INTO the wood, a wild, unbrageous tract of land lying back of the cottage, he strode, full of ponderous fears as to the outcome of his undertaking, and yet vaguely buoyed up by the natural beauty on all sides. Soon the town lay behind him; only the low hum of its traffic, the occasional clanging of a locomotive's bell, the whistle of an engine at a factory, the clatter of a dray followed him. The reverent, almost peaceful thought was borne in upon him that the meandering, little-used path he was pursuing had been traversed many times by Dora. In that secluded and picturesque spot she had breathed in the inspiration which had lifted her far above those by whom she had been misunderstood and traduced. Along that path she and his child, perchance, had plucked flowers through the years in which he had shunned them—denied them before the world, whose good opinion he had coveted to his moral undoing.
Half a mile from the cottage the path began to descend to the river valley, a vast swampy tangle of dense undergrowth. Here in the marshes, impassable during the overflow of winter and spring, but now dank, cool, and seductive, were many nooks of indescribable beauty. Here moss-grown willows bowed over seeping, crystal pools and silently trickling water. There were the armies of cattails, the solitary clumps of broom-sedge, the banks of delicate ferns, and the pond-lilies which had formed the background of her pictures. There she had found the wild rose-bushes, the papaw, the sumac, and the mazes of grape and muscadine vines into the reproduction of which she had poured her crushed and yet awakening soul.
Presently he came upon her seated on a mossy bank, her closed sketch-book on her knee. She was not working, but, with the end of her pencil at her parted lips, she sat watching Lionel, whom he could see plucking flowers and colored leaves not far away.
“Now, don't go any farther, darling boy!” he heard her call out, in tones the mellow sweetness of which shot through him like a delectable pain. “You might wander away, and then mother's boy would be lost.”
Sheltered from her view by hanging vines and the lowering branches of a beech-tree, Galt peered out at her. How could he have been so blinded?—so densely unappreciative of her? Where in all his experience had he known a creature so beautiful in soul, mind, and body? And yet he had thrown her down and trampled on her and left her covered with the mire and slime of his own making. He smothered a groan of blended self-contempt and despair. Her mother had doubted his ever regaining her regard, and Mrs. Barry knew her best. The girl had been at his mercy once, and he had not hesitated to strike; now she had the upper hand. What would she do? How would she receive his proposal?—what would she say? Would her soulful eyes blaze under the fires of just retaliation? Would her magnetic voice ring with the contempt she must so long have felt?
0008
Noiselessly treading the dank, green moss which lay between him and her, he was close to her before she was aware of his presence. Then she glanced up and saw him; there was a fluttering, shrinking look in her long-lashed eyes, in which he read the hurried hope that the meeting was purely accidental; to his horror, he also read in the simple act of reaching for her hat, which lay by her side, that she intended to avoid any sort of intercourse with him.
With the agony of this fear sounding in his voice, he cried, imploringly: “Please don't run away! I have been to your house to see you; your mother told me you were here.”
“But shewouldn't,” Dora said, pale and surprised. “She knows that I don't want to—to meetany onehere. It isn't fair, Kenneth—you know it isn't! It is taking a mean, low advantage of me, after all that has happened. It is cowardly, and I won't stand it. You will leave me instantly, orIshall go!”
“God forgive me, you are right, Dora!” he cried, in dismay. “But there is something I must say, and even your mother thought I might venture to see you.”
“If it is to offer me money for my boy, as you did in the contemptible letter I burned unanswered, soon after his birth, you will be wasting time,” she said, wrathful, in her cold, unrelenting beauty. “I can't accept money, even for him, which was earned as the price of his mother's public disgrace. He is mine, and he shall be mine to the end. I can work for him till he is old enough to work for me. We don't need you—neither of us do, Kenneth.”
“I have made you angry,” he said, quivering from head to foot, his anguished eyes fixed on hers. “Listen, Dora. Last night I planned to kill myself to get out of the agony into which my awakened love for you and my new love for Lionel has drawn me. I was ready to do it, for to that moment I had no fear of God or eternity; but a change came over me. Hope dawned; I don't know why, but it did, and I made a determination to spend the remainder of my life in your service, and in that of my child, for he is mine as much as he is yours.
