University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
CHURM'S STORY.

Churm took refuge with his cigar for a moment.

“Twenty-four years ago,” he began, jerking
his short sentences away as if each was an arrow
in his heart, — “twenty-four years ago I was
a young man about New York. There came a
beautiful girl from the country. Poor! She had
rich friends in town. They wanted a flower for
their parlors. They took her. Emma — Emma
Page was her name.”

He repeated the name, as if it was barbed, and
would not come from him without an agonized
effort.

“She charmed all,” he continued. “She fascinated
me. Strangely, strangely. I will not
analyze her power. You will see what knowledge
it implied. I was a simple, eager fellow.
Eager to love, as you are.”

“I only said willing,” I interjected.

“The wish soon ripens to frenzy. Presently
the lady and I were betrothed. I was a passionate

lover. You would not think it to look at me
now, with this coat and these clodhopper shoes.”
He forced a smile.

“Shaggy jackets and thick shoes with an orchestral
creak are de rigueur for lovers now,”
rejoined I, trying to lighten the growing gloom
of Churm's manner.

“We wore smooth black, and paper soles,”
said he. “Ah, well! I was a loyal, undoubting
heart. I loved and I trusted wholly.”

He paused, and drew his cigar to a fresh light.
Then, as he remained silent and grew moodier, I
recalled him to the subject, and asked, “You
lost her? By death?”

“By death, Byng? Yes, by the death of my
love. She stabbed it. Shall I tell you how?
Poor child! one single poisoned look of hers, one
single phrase that proved a tainted nature, stabbed
and poisoned my love dead, dead, dead.”

Again he was silent. Pity would not let me
speak.

“This may seem disloyalty,” he by and by resumed.
“But she is dead and pardoned long
ago. I must be loyal to the living. You may
run the risk I ran. I give to you, to you only,
to you peculiarly, the warning of my misery. If
you are ever harmed as I was, you will owe the
same to your son, or your friend.”

I was full of youthful, unshaken self-confidence.

I saw no danger, anticipated no wound.
I could not make the personal application
Churm suggested. I listened, greatly touched
and interested, but without foreboding.

“A look and a word,” Churm began again,
“seemed to flash upon me the conviction that
the woman I loved was sullied. A foul-minded
man may do foul wrong by such a fancy. My
mind was pure. My first impulse was to rebel
against the agonizing doubt, and be truer and
tenderer than before. You comprehend the feeling?”

“Thoroughly. Your impulse would be mine.”

“`Love,'” said I to myself, “`tests love,'”
Churm continued. “`I mistrust, because I do not
love enough. I must beware of being personally
base and cruelly unjust to her. My suspicion
shall be the evanescent dream of an unwholesome
instant, — like Ophelia's song.' But still
the anguish and the dread stayed in my heart.
What could I do? Wait? Watch? Make myself
a spy to examine this seeming sully, and find
it an indelible stain? Uncover the bad side of
my nature, apply it to hers, and study the kind
and degree of the electricity evoked by the contact!
Should I protect myself by any such baseness?
While these thoughts were tangling in my
brain, an outer force cut the knot.”

“Some one spilt the philter,” said I, thinking
of the scene over Densdeth's wine.

“Denman was my unconscious ally,” Churm
continued, without noticing the interruption.
“Denman saved me from the worst, the bitterest
fate that can befall a true man, — to marry a
woman whose truth and purity he can allow himself
to doubt.”

“Bitter indeed! A blight of all the bloom
and harvest of a life!” said I; — so fancy had
taught me.

“Ah, yes! as the `marriage of true minds' alone
gives fragrance and ripeness. I have missed the
harvest, I escaped the blight. Denman, rich and
handsome, with life clear before him, came back
from Europe. Wealth had illusions for Emma
Page. She was new to it. I was not poor; but
my wealth was only in posse.”

“Few divine a young man's posse, I fear,” said
I, as he paused to whiff.

“Posse must be put into a pipe and blown into
an illustrious bubble, before the world perceives
the esse,” he rejoined. “But inventive power is
the best capital. Mine has made me far richer
than Denman. Well; he arrived at the moment
of my agonizing doubt. Miss Page was The
Beauty of our day. He was charmed. His
cruder vision admired the rose and did not miss
the dew-drop. She presently allowed me to perceive
that he was to be my substitute. I will not
tire you with the detail of the stranding and
wreck of our engagement.”

