On the heels of this outcry, there glided in insinuatingly a soft-spoken

crowd of tempting, seductive possibilities. Marise was so sensitive, so

impressionable, so easily moved, so defenseless when her emotions were

aroused. Hadn't he the right, the duty, he who knew her better than

anyone else, to protect her against herself? Wasn't he deceiving himself

by fantastic notions? It would be so easy to act the ardent, passionate

young lover again . . . but when had he ever "acted" anything for Marise!

No matter, no matter, this was life or death; what was a lie when life

and death hung in the balance? He could play on her devotion to the

children, throw all the weight of his personality, work on her emotions.

That was what people did to gain their point. Everybody did it. And he

could win if he did. He could hold her.

* * * * *

Like the solemn tolling of a great bell there rang, through all this

hurried, despairing clutching at the endurable and lesser, a call to the

great and intolerable. The immensity of his love for Marise loomed up,

far greater than he; and before that sacred thing he hung his head, and

felt his heart breaking.

"No, that won't do. Not when it is Marise who is in question. The best,

the very best I can conceive is what I must give to Marise. A cage could

not hold her, not anything but her body, and to force her decision would

be to make a cage. No, I mustn't use the children either. They are hers

as much as mine. If all is not right between us, what would it avail

them to be with us? They must take what life brings them, like the rest

of us. If the years Marise and I have passed together, if what we have

been to each other, and are to each other, if that is not enough, then

nothing is enough. That would be a trick to play on her . . . to use my

knowledge of her vulnerable points to win. That is not what I want. What

_do_ I want? I want Marise to be happy."

He had advanced a step since the last time he had told himself this, for

now he said it with a dreadful calm, his heart aching but not faltering.

But he could go no further. There were limits to what he could endure.

He fell into a trance-like state of passivity, his body and mind

exhausted.

As he lay thus, fallen and prostrate, there soared up out of a part of

him that was neither mind nor body, but was nevertheless himself,

something swift and beautiful and living, something great enough at last

to measure its greatness with the immensity of his love for Marise.

What was it?

It was this . . . for a moment he had it all clear, as though he had died

and it were something told him in another world . . . he did not want

Marise for himself; he did not even want her to be happy; he wanted her

to be herself, to be all that Marise could ever grow to be, he wanted

her to attain her full stature so far as any human being could do this

in this life.

And to do that she must be free.

For an instant he looked full at this, his heart flooded with glory. And

then the light went out.

He was there in the blackness again, unhappy beyond any suffering he had

thought he could bear.

He lay still, feeling Marise beside him, the slow, quiet rhythm of her

breathing. Was she awake or sleeping? What would happen if he should

allow the fear and suffering which racked him to become articulate? If

he should cry out to her, she would not turn away. He knew Marise. She

would never turn away from fear and suffering. "But I can't do that. I

won't work on her sympathy. I've promised to be true to what's deepest

and truest in us both. I have been, by God! and I will be. If our

married life has been worth anything, it's because we've both been free

and honest . . . true with one another. This is her ordeal. She must act

for herself. Better die than use my strength to force her against her

own nature. If I decide . . . no matter how sure I am I'm right . . . it

won't be her decision. Nothing would be decided. I must go on just as

before . . ." he groaned, "that will take all the strength I have."

It was clear to him now; the only endurable future for them, such as

they were to each other, would come from Marise's acting with her own

strength on her own decision. By all that was sacred, he would never by

word or act hamper that decision. He would be himself, honestly. Marise

ought to know what that self was.

He had thought that this resolve would bring to him another of these

terrible racking instants of anguish, but instead there came almost a

calm upon him, as though the pain had passed and left him in peace, or

as though a quiet light had shone out in the darkness. Perhaps the dawn

had come. No, the square of the window was still only faintly felt in

the blacker mass of the silent room.

Then he knew why the pain had left him. It had been driven away by the

certainty that there was a worse fear than any he knew, or ever would

know. No matter what risk or catastrophe lay before them, Marise would

never look at him out her clear eyes and act a thing that was not true.

Marise would always be Marise. Why then, whatever came he could bear it.

Life might be cruel and pitiless, but it was not base, when it had among

its gifts such a certainty as that, rock-like under his feet, bearing

him up in his pain.

He moved to her in the bed, felt for her hand and put it gently to his

lips.

Then, holding it in his, on his breast, he turned his eyes towards the

window, waiting for the dawn.

CHAPTER XIX

MR. WELLES LIGHTS THE FUSE

July 2.

That early morning talk with Mr. Welles had left Marise trembling with

helpless sorrow and exasperation. She sat on the bench where he had left

her, and felt the nervous tears stinging her eyes. When she looked up

and saw Vincent Marsh was standing there, extremely pale, as visibly

shaken as she, as visibly little in control of himself, she burst out,

"So you too know. He has just told me that he is really going. The very

date is set. His cousin has a room in her boarding house engaged for

him. He's going to work as a clerk to pay for the extra expenses of the

life there. _Oh!_" She struck her hand on the back of the bench.

Vincent Marsh sat down beside her, his eyes on hers. He said in a

curious, low voice, rough and husky, "I wish you would do something for

me. I wish you would think with all your might, deeply, just why you are

so opposed to his doing what evidently seems to him a very saintly and

heroic action; and then tell me why it is."

Marise felt this as a challenge. He was always challenging everything.

This time she was more than ready. "I don't need any time to think of

reasons!" she cried. "It's obvious to anyone with any sense for the

reality of human values, who isn't fooled by threadbare old words. It's

one of those wasteful, futile, exasperating tricks people play on

themselves in the name of 'duty.' He's throwing away something real and

true, something that could add to the richness of human life, he's

throwing away the happiness that comes of living as suits his nature,

and so creating a harmony that enriches everybody who touches him. And

what's he doing it for? To satisfy a morbid need for self-sacrifice.

He's going to do harm, in all probability, mix up a situation already

complicated beyond solution, and why is he? So that he can indulge

himself in the perverse pleasure of the rasp of a hair-shirt. He doesn't

really use his intelligence to think, to keep a true sense of

proportions; he takes an outworn and false old ideal of self-sacrifice,

and uses it not to do anybody any real good, but to put a martyr's crown

on his head."

She became conscious that her words were having a singular effect upon

Vincent. A dark flush had come over all his face. His gaze on her was

extraordinary in its intentness, in its eagerness, in its fierceness.

She stopped suddenly, as though he had broken in on what she was saying.

He did not stir from his place, but to her he seemed to tower taller.

Into his dark, intent face came an exultant look of power and authority

which fell on her like a hot wind. With a loud knocking of her heart she

knew. Before he spoke, she knew what he would say. And he saw that.

He opened those burning lips and said in the same low voice, rough with

its intensity, "You see what you have done. You have spoken for me. You

have said at last what I have been silently and desperately calling out

to you. You know what has happened. You have said it, it is obvious to

anyone with any sense of human values. Make an end! Make an end! Come

away from a position where only an outworn old ideal holds you to

futility and waste. Come away where you will really live and know the

fullness of life. Come away from that false notion of duty which makes

you do for the children what you know is not best for them, only because

it is the traditional thing to do, only because it gives you a martyr's

crown to wear. I don't say anything now, as I would to any other woman

in the world, as I would have said to you weeks ago before I knew all

that you are . . . I don't say anything about the imbecility of keeping

such a woman as you are here in this narrow, drab hole, this sordid

prison . . . you born, if ever a human being was, to rich and warm and

harmonious living! It is your birthright. Let me give it to you. All

that, even that, a whole world of beauty and fullness waiting for you to

create it to glorious being, all that is nothing compared to what has

come to pass between us, you and me; compared to that other world of

impassioned living existence that is waiting for you. Come away from the

man who is nothing more to you than the house you live in . . . nothing

but a habit."

She started at this, moving out of the stony immobility in which she

gazed at him, listened to him. She did not know that she had moved, was

incapable of willing to do so. It had been a mere reflex start as though

she had been struck. But at the sight of it, the flame in his eyes

leaped up. "No, no, no!" he cried with an insistent triumph, "he is

nothing more to you than a habit. And you are nothing more to him. You

were right, on that evening when you shrank away from the sight of the

place in Italy where in your ignorant youth you made the mistake of

trying to join your life to his. There is not a breath you draw, not a

turn of your head or body . . . I know them all . . . that does not prove

that he is nothing to you now. I have seen you take a handkerchief from

his pocket as you would take it from a bureau-drawer. I have seen him

set you on one side, to pass through a door, as he would set a chair on

one side. You don't even see him any more when you look at him, and he

doesn't see you. Whatever there may have been between you, if there was

ever anything real, it is dead now, dead and buried . . . and you the most

living woman who ever wore flesh and blood! And I am a living man! You

know, I don't need to say it, you know what happens when our looks meet.

Our looks only! Life flares up like a torch in both of us. You know if I

but brush against your skirt, how I cannot speak! You know how when our

hands touch, every drop of blood in our two bodies burns! You are a

grown woman. You know life as well as I do. You know what this means.

You are no longer even a part of his life. You are all of mine. Look at

me now."

He flung out his hands, shaking uncontrollably. "Do you see how I show

this, say this anywhere, tell this to you here, now, where anyone could

hear me? I am not ashamed of it. It is not a thing to hide. It is a

thing to glory in. It is the only honestly living thing in all our

miserable human life, the passion of a man and a woman for each other.

It is the only thing that moves us out of our cowardly lethargy of

dead-and-alive egotism. The thing that is really base and false is to

pretend that what is dead is still alive. Your marriage is dead. Your

children do not need you as you pretend. Let yourself go in this flood

that is sweeping us along. I had never thought to know it. I could fall

down and worship you because you have shown it to me. But I will show it

to you, that and the significance of what you will be when you are no

longer smothered and starved. In all this scrawling ant-heap of

humanity, there are only a handful of human beings who ever really live.

And we will be among them. All the rest are nothing, less than nothing,

to be stamped down if they impede you. They have no other destiny. But

we have! Everything comes down to that in the end. That is the only

truth. That . . . and you and I!"

In the distance, someone called Marise's name. He thought she made a

move, and said, leaning towards her, the heat of his body burning

through to her arm where he touched her, "No, no, none of those trivial,

foolish interruptions that tie you hand and foot, can tie us any longer.

They have no real strength. They can't stand for an instant against

something alive. All that rattles in your ears, that keeps you from

knowing what you really are . . ."

Someone was hurrying down the walk towards them, hidden by the hedge.

Marise could not have turned her head if her life had hung on the

action.

Vincent looked straight at her, straight and deep and strong into her

eyes, and for an instant his burning lips were pressed on hers. The

contact was terrible, momentous.

When he went on speaking, without haste, unafraid although the hurrying

steps were almost there, she could scarcely hear his voice, although it

was urgent and puissant as the impact of his eyes. "You can't get away

from this now. It is here. It has been said. It lives between us, and

you are not strong enough, no power on earth is strong enough, to put it

down."

* * * * *

And then the outer world broke in on them, swept between them with an

outcry. Someone was there, someone who drew short sobbing breaths, who

caught at her and clung to her. It was Cousin Hetty's old Agnes . . . why

in the world was she here? . . . and she was saying in a loud voice as

though she had no control of it, "Oh, oh! Come quick! Come quick!"

Marise stood up, carrying the old woman with her. She was entirely

certain now that she was in a nightmare, from which she would presently

awake, wet with cold sweat.

"Come! Come!" cried the old woman, beating her hands on Marise's arm.

"Perhaps it ain't too late. Perhaps you can do something."

"What has happened?" asked Marise, making her voice sharp and imperative

to pierce the other's agitation.

"I don't know. I don't know," sobbed Agnes. "She didn't come down for

breakfast. I went up to see . . . oh, go quick! Go quick!"

She went down, half on the bench, half on the ground.

Marise and Marsh stood for an instant, petrified.

There was only the smallest part of Marise's consciousness which was

alive to this. Most of it lay numbed and bewildered, still hearing, like

a roll of thunder, the voice of Vincent Marsh.

