Life at Grosvenor moved on in a placid routine, day after day. What with
her children and the engrossing work at the doctor's Margaret was busy
every morning, and Isabelle rarely saw her before the noon meal. Then at
the plentiful dinner over which the blacksmith presided with a gentle
courtesy and sweetness there was gossip of the hospital and the village,
while Short, who had the father instinct, entertained the children. He knew
all the resources of the country, every animal wild or tame, every rod of
wood and pasture and hill. The little Poles opened him like an atlas or
encyclopedia.
"Mr. Wilson begins to haul from his lot to-morrow," he would announce for
their benefit. "I guess he'll take you up to the clearing where the men are
cutting if you look for him sharp. And when you get there, you want to find
a very tall man with a small head. That's Sam Tisdell,--and you tell him I
said he would show you the deer run and the yard the deer have made back
there a piece behind the clearing."
Then he told them how, when he was a young man, he had hunted for deer on
the mountains and been caught one time in a great snowstorm, almost losing
his life.
"The children have so much to do and to think about here in Grosvenor that
they are no trouble at all. They never have to be entertained," Margaret
remarked. "Mr. Short is much better for them than a Swiss governess with
three languages!"
* * * * *
There were long evenings after the six o'clock suppers, which the two
friends spent together usually, reading or talking before Isabelle's fire.
Wherever the talk started, it would often gravitate to Renault, his
personality dominating like some mountain figure the community. Margaret
had been absorbed into the life of the hospital with its exciting yet
orderly movement. There were new arrivals, departures, difficult cases,
improvements and failures to record. She related some of the slowly wrought
miracles she had witnessed during the months that she had been there.
"It all sounds like magic," Isabelle had said doubtfully.
"No, that is just what it isn't," Margaret protested; "the doctor's
processes are not tricks,--they are evident."
And the two discussed endlessly these "processes" whereby minds were used
to cure matter, the cleansing of the soul,--thought substitution,
suggestion, the relationship of body and mind. And through all the talk,
through the busy routine of the place, in the men and women working in the
hospital, there emerged always that something unseen,--Idea, Will, Spirit,
the motiving force of the whole. Isabelle felt this nowhere more strongly
than in the change in Margaret herself. It was not merely that she seemed
alert and active, wholly absorbed in the things about her, but more in the
marvellous content which filled her. And, as Isabelle reflected, Margaret
was the most discontented woman she had known; even before she married, she
was ever hunting for something.
"But you can't stay here always," Isabelle said to her one evening. "You
will have to go back to the city to educate the children if for no other
reason."
"Sometimes I think I shan't go back! Why should I? ... You know I have
almost no money to live on." (Isabelle suspected that Larry's last years
had eaten into the little that had been left of Margaret's fortune). "The
children will go to school here. It would be useless to educate them above
their future, which must be very plain."
"But you have a lot of relatives who would gladly help you--and them."
"They might, but I don't think I want their help--even for the children. I
am not so sure that what we call advantages, a good start in life, and all
that, is worth while. I had the chance--you had it, too--and what did we
make of it?"
"Our children need not repeat our mistakes," Isabelle replied with a sigh.
"If they were surrounded with the same ideas, they probably would!" ...
"The doctor has thrown his charm over you!"
"He has saved my life!" Margaret murmured; "at least he has shown me how to
save it," she corrected.
There it was again, the mysterious Peace that possessed her, that had
touched Margaret's hard, defiant spirit and tamed it. But Isabelle,
remembering the letters with the Panama postmark she had seen lying on the
hall table, wondered, and she could not help saying:--
"You are young yet, Margaret,--oh, it might be--happiness, all that you
have missed!"
"No!" Margaret replied, with a little smile. "I--think not!"
She closed her eyes as if she were contemplating that other happiness, and
after a silence she opened them and touched Isabelle's hand.
"I want to tell you something, dear.... I loved Rob Falkner, very much, the
most a woman can."
"I knew it! ... I felt it.... That it only might be!"
"He came to me," Margaret continued, "when I was hard and bitter about
life, when I was dead.... It was the kind of love that women dream of,
ours,--the perfect thing you feel in your heart has always been
there,--that takes all of you! ... It was good for us both--he needed me,
and I needed him."
"Margaret!"
"I was wonderfully happy, with a dreadful happiness that was two parts
pain, pain for myself, and more pain for him, because he needed me, you
understand, and it could not be--I could not live with him and give him the
food he hungered for--love."
Isabelle kissed the wistful face, "I know," she said. "I want to tell you
more--but you may not understand! ... He had to go away. It was best; it
was his work, his life, and I should have been a poor weak fool to let our
love stand in the way. So it was decided, and I urged him to go. He came to
see me at Bedmouth before he left,--a few days, a few hours of love. And we
saw how it would have to be, that we should have to go on loving and living
in the spirit, for as long as our love lasted, apart. We faced that.
But--but--"
Margaret hesitated and then with shining eyes went on in a low voice.
"It was not enough what we had had! I was not ready to let him go, to see
him go--without all. He never asked--I gave him all. We went away to have
our love by ourselves,--to live for each other just a few days. He took me
away in his boat, and for a few days, a few nights, we had our love--we saw
our souls."
She waited, breathing fast, then controlled herself.
