Ainslee's Magazine/The Shadow of the Mask

by Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

 

The
Shadow of the Mask

By Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

THERE are seasons when life is like a dried gourd of a past summer filled with the arid rattle of seeds; and all the myriad voices of the universe which once held for us the most poignant meanings are silent, or, if they speak at all, it is a babble of strange tongues, a meaningless clamor falling on wearied and unheeding ears.

For days this had been the experience of Christine Wickham, and she expressed in manner and appearance this mood as she walked up Fifth Avenue one afternoon in late December. Her gaze was detached, indifferent, while her movements bespoke an infinite and bored leisure. Among the hurrying, purposeful crowds about her, she appeared as aimless as a thistledown blown by uncertain and shifting breezes. And yet, she, frail thistledown, drifting through great, roaring, splendid stone cañons, began to feel, in a vague way, as if it came to her through the broken hazes of a dream, some invitation, some beckoning impulse, and this impression grew more definite, less occasional, as she went on. In fact, this feeling of being led or drawn increased as she made no resistance, but continued without mental protest to pursue her way toward an unknown goal.

She did not pause to compute the distance she had walked, but presently she realized that she was very tired. The convalescence of a recent and severe illness had been prolonged, and weariness came on suddenly. The decision to hail a cab and drive home commended itself as wise, but although it hovered on the brink of action, it did not achieve it; for stronger than ever was the sense of something or some one awaiting her somewhere. Yet she was very tired.

She looked about her rather helplessly, as if hoping to see something, any straw in the current which might assist her in making up her mind, and her eye fell upon a poster on the dignified, polished exterior of one of the picture galleries. It conveyed the unobtrusive, but to the art lover important, announcement of an exhibition of Flessing's pictures.

Christine turned. There was not even a momentary hesitation on her part, but she realized as she went up the steps that she was trembling.

As she entered the first gallery, she looked about her half timidly, as if fearing to see Flessing himself, but he was not there. This first gallery—several rooms were occupied by this exhibition—contained landscapes principally, although his choice of subjects was always rich and various; and these were full of that oneness with nature which was Flessing's peculiar gift. They were admirable, beautiful, for his genius was incontestable, and they flooded the crowded room with the dazzle and the daring of their sunlight. The transcendent gleam of the universe with which he infused his atmospheres was like some crystal-clear, superearthly shout of triumph. And Christine felt like a groping shadow in the splendor of this fulfilled genius. Why did it smite her so now? Had she not always known that when Flessing painted he wore his “coat of stars”?

Ordinarily her heart would have risen to these pictures, exulted in them; but now it was unresponsive, dull, slow-beating. Ah, tired and chill shadow! What had she to do with this facile rendering of the ecstasy of sunlight?

She shrank from it, and slipped through the crowd into the next room. There were a number of portraits here, enormously interesting. Were they not Flessing's? Christine's gaze wandered listlessly over them. Then, turning a little, her eyes fell upon a portrait near her. There was a shock, the blood tingled electrically through her veins, bit into her brain, restoring its numbed action, and with a keenness which was at once pain and rapture, she felt herself adjusted to life. She was again in harmony with the rhythm of the universe. Weariness, ennui fell from her, and it was with a thrilling sense of revived eagerness that she gazed back into those pictured eyes which, with such bold assurance, held her gaze.

They were brown as the clear waters of a mountain pool, and flickering, flashing through their depths was a very devil of mockery and laughter. Under the small, upturned brown mustache was a red and reckless smile, secretive, teasing you with alluring hints of incommunicable secrets. She could almost see the thin nostrils quiver and dilate. It was the face of the winebibber, quaffing to the lees the uncontaminated wine of life, and drunk on those insatiable drafts, gloriously drunk as Pan. A cloak or cape of rich brown velvet fell in heavy folds about him and was tossed with cavalier grace over one shoulder. The hair was brown, short, and so velvet dense that Christine had a quick sensation in her finger tips as if she had touched it and found it like the fur of an animal.