Then she turned. "Look out for her, will you," she said briefly. "No,

don't come with me. I'll go by the back road. It's the quickest, but

it's too narrow for a car. You drive to Ashley and bring the doctor in

your car."

She ran down the path and around the house to the road, not feeling the

blinding heat of the sun. She ran along the dusty road, a few steps from

the house before the turn into the narrow lane. She felt nothing at all

but a great need for haste.

As she ran, putting all her strength into her running, there were

moments when she forgot why she was hurrying, where she was going, what

had happened; but she did not slacken her pace. She was on the narrow

back road now, in the dense shade of the pines below the Eagle Rocks. In

five minutes she would be at Cousin Hetty's. That was where she was

going.

She was running more slowly now over the rough, uneven, stony road, and

she was aware, more than of anything else, of a pain in her chest where

she could not draw a long breath. It seemed to her that she must be now

wholly in the bad dream, for she had the nightmare sensation of running

with all her strength and not advancing at all. The somber, thick-set

pines seemed to be implacably in the same place, no matter how she tried

to pass them, to leave them behind, to hurry on. Everything else in the

silent, breathless, midsummer forest was rooted immovably deep in the

earth. She alone was killing herself with haste, and yet futilely . . .

not able to get forward, not able to . . .

* * * * *

And then, fit to turn her brain, the forest drew aside and showed her

another nightmare figure, a man, far away to her right, running down the

steep incline that sloped up to the Rocks. A man running as she had been

wishing she could run, a powerful, roughly dressed man, rapt in a

passion of headlong flight, that cast him down the rough slope, over the

rocks, through the brambles, as though his flight were part of an

endless fall.

Marise stopped stock-still, shocked out of every sensation but the

age-old woman's instinct of fear and concealment.

The man plunged forward, not seeing her where she stood on the road

across which he now burst, flinging himself out of the pines on one side

and into the thicket of undergrowth on the other.

Far from him as she was, Marise could hear, through the forest hush, the

terrible sound of his breathing as he ran, as he stumbled, as he

struggled to his feet, fighting crazily with the thick undergrowth.

Those loud hoarse gasps . . . it was as though he were being choked to

death by a hand on his throat.

He was gone, down the slope towards the valley road. The leaves closed

together behind him. The forest was impenetrably silent again. Marise

knew who he was, then, recognized him for 'Gene Powers beyond any doubt.

She felt a strange mixture of pity and scorn and envy. To be so

primitive as that . . . to think, even for an instant's madness, that you

could run away on your own two poor human feet from whatever life

brought to you!

* * * * *

She herself was hurrying forward again. What was she going to? What had

she left behind? The passage of the other runner had not taken a single

moment's time. She was now at the path which led to Cousin Hetty's

side-door.

She darted along this, and found herself in the yard before the door,

open as Agnes had left it when she rushed out for help.

A tea-kettle on the kitchen-stove sang in a low murmur. The clock ticked

loudly, wagging its pendulum back and forth. The cat, stretched at full

length on the floor in a yellow square of sunlight, lifted a drowsy head

and looked at her. There was a smell of freshly made coffee in the air.

As she stood there for an instant till the whirling in her head should

stop, a stick of wood in the fire broke and fell together.

Marise went through into the dining-room where the table laid for

breakfast stood in a quiet expectancy. The old house, well-kept and

well-loved, wore a tranquil expression of permanence and security.

But out in the dusky hail, the white stairs stood palely motioning up.

There Marise felt a singular heavy coolness in the stagnant air. She

went up the stairs, leaning on the balustrade, and found herself facing

an open door.

Beyond it, in a shuttered and shaded room, stood a still white bed. And

on the bed, still and white and distant, lay something dead. It was not

Cousin Hetty. That austere, cold face, proud and stern, was not Cousin

Hetty's. It was her grandmother's, her father's, her uncle's face, whom

Cousin Hetty had never at all resembled. It was the family shell which

Cousin Hetty had for a time inhabited.

Marise came forward and crossed the threshold. Immediately she was aware

of a palpable change in the atmosphere. The room was densely filled with

silence, which folded her about coldly. She sank down on a chair. She

sat motionless, looking at what lay there so quiet, at the unimaginable

emptiness and remoteness of that human countenance.

This was the end. She had come to the end of her running and her haste

and her effort to help. All the paltry agitations and sorrows, the

strains and defeats and poor joys, they were all hurrying forward to

meet this end.

All the scruples, and sacrifices, and tearing asunder of human desires

to make them fit words that were called ideals, all amounted to this

same nothingness in the end.

What was Cousin Hetty's life now, with its tiny inhibitions, its little

passivities? The same nothingness it would have been, had she grasped

boldly at life's realities and taken whatever she wanted.

And all Cousin Hetty's mother's sacrifices for her, her mother's hopes

for her, the slow transfusion of her mother's life to hers; that was all

dead now, had been of no avail against this nothingness. Some day Elly

would lie like that, and all that she had done for Elly, or could do for

her, would be only a pinch of ashes. If she, if Cousin Hetty, if Cousin

Hetty's mother, if Elly, if all of them, took hotly whatever the hours

had to give, they could not more certainly be brought to nothingness and

oblivion in the end. . . .

Those dreams of her . . . being one with a great current, sweeping forward

. . . what pitiful delusions! . . . There was nothing that swept forward.

There were only futile storms of froth and excitement that whirled you

about to no end, one after another. One died down and left you becalmed

and stagnant, and another rose. And that would die down in its turn.

Until at the end, shipwreck, and a sinking to this darkly silent abyss.

CHAPTER XX

A PRIMAEVAL HERITAGE

July 21. Evening.

Cousin Hetty lay coldly dead; and Marise felt herself blown upon by an

icy breath that froze her numb. The doctor had come and gone, queerly,

and bustlingly alive and full of talk and explanations; Agnes had come

back and, silently weeping, had walked endlessly and aimlessly around

the house, with a broom in her idle hand; one after another of the

neighbors had come and gone, queerly alive as usual, they too, for all

their hushed and awkward manners; Neale had come, seeming to feel that

cold breath as little as the others.

And now Neale was gone, after everything had been decided, all the

incredibly multitudinous details that must be decided. The funeral was

set for the day after tomorrow, and until then, everything in

everybody's life was to stop stock-still, as a matter of course. Because

Agnes was in terror of being left alone for an instant, Marise would not

even leave the house until after the funeral, and one of the thousand

petty unescapable details she and Neale had talked of in the hushed

voice which the house imposed on all in it, was the decision as to which

dress and hat were to be sent to her from the wardrobe at home.

She was to stay there with Agnes, she, who was all the family old Cousin

Hetty had left, for the last watch over what lay up there on the bed in

her bedroom. Neale would look out for the children (there was no one

else for the moment, Touclé was gone, Eugenia quite useless), would

telegraph the few old friends who would care to know the news, would

see Mr. Bayweather about the funeral, would telephone the man in West

Ashley who dug graves, would do what was to be done outside; and she

would do what was to be done inside, as now, when she sat on the stairs

waiting in case the undertaker needed something.

She was glad that the undertaker was only quiet, white-bearded old Mr.

Hadley, who for so many, many years had given his silent services to the

dead of Ashley that he had come to seem not quite a living figure

himself, hushed and stilled by his association with everlasting

stillness. Marise, cold and numbed with that icy breath upon her, knew

now why the old undertaker was always silent and absent. A strange life

he must have had. She had never thought of it till she had seen him come

into that house, where she and Agnes waited for him, uncertain, abashed,

not knowing what to do. Into how many such houses he must have gone,

with that same quiet look of unsurprised acceptance of what everybody

knew was coming sometime and nobody ever expected to come at all. How

extraordinary that it had never occurred to her that Cousin Hetty, old

as she was, would some day die. You never really believed that anybody

in your own life was ever going to die, or change; any more than you

really believed that you yourself were ever going to grow old, or

change; or that the children were ever really going to grow up. That

threadbare old phrase about the death of old people, "it always comes as

a shock," that was true of all the inevitable things that happened in

life which you saw happen to everyone else, and never believed would

happen to you.

This was the last tie with the past gone, the last person disappeared

for whom she was still the little girl she felt herself now, the little

girl who had lost her way and wanted someone to put her back in the

path. She had a moment of very simple, sweet sorrow, sitting there alone

in the hall, warm tears streaming down her cheeks and falling on her

hands. Cousin Hetty gone, dear old Cousin Hetty, with her bright living

eyes, and her love for all that was young. How much she owed her . . .

those troubled years of her youth when Cousin Hetty and the old house

were unfailing shelter. What shelter had she now?

The pendulum of her mind swung back . . . of course this was silly

traditional repeating of superstitious old words. There was no shelter;

there could be none in this life. No one could show her the path,

because there _was_ no path; and anyone who pretended to show it was

only a charlatan who traded on moments of weakness like this.

Mr. Hadley opened the door quietly and asked in that seldom-heard voice

of his for a couple of soft, clean towels. Where did Cousin Hetty keep

her towels? In the chest of drawers at the end of the hall. An odor of

cloves came up spicily into the air as Marise opened the drawer. How

like Cousin Hetty to have that instead of the faded, sentimental

lavender. She had perhaps put those towels away there last night, with

her busy, shaking old hands, so still now. All dead, the quaintness, the

vitality, the zest in life, the new love for little Elly, all dead now,

as though it had never been, availing nothing. There was nothing that

did not die.

She handed in the towels and sat down again on the stairs leaning her

head against the wall. What time could it be? Was it still daylight? . . .

No, there was a lamp lighted down there. What could she have been doing

all day, she and Agnes and the doctor and Mr. Hadley? She wondered if

the children were all right, and if Neale would remember, when he washed

Mark's face, that there was a bruise on his temple where the swing-board

had struck him. Was that only yesterday morning! Was it possible that it

was only last night that she had lain awake in the darkness, trying to

think, trying to know what she was feeling, burning with excitement, as

one by one those boldly forward-thrusting movements came back to her

from the time when he had cried out so angrily, "_They_ can't love her.

They're not capable of it!" to the time when they had exchanged that

long reckless gaze over Elly's head! And now there was the triumphant

glory of security which had been in his kiss . . . why, that was this

morning, only a few hours ago! Even through her cold numbed lassitude

she shrank again before the flare-up of that excitement, and burned in

it. She tried to put this behind her at once, to wait, like all the

rest, till this truce should be over, and she should once more be back

in that mêlée of agitation the thought of which turned her sick with

confusion. She was not strong enough for life, if this was what it

brought, these fierce, clawing passions that did not wait for your

bidding to go or come, but left you as though you were dead and then

pounced on you like tigers. She had not iron in her either to live

ruthlessly, or to stamp out that upward leap of flame which meant the

renewal of priceless youth and passion. Between these alternatives, she

_could_ make no decision, she could not, it would tear her in pieces to

do it.

The pendulum swung back again, and all this went out, leaving her

mortally tired. Agnes came to the foot of the stairs, a little,

withered, stricken old figure, her apron at her eyes. From behind it she

murmured humbly, between swallowing hard, that she had made some tea and

there was bread and butter ready, and should she boil an egg?

A good and healing pity came into Marise's heart. Poor old Agnes, it was

the end of the world for her, of course. And how touching, how tragic,

how unjust, the fate of dependents, to turn from one source of commands

to another. She ran downstairs on tip-toe and put her arm around the old

woman's shoulder. "I haven't said anything yet, Agnes," she told her,

"because this has come on us so suddenly. But of course Mr. Crittenden

and I will always look out for you. Cousin Hetty . . . you were her best

friend."

The old woman laid her head down on the other's shoulder and wept aloud.

"I miss her so. I miss her so," she said over and over.

"The thing to do for her," thought Marise, as she patted the thin

heaving shoulders, "is to give her something to work at." Aloud she

said, "Agnes, we must get the front room downstairs ready. Mr. Hadley

wants to have Cousin Hetty brought down there. Before we eat we might as

well get the larger pieces of furniture moved out."