"Those hours were more than ordinary life. They do not seem to me real even
now, or perhaps they are the most real thing in all I have known. It was
love before the parting--before Fate.... When it was all over, we went back
to earth. I returned, to Mother Pole's house in Bedmouth, and I went up to
the children's room and took my baby in my arms and kissed her, my little
girl. And I knew that it had been right, all pure and holy, and I was glad,
oh, so glad that it had been, that we had had the courage!"
Isabelle pressed the hand she held close to her breast and watched the
shining face.
"And I have never felt differently--never for one moment since. It was the
greatest thing that ever came to me, and it seems to me that I should never
really have lived if it had not been for those days--those nights and
days--and the heaven that we saw!"
"Then how can you speak as if life were ended now--"
Margaret held her hand before her face and did not answer. "It might be
possible--for you both.... She never really cared for Rob,--she left him
and took her child when they sold their house--because she was
disappointed. And she has refused to go to him ever since."
"I know all that," Margaret murmured; "that is not it wholly. I can't tell.
I don't know yet. It is not clear.... But I know that I am proud and glad
of what has been,--of our love in its fulness and glory. And I know it was
not sin! Nothing can make it so to me."
She had risen and stood proudly before Isabelle.
"It has made living possible for him and for me,--it has made it something
noble and great, to feel this in our souls.... I wanted to tell you; I
thought you would understand, and I did not want you to be wrong about
me,--not to know me all!"
She knelt and buried her head in Isabelle's lap, and when she raised her
face there were tears falling from the eyes.
"I don't know why I should cry!" she exclaimed with a smile. "I don't
often.... It was all so beautiful. But we women cry when we can't express
ourselves any other way!"
"I shall always hope--"
Margaret shook her head.
"I don't know.... There are other things coming,--another revelation,
perhaps! I don't think of what will be, dear."
But womanwise, Isabelle thought on after Margaret had left, of Falkner and
Margaret, of their love. And why shouldn't it come to them, she asked
herself? The other, Falkner's marriage, had been a mistake for both, a
terrible mistake, and they had both paid for it. Bessie could have made it
possible if she had wanted to, if she had had it in her. She had her
chance. For him to go back to her now, with the gulf between them of all
this past, was mere folly,--just conventional wrong-headedness. And it
would probably be no better for Bessie if he were to make the sacrifice....
The revelation that Margaret had hinted of had not come to Isabelle. She
lay awake thinking with aching heart of her own story,--its tragic ending.
But _he_ was not a man,--that, too, had been a mistake!
* * * * *
Isabelle, largely left to herself, for occupation drove about the snowy
hills, sometimes taking with her for company one of the convalescents or a
nurse, often alone, liking the solitude of the winter spaces. Sometimes she
went to the blacksmith's shop and talked with the old man, learning the
genealogy and the sociology of the neighborhood. The text for Sol Short's
wisdom was ever at hand in the passers-by. Ending one of his transcripts,
he made a phrase that lingered in Isabelle's mind long afterward. "So she
was left a charge upon the property," he said of an old woman that had come
out of one of the village houses. "Aunt Mehitabel went with the house. When
it was sold, she had to be taken over by the new owner, and her keep
provided. And there she is now, an old woman in ill health and ill temper.
I don't know as there is a worse combination."...
"I wonder why I stay," Isabelle said to Margaret after nearly two months
had slipped by. "I am quite rested, as well as I shall ever be, I believe.
You don't need me. Nobody does exactly! Molly writes me very contented
little letters. Mother is staying with her, and she is at the party age,
and would be terribly bored to come here, as you suggested. John is in St.
Louis; he seems to have a good deal to do out there this winter. So you see
my little world gets on perfectly without me."
"Better stay here, then," Margaret urged, "until spring. It will do you
good. You haven't exhausted the doctor yet!"
"I almost never see him, and when he does remember me he chaffs me as if I
were a silly child. No, I think I will go next week."
But she did not wish to leave. The winter peace of the little village had
been like an enveloping anodyne to her weary body and mind. Removed from
all her past, from the sights and the people that suggested those obsessing
thoughts which had filled her waking hours with dreariness, she had sunk
into the simple routine of Grosvenor as the tired body sinks into a soft
bed. The daily sight of the snowy fields, the frozen hillsides black with
forests, and the dry spirituous air, lifted her. Now and then the effect of
the anodyne wore off and the old gnawing pain, or a sodden sense of
futility, overwhelmed her afresh. "It will never get straight!" she said,
thinking in the terms of Potts's specifics. "I am somehow wrong, and I must
go all my life with this torture--or worse--until I die!" And the whole
panorama of her little life would unroll before her in the sleepless hours
of the still night: her girl ambitions, her mistaken marriage, her striving
for experience, for life, to satisfy--what? Then her mistaken love, and
Vickers's sacrifice, and the blackness afterwards,--the mistake of it all!
"They'll be better without me,--mother and Molly and John! Let me die!" she
cried. Then illogically she would think of Renault and wonder what _he_
could do for her. But she shrank from baring herself before his piercing
gaze. "He would say I was a fool, and he would be right!"
So she went out into the cold country and walked miles over the frozen
fields through the still woods, trying to forget, only to return still
ridden by her thoughts,--bitter tears for Vickers, sometimes almost
reproach for his act. "If he had let me plunge to my fate, it would have
been better than this! I might never have known my mistake,--it would have
been different, all of it different. Now there is nothing!" And at the end
of one of these black moods she resolved to return to her world and "go
through the motions as others do. What else? Perhaps it will be better when
I am distracted. Potts will give me something to brace me."...
But Isabelle did not return to the city and get that prescription from the
great Potts.