Cornelia Woodyard's expression was not pleasant when she was deliberating or in perplexity. Her broad brow wrinkled, and her mouth drew down at the corners, adding a number of years to her face. She did not allow this condition of perplexity to appear in public, reserving her "heavy thinking," as Tom Cairy called these moments, for the early morning hours of privacy. This languid spring day while Conny turned over her mail that lay strewn in disorder on her bed, she apparently had one of her worst fits of dubitation. She poked about in the mass of letters, bills, and newspapers until she found the sheet she was looking for,—it was in her husband's handwriting,—reread it, the scowl deepening, pushed it back thoughtfully into its envelope, and rang for the maid that looked after her personally as well as performed other offices in the well-organized household. When Conny emerged at the end of the hour in street costume, the frown had disappeared, but her fair face wore a preoccupied air.
"Hello, Tom!" she said wanly to Cairy, who was dawdling over the paper in the library. "How is it out?"
"Warm,—a perfect day!" Cairy replied, smiling at her and jumping to his feet.
"Is the cab there?"
"Yes,—shall we start?"
"I can't go to-day, Tom,—something has turned up."
"Something has turned up?" he queried. He was an expert in Conny's moods, but he had seen little of this mood lately.
"Business," Conny explained shortly. "Leave the cab, please. I may want it…. No," she added as Cairy came towards her with a question on his lips. "I can't bother to explain,—but it's important. We must give up our day."
She turned to her desk, and then remarked as if she felt Cairy's disappointment: "You can come in after dinner if you like, Tom! We can have the evening, perhaps."
He looked at her questioningly, as if he would insist on an explanation. But Conny was not one of whom even a lover would demand explanations when she was in this mood.
"We can't always play, Tommy!" she sighed.
But after he had left the room she called him back.
"You didn't kiss me," she said sweetly. "You may if you like, just once…. There!" she raised her head and smiled at Cairy, with that satisfaction which emotional moments brought to her. "You had better get to work, too. You can't have been of much use to Gossom lately." And she settled herself at her desk with the telephone book. As she called the hotel where Senator Thomas usually stayed when he was in the city, the scowl returned to her brow. Her mind had already begun to grapple with the problems suggested by Percy's letter of the morning. But by the time she had succeeded in getting the Senator, her voice was gentle and sweet….
… "Yes, at luncheon,—that will be very nice!" And she hung up the receiver with an air of swift accomplishment.
* * * * *
It is not necessary to go into what had passed between Cornelia Woodyard and Cairy in the weeks that had elapsed since that day when Conny had been so anxious to get back to New York from the Poles'. It would gratify merely a vulgar curiosity. Suffice it to say that never before had Conny been so pleased with life or her own competent handling of her affairs in it. Up to this morning she felt that she had admirably fulfilled all claims upon her as well as satisfied herself. Things had seemed "to come her way" during this period. The troublesome matter before the Commission that had roused her husband's conscience and fighting blood had gone over for the time. The Commission had reserved its decision, and the newspapers had gone off on a number of other scents of wrong-doing that seemed more odorously promising. Percy's conscience had returned to its normal unsuspecting state, and he had been absorbed to an unwonted degree in private business of one sort or another.
Meantime the Senator and Cornelia had had a number of little talks. The Senator had advised her about the reinvestment of her money, and all her small fortune was now placed in certain stocks and bonds of a paper company that "had great prospects in the near future," as the Senator conservatively phrased it. Percy, naturally, had known about this, and though he was slightly troubled by the growing intimacy with the Senator, he was also flattered and trusted his wife's judgment. "A shrewd business head," the Senator said of Conny, and the Senator ought to know. "It is as easy to do business with her as with a man." Which did not mean that Cornelia Woodyard had sold her husband to the Senator,—nothing as crude as that, but merely that she "knew the values" of this life.
The Senator and Conny often talked of Percy, the promise he had shown, his ability and popularity among all kinds of men. "If he steers right now," the Senator had said to his wife, "there is a great future ahead of Woodyard, and"—with a pleasant glance at Conny—"I have no doubt he will avoid false steps." The Senator thought that Congress would be a mistake. So did Conny. "It takes luck or genius to survive the lower house," the Senator said. They had talked of something in diplomacy, and now that the stocks and bonds of the paper-mill were to be so profitable, they could afford to consider diplomacy. Moreover, the amiable Senator, who knew how to "keep in" with an aggressively moral administration at Washington without altogether giving up the pleasing habit of "good things," promised to have Woodyard in mind "for the proper place."
So Conny had dreamed her little dream, which among many other things included the splendor of a career in some European capital, where Conny had no doubt that she could properly shine, and she felt proud that she could do so much for Percy. The world, this one at any rate, was for the able,—those who knew what to take from the table and how to take it. She was of those who had the instinct and the power. Then Percy's letter:—
… "Princhard came up to see me yesterday. From the facts he gave me I have no doubt at all what is the inner meaning of the Water Power bill. I shall get after Dillon [the chairman of the Commission] and find out what he means by delaying matters as he has…. It looks also as though the Senator had some connection with this steal…. I am sorrier than I can say that we have been so intimate with him, and that you followed his advice about your money. I may be down Sunday, and we will talk it over. Perhaps it is not too late to withdraw from that investment. It will make no difference, however, in my action here." …
Simply according to Conny's crisp version, "Percy has flown the track again!"
* * * * *
After a pleasant little luncheon with the Senator, Conny sent a telegram to her husband that she would meet him at the station on the arrival of a certain train from Albany that evening, adding the one word, "urgent," which was a code word between them. Then she telephoned the office ofThe People's, but Cairy was not there, and he had not returned when later in the afternoon she telephoned again.
"Well," she mused, a troubled expression on her face, "perhaps it is just as well,—Tom might not be easy to manage. He's more exacting than Percy about some things." So while the cab was waiting to take her to the station, she sat down at her desk and wrote a note,—a brief little note:—
"DEAR TOM: I am just starting for the station to meet Percy. Something very important has come up, which for the present must change things for us all…. You know that we agreed the one thing we could not do would be to let our feelings interfere with our duties—to any one…. I don't know when I can see you. But I will let you know soon. Good-by. C."
