charity sat by the roadside the Marchioness of Strathdene, nee Kedzie Thropp, of Nimrim, sat on a fine cushion and salted with her tears the toasted English crumpet she was having with her tea.

She had been married indeed, but the same ban that fell upon Jim's remarriage had forbidden her the wedding of her dreams. She was the innocent party to the divorce and she was married in a church. But it was not of the Episcopal creed, which she was now calling the Church of England. Kedzie-like, she still wanted what she could not get and grieved over what she got. It is usual to berate people of her sort, but they are no more to be blamed than other dyspeptics. Souls, like stomachs, cannot always coordinate appetite and digestion.

Kedzie had, however, found a husband who would be permanently precious to her, since she would never be certain of him. Like her, he was restless, volatile, and maintained his equilibrium as a bicycle does only by keeping on going. He was mad to be off to the clouds of France. There was a delay because ships were sailing infrequently, and their departure was kept secret. Passengers had to go aboard and wait.

Bidding "bon voyage" was no longer the stupid dock-party platitude it had been. It was bidding "good-by" with faint hope of "au revoir." Ladies going abroad, even brides, thought little of their deck costumes so long as they included a well-tailored life-preserver.

Mrs. Thropp stared at Kedzie and breathed hard in her creaking satin. And Adna looked out at her over the high collar that took a nip at his Adam's apple every time he swallowed it.

The old parents were sad with an unwonted sorrow. They had money at last and they had even been hauled up close to the aristocracy as the tail to Kite Kedzie. But now they had time to realize that they were to lose this pretty thing they had somehow been responsible for yet unable to control. They had nearly everything else, so their child was to be taken from them.

Suddenly they loved her with a grave-side ache. She was their baby, their little girl, their youth, their beauty, their romance, their daughter. And perhaps in a few days she would be shattered and dead in a torpedoed ship. Perhaps in some high-flung lifeboat she would be crouching all drenched and stuttering with cold and dying with terror.

Mrs. Thropp broke into big sobs that jolted her sides and she fell over against Adna, who did not know how to comfort her. He held her in arms like a bear's and patted her with heavy paws, but she felt on her head the drip-drip of his tears. And thus Kedzie by her departure brought them together in a remarriage, a poor sort of honeymoon wherein they had little but the bitter-sweet privilege of helping each other suffer.

The picture of their welded misery brought Kedzie a return, too, to her child hunger for parentage. She wanted a mother and a father and she could not have them. She went to put her exquisite arms about them and the three so dissimilar heads were grotesquely united.

The Marquess of Strathdene pretended to be disgusted and stormed out. But that was because he did not want to be seen making an ass of himself, weeping as Bottom the Weaver wept. He flung away his salted and extinguished cigarette and wondered what was the matter with the world where nothing ever came out right.

His own mother was weeping all the time and her letters told always of new losses. The newspapers kept printing stories of Strathdene's chums being put away in a trench or a hospital, or falling from the clouds dead.

And starvation was coming everywhere; in England there was talk of famine, and all America had gone mad with fear of it. But still the war went on in a universal suicide which nobody could stop, and peace, the one thing that everybody wanted, was wanted by nobody on any terms that anybody else would even discuss.

As he agonized with his philosophy and lighted another cigarette, the street roared like hurricane. Below the windows the French Mission was proceeding up Fifth Avenue. Marechal Joseph Joffre and Rene Viviani were awakening tumult in the American heart and stirring it to the rescue of France and of England and of Belgium and Italy, with what outcome none could know. One could only know that at last the great flood of war had encircled the United States, reducing it to the old primeval problems and emotions: how to get enough to eat, how to get weapons, how to find and beat down the enemy, how to endure the farewells of fathers, mothers, sons, sisters, sweethearts, wives. Everything was complex beyond understanding for minds, but things were very simple for hearts; they had only to ache with sorrow or wrath.

The Marchioness of Strathdene and her airy husband reached England without being submarined, and there, to her great surprise, Kedzie found a whole new universe of things not quite right. "If only it were otherwise!" was still the perpetual alibi of contentment.



CHAPTER XVIII

From the glory of the festivals of alliance Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe were absent. Both were so eager to be abroad in the battle that they did not miss the flag-waving. But they wanted to cross the sea together. The importance of this ambition tempted Charity to a desperate conclusion that the formalities of her union with Jim did not matter so long as they were together. Yet the risk of death was so inescapable and she was so imbued with churchliness that her dreams were filled with visions of herself dead and buried in unhallowed ground, of herself and Jim standing at heaven's gate and turned away for lack of a blessing on their union.

