Hate wrong, as a bull hates red;Fight strong, till the wrong lies dead,For to him, just God, the fightWho smites for the sake of the right!
Hate wrong, as a bull hates red;Fight strong, till the wrong lies dead,For to him, just God, the fightWho smites for the sake of the right!
John Hartley, "Juvenilia."
A woman's heart never breaks, but O how often it withers!—Cordelia Vaughan, "Motherhood."
Cordelia's train crept into Montreal one hour and twenty minutes late, and it was already after three before she stepped out of the overheated car into the cool, crisp air of the station platform. She saw a uniformed attendant, and hurried to him at once.
"Can I catch the New York express?" she asked, breathlessly.
"Yes, ma'm!" he answered, promptly.
Her heart gave a sudden great bound of joy; she was not yet too late; she felt that it was a good omen, that luck was with her.
"What time does it leave?" she asked, hurriedly.
"From the other station, ma'm, some time this evenin'."
Her heart went down like lead. That meant hours more of suspense, hours more of waiting, and when time was so much to her!
She could never remember just how those dreary hours were passed. She had a dim recollection of walking, walking without a stop, along narrow and hilly little city streets, of turning restlessly stationward once more and pacing feverishly up and down platforms, with ghost-like trains coming in and going out, with ghost-like passengers hurrying this way and that way on every side of her. She heard the jangle of far-away bells, and the muffled voice of the guard calling the departing trains. She looked out at it all vaguely, and wondered if it would never end.
Once in the express for New York she felt tired and faint. She attempted to read, but it was useless. The rhythm of the speeding wheels seemed pulsing against her very brain itself. It seemed to pound, like a hammer on an anvil, and she repeated its cries again and again under her breath: "Hurry-Hurry, Hurry-Hurry, Hurry-Hurry!"
She called the porter and asked him to make up her berth. In the curtained, stifling gloom she flung herself down, in the forlorn hope that sleep would come to her tired eyes and wearied limbs. But that, too, was useless. She tossed from side to side in the hot berth, listening to the maddening rhythm of the speeding wheels' "Hurry-Hurry, Hurry-Hurry!"
She had known such nights before, but none had ever seemed so long. She raised the window-blind beside her, as she lay in the berth, and looked out. It was a clear, star-lit night. A great, lonely sea of black country with a fleeting light or two in the distance, seeming to make its blackness even lonelier, was all that she could distinguish. Toward the east she thought she saw a thin rind of pearl and pink on the horizon, and looked at her watch feverishly.
It was twenty-seven minutes to two. She shut out the night and the star-light, and listened once more to the pulsing rhythm of the car-wheels.
Then her thoughts went back to the happy week that lay behind her. She reviewed each day, hour by hour, and event by event. From that her restless mind leaped still farther back to the scene with Repellier, to that unspeakable hour of shame and despair. Then she went even farther back, to the very beginning, and step by step lived over her life, as she lay there, trying to shut out from her ears the maddening "Hurry-Hurry" of the wheels. She recalled the day that a tall, hollow-cheeked stranger came swinging up the path of her father's red-tiled home and inquired with his wistful smile if this was where the Rice who took in boarders lived. She remembered her sense of shame at her plain gingham dress, and how she had forgotten both shame and dress at the stranger's admiration of her yellow hair, twisted into a loose knot at the back of her head. "Why, child, it's a second Golden Fleece that should call for the outfit of a second Argo!" he had said to her, as though speaking to a girl not yet in her teens. That speech and that moment had marked the turning of all her life's tide. She was no longer the happy and petted belle of a little Kentucky village. She was a woman with aspirations toward the larger world of which he seemed a harbinger, of the knowledge and power of which he seemed an apostle. From that day innocence and content fell from her, leaf by leaf. Yet she remembered how she had clung to the lonely invalid, how for weeks together they had wandered about that far-away land of clover meadows and blue-tinted grasses, and sunsets made golden with gentle frosts. She remembered how she had labored with him on his Great Book, how his cough had grown faster than his manuscript, and how he had called for her when he was dying, and entrusted to her all his precious work, and wrung from her frightened lips the promise that she would copy it out, word for word, and when that task was finished take it herself to a publisher. She remembered how he had turned, then, and died in peace. She remembered her weeks of secret toil, her long, strange, first journey to New York, her trembling visit to the publisher, how later he had sent for her, and made her his dazzling offer—so unconsciously bewildering, so unconsciously tragical—on condition that she discard the masculinenom de plumewhich he imagined a shrinking timidity had forced her to adopt, how he had enlarged on the advantages of the woman's name on the title-page, how he had unthinkingly paved the way for that first duplicity, how he was prepared to push the book, and in the end, he believed, make both her name and her fortune. She recalled that brief and most bitter struggle which took place within her, how she had gone back to her publisher still vacillating, how she had learned, when he had thrust his crisp, new check into her hand, how narrow one's ethical Rubicon can be, and how much one can suffer when once that narrow stream is crossed. She remembered the day she had discarded her own name, how one morning she was Frances Rice, or often plain Fanny Rice, and the next morning Cordelia Vaughan. She took the name from the Virginia branch of her family, after much hesitation, she recalled, because Valerie Vaughan, her cousin, had already identified that patronymic with the gentle art of letters, smiling bitterly at the thought that under that new name she had sprung into being as an artist as maturely and as miraculously as the goddess Minerva herself.
