Not for knaves like us she wept—Yet who served or loved as we?—Since her heart this many a dayWent to one beyond the sea!But, if in those lands afar,She her lightest word should say,Here are ten good knights and trueWith ten lives to cast away!
Not for knaves like us she wept—Yet who served or loved as we?—Since her heart this many a dayWent to one beyond the sea!
But, if in those lands afar,She her lightest word should say,Here are ten good knights and trueWith ten lives to cast away!
John Hartley, "The Young Queen."
We are—only what we have been!—"The Silver Poppy."
Hartley lost no more time than was necessary before responding to Cordelia's message asking that he come to her at once.
There was a touch of imperativeness in the hurriedly written little note that indefinitely appealed to him. It seemed to show him how much she had grown to lean on him. He assumed, though, that the urgency at the most implied nothing more than some impending problem in connection with her new book, and consequently Cordelia waited three anxious and impatient hours before he finally appeared before her. And greedily she was counting the minutes of that last precious day.
The ordeal through which she had passed the afternoon before had left its traces behind it. It still showed on her face in an unusual look of pensive weariness about the heavy eyelids, and a deepened and almost feverish glow to the eyes themselves. For once, too, her face was the true color of old ivory, with one small touch of the tenderest, shell-like pink burning on each of her cheeks. The languor of her voice, the calm pathos of her glance, and the heavier shadow about her lashes, suggested to Hartley, as it had done before, but never so vividly, the quiet, half-sorrowful beauty of an autumn twilight.
She was dressed in her riding-habit, of dark-green cloth, showing every line of the thin yet buoyant figure. It appeared to him as a figure with something bird-like in the very lightness and nervous quickness of movement beyond all its outward languor. The dark-green of her habit, too, seemed to give to the pale face above it a strangely heightened sense of isolation, like the gloom out of which the solitary figure of a Rembrandt portrait looks down on the world.
"Cordelia, what is it?" he asked anxiously, startled at the change, though unable to determine in just what it consisted.
She looked up quickly at the note of unusual tenderness in his voice.
"I am going away!" she said quietly.
A sudden sense of loss, of deprivation, swept over him, and both his voice and the startled face he turned to her showed his feeling.
"Going away?" he echoed.
"Yes." She shook her head sorrowfully.
"But where, Cordelia?"
"I leave for Quebec to-morrow morning, to join Mrs. Spaulding. From there I think I shall go back home—back to Kentucky!"
"But why are you going?"
"For your sake," she said, giving him her eyes unrestrainedly.
"For my sake, Cordelia?" he repeated, astonished, openly miserable.
"Yes, for you," she said in a lighter tone, smiling. "But that's all you're going to be told at present."
She went to the window and looked out at the falling rain.
"I thought," she said, "that we might have one last little ride together, for the sake of—of the old days!"
"But it couldn't—surely it couldn't be for long?" he asked, still thinking of her departure, scarcely believing the news.
"I don't think I shall ever again come back to New York," she said slowly, with something that was almost a sob.
"But can't you tell me why?"
"No, I can't—not now!"
"My poor child," he said suddenly, taking her pale face between his hands and looking earnestly into her eyes—and what gloriously luminous eyes they were that poignantly happy moment! "My poor child, is it any trouble I could take on my own shoulders? Is it anything I could ever help you with?"
It was his first voluntary caress, his first spontaneous and unlooked-for touch of tenderness. Her heart was beating riotously.
She shook her head.
"But explain to me about Quebec."
"Mrs. Spaulding has written to me and asked me to join her there. Here is the letter; read it."
She handed the letter to him; it had reached her that morning most opportunely. Hartley took it, and read:
Château Frontenac, Quebec City."My Darling Child:"I am dying of loneliness up here in this dreary old town. Alfred has gone up in the woods to shoot moose or something, and Heaven only knows when he'll be back. I have decided that you and Mr. Hartley had better take a holiday and run up here and join me for the rest of the week; and then we can all come down together. I refuse to take 'no' for an answer."
Château Frontenac, Quebec City.
"My Darling Child:
"I am dying of loneliness up here in this dreary old town. Alfred has gone up in the woods to shoot moose or something, and Heaven only knows when he'll be back. I have decided that you and Mr. Hartley had better take a holiday and run up here and join me for the rest of the week; and then we can all come down together. I refuse to take 'no' for an answer."