“Then my new hope seemed to fairly set the world on fire. It was showered down from heaven like the forgiveness of God upon a blinded creature buried in the mire of sin. Ever since I sold my honor the night my ambition conquered me, I have been a cursed, isolated soul. It must have been the hand of God that led me back here to Stafford. I love Lionel with all my heart, and I know now, in spite of my contradictory conduct, that I have loved you all this time. Last night Wynn Dearing told me that it is your wish to go to Paris—you, your mother, and the child—and the thought came to me that if you would be my wife we could go and remain there a few years, and return here to spend the rest of our lives, and thus regain the happiness we've lost. Oh, don't turn from me, Dora! You must, oh, you must give me a chance! God knows it is my duty, and you must not stand between me and that. I can wait for the return of your respect, even if it is for years. But give me a chance!”
She had turned her face from him, and he could not tell what effect his appeal had had upon her; but he saw that her soft, white fingers were clinched tightly on her knee. Suddenly she looked him squarely in the face.
“Oh, you make it sohardfor me!” she said, gently. “I knew you were not a happy man. I saw the shadow of spiritual death in your countenance the day I met you at Dearing's. Yes, the child is yours, as well as he is mine. God has made him a part of you, as he is a part of me. And he loves you, Kenneth, he loves you—and admires you above all men. Young as he is, it would actually pain him to be separated from you. And you are asking me to be your wife!” She shrugged her shoulders, her proud lip quivered, and she looked away. “You are asking me, andnow!”
“Yes, Dora, to be my wife before the world, as you have been in God's sight all these years. I am willing to crawl in the dust at your feet. You are far above me. You were that when I blindly deserted you, and I can never be worthy of your forgiveness, but I would die for a chance to serve you.”
“How sad it all is!” she sighed, her glance on the ground. “What a mere blown-about straw I have been! What a grim thing for a proud woman to decide! You deserted me once to save a paltry sum of money—a worldly ambition; you want me back tosave your soul—that expresses it, Kenneth. But I can't consent. I am simply human—and a woman. My pride won't let me—the pride that every woman has who holds herself erect. You sold yourself once, and you are now asking me to do the same. Your price was a successful railroad and the plaudits of a few people—the price paid to me would be the future welfare of my child. I am expected to salve the wounds of a torn and mangled womanhood with the realization that I am providing for my boy. There is no pain keener than the fear that one's offspring may suffer what we ourselves have been through, and I'd give my soul to see Lionel happy in the time to come, but I can't bring it about in the way you ask. I simply can't! I loved you, Kenneth, before that unspeakable cloud fell between us, but I was only a girl then, and during all the years that have passed since I have given you no place at all in my heart. We are, in fact, meeting to-day as strangers.”
“I know. I know it is true so far as it touchesyou,” he said, with a deep sigh, “for your love died with your respect for me, but my love has never died, Dora. I smothered it for a time, in my mad ambition, but there was no act of yours to weaken it, and so it lived and grew till it has overpowered me. I love you now, strange as it may sound to you, ten thousand times more than I ever did. You may turn from me with a shudder and as a thing to be loathed; but I shall never cease to watch over you and strive to protect you.”
“I can't say any more,” she said, as she tied the tape round her portfolio and gathered up her pencils. “I don't want to pain you; but I can't do what you ask, even—even for Lionel's sake. He and I and his grannymaygo to Paris some day, but we don't want you with us, Kenneth. I want to leave absolutelyeverythingbehind. You must be dead to us; there is no other way—no other possible way.”
He turned his fixed gaze away, that she might not see the look of agony which had overspread his face. She sat still and silent for several minutes; then he saw her draw herself up excitedly, look about anxiously, and rise to her feet.
“Oh, where is Lionel?” she cried. “He was there in the bushes when you came. Oh, he may have wandered off and be lost! There are some very dangerous places along the river-bank!”
“I see him! Don't be alarmed!” Galt said, indicating a spot beyond a clump of bushes. “He's all right; I'll bring him to you.”
“Thank you,” she said, coldly, and she sank back rigidly on the grass.
