CHAPTER XXXVII

"... And that was Thursday; your letter had come in the first mail;

and--oh, hush, hush; it was not a wicked letter, David. Don't you

suppose I know that, now? I knew it--the next day. And I read it. I

don't know just what happened then. I can't remember very clearly. I

think I felt 'insulted.' ... It sounds so foolish to say that, doesn't

it? But I was just a girl then, and you know what girls are like....

David, I am not making any excuse. There isn't any excuse. I am

just--telling you. I have to talk slowly; I am tired. You won't mind if

I talk slowly? ... I suppose I thought I had been 'insulted'; and I

remember something seemed to flame up. You know how it always was with

me? David, I have never been able to be angry since that day. Isn't

that strange? I've never been angry since. Well, then, I went out to

walk. I remember Cherry-pie called down-stairs to know if I had a clean

pocket-handkerchief. I remember that; and yet I can't seem to remember

why I went out to walk. ... And he came up and spoke to me. Oh, I

forgot to tell you: he'd been in love with me. I meant to tell you

about that as soon as we were married.... Where was I?--Oh, yes; he

spoke to me...."

Her voice broke with exhaustion; she closed her eyes and lay back in

the big chair. David put her hand against his face, and held it there

until she opened her eyes. She looked at him dumbly for a little while;

then the slow, monotonous outpouring of all the silent months began

again: "And I said I hated you. And he said if I married him, it would

show you that I hated you. David, he was fond of me. I have to remember

that. It wouldn't be fair not to remember that, would it? I was really

the one to blame. Oh, I must be fair to him; he was fond of me.... And

all that afternoon, after he married me, I was so glad to think how

wicked I was. I knew how you would suffer. And that made me glad to be

wicked...."

There was a long pause; he pulled a little shawl across her feet, and

laid her hand over his eyes; but he was silent.

"Then," she said, in a whisper, "I died, I think. I suppose that is why

I have never been angry since. Something was killed in me.... I've

wondered a good deal about that. David, isn't it strange how part of

you can die, and yet you can go on living? Of course I expected to die.

I prayed all the time that I might. But I went on living;--you are glad

I lived?" she said, incredulously, catching some broken murmur from

behind his hands in which his face was hidden; "glad? Why, I should

have thought--Well, that was the most awful time of all. The only peace

I had, just single minutes of peace, was when I remembered that you

hated me."

He laid his face against her knee, and she felt the fierce intake of

his breath.

"You _didn't_ hate me? Oh, don't say you didn't, David. Don't! It was

the only comfort I had, to have you despise me. Although that was just

at first. Afterward, last May, when you walked down to Nannie's with me

that afternoon, and I thought you had got all over it, I...something

seemed to be eating my heart away. That seems like a contradiction,

doesn't it? I don't understand how I could feel two ways. But just at

first I wanted you to hate me. I thought you would be less unhappy if

you hated me; and besides, I wanted to feel the whips. I felt them--oh,

I felt them!...And all the time I thought that soon I would die. But

death would have been too easy. I had to go on living." There was

another long silence; he kissed her hand once; but he did not speak....

"And the days went on, and went on, and went on. Sometimes I didn't

feel anything; but sometimes it was like stringing sharp beads on a

red-hot wire. I suppose that sounds foolish? But when his mother

disinherited him, I knew I would have to go on--stringing beads.

Because it would have been mean, then, to leave him. You see that,

David? Besides, I was a spoiled thing, a worthless thing. If staying

with him would make up for the harm I had done him,--Mrs. Maitland told

me I had injured him; why of course, there was nothing else to do. I

knew you would understand. So I stayed. 'Unkind to me?'" She bent

forward a little to hear his smothered question. "Oh no; never. I used

to wish he would be. But he--loved me"--she shuddered. "Oh, David, how

I have dreamed of your arms. David . . . David . . ."

They had forgotten that each had believed love had ceased in the other;

they did not even assert that it was unchanged. Nor was there any plea

for forgiveness on either side. The moment was too great for that.

She sank back in her chair with a long breath. He rose, and kneeling

beside her, drew her against his breast. She sighed with comfort.

"_Here_! At last to be here. I never thought it would be. It is heaven.

Yes; I shall remember that I have been in heaven. But I don't think I

shall be sent to hell. No; God won't punish me any more. It will be

just sleep."

He had to bend his ear almost to her white lips to catch her whisper.

"What did I say? I don't remember exactly; I am so happy. . . . Let me

be quiet a little while. I'm pretty tired. May I stay until morning? It

is raining, and if I may stay . . . I will go away very early in the

morning." The long, rambling, half-whispered story had followed the

fierce statement, flung at him when she burst in out of the storm, and

stood, sodden with rain, trembling with fatigue and cold, and pushing

from her his alarmed and outstretched hands,--the statement that she

had left Blair! There were only a few words in the outburst of terrible

anger which had been dormant in her for all these years: "He stole your

wife. Now he is stealing your money. I told him he couldn't keep them

both. Your wife has come back to you. I have left him--"

Even while she was stammering, shrilly, the furious finality, he caught

her, swaying, in his arms. It was an hour before she could speak

coherently of the happenings of the last twenty-four hours; she had to

be warmed and fed and calmed. And it was curious how the lover in him

and the physician in him alternated in that hour; he had been instant

with the soothing commonplace of help,--her wet clothes, her chilled

body, her hunger, were his first concern. "I know you are hungry," he

said, cheerfully; but his hands shook as he put food before her. When

he drew her chair up to the fire, and kneeling down, took off her wet

shoes, he held her slender, tired feet in his hands and chafed them

gently; but suddenly laid them against his breast, warming them,

murmuring over them with a sobbing breath, as though he felt the

weariness of the little feet, plodding, plodding, plodding through the

rain to find him. The next minute he was the doctor, ordering her with

smiling words to lie back in her chair and rest; then looking at her

with a groan.