"That's really all," Cordelia broke in; "the rest is simply orders about the servants and messages to dressmakers and that sort of thing."
He handed the letter back to her, disheartened, depressed.
"Could you come?" she asked him hesitatingly.
He thought over it; he scarcely saw how he could, but a desire to be near her seemed to be shouldering out all other feelings.
"I should like to go, but—well, to be candid, I really can't afford it just now."
"That doesn't count!" she cried happily.
Then a sudden disturbing thought came to him.
"But, Cordelia, how about our book? What would be done with that in the meantime? And what will become of it in the end, if you leave?" He had often confessed to her that he was no business man, that even the thought of approaching an editor or a publisher could take away his appetite for a day.
"Let's not talk about that!" Her hands were on his shoulders now, and she was reading his face hungrily.
"But what shall be done with it?"
"Well, everythingisdone!" she said, reluctantly, he thought. Then, slipping away from him for a minute or two, she fluttered back to the room with a bit of paper in her hand.
"And as a sign and proof of the same, permit me to present you with something which is entirely your own!"
It was Slater & Slater's check for one thousand dollars, already indorsed and marked accepted. He held it out to her, determined.
"You know I can't accept this," he said. But she was equally determined.
"But you shall, and must!"
Again he refused it, absolutely, proudly, she thought; and again she thrust it back on him. Then she saw that it was useless, and with that discovery a new trouble came to her.
At last she made a suggestion that had fluttered to the ark of her indecision, like a dove with an olive-branch.
"Let's take it and spend it—on our holiday! No, let's spend half of it; we can decide about the other half later on!"
He stopped to consider her proposal, and as she saw him wavering she declared that she, like Mrs. Spaulding, would never take "no" for an answer.
And so it was decided; and drawing on her gloves she reminded him of their ride.
While the horses were being brought round she told him of her interview with her publisher—not all of it, but at least enough to show how she had succeeded in securing the terms she had first asked for.
"What a wonderful little warrior you are!" he cried, taking her hand laughingly, but gratefully. He looked down at the frail little white fingers admiringly. "It ought to guide an empire!" he cried.
But, strangely enough, she could not find it in her heart to share in his delight. Even the mention of the book, during all that day, in some manner distressed and worried her.
"Those are far-off things and battles long ago," she said, as they started out, shrugging her little shoulders, as though to lift from them some burden of useless care.
"This is the beginning of our holiday. You remember what you said: the fulness and color of life! So let's turn vagabond. Do you know," she continued, taking a tighter rein on her little chestnut mare, who was champing restively at her bit, "do you know, I don't believe you've enough of the rogue in you ever to make a poet!"
"Try me!" he laughed, yet not altogether pleased.
"You haven't enough of the dare-devil in your make-up. You are always too staid and English and respectable and self-contained. You ought to have more of the vagabond, the swashbuckler, more of the Villon!"
"Is that," he asked, "your ideal of man?"
"By no means!"
"Then what is?"
"My ideal"—she looked at him as she spoke—"my ideal is a man who, for a woman's sake, can stand up alone against the whole wide world!"
"Try me!" he said again. As they turned into the Park she brooded joyously, hungrily, over that simple challenge, which might mean so little or so much. Try him! She wondered if he guessed how soon and how severely he might be tried. And she wondered, even more, just what would be the outcome of that test.
The driving rain had ceased, but it was still a humid, gray afternoon with a fine mist hanging in the air. The Park was practically deserted, and the bridle-paths empty.
"What a day for a ride!" cried Cordelia, waving her whip toward the tree-tops that billowed through the silvery fog, "and our last ride together!" Then she repeated aloud as they rode:
What hand and brain went ever paired?What heart alike conceived and dared?What act proved all its thought had been?What will but felt the fleshy screen?
What hand and brain went ever paired?What heart alike conceived and dared?What act proved all its thought had been?What will but felt the fleshy screen?
"I feel that way now," she said. "I feel as though I should like to fly, as though I could ride out everything that life holds, in one crazy, delicious, rushing gallop!"
They let out their spirited animals as they turned up into the longer stretch of the Eastern path. The air and movement had brought a deeper pink to Cordelia's cheeks, and, as was usual in her moments of excitement, her expanded pupils made her eyes look dark.
"Isn't it glorious!" she cried abandonedly. "I think I'm going to make myself drunk, dead drunk, with this ride to-day!"
