“Downstairs I had Carpaccio’s dreaming St. Ursula, with the tiny dog asleep, and the little slippers by the bedside. And you have that picture hanging almost in the same place! Yes, I must unknowingly have cast some influence upon you. That seems exquisite to me. I hope you do not mind? If you don’t, I shall try again in other ways. Indeed, I shall begin at once by influencing you to do me a favor, I’ve been waiting a long time to ask, and never quite found the courage to put into words. Send me a photograph of yourself. I want it verymuch, to make sure that my mental picture of you is right.”
It was hard to refuse the first request she had ever spoken of as a “favor.” Denin was half tempted to buy the portrait of some decent-looking fellow and label it “John Sanbourne”; but only half tempted. He could not lie to Barbara, and was reduced to the excuse that he “took a bad photograph.” It would be better for her to keep the friendly mental picture she had painted, rather than be disillusioned. “This sounds as if I were vain,” he added, “but unfortunately I have every reason not to be.”
“Either she won’t care at all about not getting the photograph, or else she’ll be offended,” Denin prophesied gloomily. “Time will show.” And when the day to which he had looked forward for an answer burst upon him like a thunderclap, bringing no letter, he thought that time had shown. She was angry, or worse still, hurt, feeling that like Psyche with the oil-dropping lantern, she had been rebuked for curiosity. He saw himself losing her again, through this small and miserable misunderstandingwhich he could not, must not, set right. A second loss would be a thousand times worse than the first, because this time her soul had belonged to his soul. Their letters, their need of each other, had circled them as if in a magic ring, or under a glass case which, transparent to invisibility, had housed them warmly together. A spiritual nausea of fear, fear of loss, turned his heart to water, so that over and over again he asked himself what to do, without having power to answer.
He remembered the old fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast, and how the Beast lay down despairingly, to die in his garden, because Beauty, who had made his life bearable, even happy, went away voluntarily and for a long time forgot her promise to come back.
The Mirador garden lost something of its old spell for Denin. A glowworm which had come to live at the end of the pergola, and evidently believed in itself as a permanent family pet, was no longer an intelligent and charming companion. He had valued it only, he saw now, because he had meantto amuse Barbara by describing it to her, as his newest friend. On nights when letters from her had come, all the passion and romance of the world since its beginning had streamed along the sea to his eyes, by the path of the moon. But now the white light had a hard, steely radiance that dazzled his eyes.
While the link held between him and Barbara, it had been easy for Denin to feel kinship with nature, with the world and worlds beyond. His mind had traveled hand in hand with hers over the whole earth and on, on to unknown immensities, as rings from a dropped stone spread endlessly on the surface of water.
Expecting answers from Barbara, he had had an incentive to live, and had looked eagerly forward to each new day, as to opening the door of a room he had never seen before, a room full of beautiful things, made ready for him alone. Now, when day after day passed, bringing no word from her, the rooms of the House of the Future were empty.
He had advised her, when she needed counsel, to look and listen inside herself, for a voice. Butnow, no such voice spoke to him, except to say, “You have been a fool. You must unconsciously have expressed yourself in some blundering way that disgusted her, broke the statue she’d set up on a pedestal. She is ‘disillusioned’ indeed!”
A week dragged itself on into a fortnight after the day when Barbara’s answer ought to have come. Still Denin had done nothing but wait, because it appeared to him that no explanation of his seeming ungraciousness was possible. If Barbara did not want him any more, he could not make her want him.
Had he not loved her so much, he might have thought her silence due to illness; but he was sure that he should know if she were ill. She had let him walk into the home of her soul and its secret garden of thought; she had offered him the flowers of her childhood and girlhood which no one else had ever seen; and if a blight had fallen upon her body, he was so near that he would feel the chill of it in his own blood. No, he told himself, Barbara was not ill. She had shut herself away from him, thatwas all; and the very nature of his relationship with her forbade his claiming anything which she did not wish to give.
He lost all hope of hearing again, at the end of a month, yet would not let himself accuse her of injustice. Had she not a right to drop him if she chose? He had no cause for complaining. He had received from the “tankard of love” those two drafts which are said to recompense a man for the pains of a lifetime, and he could expect no more. Yet he seemed always to be listening, as if for some sound to come to him through space, or even the faint echo of a sound, like the murmur in a bell after it has ceased to chime.
One day, when five weeks lay between him and hope, a telegram was brought to the Mirador. Denin opened it indifferently, for his publisher often wired to him when a new edition of “The War Wedding” came out, or if anything of special interest happened in connection with the book. But this time the message was from England. It was unsigned, yet he knew that it was from Barbara.She said, “My mother has been at death’s door for many weeks. Now she is gone. I am writing.”
“Thank God!” Denin heard himself gasp, and then was struck with remorse for his hard-heartedness. He had thanked God because Barbara had not taken herself away from him, and in the rush of joy had forgotten what it would mean for her to be without her mother.
She was alone now with Trevor d’Arcy, at Gorston Old Hall.
CHAPTER XIII
Denin cabled an answer to Barbara, and then began a letter to her. He was in the midst of it, when he was disturbed by a caller, a man he had never seen before. Expecting no one, the hermit of the Mirador had been writing out of doors, in the pergola, and so was caught without a chance of escape. He sprang up and stood in front of the little table on which were his paper and ink, as if to protect the letter from the touch of a stranger’s eyes. But the visitor, who had caught sight of John Sanbourne through the network of leaves and flowers, appeared blissfully ignorant that he was unwelcome.
He was tall, almost as tall as Denin himself, though he looked less than his height, because of a loose stoutness which hung upon him as if his clothes were untidily padded. His large face, and the whites of his eyes, and his big teeth, were all ofmuch the same shade of yellow; and his hair, turning gray, had streaks of that color under the Panama hat which he did not remove.
“Good afternoon. I suppose you are Mr. Sanbourne?” he remarked, in a throaty voice, with a certain air of condescension which told that here was no author-worshiping pilgrim. “My name is Carl Pohlson Bradley.”
“Ah! How do you do?” replied Denin aloofly. He wanted to go on with his letter.
“I’m pretty well, thank you,” responded the other, accepting the suggested solicitude for his health as fact, not a fiction of politeness. “I got here this morning. Staying at the Potter, of course. I been taking a look round the place.”
“Ah!” said Denin again. He could not think—and did not much care to think—of anything else to say. But the large yellow face changed slightly, in surprise. “I expect you heard I was likely to come, didn’t you?”
“No,” said Denin. “Not to my recollection.” Then more kindly, “I’m rather a hermit. I go outvery little, and have only a few callers. I don’t get much news, except what I see in the papers.”