“No?” said I. “I begin to identify myself
strangely with your story.”

“No. No detail! To recall talks and looks
and tones would be more tragedy than I could
bear, even to make my story sharper. So our
engagement ended. That slight perfidy was nothing.
My wrong was deeper.”

“Ah, poor Emma!” he continued, “forgiven
long ago! That stain of hers, whether it were
taint of being, or fault of nurture, or rash or
sober sin, killed faith and hope in me for a time.”

He paused again, and the blank seemed to
symbolize a blank in his life.

“It was a wide gulf to swim over,” he said.
“Dark waters, Robert! Dark and broad! and I
have seen many souls of men and women drown,
that had not force to buffet through, or patience
to drift across. But I escaped, and, having paid
the price of suffering without despair, the larger
hopes and higher faiths were revealed to me.”

He struck aside the smoke with a strong, swimmer's
gesture of the arm, — a forceful character,
as even his motions showed.

“This is sacred confidence, Robert,” he said.
“I give it to you, as a father warning a son.”

“And as a son I take and treasure it.”

“Denman,” Churm went on, “did not mind
the wrong he might have been doing me, had my
love not already perished. Denman never heeds

any one between him and his object. He looks
at the prospect; what is the fly on the pane to
him? He has been walking over others all his
life, trampling them if they lifted up their heads.
But a selfish man gets himself sent first to Coventry,
and then, if he does not mend, to St. Helena.
Denman, a great merchant by inheritance,
has gained money-power at the cost of moral
weight. Our best men look coldly on him. He
knows it, and grasps at bigger wealth to crush
criticism. It is the old story, — vaulting ambition,
the Russian campaign. Denman's gigantic
schemes are the terror, the wonder, and the admiration
of Wall Street. But he seems to a cool
student a desperate man. It saddens me to
meet him now, — aged, worn, anxious, hardly
daring to look me in the face, and, as I fear,
wholly in the power of Densdeth.”

“Densdeth!” cried I. “Who and what is
Densdeth? Does he hold every man's leadingstrings
to the Devil?”

“What is Densdeth? My story will give you
a fact or two in answer to the question. I go on
with it rapidly.

“Emma Page married Denman.

“She tried splendor for a year. She was the
beautiful wife of the richest young man in town.

“At the year's end, her daughter Emma was
born.

“A child is a terrible vengeance to a mother
who has ever lowered her womanhood, by thought
or act. What tortures she would have endured,
— so she now too late thinks, — if she could
have purged and made anew the nature she has
transmitted to an innocent being! But there it
lies before her in the cradle, the embodiment of
her inmost thought. There lies the heir, and the
waste of his heritage is irreclaimable.”

“Don't be so cruelly stern,” said I. “You
out-Herod Herod, in the converse. You massacre
the Innocents because they are guilty. This
is the old dead dogma of original sin, redivivus
and rampant.”

“No; the dogma is dead, and science handles
the facts without the trammels of an impious
theory. Life cures, and Death renews. But Life
should be a feast, not a medicine.

“Emma's birth,” he continued, “transformed
Mrs. Denman. For a year she was a faithful
mother.

“Denman did not like his wife so well in this
capacity. They diverged widely. To be handsome
for him and showy for the public was his
notion of Mrs. Denman's office. The second
year flowed rough.

“At the end of it, Clara was born, the child
of a woman chastened and purified.

“A fortnight after her birth, Denman came to
me.

“`My wife is desperately ill,' said he. `She
wishes to see you.'

“I went calmly to this farewell interview with
my old love. The husband seemed to abdicate
in my behalf.

“`I am to die,' she said, almost gayly. `I
have sent for you, because I trust you wholly.
Dear friend, here are my daughters! Befriend
them for my sake! I feel that you will understand
the yearnings of young souls. Make them
what you once hoped of me! Will you not be
the father of their spiritual life? Forgive me,
dear friend, for the old wrong, for the old
wrongs! Prove that you have pardoned me by
loving mine. Good-bye.'”

Churm was silent awhile.

He lighted a fresh cigar and smoked steadily.
The smoke lifted slowly in the still room, and
hung in wreaths overhead. He sat looking
vaguely into the shifting cloud.