She put the whip recklessly to her distracted mare, and, shooting out ahead of Hartley, raced exultantly down the level stretch before her.
A Park attendant caught sight of her careering wildly down the path. He pushed his way through the bushes as she swept past and called after her warningly to lessen her speed. The little chestnut mare swerved at the sudden appearance and call of the man, and for a moment, as her mount bounded forward, Cordelia lost the reins.
The mare's speed did not yield one stride to her frantic pull at the bit. At a glance Hartley realized that it was a runaway.
He remembered, to his sudden horror, that Cordelia was not the best of horsewomen. But still, he felt, with the open stretch that lay before them there might be no immediate danger. The danger lay ahead, in the winding roadway, the brushwood and trees, the all too many overhead bridges.
Hartley did not hesitate when he realized what these might mean. A dozen times before that day he had shown his powerful roan to be the fleeter animal. As Cordelia's mare bolted through a hedge of bare lilac-bushes at the first turn of the path, and went dashing across the open greensward of the Park, he was racing down on her, not a hundred yards behind.
As they raced he could see that he was slowly gaining. It awoke in him his dormant passion for struggle, his delight in action, and he almost gloried in that strange chase, with a barbaric, a rudimentary gladness in his sense of mastery over the quivering beast beneath him.
He came bounding alongside when they were not more than twenty yards from a row of green-painted benches lining one of the walks.
"Shake off your stirrup!" he called to her. He was almost near enough to reach out his arm and touch her, but at first she did not understand him. She had, indeed, lost all control of herself and her horse. Before he could make her understand, the row of benches were under their noses. They had to take them together. Cordelia's mare struck the top board of a bench-back and splintered it as she went over.
Then Hartley, in desperation, rode straight down on her, for already they were getting in among the thick of the trees. He caught her under the shoulders with one arm, as he swung in on her, and as her mare was shouldered over and went suddenly sprawling and tumbling to the grass, he held tight with his knees and clung to the trailing figure in green.
He clung to her and carried her out at his side in that way until his own frightened roan could be pulled up, panting and bewildered, with the blood staining the foam from its bruised mouth. He slipped to the ground, in some way, still holding her. Her face was colorless, but she looked up at him with the old luminous and wonderful eyes. He was breathing heavily, but he still held her.
"My darling!" she said, locking her arms about his neck, as a torrent of happy tears came to her eyes. "My darling!"
He still held her there close to him, but in silence, until two gardeners and a Park policeman came to their assistance. Ten minutes later a mounted policeman rode up with the recaptured mare. A passing hansom was stopped, and Cordelia was handed up into it. The mounted policeman wrote down his notes, and rode away tucking Hartley's bill into his pocket. It all seemed over and past with kaleidoscopic rapidity.
"Will you be able to manage them?" Cordelia cried, concerned, as she saw Hartley mounting again, with her mare held short by the bridle-rein.
"Quite easily. But you must get back at once!"
Nothing, at that moment, could have made her happier than that commonplace half-command from his lips.
She waved her gauntleted hand back at him; her face still stood out pale and wistful against the darkness of the hansom-box.
"And you?" she asked.
"I'll be right after you."
"Then I'll have dinner ready for you!" she cried, as the hansom turned and disappeared down through the darkening mist, smiling to herself at the incongruousness of what she had said. It was only in fiction, she felt, that the opportune moment and the adequate word coincided.
But driving home through the gray evening air with the tears still wet on her lashes, she pondered over a new and perturbing and yet not altogether painful problem: Could it be that she had played her part with him too, too earnestly? Must she lose him now, when he meant so much to her?
She yielded then where she had frowned,And fell her tears like leaves;She sank before him on the groundAnd clasped his iron greaves.
She yielded then where she had frowned,And fell her tears like leaves;She sank before him on the groundAnd clasped his iron greaves.
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
After all, Rabelais' religion and women are one and the same thing—a great Perhaps.—"The Silver Poppy."
The lights of Cordelia's little yellow-trimmed study were carefully shaded and softened. Cordelia herself, with bright but restless eyes, with a slightly flushed face, and a little quickness of speech and movement betokening, perhaps, nerves too tensely strung, was already waiting for Hartley, when, an hour later, he stepped up to her door.
He had long since grown used to that freedom of action, to that unthought-of abandon of the Bohemian which Cordelia laid claim to as her natural right, and which the world about her had the habit of laughing away as the mere unrestrained eccentricity of guileless genius. He had noticed that this careless freedom seemed to suit her best. He liked her least when she was least ingenuous.