“Itwasin the papers.” The tone in which Mr. Carl Pohlson Bradley gave this piece of information suggested that his prominence was international as well as physical.
“Can he be a New York reporter?” thought Denin, his heart sinking.
But the caller had pulled from a pocket of his brown tweed coat a newspaper, folded in such a way as to make conspicuous a marked paragraph in the middle column. This he handed to Denin as if it had been a visiting card.
The paper was a local one, and the very first line of the paragraph mentioned Mr. Carl Pohlson Bradley as a St. Louis millionaire. It went on to state that, having retired from business with a great fortune at the early age of fifty-nine, Mr. Bradley intended to buy an estate in California, as a winter residence for his family. Having read so far, Denin supposed that he had sufficiently informed himself, and offered to give the paper back.
Bradley, however, waved it away. “Read the rest,” he advised.
Denin did so, and with a shock learned that his tall yellow visitor had become the owner of what was still known as “the old Fay place.”
“This is a surprise,” he said, not making any attempt to look pleased. “I didn’t even know the place was for sale.”
“Most places are, if the price is big enough to be tempting. When I want a thing I’m willing to pay for it. And that brings us to my call on you, sir. I hear you’re an author, and have written a story that’s sold about a million copies or some other big figure which makes a lot of folks want to come here and see what you’re like. But that isn’t whatI’mhere for. I don’t read stories. I’ve called on business. I want to know how much you’ll take to sell me this bit of land you’ve bought on my place?”
Denin’s nerves had been on edge for the last few weeks, and he felt an unreasonable impulse of anger against the fat, self-complacent man. “I won’t sell,” he said. “I’m sorry if you don’t like havingso near a neighbor, but I was on the spot first.”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with it,” said Bradley. “To my notion, this bit walled off from my place is a regular eyesore. The Mirador, or whatever they call it, is a rotten little den anyhow, if you’ll excuse my saying so, more fit for a child’s playhouse than a gentleman.”
“I believe it was built for a child’s playhouse,” said Denin. “But it happens to suit me, though I’ve never thought of dignifying it by the name of ‘residence.’”
“Well, anyhow, if you like a little bungalow, you can buy a better one than this with more ground around it, without troubling yourself to move a mile,” Bradley persisted. “I’m no bargainer. As I said just now, when I want a thing I’m willing to pay for it. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mr. Sanbourne. I’ll give you, for this little corner lot, as you might call it, not only twice what it’s worth, but the price of any other bungalow within reason you choose to select. And I’ll pay your moving expenses, too. Now, what do you say to that?”
“Just what I said before. I don’t wish to sell.”
“Say, this is a holdup!” blustered the St. Louis millionaire.
Suddenly Denin’s good temper came back, with a laugh.
“So you think I’m trying to ‘hold you up’ for a higher price!” he exclaimed. “I assure you I’m not. If you offered me twenty thousand dollars I wouldn’t accept.”
“What!” gasped Mr. Bradley. “Twenty thousand dollars for this little rabbit hutch in a back yard? Good Lord, it ain’t worth a thousand, at top price.”
“Not to you, but it is to me. So, don’t you see, it’s useless to argue further?” asked Denin, his eyes still laughing at the big man’s ruffled discomfiture and surprise that such things could happen between a poor author and a millionaire.
“Argue! I didn’t come here expecting to argue!” spluttered Bradley, looking like a bull stopped at full gallop by a spider web. “I came here to—to—”
“I quite understand, and I’m sorry to be disobliging, but I’m afraid I must,” Denin cut in. “Anyhow, I needn’t be inhospitable too. Will you lunch with me, Mr. Bradley? I can’t offer you much, but if we’re to be neighbors—”
“Great Scott, man, I’m staying at thePotter!” exploded Bradley, with a glance almost of horror at the little table in the pergola where writing materials had pushed aside dishes on a white cloth already laid. The look contrasted John Sanbourne’s hospitality so frankly with the fare awaiting him at Santa Barbara’s biggest hotel, that Denin laughed again.
“Well, then,” he said, “if ever I change my mind I’ll send you word. We’ll let it stand at that.”
With a reluctance pathetic in a man so large and yellow, Bradley saw himself forced for the present to swallow the humble author’s dictum. His jaundiced eyes traveled over the little pink house, with its balcony shaded by pepper trees, over the garden which he had called a “corner lot,” and over the simple pergola which for its owner was a “corridorof illuminated tapestry.” It seemed to Denin that the man could have burst out crying, like a spoiled child suddenly thwarted.
“I think you’re da— mighty foolish!” Bradley amended, remembering the need to be conciliatory. “But I’m sure you’ll think better of it. I’m sure youwillchange your mind. I only hope for your sake I won’t have changedminewhen that time comes!”
On that he made a dramatic exit, with a mixture of stride and waddle suited to one who felt that he had had the last word.
When he had gone, Denin finished his letter and forgot all about Mr. Carl Pohlson Bradley. Also he forgot about luncheon. But that did not matter, for his meals were movable feasts. He had them, or did not have them, according to his mood, like the hermit he was becoming. Mr. Bradley, however, he was forced to remember at short intervals, nearly every day, while he lived through the time of waiting for the letter promised in Barbara’s cable. “Changed your mind yet?” the new owner of the“Fay place” would yell from his huge automobile, spraying dust over John Sanbourne on the white road to Santa Barbara. Or he would prowl, grumbling, on the other side of the flower-draped barrier which separated the Mirador garden from his newly acquired property. At last he sent a lawyer to his irritating neighbor with a definite offer of twenty thousand, five hundred dollars—just temptingly over the price Sanbourne had said that he would not take. But Denin answered, “The Mirador is my ewe lamb.”
CHAPTER XIV
“When my mother was taken so desperately ill,” Barbara wrote, “every moment had to be for her, except those I could spare now and then for the other invalid. I wanted to wire you; but to do that seemed to be conceited, as if I took your personal interest in me very much for granted. I knew you would be too kind to laugh at anything I did; but perhaps, in spite of yourself, the idea might flash through your mind, ‘Poor thing, she telegraphs because she has no time to write. She must think I value her letters a lot!’ This was just after you had said that you wouldn’t send me your photograph, you may remember. But no, whyshouldyou remember? You will recall it now, though, when I bring it up to you again. And if you do, please don’t think I was foolish and small enough to be offended or piqued. I wasn’t—oh, not for a moment. I was only disappointed and a little—letdown, if you know what I mean. I felt as if I had been taking a liberty with the best and kindest friend a girl or woman ever had, and laying myself open to be misunderstood. I felt, if I followed up that request by cabling to you that you mustn’t expect letters for some time, it would be another blunder. But oh, how I missed my friend!