Her soul was about ready to break completely, but her body gave out first. It was in a small town in New Jersey that they found themselves weather-bound.

The sky seemed to rain ice-water and they took refuge in the village's one hotel, a dismal place near the freight-station. The entrance was up a narrow staircase, past a bar-room door.

The rooms were ill furnished and ill kept, and the noise of screaming locomotives and jangling freight-cars was incessant. But there was no other hospitality to be had in the town.

Jim left Charity at her door and begged her to sleep. Her dull eyes and doddering head promised for her.

He went to his own room and laughed at the cheap wretchedness of it: the cracked pitcher in the cracked bowl, the washstand whose lower door would not stay open, the two yellow towels in the rack, the bureau, the cane chairs, and the iron bed with its thin mattress and neglected drapery.

He lowered himself into a rickety rocker and looked out through the dirtier window at the dirty town. The only place to go was to sleep, and he tried to make the journey. But a ferocious resentment at the idiocy of things drove away repose.

He resolved that he had been a fool long enough. He would give up the vain effort to conform, and would take Charity without sanction. He was impatient to go to her then and there, but he dared not approach her till she had rested.

He remembered a book he had picked up at one of their villages of denial. It was one of those numberless books everybody is supposed to have read. For that reason he had found it almost impossible to begin. But he was desperate enough to read even a classic. He hoped that it would be a soporific. That was his definition of a classic.

The book was the Reverend Charles Kingsley's Hypatia. Jim was down on the Episcopal clergy one and all, and he read with prejudice, skipping the preface, of course, which set forth the unusual impulse of a churchman to help the Church of his own day by pointing out the crimes and errors of the Church of an earlier day; a too, too rare appeal to truth for the sake of salvation by the way of truth.

As Jim glanced angrily through the early pages, the pictures of life in the fifth century caught and quickened his gritty eyes. He skimmed the passages that did not hold him, but as the hours went on he grew more unable to let go.

The sacred lunch hour passed by ignored. The rain beat down on the roof as the words rained up from the page. The character of that eminently wise and beautiful and good Hypatia seemed to be Charity in ancient costume. The hostility of the grimy churchmen of that day infuriated him. He cursed and growled as he read.

The persecution of Hypatia wrought him to such wrath that he wanted to turn back the centuries and go to her defense. He breathed hard as he came to the last of the book and read of the lynching of Hypatia, the attack of the Christians upon her chariot, the dragging of her exquisite body through the streets, and even into the church, and up to the altar, up to the foot of "the colossal Christ watching unmoved from off the wall, his right hand raised to give a blessing—or a curse?"

Jim panted as Philammon did, tracing her through the streets by the fragments of her torn robes and fighting through the mob in vain to reach her and shield her. He became Philammon and saw not words on a page, but a tragedy that lived again.

She shook herself free from her tormentors, and, springing back, rose for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around—shame and indignation in those wide clear eyes, but not a stain of fear. With one hand she clasped her golden locks around her; the other long white arm was stretched upward toward the great still Christ, appealing—and who dare say, in vain?—from man to God.

Her lips were opened to speak; but the words that should have come from them reached God's ear alone; for in an instant Peter struck her down, the dark mass closed over her again ... and then wail on wail, long, wild, ear-piercing, rang along the vaulted roofs and thrilled like the trumpet of avenging angels through Philammon's ears.

Crushed against a pillar, unable to move in the dense mass, he pressed his hands over his ears. He could not shut out those shrieks! When would they end? What in the name of the God of mercy were they doing? Tearing her piecemeal? Yes, and worse than that. And still the shrieks rang on, and still the great Christ looked down on Philammon with that calm, intolerable eye, and would not turn away. And over His head was written in the rainbow, "I am the same, yesterday, to-day, and forever!" The same as He was in Judea of old, Philammon? Then what are these, and in whose temple? And he covered his face with his hands, and longed to die.

It was over. The shrieks had died away into moans; the moans to silence. How long had he been there? An hour, or an eternity? Thank God it was over! For her sake—but for theirs?

Startled by the vividness of the murder, Jim looked up from the book, thinking that he had heard indeed the shrieks of Charity in a death-agony. The walls seemed to quiver still with their reverberation.

He put down the book in terror and saw where he was. It was like waking from a nightmare. He was glad to find that he was not in a temple of ancient Alexandria, but in even that dingy New Jersey inn.

