Late that afternoon Joe Wilkinson and Dan came slowly up the street, toward the Boyd house. The light of battle was still in Dan's eyes, his clothes were torn and his collar missing, and he walked with the fine swagger of the conqueror.
“Y'ask me,” he said, “and I'll tell the world this thing's done for. It was just as well to let them give it a try, and find out it won't work.”
Joe said nothing. He was white and very tired, and a little sick.
“If you don't mind I'll go in your place and wash up,” he remarked, as they neared the house. “I'll scare the kids to death if they see me like this.”
Edith was in the parlor. She had sat there almost all day, in an agony of fear. At four o'clock the smallest Wilkinson had hammered at the front door, and on being admitted had made a shameless demand.
“Bed and thugar,” she had said, looking up with an ingratiating smile.
“You little beggar!”
“Bed and thugar.”
Edith had got the bread and sugar, and, having lured the baby into the parlor, had held her while she ate, receiving now and then an exceedingly sticky kiss in payment. After a little the child's head began to droop, and Edith drew the small head down onto her breast. She sat there, rocking gently, while the chair slowly traveled, according to its wont, about the room.
The child brought her comfort. She began to understand those grave rocking figures in the hospital ward, women who sat, with eyes that seemed to look into distant places, with a child's head on their breasts.
After all, that was life for a woman. Love was only a part of the scheme of life, a means to an end. And that end was the child.
For the first time she wished that her child had lived.
She felt no bitterness now, and no anger. He was dead. It was hard to think of him as dead, who had been so vitally alive. She was sorry he had had to die, but death was like love and children, it was a part of some general scheme of things. Suppose this had been his child she was holding? Would she so easily have forgiven him? She did not know.
Then she thought of Willy Cameron. The bitterness had strangely gone out of that, too. Perhaps, vaguely, she began to realize that only young love gives itself passionately and desperately, when there is no hope of a return, and that the agonies of youth, although terrible enough, pass with youth itself.
She felt very old.
Joe found her there, the chair displaying its usual tendency to climb the chimney flue, and stood in the doorway, looking at her with haunted, hungry eyes. There was a sort of despair in Joe those days, and now he was tired and shaken from the battle.
“I'll take her home in a minute,” he said, still with the strange eyes.
He came into the room, and suddenly he was kneeling beside the chair, his head buried against the baby's warm, round body. His bent shoulders shook, and Edith, still with the maternal impulse strong within her, put her hand on his bowed head.
“Don't, Joe!”
He looked up.
“I loved you so, Edith!”
“Don't you love me now?”
“God knows I do. I can't get over it. I can't. I've tried, Edith.”
He sat back on the floor and looked at her.
“I can't,” he repeated. “And when I saw you like that just now, with the kid in your arms—I used to think that maybe you and I—”
“I know, Joe. No decent man would want me now.”
She was still strangely composed, peaceful, almost detached.
“That!” he said, astonished. “I don't mean that, Edith. I've had my fight about that, and got it over. That's done with. I mean—” he got up and straightened himself. “You don't care about me.”
“But I do care for you. Perhaps not quite the way you care, Joe, but I've been through such a lot. I can't seem to feel anything terribly. I just want peace.”
“I could give you that,” he said eagerly.
Edith smiled. Peace, in that noisy house next door, with children and kittens and puppies everywhere! And yet it would be peace, after all, a peace of the soul, the peace of a good man's love. After a time, too, there might come another peace, the peace of those tired women in the ward, rocking.
“If you want me, I'll marry you,” she said, very simply. “I'll be a good wife, Joe. And I want children. I want the right to have them.”
He never noticed that the kiss she gave him, over the sleeping baby, was slightly tinged with granulated sugar.
OLD Anthony's body had been brought home, and lay in state in his great bed. There had been a bad hour; death seems so strangely to erase faults and leave virtues. Something strong and vital had gone from the house, and the servants moved about with cautious, noiseless steps. In Grace's boudoir, Howard was sitting, his arms around his wife, telling her the story of the day. At dawn he had notified her by telephone of Akers' murder.
“Shall I tell Lily?” she had asked, trembling.
“Do you want to wait until I get back?”
“I don't know how she will take it, Howard. I wish you could be here, anyhow.”
But then had come the battle and his father's death, and in the end it was Willy Cameron who told her. He had brought back all that was mortal of Anthony Cardew, and, having seen the melancholy procession up the stairs, had stood in the hall, hating to intrude but hoping to be useful. Howard found him there, a strange, disheveled figure, bearing the scars of battle, and held out his hand.
