"Love makes one's temerity very great--doesn't it? I asked her to marry
me--because I loved her." He came back from the door and held out his
hand, "I've told you what I would tell no other man, Madison. You
understand now why--and you'll do this for me?"
What answer Madison made he never knew himself--he only knew that he was
staring at the door after Thornton had gone out, and that he wanted to
laugh crazily. Marry Helena! Thornton had asked Helena to marry him
because he loved her. God, there was humor here! His brain itself seemed
to cackle at it--_marry_ Helena!
And then suddenly there seemed no humor at all--only black, infamous
shame and condemnation--and he straightened up from where he leaned
against the bedpost, his face set and strained.
"Thornton had asked Helena to marry him because he _loved_ her"--the
words came slowly, haltingly, aloud--and then he covered his face with
his hands. But he, he who loved her too--what had _he_ done!
--XXII--
THE SHRINE
For a little time Madison stood there in his room, motionless, staring
unseeingly before him--and then, as one awakening from a dream that had
brought dismay and a torment too realistic to be thrown from him on the
instant, his brain still a little blunted, he took up his hat
mechanically, went out from the room, descended by the back stairs to
the rear door of the hotel, and took the road to the Patriarch's
cottage.
And as he walked in the freshness of the night, the restless turmoil of
his soul that since early afternoon had brought him near to the verge of
madness itself, that had robbed him of sane virility, that a moment
since in his room had suddenly begun to lift from him even as the leaden
clouds in the vault above him now were scattering, breaking, and through
the rifts a moon-glint and the starlight came, passed from him
utterly--and a strange calm, a strange joy, a strange sadness was upon
him--and his brain for the first time in many hours was rational,
keen--and he was master of himself again--and yet master of himself no
more!
He smiled a little at the seeming paradox--smiled a little wistfully. He
was beaten--by the game--he had won. How strange it was that sense of
more than resignation now--a sense that seemed like one of
thankfulness--a sense that bade him fling wide his arms as though
suddenly they had been loosed from bondage and he was free, free as the
God-given air around him.
He could understand Helena, and the Flopper, and Pale Face Harry now.
With them it had come slowly, in a gradual concatenation, a progression,
as it were, that had worked upon them, molding them, changing them day
by day--and he had been too blind to see, or, seeing, had measured the
changes only by a standard as false as all his life had been false. With
him it had come in a crash, unheralded, that had left him a naked,
quivering, stricken thing to know madness, terror and despair, to taste
of emotions that had sickened the soul itself.
On Madison walked--along the road, across the little bridge, into the
wagon track where, under the arched branches, it was utter dark. There
was no one upon the road--he passed no one--saw no one--he was alone.
He had lost Helena--but he understood her now--understood the depth of
remorse that she was living through, the terror and the dread as she
sought escape, the fear of him--yes, it would be fear now where once it
had been love! He had lost Helena--that was the price he had paid--but
he understood her now, and he was going to her to help her if he could,
going to tell her that he, too, was changed--as she was changed.
His hands clenched suddenly. God, the misery, the hopelessness, the
wreck and ruin that lay at his door! And amends--what amends could he
make--it was too late for that! How clearly he saw now--when it was too
late! Her life was a broken thing, robbed, stripped and despoiled for
all the years to come. Their love had not been love--she had given it
its name--"passion, vice, lust, sin, degradation and misery and shame."
And then love had come to her, into her life, love as God had meant love
to be, and she had learned what love was she had said--only that she
might never know its fulness, only that it might bring her added
bitterness and added sorrow! Thornton had asked her to marry him that
night--and she had refused him--because the past, it must have been as a
shuddering, hideous phantom that the past had risen before her, had left
her no other thing to do but turn away. It seemed he could see her--see
her bury her face in her hands and--
He stopped short in his walk. Was he changed so much as this! Did he
care so much that it was her happiness--even with another--that counted
most! Yes; it was true--he was changed indeed. And the change had
brought him too, it seemed, to learn what love was--too late.