"Give this to Mr. Cairy when he calls and tell him not to wait," she said to the maid who opened the door for her. Conny did not believe in "writing foolish things to men," and her letter of farewell had the brevity of telegraphic despatch. Nevertheless she sank into the corner of the cab wearily and closed her eyes on the brilliant street, which usually amused her as it would divert a child. "He'll know sometime!" she said to herself. "He'll understand or have to get along without understanding!" and her lips drew together. It was a different world to-night from that of the day before; but unhappy as she was she had a subtle satisfaction in her willingness and her ability to meet it whatever side it turned towards her.
The train was a halfhour late, and as she paced the court slowly, she realized that Cairy had come to the house,—he was always prompt these days,—had received the note, and was walking away, reading it,—thinking what of her? Her lips tightened a trifle, as she glanced at the clock. "He will go to Isabella's," she said to herself. "He likes Isabelle." She knew Cairy well enough to feel that the Southerner could not long endure a lonely world. And Conny had a tolerant nature; she did not despise him for going where he could find amusement and comfort; nor did she think his love less worth having. But she bit her lip as she repeated, "He will go to Isabelle." If Percy wanted to know the extent of his wife's devotion to their married life, their common interests, he should have seen her at this moment. As the train drew in, she had already thought, "But he will come back—when it is possible."
She met her husband with a frank smile.
"You'll have to take me somewhere to dinner," she drawled. "There isn't any at home,—besides I want to talk at once. Glad to see me?"
When they were finally by themselves in a small private room of a restaurant where Conny loved to go with her husband,—"because it seems so naughty,"—she said in answer to his look of inquiry: "Percy, I want you to take me away—to Europe, just for a few weeks!"
Woodyard's face reflected surprise and concern.
"But, Con!" he stammered.
"Please, Percy!" She put her hand softly on his arm. "No matter what is in the way,—only for a few weeks!" and her eyes filled with tears, quite genuine tears, which dropped slowly to her pale face. "Percy," she murmured, "don't you love me any longer?"…
It was perfectly true, as Conny surmised, that Cairy went to Isabelle. But not that evening—the blow was too hard and too little expected—nor on the whole more frequently than he had been in the habit of going during the winter. Isabelle interested him,—"her problem," as he called it; that is, given her husband and her circumstances, how she would settle herself into New York,—how far she might go there. It flattered him also to serve as intellectual and aesthetic mentor to an attractive, untrained woman, who frankly liked him and bowed to his opinion. It was Cairy, through Isabelle, much more than Lane, who decided on the house in that up-town cross street, on the "right" side of the Park, which the Lanes finally bought. It was in an excellent neighborhood, "just around the corner" from a number of houses where well-known people lived. In the same block the Gossoms had established themselves, on the profits ofThe People's, and only two doors away, on the same side of the street, a successful novelist had housed himself behind what looked like a Venetian facade. Close by were the Rogerses,—he was a fashionable physician; the Hillary Peytons; the Dentons,—all people, according to Cairy, "one might know."
When Isabelle came to look more closely into this matter of settling herself in the city, she regretted the Colonel's illiberal will. They might easily have had a house nearer "the Avenue," instead of belonging to the polite poor-rich class two blocks east. Nevertheless, she tried to comfort herself by the thought that even with the Colonel's millions at their disposal they would have been "little people" in the New York scale of means. And the other thing, the "interesting," "right" society was much better worth while. "You make your own life,—it isn't made for you," Cairy said.
Isabelle was very busy these days. Thanks to the Potts regime, she was feeling almost well generally, and when she "went down," Dr. Potts was always there with the right drug to pull her up to the level. So she plunged into the question of altering the house, furnishing it, and getting it ready for the autumn. Her mother and John could not understand her perplexity about furnishing. What with the contents of two houses on hand, it seemed incomprehensible that the new home should demand a clean sweep. But Isabelle realized the solid atrocity of the Torso establishment and of the St. Louis one as well. She was determined that this time she should be right. With Cairy for guide and adviser she took to visiting the old furniture shops, selecting piece by piece what was to go into the new house. She was planning, also, to make that deferred trip to Europe to see her brother, and she should complete her selection over there, although Cairy warned her that everything she was likely to buy in Europe these days would be "fake." Once launched on the sea of household art, she found herself in a torturing maze. What was "right" seemed to alter with marvellous rapidity; the subject, she soon realized, demanded a culture, an experience that she had never suspected. Then there was the matter of the Farm at Grafton, which must be altered. The architect, who was making over the New York house, had visited Grafton and had ideas as to what could be done with the rambling old house without removing it bodily. "Tear down the barn—throw out a beautiful room here—terrace it—a formal garden there," etc. In the blue prints the old place was marvellously transformed.
"Aren't you doing too much, all at once?" Lane remonstrated in the mild way of husbands who have experienced nervous prostration with their wives.
"Oh, no; it interests me so! Dr. Potts thinks I should keep occupied reasonably, with things that really interest me…. Besides I am only directing it all, you know."
And glad to see her once more satisfied, eager, he went his way to his work, which demanded quite all his large energy. After all, women had to do just about so much, and find their limit themselves.
Isabelle had learned to "look after herself," as she phrased it, by which she meant exercise, baths, massage, days off when she ran down to Lakewood, electricity,—all the physical devices for keeping a nervous people in condition. It is a science, and it takes time,—but it is a duty, as Isabelle reflected. Then there was the little girl. She was four now, and though the child was almost never on her hands, thanks to the excellent Miss Butts, Molly, as they called her, had her place in her mother's busy thoughts: what was the best regimen, whether she ought to have a French or a German governess next year, how she should dress, and in the distance the right school to be selected. Isabelle meant to do her best for the little girl, and looked back on her own bringing up—even the St. Mary's part of it—as distressingly haphazard, and limiting. Her daughter should be fitted "to make the most of life," which was what Isabelle felt that she herself was now beginning to do.