He returned a moment later with Lionel in his arms. She could see, as she swept them with a hurried glance, that Galt was pressing the child close against his breast with a look of despair in his white face. Reaching Dora, Galt was lowering the child to the ground when Lionel clung tightly round his neck, pressing his little hand against his cheek.
“What is the matter?” Lionel asked, anxiously. “Mamma, he can't talk. He tries, but he can't; he is trembling all over; he is about to cry. What is the matter with him?”
Reaching up, and without a word, Dora took the child into her arms, and, holding him across her lap as if he had been an infant, she bent over his face to kiss him. Presently she looked up at Galt, and her proud lip trembled as she said:
“Oh, Kenneth, fate is handling us strangely. I spoke harshly just now, for I can see that you are suffering. I wish I could be less human. After all my dreams, I am of the earth, earthy. I am no higher than a worm of this soil, after all the heights I thought I had climbed. But I can't help myself. I could never forget. I might try throughout eternity, but I'd never, never forget—forget that I offered myself wholly, body and soul, and that you refused to—to take me when I was in trouble. It may be sinful to look at it so, but I simply can't see it otherwise. You must really go now. Good-bye!”
“Good-bye,” he echoed, in his throat. “I am going away to-morrow, and I promise never to intrude myself upon either of you again.”
“'Good-bye?'—you said 'good-bye!'” Lionel suddenly sat up in his mother's lap and stared from his great, startled eyes, his beautiful mouth puckered up and quivering.
“Yes, I have to go away,” Galt faltered, his glance averted. “I only came to spend a short time at Stafford.”
“But you told me you never would go away from me,” the child persisted. “Don't you remember the day I fell and hurt my knee, and you washed it and put the medicine on it? Don't you remember you kissed me, and hugged me, and wanted me to kiss you, and said if I'd promise to be your little boy you would always stay with me? How can I be your little boy if—if you go off?”
The eyes of the mother and father met in the strangest stare that ever passed between two mortal creatures.
“I can always love you if I can't be with you,” Galt faltered, conscious of the emptiness of his words. “I can always love you and think what a plucky little boy you are, and—and—” His voice trailed away into nothingness. A sob rose in his throat and choked him.
“But I want you tostay!” The child was crying now, with his chubby hands to his eyes. Suddenly Dora, with a desperate movement, pressed him to her breast.
“You must not play on his feelings that way!” she cried, fiercely, casting a significant glance toward the town. “Go, please!”
He bowed low, a look of death on his face. She pressed the head of the sobbing child to her breast, and firmly held it there with her beautiful white hand. “Good-bye,” she said, with the dignity and calmness of an offended queen. “Good-bye—forever!”
He turned and moved away. A few paces from her, before the trees had obscured her from his sight, he looked back and saw her with Lionel in her arms. Her exquisite face was pressed consolingly against the golden head. She was whispering to the child and rocking back and forth, as if he were a babe on her breast.
ON his left, farther away from the town, and about a mile distant, stood a small mountain. Dark-red as to soil, bristling with sandstone bowlders, sparcely grown with pines and thorny locust-trees, and gashed by rain-washed gullies, it rose majestically against the cloud-flecked blue of infinite space beyond.
Hardly knowing why he did so, Galt turned his face toward it and strode on, vaguely conscious that he was battling against the soul-calamity which had beset him as a dumb beast might fight for its physical life. Around the sloping base of the mountain lay old worn-out fields, now given over to the riotous possession of anything which would take root upon its soil. There was no path leading to the seldom visited elevation, but with his eyes constantly on the solitary finger of earth he climbed over the old rail-fence encompassing the land, and forged his way through the dense undergrowth, now ploughing his feet through a matting of heather and dewberry-vines, or plunging unexpectedly into some weed-hidden spring or fresh-water stream. Between him and the mountain ran a creek, and he suddenly found himself at a spot on the banks of it, where, as a boy, home on his vacations, he used to fish. But it had changed, he told himself, as everything else had changed—he was a man now, butsucha man!
Crossing the creek on a foot-log formed from the fallen corpse of a giant oak he had once known, he walked onward. The land was now sloping sharply upward, and his way was less impeded. The air was becoming more rarefied, the view on either side and behind him was unfolding more rapidly in the hazy distance. The sun, which had been beating on him mercilessly, was now behind a drifting cloud, and the cool breezes of a higher altitude fanned his flushed face.