Then she let her busy thoughts dwell on her first triumphant year in New York, on many memories of the growing belief of her friends that she was the daughter of an old and aristocratic Kentucky family, of her interviews and her invitations, of her first intoxicating draught of publicity, of her gradual dismay as she found herself being forgotten, of her months of silent and agonized effort, that resulted in nothing, of her restless nights and her feverish days, when her spirit cried out for some balm for the itch which was burning and consuming her. She was no fool, she knew; she was as clever as other women. But some essential touch of imagination, some necessary element of creativeness, was not hers; and it had been imposed upon her to seek by sheer strategy and despairing strife that which came so lightly to the hand of others.
As she lay there alone in her rocking berth her withered and barren heart itself grew appalled at the thought of those years of smallness, of meanness, of deceit and duplicity, and endless lies. The enormity of her wrong-doing overwhelmed her. And the bitterest sting of all lay in the fact that so much of it was irreparable, that she had wronged not only the living, but the dead as well.
The one appeasing oasis in that arid desert of deceit and self-seeking was the memorial week she had journeyed back to the little Kentucky town of her childhood and there watched over the erection of a granite shaft beside the sadly neglected grave of a young Northerner who had once come so intimately into her girlhood life.
She was not all bad, not all bad, she cried out to herself, piteously! It was not yet too late. It might cost her much, but Love would show her the way. That old dead past should be wiped out. She would tell her husband everything. She would hold nothing back from him, and, with her slate once clean, from that day she would show him, by her devotion to him and his work, by her patient help, by her humility and her tenderness, how she could be good, as other women—as the best of other women.
Yet it would be better, she decided, on second thoughts, to wait until after their marriage. If he, too, should forsake her at the last moment she would have nothing left to her in all the world. No, she must cling to him, she said, whatever happened, at whatever cost. She needed him; she was not strong enough to fight her fight alone. For him, and with him, she could do it. But alone, by herself, she could not do it. She would go with him to Repellier and tell them everything. Repellier could do what he cared to, it would make little difference; other things, after that, would scarcely count. And she could reason out her answer and her excuses to the world later. Perhaps he might even be willing to let bygones be bygones, when he saw and understood the new turn things had taken. But on that one point she was decided—she would, some day, tell her husband everything.
Then her thoughts traveled lightning-like back to the present moment, and her one haunting fear crept up into the foreground of her consciousness. What if she should yet be too late! What if the die had already been cast? She felt that Hartley would never forgive her that last and bitterest lie. Why had she let her heart run away with her; why had she told him so soon? Why had she not made sure before she had capitulated so utterly? Even to have confessed and repented, even to have thrown herself to the utmost on his goodness and his generosity would have been safer. But that chance now was gone.
Would she be too late? That was the question she asked herself again and again as the rhythmical "Hurry-Hurry" of the car-wheels smote on her ears once more. They used to tell her that she was lucky; she remembered it to her joy; she clung to the belief that luck would still be with her.
Cordelia had passed a sleepless night when the Montreal express drew rumblingly down into the darkness of the Grand Central tunnel. She had found it impossible to eat, but a cup of strong coffee seemed to have refreshed her. The air was raw and cold as she finally stepped out into the vaulted gloom of the depot, and her breath hung in little white clouds as she pushed her way hurriedly toward the carriage-stand, where a pack of yelping and barking cab-men surrounded her, like hounds about a timorous quarry. She stepped into a public automobile, and started at once for the office of her publisher.
As she turned into the early morning quietness of Fifth Avenue, and the old, familiar, intangible smell of the city stole up into her nostrils, it seemed as though she had stepped back into life and the world again. Had she not dreamed a dream, she asked, as the very intangibility of that city odor crept up to her, teasing to be remembered and named. Here was the world where she had lived and fought and worked, here was where her sterner and wider and darker life had opened out before her. Here she had passed her happiest and her most miserable moments. That lost week in the sleepy old northern city on the St. Lawrence seemed mockingly unsubstantial. Which was the real, she asked herself, as she rolled down the familiar, smooth asphalt. And which, from that time on, was to be the unreal?
Her knees were shaking under her and her heart was beating tumultuously as she stepped into the offices of "Slater & Slater," and inquired for the senior member of that firm.