So Isabelle was occupied, as she believed profitably, spending her new energy wisely, and though she was getting worn, it was only a month to the date she had set for sailing. Vickers had promised to meet her at Genoa and take her into the Dolomites and then to San Moritz, where she could rest. As her life filled up, she saw less of her husband than ever, for he, too, was busy, "with that railroad thing," as she called the great Atlantic and Pacific. She made him buy a horse and ride in the Park afternoons when he could get the time, because he was growing too heavy. He had developed laziness socially, liked to go to some restaurant for dinner with chance friends that were drifting continually through New York, and afterwards to the theatre,—"to see something lively," as he put it, preferably Weber and Fields', or Broadway opera. Isabelle felt that this was not the right thing, and boring, too; but it would all be changed when they were "settled." Meantime she went out more or less by herself, as the wives of busy men have to do.
"It is so much better not to bring a yawning husband home at midnight," she laughed to Cairy on one of these occasions when she had given him a seat down town in her cab. "By the way, you haven't spoken of Conny lately,—don't you see her any more?"
Isabelle still had her girlish habit of asking indiscreet, impertinent questions. She carried them off with a lively good nature, but they irritated Cairy occasionally.
"I have been busy with my play," he replied shortly.
As a matter of fact he had been attacked by one of those fits of intense occupation which came upon him in the intervals of his devotions. At such times he worked to better effect, with a kind of abandoned fury, than when his thoughts and feelings were engaged, as if to make up to his muse for his periods of neglect. The experience, he philosophized, which had stored itself, was now finding vent,—the spiritual travail as well as the knowledge of life. A man, an artist, had but one real passion, he told Isabelle,—and that was his work. Everything else was mere fertilizer or waste. Since the night that Conny had turned him from the door, he had completed his new play, which had been hanging fire all winter, and he was convinced it was his best. "Yes, a man's work, no matter what it may be, is God's solace for living." In response to which Isabelle mischievously remarked:—
"So you and Conny really have had a tiff? I must get her to tell me about it."
"Do you think she would tell you the truth?"
"No."
Isabelle, in spite of Cairy's protestations about his work, was gratified with her discovery, as she called it. She had decided that Conny was "a bad influence" on the Southerner; that Cairy was simple and ingenuous,—"really a nice boy," so she told her husband. Just what evil Conny had done to Cairy Isabelle could not say, ending always with the phrase, "but I don't trust her," or "she is so selfish." She had made these comments to Margaret Pole, and Margaret had answered with one of her enigmatic smiles and the remark:—
"Conny's no more selfish than most of us women,—only her methods are more direct—and successful."
"That is cynical," Isabelle retorted. "Most of us women are not selfish; I am not!"
And in her childlike way she asked her husband that very night:—
"John, do you think I am selfish?"
John answered this large question with a laugh and a pleasant compliment.
"I suppose Margaret means that I don't go in for charities, like that Mrs. Knop of the Relief and Aid, or for her old Consumers' League. Well, I had enough of that sort of thing in St. Louis. And I don't believe it does any good; it is better to give money to those who know how to spend it…. Have you any poor relatives we could be good to, John? … Any cousins that ought to be sent to college, any old aunts pining for a trip to California?"
"Lots of 'em, I suppose," her husband responded amiably. "They turn up every now and then, and I do what I can for them. I believe I am sending two young women to college to fit themselves for teaching."
Lane was generous, though he had the successful man's suspicion of all those who wanted help. He had no more formulated ideas about doing for others than his wife had. But when anything appealed to him, he gave and had a comfortable sense that he was helping things along.
Isabelle, in spite of the disquiet caused by Margaret's statement, felt convinced that she was doing her duty in life broadly, "in that station where Providence had called her." 'She was sure that she was a good wife, a good daughter, a good mother. And now she meant to be more than these humdrum things,—she meant to be Somebody, she meant to live! …
When she found time to call at the Woodyards', she saw that the house was closed, and the caretaker, who was routed out with difficulty, informed her that the master and mistress had sailed for Europe the week before.
'Very sudden,' mused Isabelle. 'I don't see how Percy could get away.'
Half the houses on the neighboring square were closed already, however, and she thought as she drove up town that it was time for her to be going. The city was becoming hot and dusty, and she was rather tired of it, too. Mrs. Price was to open the Farm for the summer and have Miss Butts and the little girl with her. John promised "to run over and get her" in September, if he could find time. Her little world was all arranged for, she reflected complacently. John would stay at the hotel and go up to Grafton over Sundays, and he had joined a club. Yes, the Lanes were shaking into place in New York.
Cairy sent her some roses when she sailed and was in the mob at the pier to bid her good-by.
"Perhaps I shall be over myself later on," he said, "to see if I can place the play."
"Oh, do!" Isabelle exclaimed. "And we'll buy things. I am going to ruinJohn."
Lane smiled placidly, as one not easily ruined. When the visitors were driven down the gangway, Isabelle called to Cairy:—
"Come on and go back in the tug with John!"
So Cairy limped back. Isabelle was nervous and tired, and now that she was actually on the steamer felt sad at seeing accustomed people and things about to slip away. She wanted to hold on to them as long as possible. Presently the hulking steamer was pulled out into the stream and headed for the sea. It was a hot June morning and through the haze the great buildings towered loftily. The long city raised a jagged sky-line of human immensity, and the harbor swarmed with craft,—car ferries, and sailing vessels dropping down stream carefully to take the sea breeze, steamers lined with black figures, screeching tugs, and occasionally a gleaming yacht. The three stood together on the deck looking at the scene.
"It always gives me the same old thrill," Cairy said. "Coming or going, it makes no difference,—it is the biggest fact in the modern world."
"I love it!" murmured Isabelle, her eyes fastened on the serried walls about the end of the island. "I shall never forget when I saw it as a child, the first time. It was mystery, like a story-book then, and it has been the same ever since."
Lane said nothing, but watched the city with smiling lips. To him the squat car ferries, the lighters, the dirty tramp steamers, the railroad yards across the river, as well as the lofty buildings of the long city—all the teeming life here at the mouth of the country—meant Traffic, the intercourse of men. And he, too, loved the great roaring city. He looked at it with a vista that reached from the Iowa town where he had first "railroaded it," up through the intervening steps at St. Louis and Torso, to his niche in the largest of these buildings,—all the busy years which he had spent dealing with men.
Isabelle touched his arm.
"I wish you were coming, too, John," she said as the breeze struck in from the open sea. "Do you remember how we talked of going over when we were in Torso?"