“It's hard to thank you, Cameron,” he said; “you seem to be always about when we need help. And”—he paused—“we seem to have needed it considerably lately.”
Willy Cameron flushed.
“I feel rather like a meddler, sir.”
“Better go up and wash,” Howard said. “I'll go up with you.”
It happened, therefore, that it was in Howard Cardew's opulent dressing-room that Howard first spoke to Willy Cameron of Akers' death, pacing the floor as he did so.
“I haven't told her, Cameron.” He was anxious and puzzled. “She'll have to be told soon, of course. I don't know anything about women. I don't know how she'll take it.”
“She has a great deal of courage. It will be a shock, but not a grief. But I have been thinking—” Willy Cameron hesitated. “She must not feel any remorse,” he went on. “She must not feel that she contributed to it in any way. If you can make that clear to her—”
“Are you sure she did not?”
“It isn't facts that matter now. We can't help those. And no one can tell what actually led to his change of heart. It is what she is to think the rest of her life.”
Howard nodded.
“I wish you would tell her,” he said. “I'm a blundering fool when it comes to her. I suppose I care too much.”
He caught rather an odd look in Willy Cameron's face at that, and pondered over it later.
“I will tell her, if you wish.”
And Howard drew a deep breath of relief. It was shortly after that he broached another matter, rather diffidently.
“I don't know whether you realize it or not, Cameron,” he said, “but this thing to-day might have been a different story if it had not been for you. And—don't think I'm putting this on a reward basis. It's nothing of the sort—but I would like to feel that you were working with me. I'd hate like thunder to have you working against me,” he added.
“I am only trained for one thing.”
“We use chemists in the mills.”
But the discussion ended there. Both men knew that it would be taken up later, at some more opportune time, and in the meantime both had one thought, Lily.
So it happened that Lily heard the news of Louis Akers' death from Willy Cameron. She stood, straight and erect, and heard him through, watching him with eyes sunken by her night's vigil and by the strain of the day. But it seemed to her that he was speaking of some one she had known long ago, in some infinitely remote past.
“I am sorry,” she said, when he finished. “I didn't want him to die. You know that, don't you? I never wished him—Willy, I say I am sorry, but I don't really feel anything. It's dreadful.”
Before he could catch her she had fallen to the floor, fainting for the first time in her healthy young life.
An hour later Mademoiselle went down to the library door. She found Willy Cameron pacing the floor, a pipe clenched in his teeth, and a look of wild despair in his eyes.
Mademoiselle took a long breath. She had changed her view-point somewhat since the spring. After all, what mattered was happiness. Wealth and worldly ambition were well enough, but they brought one, in the end, to the thing which waited for all in some quiet upstairs room, with the shades drawn and the heavy odors of hot-house flowers over everything.
“She is all right, quite, Mr. Cameron,” she said. “It was but a crisis of the nerves, and to be expected. And now she demands to see you.”
Grayson, standing in the hall, had a swift vision of a tall figure, which issued with extreme rapidity from the library door, and went up the stairs, much like a horse taking a series of hurdles. But the figure lost momentum suddenly at the top, hesitated, and apparently moved forward on tiptoe. Grayson went into the library and sniffed at the unmistakable odor of a pipe. Then, having opened a window, he went and stood before a great portrait of old Anthony Cardew. Tears stood in the old man's eyes, but there was a faint smile on his lips. He saw the endless procession of life. First, love. Then, out of love, life. Then death. Grayson was old, but he had lived to see young love in the Cardew house. Out of love, life. He addressed a little speech to the picture.
“Wherever you are, sir,” he said, “you needn't worry any more. The line will carry on, sir. The line will carry on.”
Upstairs in the little boudoir Willy Cameron knelt beside the couch, and gathered Lily close in his arms.
Thanksgiving of the year of our Lord 1919 saw many changes. It saw, slowly emerging from the chaos of war, new nations, like children, taking their first feeble steps. It saw a socialism which, born at full term might have thrived, prematurely and forcibly delivered, and making a valiant but losing fight for life. It saw that war is never good, but always evil; that war takes everything and gives nothing, save that sometimes a man may lose the whole world and gain his own soul.
It saw old Anthony Cardew gone to his fathers, into the vast democracy of heaven, and Louis Akers passed through the Traitors' Gate of eternity to be judged and perhaps reprieved. For a man is many men, good and bad, and the Judge of the Tower of Heaven is a just Judge.
It saw Jim Doyle a fugitive, Woslosky dead, and the Russian, Ross, bland, cunning and eternally plotting, in New England under another name. And Mr. Hendricks ordering a new suit for the day of taking office. And Doctor Smalley tying a bunch of chrysanthemums on Annabelle, against a football game, and taking a pretty nurse to see it.