Finally he reached a flat, jutting bowlder near the top, and, exhausted from the inconsiderate tax on his muscles, he sank down panting. There lay old Stafford nearest at hand, and beyond stretched out the new town under its web of smoke, the besmudged handwriting of mercantile progress. His brain had fostered the idea, and made it practicable. Reaching out southward, in the sunlight, like two threads of silver, lay the great steel highway which his foresight and ambition had brought into existence. His fancy pictured with lightning flashes the growing villages and towns, as he had seen them on the opening day when he, like an emperor of a conquered territory, had been escorted over it. The moment had given him the thrill of gratified avarice and the empty glory of conquest, but the eyes of the eager throngs which had gazed upon him in wonder and envy that day saw nothing of the cancer which even then was eating into the vitals of his higher nature. Then—But why contemplate it? The juggernaut of relentless Right had ground him under its wheels.
He locked his arms over his knees, lowered his head, and groaned in sheer despair. If Dora had only given him a bare chance! But she hadn't, and now, loved as woman never was loved before, desired in spirit and body as woman never was desired by man, she had coldly, firmly put him from her. The sight of her as she sat holding his child in her arms, and spurning him as was her right to spurn him, would haunt him into and through the Eternity which had now become such a hopeless reality.
Suddenly raising his eyes to the relentless blue above, he tried to frame a prayer.
“O God, have mercy!” he cried. “Show me, a sinner, a way out of the darkness of my damnation. Give them to me, that I may atone by my conduct to them throughout my life. Soften her heart, O God, and open her eyes to the depths of my woe! I have suffered, I will suffer on to the end, but give me my wife and child!”
Noon came and passed, but he had no thought of thirst or of hunger. He remained there on the rock and watched the sun go down, and saw the soft veil of coming darkness thicken over the earth. Now old Stafford lay in darkness, save for the dazzling circles of light where the arc-lamps swung across the streets and were grouped like a constellation in the square. He waited till the town clock had struck nine; then, still without sense of fatigue or hunger, he went down, now with considerable difficulty, owing to the darkness of the incline.
He managed to reach his front gate without meeting any one, and was entering when he saw the figure of a woman emerge from the veranda and come slowly down the walk. Could it be one of the servants? he asked himself. But his answer was the recognition of the woman herself. It was Mrs. Barry. She paused, unable, it seemed, to formulate what she had to say, so sudden was the meeting, and his heart sank lower, as the thought came to him that something might have happened to Dora or the child.
“I came to see you,” she began, pushing back the bonnet which had partially obscured her face. “Your servants told me they didn't know where you were.”
“You wanted to seeme?” he gasped. “Has anything gone wrong?”
“No, it is notthat,” the woman said, leading the way toward a clump of cedars on the grass, as if from the sensitive fear of meeting some one on the walk. “My daughter and the child came home at noon. I saw from her looks that she was troubled over something, and that Lionel had been crying, from the marks on his face; but I did not question either of them. All this afternoon she did not speak of you, but to-night, after she had put the boy to sleep, she came into my room and sat down near me. I knew she was in awful struggle over something. She began telling me, in a slow, halting voice, of all that you had said. She is my only child, Kenneth Galt, but I don't understand her any better than if she were not of my flesh and blood. I never fully understood her father. I suppose no practical-minded person can comprehend those who live in the imagination, surrounded by ideals which become real to them. She began to go over the whole history of her trouble from the very first, and she never left out a single detail. She summed it all up in the most marvellous manner. My heart ached for her as it never had before. She wants to do right, she says, and she knows what would be right and self-sacrificing on her part, but she says she simply can't conquer the offended pride within her. She has had trouble and we are poor, but there never was born a queen with more pride of womanhood.”
“Yes, yes,” Galt gasped, as he stared at her. “I know; I know.”
“Then I tried to advise her,” Mrs. Barry went on. “At first it was like talking to a person born deaf, but finally she began to listen, for, as a last resort, I was holding up the child's interests. I spoke of what a glorious thing a trip to Paris would be—to stay there as long as we liked, and to be able to come home again, for we do love it here, and I am sure the people would be kind in their view of it. I reminded her that once, when we asked Lionel what he had rather have than anything on earth, he had said that,first, he wanted a father like other children, and,next, that he wanted to be where he could have playmates.”