What a stretch of time there was between those first years of marriage and to-day! She would never have considered in the Torso days that she could sail off like this alone with a maid and leave her husband behind.
"Oh, it will be only a few weeks,—you'll enjoy yourself," he replied. He had been very good about her going over to join Vickers, made no objections to it this time. They were both growing more tolerant, as they grew older and saw more of life.
"What is in the paper?" she asked idly, as her husband rolled it up.
"There's a dirty roast on your friend, Percy Woodyard,—nothing else!"
"See, that must be the tug!" exclaimed Isabelle, pushing up her veil to kiss her husband. "Good-by—I wish you were going, too—I shall miss you so—be sure you exercise and keep thin!"…
She watched the two men climb down into the bobbing tug and take places beside the pilot room,—her tall, square-shouldered husband, and the slighter man, leaning on a cane, both looking up at her with smiles. John waved his paper at her,—the one that had the "roast" about Percy Woodyard. She had meant to read that,—she might see the Woodyards in Paris. Then the tug moved off, both men still waving to her. She hurried to the rear deck to get a last look, sentimental forlornness at leaving her husband coming over her afresh. As she gazed back at the retreating tug there was also in her heart a warm feeling for Cairy. "Poor Tom!" she murmured without knowing why.
On this great ship, among the thousand or more first-class passengers, there were a goodly number of women like her, leaving home and husband for a foreign trip. After all, as she had often said, it was a good idea for husbands and wives to have vacations from each other. There was no real reason why two people should stick together in an endless daily intimacy because they were married….
Thus the great city—the city of her ambitions—sank mistily on the horizon.
Mrs. Pole's house stood on the outskirts of the old town of Bedmouth, facing the narrow road that ran eastward to the Point. In the days of Mrs. Pole's father the ships passing to and from Bedmouth on the river could be seen from the front windows. Now the wires of a trolley road disfigured the old street and cheap wooden houses cut off the view of the river. In the rear there was a small garden, sloping down to an inlet of the sea, from which could be seen Bedmouth-way the slender spires of two churches that rose among the drooping branches of the elms, and seaward the squat outline of a great summer hotel, bedecked with many flags. In the black mould of the old garden grew tall syringa bushes, lilacs, pampas grass, and a few tiger lilies, and over the crumbling brick walls hung dusty leaves of grapevines. When the gate at the bottom of the garden was open, there was a view of the inlet, bordered with marsh grass, and farther away a segment of the open sea, with the lighthouse on Goose Rock.
Here the Judge's wife had come to live when her husband died, forsakingWashington, which had grown "too busy for an old woman." …
At the end of the garden, which was shaded by the high wall, Margaret sat, an uncut book on her knees, her eyes resting on the green marsh to be seen through the open door. Near by Ned in his little invalid chair was picking the mortar from the brick wall with a nail he had been able to reach. The two were often alone like this for hours, silent.
"Mother," the child said at last, as Margaret took up the book.
"What is it, Ned?"
"Must I sit like this always,—forever and ever?"
"I hope not, dear. You must remember Dr. Renault said it would take patience."
"But I have been patient."
"Yes, I know, dear!"
"If I didn't get any better, should I have to sit like this always?" At last the question which she feared had come, the child's first doubt. It had been uncertain, the recovery of the lost power; at times it seemed as if there were no progress. The mother answered in her slow, deep voice:—
"Yes, dear; you would have to be patient always. But we are going to hope!"
"Mother," the child persisted, "why does it have to be so?"
And the mother answered steadily:—
"I don't know, my boy. Nobody knows why."
Ned resumed his scratching at the wall, pondering this mystery of an inexplicable world. Presently there was a sound of oars beyond the wall, and the child exclaimed:—
"There's Big Bob! He said he'd take me for a row."
Falkner carried off the Little Man for his promised boat ride, leaving Margaret to cut the leaves of her book and to think. It was the week before, the end of August, that Falkner had put into Bedmouth in his small sloop. He was staying with his sister at Lancaster, only a short walk on the other side of the Point. After a few days more at the most he would have to turn back southwards, and then? … She threw down her book and paced slowly back and forth along the garden walk. As the sun sank low, her mother-in-law appeared, a frail little lady, who looked gently into Margaret's face.
"I am afraid you feel the heat, Margaret. It has been a very hot day."
"Is it hot?" Margaret asked vaguely, shading her eyes with her hand to look out over the marsh.
There was the sound of oars and a child's laugh, loud and careless, just beyond the wall. "Look out!" Ned cried.
"There, you've wet your feet!" The two women smiled. That boyish laugh was rare these days.
When the grandmother wheeled Ned into the house for his supper, Margaret and Falkner strolled out of the garden beside the marsh to a rocky knoll that jutted into the sea. They seated themselves under a scrawny pine whose roots were bathed by the incoming tide, and watched the twilight stillness steal across the marshes and the sea. There was no air and yet the ships out by Goose Island passed across the horizon, sails full set, as though moved by an unseen hand.
They knew each other so well! And yet in silent times like these their intimacy seemed always to go deeper, to reveal without the aid of speech new levels of understanding.
"I had a letter this morning from Marvin," Falkner remarked at last.
Margaret scooped up a handful of pebbles and let them fall through her thin fingers, waiting for the expected words.
"It is settled. We sail from New York the tenth."
"The tenth?"
"Yes, … so I must go back soon and get ready."
The decision about Panama had been in the balance when Falkner left New York, she knew. Another opportunity of work in the States had come meanwhile; the decision had not been easy to make. When Falkner had written his wife, Bessie had replied: "You must do what seems best to you, as you have always done in the past…. Of course I cannot take the children to Panama." And when Falkner had written of the other work nearer home, Bessie said: "I don't care to make another move and settle in a new place…. We seem to get on better like this. Go to Panama if you want to, and we will see when you get back." So he had debated the matter with himself all the way up the coast….
"When must you leave?"
"To-morrow," he answered slowly, and again they were silent.
It was as she wished, as she had urged. The new work would reopen the man's ambition, and thatmustbe. Where a man's work was concerned, nothing—nothing surely of any woman—should intervene. That was her feeling. No woman's pining or longing to fetter the man: clear the decks for action!