He went forward again--a little more slowly; now; a sadness upon him,
but, through the sadness, an uplift from that new sense of freedom that
was as a balm, soothing him in the most curious way. His had been a rude
awakening--mind and body and soul had been torn asunder; but he knew
now, as he recalled the hours just past when he had looked on fear, when
the gamut of human passion had raged over him, when he had stood
staggered and appalled before, yes, before his God, that he had come
forth a new man. And how strange had been the ending, how strange and
simple, and yet how significant, typifying the broad, clean outlook on
life, bringing coherency to his tottering mind, had been those words of
Thornton's--"because he loved her."
He had reached the end of the wagon track now, and he walked across the
lawn, his steps noiseless on the velvet sward, and passed between the
maples; and the moon gleam--for the flying clouds, rear-guard of the
routed storm, were flung wide apart, dispersed--fell upon a coiled and
huddled little figure all in white, that was quite still and motionless
upon the rustic seat beside the porch.
She did not see him, did not hear him, until he stood before her and
called her name.
"Helena!" he said unsteadily. "Helena!"
She raised her head and looked at him; and then she rose from the bench,
and, still holding to it by one hand, drew back a little. There was no
outcry, no startled action. Her dark eyes played questioningly upon
him--and he could see that they were wet with tears, and that the face
from out of which they looked was very white.
"Why have you come back here to-night?" she asked in a low tone; and
then, suddenly, a fear, a terror in her voice, as the Flopper's warning
flashed upon her: "Thornton--you have seen Thornton?"
"Yes," he said, surprised a little that she should know; "I saw Thornton
a few minutes ago."
She came toward him now and clutched his arm.
"What have you done?" she cried tensely. "Answer me! You--you met him on
your way here?"
It was a moment before Madison replied. He had schooled himself of
course for more than this, yet the words hurt--that was why she had
asked for Thornton--she was afraid that he had harmed the man.
"No," he said; "I did not meet him. I think you must have been longer
here on that bench than you imagined--haven't you? He came to my room."
"Your room! What for? Tell me!"
Madison smiled with grave whimsicality.
"To call me a gentleman and repose a trust."
She stepped back again, uncertainly.
"I do not know what you are talking about," she said in a strained way.
"And you are talking very strangely."
"Yes," he said. "Everything is strange to-night. It is like a new world,
and--and I have not found my way--yet."
She drew back still further.
"Are you mad?" she whispered.
"No," he answered. "Not now--that Is past."
She looked at him for a little time; and, her hands joined before her,
her fingers locked and interlocked nervously.
"And--and Thornton?" she asked, at last.
"It was a trust," said Madison slowly; "but it was betrayed before it
was given. He did not know--the game. He did not know what was
between--you and me."
"No," she said--and the word came almost inaudibly.
"And so," he said, "I will tell you, for it cannot matter now in any
case. He told me that he had asked you to marry him to-night--and that
you had refused."
Madison paused, and swept his hand across his forehead--his voice
somehow had suddenly grown hoarse, beyond control.
"Yes," she said--and reached again for the back of the bench, supporting
herself against it.
"He is going away," Madison continued; "and he is to send more money
here for the 'cause'--when I ask for it--only you are not to know,
because you might be diffident about taking it after refusing him."
She stared at him numbly--there was no sarcasm in his words; in his
tones only a sort of dreary monotony. She shivered a little--how cold it
seemed! She did not quite grasp his words--and yet she shrank from them.
And then her very soul seemed to cry out against them, to pit itself
against their meaning, as their meaning surged upon her. And
unconsciously she drew herself up, and the whiteness of her face fled
before a rush of color.
"Oh, the shame of it!" she burst out. "The bitter shame of it! You shall
not touch the money--do you hear! You shall not touch it! I--I thought
that you had understood this afternoon. I am glad then that you have
come to-night--if I must say more to make you understand. This is the
end! I do not care what happens--the little I can do now to atone for
what I have done, I am going to do. The game is at an end--you shall not
touch another cent--and everything that we have taken goes back to those
whom we have worse than robbed it from! You hear--you understand! I will
cry it out in the town street if there is no other way--but it shall
stop--it shall stop to-night"--she was panting, breathless, the little
figure erect, outraged, quivering--and then suddenly the shoulders
seemed to droop, the lips to tremble, and she was on her knees upon the
grass beside the bench, and sobbing as a child.
"Helena!" Madison said hoarsely. "Helena! Listen! That is what I came
for to-night--to find a way out for you, for us all, if I can."