“Oh, I can't bear it, Mrs. Barry!” Galt groaned. “If there is anything under high heaven I could do to rectify my mistake, I'd give my life to do it.”
“I know it, Kenneth, and I am going to say something that may surprise you. I don't harbor any ill-feeling toward you. I simply can't. Living so close with Dora has lifted me up in spiritual things. I can't have anything but pity for the consequences of sin and temptation. What you did wasn't a proof that you didn't love my child. It only proved that the temptation you had, at the moment of your fall, kept you from realizing what you would lose. That's all. I believe you loved her then, that you did even after you left her, and I am sure that you do now more than ever; in fact, I made that plain to her. I think she sees it, too,in her way; but it doesn't help her overcome her pride. I am sorry for her—more so than I ever imagined I could be for a woman under any trial. She is pulled many ways by duty, and she is fairly in an agony, undecided as to—”
“Undecided?Did you say that?” Galt leaned forward eagerly, his lips quivering, as he waited breathlessly.
“Yes, she is undecided. You see, things have come to such a focus that we must leave here. She has just learned that Fred Walton has been falsely accused by many persons, and she always liked him. He is coming back home, and she wants to clear his name, and yet she shrinks from having her private affairs brought in public view again. She said, herself, that if she could get her own consent to become your wife, then everybody would understand the truth, and not blame him. Then there is the child—”
“Yes, Lionel!” Galt panted. “We must save him, and we can—we can, if Dora could only—”
“She knows that full well,” the woman said, passing her gaunt hand over her withered mouth and swallowing the rising lump in her throat. “If you only could have—have heard what I did to-night it would have wrung tears from your eyes. Lionel had waked up, and she had to go to him. He couldn't sleep for what was on his mind. Kenneth Galt, that little angel was simply begging his mother not to let you go away—think of it, actually pleading for you! He had heard you say you were going, and, in some way, he fancied Dora could persuade you to stay. He cried till his little pillow was wet. He told her he loved you, that you had said he was your little boy, and that he wanted to be with you always. I heard her pleading with him and arguing, but through it all his little voice would continue to cry out that it should not be so—that he wantedyou, and thatyouwantedhim.”
“God bless him!” burst from the lips of the bowed man.
“Finally he dropped to sleep,” Mrs. Barry went on, “and slept, still sobbing, as children do when wrought up high, and she left him and came again to me. Poor thing! She was simply undone—conquered! She put her head in my lap and burst out crying. She sobbed and sobbed a long time, and then I asked her if she would letmemanage it. She knew what I meant—exactly what I meant, for she became like a lump of clay in my lap. For a long time she lay like that, hardly breathing. Then I told her of what a wonderful influence she had been to me in opening my eyes, old as I am, to the beauty of a higher, spiritual life, and that in holding back, as she was now doing, and refusing to pardon a repentant man, even when the happiness of her own child was at stake, she was going backward instead of forward. She seemed to realize it. She sat up straight, and the old light of sweetness and gentleness seemed to dawn in her face. 'I'll simply put myself in your hands, mother,' she said—'in your hands!'
“I broke down and cried in pure joy, Kenneth Galt. Then what do you think? I heard her go back to her room, and knew that the child had waked. I am not sure; but I think she waked him purposely, for she never could bear to have him go to sleep unhappy. I heard her telling him about the beauty of Paris—about its streets, its boulevards, and its parks; its buildings; its statuary and pictures, and of the pretty children who were to be his friends. She laughed like a happy child—they were always like two children, anyway—when she told him about crossing the ocean in a great ship, and of the high waves, deep water, and big fish. But he stopped her with a question. What do you think it was, Kenneth? He wanted to know ifyouwere going? I knew she hesitated, her pride closing her lips, even there alone with her child. She wouldn't answer his question. Then I heard Lionel say plainly, and there was a strange sort of stubborness in his little voice: 'Well, I don't want to go; he would not want me to leave him; he said so once; he said he would never leaveme, and I wasn't to leavehim. Is he going, mother?' he kept asking.