She looked in the catalogue for a title. It had been given no name, but was mentioned merely as “a portrait.” Christine smiled. A portrait certainly. Flessing's portrait of himself, fanciful to the point of the fantastic, and perhaps identified with him by no one save herself, Yet this was the Flessing whom she had divined in unexpected moments the Flessing who painted the light of leaping waters, those far and marvelous horizons, the glory of the sunrise.

But the Flessing who occasionally mingled in the world, and whom men and women found a gay and charming companion—how charming her heart knew—had not chosen to reveal himself to the world, except through this picture, which none would recognize. He wore always a mask of protection, a mask, which, like the black crape of the thief, obscured his features in shadow and blurred and dimmed their outline.

How long Christine stood gazing at the picture she did not know. Two women who had been moving about the gallery with rustling garments and sibilant whispers passed between it and her, bestowing upon it a single indifferent glance. Christine followed their modish, superficial backs with a glance of inquiry. They, and the room full of other women and men, were as pale shades, simulating a counterfeit existence. She turned back to the portrait for the stable feeling of reality. It smiled at her with a radiant amusement and comprehension, and she smiled back, mentally exclaiming:

“Ah, you can fascinate me, but you cannot lure me to reveal myself. No. Yes, I quite understand. You threaten me with the witchery you learned in the forest, all your spells of woven laughter and sunlight; but I, too, have my reserves.”

She was recalled to a consciousness of her environment by a flat voice just behind her.

“That portrait! Very wonderful, no doubt; but I cannot admire it. It lacks so entirely the ethical quality.”

Christine started. Color flashed all over her face. She felt as if she had been overheard arranging a rendezvous, It was indeed time she went home. Absurdly embarrassed, she left the gallery with down-bent head and hasty steps; but the shame was superficial, while the exultation of being recalled to life increased. She felt as she walked homeward as if she had entered another phase of existence; she who had been dead was alive again. No, had received an intimation of what life might be, and had stirred and thrilled and tingled in her cerements.

How brilliant and splendid was the long street! It was just on the edge of dusk, the sky was a pale green with sinister bands of black near the horizon. Far down, the “Flatiron” reared itself massive, majestic as the pyramids. A woman passed her wearing a great cluster of violets, their fragrance was wafted to her, enchantingly, fugitively sweet; a girl's laugh, soft and joyous, rang in her ears; the globes of light, faint violet and pale yellow, began to glow, long rows of them, flowers of the. night and the city. There was something different in the atmosphere; something—why, it was Christmas Eve, and—what steps were those behind her, quick, familiar, though so long unheard?

Then Flessing mentioned her name, and Christine lifted her head to greet him.

“Mrs. Wickham,” he said, and there was a flattering breathlessness in his voice, “Mrs. Wickham, it is Christmas Eve, and I am the loneliest man in New York. May I walk home with you?”

“The loneliest man in New York!” she repeated. “And I am the loneliest woman. What,” with one of her sweet yet constrained smiles, “is more fitting than that we walk home together?”

“Nothing,” he said, lapsing into earnestness and gazing at her overlong. “You know the Chestertons?” returning to a more formal and commonplace manner. “Yes, of course. I was to spend Christmas with them. Came on from the West to do so, and found a telegram from them yesterday morning, saying that a member of the family was ill and asking me to postpone my visit. So, for the next few days I remain here, enjoying the garish hospitality of a New York hotel.”

“I will not pity you,” she said, with light composure. “The loneliness is self-imposed. There are hosts of people who would be only too glad to mitigate it.”

“Perhaps,” he agreed, “but there is myself to consider.”

“But the absurdity of your being lonely.” She could not drop the subject, but mused as if he were not there. “The man of that portrait could never know a moment's ennui.”

“How about the man who painted it?”

Struck by something in his tone, she looked at him half doubtfully now. That mask—it baffled her.

“You sometimes have seemed to me to suggest the things the picture says openly.”

She hesitated. She was no longer sure of her ground. What fantasy had it been on her part to identify him with the picture! They were not in the least similar, as she realized now.