A chubby-faced office-boy, opening envelopes with a sharp steel paper-knife, was the only person to be seen. Mr. Slater had not come down yet; would not be there before half-past nine. Would she wait, and, if so, would she take a chair.
Cordelia could not wait; she left word that she would be back in half an hour, with a request that Mr. Slater keep himself disengaged until she saw him, as her business was most important. It was, indeed, vital, she tried to impress on the boy, who seemed, nevertheless, to give more attention to his envelopes than to his visitor.
Once back in her cab she instructed the driver to turn up the avenue and drive as far as the Plaza and back. At Twenty-ninth Street, in response to a sudden whim, she called out for him to turn east, and as her motor-cab slowly glided past the Church of the Transfiguration, the Little Church Around the Corner, she looked with veiled yet with curiously alert eyes at that diminutive edifice, at the ivy on the walls, at the garden-like greenness between its doors and the street, at the Gothic arches showing through bare tree-branches, and at the little roofed gateway, through which so many happy hearts, in their time, had passed out and been forgotten.
Would it be too late, she asked herself again, with a sudden, new-born passion of restlessness.
Mr. Henry Slater received Cordelia with a smile that was both conciliating and commiserative. This was partly because of the firm line of her thin and tightly closed lips and a latent fire that shone in her eyes, and partly because of the ghastliness of her pale and worn and withered face, as she stood between him and the chair he had blandly put out for her to take.
"You received my telegram?" she asked, her voice dry, trembling in spite of herself.
"Yes, I did," he answered, suavely, "but not, unfortunately, until this morning. I leave the office at four in the afternoon, you know, and every Thursday I am at our printing-plant at Newark. But in connection with your wire, Miss Vaughan, while——"
"Have you done what I asked?"
Mr. Slater's smile waned and flickered and quite went out; he was beginning to lose patience with his eccentric authoress.
"Your request, Miss Vaughan, was an impossible one."
"But itmustbe done!" she cried, passionately.
He shrugged his shoulders, ambiguously.
"And itshallbe done!" she cried again, even more passionately. Then she added, in a calmer voice, watching his face: "It must be done, though I surrender everything to you, royalties, copyright,everything!"
"Your book is out, Miss Vaughan!"
His words sounded to her like the snap of a steel trap. She said nothing, and made no move, but looked up at him, dazed.
"In fact," he went on, "it has already received three reviews, in response to my advance copies. And I might add that its career will be phenomenal, simply phenomenal! Here are three clippings from yesterday's papers; all of them, as you can see, highly favorable—in fact, enthusiastic. What more could you ask for? Indeed, you aremade, Miss Vaughan—made!"
She took the three long ribbons of paper with unconscious hands, still holding them at arm's length before her. Her eyes were still on Mr. Henry Slater. Something in her look made him nervous. He smiled slightly, bowed, and waited for her to speak.
"You are made, Miss Vaughan—made!" he repeated, with simulated joyousness. Still she did not speak.
He turned to his desk with an expression which was intended, perhaps, to denote that he was a very busy man, and that he himself had his troubles. Then the shadow of a frown crept over his usually well-controlled features. But still the woman with the ribbons of papers did not move.
He called one of his assistants.
"Henry, show Miss Vaughan to her carriage, please—Miss Vaughan, this lady here, Henry. I think she is not well!"
She had dreamed her dream.
... A lifeBy love's black frost all blighted and foregone,Glad that it suffers not; with sorrow inIts poor thin laughter sadder far than tears.Ah, more than pain in that abysmal breastEach broken, dark, irresolute delight!
... A lifeBy love's black frost all blighted and foregone,Glad that it suffers not; with sorrow inIts poor thin laughter sadder far than tears.Ah, more than pain in that abysmal breastEach broken, dark, irresolute delight!
John Hartley, "Street Dust."
To wear love's brand you must bear love's burn.—"The Silver Poppy."
It was the second morning after Cordelia's seemingly whimsical return to New York that Hartley awoke in an indeterminate gray vapor of impending evil. A feeling of chill nausea crept over him as he dressed, and, in a sudden fit of weakness, he fell back on the bed, filled with the strong man's unreasoning, weak terror of illness.
He ate no breakfast whatever, and, as the morning wore miserably away and his torpor of mind and body seemed to increase, he at last ventured dizzily out into the streets, looking up and down the little French-Canadian city for the sign-board of an English doctor. He found one, finally; and in response to his ring a homesick young surgeon just over from London, after cheerily pounding him about and casually looking down his throat, handed him an antiseptic gargle for tonsillitis, and then talked for an hour of home, of the London music-halls, and of his hatred for the Colonies.
When Hartley made his escape from the sickeningly odorous, drug-scented little surgery, a new irrational hatred of the subdued, bustling, big-roomed hotel took hold of him. Following a sudden impulse, he bought a pair of heavy walking-shoes and a little leather knapsack, madly determined by a few days of open-air tramping through the valley of the St. Lawrence to walk himself once more into health and strength.
