The Gay Cockade
wild night.
But here was Ursula doing it every day. On the evening of the first
dress-rehearsal she wore clothes that showed her sense of fitness. As if
in casting off conventional restraints, she renounced conventional
attire; she came down to her lover wrapped in a cloak of the deep-purple
bloom of the heather of the moor, and there was a pheasant's feather in
her cap.
"_May you never regret it, my dear, my dear_," said the lover on the
stage.
"_I shall love you for a million years_," said Ursula, and we felt that
she would, and that love was eternal, and that any woman might have it
if she would put her hand in her lover's and run away with him on a
wild night!
And it was the genius of Jimmie Harding that made us feel that the thing
could be done. He sat forward in his chair, his arms on the back of the
seat in front of him. "Jove!" he kept saying under his breath. "It's the
real thing. It's the real thing--"
When the scene was over, he went on the stage and stood by Ursula. Elise
from her seat watched them. Ursula had taken off the cap with the
pheasant's feather. Her glorious hair shone like copper, her hand was on
her hip, her little swagger matched the swagger that we remembered in
the old Jimmie. I wondered if Elise remembered.
* * * * *
I am not sure what made Ursula care for Jimmie Harding. He was no longer
a figure for romance. But she did care. It was, perhaps, that she saw in
him the fundamental things which belonged to both of them, and which did
not belong to Elise.
As the days went on I was sorry for Elise. I should never have believed
that I could be sorry, but I was. Jimmie was always punctiliously polite
to her. But he was only that.
"She's getting what she deserves," Duncan said, but I felt that she was,
perhaps, getting more than she deserved. For, after all, it was she who
had kept Jimmie at it, and it was her keeping him at it which had
brought success.
Neither Duncan nor I could tell how Jimmie felt about Ursula. But the
thought of her troubled my sleep. Stripped of her art, she was not in
the least the heroine of Jimmie's play. She was of coarser clay,
commoner. And Jimmie was fine. The fear I had was that he might clothe
her with the virtues which he had created, and the thought, as I have
said, troubled me.
At last Duncan and I had to go home, although we promised to return for
the opening night. Ursula gave a farewell supper for us. She lived alone
with a housekeeper and maid. Her apartment was furnished in good taste,
with, perhaps, a touch of over-emphasis. The table had unshaded purple
candles and heather in glass dishes. Ursula wore woodland green, with a
chaplet of heather about her glorious hair. Elise was in white with
pearls. She was thirty-five, but she did not look it. Ursula was older,
but she would always be in a sense ageless, as such women are--one would
thrill to Sara Bernhardt were she seventeen or seventy.
Jimmie seemed to have dropped the years from him. He was very confident
of the success of his play. "It can't fail," he said, "with Ursula to
make it sure--"
I wondered whether it was Ursula or Elise who had made it sure. Could he
ever have written it if Elise had not kept him at it? Yet she had stolen
his youth!
And now Ursula was giving his youth back to him! As I saw the cock of
his head, heard the ring of his gay laughter, I felt that it might be
so. And suddenly I knew that I didn't want Jimmie to be young again. Not
if he had to take his youth from the hands of Ursula Simms!
There were many toasts before the supper ended--and the last one Jimmie
drank "To Ursula"! As he stood up to propose it, his glasses dangled
from their ribbon, his shoulders were squared. In the soft and shaded
light we were spared the gray in his hair--it was the old Jimmie, gay
and gallant!
"To Ursula!" he said, and the words sparkled. "To Ursula!"
I looked at Elise. She might have been the ghost of the woman who had
flamed in the old house in Albemarle. In her white and pearls she was
shadowy, unsubstantial, almost spectral, but she raised her glass. "To
Ursula!" she said.
All the way home on the train Duncan and I talked about it. We were
scared to death. "Oh, he mustn't, he must not," I kept saying, and
Duncan snorted.
"He's a young fool. She's not the woman for him--"
"Neither of them is the woman," I said, "but Elise has made him--"
"No man was ever held by gratitude."
"He'd hate Ursula in a year."
"He thinks he'd live--"
"And lose his soul--"
* * * * *
Jimmie's play opened to a crowded house. There had been extensive
advertising, and Ursula had a great following.
Elise and Duncan and I had seats in an upper box. Elise sat where she
was hidden by the curtains. Jimmie came and went unseen by the audience.
Between acts he was behind the scenes. Elise had little to say. Once she
reached over and laid her hand on mine.
"I--I think I'm frightened," she said, with a catch of her breath.
"It can't fail, my dear--"
"No, of course. But it's very different from what I expected."
"What is different?"
"Success."
As the great scene came closer, I seemed to hold my breath. I was so
afraid that the audience might not see it as we had seen it at
rehearsal. But they did see it, and it was a stupendous thing to sit
there and watch the crowd, and know that Jimmie's genius was making its
heart beat fast and faster. When Ursula in her purple cloak and
pheasant's feather spoke her lines at the end of the third act, "_I
shall love you for a million years_," the house went wild. Men and women
who had never loved for a moment roared for this woman who had made them
think they could love until eternity. They wanted her back and they got
her. They wanted Jimmie and they got him. Ursula made a speech; Jimmie
made a speech. They came out for uncounted curtain-calls, hand-in-hand.