He wondered if Charity had not died. He hesitated to go to her door and knock. She needed sleep so much that he hardly dared to risk waking her, even to assure himself that she was alive.

He went to the window and saw two men under umbrellas talking in the yard between the hotel wings. They would not have been laughing as they were if they had heard shrieks.

His eye was caught by a window opposite his. There sat Charity in a heavy bath-robe; her hair was down; she had evidently dropped into the chair by the open window and fallen asleep.

Jim stared at her and was reminded of how he had stared at Kedzie on his other wedding journey. Only, Kedzie had been his bride, and Charity was not yet, and might never be. Kedzie was girlish against an auroral sky; she was rather illumined than dressed in silk. Charity was a heart-sick woman, driven and fagged, and swaddled now in a heavy woolen blanket of great bunches and wrinkles. Kedzie was new and pink and fresh as any dew-dotted morning-glory that ever sounded its little bugle-note of fragrance. Charity was an old sweetheart, worn, drooping, wilted as a broken rose left to parch with thirst.

Yet it was Charity that made his heart race with love and desire and determination. She was Hypatia to him and he vowed that the churchmen should not deny her nor destroy her. He clenched his fists with resolution, then went back to his book and finished it. He loved it so well that he forgave the Church and the clergy somewhat for the sake of this clergyman who had spoken so sturdily for truth and beauty and mercy. He loved the book so well that he even read the preface and learned that Hypatia really lived once and was virtuous, though pagan, and was stripped and slain at the Christian altar, chopped and mutilated with oyster shells in a literal ostracism, her bones burned and her ashes flung into the sea.

The lesson Kingsley drew from her fate was that the Church was fatally wrong to sanction "those habits of doing evil that good may come, of pious intrigue, and at last of open persecution, which are certain to creep in wheresoever men attempt to set up a merely religious empire, independent of human relationships and civil laws." The preacher-novelist warned the Church of now that the same old sins of then were still at work.

Jim closed the book and returned to the window to study Charity. He vowed that he would protect her from that ostracism. His wealth was but a broken sword, but it should save her.

He felt it childish of her to be so set upon a wedding at the hands of one of the clergymen who stoned her, but he liked her better for finding something childish and stubborn in her. She was so good, so wise, so noble, so all-for-others, that she needed a bit of obstinate foolishness to keep her from being absolute marble.

He put on his hat and his raincoat and went out into the town, hunting a clergyman, resolved to compel him at all costs. The sudden shower became lyrical to his mood as a railroad train clicks to the mood of the passenger.

There was but one Episcopal church in the village and the parsonage was a doleful little cottage against a shabby temple. The hotelkeeper had told him how to find it, and the name of the parson.

Jim tapped piously on the door, then knocked, then pounded. At length a voice came to him from somewhere, calling:

"Come into the church!"

"That's what I've been trying to do for weeks," Jim growled. He went into the church and found the parson in his shirt-sleeves. He had been setting dishpans and wash-tubs and pails under the various jets of water that came in through the patched roof in unwelcome libations.

His sleeves were rolled up and he was rolling up pew cushions. He gave Jim a wet hand and peered at him curiously. It relieved Jim not to be recognized and regarded as a visiting demon.

The clergyman's high black waistcoat was frayed and shiny, as well as wet, and his reverted collar had an evident edge from the way the preacher kept moistening his finger and running it along the rim. In spite of this worse than a hair-shirt martyrdom, the parson seemed to be a mild and pitiful soul, and Jim felt hopeful of him as he began:

"I must apologize, Mr. Rutledge, for intruding on you, but I—well, I've got more money than I need and I imagine you've got less. I want to give you a little of mine for your own use. Is there any place you could put ten thousand dollars where it would do some good?"

Young Mr. Rutledge felt for a moment that he was dreaming or delirious. He made Jim repeat his speech; then he stammered:

"Oh, my dear sir! The wants of this parish! and my poor chapel! You can see the state of the roof, and the broken windows. The people are too poor to pay for repairs. My own pittance is far in arrears, but I can't complain of that since so many of my dear flock are in need. I was just about persuaded that we should have to abandon the fight to keep the church alive. I had not counted on miracles, but it seems that they do occur."

"Well, I'm not exactly a miracle-worker, but I've got some money you can have if—there's a string to it, of course. But you could use ten thousand dollars, couldn't you?"