He had covered five dreary miles of what seemed endless, undulating dust and gravel when he tottered weakly to the whitewashed palings of ahabitant'scottage and gave up. Crawling and staggering to the door, he incoherently cried for water.
The swarthy, keen-eyed little French doctor who, two hours later, came bustling to his straw-mattress bedside, grew suddenly serious as he bent over his stalwart patient, while the patient himself, as he sank from soft gray heights of silence into black pits of torturing desolation, listened languidly to a thin, far-away voice that seemed to be telling somebody that he was in a bad way, with black diphtheria, and that above all things he must be kept quiet, and must not be moved. It was the last declaration that left the sick man so dreamily content. He felt that he could rest there forever, almost—that nothing better could come to him than to lie there for countless years, resting.
When, three days later, the Spauldings returned to New York with no news of Hartley or his where-abouts, Cordelia went through a second day of silent torture. She wrote to him twice, and, receiving no reply, telegraphed in Henry Spaulding's name to Hartley's Quebec hotel for information. No definite news could be given her, so she wrote to him still again, imploring him to come back at once, saying that she needed him, that she had much to confess to him and ask of him. In the course of a few weeks her different letters were returned to her, unopened.
In those first days of silence and suspense she vacillated miserably between two fears: one, that Hartley had already learned the truth about The Unwise Virgins; the other, that Repellier had at last intervened and written to him the actual history of The Silver Poppy. But in some way, she knew, he had found her out.
At the end of a long week of tormenting uncertainty, in sheer despair she flung herself into the currents of activity that rose about her, like a hundred inviting Lethes, with the first success of The Unwise Virgins. For the triumph of that volume did not long remain a matter of doubt. Gaily designed posters, clustering flamboyantly about bill-boards and blind-walls, about street-cars and elevated-railway platforms, about even urban and suburban ash-barrels, told of its merits and its unprecedented sales. More than one of the larger department stores gave the volume a table by itself, above which hung a huge photographic print of the authoress, showing the frailest of white shoulders emerging from a swathing cloud of lace-work, and above them a face with femininely appealing eyes and the pensive shadow of a half-bitter and yet half-girlish smile. An English edition was soon called for, and was more than moderately successful, while even The Silver Poppy itself appeared in a new binding, to reappear still again as a newspaper serial, and to bring yet a little more publicity to the young authoress, in the very heyday of a fame for which it was commonly said she was at heart most contemptuous.
Yet Cordelia flung herself into it all as into a cooling stream, drugging herself during the following month or two with an incessant, opiate rush of activity that, spread thinly, might easily have irrigated a less tumultuous lifetime. The newspapers were full of her doings; one day she was winning the prize in a world's beauty competition; another day she was to go on the stage and star in a dramatized version of her new book; and at still another time she was to return to the South and devote the rest of her life to a cycle of novels dealing comprehensively with American national life. Hanchett was commissioned to paint a portrait of her for the Southern Women's Club; and, while she remained a guest in the little, yellow-tinted study on Seventy-second Street, there was never a day when either the yellow Victoria or the more massive brougham of the Spauldings was not in use. But she had grown strangely averse to many of her former friends, and Mrs. Spaulding soon realized that the older feeling no longer held them together, though, indeed, it was not until after the first announcements of Cordelia's proposed lecturing tour that the yellow-tinted study was actually deserted by her. When the author of The Unwise Virgins did migrate, she sought apartments in one of the handsomest of those lower Fifth Avenue private hotels, consecrated, in the words of Miss Short, "to white-gloved attendants, lap-dogs, and opulent valetudinarianism." Cordelia felt that there must be no shadow of excuse for her enemies—and how many of them she had!—to claim that the social tide had turned against her. The cost of these apartments frightened her a little at first; but until they had been well photographed and the views in turn reproduced in the evening newspapers, with appropriate descriptions—until, indeed, she actually started out on her hurried and yet much-heralded lecturing tour—she kept them up sumptuously, with a studious recklessness of expense, receiving as her guests many long-haired men and many heavy-jawed women, bristlingly aggressive of intellect and eminence. Yet all of them, in her heart, she knew she despised, though again and again she found it useless to fight against her new strange dread of old friends, bitterly realizing that once more her tree-like growth to fame must be marked by its new and ever-widening circle.
Then came the lecture tour itself. It was preceded by a campaign of advertising, artfully laid out by her manager, and in the end proved so marked a financial success that Cordelia herself was assured—whatever else might happen—of a generous competency for the remainder of her natural life. And many times, brooding over and making the most of this fact, she thought of those earlier and sadly uncertain days when she had frugally washed out her own towel and hung it to dry before her little studio window.