“Then I heard her say, 'Yes, darling, he is going—now you can sleep!'”
“She said that? Did she say that?” Galt cried, his whole despondent being aflame.
“Yes; it is settled, Kenneth. Perhaps, in time, you and she will be thoroughly happy together. I don't know, but I hope so.”
“Thank God!” Galt said, fervently, and, taking the old woman's hand, he wrung it in an ecstasy of delight. “I only wanted a chance, Mrs. Barry. I shall devote my life to all of you, and we can be happy—gloriously happy over there. She shall be our queen, and Lionel our little prince. I'll have this old house kept in order, and some day we'll come back to it.”
“Then here is my plan,” Mrs. Barry said. “Meet us in Atlanta the day after to-morrow, and we shall be ready to sail. I'll let you know what hotel we go to. The news will come back from there, but we sha'n't be here during the reception of it. Now, I'm glad, for your sake as well as ours, that it is all going to turn out well. I want to see you happy. You have suffered enough, and so has she. As for me, I never was so happy in my life. I want to go to Paris for a while. My husband is buried there, you know.”
ON the morning of the fourth day after the meeting of Dora and Kenneth Galt, old Stafford was stirred to its outskirts by the return of the most popular young man who had ever lived in the town. Fred Walton got in an hour or so before noon.
He had sent a telegram to his father announcing his coming, but had failed to mention the hour of his arrival, and so there was no special conveyance at the station to meet him, though old Simon, in his Sunday frock-suit and a fresh collar, with a five-cent shoe-shine and a ten-cent shave at the barber-shop adjoining the bank, sat in the counting-room waiting, not sure whether his son would get in during the morning or by the afternoon train.
He was not long kept in doubt, for the electric trolley-car that whizzed up from the station was fairly packed with individuals of both sexes and all classes, who, it seemed, had ridden up chiefly that they might be among the first to pay tribute to their old favorite and hear him talk.
It was all joyous and reassuring enough to Fred at first, and might have continued so had the car not stopped at a crossing half-way between the station and the square, and taken on Wynn Dearing, who, having returned home, had been visiting a patient near by. The eyes of the two met. Fred colored high; but with a hard, grave countenance Dearing simply turned to the conductor, paid his fare, and sat down near a window, through which he stared stonily all the way to the square.
The heart of the returning exile sank into a veritable slough of despair. His admirers, packed about him, were stilled for a moment by the “cut” he had received, and then, not being able to interpret it, they valiantly passed it over, and showed by their excessive cordiality that if one of his old companions had been coarse enough to snub him on that day of all days, they remained true.
But the light and joy of it all was blotted out for the one most concerned. He sat trying to answer the innumerable questions, trying to return humorous sallies and references to the gay old days with smiles that would reflect their good-will, but it was a poor effort at best. He endeavored, in a miserable maze, to recall the exact words of his father's hurried letter ordering him home, and his spirits sank lower and lower as he made the effort. After all, he told himself, he had misunderstood Margaret's message—the message which had raised him to the very skies of delight. The letter, which he had read hundreds of times, was in the pocket of his coat, and he could feel its now grim and satirical pressure against his breast.
“She told me she wanted to see you,” old Simon had written, “and for me to write you so. She said she was sure when you and her got together you and her would understand each other perfectly. She was powerful flushed and excited, and I could hardly make out just what she did or did not mean. It was the way sheactedmore than what she actually said in so many plain words that made me believe she had concluded to let bygones be bygones. So, if I was you, Fred, and still thought she would be a proper mate, why, I should lay business aside and make hay for a while. The sun seems shining up this way for you right now, and so, as I say, I would come right on before some other cloud rises. Women are changeable, and she may be no exception to the rule. I can't quite understand why she shut off my proposition in your behalf when I went up to see her, and then come down all in a tilt and hustle the next day, and did what she did, and talked like she did. I am too much of a business man by habit, I reckon, to encourage anybody in a deal that ain't fully closed, signed, sealed; and delivered; so, you see, all I can say is to come on and work out your own salvation.”