"Indeed not," said Mr. Rutledge, feeling as Faust must have felt when Mephisto began to promise things. A spurt of water from a new leak brought him back from the Middle Ages and he cried: "You might lend a hand with this tub, sir, if you will."

When the new cascade was provided for, Jim renewed his bids for the preacher's soul:

"If you can't use ten thousand, how much could you use?"

"I don't know."

"Well, you could use a new roof at least. I'll give you a new roof, and a real stained-glass window of Charity to replace that broken imitation atrocity, and a new organ and hymn-books, and new pew covers, and I'll pay your arrears of salary and guarantee your future, and I'll give you an unlimited drawing account for your poor, and—any other little things you may think of."

Mr. Rutledge protested:

"It's rather cruel of you, sir, to make such jokes at such a time."

"God bless you, old man! I never was so much in earnest. It's easy for me to do those little trifles."

"Then you must be an angel straight from heaven."

"I'm an angel, they tell me, but from the opposite direction. It's plain you don't know who I am. Sit down and I'll tell you the story of my life."

So the little clergyman in his shirt-sleeves sat shivering with incipient pneumonia and beatitude, and by his side in the damp pew in the dark chapel Jim sat in his raincoat and unloaded his message.

The Reverend Mr. Rutledge had heard of Jim and of Charity, and had regretted the assault of their moneyed determination on the bulwarks of his faith. But somehow as he heard Jim talk he found him simple, honest, forlorn, despised and rejected, and in desperate necessity.

He looked at his miserable church and thought of his flock. Jim's money would put shingles on the rafters and music in the hymns and food in the hungry. It became a largess from heaven.

He could see nothing, hear nothing, but a call to accept. He asked for a moment to consider. He retired to pray.

His prayer was interrupted by one of his hungriest parishioners, a Mrs. McGillicuddy, one of those poor old washerwomen whose woes pile up till they are almost laughable to a less humorous heart than the little preacher's. He asked her to wait and returned to his prayers.

His sheep seemed to gather about their shepherd and bleat for pasture and shelter. They answered his prayer for him. He came back and said:

"I will."

* * * * *

"I do," was what Jim and Charity said a little later when Jim had wrested Charity from her sleep by pounding at her door. He waited, frantically, while she dressed. And he had the town's one hack at the door below. He was afraid that the parson would change his mind before they could get the all-important words out of him.

They rode through the rain like Heine's couple in the old stage- coach, with Cupid, the blind passenger, between them. They ran into the church under the last bucketfuls of shower. Jim produced the license he had carried so long in vain. The washerwoman consented to be one witness; the sexton-janitor made the other.

Jim had the ring ready, too. He had carried it long enough. It made a little smoldering glimmer in the dusk church. He knelt by Charity during the prayer, and helped her to her feet, and the little clergyman kissed her with fearsome lips. Jim nearly kissed him himself.

He did hug Mrs. McGillicuddy, and pressed into her hand a bill that she thought was a dollar and blessed him for. When she got home and found what it was she almost fainted into one of her own tubs.

Jim left a signed check for the minister, with the sumlines blank, and begged him not to be a miser. They left with him a great doubt as to what the Church would do to him for doing what he had done for his chapel. But he was as near to a perfection of happiness as he was likely ever to be.

His future woes were for him, as Charity's and Jim's were for them. They would be sufficient to their several days; but for this black rainy night there were no sorrows.

It was too late to get back to the city and luxury—and notoriety. They stayed where they were and were glad enough. They expected to fare worse on the battle-front in France where they would spend their honeymoon.

There was some hesitation as to which of their two rooms at the hotel was the less incommodious, but the furniture had been magically changed. Everything was velvet and silk; what had been barrenness was a noble simplicity; what had been dingy was glamorous.

The ghastly dinner sent up from the dining-room was a great banquet, and the locomotive whistles and the thunderous freight-cars were epithalamial flutes and drums.

Outside, the world was a rainy, clamorous, benighted place. And to-morrow they must go forth into it again. But for the moment they would snatch a little rapture, finding it the more fearfully beautiful because it was so dearly bought and so fleeting, but chiefly beautiful because they could share it together.

They were mated from the first, and all the people and the trials that had kept them apart were but incidents in a struggle toward each other. Henceforth they should win on side by side as one completed being, doing their part in war and peace, and compelling at last from the world, along with the blame and the indifference that every one has always had from the world, a certain praise and gratitude which the world gives only to those who defy it for the sake of what their own souls tell them is good and true and honorable.

THE END