“Two letters from you came to me, after I had been obliged to stop writing, but because I’d been able to send none, nothing seemed right. I felt as if I had lost hold upon you. I groped for you in the darkness, but because I had dropped your hand, I was punished by not finding it again.
“Mother suffered so much that I could not wish to keep her. For two days and nights after she went, I lay in a kind of stupor. You see, I hadn’t slept more than an hour out of the twenty-four, for weeks, so I suppose I had to make up somehow, or break. I was hardly conscious at all, and they let me lie without rousing me up to eat or drink. But at last I waked of my own accord, out of a dream, it must have been, though I don’t remember the dream.I remember only that I thought you were calling me, though the voice sounded likehis. Immediately after, I seemed to hear the words, ‘John Sanbourne believes you’ve stopped writing to him because you were vexed at his refusal of the photograph.’ I started up, tingling all over with shame, for I saw that it might easily be true. I didn’t go to sleep again. I asked for a telegraph form, and sent the cable to you which I know you received next day, because of the date of your answer.
“I beg of you not to take your friendship away from me. I shall need it more than ever now, if possible, because my mother is gone. I don’t feel that she will come back to me in spirit, because she was unhappy here, and at the end was glad to go. She loved me, I’m sure, but not in the way which makes one spirit indispensable to the other. I think after the war gloom of this world, and her own pain, she will want to be very quiet and peaceful for a while in beautiful surroundings, where she can feel young and gay again, and not trouble herself to remember that she was the mother of agrown-up, sad woman down on earth. I want her spirit to be happy in its own way, so I’m not even going to try and call her to me.
“She looked no more than seventeen in her white dress, in a white-lined coffin; and seeing her like that, so young and almost coquettishly pretty, made me realize why she had so bitterly regretted the passing of her youth, and had clung desperately to its ragged edges. I gave her a bed and a covering of her favorite flowers, though they were not those I care for most: gardenias and camellias and orchids. I associate them always with hot-houses and florists’ shops, which seem to me like the slave markets of the flower world—don’t they to you?
“I beg of you not to believe that I forgot, or did not keep turning in thought to my friend, in those long days and nights when I hadn’t time to write, or couldn’t risk the rustle of a sheet of paper, or the scratch of a pen. I thought of you constantly, especially in the night when I sat beside mother, not daring to stir or draw a long breath if she slept. I reviewed all the past, since August 18th, 1914, andas if I had been an outsider, saw myself as I was before I read your book—before I wrote to you, and gained your friendship for my strong prop.
“I was a child in those days. I couldn’t face grief and realize that it must be borne. All the small, dear, warm, cushiony things of life as I had lived it, seemed the only ones which ought to be real. I clung to them. I wanted to shut out sorrow and hide away from it by drawing rose-colored blinds across my windows. I was a shivering creature who had been caught in a sleety rain and soaked through to the skin. I ran home out of the sleet, thinking to pull those rose-colored curtains and put on dry clothes and warm myself at the fire. But the curtains had been ripped away. There were no dry clothes, and no fire. There was no help or comfort anywhere. The world marched in an army against me. Only misery was real; in vain to writhe away from it; it was everywhere. Horror and anguish poured through me, as water pours into a leaking ship. My soul was withering in the cold. The bulwarks of my character were beaten down. Thenyou came into my life. You didn’t give me back my rose-colored curtains to hide the face of sorrow, but you taught me how to look into sorrow’s eyes, and find beauty and wonder beyond anything I had ever known. You let me creep into a temple you had built, and learn great truths which you had found out through your own suffering. I knew you had written your book with your heart’s blood, or you couldn’t have made my heart fill with life and beat again. You couldn’t have reached me where I was cowering, far, far below tear-level.
“Even when I could see by your letters that you hadn’t quite been able to shake off chains of depression from yourself, you had the power to release others. What a splendid power! Did you realize that you had it, when you wrote your book, I wonder?
“You showed me what to do with the strange forces I could feel blindly groping in my soul. You showed me that philosophy shouldn’t be a brew of poppies to drown regrets, but a tonic, a stimulant. You taught me that hope must live in the heart, becausehope is knowledge wrapped up in our subconsciousness, and spilling rays of light through the wrappings. You gave me the glorious advice not to waste life, which must be lived, by trying to kill Time, making him die a dull death at bedtime every night, but to run hand in hand with him—run wherever he might be going, because things worth while might be ready to happen round the very next bend of the future.
“This was the lesson I needed most, because I’d forgotten that if there was no intimate personal joy left for me in this world, there was for others; and even I might help them to find it, by having the bright courage of my imagination, instead of the dull courage of convictions.
“You made me believe (even though I can’t always live up to the belief) that when we are horribly unhappy, we’re only seeing a beautiful, bright landscape reflected gray-green, in our own little cracked and dusty mirror, distorted in its cramped frame. While Mother was ill, and other troubles pressed on me heavily, I often reminded myself ofthose words of yours, in a many-times-read letter; and I tried to turn my eyes away from the poor cracked mirror, dim with the dust which I had stupidly thought was the dust of my own destiny; tried to look instead at the clear truth of things.
“In the same letter (one of those I treasure most; for I’ve kept all, and always shall keep them) you gave me another thought that has done me good. You said it had only just come to you as you wrote to me. Do you remember? You were wondering if our Real Selves (the ‘realities behind the Things’ you’ve spoken of so often) exist uninterruptedly on the Etheric Plane, to be joined there by the souls of the earthbound selves, each time they finish with their bodies. ‘Imagine the soul arriving from earth, pouring its new experiences into the mind of its Real Self,’ you said, ‘and receiving in return memories of all it had ever lived through, learning the reasonwhyof every sorrow and joy, and never quite forgetting, though it might think it had forgotten.’
“Oh, I thank you, my friend, for every mental growing pain you have given me! Instead of forgettingwhat I owed you, in those weeks of silence, I realized it all more and more, and resolved to be worthier of my lessons when the strain on my new strength increased, as it is bound to do, with mother gone. I shall try, that’s all I can say. I don’t know how I shall win through. And I shall have more to thank you for, if you tell me that our friendship hasn’t been disturbed by my seeming ingratitude.
“Did you ever see those queer little dried-up Japanese flowers which seem utterly dead till you throw them into water? Then they expand and remember that they are alive. I am one of them. Don’t pour off the water. I’m afraid if you did, I might be weak enough to dry up again.”