"To-morrow!" she murmured. She was smiling bravely, a smile that belied the tenseness within. Falkner picked the long spines from a pine branch, and arranged them methodically one by one in a row. They were not all alike, differing in minute characteristics of size and length and color. Nature at her wholesale task of turning out these millions of needles varied the product infinitely. And so with human beings!
They two were at peace together, their inner hunger appeased, with a sustaining content in life neither had ever known before. When they were together in this intimate silence, their spirits were freed from all bondage, free to rise, to leap upwards out of the encircling abysm of things. And this state of perfect meeting—spiritual equilibrium—must end….
"To-morrow?" she repeated, raising her eyes and gazing far out to the sunlit sea. And her heart was saying, "Tomorrow, and to-morrow, and the days thereafter,—and all empty of this!"
"It is best so," he said. "It could not go on like this!"
"No! We are human, after all!" and smiling wanly she rose to return to the house. When they reached his boat, Falkner took her hand,—a hand with finely tapering fingers, broad in the palm and oval,—a woman's hand, firm to hold, gentle to caress. The fingers tightened about his slowly. He looked into the blue eyes; they were dry and shining. And in those shining eyes he read the same unspoken words of revolt that rose within his heart,—'Why thus too late! too late! Why has life declared itself in all its meaning—too late? Why were we caught by the mistakes of half knowledge, and then receive the revelation?' The futile questions of human hearts.
"You will come to-night—after dinner?" Margaret asked. "Bring the boat. We will go to Lawlor's Cove. I want to get away—from everything!"
As she mounted the garden steps to the house, she heard the whirr of a motor in the street. It stopped in front of the house, and as Margaret waited she heard Mrs. Hillyer's thin voice: "I am so sorry! Please tell Mrs. Pole that I came over from Lancaster to get her for dinner." Presently the motor whirled away in the direction of the great hotel, a cloud of dust following in its wake. Margaret stood for a moment watching the car disappear into the distance, thankful that she had escaped Mrs. Hillyer and her new motor just now…. The sun, sinking into the Bedmouth elms across the green marshes, fell full and golden upon her face. It was still and hot and brooding, this sunset hour, like the silent reaches of her heart. But slowly a smile broke from her lips, and she raised her arms to the light. It had touched her, the Sun God! It had burned her with its heat, its life. She knew! And she was glad. Nothing could take its fire wholly from her.
"To-night!" she murmured to herself.
She had written him in that fierce honesty which spoke in every penstroke on the paper:—
… "Yes, I love you! I am proud when I say it over to myself, when I see it written here. I want you to know just how it is with me and my husband…. So our marriage was a mistake, one of the millions women make out of the girlish guess. Ignorance, blind ignorance of self and life! And my husband knows how it is between us. He knows that when the man comes to me whom I can love, I shall love him…. The man has come…. When it is time, I shall go to him and tell him honestly what has happened. I hate the little, lying women,—those who are afraid. I am not afraid! But these last hours I will have my heart's joy to myself,—we will draw a circle about ourselves."…
"As I kiss you, I love you with that spirit you have given me," she said to Falkner. "That is right, and this is right. You have given me life, and thus I give it back to you."…
When they were alone beside the sea this last evening, Margaret said: "Dearest, you must know as I know, that nothing which we have had together is sin. I would not yield even to you where I felt the right. To my father the Bishop, this would be Sin. To that dear old lady over there in Bedmouth, who suffered all her life from a bullying husband and from a selfish son,—and who is now too broken to think for herself,—it would be Sin, anything not suffering would be Sin! But I know!" She raised her head proudly from his arms. "I know within me that this is the rightest thing in all my life. When it came, I was sure that I should take it, and that it would save me from worse than death…. It came … and we were strong enough to take it, thank God!"
On the other side of the shingle rampart, which rose sheer behind them, the slow swells of the sea fell at distant intervals with solemn resonance, the only sound that broke the stillness of the night. This surge rising and falling on the land from out the great body of the sea was like a deep voice in the woman's soul, echoing her instinct of a reason beyond reasons that compelled.
But the man, holding her close to him, his lips upon her lips, did not heed her hot words of justification. His was the hunger which took what satisfied it without debate.
"It makes little difference, the right and the wrong, after to-night," he replied grimly, "in all the days to come…. We have lived and we have loved, that is enough."
"No, no,—we are not weak, blind fools!" she spoke on swiftly. "I will not have it so! I will not have you leave me to-night with the thought that some day you will feel that of me. You must understand—you must always remember through all the years of life—that I—the woman you love—am sinless, am pure…. I can go with your kisses upon my lips to my children, to little Ned, and hold them tight, and know that I am pure in the sight of God! …
"I give them my life, my all,—I am giving them this, too. A woman's heart is not filled with the love of children. A woman's life is not closed at thirty-two! … I have a soul—a life to be satisfied,—ah, dearest, a soul of my own to be filled, in order to give. Most men don't know that a woman has a life of her own—apart from her children, from her husband, from all. It's hers, hers, her very own!" she cried with a sob of joy and anguish.
In these words escaped the essence of that creed which had taken the place of the Bishop's teaching,—the creed that is breathed insensibly in the atmosphere of the age,—'I, the woman, have a soul that is mine which has its rights, and what it bids me take, that I will take and hold!'
The man listened to the solemn rhythm of the sea pounding upon the rocky coast, and it spoke to him of fatality, of the surge of life striking blindly, carrying in its mighty grip the little human atoms. It had borne him up to the stars, and in a few hours it would roll him back, down into the gulf, from which no effort of his will could take him. With this hunger, which was his human birthright, he must labor on, unappeased. It was given him merely to know what would recreate living for him, what would make of the days joy instead of pain, and it was not to be his, except for this moment of time.
"I think," he said, "there is enough to suffer and endure. We will not quibble about the law. In the face of the gulf, why argue?" and he took her once more in his arms, where she rested content….
Lawlor's Point was a little neck of shingle, curving inwards from the open sea, making a small harbor. On the landward side the still, salty marsh was fringed by evergreens that rose dark in the night. Once it had been a farm, its few acres swept by the full Atlantic winds, its shore pounded by the rock drift of the coast. Within the shingle the waves had washed a sandy beach…. Margaret knew the place years before, and they had found it to-night in the dark. The abandoned farm-house, windowless, loomed above them, desolate, forlorn, emitting an odor of the past from its damp rooms. About the old walnut tree where they had been sitting there grew in the long grass fleur-de-lys and myrtle.