"It's so stupid and lonesome downstairs in that big sepulchral dining-room!" she said. "Let's have dinner up here."
A momentary and careless feeling that some too boldly effacing sponge was wiping out the last blurred line of formality passed through him.
"Oh, I have nearly all my meals served up here, now that I'm alone!" she explained. "It's much quieter and more cozy. Here we can have dinner in peace, and be undisturbed. You don't mind, do you?"
After his stiff ride the blood was still running through his veins vigorously. He could feel life pulsing dominatingly through him, and some mysterious back-wash of that wave of joyous intoxication which earlier had taken possession of Cordelia now seemed sweeping in turn through him.
"The queen can do no wrong!" he cried, looking down into the unnatural brightness of her face that gleamed like a flower in the half-light. Then something transient, fugitive, inscrutable, something that crept up into her eyes, drove the careless smile from his lips, and they looked at each other, man and woman.
"Stevens," she said, turning to the servant who had answered her ring, "I am at home to no one this evening! Remember, Stevens, to no one!"
She had replaced her dark-green riding-habit by a loose, heavily pleated robe of bebe blue, lined with the palest of yellow satin. Its sleeves hung loosely about her white arms, which they left partly unconcealed, as though by accident. Her even whiter throat, too, was left bare. She seemed suddenly converted from a child of alertness to a woman of languor. Hartley did not go out of his way to analyze the mystery of that sudden alteration by means of a mere change of raiment. But it seemed as if some magical breath of enchantment had blown away the fragile petals from the blossom of youth and left in its place the mellowed and rounded fruit of womanhood.
As he gazed across the table at her during that strangest of dinners she seemed to take on a warm maturity and a vitality quite new to her. The heavier shadows, caused, no doubt, he thought, by mere weariness of body, that seemed to dwell under the arch of her eyebrow, again and again suggested to him the picture of her as a young mother, saddened with the burden of her first maternity.
"Do you know," she said to him suddenly—they had been talking but little that night—"I have never yet once called you by your Christian name! John! How that sounds like you: substantial, solid, dignified! No; I have never dared. I believe I am still afraid of you—John!"
He made her say it over a dozen times. She repeated the name until it seemed to fall to pieces on her tongue, and lose all meaning. Then she sighed heavily.
"I'm tired!" she murmured, locking her fingers behind her head. He noticed an unlooked-for fulness about the round, tower-like neck that seemed to sigh into the white breadth of the shoulders like a river into its sea.
"Cordelia, youaretired," he repeated suddenly: and he moved as though to rise from his chair. A frightened look shot into her face. She wondered for a moment if he would have the heart to leave her there, so soon, so unsatisfied, and without a sign. She dreaded the thought of the solitude that would come after he had gone, the thought of that last night of what she must soon call her old life.
"I wonder if you know how tired I am?" she murmured absently, pushing back her sleeves and leaning forward with her elbows on the table.
"I wonder if you can imagine how heavily I'll sleep to-night, and how tired I shall get up, even, in the morning?"
He rose from his chair, and walking round to the side of the table where she sat, stood behind her without speaking. She could feel the caress of his hand on her thick hair.
"I feel as though I'd like to be mothered to-night by some one!" she murmured softly, as her eyelids drooped.
He still touched her hair, almost reverently, but that was all.
Then she turned to him with the smile of a tired child.
"Lift me up—I want you to lift me up, and carry me over to my couch!"
He lifted her in his arms as he might a child of three, and as he did so the memory of another night when he had first done the same thing rushed back through his mind; and without a word he carried her to the little Japanese couch beside her writing-desk of gold and mother-of-pearl. He found a rug and covered her feet.
She gazed up at him with lips that appeared to pout girlishly.
"Do you want to sleep now?" he asked gently, bending over her.
As he looked down at her in the silence that followed his words her mouth seemed to grow heavy. That fugitive, inscrutable something crept into her eyes once more; and all of a sudden his face grew deathly pale, and then flushed again.
"John!"
He turned and made three steps toward the door.
"John!" she cried after him, with a note of pain in the cry. She had flung off the rug, and was leaning on her elbow. He looked from where he stood, hesitating.
He went slowly back, and bent over her once more. Her pleading lips were perilously close to his.