Agnes stood up, docilely submitting herself to the command, stopped

crying, and went with Marise into the dim old room, in which nothing had

been changed since the day, twenty years ago, when the furniture had

been put back in place after Cousin Hetty's old mother had lain there,

for the last time.

The two women began to work, and almost at once Agnes was herself again,

stepping about briskly, restored by the familiarity of being once more

under the direction of another. They pulled out the long haircloth sofa,

moved the spindle-legged old chairs into the dining-room, and carried

out one by one the drawers from the high-boy in the corner. From one of

these drawers a yellowed paper fell out. Marise picked it up and glanced

at it. It was a letter dated 1851, the blank page of which had been used

for a game of Consequences. The foolish incoherencies lay there in the

faded ink just as they had been read out, bringing with them the

laughter of those people, so long dead now, who had written them down in

that pointed, old-fashioned handwriting. Marise stood looking at it

while Agnes swept the other room. Cousin Hetty had been ten years old in

1851, just as old as Paul was now. Her mother had probably left

something she wanted to do, to sit down and laugh with her little

daughter over this trivial game. A ghostly echo of that long-silent

laughter fell faintly and coldly on her ear. So soon gone. Was it worth

while to do it at all? Such an effort, such a fatigue lay before those

children one tried to keep laughing, and then . . .

Someone came in behind her, without knocking or ringing. People had been

coming and going unannounced in that house all the day as though death

had made it their own home. Agnes came to the door, Marise looked up

and saw Nelly Powers standing in the door-way, the second time she had

been there. "I come over again," she said, "to bring you some hot

biscuit and honey. I knew you wouldn't feel to do much cooking." She

added, "I put the biscuits in the oven as I come through, so they'd keep

warm."

"Oh, thank you, Nelly, that's very kind and thoughtful," said Marise. As

she spoke and looked at the splendid, enigmatic woman standing there,

the richness of her vitality vibrating about her, she saw again the

nightmare vision of 'Gene and heard the terrible breathing that had

resounded in the Eagle Rock woods. She was overwhelmed, as so often

before in her life, by an amazement at the astounding difference between

the aspect of things and what they really were. She had never entirely

outgrown the wildness of surprise which this always brought to her. She

and Nelly, looking at each other so calmly, and speaking of hot

biscuits!

She listened as though it were an ironically incongruous speech in a

play to Agnes' conscientious country attempt to make conversation with

the caller, "Hot today, ain't it? Yesterday's storm didn't seem to do

much good." And to Nelly's answer on the same note, "Yes, but it's good

for the corn to have it hot. 'Gene's been out cultivating his, all day

long."

"Ah, not all day! Not all day!" Marise kept the thought to herself. She

had a vision of the man goaded beyond endurance, leaving his horses

plodding in the row, while he fled blindly, to escape the unescapable.

An old resentment, centuries and ages older than she was, a primaeval

heritage from the past, flamed up unexpectedly in her heart. _There_ was

a man, she thought, who had kept the capacity really to love his wife;

passionately to suffer; whose cold intelligence had not chilled down to

. . ."

"Well, I guess I must be going now," said Nelly in the speech of the

valley. She went away through the side-door, opening and shutting it

with meticulous care, so that it would not make a sound. . . . As though a

sound could reach Cousin Hetty now!

"I don't like her biscuits," said Agnes. "She always puts too much sody

in." She added, in what was evidently the expression of an old dislike,

"And don't she look a fool, a great hulking critter like her, wearing

such shoes, teeterin' along on them heels."

"Oh well," said Marise, vaguely, "it's her idea of how to look pretty."

"They must cost an awful sight too," Agnes went on, scoldingly, "laced

halfway up her leg that way. And the Powerses as poor as Job's turkey.

The money she puts into them shoes'd do 'em enough sight more good if

'twas saved up and put into a manure spreader, I call it."

She had taken the biscuits out of the oven and was holding them

suspiciously to her nose, when someone came in at the front door and

walked down the hall with the hushed, self-conscious, lugubrious tip-toe

step of the day. It was Mr. Bayweather, his round old face rather pale.

"I'm shocked, unutterably shocked by this news," he said, and indeed he

looked badly shaken and scared. It came to Marise that Cousin Hetty had

been of about his age. He shook her hand and looked about for a chair.

"I came to see about which hymns you would like sung," he said. "Do you

know if Miss Hetty had any favorites?" He broke off to say, "Mrs.

Bayweather wished me to be sure to excuse her to you for not coming with

me tonight to see if there was anything she could do. But she was

stopped by old Mrs. Warner, just as we were leaving the house. Frank, it

seems, went off early this morning to survey some lines in the woods

somewhere on the mountain, and was to be back to lunch. He didn't come

then and hasn't showed up at all yet. Mrs. Warner wanted my wife to

telephone up to North Ashley to see if he had perhaps gone there to

spend the night with his aunt. The line was busy of course, and Mrs.

Bayweather was still trying to get them on the wire when I had to come

away. If she had no special favorites, I think that 'Lead, Kindly Light,

Amid th' Encircling Gloom' is always suitable, don't you?"

Something seemed to explode inside Marise's mind, and like a resultant

black cloud of smoke a huge and ominous possibility loomed up, so

darkly, so unexpectedly, that she had no breath to answer the

clergyman's question. Those lines Frank Warner had gone to survey ran

through the Eagle Rock woods!

* * * * *

"Or would you think an Easter one, like 'The Strife Is O'er, the Battle

Won,' more appropriate?" suggested Mr. Bayweather to her silence.

* * * * *

Agnes started. "Who's that come bursting into the kitchen?" she cried,

turning towards the door.

It seemed to Marise, afterwards, that she had known at that moment who

had come and what the tidings were.

Agnes started towards the door to open it. But it was flung open

abruptly from the outside. Touclé stood there, her hat gone from her

head, her rusty black clothes torn and disarranged.

Marise knew what she was about to announce.

She cried out to them, "Frank Warner has fallen off the Eagle Rocks. I

found him there, at the bottom, half an hour ago, dead."

* * * * *

The savage old flame, centuries and ages older than she, flared for an

instant high and smoky in Marise's heart. "_There_ is a man who knows

how to fight for his wife and keep her!" she thought fiercely.

CHAPTER XXI

THE COUNSEL OF THE STARS

July 21. Night.

It had been arranged that for the two nights before the funeral Agnes

was to sleep in the front bedroom, on one side of Cousin Hetty's room,

and Marise in the small hall bedroom on the other side, the same room

and the same bed in which she had slept as a little girl. Nothing had

been changed there, since those days. The same heavy white pitcher and

basin stood in the old wash-stand with the sunken top and hinged cover;

the same oval white soap-dish, the same ornamental spatter-work frame in

dark walnut hung over the narrow walnut bedstead.

As she undressed in the space between the bed and the wash-stand, the

past came up before her in a sudden splashing wave of recollection which

for a moment engulfed her. It had all been a dream, all that had

happened since then, and she was again eight years old, with nothing in

the world but bad dreams to fear, and Cousin Hetty there at hand as a

refuge even against bad dreams. How many times she had wakened,

terrified, her heart beating hammer-strokes against her ribs, and

trotted shivering, in her night-gown, into Cousin Hetty's room.

"Cousin Hetty! Cousin Hetty!"

"What? What's that? Oh, you, Marise. What's the matter? Notions again?"

"Oh, Cousin Hetty, it was an _awful_ dream this time. Can't I get into

bed with you?"

"Why yes, come along, you silly child."

The fumbling approach to the bed, the sheets held open, the kind old

hand outstretched, and then the haven . . . her head on the same pillow

with that of the brave old woman who was afraid of nothing, who drew her

up close and safe and with comforting assurance instantly fell asleep

again. And then the delicious, slow fading of the terrors before the

obliterating hand of sleep, the delicious slow sinking into

forgetfulness of everything.

* * * * *

Standing there, clad in the splendor of her physical maturity, Marise

shivered uncontrollably again, and quaked and feared. It was all a bad

dream, all of it, and now as then Cousin Hetty lay safe and quiet,

wrapped in sleep which was the only escape. Marise turned sick with

longing to go again, now, to seek out Cousin Hetty and to lie down by

her to share that safe and cold and dreamless quiet.

She flung back over her shoulder the long shining dark braid which her

fingers had been automatically twisting, and stood for a moment

motionless. She was suffering acutely, but the pain came from a source

so deep, so confused, so inarticulate, that she could not name it, could

not bring to bear on it any of the resources of her intelligence and

will. She could only bend under it as under a crushing burden, and

suffer as an animal endures pain, dumbly, stupidly.

After a time a small knock sounded, and Agnes's voice asked through the

door if Miss Marise thought the door to . . . to . . . if the "other" door

ought to be open or shut. It was shut now. What did people do as a

general thing?

Marise opened her own door and looked down on the old figure in the

straight, yellowed night-gown, the knotted, big-veined hand shielding

the candle from the wandering summer breeze which blew an occasional

silent, fragrant breath in from the open windows.

"I don't know what people do as a rule," she answered, and then asked,

"How did Miss Hetty like best to have it, herself?"

"Oh, open, always."

"We'd better open it, then."

The old servant swayed before the closed door, the candlestick shaking

in her hand. She looked up at Marise timidly. "You do it," she said

under her breath.

Marise felt a faint pitying scorn, stepped past Agnes, lifted the latch,

and opened the door wide into the blackness of the other room.

The dense silence seemed to come out, coldly and softly. For Marise it

had the sweetness of a longed-for anaesthetic, it had the very odor of

the dreamless quiet into which she longed to sink. But Agnes shrank

away, drew hastily closer to Marise, and whispered in a sudden panic,

"Oh, don't it scare you? Aren't you afraid to be here all alone, just

you and me? We'd ought to have had a man stay too."

Marise tried to answer simply and kindly, "No, I'm not afraid. It is

only all that is left of dear Cousin Hetty." But the impatience and

contemptuous surprise which she kept out of her words and voice were

felt none the less by the old woman. She drooped submissively as under a

reproach. "I know it's foolish," she murmured, "I know it's foolish."

She began again to weep, the tears filling her faded eyes and running

quietly down her wrinkled old cheeks. "You don't know how gone I feel

without her!" she mourned. "I'd always had her to tell me what to do.

Thirty-five years now, every day, she's been here to tell me what to do.

I can't make it seem true, that it's her lying in there. Seems as though

every minute she'd come in, stepping quick, the way she did. And I

fairly open my mouth to ask her, 'Now Miss Hetty, what shall I do next?'

and then it all comes over me."

Marise's impatience and scorn were flooded by an immense sympathy. What

a pitiable thing a dependent is! Poor old Agnes! She leaned down to the

humble, docile old face, and put her cheek against it. "I'll do my best

to take Cousin Hetty's place for you," she said gently, and then, "Now

you'd better go back to bed. There's a hard day ahead of us."

Agnes responded with relief to the tone of authority. She said with a

reassured accent, "Well, it's all right if _you're_ not afraid," turned

and shuffled down the hall, comforted and obedient.

Marise saw her go into her room, heard the creak of the bed as she lay

down on it, and then the old voice, "Miss Marise, will it be all right

if I leave my candle burning, just this once?"

"Yes, yes, Agnes, that'll be all right," she answered. "Go to sleep

now." As she went back into her own room, she thought passingly to

herself, "Strange that anyone can live so long and grow up so little."

She herself opened her bed, lay down on it resolutely, and blew out her

candle.

Instantly the room seemed suffocatingly full of a thousand flying,

disconnected pictures. The talk with Agnes had changed her mood. The

dull, leaden weight of that numbing burden of inarticulate pain was

broken into innumerable fragments. For a time, before she could collect

herself to self-control, her thoughts whirled and roared in her head

like a machine disconnected from its work, racing furiously till it

threatens to shake itself to pieces. Everything seemed to come at once.

Frank Warner was dead. What would that mean to Nelly Powers?

Had there been enough bread left in the house till someone could drive

the Ford to Ashley and buy some more?

Ought she to wear mourning for Cousin Hetty?