“I see,” he said, “that in order to find out something I want to know I am driven to a confession which knocks the supports from my previous attitude and which may incur your indignation. My meeting you this afternoon was not a haphazard and fortuitous chance. It was deliberate and premeditated. I saw you in the gallery, although you did not see me; and I stood there a long time watching you. And I am overwhelmed to know what you found in that portrait to arrest your attention so long. I could not fail to see that your interest was psychological, hence my curiosity.”

They had turned from the great avenue into one of the quiet downtown streets, and had reached her house. She paused on the top step, meeting the eager and intense question of his eyes with one of her delicate flushes. Then, with a slight gesture of the hand, as if abandoning hesitation and yielding wholly to impulse, she said:

“I, too, am leaving town in a few days. I have been ill, and it is considered best for me to spend the winter in a warmer climate; but I would not go until after Christmas.” She flushed again, appeared to waver, and then went bravely on. “There is a little Christmas celebration that I never omit. If you care to come in late to-morrow afternoon you may have a part in it. It is a very simple little celebration. There will be no one else. I have never asked any one before. Then,” she added, “I will answer your question. I will tell you what the picture said to me.”

She stood in the open door. Behind her was the dismantled hall full of packing boxes. A shaft of light fell across her.

“Christine!” he cried sharply, gazing at her in astonishment and dismay. “Why is that shadow on your face? It was not there once.”

She passed her shaking hand across her face. “Do—do we not all wear masks in this world?” she said.

“But not you, not you,” he cried poignantly. “Christine, you have no need.”

She could bear no more; she passed through the door, closing it behind her, and he walked away, thinking of her. He remembered her young, exquisite beauty, and how lovely he had thought her in the arbutuslike fashion. For a season or two she had been very gay, appearing everywhere, enormously admired; and he, a young artist whose work was already noted by connoisseurs, but whose future was still problematic, had wooed her ardently, had fancied in star-strewn moments that his love was returned; and then, upon the very day that he had meant to ask her to marry him, he learned that she had announced her engagement to another man.

Harvey Wickham was much older than herself, a friend of her father's, a man of great wealth but of repellent personality, severe, stern, with a harsh and bitter austerity aptly characterized as dour. Christine married him without offering any explanation to Flessing, and he, on his part, asked none.

Within the next five years she appeared infrequently in the world which had known her so well, although Flessing had met her two or three times casually and formally at a dinner, a garden party, the home of a friend. Then Harvey Wickham had died, but although the episode of her marriage was closed with this final seal, her friends had seen even less of her than before, so Flessing had been informed. In fact, in the three or four succeeding years, her withdrawal from social life had been complete.

Flessing pondered these things as he walked back to his hotel, but she had, to-day, at least, given him no clue to their answer.

The next afternoon, when the diamond glitter was again beginning to sprinkle the dusk of the evening—blurringly, however, for the snow had been falling all day—he rang Christine's doorbell. He was at once admitted, and followed the servant across the bare and echoing hall and up a short flight of stairs. The drawing-room door was a little open, and he shivered as he passed it. It had that look of icy isolation which draped pictures and furniture in holland coverings alone can give.

Everything was dismantled, closed. Flessing's impressionable, artistic nature felt the chill of it; but on the threshold of Christine's sitting room, even before he crossed the doorsill, some cheer of warmth and harmony was subtly conveyed to him, and Christine came forward with her usual poised, restrained grace.

“For the first time I realize that this is Christmas,” cried Flessing, taking her hand and looking about him with pleasure and surprise.

He had a sensation of having stepped into another planet, at least another dimension. Without, the snow fell, softly, silently, continuously. He had brought a powder of it in on his shoulders. Yes, he had passed from it all, the outside world with its muffled, mundane sounds, the empty echoing passages which had caused him to shiver with their bare blankness. But this sitting room of Christine's, her cloister almost, was full of warmth and peace.