"Let us go nearer to the water!" Margaret exclaimed. "I want to hear its voice close to my ears. This place is musty with dead lives. Dead lives!" She laughed softly. "I was like them once, only I walked and spoke, instead of lying still in a grave. And then you found me, dearest, and touched me. I shall never be dead like that again."
And when they had picked their way over the rough shingle to the water, she said in another passionate outburst, as if nature dammed for a long time were pouring itself forth in torrent:—
"Pain! Don't say the word. Do you think that we can count the pain—ever?Now that we have lived? What is Pain against Being!"
"A man's thought, that!" he reflected, surprised by the piercing insight, the triumphant answer of the spirit to the backward dragging surge of circumstance. "A woman suffers—always more than a man."
Margaret, flinging up her head to the dark heaven, the deep guttural note of the sea in her ears, chanted low, "Some pain is tonic…. Though to-night we are together, one and undivided—for the last time, the last time," she whispered, "yet I cannot feel the pain."
The man rebelled:—
"The last time? … But we are not ready, Margaret,—not yet!"
"We should never be ready!"
"We have had so little."
"Yes! So little—oh, so little of all the splendid chance of living."
The same thought lay between them. They had come but to the edge of experience, and beyond lay the vision of recreated life. Like souls that touched the confines of a new existence and turned back, so must they turn back to earth. So little! A few hours of meeting, a few spoken words, a few caresses, a few moments like this of mute understanding, out of all conscious time, and then nothing,—the blank!
There was something cowardly, thus to turn back at the edge of experience, incomplete and wistfully desirous. Yet the man would not ask her to venture on. What the woman would gladly give, he would not take as sacrifice. She understood.
"Would it be easier?" she asked slowly, "if for a time we had all?"
"Yes!"
"If for a little while we left the world behind us and went away—to know—all?"
"We should be happier then, always…. But I cannot ask it."
"It would be better so," she whispered dreamily. "I will go!"
Her hands clasped about him and her lips trembled.
"We will take our life!" She smiled as the vision of joy—food for a lifetime—filled her heart. "For a few hours I will be yours, all yours."
Thus, there beside the grumbling sea, these two—full man and woman, having weighed the issues of this life, the complex threads of soul and body, obligation and right, willed that they would take to themselves out of all eternity a few days, a few nights, a few mornings and a few evenings,—entire hours to be theirs, from which must be born courage for the future.
* * * * *
Old Mrs. Pole looked up at the sound of Margaret's step. The younger woman's face was pale, but still radiant with a complete joy. She patted the old lady's cheek and glanced down at the magazine in her lap. Between these two there was a depth of unspoken sympathy.
"Found a good story, mother dear?" Margaret asked.
The old woman's lips trembled. Many times that evening she had resolved to speak to Margaret of something her heart ached over. For she had seen far these last days with those old eyes that had seen so much. She could divine the dead waste in her daughter-in-law's heart, having lived with father and son, and out of the wisdom of suffering years endured she wished to speak to-night. But the deeper wisdom of age restrained her.
"Yes, my dear,—a very good story."
Each ache must find its own healing.
The long train pulled slowly into the station of the little seaport town. It was late, as always at this turning-point of the season, when the summer population was changing its roost from sea to mountain or from the north to the south shore. Falkner, glancing anxiously along the line of cars for a certain figure, said again to himself, 'If she shouldn't come—at the last moment!' and ashamed of his doubt, replied, 'She will, if humanly possible.' … At last his eye caught sight of Margaret as she stepped from the last car. She had seen him at the instant, and she smiled rapidly above the crowd, one of her fleeting smiles, like a ray of April sun. Another smile, he took her bag from the porter's hand, and their meeting was over. It was not until they were seated at a table in a sheltered corner of the station restaurant that he spoke:—
"TheSwallowis waiting at the wharf. But we had best get something hot to eat here. We shall have a long sail."
He took charge, at once, and while he ordered the luncheon, she looked at the travellers swarming to their food. Once during the long ride she had thought, "If we were seen by some one!" and her face had burned at the miserable fear. Now looking at the passing faces, she had a fierce wish that she might be seen by all the world! To speak out, to act unashamed,—but not yet,—no; the time was not ripe. As her look returned to Falkner, who was dressed in yachting flannels with a white sweater she smiled again:—
"I am so hungry!"
"I am afraid it will be bad. However—"
"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters—to-day!"
Neither of them, she reflected, cared for the detail of life, for luxury, mere comfort. They had shed superfluity, unlike those around them, who lived for it.
"Is it all right?" he asked as the waitress slung the dishes on the table.
"Everything!" and she added: "I can telephone Ned? I promised to speak to him every day."
"Of course!"
"Now let us forget…. What a lot of people there are in the world running about!"
"We'll say good-by to them all very soon," he replied.
Their spirits rose as they ate. It was festive and joyous, even this dirty country station. The September sun was shining brightly through the window, and a faint breeze came straying in, smelling of the salt water. She had given no thought to what they would do, to where they would go. She did not ask. It was good to trust all to him, just to step forth from the old maze into this dreamed existence, which somehow had been made true, where there was no need to take thought. She pushed away her ice untouched and began slowly to draw on her gloves.
"All the way here from Bedmouth I had a queer feeling that I was making a journey that I had made before, though I was never here in my life. And now it seems as if we had sat by this window some other day,—it is all so expected!" she mused. And she thought how that morning when she got up, she had gone to her little girl, the baby Lilla, and kissed her. With her arms about the child she had felt again that her act was right and that some day when the little one was a woman she would know and understand.
Her lips trembled, and then a slow smile suffused her face, bringing color, and leaning forward she murmured:—
"I am so happy!" Their eyes met, and for the moment they were lost in wonder, unconscious of the noisy room….
With a familiarity of old knowledge, Falkner descended the winding streets to the water front. In this lower part of the town the dingy old houses had an air of ancient grandeur, and tall elms drooped dust-laden branches over the street.