CHAPTER XV
To get back the jewel he had thought lost, was to be born into a new life in a new world. Denin had to tell the portrait in the redwood frame, what he felt, for he dared not tell Barbara herself. To have given her a glimpse of his heart would have been to show that its fire had not been kindled by friendship. His answer to her letter was so tame, so lifeless compared to the song of his soul, that it seemed something to laugh at—or to weep over. But there was a line he must not pass. He knew this well, and that his only happiness could be in the Mirador and in Barbara’s friendly letters, as long as she cared to write. Mr. Carl Pohlson Bradley might go on bidding for the Mirador up to a million if he liked. There was no chance of his getting it! Denin was as sure of that, as he was of the shape of the world, or perhaps a little surer.Then, one day, a thunderbolt fell in the garden. It was dropped by the postman, in the form of a letter.
Barbara wrote, “Everything is changed since I wrote you six days ago. I can’t live here any longer, under the same roof with a man whose one pleasure is to torture and insult me. I haven’t spoken about him to you lately. There was no need, but things grew no better between us—worse, rather, for he resented the calmness I was finding through you. It made him furious apparently, that he had no longer the same power over me as at first, to drive me away from him, crying, or shaking all over with shame and anger at the dreadful things he said. I hardly cared at all of late days, when he called me a hypocrite, or a liar, or a damned fool, or other names far worse. I paid him a visit morning and evening, or at other times if he sent for me, and went out motoring or driving with him when he felt well enough to go. He refused to move without me, and so, as the doctor ordered fresh air for him, I couldn’t refuse. When he was at his worst—or what I thought the worst then—I could look straight ahead,and think of things you said, hardly bearing his abuse.
“‘This is my “bit” to do in the war days,’ I reminded myself, and thought maybe my kind of fighting was almost as hard to do as the fighting in the trenches. Besides, I never lost sight of what you answered when I first told you how hard it was, living up to obligations I’d taken on myself. You said, ‘We’re all sparks of the one Great Fire, some brighter than others. We can’t hate each other for long without finding out that it’s as bad as hating ourselves.’ Truly, I quite brought myself to stop hating him. I only pitied, and tried to help, as much as he would let me. But I see now that it was all in vain. I can’t do him any good by staying, and—well, I just simply can’t bear it! He is too ill to be moved. This dear old house will have to be his home while he drags on his death in life—which may mean years. So I, not he, must go.
“Lest you should blame me too much, I will tell you what happened, though I wasn’t sure I would do so when I began to write.
“His valet is a trained nurse, a repellent person, though competent, with dull eyes and a face which looks as if it had petrified under his skin, because his soul—if any—belongs to the Stone Age. The creature’s name happens to be Stone, too; and if he has any feeling it is love of money. His master has been bribing him, it seems, to spy upon me. While I was away from the house, at my mother’s funeral, Stone was searching the drawers of my desk in the octagon study I’ve told you about, where I like to sit because it was my dearest one’s favorite room.
“I had never thought of hiding your letters. There was nothing in them which needed to be hidden. Besides, it never occurred to me that cruel suspicions and disgusting ideas of baseness were wriggling round me, like little snakes that peep out from between the rough stones in a ruined wall. There they all were, bound together in a packet, the kind, brave letters that have been my salvation! Stone took them to his master, who sent for me when I came home after the funeral.
“As soon as I saw him, I knew that something unusualhad happened. He flung his ‘discovery’ of the letters into my face. He told me that he had burnt all but a few which he would keep to ‘use’ against me, and tried to frighten me into promising never to write to ‘this John Sanbourne’ again. Of course I gave no promise. Instead, I told him that what he had done and said freed me from him forever. Then I went out of the room and left him there, helpless on his sofa. For the first time I felt no pity for him whatever—not so much as I should feel for a crushed wasp who had stung me. I haven’t seen him since. I don’t intend to see him again. But when I could get my thoughts in order after the fire of fury had cooled a little, I wrote to him. I said that I was sending for a lawyer, and would make some arrangement so that he should want for nothing. I told him that he might stay at Gorston Old Hall as long as he wished, but that I was going away almost immediately. Once gone, I should never return while he was in the house. I have always thought divorce very dreadful; but now I see how one’s point of view changes when one’sown interest is at stake. If I could, I would divorce this man, with whom my marriage has been a tragic farce. But I have no case against him legally. I knew when I consented to call myself his wife, that I should never be his wife really, and so, my solicitor says, I could not even sue for nullity of marriage. It wasn’t I who thought of that. I don’t remember having heard the term mentioned, though perhaps I have, without noticing, when such things seemed as far from my life as the earth from Mars. It was the lawyer who brought up the subject, but added the instant after, that nothing could be done, in the way of legal separation of any kind. He advised me to send the man away from Gorston Old Hall, saying that I should be more than justified. But I wouldn’t agree to do that. For one thing, it would be like physical cruelty to a wounded animal. For another thing—even a stronger reason—thetemptationto send him away was—and is—terribly strong.
“I could feel myself trying to justify the idea to my own soul, as if I were pleading a case beforea tribunal. I could hear myself argue that it was unfair to let such a man enjoy the home of my Dearest, whom he had already superseded too long. But I knew, deep within myself, that my Dearest would be the very one of all others to say, ‘Let him stay on,’ if he could come back and speak to us. In that same deep down, hidden place, was the knowledge of my real reason for wanting the man to go. To move him might easily break off the thread of his life.Thatwas the temptation: to do a thing which might seem just to every one who heard the circumstances, and to get rid of the intolerable burden—to be absolutely free of it as I could be in no other way.
“Of my own self, I’m afraid I couldn’t have resisted the temptation. I should probably have thrown all responsibility on my solicitor, and let him settle everything as he thought best. The strength to resist has come through you, and what you have taught me. So it is that this man who has insulted you, and burned your letters, owes his comforts and perhaps his life itself, to you.
“There are many things which it is hard to forgive him, but I think the hardest of all is the loss of the letters. To lose them is like losing my talisman. But the ones he was keeping as a threat, I shall have again. The solicitor says he will force the man to give them up.
“Now that my leaving this dear house is settled, the next question is, What shall I do with my life, since my services as an untrained nurse are no longer pledged here? Already, though only a few days have passed, I’ve decided how to answer that question. I shall go into some hospital as a probationer, and as soon as I am qualified, I shall offer my services to the Red Cross. That may be sooner than with most amateurs, for already I’ve learned almost as much about nursing as hospital training of a year could have taught me. Wherever I’m sent, I’m willing to go. But before I take up this new work, I have a plan to carry out. Oh, how I wonder what you will say to it!
“Only a few weeks before she went out of the world, a cousin of my father’s left Mother someproperty in California, quite valuable property, near Bakersfield. I don’t know if you have ever been there, but of course you’ve heard that it is a great oil country. There are big wells on this property. If it had come to Mother earlier, she would have been overjoyed, because it would have made all the difference between skimping poverty and comparative riches. It came too late for her, and for me it isn’t very important, so far as the money is concerned. There’s another thing that makes it important, though. The place is in California! It seems like mending a link in a broken chain, to own land in dear California again.