The play was a success!
The last act was, of course, an anti-climax. Before it was finished,
Elise said to me, in a, stifled voice, "I've got to get back to Jimmie."
It seemed significant that Jimmie had not come to her. Surely he had not
forgotten the part she had played. For fifteen years she had worked for
this.
We found ourselves presently behind the scenes. The curtain was down,
the audience was still shouting, everybody was excited, everybody was
shaking hands. The stage-people caught at Elise as she passed, and held
her to offer congratulations. I was not held and went on until I came to
where Jimmie and Ursula stood, a little separate from the rest. Although
I went near enough to touch them, they were so absorbed in each other
that they did not see me. Ursula was looking up at Jimmie and his head
was bent to her.
"Jimmie," she said, and her rich voice above the tumult was clear as a
bell, "do you know how great you are?"
"Yes," he said. "I--I feel a little drunk with it, Ursula."
"Oh," she said, and now her words stumbled, "I--I love you for it. Oh,
Jimmie, Jimmie, let's run away and love for a million years--"
All that he had wanted was in her words--the urge of youth, the beat of
the wind, the song of the sea. My heart stood still.
He drew back a little. He had wanted this. But he did not want it
now--with Ursula. I saw it and she saw it.
"What a joke it would be," he said, "but we have other things to do, my
dear."
"What things?"
The roar of the crowd came louder to their ears. "Harding, Harding!
Jimmie Harding!"
"Listen," he said, and the light in his eyes was not for her. "Listen,
Ursula, they're calling me."
She stood alone after he had left her. I am sure that even then she did
not quite believe it was the end. She did not know how, in all the
years, his wife had molded him.
When he had satisfied the crowd, Jimmie fought his way to where Elise
and Duncan and I stood together.
Elise was wrapped in a great cloak of silver brocade. There was a touch
of silver, too, in her hair. But she had never seemed to me so small, so
childish.
"Oh, Jimmie," she said, as he came up, "you've done it!"
"Yes"--he was flushed and laughing, his head held high--"you always said
I could do it. And I shall do it again. Did you hear them shout, Elise?"
"Yes."
"Jove! I feel like the old woman in the nursery rhyme, 'Alack-a-daisy,
do this be I?'" He was excited, eager, but it was not the old eagerness.
There was an avidity, a greediness.
She laid her hand on his arm. "You've earned a rest, dearest. Let's go
up in the hills."
"In the hills? Oh, we're too old, Elise."
"We'll grow young."
"To-night I've given youth to the world. That's enough for me"--the
light in his eyes was not for her--"that's enough for me. We'll hang
around New York for a week or two, and then we'll go back to Albemarle.
I want to get to work on another play. It's a great game, Elise. It's a
great game!"
She knew then what she had done. Here was a monster of her own making.
She had sacrificed her lover on the altar of success. Jimmie needed her
no longer.
I would not have you think this an unhappy ending. Elise has all that
she had asked, and Jimmie, with fame for a mistress, is no longer an
unwilling captive in the old house. The prisoner loves his prison,
welcomes his chains.
But Duncan and I talk at times of the young Jimmie who came years ago
into our office. The Jimmie Harding who works down in Albemarle, and who
struts a little in New York when he makes his speeches, is the ghost of
the boy we knew. But he loves us still.
THE HIDDEN LAND
The mystery of Nancy Greer's disappearance has never been explained. The
man she was to have married has married another woman. For a long time
he mourned Nancy. He has always held the theory that she was drowned
while bathing, and the rest of Nancy's world agrees with him. She had
left the house one morning for her usual swim. The fog was coming in,
and the last person to see her was a fisherman returning from his nets.
He had stopped and watched her flitting wraith-like through the mist. He
reported later that Nancy wore a gray bathing suit and cap and carried a
blue cloak.
"You are sure she carried a cloak?" was the question which was
repeatedly asked. For no cloak had been found on the sands, and it was
unlikely that she had worn it into the water. The disappearance of the
blue cloak was the only point which seemed to contradict the theory of
accidental drowning. There were those who held that the cloak might have
been carried off by some acquisitive individual. But it was not likely;
the islanders are, as a rule, honest, and it was too late in the season
for "off-islanders."
I am the only one who knows the truth. And as the truth would have been
harder for Anthony Peak to bear than what he believed had happened, I
have always withheld it.
There was, too, the fear that if I told they might try to bring Nancy
back. I think Anthony would have searched the world for her. Not,
perhaps, because of any great and passionate need of her, but because he
would have thought her unhappy in what she had done, and would have
sought to save her.
I am twenty years older than Nancy, her parents are dead, and it was at
my house that she always stayed when she came to Nantucket. She has
island blood in her veins, and so has Anthony Peak. Back of them were
seafaring folk, although in the foreground was a generation or two of
cosmopolitan residence. Nancy had been educated in France, and Anthony
in England. The Peaks and the Greers owned respectively houses in Beacon
Street and in Washington Square. They came every summer to the island,
and it was thus that Anthony and Nancy grew up together, and at last
became engaged.
As I have said, I am twenty years older than Nancy, and I am her cousin.