The passionate outburst passed--and she was on her feet again, facing
him.
"You are clever--clever!" she cried fiercely. "But you shall not play
with me--you shall not trick me--I meant every word I said!"
But now Madison made no answer. The moonlight bathed them both in its
clear, white radiance; and touched the sward, shading it to softest
green; and the trees limned out like fairy things against the night; and
the calm light flooded the little cottage with its hidden walls where
the ivy and the creepers grew, and lingered over the trellises to drink
the fragrance of the flowers that peeped out from their leafy beds. And
upon Madison's face crept slowly the anguish that was in his soul--until
it was mirrored there--until unconsciously it answered her where words
would have been useless things. Like some white-robed, sorrowing angel,
she seemed, as she stood there before him--the brown eyes full of
shadow, troubled; the sweet face tear-splashed; the little figure in its
simple muslin frock, pitiful in its brave defiance. And pure--just God,
how pure she looked!--the brow stainless white under the mass of dark,
coiled hair; the perfect throat of ivory. And--and the misery that was
in every feature of her face, in every line of her poise--and he had
brought her that--_he_ had brought her to that--and now when he loved
her as he might have loved her once and known her love in return, when
his heart cried out for her, when she was all in life he cared for, she
was gone from him, out of his life, and between them was a barrier he
could never pass--a barrier of his own raising.
And so he made no answer, for indeed he had not heard her; but she was
coming toward him now, her hands outstretched in a wondering way,
wistfully, pleadingly, as though to hold back a refutation that would
change the dawning light upon her face to dismay and grief again.
"It--it is true," she faltered. "It has come to you too--this change,
this new life that has come to me. It is true--I can see it in your
face."
"Yes; it is true," he answered, in a low voice.
"Thank God!" she whispered--and hid her face in her hands--and presently
he heard her sob again.
A tiny cloud edged the moon, and the light faded, and it grew dark, and
the darkness hid her; then softly, timidly almost it seemed, the
radiance came creeping through the branches overhead again--and then he
spoke.
"Helena," he said, steadying his voice with an effort, "you spoke of
atonement a little while ago; but there is no atonement that I can make
to you--nothing that I can do to change what I would give my soul to
change. I know what it meant to you to send Thornton away to-night, for
I love you now as you love him--I know why you did it, and--"
She was staring at him a little wildly--her hands pressed against her
cheeks.
"Love--Thornton," she repeated in a sort of wondering way, a long pause
between the words.
"Yes," he said gently; "I know. Have you forgotten what you told me this
afternoon?--that you had learned--last night--what love was."
She shook her head.
"I do not love Thornton," she said in a monotone. "And yet it is true
that through him I learned what love was, what it _could_ be--don't you
understand?"
Understand! No; it seemed that he could never understand! She did not
love Thornton! And then, as some fiery cordial, the words seemed to whip
through his veins, quickening the beat of his heart into wild,
tumultuous throbbing. Yes, yes, he could understand--it was
true--true--she did not love Thornton.
"Helena!" he cried--and stretched out his arms to her. "I thought, oh,
God, I thought that I had lost you--Helena!"
But she did not move.
"What does it matter to you whether I love Thornton or not?" she said
dully. "Does it change anything where you and I are concerned--does it
change what I told you this afternoon--that I would not go back to
_that_."
"To that! Ah, no!"--his voice rang dominant, vibrant, triumphant now.
"Helena, don't you understand? We are to begin life again--in a new
way, the true way, the only way. Don't you see--I love you!"
Still she did not move--but there was a great whiteness in her face, and
in the whiteness a great light.
"You mean?"--her lips scarcely seemed to form the words.
"Yes!" he cried. "Yes; to make a home for you, to marry you if only you
love me still, to live in God's own sight and hold you as a sacred
gift--Helena! Helena!"--his arms went out to her again, and the yearning
in his soul was in his voice--to crush her to him, to hold her in his
arms, and hold her there where none should take her from him, to shield
and guard her through the years to come, to live with her a life that
seemed to break now in a vista of gladness, of glory, as the day-dawn
breaks with its golden rays of God-given promise--the new life, perfect
and pure and innocent--because he loved her. "Helena! Speak to me. Tell
me that it is not too late--tell me that you love me too."