What had happened on the Eagle Rocks? Had Frank and 'Gene quarreled, or

had 'Gene crept up behind Frank as he sighted along the compass?

How would they get Cousin Hetty's friends from the station at Ashley,

out to the house, such feeble old people as they were? It would be

better to have the services all at the church.

Had anything been decided about hymns? Someone had said something about

it, but what had she . . . oh, of course that had been the moment when

Touclé had come in, and Mr. Bayweather had rushed away to tell Frank's

mother. Frank's mother. His mother! Suppose that were to happen to Mark,

or Paul? No, not such thoughts. They mustn't be let in at all, or you

went mad.

Was it true that Elly cared nothing about her, that children didn't, for

grown-ups, that she was nothing in Elly's life?

She was glad that Touclé had come back. There would be someone to help

Neale with the children. . . .

_Neale_ . . . the name brought her up abruptly. Her mind, hurrying,

breathless, panting, was stopped by the name, as by a great rock in the

path. There was an instant of blankness, as she faced it, as though it

were a name she did not know. When she said that name, everything

stopped going around in her head. She moved restlessly in her bed.

And then, as though she had gone around the rock, the rapid, pattering,

painful rush of those incoherent ideas began again. Queer that nobody

there, Mr. Bayweather, Agnes, Touclé, none of them seemed to realize

that Frank had not fallen, that 'Gene had . . . but of course she

remembered they hadn't any idea of a possible connection between Frank

and the Powers, and she had been the only one to see 'Gene in that

terrible flight from the Rocks. Nelly had thought he had been

cultivating corn all day. Of course nobody would think of anything but

an accident. Nobody would ever know.

Yes, it was true; it was true that she would touch Neale and never know

it, never feel it . . . how closely that had been observed, that she could

take a handkerchief from his pocket as from a piece of furniture. It was

true that Neale and she knew each other now till there was no hidden

corner, no mystery, no possibility of a single unexpected thing between

them. She had not realized it, but it was true. How could she not have

seen that his presence left her wholly unmoved, indifferent now? But how

could she have known it, so gradual had been the coming of satiety,

until she had to contrast with it this fierce burning response to a

fierce and new emotion? . . .

Had she thought "indifference"? and "satiety"? Of whom had she been

thinking? Not of _Neale_! Was that what had come of the great hour on

Rocca di Papa? _Was that what human beings were?_

She had gone further this time, but now she was brought up short by the

same blankness at the name of Neale, the same impossibility to think at

all. She could not think about Neale tonight. All that must be put off

till she was more like herself, till she was more steady. She was

reeling now, with shock after shock; Cousin Hetty's death, 'Gene's

dreadful secret, the discovery no longer to be evaded of what Vincent

Marsh meant and was. . . .

She felt a sudden hurried impatient haste to be with Vincent again, to

feel again the choking throb when she first saw him, the constant scared

uncertainty of what he might say, what she might feel, what they both

might do, from one moment to the next . . . she could forget, in those

fiery and potent draughts, everything, all this that was so hard and

painful and that she could not understand and that was such a torment to

try to understand. Everything would be swept away except . . .

As though she had whirled suddenly about to see what was lurking there

behind her, she whirled about and found the thought, "But I ought to

tell someone, tell the police, that I saw 'Gene Powers running away

after he had killed the man who wanted to take his wife from him."

Instantly there spoke out a bitter voice, "No, I shall tell no one.

'Gene has known how to keep Nelly. Let him have her for all his life."

Another voice answered, "Frank's mother . . . his mother!"

And both of these were drowned by a tide of sickness as the recollection

came upon her of that dreadful haste, those horrible labored breaths.

She sat up with a great sweeping gesture of her arms, as though she must

fight for air. The little room seemed palpably crammed with those

jostling, shouting, battling thoughts. She slid from the bed and went to

the window, leaning far out from it, and looking up at the sky,

immeasurably high and black, studded thick with stars.

They looked down disdainfully at her fever and misery. A chilling

consolation fell from them upon her, like a cold dew. She felt herself

shrink to imperceptible proportions. What did they matter, the struggles

of the maggots who crawled about the folds of the globe, itself the most

trifling and insignificant of all the countless worlds which people the

aimless disorder of the universe? What difference did it make? Anything

they did was so soon indistinguishable from anything else. The easiest

way . . . to yield to whatever had the strongest present force . . . that

was as good as any other way in the great and blind confusion of it all.

After she had gone back to bed, she could still see the silent multitude

of stars above her, enormous, remote beyond imagination, and it was

under their thin, cold, indifferent gaze that she finally fell asleep.

CHAPTER XXII

EUGENIA DOES WHAT SHE CAN

July 22.

Agnes brought upstairs an armful of white roses. "The lady that visits

at your house, she brought them from your garden and she wants to see

you if she can."

Eugenia of course. That was unexpected. She must have made an effort to

do that, she who hated sickness and death and all dark things.

"Yes, tell her I will be down in a moment. Take her in a glass of cold

water, too, will you please, Agnes. The walk over here must have been

terribly hot for her."

The roses showed that. They were warm to the touch and as she looked at

them intently, at their white clear faces, familiar to her as those of

human beings, bent on her with a mute message from the garden, she saw

they had begun to droop imperceptibly, that the close, fine texture of

their petals had begun ever so slightly to wither. She sprinkled them,

put their stems deep into water and went downstairs, wiping her moist

hands on her handkerchief.

Eugenia in mauve organdie stood up from the deep Windsor chair where she

had sunk down, and came forward silently to greet her. They kissed each

other ceremoniously in token of the fact that a death lay between them

and the last time they had met . . . was it only yesterday morning?

"Were you able to sleep at all, Marise? You look shockingly tired."

"Oh yes, thanks. I slept well enough. Are the children all right?"

Eugenia nodded, "Yes, as usual."

"Did their father tell them the news of Cousin Hetty's death? How did

they take it? Elly perhaps was . . ."

Eugenia did not know about this, had not happened to hear anybody say.

But old Touclé was back, at least, to do the work.

"I knew she must be," said Marise. "She was here last night. It was she,

you know, who found Frank Warner's body at the foot of . . . of course

you've heard of that?"

Eugenia made a little wry face. Of course she had heard of that, she

said with an accent of distaste. Everybody was talking about the

melodramatic accident, as probably they would still be talking about it

a hundred years from now, up here where nothing happened. People had

come all the way from North Ashley to look at the place, and some of the

men and boys had gone around up to the top of the Eagle Rocks to see

where Frank had lost his footing. They found his surveyor's compass

still set upon its staff. It was where the line ran very near the edge

and Frank must have stepped over the cliff as he was sighting along it.

They could see torn leaves and stripped twigs as though he had tried to

save himself as he fell.

She stopped speaking. Marise found herself too sick and shaken to

venture any comment. There was rather a long silence, such as was

natural and suitable under the circumstances, in that house. Presently

Marise broke this to ask if anyone knew how Frank's mother had taken the

news, although she knew of course Eugenia was the last person of whom to

ask such a question. As she expected, Eugenia had only lifted eyebrows,

a faint slow shake of her head and a small graceful shrug of her

shoulders, her usual formula for conveying her ignorance of common

facts, and her indifference to that ignorance.

But Marise, looking at her, as they sat opposite each other in the

twilight of the closely shuttered room, was struck by the fact that

Eugenia did not seem wholly like herself. Her outward aspect was the

same, the usual exquisite exactitude of detail, every blond hair shining

and in its place, the flawless perfection of her flesh as miraculous as

ever, her tiny white shoe untouched by dust through which she must have

walked to reach the house. But there was something . . . in her eyes,

perhaps . . . which now looked back at Marise with an expression which

Marise did not understand or recognize. If it had not been impossible to

think it of Eugenia, Marise would have imagined that her eyes looked

troubled, excited. Was it possible that even in her safe ivory tower of

aloofness from life, she had felt the jarring blow of the brutally

immediate tragedy of the Eagle Rocks? Or perhaps even Cousin Hetty's

disappearance . . . she had always hated reminders of death.

As Marise, surprised, looked at her and wondered thus passingly if she

felt any reverberation from the tragedy-laden air about them, Eugenia's

face hardened back into its usual smooth calm; over the eyes that had

been for an instant transparent and alive with troubled brightness, slid

their acquired expression of benignant indifference. She answered

Marise's faintly inquiring gaze by getting up as if to go, remarking in

a clear low tone (she was the only person who had come into the house

who had not succumbed to that foolish, instinctive muffling of the

voice), "I forgot to give you a message from Neale. He is obliged to be

away today, on business, something about a deed to some wood-land."

Marise was slightly surprised. "Where is he going?" she asked. "In the

Ford? On the train?" How little she had thought about the mill of late,

that she should be so entirely blank as to this business trip.

"Oh, I didn't even try to understand," said Eugenia, smoothing the

shining silk of her parasol. "Business finds no echo in me, you know. A

man came to supper last night, unexpectedly, and they talked

interminably about some deal, lumbering, lines, surveys, deeds . . . till

Touclé came in with the news of the accident. The man was from New

Hampshire, with that droll, flat New Hampshire accent. You know how they

talk, 'bahn' and 'yahd' for barn and yard."

The words "New Hampshire" and "deeds" stirred a disagreeable association

of ideas in Marise's mind. The shyster lawyer who had done the Powers

out of their inheritance had come from New Hampshire. However, she

supposed there were other people in the state besides dishonest lawyers.

Eugenia went on casually. "It seemed quite important. Neale was absorbed

by it. He told me afterward, Neale did, that the man had acted as agent

for him some years ago in securing a big tract of wood-land around here,

something that had been hard to get hold of."

Marise was startled and showed it by a quick lift of her head. She had

never known Neale to employ an agent. She looked hard at Eugenia's

quiet, indifferent face. The other seemed not to notice her surprise,

and returned her look with a long clear gaze, which apparently referred

to her hair, for she now remarked in just the tone she had used for the

news about Neale, "That way of arranging your coiffure _is_ singularly

becoming to you. Mr. Marsh was speaking about it the other day, but I

hadn't specially noticed it. He's right. It gives you that swathed

close-coifed Leonardo da Vinci look." She put her handkerchief into a

small bag of mauve linen, embroidered with white and pale-green crewels,

and took up her parasol.

Marise felt something menacing in the air. Eugenia frightened her a

little with that glass-smooth look of hers. The best thing to do was to

let her go without another word. And yet she heard her voice asking,

urgently, peremptorily, "What was the name of the man from New

Hampshire?"

Eugenia said, "What man from New Hampshire?" and then, under Marise's

silent gaze, corrected herself and changed her tone. "Oh yes, let me

see: Neale introduced him, of course. Why, some not uncommon name, and

yet not like Smith or Jones. It began with an L, I believe."

Marise said to herself, "I will not say another word about this," and

aloud she said roughly, brusquely, "It wasn't Lowder, of course."

"Yes, yes," said Eugenia, "you're right. It was Lowder. I _thought_ it

was probably something you'd know about. Neale always tells you

everything."

She looked away and remarked, "I suppose you will inherit the furniture

of this house? There are nice bits. This Windsor chair; and I thought I

saw a Chippendale buffet in the dining-room."

Marise, immobile in her chair, repeated, "It wasn't Lowder. You didn't

say it was Lowder."

"Yes, it was Lowder," said Eugenia clearly. "And now you speak of it

once more, I remember one more thing about their talk although I didn't

try to understand much of it. It was all connected with the Powers

family. It was their woodlot which this Mr. Lowder had bought for Neale.

I was surprised to know that they had ever had any wood-land. They have

always seemed too sordidly poverty-stricken. But it seems this was the

only way Neale could get hold of it, because they refused to sell

otherwise."

She looked again at Marise, a long, steady, and entirely opaque gaze

which Marise returned mutely, incapable of uttering a word. She had the

feeling of leaning with all her weight against an inner-door that must

be kept shut.

"Did Neale _tell_ you this man had secured the Powers woodlot for him,

for Neale, for our mill?" she heard her voice asking, faint in the

distance, far off from where she had flung herself against that door.