“Mother always said she would hate to go back, but I never felt like that. Now, it seems to be rather necessary for me to go—or to send some one, to look into things which concern the property. We hear there has been mismanagement—perhaps dishonesty. Of course I know nothing about business myself, and should be of no use. But if I went to California, I would engage some good lawyer on the spot, to take care of my interests: and,I could meetyou, my friend. That is, I could if you were willing. Would you be? Would you welcome me if I came one day to the gate of the little garden, and begged, ‘Dear Hermit of the Mirador, will you give a poor tired traveler lunch in your pergola?’
“You see now that the legacy is only an excuse. I confess it. I shouldn’t go to California just to straighten out things at the oil fields—no, not even if I lost the property by not going. But to see my friend who has given me back life, and love in the sweetness of memory and hope of future usefulness, I would travel with joy across the whole world instead of half.
“I know you refused to send your photograph, because I ‘might be disillusioned.’ But Icouldn’tbe disillusioned, because there’s no illusion. Do I care what your looks may be? If you are ugly, I’m sure it’s a beautiful, brave ugliness. Anyhow,Ishould think it so. Please, therefore, don’t put me off for any such reason as you gave about the photograph. It isn’t really worthy of you, or even of me. Let us dare to be frank with each other. I’vetold you how much I want to see you and what it would mean to me. In return you must tell me whether you want me to come, or whether, because of somerealreason (which you may or may not choose to explain) you wish me to stay away.
“When you get this, there will be only time to telegraph to—Yours ever in unbreakable friendship, Barbara Denin.”
PART III
BEYOND THE MILESTONES
CHAPTER XVI
There was a great wind wailing over the sea, on the day that Barbara’s letter was brought to Denin. The wind seemed to come from the four corners of the earth, laden with all the stormy sorrow of the world since men and women first loved and lost each other. The voice was old as death and young as life, and the heartbreak of unending processions of lovers was the message it brought to the Mirador garden. Denin knew because he had heard through the fire-music of life, that there was another voice and another message for those who would listen. He knew that higher than tragedy rang the notes of endless triumph; that the message of love went on forever beyond the break of the note of loss. He knew the lesson he had so hardly taught himself and Barbara: that happiness is stronger than sorrow, as all things positive are stronger than all negative things. Butthe big truths of the universe were too big for him that day. The thought that he might see Barbara, and yet must not see her, shut out all the rest.
There had been, it seemed, only one honorable course open when he had decided to sacrifice his place in life to save Barbara from scandal and to let her keep her happiness. It was very different now. Her marriage with Trevor d’Arcy had not been a marriage of love. It had been worse than a failure. She had loved only one man, John Denin. Why not let her come and find him?
But no, the trial would be too great. It would not be fair to put the girl, still almost a child, to such a test. Her love for Denin had been a delicate poem. He had died, and his memory was cherished in her heart, as a rose of romance. There was no human passion in such a gentle love, and only the strongest passion could pass through the ordeal he proposed. She might hate him for his long silence, and blame him for deceit. She would see herself disgraced in the eyes of the world, and nothing that he could give would repay her for all that she mustlose. No love could be expected to stand such a test, much less the love of a child for an ideal which had never, in truth, existed. It would break her heart to fail, and break his to have her fail. The memory of a meeting and a parting would be for him a second death—death by torture. The temptation to let things take their course was overcome. Indeed, he no longer felt it as a temptation; nevertheless he suffered.
Some reason for putting her off must be alleged, but there was time to think of that afterwards, between the telegram and letter which would follow. The great thing was to prevent her from coming to the Mirador, and finding out what a tragic tangle she had made of her life.
When he had sent the cable, and was at home again, Denin read once more all of Barbara’s closely written pages. At the end he kissed the dear name with a kiss of mingled passion and renunciation.
“She’ll think I have no more heart than a stone,” he said to himself. “Her friendship for Sanbournewill crumble to pieces.” Ineffably he longed to keep it—all that he had in life of sunshine. Yet he could not see how to account for his refusal without lying, and without appearing in her eyes cold as a block of marble. He looked at the letter—which might be her last—as a man might look at a beloved face about to be hidden in a coffin: and suddenly the date sprang to his eyes.
For all his reading and re-reading he had not noticed it before. There had been a delay. The letter had been several days longer than usual in reaching him. What if she had grown tired of awaiting the asked-for cable, and had chosen to take silence for consent?
The certainty that this was so seized upon Denin. He was suddenly as sure that Barbara was on the way to him, as if he had just heard the news of her starting. If, honestly and at the bottom of his heart he wanted to save her a tragic awakening from dreams, he must leave nothing to chance. He must be up and doing. It was not impossible, even if she had waited four days for a cable, and started impulsivelyoff on the fifth, that she might walk in at the gate of the Mirador garden, a week from that night, so Denin hastily calculated. How was he to be gone before she came—if she did come—without humiliating the dear visitor by seeming deliberately to avoid her? How could John Sanbourne’s absence be accounted for in some reasonable and impersonal way, if Lady Denin arrived at Santa Barbara enquiring for him?
In his need of a pretext, he recalled the offer which he had laughed at; Carl Pohlson Bradley’s offer to buy the Mirador in its garden. The man would snap at the chance to get his way so soon. In a few days the business could be settled, and Sanbourne could be gone. But where? And Denin sought anxiously to provide the “good reason” at which he had hinted to Barbara, in his cable forbidding her to come.
Even if he had sold the Mirador before receiving his friend’s letter, he might have waited to see her. He could have stayed on in a hotel, if the new owner of the place had been impatient. No, sellinghis house was but one step of the journey. What should the next one be?
Almost instantly the solution of the whole difficulty presented itself to his mind. A few days before, he had sent a subscription to a fund for organizing a relief expedition to Serbia. The appeal had come to John Sanbourne through his publisher. And even as he wrote his check, he had thought, if it were not for the exquisite bond of friendship which tied him to a fixed address—the address of the Mirador—how easy it would be to give himself as well as his money, to the cause of Serbia in distress. Not only doctors and nurses were wanted for the expedition, but men of independent means, able to act as hospital orderlies and in other ways.
Physically, Denin had not yet got back the full measure of his old strength. After all these months, he would be of no use as a fighting man. He limped after a hard walk; and often with a change of weather he suffered sharp pain, as if his old wounds were new. But he could stand a long journey, and surely he would be equal to the work of an orderly,perhaps something better. If there were dangers to meet in Serbia, he would welcome them, whatever they might be. To die would be to adjust things as they could be adjusted in no other way. Since August 18, 1914, John Denin had had no right to live.
