V
AT last the tumult of passion subsided and Margaret, still leaning on the pillar of the church portico, looked out with bewildered eyes. Again an overwhelming weakness swept over her and wiped out some of the vivid misery.
She must go home—home! The word brought a dull pang of anguish, she had no right to a home, for she had broken up her own and orphaned her children. She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the thoughts which stormed back, at a word, to assault her poor fagged brain again. Then the soft sweet notes of the recessional came out to her and she knew that in a few moments the dispersing congregation would find her there; summoning all her flagging energies she stepped down into the street and turning westward was suddenly apprised of the fact that she had been in the old church so often visible from the windows of Allestree’s studio. The discovery brought her a feeling of relief; she was near the studio and she could go there and telephone for a cab to take her back to the hotel.Losing herself in the shadows of the darkest side of the poorly lighted street, she hurried toward the old building on the corner and saw, with relief, the light still shining in Allestree’s window as well as in the curiosity-shop below.
She crossed the street and trying the side door found the latch down. In another moment she was toiling wearily up the old stairs, clinging to the balustrade with an absolute need of its support.
To her surprise the studio was empty; she called to Allestree, supposing him to be, perhaps, in his storeroom above, but there was no answer and she sank down in the nearest chair, too weary and helpless to frame her thoughts. An open fire was burning low on the hearth, and a half smoked cigarette lay on the mantel edge. He had evidently gone out for a moment and would soon return. Margaret roused herself and looked about her with a wretched feeling of strangeness and separation from her own life. She seemed suddenly detached, a mere onlooker where once she had been the centre of the stage. There had stood the portrait of her, and there the picture of Rose; both were gone! She even noticed that the little tea-table was pushed away, and divined Allestree’s secret feeling. She knew every detail of the room, the tapestries, the worn Turkey rug, Robert’s old cigarette-case.It was intolerable; she rose, and going to the table, where the telephone stood, saw Allestree’s portfolio and the pen and ink. She would leave a line to explain her visit before she called a cab, and she opened the portfolio to look for a scrap of paper; as she did so her eye fell on the page of a letter written in old Mrs. Allestree’s clear hand; unconsciously she read the lines before her:
“Margaret has broken up Fox’s happiness twice, once when she broke her own engagement to him, and now in separating him from Rose—”
She closed the book sharply, suddenly aware of what she did and deeply shamed by it, but the thought of the personal dishonesty of her heedless act was lost in the sharper pang of realization; she saw at last the light in which her actions had appeared to others. She stood still, her face frozen, and a cry sprang to her lips from the depths of hidden passion, the cry of some mortally wounded wild creature who faces death alone. She knew it, she did not need to be told it, but others knew it too! It was the bitter drop in her cup of gall; the wild anguish which swept away all other realities, even the desire for life, amazed her. For one moment she hated Rose with all the strength of her undisciplined soul, the next a great wave of humiliation submerged her being. She turned,forgetting the telephone, forgetting everything but a desire to escape the meeting with Allestree, groped her way to the door like a blind woman and went down stairs. At the foot she hesitated; a step in the street made her fear to meet Robert at the door, and she turned and plunged into the curiosity-shop. She found herself behind the chintz curtain, in the place which evidently served as a living-room for Daddy Lerwick, and she saw a table spread for supper, while the scent of garlic streamed from a pot on the stove. Hurrying across the room she lifted the curtain and entered the shop.
Daddy Lerwick was leaning on the counter talking to a young girl and passing a necklace back and forth in his fat hands. At the sound of Margaret’s step they both turned and looked at her in surprise, a surprise which gave place on his part to servile courtesy. But Margaret scarcely noticed him; instead she saw the pale, worn face of the girl, the pinched misery of her look as she glanced at the stones in Lerwick’s coarse fingers. Margaret’s eyes following hers, lighted, too, on the jewels; it was a topaz necklace, the mate to the bracelet which she had prized so long ago. The intuition of misery, the sixth sense of the soul which—no longer atrophied with selfishness—had suddenlyawakened within her, divined the secret. She read the suspended bargain in Lerwick’s eye, the hopeless anguish in the girl’s. It was only an instant; the thought came to her like the opening of a dungeon door on the glare of midday. Then she drew back to avoid an encounter with two more customers who had entered the shop and who began at once to ask the prices of the objects in the windows. Lerwick went forward to answer them; the girl leaned on the counter, hiding her face in her hands; a shiver of misery passed over her and Margaret saw it. Moved by an impulse, as inexplicable as it was unnatural, she touched the shabby sleeve. “What is the matter?” she asked softly.
The young woman looked up startled, but only for an instant, the next the dull misery of her look closed over her face like a mask, though her lip trembled. “He’s offered me fifteen dollars,” she faltered; “I—I suppose I’ll have to take it.”