If the lecture itself—prepared by an expert in the employ of her manager, and dealing gravely, yet with flashes of facetiousness, with The American Woman—was a somewhat qualified success in the larger Eastern cities, effetely tending to a flippant view of life's more vital problems, Cordelia's tour through the South, and also the West, partook not a little of the nature of a Roman triumph.
Not that this triumph was without its trials, from the blunt suggestion of her manager that her next lecture deal with How I Wrote My First Novel, to the long and agonizing night of nervous collapse after the ordeal of her first appearance on the platform. Though frail in body, she could withstand much, and was seldom ill. But the ordeal of that first lecture had left her white and shattered and limp; and it was then, the first time for many a long day, that she gave herself over to tears. She wept long and bitterly, and walked the room of her hotel till morning. Then she sent for a doctor, and clung to that kindly eyed man, when he came, with the pitiful forlornness of a lost and homesick child.
In many of the towns, particularly in the West, she became the guest of different women's clubs, and sometimes after her lecture a reception was held, and often hundreds of admiring and anxious-eyed women would press up to shake her hand. Through all this she carried herself well, and with a certain dignity. But many of those who met her at once remarked how different she was from her pictures, and asked, perhaps a little bewildered, just how young—or how old—she was.
When she lectured at Lexington her father came in secret—for she had written to him pleading with him not to do so—to hear his wonderful daughter, whom even he himself had never quite understood. And when, toward the close of the lecture, the sound of quiet sobs rose from the back of the audience, there was a dramatic moment when the woman on the platform stopped speaking and caught hurriedly at the little table beside her for support.
It was in her own State, too, that she delivered her much-talked-of address on Motherhood before the Four-O'clock Club—an address which later appeared in a tinyédition de luxe, and was looked on by certain of her admirers as the most tender and most human utterance of all her career.
There appeared but one small cloud on the horizon of all that open success, remarkable for the unexpected strangeness of its appearance, and notable because of the equal abruptness of its passing.
It was during the dull and quiescent days following the alleviatingly active weeks of the lecture tour. Cordelia felt that she would go mad if she remained longer with nothing to take up her mind. Her restless feet had worn a dull pathway in the pile of the over-gaudy carpet that ornamented her soberly magnificent apartment-hotel. In despair, she turned once more to literature, and once more alone and most bitterly she struggled to wrest from a reluctant Muse some solitary bay-leaf of her own, some final shred of laurel to which no other hand might lay claim, aspiring to climb once more to the pinnacle of that most delectable mountain about whose dangerous fringe she had now fretted for many months.
It was a courageous struggle. But it proved a futile one. Then casting desperately about her, in a new-born terror of helplessness, hidden away on the obscure shelf of an obscure library she stumbled across a badly bound, age-yellowed little volume which bore the title The Spirit Child. It had been conceived and written by one Florence Hitch, of Boston, and dedicated to "all seekers after Truth and the Spirit." Could there be, Cordelia asked herself, another such book so obviously dead and forgotten!
It had, indeed, been lost to the world, unremembered this many a year. But it still remained the first-born of that aspiring heart which had once conceived and laid it in the lap of unapproving mankind. When, in the despair on her new-found sterility, Cordelia made not ungenerous use of that faded and grotesquely bound little volume, during the creation of her own remarkable spiritualistic story which appeared in one of the Sunday papers under the title of A Daughter of Dream, the fair snapper-up of unconsidered trifles had anticipated no slightest word of reproof. But that elderly maiden lady, Miss Florence Hitch, at once beheld and recognized her first-born, stripped as it was of its original swaddling-clothes, and with a maternal and quite natural fury proceeded to fight to the end for her own. It was a spirited and moving struggle, in which the daily press at once took issue, and though Miss Hitch mysteriously and unexpectedly subsided at the end of a two-weeks' warfare, and in carefully dictated phrases attempted to explain away the entire matter as a singular and interesting example of literary parallelism, lingering echoes of that disturbing explosion came to Cordelia from quarters least expected. And those were most unhappy days, when she sat waiting for her daily envelope of carefully labeled articles and news items from her clipping agency, among which she lingered for hours, like a pale dryad amid the thickly falling leaves of autumn.
One November night of constant rain, when she could not sleep, her brooding fancy half conceived the thing she was. John Hartley had once told her of that strangest of sights, a salmon-run. She felt that she must live a life like one of those poor creatures, that she must fight, and push, and shoulder, and battle ever up some dark river whose tide was ever against her—must struggle madly on, day by day, losing day by day a little of herself, shoal by shoal and rapid by rapid shedding a little of what had been best and beautiful in her, still panting and pushing on for those unknown and cruelly distant head waters of peace, into which she might finally creep a tattered and half-naked, hideous thing, stripped to the vertebra, a toy of a passionate instinct stronger than her own will, and sweeter, perhaps, than her own life.
Yet rest and peace was the one thing which she reached out for, in those troubled days, with thin and futile arms, feeling, even as she did so, that it could never be attained.