Although the windows looked out upon a narrow garden, and were now as if curtained outside by that white, monotonously falling snow, yet he felt as if at all times the roar and hurry of the world must but faintly penetrate here. He felt an atmosphere dim, and sweet, and soft, as if deep tones of color glowed but were never apparent, or at least obvious; as if the room held all rich memories of music until it vibrated with harmony, its vibrations unheard yet apprehended by the inner, intuitive sense of hearing. And there was fragrance, something fresh and of the woods, like wet ferns trodden in the dawn; but no, that, too, was an impression.

Automatically almost, Flessing's trained eye took quick, accurate, and complete note of the long room in effect and detail. The walls were of a soft, indefinite blue, and over the pictures and banked above the colonial mantelpiece were branches of pine and balsam, their delicate tracery of green outlined against that clouded blue. There were holly and mistletoe in jars of green glaze, subdued and serene. A wood fire burned on the hearth, and the scarlet berries and the upward leaping flames were the only points of brilliant color. Christine, as she stood smiling at him, seemed the living expression of her surroundings. If one understood all that that room said, one understood Christine, but Flessing knew now that he never had understood her. Undemonstrative, restrained in manner and expression, she haunted the imagination with puzzling suggestions of warmth and ardor which one could never define. Her dark hair fell back in a cloud from her temples, her face had a soft, moonlike glow and pallor, her gray eyes were often downcast, yet when they lifted they appeared cool and contemplative. She wore this afternoon a dull-blue gown, its only emphasis being odd ornaments of lapis lazuli and jade, set in a silver chain.

Flessing drew a sigh of content. “Now I feel the spirit of Christmas indeed. What could be better than to sit here in this quiet room and have you talk to me, and presently hear you play to me? This is truly a Christmas celebration.”

“Oh, but this is not the celebration,” she said, smiling.” Flessing had always loved her smile, it was at once quaint and mysterious. “It is not quite dark enough for that yet.”

“Still something to anticipate!” he exclaimed.

“Yes.” She nodded, glancing toward the window. “It is not quite dark enough now. So sit here a little while in this easy-chair and I will play to you.”

“It is too good to be true,” he said positively. “Ah, Christine, what rest, what peace! You have brought me to some far country, some land of dreams.”

She smiled and moved toward the piano, but made no reply. Christine had the gift of silence, a most gracious gift with her, more eloquent than speech.

For a time, as he lay back in his chair and listened with closed eyes, Flessing could not have told just what she was playing; it was as if in a dream he heard the music of dreams, until, listening, he became enwrapped in some deep, and strange, and mysterious tranquillity.

At last Christine arose, and, crossing the room, stood looking down into the fire. It had darkened, and beyond the zone of the fire glow the shadows had deepened; and in the warmth of this twilight hour the pine and the balsam branches gave out an aromatic fragrance.

“You talked to me of spells yesterday. What spell of music and of Christmas have you woven?” asked Flessing, rising and looking down at her with wondering eyes.

“It is only beginning.” She pointed to a long green candle in a blue pottery candlestick upon the mantelpiece. “That is a bayberry candle,” she said, “and I have always burned one at Christmas ever since I have been a child. It must be lighted, you know, just at dusk on Christmas night, and then, if it burns down to the socket without going out, it will bring luck, and health, and happiness to all within the house for the coming year. Give me a splinter from the fire. We must do things in the old primitive way to-night.”

She took the flaming bit of wood from him, and carefully lighted the candle.

“Now,” she said, turning to Flessing again, “while the candle burns, we are going to talk about your picture.”

She sat down and motioned him to take again his chair opposite her.

“Oh,” clasping her hands in her lap and speaking with an intensity which surprised him, “I must know more about it; I must!

“Think!” she went on, without giving him an opportunity to speak. “Fancy having so exquisite a sense of the fullness, the amplitude of life! The man of that picture must have heard tones of music which never penetrate our dull ears; he must have seen shades of color and a blending of shades infinitely subtle which make the hues discerned by the ordinary person seem intolerably crude. Ah, what existence must mean to one who can so far penetrate its beauties, no somber warp and woof, gray and dun-color, but scarlet and flame and gold.”