And then her eyes were raised to his, and they were wet--but there was
love-light and a wondrous happiness shining through the tears.
"Helena!" he murmured brokenly--and swept her into his arms--and kissed
the eyelids, lowered now, the hair, the white brow, the lips--kissed
her, and held her there, her clinging arms about his neck, her face half
hidden on his shoulder.
And so for a space they stood there--and there were no words to say,
only the song in their hearts in deathless melody--but after a little
time he held her from him, and lifted up her face that he might look his
fill upon it.
"Helena," he said, "I cannot understand it all yet--it is as though it
were born out of the sin and the darkness and the blackness of what is
gone--as though here at this Shrine that we created in mockery and crime
it was meant that you and I should save each other for each other. And
yet this Shrine as we have made it is a thing of guilt, and it has
brought us all, you and I, and Harry, and the Flopper to a new life."
She lay still for a moment in his arms--then her hand crept up and
touched his forehead and smoothed back his hair.
"I do not quite know how to say it," she said a little timidly. "When
you went away this afternoon, the Patriarch took me back into his room,
and--and I knelt at his knees--and after a little while my mind seemed
very calm and quiet--do you know what I mean? And I tried to think
things out--and understand. And it seemed to come to me that there was a
shrine everywhere if we would only look for it--that God has put a
shrine in every heart, only we are so blind--that every one can make
their own surroundings beautiful and good and true, no matter where they
are, or how poor, or how rich--and if they live like that they must be
good and true themselves."
"Yes," he said slowly; then, after a moment: "And faith too is very much
like that."
"Only some need a sign," she said.
There was silence again, while her hand crept over his face and back to
his forehead to smooth his hair once more--and then very gently she
slipped out of his arms.
"What are we to do about--about everything here?" she asked soberly. "We
are forgetting that in our own happiness. How are we going to return the
money that we have taken?"
"I don't know yet," he answered. "I haven't thought much about it--but
we'll manage somehow."
She shook her head.
"I've thought a great deal about it since yesterday--and I'm not so sure
it is to be 'managed somehow'--and the more I've thought the more
tangled and complicated it has become."
"Well, we'll untangle it to-morrow," said Madison, with a smile, "and--"
"No"--she touched his sleeve. "To-night. Let us do it now--to-night. I
should be so happy then."
He smiled at her again, and drew her to him.
"But we ought to have Pale Face and the Flopper too, don't you think
so?" he said.
"Of course," she said; "and so we will. The Flopper is here, and we can
send him for Harry. It's early yet--not ten o'clock."
"All right," said Madison; "if you wish it. We'll go in then and get the
Flopper."
And so they walked to the cottage door, and into the porch--but in the
porch Madison held her for a moment, and lifted up her face again and
looked into her eyes.
"My--wife," he whispered--and took her in his arms.
--XXIII--
THE WAY OUT
Strange scene indeed! Strange antithesis to that other night when these
four were gathered in that crime-reeked, sordid room at the Roost--where
Pale Face Harry, gaunt, emaciated, coughed, and, trembling, plunged a
morphine needle in his arm; where the Flopper, a wretched tatterdemalion
from the gutter, licked greedy lips and gloated in his rascality; where
Helena, flushed-faced, inhaled her interminable cigarettes and dangled
her legs from the table edge; where Madison, suave, flippant, so certain
of his own infallibility, glorying in his crooked masterpiece, laid the
tribute to genius at his own feet!
Strange scene! Strange antithesis indeed! It was quiet here--very
still--only the distant, muffled boom of the pounding surf. And the
shrine-room, for the first time since its creation, was locked against
the night. It lay now in shadow from the single lamp upon the table--and
the light, where it fell in a shortened circle, for the lamp itself had
a little green paper shade, was soft, subdued and mellow.
Where he had been wont to sit in the days gone by, the Patriarch sat now
in his armchair by the empty fireplace--in the shadow--his head turned
in his strange, listening, attentive way toward the table--toward the
four who were grouped around it. There had been no one to stay with him
in his own room, and so Helena had brought him there--to play his silent
part.