Margaret quietly put out her hand. “Will you sell it to me?” she said; “I will give more and you will not have to give your name.”
The girl’s cheek crimsoned; she hesitated and gathered the necklace into her hands; the gesture was pathetic, it bespoke the actual pang of parting with an old keepsake.
Margaret saw it. “Come, come with me,” she said and led her back through the door to the studio entrance; she no longer feared to meet Allestree; a new impulse stirred her heart.
Under the light there she opened her purse and hastily counted her money, she had a little over a hundred dollars in small bills. Hurriedly thrusting a dollar or two back into her pocketbook, she pressed the remainder into her companion’s hands, saying at the same time: “Keep your necklace, I do not want it; I only wished to help you save it.”
The young stranger looked at her in dull amazement, stunned by the incomprehensible sympathy and generosity when she had long since ceased to look for either. She drew a long shuddering breath. “Oh, I can’t take so much!” she gasped out, “you—you must keep the necklace!”
Margaret regarded her sadly. “Child,” she replied, “I’m more unhappy than you are; I do not want either the money or the necklace; keep them both!”
“Do you really mean it?” the girl whispered, her eyes fastened on the face opposite in absolute wonder and doubt; “you really mean to give me all this—and you want nothing?”
Margaret smiled with stiff lips. “Nothing!”
The pinched, childlike features of the stranger quivered; it seemed as if the frozen sensibilities were melting under this touch of common humanity. Suddenly she burst into an agony of tears, slipping down upon the stairs, her slender shabby figure racked with sobs. “He heard me!” she cried, “there is a God!”
Margaret looked at her strangely. “Do you think so?” she asked vaguely, with parched lips, “do you believe in God?”
“Yes,” the girl cried, clasping her hands, “I prayed—oh, God, how I prayed! It seemed as if He didn’t hear me, no help came and I couldn’t pay; I couldn’t pay, and they didn’t believe me any more because I’d failed—you don’t know, you’ve never failed like that! I thought God didn’t care, that He had forgotten—but now—” she rose from her knees, her face still wet with tears but singularly changed, “I shan’t have to do it!” she cried, “here’s enough to begin all over again, I can go on, I’m saved! He heard! Don’t you believe it? Don’t you see it must be so?” she persisted, unconsciously catching at Margaret’s draperies and her thin toil-worn hand closing on their richness.
“For you, yes,” the older woman replied slowly; “good heavens, I never knew how much moneymeant before!” she murmured, passing her hand over her eyes again, “and you think—God heard you—God?”
“He sent you!” the girl cried, exultantly, wildly happy; “oh, yes, I’m sure of it—oh, God bless you!”
A strange expression passed over Margaret’s face. She leaned back against the wall, pressing her hand to her heart. Then, as the girl still sobbed softly, she touched her shoulder. “Open the door,” she said quietly, “I—I must go, can you help me? I’m a little dizzy.”
The young woman sprang to her and put out her arm eagerly. “Let me help you; oh, I’d do anything for you!”
Margaret smiled, a wan little smile that made her haggard brilliant face weirdly sad. “It is nothing. There, the air from the outside makes me well again, this place is choking!”
The stranger walked with her to the corner, eager to help her, to call a cab, to put her on the cars, but as Margaret’s faintness passed she refused, putting aside her protests with firm dismissal. “No, no, I can go home,” she said bravely; “good-bye, I’m glad I could help you.”
“Oh, let me go with you, let me do something!” the girl appealed to her eagerly.
But Margaret dismissed her and they parted, the young stranger hurrying away down a narrow by-street while her benefactress walked slowly toward the nearest avenue. But she had gone only a few steps when she turned and looked after the shabby figure, which was only a short distance from her. A vivid recollection of that cry that God had heard her prayer, the absolute conviction of it, swept over the stricken woman, and moved by an impulse which she did not pause to question, Margaret ran after the girl through the gathering mist and overtook her, breathless. She turned with a frightened look, full of dread, no doubt, that she must yet give up the miraculously acquired wealth, and she started when Margaret laid a thin, ungloved hand on her arm.
“I wanted to ask you,” she began,—and then changed the sentence swiftly into a command,—“pray for me to-night! You believe there is a God—perhaps He’ll hear you again!”
“Indeed I will!” the girl cried, bewildered; “oh, I wish—”
But the unfinished speech was lost; Margaret had turned and swiftly disappeared again into the folds of the mist; like a shadow the girl saw her vanishing into deeper shadows; something uncanny and marvellous seemed to lurk in the verythought of her beautiful haggard face, the wildness of her smile, and the young woman hurried away, hugging her treasure close, almost persuaded that she had talked face to face with a being from another world.