The more he thought of it, the wiser seemed the Serbian plan. With Bradley’s money, he could do five times more for the Red Cross fund than he had hoped to do. What mattered the wrench of parting from the Mirador? The only thing that really mattered, as before, was saving Barbara from pain. She would not be hurt if she came and found him gone on such an errand as this, for it was one which could not wait. Later, she would understand even more clearly, for he would write a letter and send it to Gorston Old Hall, where some servant would have been given a forwarding address. Thus he need not quite lose his friend. She would forgive his going away, and write to him in Serbia.
Denin calculated that Barbara could not have sailed from England until at least five or six daysafter sending her letter to him. Probably she would not have sailed so soon. Apparently, when writing, she had only just made up her mind that Gorston Old Hall was unbearable. There would have been many things to arrange, and business to settle with her solicitor, friends to say good-by to. She could not possibly reach Santa Barbara even if she traveled with the most unlikely haste, until the end of the week. That she should arrive on Saturday would be almost a miracle. It was Monday now, and Thursday might see him away from the place where he had dreamed of passing all his days. Now that he had thrown off the dream, he saw it a fantastic vision. As vigor of body and mind came back to him, the boundaries of the Mirador garden would soon, in any case, have become too narrow for his energies. He would have found it necessary to shoulder some useful burden, and work with the rest of the world. The hour had struck for him now, and John Sanbourne had got his marching orders, as John Denin had got them long ago.
He sent word to Bradley through his lawyer, that the Mirador was for sale, after all. Next, he telegraphed to the leader of the Serbian Relief Expedition, in New York, and asked if there was a place for him. Because the name of John Sanbourne was known, an enthusiastic answer came back with great promptness. This stirred Denin’s heart, which, despite his firm resolution, felt heavy and cold. He thought of Barbara coming to the Mirador, only to find Mr. Bradley’s workmen engaged in tearing down the barrier between the big garden and the little one. But now that his course of action was decided, he supplemented his first cable to her with another. This was in case his “presentiment” were wrong, and she had not started. He told her what his “good reason” was: that he had sold the Mirador and was starting at once for Serbia. Further explanations, he added, would be given when he wrote.
Never had a letter to Lady Denin been so difficult for John Sanbourne to compose, for he could say only the things he least wished to say; and so theresult of his labor was, in the end, very short. Nevertheless, it took hours to write.
The day after the sending of the letter was largely taken up by a visit from Carl Pohlson Bradley and his man of business. Denin held the millionaire to the last price named by himself, for he intended to use the money largely for the benefit of the Serbian Red Cross. At last a contract was signed, and the check paid into John Sanbourne’s bank at Santa Barbara. He had still all Wednesday and part of Thursday for packing and disposing of his treasures. The task was easy, for the treasures were few. He could “fold his tent like an Arab, and silently steal away.”
Denin did not expect ever to return to Santa Barbara. Having loved the Mirador, and given it up, there was no longer anything tangible to call him back. More likely than not, death which had come close to him in France, would come closer still in Serbia. He would cast off his body like an outworn cloak, and free of it, would knock once more at the gate where, once, he had heard voices singing.
The one possession which Denin could not bear to give up, yet knew not how to take, was the portrait of Barbara which he had made, and framed in redwood. It was large, and the delicate tints of its pastels had to be carefully protected. He could not possibly include it in his slender “kit” for Serbia. At last he decided to pack frame and all with precaution, carry the case to New York, and leave it in charge of Eversedge Sibley. There would be time for a visit to Sibley before the sailing of the expedition; and Denin would make his friend promise to burn the wooden box unopened, if he died abroad.
Everything else, with the exception of some favorite books which could be slipped into his luggage, he determined to give away. Gossip about the sale of the Mirador, and Sanbourne’s intended departure for Serbia, ran like quicksilver, in all directions. The acquaintances he had made—or rather acquaintances who had fastened upon him—began calling to enquire if the news were true, and their question answered itself before it was asked. The hermit of the Mirador and his faithful dumb companion, apipe, were surrounded with the aimless confusion of a hasty flitting. Souvenirs of John Sanbourne had their value, but he did not appear to know that. He offered his Lares and Penates recklessly, to any one who would accept. The parson’s daughter, to whom—all unconsciously—he was an ideal hero, took away the pictures, copies of those the child Barbara had loved. The parson himself got a valuable contribution of books for his library. The furniture was given to a young couple who had taken a bungalow not far off, and were getting it ready with an eye to economy. Dishes and linen went the same way, excepting a cup and saucer and teapot which were clamored for with tears by an old lady for whom “The War Wedding” ranked with the Bible.
Denin had allowed no one to enter the balconied bedroom, for he had left Barbara’s portrait until the last minute, and no eyes but his were to see that sacred thing. Once the picture was shut away and nailed up between layers of cotton and wood, it might be that he should never again be greeted by the dear, elusive smile. The furniture from upstairshe had added to the confusion of the sitting-room below, and early in the afternoon of Thursday everything had been carted away by the new owners. To strip the house while Sanbourne was still in it seemed heartless, they had protested; but he had begged them to do so. Mr. Bradley was to claim possession of the place next day.
When all those who called themselves his friends had bidden him good-by, a curious sense of peace, of pause between storms, fell upon the departing hermit of the Mirador. Because the little house was almost as empty and echoing as on the day when he had seen it first, that day lived again very clearly in Denin’s mind. He had sought a refuge, and had found happiness. The spirit of Barbara had come to him in the garden, and had brought him love. That love he was taking away with him, though he had to leave behind much that was very sweet; and now the time had come to say farewell to the memories of months. In three hours the motor car was due, which Denin had ordered to take him and his luggage to the station. The most important pieceof that luggage was Barbara’s portrait, and it had still to be put into its case. But he was leaving the farewell to her eyes, till the last moment, the last second even.
Meanwhile he walked in the garden, and in the jeweled green tunnel of the pergola. There, in the pergola, he had read most of Barbara’s letters, and answered them. He was glad that no one was ever likely to stroll or sit in the corridor of illuminated tapestry after to-day. Carl Pohlson Bradley intended to have the pergola pulled down, and the whole place torn to pieces in order to carry out the grandiose scheme of a “garden architect” whom he had employed.