"Why yes, why not? Not very recently he said, some time ago. We had

quite a talk about it afterwards. It must be something you've

forgotten," said Eugenia. She took up a card from the table and fanned

herself as she spoke, her eyes not quitting Marise's face. "It's going

to be as hot as it was yesterday," she said with resignation. "Doesn't

it make you long for a dusky, high-ceilinged Roman room with a cool,

red-tiled floor, and somebody out in the street shouting through your

closed shutters, 'Ricotta! Ricotta!'" she asked lightly.

Marise looked at her blankly. She wished she could lean forward and

touch Eugenia to make sure she was really standing there. What was it

she had been saying? She could not have understood a word of it. It was

impossible that it should be what it seemed to mean,--impossible!

A door somewhere in the house opened and shut, and steps approached. The

two women turned their eyes towards the hall-door. Old Mrs. Powers

walked in unceremoniously, her gingham dress dusty, her lean face deeply

flushed by the heat, a tin pan in her hands, covered with a

blue-and-white checked cloth.

"I thought maybe you'd relish some fresh doughnuts as well as anything,"

she said briskly, with no preliminary of greeting.

Something about the atmosphere of the room struck her oddly for all the

composed faces and quiet postures of the two occupants. She brought out

as near an apology for intruding, as her phraseless upbringing would

permit her. "I didn't see Agnes in the kitchen as I come through, so I

come right along, to find somebody," she said, a little abashed.

Marise was incapable of speaking to her, but she made a silent gesture

of thanks, and, moving forward, took the pan from the older woman's

hand.

Mrs. Powers went on, "If 'twouldn't bother you, could you put them in

your jar now, and let me take the pan back with me? We hain't got any

too many dishes, you know."

Marise went out to the pantry with the older woman, feeling with

astonishment the floor hard and firm under her feet as usual, the walls

upright about her. Only something at the back of her throat contracted

to a knot, relaxed, contracted, with a singular, disagreeable,

involuntary regularity.

"You look down sick, Mis' Crittenden," said Mrs. Powers with a

respectful admiration for the suitability of this appearance. "And there

ain't nothing surprising that you should. Did you ever see anybody go

off more sudden than Miss Hetty? Such a good woman she was, too. It must

ha' gi'n you an awful turn." She poured the doughnuts into the jar and,

folding the checked cloth, went on, "But I look at it this way. 'Twas a

quick end, and a peaceful end without no pain. And if you'd seen as many

old people drag along for years, as I have, stranglin' and chokin' and

half-dead, why, you'd feel to be thankful Miss Hetty was spared that.

And you too!"

"Marise," said Eugenia, coming to the pantry door, "your neighbors

wanted me, of course, to bring you all their sympathetic condolence. Mr.

Welles asked me to tell you that he would send all the flowers in his

garden to the church for the service tomorrow. And Mr. Marsh was very

anxious to see you today, to arrange about the use of his car in meeting

the people who may come on the train tomorrow, to attend the funeral. He

said he would run over here any time today, if you would send Agnes to

tell him when you would see him. He said he wouldn't leave the house all

day, to be ready to come at any time you would let him."

Mrs. Powers was filled with satisfaction at such conduct. "Now that's

what I call real neighborly," she said. "And both on 'em new to our ways

too. That Mr. Welles is a real nice old man, anyhow. . . . There! I call

him 'old' and I bet he's younger than I be. He acts so kind o' settled

down to stay. But Mr. Marsh don't act so. That's the kind man I like to

see, up-and-coming, so you never know what he's a-goin' to do next."

Eugenia waited through this, for some answer, and still waited

persistently, her eyes on Marise's face.

Marise aroused herself. She must make some comment, of course. "Please

thank them both very much," she said finally, and turned away to set the

jar on a shelf.

"Well, you goin'?" said Mrs. Powers, behind her, evidently to Eugenia.

"Well, good-bye, see you at the funeral tomorrow, I s'pose."

Marise looked around and caught a silent, graceful salutation of

farewell from Eugenia, who disappeared down the hall, the front door

closing gently behind her.

Mrs. Powers began again abruptly, "Folks is sayin' that Frank Warner

must ha' been drinking, but I don't believe it. He wa'n't no drinker.

And where'd he git it, if he was? It was heedless, that's what it was.

He always was a heedless critter from a little boy up. He was the one

that skated right ahead into the hole and most drowned him, and he was

fooling with his gran'father's shot-gun when it went off and most blew

him to pieces. 'S a wonder he lived to grow up: he come so nigh breaking

his neck, before this."

Marise was surprised to hear Eugenia's voice again, "Marise, I stepped

back to ask you if there are any errands I could do for you, any

messages to take. I pass by the door of Mr. Welles' house. I could

perfectly easily stop there and tell Mr. Marsh he could see you now, for

instance."

Marise seemed to see her from afar. She heard what she said, but she was

aware of it only as an interruption. There was a question she must ask

old Mrs. Powers. How could she think of anything else till that had been

answered? She said to Eugenia at random, using the first phrase that

came into her mind, "No, no. Later. Some other time."

Eugenia hesitated, took a step away from the door, and then came back

in, deliberately, close to Marise. She spoke to her in Italian, very

clearly, "He is not a man who will wait."

To this Marise, wholly engrossed in her inner struggle, opposed a stupid

blankness, an incapacity to think of what Eugenia was saying, long

enough to understand it. In that dark inner room, where she kept the

door shut against the horror that was trying to come in, she dared not

for an instant look away. She merely shook her head and motioned

impatiently with her hand. Why did not Eugenia go away?

And yet when Eugenia had gone, she could not bring the words out because

of that strange contraction of her throat.

"My! but you ought to go and lie down," said Mrs. Powers

compassionately. "You're as white as a sheet. Why don't you just give up

for a while? Agnes and I'll tend to things."

Marise was filled with terror at the idea of not getting her answer, and

spoke quickly, abruptly. "Mrs. Powers, you never heard, did you, you

never thought, in that trouble about losing your wood-land . . . nobody

ever thought that Mr. Lowder was only an agent for someone else, whose

name wasn't to be known then."

"Oh sure," said Mrs. Powers readily. "'Gene found out from a man that

had lived in his town in New Hampshire that Lowder didn't do no

lumbering of his own. He just makes a business of dirty deals like that

for pay. He always surmised it to be some lumber-company; somebody that

runs a mill. Lots of men that run mills do that sort of thing, darn

'em!"

Marise leaned against the pantry shelf. The old woman glanced at her

face, gave a cry, and pushed her into a chair, running for water. At the

sound, Agnes came trotting, and showed a scared rabbit-like face. "She's

just beat out with the shock of Miss Hetty's going off so sudden,"

explained Mrs. Powers to Agnes.

Marise got to her feet angrily. She had entirely forgotten that Cousin

Hetty was dead, or that she was in her house. She was shocked that for a

moment she had relaxed her steady pressure against that opening door.

She flung herself against it now. What could she do next?

Instantly, clearly, as though she had heard someone saying it to her,

she thought, "Why, of course, all I have to do is to go and ask Neale

about it!"

It was so simple. Somehow, of course, Neale could give the answer she

must have. Why had she not thought of that the instant Eugenia had begun

to speak?

She drank the glass of water Agnes gave her and said, "Mrs. Powers,

could you do something for me? I promised I would stay here till the

funeral and I know Agnes is afraid to stay alone. Would you mind waiting

here for perhaps half an hour till I could get to the mill and back?

There is something important I must see to."

Mrs. Powers hesitated. "Well now, Mis' Crittenden, there ain't nothing I

wouldn't do for you. But I'm kind o' _funny_ about dead folks. I don't

believe I'd be much good to Agnes because I feel just the way she does.

But I'll run over to the house and get Nelly and 'Gene to come. I guess

the four of us together won't be nervous about staying. 'Gene ain't

workin' today. He got a sunstroke or something yesterday, in the sun,

cultivatin' his corn and he don't feel just right in his head, he says."

She went out of the door as she spoke, calling over her shoulder, "I

wun't be gone long."

Marise sat down again, there in the pantry, leaned her head against the

door and looked steadily at the shelves before her, full of dishes and

jars and bottles and empty jelly glasses. In her mind there was only one

thing, a fixed resolve not to think at all, of anything, until she had

been to Neale's office and had Neale explain it to her. Surely he would

not have started on that trip whatever it was. It was so early still.

She must not think about it at all, until she had asked Neale. Eugenia

had probably made a mistake about the name. Even if Neale had gone she

would be able to ask about the name and find that Eugenia had made a

mistake. That would make everything all right. Of course Eugenia had

made a mistake about the name.

She was still staring fixedly at the shelves, frowning and beginning

again to count all the things on them, when Mrs. Powers' voice sounded

from the kitchen. "I met 'em on the way is why I'm back so soon," she

explained to Agnes. "Nelly had some flowers to bring. And they've been

down by the river and got a great lot of ferns too."

Marise started up, for an instant distracted from her concentration on

what Eugenia had said. This was the first time she had seen Nelly and

'Gene since Frank's death. How would they look? How did people go on

living? How would they speak, and how could they listen to anything but

their own thoughts? What had Frank's death meant to Nelly?

She turned shrinkingly towards Nelly. Nelly was bending down and

flicking the dust from her shoes with her handkerchief. When she stood

up, she looked straight at Marise. Under the thick-springing,

smooth-brushed abundance of her shining fair hair, her eyes, blue as

precious stones, looked out with the deep quiet which always seemed so

inscrutable to the other woman.

She held out an armful of flowers. "I thought you'd like the white phlox

the best. I had a lot of pink too, but I remembered Mrs. Bayweather said

white is best at such times."

Marise drew a long breath. What superb self-control!

"Were the biscuits good?" asked Nelly, turning to Agnes. "I was afraid

afterward maybe they weren't baked enough."

Marise was swept to her feet. If Nelly could master her nerves like

that, she could do better herself. She took the flowers, carried them to

the kitchen, and set them in a panful of water. She had not yet looked

at 'Gene.

She went to find an umbrella to shield her hatless head from the sun,

and on her way out only, cast a swift glance at 'Gene. That was enough.

All the blazing, dusty way to the mill, she saw hanging terribly before

her that haggard ashy face.

At the mill, she paused in the doorway of the lower office, looking in

on the three desk-workers, tapping on their machines, leaning sideways

to consult note-books. The young war-cripple, Neale's special protégé,

seeing her, got to his feet to ask her what he could do for her.

Marise considered him for a moment before she answered. _Was_ there

anything he could do for her? Why had she come? All she could remember

for the moment was that singular contraction of her throat, which had

come back now.

Then she remembered, "Is Mr. Crittenden here?"

"No, he was called away for the day, urgent business in New Hampshire."

Marise looked about her helplessly. "May I sit down for a moment?"

The young stenographer ran, limping and eager, to offer her a chair, and

then, shyly, swung his swivel chair towards her, not wishing to go back

to his work, uncertain what to say to his employer's wife.

"When will Mr. Crittenden be back?" asked Marise, although she knew the

answer.

"No later than tonight, he said," answered the stenographer. "He spoke

particularly about coming back because of Miss Hetty Allen's funeral."

"Yes, of course," said Marise.

There was nothing more to be said, she knew that, nothing more to be

done, until Neale came back. But it seemed physically impossible for her

to live until then, with the clutch in her throat.

She ought to get up now, at once, and go back to Cousin Hetty's. The

Powers were waiting for her return. But her consternation at finding

Neale really gone was a blow from which she needed a breathing time to

recover. She couldn't have it so. She could never endure a whole day

with this possibility like a threatening powder-mine under her feet,

ready to go off and bring her inner world to ruin and despair. She put

her hand out to take her umbrella and struggled up.

"Any message to leave for Mr. Crittenden?" asked the stenographer,

seeing her ready to go.