It saw Ellen roasting a turkey, and a strange young man in the Eagle Pharmacy, a young man who did not smoke a pipe, and allowed no visitors in the back room. And it saw Willy Cameron in the laboratory of the reopened Cardew Mills, dealing in tons instead of grains and drams, and learning to touch any piece of metal in the mill with a moistened fore-finger before he sat down upon it.
But it saw more than that.
On the evening of Thanksgiving Day there was an air of repressed excitement about the Cardew house. Mademoiselle, in a new silk dress, ran about the lower floor, followed by an agitated Grayson with a cloth, for Mademoiselle was shifting ceaselessly and with trembling hands vases of flowers, and spilling water at each shift. At six o'clock had arrived a large square white box, which the footman had carried to the rear and there exhibited, allowing a palpitating cook, scullery maid and divers other excitable and emotional women to peep within.
After which he tied it up again and carried it upstairs.
At seven o'clock Elinor Cardew, lovely in black satin, was carried down the stairs and placed in a position which commanded both the hall and the drawing-room. For some strange reason it was essential that she should see both.
At seven-thirty came in a rush:
(a)—Mr. Alston Denslow, in evening clothes and gardenia, and feeling in his right waist-coat pocket nervously every few minutes.
(b)—An excited woman of middle age, in a black silk dress still faintly bearing the creases of five days in a trunk, and accompanied by a mongrel dog, both being taken upstairs by Grayson, Mademoiselle, Pink, and Howard Cardew. (“He said Jinx was to come,” she explained breathlessly to her bodyguard. “I never knew such a boy!”)
(c)—Mr. Davis, in a frock coat and white lawn tie, and taken upstairs by Grayson, who mistook him for the bishop.
(d)—Aunt Caroline, in her diamond dog collar and purple velvet, and determined to make the best of things.
(e)—The real bishop this time, and his assistant, followed by a valet with a suitcase, containing the proper habiliments for a prince of the church while functioning. (A military term, since the Bishop had been in the army.)
(f)—A few unimportant important people, very curious, and the women uncertain about the proper garb for a festive occasion in a house of mourning.
(g)—Set of silver table vases, belated.
(h)—Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks, Mayor and Mayoress-elect. Extremely dignified.
(i)—An overfull taxicab, containing inside it Ellen, Edith, Dan and Joe. The overflow, consisting of a tall young man, displaying repressed excitement and new evening clothes, with gardenia, sat on the seat outside beside the chauffeur and repeated to himself a sort of chant accompanied by furious searchings of his pockets. “Money. Checkbook. Tickets. Trunk checks,” was the burden of his song.
(j)—Doctor Smalley and Annabelle. He left Annabelle outside.
The city moved on about its business. In thousands of homes the lights shone down on little family groups, infinitely tender little groups. The workers of the city were there, the doors shut, the fires burning. To each man the thing he had earned, not the thing that he took. To all men the right to labor, to love, and to rest. To children, the right to play. To women, the hearth, and the peace of the hearth. To lovers, love, and marriage, and home.
The city moved on about its business, and its business was homes.
At the great organ behind the staircase the organist sat. In stiff rows near him were the Cardew servants, marshaled by Grayson and in their best.
Grayson stood, very rigid, and waited. And as he waited he kept his eyes on the portrait of old Anthony, in the drawing-room beyond. There was a fixed, rapt look in Grayson's eyes, and there was reassurance. It was as though he would say to the portrait: “It has all come out very well, you see, sir. It always works out somehow. We worry and fret, we old ones, but the young come along, and somehow or other they manage, sir.”
What he actually said was to tell a house maid to stop sniveling.
Over the house was the strange hush of waiting. It had waited before this, for birth and for death, but never before—
The Bishop was waiting also, and he too had his eyes fixed on old Anthony's portrait, a straight, level-eyed gaze, as of man to man, as of prince of the church to prince of industry. The Bishop's eyes said: “All shall be done properly and in order, and as befits the Cardews, Anthony.”
The Bishop was as successful in his line as Anthony Cardew had been in his. He cleared his throat.
The organist sat at the great organ behind the staircase, waiting. He was playing very softly, with his eyes turned up. He had played the same music many times before, and always he felt very solemn, as one who makes history. He sighed. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was only an accompaniment to life, to which others sang and prayed, were christened, confirmed and married. But what was the song without the music? He wished the scullery maid would stop crying.
Grayson touched him on the arm.
“All ready, sir,” he said.
Willy Cameron stood at the foot of the staircase, looking up.