"Must you go?" she asked, sinking back in her weariness, and raising two arms from which the loose silken sleeves fell back. The next moment a vibrant tremor of exaltation swept over her.
"Don't go! Don't go!" she murmured. "Don't leave me!"
The two white arms came together and folded over him and drew him in like wings.
Time and the world were nothing to her then; time and the world were shut out from him. It was the lingering, long-delayed capitulation of the more impetuous, profounder love she had held back from him, of the finer and softer self she had all but famished in the citadel of her grim aspirations. She no longer allured him, or cared to allure him; she had nothing to seek of him thereafter; she had only the ruins of her broken life to give him.
And he, too—he felt those first thin needles of bliss that crept and projected themselves over the quiet waters of friendship, and he knew that a power not himself was transforming those waters of change and unrest and ebb and flow into the impenetrable solidity of love itself.
There we watched those troubled eyes,And her laughing face grow wan;And the birds sought other skies,And she knew her year—was gone!
There we watched those troubled eyes,And her laughing face grow wan;And the birds sought other skies,And she knew her year—was gone!
John Hartley, "The Valley Princess."
This dog of a life—mongrel of joy and misery that it is!—"The Silver Poppy."
Cordelia had found, and with bewildered eyes was watching unfold, her first and only love. About the belated flowering of that tender and reluctant growth clung a touch of tragic bitter-sweetness; it seemed so poignantly ineffectual, so like the odorous second blossoming of orchards at the betraying breath of a St. Martin's summer.
Yet Cordelia's week in the little old French city on the St. Lawrence was, perhaps, the happiest week in all her life. It was not all pure happiness; it had its moments of pain—but it was enough. She felt within her some shy subliminal renewal, as silent yet as implacable as the insidious first workings of spring.
Through all the gray years that followed, her week of happiness remained a beautiful memory, colored with the quiet passion of a pathetic struggle up toward the light of that impossible new world into which she seemed to glance for one fugitive moment. And that golden week of happiness had come, too, upon her so unlooked for, so unasked for! It had crept upon her like a quiet dream through broken and restless sleep. And even she herself felt, at times, how it had transformed her—seeing, at the last, how nearly it had liberated from the gloomy walls of pride and egoism those phantasmal dead selves which clamored for air only in life's more exalted moments.
A pale wistfulness took possession of her, a quietness and gentleness of demeanor which was new and strange to her. More than once in their rambles about the quaint old city Hartley had surprised her looking at him out of troubled and tearful eyes, with an indefinite, dumb entreaty on her quivering under-lip. And each time he caught that passing look it touched him and intangibly drew him closer to her. She felt the necessity of having him to lean upon, the want of his arm and voice and presence. And some passionate dread of the solitude she felt ominously before her drove Cordelia still closer and still more desperately to his side.
This was not lost on Hartley himself. Those sorrowing eyes seemed to trumpet to the knight that lay dormant in him; and if he said little at the time, he nevertheless felt much. With the birth of this tenderer feeling came a newer and deeper trust in her, a less active quest of motive and meaning in all her acts. Though he knew, indeed, that she was still holding back something from him, he made no effort to wring a reluctant statement from her. He was willing to wait her time. She had given him much; the little he could and would not claim.
In the meanwhile, with the sense of something slipping between their fingers, and with a premonition of impending change hanging over both of them, they made the most of those passing days. Mrs. Spaulding did not care to take part in their wanderings, and it was only during their hours at the hotel that the shadow of her presence fell between them.
More than one happy day they spent in visits to the Basilica, to the old Citadel fortress, to the ancient ruins of the Château Bigot in the valley of the St. Charles. They idled away a merry forenoon in search of the Golden Dog, and when that strange figure in gilt was found at last, on the northern façade of the post-office, Hartley put its still stranger rhyme into English for her. For many an hour, too, they rambled about the crooked little streets of the lower town, which Hartley declared to be wondrously like a second Dieppe or Amiens. And they went on long walks out upon the Plains of Abraham, and visited the tall shaft which marks the spot where Wolfe died victorious.
"How sad it seems," said Cordelia, "to die on the day, in the very hour, that life has grown most worth living!"
She gazed up at the ironical towering marble with musing eyes.
"But isn't it better it should come even in that last moment, than never at all?" Hartley asked, looking up to where her own eyes rested, and himself busy, for the moment, with his own thoughts.
"It may be!" said Cordelia, looking from the marble to the man. "It may be!" she repeated absently.