She shook her head. Her eye fell on the waste-paper basket beside the

desk. On one of the empty envelopes, torn in two, the words, "Return to

C.K. Lowder," stood out clearly. She turned away and stood motionless,

one hand at her temple. She was thinking to herself, "This is simply

incredible. There is some monstrous mistake. If I could only think of a

way to find it out before it kills me."

She became aware that the young cripple was looking at her anxiously,

and saw in his startled, agitated face a reflection of what hers must

be. She made an effort to speak quietly, and heard herself say, "Do you

happen to remember if Mr. Crittenden was alone as he drove away?"

"Oh no," said the other. "He had had someone with him ever since the

afternoon train came in yesterday. Mr. Crittenden drove the car in

himself to the Ashley station to meet him. Somebody here on business."

"What sort of a man, do you remember?" asked Marise.

"Well, a clean-shaven man, with a queer thin long mouth, like the

pictures of William Jennings Bryan's. And he talked out of one corner of

it, the way . . . see here, Mrs. Crittenden, you look awfully tired.

Wouldn't you better sit down and rest a moment more?"

Marise shook her head with an impatient gesture. Now she needed to get

away from that office as much as she had wished to go to it. The place

was hateful to her. The young man's eyes were intolerable. He was one of

the people, one of the many, many people who had grown up trusting in

Neale.

She swung suddenly to a furious incredulity about the whole thing. It

was nonsense! None of it could be true. What were all these people

saying to her, Eugenia, Mrs. Powers, this boy . . . ? She would never

forgive them for trying to do such an infamous thing. They were trying

to make her believe that Neale had been back of Lowder in the low-down

swindle that had been practised on the Powers. They were trying to make

her believe that for seven years Neale had been lying to her with every

breath he drew. Because other men could lie, they thought they could

make her believe that Neale did. Because other women's husbands had done

base things in business, they thought she would be capable of believing

that about Neale. They didn't know how preposterous it was, how close

she and Neale had always been, how deeply a part of the whole aspect of

life to her, Neale's attitude toward his work had become. Those people

did not realize what they were trying to make her believe, it was not

only that her husband had been the instigator of a mean little cheat

which had cost years of suffering to helpless neighbors, it was the

total destruction of all that she had thought Neale to be . . . _thought_

him? Known him to be.

"I must get back at once," she said, with a resentful accent and moved

towards the door.

CHAPTER XXIII

MARISE LOOKS DOWN ON THE STARS

July 22.

She passed out from the office into the yellow glare of the sun, her

feet moving steadily forward, with no volition of hers, along the dusty

road. And as steadily, with as little volition of hers, march, march,

came . . . first what Eugenia had said, the advance from that to Mrs.

Powers' words, from that to the stenographer's, to the name on the

envelope . . . and then like the door to a white-hot blast-furnace thrown

open in her face, came the searing conception of the possibility that it

might be true, and all the world lost.

The extremity and horror of this aroused her to a last effort at

self-preservation so that she flung the door shut by a fierce incapacity

to believe any of those relentless facts which hung one from another

with their horrible enchaining progression. No, she had been dreaming.

It was all preposterous!

The heat wavered up from the hot earth in visible pulsations and there

pulsed through her similar rhythmic waves of feeling; the beginning . . .

what Eugenia had said, had said that _Neale had told her_ . . . what Mrs.

Powers had said, "Lots of men that run mills do that sort of thing" . . .

what the stenographer had said . . . the name on the envelope . . .

_suppose it should be true_.

She was at Cousin Hetty's door now; a give-and-take of women's voices

sounding within. "Here's Mrs. Crittenden back. Come on, Nelly, we better

be going. There's all the work to do."

Marise went in and sat down, looking at them with stony indifference, at

'Gene this time as well as at the women. The drawn sickness of his ashy

face did not move her in the least now. What did she care what he did,

what anyone did, till she knew whether she had ever had Neale or not?

The women's chatter sounded remote and foolish in her ears.

If Neale had done that . . . if that was the man he was . . . but of course

it was preposterous, and she had been dreaming. What was that that

Eugenia had said? The descent into hell began again step by step.

The Powers went out, the old woman still talking, chattering, as if

anything mattered now.

After they were gone, Agnes ran to the door calling, "Mis' Powers! You

forgot your pan and towel after all!" And there was Mrs. Powers again,

talking, talking.

She had been saying something that needed an answer apparently, for now

she stood waiting, expectant.

"What was that, Mrs. Powers? I was thinking of something else."

"I was just tellin' you that there's going to be a big change over to

our house. 'Gene, he told Nelly, as he was setting here waiting for you,

how he was going to cut down the big pine one of these days, like she

always wanted him to. You know, the one that shades the house so.

'Gene's grandfather planted it, and he's always set the greatest store

by it. Used to say he'd just as soon cut his grandmother's throat as

chop it down. But Nelly, she's all housekeeper and she never did like

the musty way the shade makes our best room smell. I never thought to

see the day 'Gene would give in to her about that. He's gi'n in to her

about everything else though. Only last night he was tellin' her, he was

going to take something out'n the savings-bank and buy her an organ for

Addie to learn to play on, that Nelly always hankered after. Seems

'sthough he can't do enough for Nelly, don't it?"

Marise looked at her coldly, incapable of paying enough attention to her

to make any comment on what she said. Let them cut down all the trees in

the valley, and each other's throats into the bargain, if Neale had . . .

if there had never been her Neale, the Neale she thought she had been

living with, all these years.

Mrs. Powers had gone finally, and the house was silent at last, so

silent that she could now hear quite clearly, as though Eugenia still

sat there, what the sweet musical voice was saying over and over. Why

had they gone away and left her alone to face this deadly peril which

advanced on her step by step without mercy, time after time? Now there

was nothing to do but to wait and stand it off.

* * * * *

She was sitting in the same chair, her umbrella still in her hand,

waiting, when Agnes came in to say that she had lunch ready. She turned

eyes of astonished anger and rebuke on her. "I don't want anything to

eat," she said in so strange a voice that Agnes crept back to the

kitchen, shuffling and scared.

She was still sitting there, looking fixedly before her, and frowning,

when Agnes came to the door to say timidly that the gentleman had come

about using his car to meet the train, and wanted to know if he could

see Mrs. Crittenden.

Marise looked at her, frowning, and shook her head. But it was not until

late that night that she understood the words that Agnes had spoken.

* * * * *

She was still sitting there, rigid, waiting, when Agnes brought in a

lighted lamp, and Marise saw that evening had come. The light was

extremely disagreeable to her eyes. She got up stiffly, and went

outdoors to the porch, sitting down on the steps.

The stars were beginning to come out now. The sight of them suggested

something painful, some impression that belonged to that other world

that had existed before this day, before she had conceived the

possibility that Neale might not be Neale, might never have been Neale,

that there was no such thing for her as human integrity. Was it she who

had leaned out from the window and felt herself despised by the height

and vastness of the stars? From the height and vastness of her need, she

looked down on them now, and found them nothing, mere pin-pricks in the

sky, compared to this towering doubt of her, this moral need which

shouted down all the mere matter on the earth and in the heavens above

the earth. Something eternal was at stake now, the faith in

righteousness of a human soul.

She had thought childishly, shallowly last night that she had had no

faith, and could live with none. That was because she had not conceived

what it would be to try to live without faith, because she had not

conceived that the very ground under her feet could give way. At that

very moment she had had a faith as boundless as the universe, and had

forgotten it. And now it was put in doubt. She could not live without

it. It was the only vital thing for her.

Was she the woman who had felt forced into acquiescing when Vincent

Marsh had said so boldly and violently, that she loved her husband no

more, that he was nothing to her now? It seemed to her at this moment

that it was a matter of the utmost unimportance whether she _loved_ him

or not; but she could not live without believing him. That was all. She

could not live without that. Life would be too utterly base . . .

Neale nothing to her? She did not know _what_ he was to her, but the

mere possibility of losing her faith in him was like death. It was a

thousand times worse than death, which was merely material. This

mattered a great deal more than the physical death of someone's body . . .

it was the murder, minute by minute, hour by hour, month by month, year

by year of all her married life, of all she had found lovable and

tolerable and beautiful and real in life.

Of course this could not be true . . . of course not . . . but if it were

true, she would find the corrosive poison of a false double meaning in

every remembered hour. She did not believe any of those hideously

marshaled facts, but if they were true, she would go back over all those

recollections of their life together and kill them one by one, because

every hour of her life had been founded on the most unthinking, the most

absolute, the most recklessly certain trust in Neale. To know that past

in peril, which she had counted on as safe, more surely than on anything

in life, so surely that she had almost dismissed it from her mind like a

treasure laid away in a safe hiding-place . . . to know those memories in

danger was a new torture that had never before been devised for any

human being. No one had the safe and consecrated past taken from him.

Its pricelessness shone on her with a blinding light. What if it should

be taken away, if she should find she had never had it, at all . . . ?

The idea was so acute an anguish to her that she startled herself by a

cry of suffering.

Agnes' voice behind her asked tremblingly, "Did you call me, Miss

Marise?"

Marise shifted her position, drew a breath, and answered in a hard tone,

"No."

She knew with one corner of her mind that Agnes must be terrified. What

if she were? Marise's life-long habit of divining another's need and

ministering to it, vanished like a handful of dust in a storm. What did

she care about Agnes? What did she care about anything in the world but

that she should have back again what she had valued so little as to lose

it from her mind altogether? All of her own energy was strained in the

bitterness of keeping her soul alive till Neale should come. She had not

the smallest atom of strength to care about the needs of anyone else.

She looked up at the stars, disdainful of them. How small they were, how

unimportant in the scheme of things, so much less able to give

significance to the universe, than the presence of integrity in a human

soul.

If she could have Neale back again, as she had always had him without

thinking of it, if she could have her faith in him again, the skies

might shrivel up like a scroll, but something eternal would remain in

her life.

* * * * *

It seemed to her that she heard a faint sound in the distance, on the

road, and her strength ran out of her like water. She tried to stand up

but could not.

Yes, it was the car, approaching. The two glaring headlights swept the

white road, stopped, and went out. For an instant the dark mass stood

motionless in the starlight. Then something moved, a man's tall figure

came up the path.

"Is that you, Marise?" asked Neale's voice.

She had not breath to speak, but all of her being cried out silently to

him the question which had had all the day such a desperate meaning for

her, "Is that _you_, Neale?"

PART IV

CHAPTER XXIV

NEALE'S RETURN

July 22. Evening.

He stooped to kiss her and sank down beside her where she sat cowering

in the dark. Although she could not see his face clearly Marise knew

from his manner that he was very tired, from the way he sat down, taking

off his cap, and his attitude as he leaned his head back against the

pillar. She knew this without thinking about it, mechanically, with the

automatic certainty of a long-since acquired knowledge of him. And when

he spoke, although his voice was quiet and level, she felt a great

fatigue in his accent.

But he spoke with his usual natural intonation, which he evidently tried

to make cheerful. "I'm awfully glad you're still up, dear. I was afraid

you'd be too tired, with the funeral coming tomorrow. But I couldn't get

here any sooner. I've been clear over the mountain today. And I've done

a pretty good stroke of business that I'm in a hurry to tell you about.

You remember, don't you, how the Powers lost the title to their big

woodlot? I don't know if you happen to remember all the details, how a

lawyer named Lowder . . ."

"I remember," said Marise, speaking for the first time, "all about it."

"Well," went on Neale, wearily but steadily, "up in Nova Scotia this

time, talking with one of the old women in town, I ran across a local

tradition that, in a town about ten miles inland, some of the families

were descended from Tory Yankees who'd been exiled from New England,

after the Revolution. I thought it was worth looking up, and one day I

ran up there to see if I could find out anything about them. It was

Sunday and I had to . . ."

Marise was beside herself, her heart racing wildly. She took hold of his

arm and shook it with all her might. "Neale, quick! quick! Leave out all

that. _What did you do?_"

She could see that he was surprised by her fierce impatience, and for an

instant taken aback by the roughness of the interruption. He stared at

her. How _slow_ Neale was!