"Dear old place!" he exclaimed, memories reviving of his boyhood cruises. "It was in ninety-one when I was here last. I never expected to put in here again."
The streets were empty, a noon stillness brooding in them. Margaret slipped her hand into his, the joy, the freedom, the sense of the open road sweeping over her afresh. The world was already fading behind them…. They came out upon the wharves, and threaded their way among the sagging gray buildings that smelt of salt fish, until the harbor water lapped at the piles beneath their feet.
"There's theSwallow!" Falkner cried, pointing into the stream.
They were soon aboard, and Margaret curled herself in the cockpit on a rug, while Falkner ran up the sails. Little waves were dancing across the harbor. Taking the tiller, he crouched beside her and whispered:—
"Now we are off—to the islands of the blest!"
It was all so in her dream, even to the white sail slowly filling before the breeze. They glided past hulking schooners lying idle with grimy sails all set, and from their decks above black-faced men looked down curiously at the white figure in the cockpit of the little sloop. Behind the schooners the wharves and the red brick warehouses, the elms and the white houses on the hill, the tall spires—all drew backwards into the westering sun. A low gray lighthouse came into sight; theSwallowdipped and rose; and the breeze freshened as they entered the lower bay. A great ship was slowly rounding the point, bound outward, too, laboring into the deep—for what? For some noisy port beneath the horizon. But for her the port of starlight and a man's arm,—the world was wonderful, this day! Falkner raised his hand and pointed far away to the eastward where a shadow lay like a finger on the sea,
"Our harbor is over there!"
Away to the east, to the broad open ocean, it was fitting they should speed,—they who had shaken themselves loose from the land….
She held the tiller when he rummaged below for a chart, and while she was there alone, a pot-bellied pleasure steamer, swarming with people, rolled past, shaking theSwallowwith its wake. The people on the decks spied the sail-boat, raised glasses, looked down, and had their say. 'A bit of the chattering world that is left,' thought Margaret, 'like all the rest.' And something joyful within cried: 'Not to-day! To-day I defy you. To-day I have escaped—I am a rebel. You can do nothing with me. Oh, to-day I am happy, happy, happy,—can you say that?' Falkner came up from the cabin with his chart, and shading his eyes, swept the sea for the landmarks of their course. And theSwallowsped on out of the noisy to-day through a path of gold and blue to the radiant to-morrow.
"See!" Falkner pointed back to the old seaport grown dim in the distance behind them. The sun was falling behind the steeples, and only the black smoke from engine and chimney marked the edge of the shore. Far away to the north opened a long reach of blue water and at the head of the bay green fields descending gently to the sea. TheSwallowwas a lonely dot in the open waters, dipping, rising, the sun on its white sail,—fleeing always. Falkner sat beside her, circling her shoulders with his arm, talking of the sea and the boat as if they had sailed for many days like this together and were familiar with all. His arm as it touched her said, 'I love you!' And his eyes resting on her face said, 'But we are happy, together, you and I,—so strangely happy!'
What was left there behind—the city and the vessels, the land itself—was all the mirage of life, had never been lived by them. And this—the swaying, sweeping boat, a dot upon the ocean and they together, heart by heart, going outward to the sea and night—was all that was real. Could it be possible that they two would ever land again on that far shore of circumstance, hemmed in by petty and sorrowful thoughts?
Yet across the dream came the thought of the Little Man, waiting behind there, and the woman knew that on the morrow after the morrow she should wake. For life is stronger than a single soul! …
To the west and north there were islands, long stretches of sea opening between their green shores, far up into the coast land. The wind freshened and died, until at last in the twilight with scarcely a ripple theSwallowfloated into a sheltered cove on the outermost of all the islands. A forest of stiff little spruces covered the sea point, and behind this was a smooth green field, and above on the crest of the island a small white farm-house.
"A man named Viney used to live there," Falkner said, breaking a long silence. "Either he or some one else will take us in." Margaret helped him anchor, furl the sails, and then they went ashore, pulling the tender far up on the shingle beech beside the lobster-pots. They crossed the field—it was nearly dark and theSwallowwas a speck on the dark water beneath—and knocked at the white farm-house.
"It is like what you knew must be so when you were a child," whisperedMargaret.
"But suppose they turn us away?"
"Why, we'll go back to theSwallowor sleep under the firs! But they won't. There is a charm in all our doings this day, dearest."
The Vineys welcomed them, and gave them supper. Then Mr. Viney, divining that with these two wanderers a love matter was concerned, remarked suggestively:—
"Maybe you'd like to go over to my son's place to sleep. My son's folks built a camp over there on the Pint. It's a sightly spot, and they've gone back to the city. Here, Joe, you show 'em the path!"
So in the starlight they threaded the spruce forest down by the sea, and found the "camp," a wooden box, with a broad veranda hanging over the eastern cliff.
"Yes!" exclaimed Margaret, taking now her woman's place of command; "this is the very spot. We'll sleep here on the veranda. You can bring out the bedding. If we had ordered it all, we could not have discovered the perfect thing, like this!"
The gray pathway of the ocean lay at their feet, and from the headlands up and down the coast, from distant islands, the lights began to call and answer each other. A cloud of smoke far eastward hung over a seagoing steamer. And throughout the little island, over the floor of the ocean, in the wood about them, there was perfect stillness, a cessation of all movement.
"Peace! Such large and splendid peace!" Margaret murmured, as they stood gazing at the beauty of the coming night. Peace without and answering peace within. Surely they had come to the heart of solitude, removed from the tumultuous earth.
"Come!" he whispered at her ear, and she slowly turned her face to him.
"Now, I know!" she said triumphantly. "This has been sent to answer me,—all the glory and the wonder and the peace of life, my dearest! I know it all. We have lived all our years with this vision in our hearts, and it has been given to us to have it at last."
And as they lay down beside each other she murmured:—
"Peace that is above joy,—see the stars!"
And there beneath the tranquil stars in the calm night came the ecstasy of union, transcending Fate and Sorrow….
Thus at the extreme verge of human experience these two realized that inner state of harmony, that equilibrium of spirit, towards which conscious beings strive blindly, and which sanctioning what man forbids gives reason to life. The spirit within them declared that it was best so to gain the heights, whether in the final sum of life it should lie as Sin or Glory, For this night, for these immediate hours, as man and woman they would rise to wider kingdoms of themselves than ever otherwise might be reached.