Now, sure that he had made a grave mistake, and with the heaviest of hearts, Fred left the car at the postoffice, noting that Wynn Dearing, with a hard, set face, was striding across the street to his office with never another look in his direction.
“He is furious because I have come back,” Fred said to himself. “I promised him I'd stay away, and I have broken my word. General Sylvester is as much against me as ever, and so is Wynn. It is all up. I'll never live it down. These persons who seem glad to see me have nothing at stake, or they would snub me too. My father has forgiven me, but that has nothing to do with Margaret. After he wrote as he did, I hoped—hoped—well, I was a fool! I hoped too much. I'll go back West and stay there. I'll see Wynn Dearing and tell him of my mistake. Surely that will justify me if my—my presumption ends there.”
As he neared the bank he saw his father standing in the door, backed up by all his clerks. The gaunt, grizzled visage of the old man, under its half-sheepish look, was lighted up as it had never been in his son's memory, and the faces around him were wreathed in welcoming smiles, but it was a hand of lead that Fred extended, a smile that was dead lay on his handsome face.
Dearing, to his surprise, on reaching his office after leaving the car, found Margaret waiting for him. He stared at her almost fiercely for a moment; then, as she avoided his eyes and was silent, he broke out:
“You have come down here to see him?”
“Yes, brother,” she answered, simply. “I want to be among the first to welcome him home. He has suffered enough, and has proved his genuine nobility. I can't explain everything just now, for I have no right to; but you will know all that I know very, very soon.”
“I know this, Madge,” he said, and he sat down before her, looking like a figure carved in stone, so ghastly pale and rigid was he. “I knowthis: if you pardon that man for what he has done, I'll never speak to you again. I can stand some things, but I can't stand that. No man can marry my sister who has stampedthe very heart out of my life, as this one has!Now, perhaps you understand.”
“Oh, brother, you mean that you love—”
He nodded, and his head sank to his chest.
“Then you must listen tome!” Margaret began. “But, no, you will have to wait—I can't tell you even now—I can't explain.”
At this juncture there was a step on the floor of the front room. Some one was approaching. It was a messenger boy with a telegram.
Dearing took it and tore it open. The letters on the yellow sheet swam before his eyes, but he read the words:
Kenneth and I are married; now you will understand everything. We are all going to New York, then to Paris for a while. With love from mamma, Lionel, and myself, good-bye. Dora.
Margaret had read the telegram over her brother's shoulder, and with a woman's tact she signed the boy's book and led him to the outer door. She stood there alone for several minutes, looking out into the street. There was no sound in the office. She waited ten minutes, and then, with a tear of sympathy in her eye, she went back to her brother and put her arms about his bowed form.
As soon as was practicable, Fred led his father away from the clerks back to the old man's office.
“Wynn Dearing refused to speak to me on the car as we came up,” he said. “Father, I am afraid I misunderstood your letter, and have made an awful fool of myself by coming. He will think, and his sister will think—” But Fred could go no further. He sank into a seat near the desk, and the banker slowly lowered himself into his revolving chair.
“You say Wynn—you say her brother wouldn't speak to you,” he faltered. “Now, I wonder if—I—I wonder—You see, I hardly knew what to think when she popped in here like she did that day. What she said was all so jumbled and roundabout that, as I wrote you, it was more the way sheactedthat made me draw my conclusions than her exact words onanydirect line.”
“Well, how did sheact?” Fred inquired, despondently.
“Why, if youwillknow—” old Simon was growing red in the face. “I had no idea of telling it even toyou, but the truth is she up and kissed me—so she did! She gave me a smack right on the cheek!”
“Shekissedyou?”
“That's what she did, by gum! And Toby come in just in time to make her let go of my neck. So, you see, after I thought it all over, why, I thought that maybe she regarded me as being a kin to her in some shape or other, and meant that as a sort o' hint of what she was willing to do.”
At this moment a voice was heard in the corridor. It was Wynn Dearing's, and he was asking for Fred.
“I wonder if he's come here to pick a row,” old Simon asked, as his startled eyes bore down on the face of his son. “If he has, I reckon we can accommodate him. I ain't no fighter, but you are my own flesh and blood, and considering the time you've been away, and what you have accomplished, he hain't treated you right. Toby”—raising his voice and going to the door and looking out—“show that fellow back here. Nobody ain't hiding in this shebang, I am here to say, and if folks ain't satisfied all round—clean all round—why—”
But Wynn Dearing was brushing past the old man through the narrow doorway, his face pale, his hand extended to Fred.