He began, "But, dear, why do you care so much about it? You can't

understand about what I did, if I don't tell you this part, the

beginning, how I . . ." Then, feeling her begin to tremble uncontrollably,

he said hastily, "Why, of course, Marise, if you want to know the end

first. The upshot of it all is that I've got it straightened out, about

the Powers woodlot. I got track of those missing leaves from the Ashley

Town Records. They really were carried away by that uncle of yours. I

found them up in Canada. I had a certified copy and tracing made of

them. It's been a long complicated business, and the things only came in

yesterday's mail, after you'd been called over here. But I'd been in

correspondence with Lowder, and when I had my proofs in hand, I

telephoned him and made him come over yesterday afternoon. It was one of

the biggest satisfactions I ever expect to have, when I shoved those

papers under his nose and watched him curl up. Then I took him back

today, myself, to his own office, not to let him out of my sight, till

it was all settled. There was a great deal more to it . . . two or three

hours of fight. I bluffed some, about action by the bar-association,

disbarment, a possible indictment for perjury, and seemed to hit a weak

spot. And finally I saw him with my own eyes burn up that fake

warranty-deed. And that's all there is to that. Just as soon as we can

get this certified copy admitted and entered on our Town Records, 'Gene

can have possession of his own wood-land. Isn't that good news?"

He paused and added with a tired, tolerant, kindly accent, "Now Nelly

will have fourteen pairs of new shoes, each laced higher up than the

others, and I won't be the one to grudge them to her."

He waited for a comment and, when none came, went on doggedly making

talk in that resolutely natural tone of his. "Now that you know the end,

and that it all came out right, you ought to listen to some details, for

they are queer. The missing pages weren't in that first town I struck at

all. Nothing there but a record of a family of Simmonses who had come

from Ashley in 1778. They had . . ."

Marise heard nothing more of what he said, although his voice went on

with words the meaning of which she could not grasp. It did not seem to

her that she had really understood with the whole of her brain anything

he had said, or that she had been able to take in the significance of

it. She could think of nothing but a frightening sensation all over her

body, as though the life were ebbing out of it. Every nerve and fiber in

her seemed to have gone slack, beyond anything she had ever conceived.

She could feel herself more and more unstrung and loosened like a violin

string let down and down. The throbbing ache in her throat was gone.

Everything was gone. She sat helpless and felt it slip away, till

somewhere in the center of her body this ebbing of strength had run so

far that it was a terrifying pain, like the approach of death. She was

in a physical panic of alarm, but unable to make a sound, to turn her

head.

It was when she heard a loud insistent ringing in her head, and saw the

stars waver and grow dim that she knew she was fainting away.

* * * * *

Then she was lying on the sofa in Cousin Hetty's sitting-room, Neale

bending over her, holding a handkerchief which smelled of ammonia, and

Agnes, very white, saying in an agitated voice, "It's because she hasn't

eaten a thing all day. She wouldn't touch her lunch or supper. It's been

turrible to see her."

Marise's head felt quite clear and lucid now; her consciousness as if

washed clean by its temporary absence from life. She tried to sit up and

smile at Neale and Agnes. She had never fainted away in all her life

before. She felt very apologetic and weak. And she felt herself in a

queer, literal way another person.

Neale sat down by her now and put his arm around her. His face was grave

and solicitous, but not frightened, as Agnes was. It was like Neale not

to lose his head. He said to Agnes, "Give me that cup of cocoa," and

when it came, he held it to Marise's lips. "Take a good swallow of

that," he said quietly.

Marise was amazed to find that the hot sweet smell of the cocoa aroused

in her a keen sensation of hunger. She drank eagerly, and taking in her

hand the piece of bread and butter which Neale offered to her, she began

to eat it with a child's appetite. She was not ashamed or self-conscious

in showing this before Neale. One never needed to live up to any pose

before Neale. His mere presence in the room brought you back, she

thought, to a sense of reality. Sometimes if you had been particularly

up in the air, it made you feel a little flat as she certainly did now.

But how profoundly alive it made you feel, Neale's sense of things as

they were.

The food was delicious. She ate and drank unabashedly, finding it an

exquisite sensation to feel her body once more normal, her usual home,

and not a scaring, almost hostile entity, apart from her. When she

finished, she leaned against Neale's shoulder with a long breath. For an

instant, she had no emotion but relieved, homely, bodily comfort.

"Well, for Heaven's sake!" said Neale, looking down at her.

"I know it," she said. "I'm an awful fool."

"No, you're not," he contradicted. "That's what makes me so provoked

with you now, going without eating since morning."

Agnes put in, "It's the suddenness of it that was such a shock. It takes

me just so, too, comes over me as I start to put a mouthful of food into

my mouth. I can't get it down. And you don't know how _lost_ I feel not

to have Miss Hetty here to tell me what to eat. I feel so gone!"

"You must go to bed this minute," said Neale. "I'll go right back to the

children."

He remembered suddenly. "By George, I haven't had anything to eat since

noon, myself." He gave Marise an apologetic glance. "I guess I haven't

any stones to throw at your foolishness."

Agnes ran to get him another cup of cocoa and some more bread and

butter. Marise leaned back on the sofa and watched him eat.

* * * * *

She was aware of a physical release from tension that was like a new

birth. She looked at her husband as she had not looked at him for years.

And yet she knew every line and hollow of that rugged face. What she

seemed not to have seen before, was what had grown up little by little,

the expression of his face, the expression which gave his presence its

significance, the expression which he had not inherited like his

features, but which his life had wrought out there.

Before her very eyes there seemed still present the strange, alien look

of the dead face upstairs, from which the expression had gone, and with

it everything. That vision hung, a cold and solemn warning in her mind,

and through it she looked at the living face before her and saw it as

she had never done before.

In the clean, new, sweet lucidity of her just-returned consciousness she

saw what she was not to forget, something like a steady, visible light,

which was Neale's life. That was Neale himself. And as she looked at him

silently, she thought it no wonder that she had been literally almost

frightened to death by the mere possibility that it had not existed. She

had been right in thinking that there was something there which would

outlast the mere stars.

He looked up, found her eyes on him, and smiled at her. She found the

gentleness of his eyes so touching that she felt the tears mounting to

her own. . . . But she winked them back. There had been enough foolishness

from her, for one day.

Neale leaned back in his chair now, looked around for his; cap, took it

up, and looked back at her, quietly, still smiling a little. Marise

thought, "Neale is as _natural_ in his life as a very great actor is in

his art. Whatever he does, even to the most trifling gesture, is done

with so great a simplicity that it makes people like me feel fussy and

paltry."

There was a moment's silence, Neale frankly very tired, looking rather

haggard and grim, giving himself a moment's respite in his chair before

standing up to go; Marise passive, drawing long quiet breaths, her hands

folded on her knees; Agnes, her back to the other two, hanging about the

sideboard, opening and shutting the drawers, and shifting their contents

aimlessly from one to the other.

Then Agnes turned, and showed a shamed, nervous old face. "I don't know

what's got into me, Miss Marise, that I ain't no good to myself nor

anybody else. I'm afraid to go back into the kitchen alone." She

explained to Neale, "I never was in the house with a dead body before,

Mr. Crittenden, and I act like a baby about it, scared to let Mrs.

Crittenden out of my sight. If I'm alone for a minute, seems 'sthough

. . ." She glanced over her shoulder fearfully and ended lamely, "Seems

'sthough I don't know what might happen."

"I won't leave you alone, Agnes, till it is all over," said Marise, and

this time she kept contempt not only out of her voice, but out of her

heart. She was truly only very sorry for the old woman with her foolish

fears.

Agnes blinked and pressed her lips together, the water in her eyes.

"I'm awful glad to hear you say that!" she said fervently.

Marise closed her eyes for a moment. It had suddenly come to her that

this promise to Agnes meant that she could not see Neale alone till

after the funeral, tomorrow, when she went back into life again. And she

found that she immensely wanted to see him alone this very hour, now!

And Agnes would be there . . . !

She opened her eyes and saw Neale standing up, his cap in his hand,

looking at her, rough and brown and tall and tired and strong; so

familiar, every line and pose and color of him; as familiar and

unexciting, as much a part of her, as her own hand.

As their eyes met in the profound look of intimate interpenetration

which can pass only between a man and a woman who have been part of each

other, she felt herself putting to him clearly, piercingly, the question

which till then she had not known how to form, "_Neale, what do you want

me to do?_"

She must have said it aloud, and said it with an accent which carried

its prodigious import, for she saw him turn very white, saw his eyes

deepen, his chest lift in a great heave. He came towards her, evidently

not able to speak for a moment. Then he took her hands . . . the memory of

a thousand other times was in his touch . . .

He looked at her as though he could never turn his eyes away. The

corners of his mouth twitched and drew down.

He said, in a deep, trembling, solemn voice, "Marise, my darling, I want

you always to do what is best for _you_ to do."

He drew a deep, deep breath as though it had taken all his strength to

say that; and went on, "What is deepest and most living in you . . . that

is what must go on living."

He released one hand and held it out towards her as though he were

taking an oath.

CHAPTER XXV

MARISE'S COMING-OF-AGE

July 23. Dawn

Even after the old child, Agnes, had been soothed and reassured, over

and over, till she had fallen asleep, and the house lay profoundly

quiet, Marise felt not the slightest approach of drowsiness or even of

fatigue. She lay down on her bed, but could not close her eyes. They

remained wide open, looking not at a wild confusion of incoherent images

as they had the night before, but straight into blackness and vacancy.

It was strange how from the brawling turmoil of impressions which had

shouted and cried out to her the night before, and had wrought her to

frenzy by their insane insistence, not an echo reached her now. Her mind

was as silent and intent as the old house, keeping its last mute watch

over its mistress. Intent on what? She did not know. On something that

was waiting for her, on something for which she was waiting.

In an immense hush, like the dusky silence in a cathedral aisle or in

the dark heart of the woods, there was something there waiting for her

to go and find it.

That hush had fallen on her at the sight of Neale's face, at the sound

of his voice, as he had looked at her and spoken to her, at the last,

just before he went away back to the children. Those furiously racing

pulses of hers had been stilled by it into this steady rhythm which now

beat quietly through her. The clashing thoughts which had risen with

malevolent swiftness, like high, battling shadowy genii, and had torn

her in pieces as they fought back and forth, were stilled as though a

master-word had been spoken which they must all obey.

The old house, silent under the stars, lay quiet in its vigil about her,

but slept no more than she; the old house which had been a part of her

childhood and her youth now watched over her entry into another part of

her journey.

For as she lay there, wide-awake, watching the light of the candle, she

felt that she knew what was waiting for her, what she must go to find.

It was her maturity.

And as she lay quiet, her ears ringing in the solemn hush which Neale's

look and voice had laid about her, she felt slowly coming into her, like

a tide from a great ocean, the strength to go forward. She lay still,

watching the candle-flame, hovering above the wick which tied it to the

candle, reaching up, reaching up, never for a moment flagging in that

transmutation of the dead matter below it, into something shining and

alive.

She felt the quiet strength come into her like a tide. And presently, as

naturally as a child wakes in the morning, refreshed, and feels the

impulse to rise to active effort again, she sat up in bed, folded her

arms around her knees, and began to think.

Really to think this time, not merely to be the helpless battle-field

over which hurtling projectiles of fierce emotions passed back and

forth! She set her life fairly there before her, and began to try to

understand it.

As she took this first step and saw the long journey stretching out

before her, she knew on what staff she leaned. It was Neale's belief

that she was strong and not weak, that she could find out, if she tried,

what was deepest and most living in her heart. With this in her hand,

with that great protecting hush about her, she set forth. She was afraid

of what she might find, but she set forth.

She must begin at the beginning this time, and go steadily forward from

one step to the next, not her usual involuntary plunge, not the usual

closing over her head of those yelling waters of too vivid impression.

The beginning had been . . . yes, the first conscious beginning had been

the going away of little Mark, out of his babyhood into his own

child-life. He had gone out and left an empty place behind him, which

till then had been filled with the insistent ever-present need for care

for the physical weakness of babyhood. And she had known that never

again would Mark fill that place.