Thus far to them had come revelation.
* * * * *
In the morning Margaret would play housewife. Sending Falkner to the Vineys' for the things needed, she cooked the meal while he swam out to theSwallowand made ready for the day's sail. Whimsically she insisted on doing all without his help, and when he was ready, she served him before she would eat herself,—"Just as Mrs. Viney would her man."
Did she wish to show him that she was equal to the common surface of living,—a comrade to do her part? Or, rather, was the act symbolical,—woman serving joyfully where she yields real mastery? The woman, so often capricious and disdainful, was submissive, as if she would say: "This man is my mate. I am forever his. It is my best joy to be through him myself."
And after the meal she insisted on completing the task by washing the dishes, putting all to rights in the camp; then mended a rent in his coat which he had got from a stumble in the dark the night before. He laughed, but her eyes shone.
"Let medoas long as I can! … There—wouldn't you and I shed things! That's the way to live,—to shed things." As they passed the Vineys' house on their way to the boat, Margaret observed:—
"That would do very well for us, don't you think? You could go lobstering, and I would have a garden. Can you milk a cow?" She was picturing the mould for their lives.
And all that day as they sailed among the islands, up thoroughfares, across the reaches of the sea, they played a little game of selecting the right cottage from the little white farm-houses dotted along the shores, and said, "We'd take this or that, and we'd do thus and so with it—and live this way!" Then they would laugh, and grow pensive, as if the land with its smoke wreaths had suddenly drifted past their eyes, reminding them of the future. 'You are bound with invisible cords,' a voice said. 'You have escaped in fancy, but to-morrow you will find the world wagging its old way.' But the woman knew that no matter what came, the morrow and all the morrows could never be again as her days once had been. For the subtle virtue of a great fulfilment is its power to alter the inner aspect of all things thereafter. Nothing could ever be the same to either of them. The stuff of their inner lives had been changed….
They sailed the day long in the full sun, which beat down with a memory of summer that already had departed. At noon they landed on a rocky islet, a mere clump of firs water bound, and after eating their luncheon they lay under the fragrant trees and talked long hours.
"If this hadn't been," Falkner said with deep gratitude, "we should not have known each other."
She smiled back triumphantly. That was the truth she had divined the night he was to have left her.
"No," she assented, "we should have been almost strangers and been dissatisfied always."
"And now nothing can come between us, not time nor circumstance, nor pain.Nothing! It is sealed for all time—our union."
"Our life together, which has been and will be forever."
None of the surface ways of life, no exchange of words, no companionship, could have created anything to resemble this inner union which had come about. The woman giving herself with full knowledge, the man possessing with full insight,—this experience had made a spirit common to both, in which both might live apart from each other, so long as they could see with the spirit,—an existence new, deep, inner.
So they talked of the life to be with perfect willingness, as two might who were to part soon for a long journey, which both would share intimately and real loneliness never seize them.
"And beyond this luminous moment," suggested the man,—his the speculative imagination,—"there must lie other levels of intimacy, of comradeship. If we could go on into the years like this, why, the world would ever be new,—we should go deeper into the mysteries every day, discovering ourselves, creating ourselves!"
The warm sunlight, the islands mirrored in the waveless sea, the aromatic breath of the spruce and fir, the salty scent of the tidal shore—this physical world in which they lay—and that other more remote physical world of men and cities—all, all was but the pictured drama of man's inner life. As he lived, each day dying and recreated, with an atmosphere of the soul as subtly shifting as the atmosphere of the earth, so this wonderful panorama of his faded, dissolved, was made anew. For out of the panorama of sense man builds his tabernacle, and calls it life, but within the veil there lies hidden beneath a power, that can unlock other worlds,—strange, beautiful worlds, like the mazes of the firmament through which the earth pursues its way. And the tide ebbing past this islet to the sea, flowing fast outward into the deep, carried them in its silent depths out into the new, the mysterious places of the spirit.
The sun sank, covering the islands and the sea with a rare amethystine glow deepening to a band of purple, like some old dyed cloth, then fading to pale green at the rim of the earth. There ensued a hush, a pause in life, that filled the air. 'We are fading, we are withdrawing,' whispered the elements. 'Our hour is past, the riotous hour, the springtime flood, the passionate will. And in our place the night will come and bring you peace.' The sadness of change, the sense of something passing, of moments slipping away to eternity! …
"Tell me," she said as they drifted back with the tide, "what is it?"
"Only," he answered, "the thought of waste,—that it should have come late, too late!"
Proudly denying the flaw in the perfect image, she protested:—
"Not late,—the exact hour. Don't you see that it could never have been until now? Neither of us was ready to understand until we had lived all the mistakes, suffered all. That is the law of the soul,—its great moments can neither be hastened nor delayed. All is appointed."
Her gentle voice touched his heart like a soothing hand,—'Accept—rejoice—be strong—it must be so! And it is good!'
"Dearest, we should have passed each other in the dark, without knowing, earlier. You could not have seen me, the thing you love in me, nor I you, until we were stricken with the hunger…. It takes time to know this babbling life, to know what is real and what is counterfeit. Before or after, who knows how it might have been? This was the time for us to meet!"
In these paths her eyes were bright to see the way, her feet accustomed. So it was true. By what they had suffered, apart, by what they had tested and rejected, they had fitted themselves to come together, for this point of time, this flame of fulfilment. Mystery of waste to be accepted. No wistfulness for loss! Brave smiles for that which had been given. And resolved hearts for that to come….
Slowly, with the mood of the day in her lingering feet, Margaret crossed the field towards the Vineys' cottage, while Falkner stayed to make theSwallowready for its homeward journey in the morning. Joe Viney rowed out to the boat with him. Nodding towards the slight figure on the path above, the fisherman observed simply:—
"She ain't strong, your wife?"
With that illumined face! He had thought her this day pure force. Later as he followed her slow steps to the camp, he said over the old man's words, "She ain't strong." She lived behind her eyes in the land of will and spirit. And the man's arms ached to take her frail body to him, and keep her safe in some island of rest.