One day they went by train to the straggling little village of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, and together visited the Shrine, and drank a cupful of the miraculous waters from the Holy Spring. A pilgrimage had brought to the town that day a sadly picturesque army of life's unfortunates, so that both Cordelia and Hartley drew a breath of relief when the halt and the maimed had been left behind them and they had escaped from the pitiful tumult of cassock and crutch and wandered out into the cool quietness of the open country. There Cordelia, venturing inquisitively into one of the little whitewashed cottages, was smitten with a sudden vague sense of homesickness on hearing once more the familiar hum of a spinning-wheel; while to Hartley the softness of the mingledpatoisof Brittany and Normandy, the sedate tranquillity of the clean little huddling riverside villages, and the crowded yet rambling rows of tiny cottages with wide eaves that drooped down over mullioned windows like tired lids over sleepy eyes, brought back from time to time many thoughts of his older Oxford. Cordelia listened, with wondering eyes and a strangely heavy heart, to his descriptions of that far-away English country, trying passionately, yet vainly, to see it as she knew he beheld it in his own eyes.
"Some day I hope we shall see it," he said, wistfully. "We two, together!"
Then they were both charmed into silent wonder by the old-world quaintness of the rambling hillside road, and following it idly, they wandered on, enchanted into forgetfulness by the beauty of the blended tints of the autumnal maples and oaks, by the soft verdure of the terraced foot-hills, broken with little rifts of silver where flashing streams fell musically down to the blue St. Lawrence, on which, here and there, they could catch glimpses of low-lying batteaux and drifting sails.
They had strolled happily on through the tiny village of Rivière des Chiens, pausing a moment before a towering line of Lombardy poplars that stood black against the setting sun, when the sound of broken weeping startled them both from their day-dreams. Hartley, in alarm, ran on ahead, and under a blighted thorn-tree, crouched amid the roadside goldenrod, he found a woman with a child clutched to her breast. Her gaunt body rocked back and forth as she sat there, and she neither looked up nor ceased her wailing when he bent over and touched her on the shoulder. He called to her in English, and then in French, but still she sat amid the dusty goldenrod, clutching the child to her breast.
"Is it dead?" asked Cordelia, in a frightened voice, trying to see into the muffled face. "Oh, be careful! Do be careful! It may be something horrible—some horrible disease!"
Hartley had wakened the woman from her stupor, and in broken French, rich with the idiom of the seventeenth century, she was explaining in her dead voice that she had tried to make her way on foot to Ste. Anne, that if she once reached the shrine of the blessed saint she knew her boy would be saved. Two of them had died, of the black sickness; he was all she had left! And in a fresh paroxysm of grief she caught the sick child once more up to her bent body, and swayed back and forth with it in hopeless despair.
Hartley sent Cordelia hurriedly to the nearest farm-house, for a conveyance. Impatient at the delay while thehabitantharnessed his stocky little pony to a cart, he helped the woman to her feet, and taking the child in his own arms, started back for the village, not a mile distant. There he sent a messenger post-haste to Ste. Anne's, and an hour later the ponderous little wagon that did service as ambulance for the convent of the Franciscan Sisters at Beaupré was speeding homeward with both mother and child, and Hartley and Cordelia were waiting on the chilly little wind-swept platform for the Quebec train, intangibly detached from one another and mysteriously depressed in spirits. It was not until the warmth and lights of the hotel had shut out the night from them that either cared to talk. Then, of a sudden, Hartley found the woman at his side shaken with a passionate burst of seemingly inconsequential weeping.
"Cordelia, what is it?" he cried, in startled wonder.
"Motherhood!" said Cordelia, inadequately, through her tears—"it—it is such an awful thing!"
And then she fled from him, and he sat up late into the night, thinking.
And from the gloomy caves of Mem'ry cameThe bandits of Repentance in the nightAnd left her naked, and in spirit torn.
And from the gloomy caves of Mem'ry cameThe bandits of Repentance in the nightAnd left her naked, and in spirit torn.
John Hartley, "Street Dust."
Every Klondike of achievement has its Chilkoot of adversity.—"The Silver Poppy."
The next afternoon they were on the Grand Battery, leaning against one of the obsolete old mortars that frowned down over the river. A calm sky of robin's-egg blue stretched over them. Golden and quiet as were the Laurentides about them, there was a touch of chilliness in that clear, northern air, a muffled coldness which Hartley likened to a naked saber-blade buried in rose-leaves. The wide St. Lawrence lay beneath them like a pool of silver. In the remoter distance stretched the blue and purple foot-hills of the Laurentians themselves.