He looked at her a moment, and then glanced quickly about the room where the shadows had deepened until the dense masses beyond the firelight seemed to stretch away into the soft glooms of a forest. The candle, a cone of pale flame above its decreasing green column, burned clearly and steadily.

After that brief moment of cogitation, Flessing leaned forward and spoke rapidly.

“Grant him not only the wider sense perception, but make him an explorer beyond them in many worlds not physical. Endow him also with an intellect which enables him to unlock store-houses of knowledge and experience with the keys of faith and enthusiasm.”

She clasped her hands tight. On her moon-pale face, uplifted to his, a lambent glow came and went.

“Such natures inherit the earth,” she murmured, “and what an earth! Kingdoms of light to which our plodding thought may never rise!”

“Admit it, admit it all,” he cried, with a bitter impatience; “but granting all, do we not come then against the law of reaction, the duality of all things? Must not so much sunlight have its corresponding dark? You have said, 'such natures inherit the earth.' But those who have all, by a paradox—life's paradox—have nothing. One who has pierced the veil so far as that man of the picture, must see the illusoriness of all things, and in that dark and terrible moment of reaction, the vision goes—is lost to him.”

A log on the hearth fell apart, and in the brilliant light of the flames flashing upward, she saw that the shadow on his face had deepened that black crape mask which blurred and dimmed its light. She glanced up to see if any flame had veered the candle's spark, but its gleam was bright and clear as ever.

“Christine, I painted that portrait with the passion of my soul; in pigments which shall seem to palpitate with life when I am dust. I tried to create an illusion of life beside which sentient, moving creatures should seem as ghosts, because, Christine, as a vital reality to me, as a part of me, he fades, he vanishes.”

“Never!” She rose in the strength of her denial. “I see him forever in his eternal youth, haunting the forest, listening to the whispers of oak, and ash, and pine, scooping up bubbles of laughter from remote forest pools, and then passing singing into fields of ripe wheat and scarlet poppies.”

“No.” Flessing shook his head sadly. “Great was my gift, and I perfected it. Great is my technique, but what shall it profit me without the vision? I have nothing, if I have not love. Travestied, ignored, debased, love is the beauty, the light of the world, and how may I see without it, Christine; how may I see?”

His hands were outstretched to her, like a child's, tears wet his eyes.

She did not take those outstretched hands, but, rising, she leaned against the mantelpiece farther from him, while slowly he bowed his head.

“Loving you,” she said, her voice low and broken, “for I did love you, I deliberately married Harvey to gain the material things I had been taught to prize. But, instead, I lost everything, everything. I found too late that I had misinterpreted myself, that I was not cold, I was not scheming. I was born for that love and light toward which my spirit yearned. Then I discovered that something horrible had happened to me. The world had always been full of intimations of joy and beauty, perhaps not felt, but always divined. Why, the sight of a flower would cause my heart to lift with joy; in my ears was always an unheard music, as if sweet, echoing bells had always just rung, or were just about to ring. But that quite left me; the world became toneless, drained of color. There were no symbols, only facts. As long as Harvey lived, I kept up the pretense of interest, but after he died I dropped even that. The world meant nothing to me; I left it. I had denied love, and life denied me.

“But when I saw your picture yesterday it seemed to set me free a little. Why—when I awoke this morning, I saw beauty again; beauty in that white world out there.” She waved her hand toward the window. “I heard again the bells chiming very faintly and far, far away, but still the bells.”

The candle had burned to its socket and now it flamed bravely, giving out its bayberry fragrance.

“Why, Christine!” Flessing cried loudly, leaning forward. “The shadow has gone from your face!”

She, too, bent forward and peered closely at him.

“And yours,” she whispered awedly. “It was the shadow of death on both our faces, the death of love denied and crushed.”

He groped for her hand, but she threw her arms about his neck, and pressed close against him,

“They are gone forever, those shadows!” Her voice was like an exultant peal of the bells she heard. “And our hearts are strong for life and love!”