After the arrival of Barbara’s first letter, and the one in which she confessed her love for the dead John Denin, his sweetest association with the pergola was the companionship of a little child—only a dream child, but more real, it seemed, than any living child could be. It was the child-Barbara who had walked day after day, hand in hand with him in the pergola. She had welcomed him to the Mirador when he hadcome as its owner; but after a certain letter from England, she had changed in a peculiarly thrilling way. The letter was among the first half dozen; but in the growing packet, Denin kept it near the top. It was one of those which he re-read oftenest. In it Barbara had said to her friend, John Sanbourne, “If my dear love had lived, to make me his wife, perhaps by this time we should have had a baby with us. I think often of that little baby that might have been—so often, that I have made it seem real. It is a great comfort to me. I can almost believe that itssoulreally does exist, and that it comes to console me because its warm little body can never be held in my arms. I see the tiny face, and the great eyes. They are dark gray, like its father’s. And when mine fill with tears, it lays little fingers on them, fingers cool and light as rose petals. Oh, itmustexist, this baby soul, for it is so loving, and it has such strong individuality of its own! I couldn’t spare it now. Already, since it first came and said, ‘I am the child who ought to be yours and his,’ it seems to have grown. It is therealestthing!Its hair is darker and longer and curlier than it used to be. Perhaps this baby will always stay with me, and I shall see it grow into boyhood, then, at last, into manhood. It’s wonderful to have this dream-baby! Tell me, have you ever had one? I know you are alone in life, for you have said so. But the more alone in life one was, the dearer a dream-baby might be.”
After that letter, which pierced Denin’s heart and then poured balm into the wound, the child-Barbara who haunted the Mirador had changed for him, except in name; or rather another child-Barbara had come, not a child of ten or twelve, but a baby thing with smoke-blue eyes and little satin rings of ruddy hair. The elder Barbara did not go away, but loved the baby as he did, helping him teach it how to walk, and talk, and think.
He wrote to Lady Denin after that letter of hers: “Yes, I too have a dream-child, but mine is a little girl. I hardly know how I got on without her before she came.”
“Thank Heaven for memory!” he said to himselfnow, as he took his last look at the tunnel of greenery starred with passion-flowers. “After all, does it so much matter whether we had a beloved thing one minute ago, or ten years ago, if it lives always in our hearts? Each tick of the watch turns the present into the past. But in our hearts there is no past.”
So he bade good-by to the pergola, and the garden he had made out of a tangled wilderness. Then he turned towards the house; for in the house he had to take leave of the portrait.
CHAPTER XVII
“I’ll get out here, please!” said a woman in black, stopping the automobile which had brought her from the railway station within sight of the Fay place. She was tall and slender, and apparently young, but her mourning veil was so thick that it lay like drifting coal-smoke between her face and the curious stare of the chauffeur.
“It’s a quarter of a mile to the gate yet. And I shan’t charge any more to take you right to it,” he explained.
“I know—thank you!” his passenger said. “But I want to walk the rest of the way.”
She had a pretty way of speaking, though rather a foreign sort of accent, he thought. Perhaps it was English. Her luggage had been left at the station, so she was free to do as she pleased, if it amused her to spoil her shoes with the white dust of the road.She paid the price agreed upon, and a dollar over, which the chauffeur acknowledged with a “Thank you, miss!” As he turned and drove away, however, he wondered if he ought to have called her “miss.” To be sure, she had the air of a girl; but her manner was grave. He didn’t know one sort of mourning from another; but being a foreigner like as not she was one of them war widows over there.
The tall young woman walked fast at first, as if she were in a hurry. Through the dark fog of her veil she looked at everything, gazing at each tree as if she recognized it, and at each flowering creeper that flooded the wall of the “Fay place” with color. She passed the main gateway, and went on without hesitation; but as she came near the small gate of the Mirador garden, her pace slackened. She moved very slowly; then fast again; and just outside the gate she stopped, the bosom of her black dress rising and falling as if she were out of breath. It was as though she were afraid to go in at the gate. But after a minute of breathing hard sherecovered herself, and opened it, almost noiselessly.
The path on the other side was arched over with pepper trees. The woman in black closed the gate and latched it very gently, almost tenderly. A few berries, like beads of pink coral from a child’s necklace, lay on the old gold of the path. She tiptoed along to avoid treading on them. Presently the path was interrupted by a short flight of old brick steps, and at the top it went on again. In a moment the little pink house was in sight, backed by a great jade-green olive tree, touched with silver in the slanting light of afternoon. The garden was a lovely riot of flowers. It looked sweet and welcoming, with an old-fashioned welcome, but no one was there.
The woman’s heart beat, then missed a beat. She threw back her veil, and her face shone out white and beautiful as the moon shines suddenly through a torn black cloud. It was the face of a girl, but the eyes were the eyes of a woman. They wandered over the garden, then focussed on the house. The open windows were curtainless. There wereno chairs under the balcony which gave a shady roof to the front door. Instead, a few odds and ends of broken crockery and disorderly wisps of straw lay scattered here and there. Despite the welcoming charm of the garden, there was an air of desolation about the place, which struck at the woman’s heart. Hesitating no longer, she walked quickly up the path, and paused only at the open door of the little pink house.
Even there she stopped only for a few seconds. The room inside was stripped of furniture. There was no need to knock. The woman walked in and looked through the door of the “parlor” into the kitchen where a child had once cooked dinners for her dolls. It also was empty.
“Gone!” The word dropped from her lips. She did not know that she had spoken until a whispering echo of emptiness answered. Suddenly she realized that she was very tired, more tired than she had ever been in her life before. She seemed to have come to the end of the world, and to have found nothing there but a stone wall.
“Oh!” she said, and covered her face with her hands, shivering, though the sun outside the deserted house was warm. When her hands fell, there were no tears in her eyes, but they were like blind eyes yearning for sight.
It seemed to her that the house was trying to tell the secret of what had happened. Stripped as it was, she had the impression that it was full of intelligence and kindness. She listened at the foot of the stairs. Perhaps the owner of the house had not really gone yet. Perhaps he was up there. Perhaps for some reason he had to leave this place, but was waiting for Some One he expected. Surely that must be so! Surely he would not go away, just at this time?
When she had listened, and heard nothing, she called his name, softly at first, then more loudly. But there was no answer. If he were in the room above, he must have heard. Oh, the poor little room with the balcony, where a child had looked out over the garden, and played that fairies lived in the olive trees!
The girl was slightly made and light of foot, but she went up the steep steps heavily, like a weary woman who feels herself old, very old. The door of the balconied bedroom was shut. Maybe, after all, he might not have heard her call! She knocked, once, twice, then turned the knob and timidly pushed open the door. She could see nothing inside the room but a packing-case, with a wooden cover propped against it, and a box of bright new nails beside it on the bare, tiled floor.