Miles beneath them they could see the valleys of gloomy greenness, dotted with their little flashing whitewashedhabitanthouses, and over everything the mellow, autumnal sunlight lay; over the gray walls of the Citadel, burning like fire on the windows and spires, gemming the long hillside sloping down to the river, making opals and pearls of the little sails and softening the very grimness of the dark and more distant headlands frowning so sternly out over the peaceful water.
It had been a day full of quiet happiness for both of them, and a feeling of vague regret, of languid sorrow, fell over them, as they stood in silence, looking on the beauty of river and foot-hill and mountain bathed in autumnal silence and gold.
"Oh, if we never grew old!" Cordelia said, with a wistful little shake of the head, drawing closer to Hartley, and slipping her hand through his arm.
He looked down at her with a strange sternness that was not all sternness in his eyes. She turned away, gazing across the wide stretch of river dotted with its shifting opals and pearls.
"Cordelia," he said, softly.
She did not answer. Her musing eyes were far away, on a drifting bank of gray cloud that was slowly shrouding the glory of the sunset and bringing with it a breath of colder wind.
"Cordelia," he repeated, even more softly, "will you marry me?"
She fell back from him, startled, amazed. It came as a bolt out of the blue.
It was the one thing she had not looked for, had not hoped for, had never thought to ask for.
"Marry you!" she repeated, as though the words were words she did not know. "Marry you!"
The molten silver of the river so far beneath her seemed to rise and fall and fade, and the purple line of the foot-hills wavered and darkened and went out. A new voice had come to her in the wilderness of her doubt, a new path seemed to lead out of the two-fold desert of her despair.
"Yes, dear," he said, quietly, taking her gloved hand in his, "will you marry me?—be my wife?"
No words came to her tongue, and her face was white; but the slowly awakening light that crept into her eyes and illuminated all her pallid face made a new, a transformed woman of her. A belated song-sparrow alit on one of the old guns near them, and sang thinly for a moment or two. Never had the man beside her seen that tender light which came to her that minute and hung over her like a halo.
She drew back from him for a moment again, still doubting, still perplexed, still hesitating. He held out his two arms for her as one does for a child.
"I love you, my darling; I love you!" she murmured, as he folded them about her. And he knew it was true. He bent over her, and she gave him her mouth to kiss, reluctantly, as though it had never been kissed before. He kissed her, not passionately, but gravely, almost reverentially; and she was happier at the thought that he had done it so.
"I used to half fear you, dear," he said, still holding her hand through his arm. "I thought you were cold. I looked on you only as the woman who wrote books, as one who worked for praise and fame and success, as a woman hardened and schooled by a selfish world. That suspicion of selfishness, I believe, mademeselfish. No, no; you must listen, dear, for this is a confession. What I took for coldness in you challenged a certain coldness in me, and for weeks and weeks I misunderstood you and misjudged you. Now I know better. What has happened during the last week has shown me how wrong I was. And now I want you to forgive me, if you can, for all those old misunderstandings. Will you, Cordelia, dear?"
"You believe in me? You trust me, fully?" she cried, thrilling through all her frail body, trembling with the fierceness of some newer, finer fire.
For one silent minute he looked deeply into her eyes, and, seeing that great and glorious light in them, he responded: "I do, Cordelia! I do, my own!" And there was no shadow of doubt in his voice.
"But I have done so much that is—that is not right!" she hesitated, almost imploringly, leaning over the grim old gun-carriage and burying her face shudderingly in her hands.
"But now I love you because I know you could never deceive me, just as I would never deceive you. I can read it in your eyes, dear. In the past we have both done things which we ought not to have done, perhaps. But that was because we were both misguided, and both hemmed in by the wrong influences, wasting all the best of our lives, and the best of our hearts, on the things that were wrong."
"It is too late!" she almost wailed.
"No; no, indeed; we can go back and begin all over again, this time with a clean slate. I have been thinking these things over, trying, the last few days, to work them out by myself, and I believe I have learned more than one lesson in that time. Think how easily it can be done! We can slip around to that haven of the love-tossed, to the Little Church Around the Corner, and then we can hunt us out some little nook of our own in the big city, and there we can live our lives, and dream our dreams, and do our work, and be happy together! And how happy I shall be, working for you, dearest," he said, with the tremble of emotion in his voice.