At the table, Pale Face Harry, bronzed and rugged, clear-eyed, a robust
figure from his clean living, his months of the out-of-doors, traced the
grain of the wood on the table mechanically with his finger nail, his
face sober, perplexed; while the Flopper, clear-eyed too, his face
almost a handsome one in its bright alertness, now that it had rounded
out and the hard, premature lines were gone, mirrored Pale Face Harry's
perturbed expression, his eyes fixed anxiously on Madison opposite him;
and Helena, sitting beside Madison, was very quiet, her forehead
wrinkled and pursed up into little furrows, the brown eyes with a hint
of dismay and consternation lurking in their depths, one hand stretched
out to lay quite unconsciously on Madison's sleeve--and from the sleeve
to steal occasionally into Madison's hand.
Madison, his lips tight, pushed back his chair suddenly--they had been
sitting there an hour.
"You were right, Helena," he said, with a nervous laugh. "The more you
try to figure it out the worse it gets."
"Aw, say, Doc," pleaded the Flopper desperately, "don't youse give it
up--youse have got de head--youse ain't never left us in a hole yet."
Madison looked at him, and smiled mirthlessly.
"My head!" he exclaimed bitterly. "I got you into this, all of you--but
it will take more than my head to get you out. If I could stand for it
myself, I'd do it--but I can't without dragging you in too--we're too
intimately mixed up. If I said it was a deal of mine--they'd ask where
Helena came from--they'd ask where you came from, Flopper. We're
beaten--beaten every way we turn. The game has got us--we haven't a
move. We played it to the limit, the slickest swindle that was ever
worked, and it worked till there's more money than I've tried to count.
And then it changed us from thieves, from--from anything you like--and
now that we want to quit, now that we want a chance to make good, it's
got us in its grip and we can't get away." He flirted a bead of moisture
from his forehead. "My God, I don't know what to do!" he muttered
hoarsely. "It was easy enough to _talk_ about stopping this thing, about
returning the money--but I can't see the way out."
No one answered him--all were silent--as silent as the mute and
venerable figure that sat, listening attentively it seemed, in the
armchair by the fireplace.
Madison turned abruptly after a moment to Pale Face Harry.
"You, Harry," he said, laying a hand on the other's shoulder, "you're
the only one of the four that can walk out of it--you don't show in the
center of the stage--you go. You said the old folks would cry over
you--twenty years is a long time to stay away from the old folks--I--I
never knew mine. You go on back to the little farm out there in the West
where you said you'd like to go, and--and give the old people a hand for
the years they've got left."
Pale Face Harry shook his head.
"God knows I'd like to," he said, choking a little; "that's what I
counted on. God knows I'd like to go out there and lead a decent
life--but I don't go that way--I don't crawl out and leave you--what's
coming to you is coming to me."
"That won't help us any, Harry," said Madison softly, and his hand
tightened in an eloquent pressure on Pale Face Harry's shoulder. "You
go--and God bless you!"
Again Pale Face Harry shook his head.
"No," he said. "I stick. If the game's got you, it's got me too--to the
limit. There's no use talking about that."
The Flopper licked his lips miserably.
"Swipe me!" he mumbled. "Hell wasn't never like dis! Me an' Mamie we've
got it fixed, an' her old man says he'll take me inter de store. Say,
Doc, say--ain't dere a chanst ter live straight now we wants ter?"
But Madison did not hear the Flopper save in a vague, inconsequential
way--he was looking at Helena. She had drooped forward a little over the
table, her chin in her hands, her lips quivering--and a white misery in
her face seemed to bring a chill, a numbness to his heart. His Hands
clenched, and he began to pace up and down the room.
How buoyantly he had tackled the problem--buoyant in his own
emancipation, buoyant in his love, in the future full of dreams, full of
inspiration, full of the new life that Helena and he would live
together! How confidently he had settled himself to undo in a moment the
work of months, to outline a mere matter of detail, with never a thought
that he was face to face with a problem that he could never solve--that
brought him to the realization that the game, not he, was the master
still, iron-handed, implacable--that though the mental chains were
loosed it was but as if, in ironic justice, in grim punishment, only
that he might look, clear-visioned, upon the ignominy of the physical
shackles he himself had forged and fashioned so readily, whose breaking
now was beyond his strength.