She at last determined, in a sudden fury of daring, that she would endure it all no longer, crying out within herself that life owed her more than it was giving. As a result of that new spirit of audaciousness, she appeared early the next day at the studio of Repellier; yet even as she stepped into the familiar, high-ceilinged room she quailed inwardly, and found herself with little to say. She was dressed in a tightly fitting whip-cord gown—her eye for outward apparel had in no way dimmed—and on her breast she wore a huge bunch of English violets. Repellier's quick eye noticed that her cheeks were rouged, and that a touch of crimson had been added to her usually pale lips. During all her brief visit she appeared ill at ease—so ill at ease that the kind-hearted old Repellier did not have the courage to speak of anything but the lightest commonplaces, even showing her his newer canvases and, from his windows, pointing out to her the city muffled in rain.
When she rose to say good-by he went with her to the door, wondering why she had not spoken, and marveling at the change in her. From his open door he gazed after her, musingly. It was at the top of the stairs that she turned hesitatingly back.
"Mr. Repellier!"
He waited for her to speak, though some subterranean medium seemed to carry her words to him before they were uttered.
"Do you ever," she hesitated, "I mean have you ever heard anything of—of Mr. Hartley?"
The picture of a humbled and half-wistful supplicant, of a woman withered and broken, weighed down by the monotony and starvation of an empty life, yet consumed by a still insatiable greed, of a being who had grown old unwillingly, clinging there weakly to his baluster-rail and looking back at him through the half-light of a gloomy hallway, photographed itself indelibly on Repellier's memory, as there flashed over him the incongruous image of Hanchett's new portrait of her, hung but a week before in the hall of the Southern Women's Club, where, he knew, she was to look down for all time from her great gilt frame, beautiful to the eye, frail and tender, mysteriously seductive, the drooping eyes luminous and mutely pleading, the mouth pensive, almost pathetically weak in its excess of timorous femininity, the proudly poised head weighed down with its heavy burden of golden-red hair, the whole figure touched with a fervor hinting at the inner fire consuming the all too frail flesh. It was Æschylean, Repellier felt, in its piercing irony.
"Yes, I have heard from Hartley," he answered, slowly, as she raised a suddenly vivid face to him. "He has been ill, and alone, for weeks."
"Ill!" she cried, in a hard, thin voice; and a baffled life seemed to ebb away with that one little cry. Through the half-lights the woman did not move.
"For six weeks the poor fellow lay ill with malignant diphtheria, in ahabitant'scottage, below Quebec," Repellier went on, more compassionately. "His strength did not come back to him, so they advised him to take the sea voyage, on a freighter, round to New York. They had a rough time of it, and they landed him here a little worse than when he crawled aboard."
"And then?"
"He's been strengthening up in a Brooklyn hospital—only last week he sent for me. I might as well tell you, Miss Vaughan, that he wrote to you three times, from Canada, and that only yesterday, on his way to his rooms to pack up his things, he picked up a copy of The Unwise Virgins!"
"And then—then you told him everything?" she whispered, tensely.
The old artist went over to her, and placed a hand gently on her arm.
"I told him only what I had to; the rest, I fear, he guessed." She drew back from him quickly.
"It was better for you both, I know now," he said, with his hand still touching her rigid arm. "And some day I think you will both forgive me for it!"
She turned from him where he stood, and groped her way blindly down the long stairs, her brain reeling with the mockery of it all, while her heart still cried blindly out for the man who had crowned her with his love, as she frantically told herself that she must still find him, and that in some devious way it might not yet be too late.
We dared so long, and doubted not,The saddest is that you should failNow all the battle has been fought,And doubt, or daring, no avail!
We dared so long, and doubted not,The saddest is that you should failNow all the battle has been fought,And doubt, or daring, no avail!
John Hartley, "Pale Souls."
It is the ebb-tide of love that shows the mud-flats of the soul.—"The Silver Poppy."
For two days Cordelia drove irrationally up and down beneath the windows of Hartley's apartments, hiding timorously back in the shadows of the curtained brougham, yet every alert moment watching the crowded sidewalks and carriage-lined drive, half-hoping that through some vague operation of the irenics of affection she might still find a way back to him, and to the life she had so miserably lost.
Then, as the second day of her tacit search wore fruitlessly on, she once more grew audacious with the last courage of desperation. Driving briskly up to the apartment-house which had been the pivot of her dreary two-days' reconnaissance, she alighted and peremptorily asked if she might see the rooms recently occupied by Mr. Hartley.
The clerk glanced at her sharply, for a moment not recognizing the white, weary-looking face under its heavy veil but partly caught up. His hesitation was only momentary, for, immediately he had placed the familiar, flute-like contralto voice, he obsequiously called over a brass-buttoned attendant.