Emptiness, silence, solitude in the place of constant activity; it had

frightened her, had set before her a vision that her life had reached

its peak, and henceforth would go down the decline. Into that empty

place had come a ringing, peremptory call back to personal and physical

youth and excitement and burning sensations. And with that blinding

rebirth of physical youth had come a doubt of all that had seemed the

recompense for the loss of it, had come the conception that she might be

letting herself be fooled and tricked out of the only real things.

There had been many parts to this: her revolt from the mere physical

drudgery of her life, from giving so much of her strength to the dull,

unsavory, material things. This summer, a thousand times in a thousand

ways, there had been brought home to her by Vincent, by Eugenia, the

fact that there were lives so arranged that other people did all the

drudgery, and left one free to perceive nothing but the beauty and

delicacy of existence. Now, straight at it! With all the knowledge of

herself and of life which she had gathered,--straight at it, to see what

this meant! Did their entire freedom from drudgery give them a keener

sense of the beauty and delicacy of existence? Were they more deeply

alive because of the ease of their lives?

She cast about her for evidence, in a firm, orderly search among the

materials which life had brought to her. Had she seen anything which

could give evidence on that? There was Eugenia; Eugenia and her friends

had always lived that life of rich possessions and well-served ease.

What had it made of them? Was their sense of beauty deeper and more

living because of it? No, not in the least.

She turned her inward eye on Eugenia's life, on the lives of the people

in that circle, in a long searching gaze. Was it deep in eternal values?

Was it made up of a constant recurrence of sensitive aliveness to what

is most worth responding to? Odd, that it did not seem to be! They were

petulant, and bored, and troubled about minute flaws in their ease, far

more than they were deep in communion with beauty.

Another piece of evidence came knocking at the door now, a picture of

quaint and humble homeliness . . . herself standing before the stove with

the roast on a plate, and little Mark saying fastidiously, "Oh, how

nasty raw meat looks!" She recalled her passing impatience with the

childishness of that comment, her passing sense of the puerile ignorance

of the inherent unity of things, in such an attitude of eagerness to

feed on results and unwillingness to take one's share of what leads up

to results. Yes, it was more there, than in looking at Eugenia, that she

could find evidence. Did she want to be of those who sat afar off and

were served with the fine and delicate food of life, and knew nothing of

the unsavory process of preparing it? It had seemed to her this summer,

a thousand times with Vincent's eyes on her, scornful of her present

life, that she did want it, that she wanted that more than anything

else. Now let her look full at it. She was a grown woman now, who could

foresee what it would mean.

She looked full at it, set herself there in her imagination, in the

remote ivory tower and looked out from its carven windows at the rough

world where she had lived and worked, and from which she would

henceforth be protected . . . and shut out. She looked long, and in the

profound silence, both within and without her, she listened to the

deepest of the voices in her heart.

And she knew that it was too late for that. She had lived, and she could

not blot out what life had brought to her. She could never now, with a

tranquil heart, go into the ivory tower. It would do her no good to shut

and bar the golden door a hundred times behind her, because she would

have with her, everywhere she went, wrought into the very fiber of her

being, a guilty sense of all the effort and daily strain and struggle in

which she did not share.

She saw no material good accomplished by taking her share. The existence

in the world of so much drudgery and unlovely slavery to material

processes was an insoluble mystery; but a life in which her part of it

would be taken by other people and added to their own burdens . . . no,

she had grown into something which could not endure that!

Perhaps this was one of the hard, unwelcome lessons that the war had

brought to her. She remembered how she had hated the simple comforts of

home, the safety, the roof over her head, because they were being paid

for by such hideous sufferings on the part of others; how she had been

ashamed to lie down in her warm bed when she thought of Neale and his

comrades in the trench-mud, in the cold horror of the long drenching

nights, awaiting the attack; and she had turned sick to see the long

trains of soldiers going out while she stayed safely behind and bore no

part in the wretchedness which war is. There had been no way for her to

take her part in that heavy payment for her safety and comfort; but the

bitterness of those days had shocked her imagination alive to the shame

of sharing and enjoying what she had not helped to pay for, to the

disharmony of having more than your share while other people have less

than theirs.

This was nothing she had consciously sought for. She felt no dutiful

welcome that it had come; she bent under it as under a burden. But it

was there. Life had made her into one of the human beings capable of

feeling that responsibility, each for all, and the war had driven it

home, deep into her heart, whence she could not pluck it out.

She might never have known it, never have thought of it, if she had

been safely protected by ignorance of what life is like. But now she

knew, living had taught her; and that knowledge was irrevocably part of

the woman she had become.

Wait now! Was this only habit, routine, dulled lack of divining

imagination of what another life could be? That was the challenge

Vincent would throw down. She gazed steadily at the wall before her, and

called up, detail by detail, the life which Vincent Marsh thought the

only one that meant richness and abundance for the human spirit. It hung

there, a shimmering mass of lovely colors and exquisite textures and

fineness and delicacy and beauty. And as she looked at it, it took on

the shape of a glorious, uprooted plant, cut off from the very source of

life, its glossy surfaces already beginning to wither and dull in the

sure approach of corruption and decay. But what beauties were there to

pluck, lovely fading beauties, poignant and exquisite sensations, which

she was capable of savoring, which she sadly knew she would live and die

without having known, a heritage into which she would never enter;

because she had known the unforgettable taste of the other heritage,

alive and rooted deep!

This faded out and left her staring at the blank wall again, feeling old

and stern.

Nothing more came for a moment, and restless, feeling no bodily fatigue

at all, she got out of her bed, took up the candle, and stepped

aimlessly out into the hall. The old clock at the end struck a muffled

stroke, as if to greet her. She held up her candle to look at it.

Half-past two in the morning. A long time till dawn would come.

She hesitated a moment and turned towards the door of a garret room

which stood open. She had not been in there for so long,--years perhaps;

but as a child she had often played there among the old things, come

down from the dead, who were kept in such friendly recollection in this

house. Near the door there had been an old, flat-topped, hair-covered

trunk . . . yes, here it was, just as it had been. Nothing ever changed

here. She sat down on it, the candle on the floor beside her, and saw

herself as a little girl playing among the old things.

A little girl! And now she was the mother of a little girl. So short a

time had passed! She understood so very little more than when she had

been the little girl herself. Yet now there was Elly who came and stood

by her, and looked at her, and asked with all her eyes and lips and

being, "Mother, what is the meaning of life?"

What answer had she to give? Was she at all more fit than anyone else to

try to give Elly the unknowable answer to that dark question? Was there

any deep spiritual reality which counted at all, which one human being

could give to another? Did we really live on desert islands, cut off so

wholly from each other by the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea? And if we

did, why break one's heart in the vain effort to do the impossible, to

get from human beings what they could not give?

Her heart ached in an old bitterness at the doubt. Did her children . . .

could they . . . give her the love she wanted from them, in answer to her

gift of her life to them? They were already beginning to go away from

her, to be estranged from her, to shut her out of their lives, to live

their lives with no place for her in them.

She sat there on the old trunk and saw the endless procession of parents

and children passing before her, the children so soon parents, all

driven forward by what they could not understand, yearning and starving

for what was not given them, all wrapped and dimmed in the twilight of

their doubt and ignorance. Where were they going? And why? So many of

them, so many!

Her humbled spirit was prostrate before their mystery, before the

vastness of the whole, of which she and her children were only a part, a

tiny, lowly part.

With this humbling sense of the greatness of the whole, something

swollen and sore in her heart gave over its aching, as though a

quieting hand had been laid on it. She drew a long breath. Oh, from what

did it come, this rest from that sore bitterness?

It came from this, that she had somehow been shown that what she wanted

was not love from her children for herself. That was trying to drive a

bargain to make them pay for something they had never asked to have.

What she wanted was not to get love, to get a place in their lives for

herself, to get anything from them, but to give them all that lay in her

to give. If that was what she wanted, why, nothing, nothing could take

it away. And it was truly . . . in this hour of silence and searching . . .

she saw that it was truly what she wanted. It was something in her which

had grown insensibly to life and strength, during all those uncounted

hours of humble service to the children. And it was something golden and

immortal in her poor, flawed, human heart.

* * * * *

A warm bright wave of feeling swept over her . . . there, distinct and

rounded against the shadowy confused procession of abstract ideas about

parents and children, there stood looking at her out of their clear

loving eyes, Paul and Elly and little Mark, alive, there, a part of her;

not only themselves but her children; not only her children but

themselves; human life which she and Neale had created out of the stuff

of the universe. They looked at her and in their regard was the clear

distillation of the innumerable past hours when they had looked at her

with love and trust.

At the sight of them, her own children, her heart swelled and opened

wide to a conception of something greater and deeper in motherhood than

she had had; but which she could have if she could deserve it; something

so wide and sun-flooded that the old selfish, possessive,

never-satisfied ache which had called itself love withered away, its

power to hurt and poison her gone.

She had no words for this . . . she could not even try to understand it.

It was as solemn a birth-hour to her, as the hour when she had first

heard the cry of her new-born babies . . . she was one mother then, she

had become another mother now. She turned to bless the torment of

bitter, doubting questioning of what she had called mother-love, which

had forced her forward blindly struggling, till she found this

divination of a greater possibility.

She had been trying to span the unfathomable with a mean and grasping

desire. Now she knew what she must try to do; to give up the lesser and

receive the greater.

* * * * *

This passed and left her, looking straight before her at the flickering

shadows, leaping among the dusky corners of the dark slant-ceilinged

room. The old clock struck three in the hall behind her.

She felt tired now, as she had after the other travail which had given

her her children, and leaned her head on her hand. Where did she

herself, her own personal self come in, with all this? It was always a

call to more effort which came. To get the great good things of life how

much you had to give! How much of what seemed dearly yourself, you had

to leave behind as you went forward! Her childhood was startlingly

called up by this old garret, where nothing had changed: she could still

see herself, running about there, happily absorbed in the vital

trivialities of her ten years. She had not forgotten them, she knew

exactly the thrill felt by that shadowy little girl as she leaned over

the old chest yonder, and pulled out the deep-fringed shawl and quilted

petticoat.

It had been sweet to be a little girl, she thought wistfully, to have

had no past, to know only the shining present of every day with no

ominous, difficult future beyond it. Ineffably sweet too was the aroma

of perfect trust in the strength and wisdom of grown-up people, which

tinctured deep with certainty every profoundest layer of her

consciousness. Ineffably sweet . . . and lost forever. There was no human

being in the world as wise and strong as poor old Cousin Hetty had

seemed to her then. A kingdom of security from which she was now shut

out.

And the games, the fantastic plays,--how whole and rounded and entire,

the pleasure in them! She remembered the rainy day she had played

paper-dolls here once, with little Margaret Congdon . . . dead, years ago,

that much-loved playmate of past summer days . . . and how they had taken

the chest for the house for Margaret's dolls, and the hair-trunk where

she sat, for hers; how they had arranged them with the smallest of

playthings, with paste-board furniture, and bits of colored tissue paper

for rugs, and pieces of silk and linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes;

how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could

hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old

room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part of their deep

content.

Nothing had changed in that room, except the woman who sat there.

She got up with a sudden impulse, and threw back the lid of the trunk. A

faint musty odor rose from it, as though it had been shut up for very

long. And . . . why, there it was, the doll's room, just as they had left

it, how long ago! How like this house! How like Cousin Hetty never to

have touched it!

She sat down on the floor and, lifting the candle, looked in at the

yellowed old playthings, the flimsy, spineless paper-dolls, the faded

silk rags, the discolored bits of papers, the misshapen staggering

paste-board chairs and bed, which had seemed so delightful and

enchanting to her then, far better than any actual room she knew. A

homesickness for the past came over her. It was not only Margaret who

was dead. The other little girl who had played there, who had hung so

lovingly over this creation of her fancy, was dead too, Marise thought

with a backward look of longing.