"No, no; not back to New York!" she pleaded. "Couldn't we go to England, to Oxford—your own Oxford, and live there, alone, away from them all?"
"Yes, we could, if you thought best!"
The idea of it was new to him.
"John," she said, suddenly, and her voice seemed to lose its softness as she spoke. "John, I have something to tell you! I did not intend to tell you so soon, but now I must!"
She felt that in that exalted moment she must burn every bridge behind her; she must give herself no further chance of defeating herself.
"It is about your book—I could not take it; I have not taken it. I have given it back to you. It is being published now, but—but not in my name!"
Oh, if that could have been the whole truth, she thought, as the first thorn of her poor rose of abnegation pierced her. But it was the best that she could do, she told her aching heart pitifully. It was not too late; she could still make it the truth. In that moment of new birth she felt that she must tell him everything, from the first to the last. But as she framed the very words of her confession she saw that she must still wait a little—that was the most agonizing part of it. Yet nothing, she said to herself sternly, nothing, in the end, should be kept back from him. By her very frankness and openness of soul she would hold him and bind him the closer to her.
"It is being printed now—but not in my name!" she repeated, weakly, clinging to that one prospective act of redemption.
"I thought you would do it," he said, showing no surprise. "And I am glad of it, for your sake, dearest. I don't mind about the book; I do not want that. But it is You, the true You, that I want!" And as he said it his hand sought her hand once more.
"But I have done other things, oh, so many other things, that were—were ignoble, that were wrong!" she cried, pitifully, a terror of her past growing up within her.
"Do you love me?" he said, suddenly, turning to her.
"I would die for you, this day!" she said. And by the beauty and the sudden glory that swept over her face once more he knew her word was not to be doubted.
"Then the other things can never count!" he answered, kissing her tenderly on her cold cheek.
A cold wind blew up the river, and the dusk was falling. Their day was almost gone. Cordelia looked up at the darkening sky, and held her hands out before her.
"See," she said, "the snow-flakes!"
A few white flakes drifted and fluttered down between them; she caught at them with her hands, but they eluded her.
"Yes," he said, standing close beside her, happily, and gazing with her up into the darkening air. "Itissnow, falling already!"
Then through the sober autumn air they walked slowly back to the hotel, arm in arm, and silent.
"I must be alone, dearest, for the rest of this day," she said, happily. He understood, and left her to her own woman's thoughts.
When she knew him to be safely in his own room she slipped stealthily down to the hotel telegraph-office and hurriedly wrote out a message for her New York publisher. It said:
"Substitute name John Hartley for Cordelia Vaughan on title-page of novel The Unwise Virgins. For this I agree to relinquish all royalty claims. Will explain later. Answer."
"Substitute name John Hartley for Cordelia Vaughan on title-page of novel The Unwise Virgins. For this I agree to relinquish all royalty claims. Will explain later. Answer."
She signed the message and handed it to the operator with a slightly shaking hand, asking nervously how soon she could get a reply. There was no reason why she should not receive one in two hours, perhaps three hours, at the latest.
When that time had expired, and no answer came to her, she repeated the message, this time sending the despatch to Henry Slater's home address.
Late into the night she sat up in her room, frantically waiting for some word from him. As the hours dragged on she paced the little chamber in a fever of unrest, pausing and listening at every footstep that passed her door. Midnight came and went, and still no word arrived. Then she knew that there was but one thing for her to do.
In the gray of the morning, when Hartley and all the hotel were still sleeping, she called a carriage, and, hurrying to the railway station, caught the early morning express for Montreal, on her way to New York. It was no time for half measures.
Three hours later, when Hartley went down to breakfast, after a night of mysteriously depressing restlessness, he found awaiting him an incoherent little note from Cordelia. Bewildered, only after many readings he gathered from it that she had been called away because of some business tangle about which she would tell him later.
"If that isn't like her, the crazy child!" was Mrs. Spaulding's cry when she heard of it all, less disturbed in spirit than Hartley had expected.
And while, indeed, he was still pondering over his surprising note from her, Cordelia herself was speeding along past the old French settlements on the banks of the upper St. Lawrence, gazing absently out at the low-eaved little cottages, and desperately asking herself, again and again, if it would be too late.