"Mr. Hartley, by the way, releases his rooms to-morrow," amiably commented the clerk, as he reached for the keys.
"Yes, I know!" murmured Cordelia, impassively, yet with a quailing heart, struggling to hide the tremor of dull fear that was shaking her. She saw that she must act with decision.
"I wonder," she went on, evenly, "if Mr. Hartley explained to you my intention of occupying these rooms once more—until the lease runs out, at any rate?"
"He simply sent word that he would come for his things to-morrow, and that you would take possession of the furniture later."
"Yes, of course! But I should like to put things in order, at once." She turned to go, but looked back, toying nervously with the keys.
"You say Mr. Hartley comes for his trunks to-morrow?"
"Yes, Miss Vaughan, to-morrow afternoon."
Hartley hesitated before the familiar door, as he slipped his pass-key into the lock. He knew that it would be for the last time, that once more the continuity of life was to be rudely snapped. His thoughts went back to another day, wearily, when he had closed the door on those same rooms and hurried away careless, hopeful, light-hearted. He thought, too, as he stood there, with what different feelings, at different times, he had passed in and out of those same apartments.
Within, he expected everything to be dust and neglect and disorder. To his surprise there was no sign of this; the very empty quietness of the rooms seemed still touched with an unknown presence. Everything had been put carefully to rights, the furniture and rugs were spotless, the curtains were looped back airily, clusters of freshly cut flowers stood on his desk and on his mantelpiece.
He looked about him, and sighed heavily, pacing the rooms impatiently for a bitter minute or two. Then, with an effort, he pulled himself together, and fell to hurriedly packing his trunks. A sudden new-born fever to get away from the place swept over him; he had made a grievous mistake in ever coming back; he was reaping his own reward of corroding memories. No, no, he told himself, he had no wish to see her again. She was like the dead to him; she belonged to the ghost-like past. He had no resentment against her now; he felt no hatred for her. All that he seemed to feel was a dubious pain, dull and faint and far-away, a pain for all those days he had blotted out and cut off from his actual life—as men are said to feel an ache in a limb that has been amputated.
When he had packed his many-labeled steamer-trunk—brooding absently over a half-obliterated label bearing the word "Turin," a word that conjured up strange memories for him—he stowed away the last of what belongings he cared to take with him in his larger box, inwardly rejoicing that he was carrying away nothing of hers, or nothing that should remind him of her, and the life of which she stood the center. He was forcing down the lid of his trunk when the sharp, metallic click of a key in the door-lock startled him into sudden uprightness.
The door opened slowly, timorously, and Cordelia stood before him, with her hand on the knob.
She looked at him in silence, studying his impassive face with pleading, unwavering eyes, seeming to drink in every detail of feature and expression, searching for something she had, perhaps, half-hoped to find there, startled, too, at the change in him.
"John," she said, in a whisper, taking a step toward him. He looked at her, unrelaxed, without moving.
"John," she whispered once more, pitifully, creeping a step or two closer to him, and stopping again.
She was dressed all in black, and wore a heavy black-plumed hat that framed the white oval of her face; it was a face that looked tired and wan and touched with the twilight of lost happiness. In her hand she carried a great cluster of lilies of the valley. Their sickly, heavy, penetrating fragrance surrounded her and floated in with her, until Hartley himself could smell it. For all the rest of her days the odor of lilies of the valley was hateful to her.
She stood there for a moment, still hesitating, and then turned and closed the door, which had remained open behind her.
"You—you are not going away?" she gasped.
He was glad, inwardly, that it was all definitely settled, that no mischance could now turn him back, that even his own hand could no longer bar his outward way.
"I'm going to England to-morrow," he said, impassively. He stooped and turned the key in his steamer-trunk with a movement of determined conclusiveness that did not escape her.
"You are going," she echoed, "forever?"
She crept toward him, meekly, wistfully; she touched him with her hand. He was sallow and shrunken, with new, hard lines about the once boyish mouth; but to the woman who clutched at his arm, he was a lover clothed in beauty and a liberating angel of redemption in one.
"John," she said, in a low half-sob, "you won't—you can't leave me, without a word?"
He drew back from her; he, too, was humbled and broken, but the pride of his youth and the pride of his race still clung to him.
"There is nothing for me to say," he answered, coldly. He asked himself fiercely why he had half-heartedly wished, so many times, to see her but once, before going.
With a sudden impetuous movement she ran to him and flung her arms about him, clinging to him, panting and shaken.
"I love you; oh, I love you!" she cried out, passionately, locking each thin arm about his resisting body. He no longer tried to force her away, and she clung to him and cried out again and again: "I love you, my own, I love you!"
Yet he stood unmoved, feeling as though she had long since drained to the bottom his deepest springs of emotion; now he could neither care nor resist.
