Mrs.Barry inherited the shop and the house.At thirty-eight she could have bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points and general results.Only a few people remembered her wedding comedy, but she made of it no secret.She did not pack it in lavender or moth balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.
One day a middle-aged money-making lawyer, who bought his legal cap and ink of her, asked her across the counter to marry him.
"I'm really much obliged to you," said Helen, cheerfully, "but Imarried another man twenty years ago.he was more a goose than a man, but I think I love him yet.I have never seen him since about half an hour after the ceremony.Was it copying ink that you wanted or just writing fluid?"The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-time grace and left a respectful kiss on the back of her hand.Helen sighed.Parting salutes, however romantic, may be overdone.Here she was at thirty-eight, beautiful and admired; and all that she seemed to have got from her lovers were approaches and adieus.Worse still, in the last one she had lost a customer, too.
Business languished, and she hung out a Room to Let card.Two large rooms on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants.
Roomers came, and went regretfully, for the house of Mrs.Barry was the abode of neatness, comfort and taste.
One day came Ramonti, the violinist, and engaged the front room above.The discord and clatter uptown offended his nice ear; so a friend had sent him to this oasis in the desert of noise.
Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows, his short, pointed, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished head of gray hair, and his artist's temperament--revealed in his light, gay and sympathetic manner--was a welcome tenant in the old house near Abingdon Square.
Helen lived on the floor above the store.The architecture of it was singular and quaint.The hall was large and almost square.Up one side of it, and then across the end of it ascended an open stairway to the floor above.This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room and office combined.There she kept her desk and wrote her business letters; and there she sat of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light and sewed or read.Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that he spent much time there, describing to Mrs.Barry the wonders of Paris, where he had studied with a particularly notorious and noisy fiddler.
Next comes lodger No.2, a handsome, melancholy man in the early 40's, with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes.He, too, found the society of Helen a desirable thing.With the eyes of Romeo and Othello's tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climes and wooed her by respectful innuendo.
From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in the presence of this man.His voice somehow took her swiftly back to the days of her youth's romance.This feeling grew, and she gave way to it, and it led her to an instinctive belief that he had been a factor in that romance.And then with a woman's reasoning (oh, yes, they do, sometimes) she leaped over common syllogism and theory, and logic, and was sure that her husband had come back to her.For she saw in his eyes love, which no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of regret and remorse, which aroused pity, which is perilously near to love requited, which is the _sine qua non_ in the house that Jack built.
But she made no sign.A husband who steps around the corner for twenty years and then drops in again should not expect to find his slippers laid out too conveniently near nor a match ready lighted for his cigar.There must be expiation, explanation, and possibly execration.A little purgatory, and then, maybe, if he were properly humble, he might be trusted with a harp and crown.And so she made no sign that she knew or suspected.
And my friend, the reporter, could see nothing funny in this! Sent out on an assignment to write up a roaring, hilarious, brilliant joshing story of--but I will not knock a brother--let us go on with the story.
One evening Ramonti stopped in Helen's hall-office-reception-room and told his love with the tenderness and ardor of the enraptured artist.His words were a bright flame of the divine fire that glows in the heart of a man who is a dreamer and doer combined.