The intruder stepped over the threshold, and saw that, at the further end of the room out of sight from the door, stood a small leather portmanteau—pathetically small, somehow—and a still smaller suitcase. He had not gone, then!—and she had no right to be here, in his room. She turned hastily to go out, and facing the door—blown partly shut by the breeze from an open window, she also faced a portrait framed in a wonderful frame of ruddy, rippled wood, like the auburn hair of a woman. The eyes of the portrait—smoke-blue eyes—looked straight into hers. And as she looked back into them, it waslike seeing herself in a mirror, a mysterious mirror which refused to reflect her mourning clothes, and gave her instead a white dress.
This was so strange a thing, that the girl could not believe she really saw it. She thought that she must be asleep in the train, on the way to Santa Barbara, and that in her eager impatience she had dreamed ahead. This would explain the deserted house. She was only dreaming that she had walked up the garden path, and had found her friend gone—gone to avoid her. Howlikea dream!—the strain to succeed, and then failure and vague disappointment wherever one turned! How like a dream that her portrait should be found hanging in a marvelous frame, in the house of a man who had never seen her, never even had her description! She would wake up presently, of course, and find herself shaking about in the train. How glad, how glad she must be that this was a dream, because when she did indeed come to the Mirador, there would be curtains and furniture and pictures and books, such as John Sanbourne had written about, and JohnSanbourne himself would be there expecting her! Still, it was astonishing that the dream went on and on being so vivid. She could not wake up!
As she stared at the eyes of the portrait, hypnotized by them, a stronger breeze slammed the door shut. Now she would surely wake! Noises always waked one. They had no place in dreams. But no. The scene remained the same, except that the handle of the door was being slowly turned. Some one was opening it from the outside. The dream was to go on, to another phase. The girl clasped her hands, and pressed them against her breast. So she stood when the door opened wide, and a man, stopped by the sight of her, stepped back in crossing the threshold.
“Barbara!”
The name sprang to Denin’s lips, but he did not utter it.
He had meant to go away in time. He had tried to spare her this; yet he had in his secret heart thought that, if she did come, it would be heaven to see her. But now it was not so. There was onebrief flash of joy in her beauty; then horror of himself overpowered it. Her very loveliness seemed to make his guilt more hateful—a lifetime of guilt! He saw himself as the murderer of this girl’s youth and happiness. It seemed to him that no man had ever sinned as he had sinned. He had crept away and hidden in the dark when she most needed him. Defenseless, she had in all good faith married another man. And because of his weakness she had sinned against the law. She had done a thing which, if known, would ruin her life in the world she knew. It was his fault, not hers, yet she had suffered for it, and now she would suffer more than she had suffered yet. If she had thought she loved the dead man, from this moment she would hate the living one, who had deceived her.
Yet there was one hope. Perhaps he was even more changed than he had supposed, and if he went away instantly without speaking, she might not recognize him. He stepped back, on the impulse, but she held out her hands, as he turned to go, and cried to him piteously.
“Oh, if you are a dream,” she said, in a low, strange voice, “stay! I beg of you to stay.”
Still he did not speak. He could not, now. He waited.
“It’s all a dream,” she whispered. “I know that. Coming here—to the empty house—finding my own picture—and then—then—when I looked for John Sanbourne, seeing you—my love! O God, let me never wake up in this world. If this could only be—what they call death!”
The word broke, to a sob, and she swayed towards him, deathly white. Denin sprang forward, and caught her in his arms—his wife—the first time he had ever held her so. Then, because he could think no longer, but only feel, he kissed her on hair and eyes and lips, and strained her to him with every worshiping name he had given her in his heart since their wedding and parting day.
She lay so still against him, that it seemed she must have fainted; but her eyes opened, drowned in his, as he kissed her on the lips. He saw the blue glitter, as if two sapphires blocked his vision, andsuddenly his face was wet with Barbara’s tears. “Have I died?” she whispered. And the tears which were damp on his face were salt on his lips as he whispered back, “No.”
He remembered how he, too, had once thought himself dead, and then had crept slowly back to life. He had seen Barbara then, as in a dream within a dream. Now she, too, was passing through this experience. He held her tight. He could not let her suffer as he had suffered when he came back to life! Yet what could he do for her, after all? The sense of his helplessness was heavy upon him.
“Forgive me,” he said, “Barbara, darling! I never meant this to happen. The first I heard of you—after—was that you’d married—your cousin. I believed you loved him. I was in a German hospital—broken to pieces—disfigured. I ought to have died, but somehow I couldn’t die. I had to live on. Later, I escaped. I came here—whereyouhad lived. God knows, all through I tried to do for the best—your best. Nothing else mattered. I wrote that book—for you, only for you! And you knowthe rest. You turned my hell to heaven. I was—almost happy, except for what you suffered. But I dared not have you come here. I cabled. I was going away—”
She pressed her head back against his shoulder, and looked up at him. “You were going—” The words burst from her on a high note of sharp reproach, but she caught them back with a sigh of joy. “You didn’t go!” she breathed. “God wouldn’t have let you go. He put it in my heart to leave England the day after I wrote. Ah, we’re not dreaming, and we’re not dead! We’re alive, and we love each other better than all the world. I know now that you do love me, or you couldn’t hold me and kiss me so. You couldn’t have made such a sacrifice—the sacrifice of your very life and self for me. It was like you—like you! The mistake was my fault, not yours. But I’ll make up to you for it all, and you will make up to me. We’ll never part for an hour again.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Barbara,” he reminded her. “John Denin’s dead. We can’tbring him back to life. Too many interests are involved, yours first of all, but others, too. It would be selfish and cruel for me to take you so—”
“You don’t take me,” she said. “I give myself, I give myself to John Sanbourne, as I gave myself to John Denin.”
“But we’ll be poor,” he told her. “John Denin’s money can’t come to us—”
“I have enough of my own now. And if I hadn’t, I’d beg with you. We could be tramps together.”
Denin laughed out joyously, almost roughly, and clasped her tight. “It won’t come to that, my darling! Perhaps I can write another book. Yes, I can! It shall be called ‘The Honeymoon.’”
“Let us go away somewhere,” Barbara implored, “where nobody will know us, and we can love each other in peace till we die: for we belong to one another in God’s sight and our own. Yes, till we die. And afterwards—afterwards! Oh, you have taught me that!”
“I have pledged myself to go to Serbia,” Denin said.
“Then I’ll go to Serbia with you, that’s all! What does it matter where?”
“And the world—and Gorston Old Hall?” he heard himself asking.
“Neither do they matter. Nothing matters but you. And God will understand—because I amyourwife, and belong to no one else, or ever, ever did.”
“You are right,” Denin answered, holding her very close. “God will understand. You’re mine, and I’m yours, and nothing shall part us again.”
The portrait with the smoke-blue eyes smiled at them from the door. They saw only each other: but the eyes in the picture Denin had painted seemed to see beyond the place where the milestones end.
THE END