"I have done wrong," she cried to him, feverishly; "I have made mistakes, and I have suffered, and grown wise! But see, through it all, how humble I have come to be! See how I crawl back to you! It was all vile, that old life of mine, I know!—but I only stumbled into it at first, by the littlest, most miserable chance; and I had to keep it up, to the end! And you couldn't understand that old, ceaseless craving for what it brought, and how the passion for that world they thrust me into made me half-blind and half-drunk, and how I had to keep on, and on, and on!"
She tried to draw his face down to her own.
"If you knew what, or how, I have suffered! If you only knew—you'd forgive me! If you could understand how I love you now you would take me back, you would say that never in all the world would you find another love like mine! Oh, it isn't too late! It isn't too late! We have our lives still before us; we have both been living on the north side of life too long; we have been missing all the sun, and warmth, and color. And you can save me from myself; you were saving me from myself! With you I could begin over again, from the first!"
He broke away from her then, with a vehemence that she had not looked for in him, but still she went on, feverishly: "Oh, you are strong, where I am faltering and weak. Iwantto be honest, and good, and upright—but from the first they wouldn't let me! Oh, they wouldn't let me!"
"You have lied to me!" he cried out to her, harshly. "You lied to me from the first. You lied to me in the very hour when I asked you for all your open trust. Your life has been a lie! You are a lie—a living lie!"
She tried to muffle the words with her hand, but his passion swept him on.
"What you are now you'll be to the end! You have gone through life a cheat, an impostor, and you'll be one to the last! Even now you are acting a lie, evennow, with me!"
He knew it was not the truth he spoke, but he felt safer after flinging it at her.
"No, no," she cried back. "Thisis no lie! What woman would come and say what I have said? I couldn't ever act a part with you! I have no one but you—I have no one but you!"
As he flung her from him, in his own sudden terror of himself, she fell back and crouched on his trunk, rocking her frail body weakly back and forth, and sobbing over and over again: "Let me go back with you! Oh, have mercy on me, my own, and let me go back with you!"
Then she crept up to him on her knees, and clung to him with her thin, white hands, her eyes streaming with tears.
"I have friends," she went on, hysterically. "I have power and influence! I will work for you; I will slave for you! I will help you on, to the end; I willmakeyou, my own! Onlyloveme, love me! I need your love! You have taught me what it means, and I must have it! See, see how humbled I am, here, on my knees to you!"
With a sudden passionate movement he seized her drooping head between his hands and looked down long and searchingly into her white, tear-stained, up-turned face. His penetrating glance took note, for the first time, of the golden tint in the iris of her gray-green eyes, of the golden tint in her face itself, as if pale gold had been infused under some translucent shell of rose-white. Something in its reckless, wan beauty mounted to his brain intoxicatingly, and with a gasp he broke away from her again. As he fell back from her touch, his foot crushed her copy of The Silver Poppy, and he looked down at it, liberated, remembering how he had flung it there from among his own books, when he had stumbled unexpectedly upon it as upon the hideous sloughed skin of a snake. Intuitively, as she watched him, the woman at his feet saw her last flickering glimmer of hope die away, and then, in her utter despair, she beat her forehead with her hands and flung herself down and sobbed out brokenly that the whole world was against her, that he had trapped and betrayed her into loving him, and that he, and he alone, could save her.
Then, seeing him still obdurate and unmoved, she fell to beating the floor with her clenched fists, raving insanely at his cruelty, imploring him to have pity on her. And again, as her impotent passion wore itself out, she lay there sobbing weakly, while he still stood above her, gazing out at the wheeling sea-gulls, into the blue distance beyond the lower Hudson.
Then a bell rang sharply, and she sat up, limp and exhausted, wiping the tears from her swollen face.
Hartley went to the door; a breath of relieving fresh air seemed to break in on him as he opened it. Two uniformed expressmen stood outside, waiting for his baggage. They had witnessed tearful farewells before, and their faces were respectfully expressionless, like masks, while they lifted the larger trunk out through the door and down the hallway.
Cordelia crept brokenly over to the window where Hartley stood, her shaking hands moving and feeling hesitatingly about his averted shoulders, as the hands of the blind do.
"Only kiss me—once!" she whispered, quietly, with a sudden white calm sweeping over her face. "Kiss me—once!"
She lifted her wet face, with its tumbled red-gold hair, up to his. Her eyes were closed, and she clung swaying to his coat-sleeves, waiting. He looked down at her, swept away from her by a sudden alienating, dispiriting wave of pity, and kissed her with a kiss that seemed to leave her shrouded and coffined.
"Nowgo! Oh,go!" she cried out to him quickly, with her face still uplifted, and her eyes still closed.
He turned away from her and crossed the room slowly, waiting to close the door after the expressmen stoically carrying down his remaining trunk. He felt, in that last minute, as he passed out, that she was richer by an indeterminate something that he himself had lost, although the sound of her broken sobbing crept out to him through even the closed door.