“I have done you a great wrong, old man,” he said, in a shaking voice, “and I have come to beg your pardon.”
“Oh, that's all right, Wynn,” Fred gasped, in surprise. “I am sure you have treated me no worse than I deserve.”
“Oh yes, I have, Fred. I have worked against you ever since you left, and I now find that you are wholly innocent of what I accused you of. Let me talk it over with your father. Margaret is waiting at my office to see you. I promised I'd send you to her.”
As if in a dream, Fred hastened out of the bank and went down to Dearing's office. No one was in the front, but he found Margaret in the back room standing at a window, looking out. She turned as he entered and gave him both her hands.
“Oh, I'm so glad—so glad!” she cried, and he saw tears on her lashes, and the handkerchief she held in one of her hands was damp. “Oh, Fred, we have all treated you so badly, so cruelly, so unjustly, when you were striving so hard! A great mistake was made. If I had known what I now know when we met in New York, I would never have treated you as I did. You were thinking of one thing and I of another.”
“I don't understand,” he said, groping for her meaning, his big, honest eyes dilating.
“And I can't explain,” she said. “It really doesn't matter, anyway. I don't want even to think about it—at least to-day, when I am so happy. But I want you to know one thing: you see, Dora Barry showed me the letter you wrote her, and I want you to know that I love you. I have loved you every day, every minute, since you left.”
“You love me—you really care for me?” he said, deep in his throat.
“Yes; but come walk home with me, dear,” she said. “I want you all to myself. I shall never get my own forgiveness for allowing myself to misjudge you as I did. Let's not talk about it, but come on. Wynn may be back in a moment, and I don't want any explanations now, anyway. I want you wholly to myself.”
As they walked down the quiet street side by side he tried to speak, but the happiness within him had risen to a storm, and he could only stare at her in silent wonder, as if doubting his own good-fortune.
ONE of the great ocean bound steamships was ready for sailing from the New York harbor. On the deck, near the stern, somewhat removed from the others and leaning against the railing, stood a man and a child and a young woman so beautiful and so richly clad that the eyes of many of the passengers and their friends, who had massed themselves on the pier below, were fixed upon her admiringly.
“It is going to be a glorious voyage, darling,” Kenneth Galt said, as he stroked the golden hair of the child. “The bay is as smooth as glass. Look how the people are staring at you! You cannot dream how beautiful you are. Are you happy, Dora?”
She looked down at the water, put her hand against the cheek of the child, and smiled, a far-off look in her eyes. “Think, oh, think of what it means tohim!” Just then Mrs. Barry came from the luxurious suite of state-rooms Galt had secured.
“Some one has sent a great bunch of flowers,” she said to her daughter. “They were addressed to you. I asked the florist's man who sent them. He said he didn't know, but that it was a telegraphic order from somewhere. Go see them; they are simply beautiful. They perfume the whole place.”
Leaving the three together, Dora went to the suite of rooms. In the one reserved for her, on a table, she found a great mass of damp, fresh roses. The card accompanying the gift had slipped down between the stems. She drew it out and read:
“Bon voyage!”
That was all. She sat down at the table, gathered a bunch of the flowers in her hands, and buried her flushed face in them.
“Oh!” she cried, and then she burst into tears. “Bon voyage! bon voyage! From you—dear, dear, dear Wynn! I know. I understand. I have known and understood for years. I shall know and understand—always!”
The signal for leaving had sounded. She felt the ponderous throb of the ship under her. She dried her eyes and walked out on the deck. Her husband came to meet her. He took her arm, and they leaned over the railing and looked down into the multitude of waving hats and handkerchiefs.
“Who sent the flowers, darling?” Galt asked.
“There was no name attached,” she answered. “Look, Kenneth! Lionel is trying to climb the railing—don't let him!”
Galt hurried away to do her bidding, and she gazed down into the water, which was being churned into white foam.
“Bon voyage!” she said, bitterly. “Bon voyage!”