When at last she was coherent again, she began that pitiful confession,

and he listened; at first walking up and down; then coming nearer;

sitting beside her; then kneeling; then lifting her and holding her

against his breast. When, relaxing in his arms like a tired child, she

ended, almost in a whisper, with her timid plea to be allowed to stay

until morning, the tears dropped down his face.

"Until morning?" he said, with a laugh that broke into a sob--"until

death!"

Long before this his first uneasiness, at the situation--for her

sake,--had disappeared. The acquired uneasinesses of convention vanish

before the primal realities. The long-banked fire had glowed, then

broken into flames that consumed such chaff as "propriety." As he held

her in his arms after that whispered and rambling story of despair, he

trembled all over. For Elizabeth there had never been a single moment

of conventional consciousness; she was solemnly unaware of everything

but the fact that they were together for this last moment. When he said

"until death," she lifted her head and looked at him.

"Yes," she said, "_until death_."

Something in her broken whisper touched him like ice. He was suddenly

rigid. "Elizabeth, where did you mean to go to-morrow morning?" She

made no answer, but he felt that she was alert. "Elizabeth! Tell me!

what do you mean?" His loud and terrified command made her quiver; she

was bewildered by the unexpectedness of his suspicion, but too dulled

and stunned to evade it. David, with his ear close to her lips, raised

his head. "Elizabeth, don't you understand? Dear, this is life, not

death, for us both."

She drew away from him with a long sigh, struggling up feebly out of

his arms and groping for her chair; she shook her head, smiling

faintly. "I'm sorry you guessed. No, I can't go on living. There's no

use talking about it, David. I can't."

He stood looking down at her, pale from the shock of his discovery.

"Listen to me, Elizabeth: you belong to me. Don't you understand, dear?

You always have belonged to me. He knew it when he stole you from

yourself, as well as from me. You have always been mine. You have come

back to me. Do you think I will let Blair Maitland or death or God

Almighty, steal you now? Never. You belong to me! to me!"

"But--" she began.

"Oh, Elizabeth, what do we care for what they call right and wrong?

'Right' is being together!"

She frowned in a puzzled way. She had not been thinking of "right and

wrong"; her mind had been absorbed by the large and simple necessity of

death. But his inevitable reasonableness, ignoring her organic impulse,

was already splitting hairs to justify an organic impulse of his own.

"God gave you to me," he said, "and by God I'll keep you! That's what

is right; if we parted now it would be wrong."

It seemed as if the gale of passion which had been slowly rising in him

in these hours they had been together blew away the mists in which her

mind had been groping, blew away the soothing fogs of death which had

been closing in about her, and left her, shrinking, in sudden,

confusing light.

"Wrong?" she said, dazed; "I hadn't thought about that. David, I

wouldn't have come to you except--except because it was the end.

Anything else is impossible, you know."

"Why?" he demanded.

"I am married," she said, bewildered.

He laughed under his breath. "Blair Maitland will take his own

medicine, now," he said;--"you are married to _me!_"

The triumph in his voice, while it vaguely alarmed her, struck some

answering chord in her mind, for while mechanically she contradicted

him, some deeper self was saying, "yes; yes."

But aloud she said, "It can't be, David; don't you see it can't be?"

"But it _is_ already; I will never let you go. I've got you--at last.

Elizabeth, listen to me; while you've been talking, I've thought it all

out: as things are, I don't think you can possibly get a divorce from

Blair and marry me. He's 'kind' to you, you say; and he's 'decent,' and

he doesn't drink--and so forth and so forth. I know the formula to keep

a woman with a man she hates and call it being respectable. No, you

can't get a divorce from him; but he can get a divorce from you ... if

you give him the excuse to do so."

Elizabeth looked at him with perfectly uncomprehending eyes. The

innocence of them did not touch him. For the second time in her life

she was at the mercy of Love. "Blair is fond of me," she said; "he

never would give me a divorce. He has told me so a hundred times. Do

you suppose I haven't begged him to let me go? On my knees I begged

him. No, David, there is no way out except--"

"There is a way out if you love me enough to--come to me. Then," he

said in a whisper, "he will divorce you and we can be married. Oh,

Elizabeth, death is not the way out; it is _life_, dear, life! Will you

live? Will you give me life?" He was breathing as if he had been

running; he held her fingers against his lips until he bruised them.

She understood. After a minute of silence she said, faintly: "As for

me, nothing matters. Even if it is wicked--"

"It is not wicked!"

"Well, if it were, if you wanted me I would come. I don't seem to care.

Nothing seems to me wrong in the whole world. And nothing right. Do you

understand, David? I am--done. My life is worthless, anyhow. Use

it--and throw it away. But it would ruin you. No, I won't do it."

"Ruin me? It would make me! I have shriveled, I have starved, I have

frozen without you. Ask my mother if what I tell you isn't true." She

caught her breath and drew away from him. "Your mother!" she said,

faintly. But he did not notice the recoil.

"It would end your career," she said. She was confused by the mere

tumult of his words.

"Career! The only career I want is _you_. Medicine isn't the only thing

in the world, nor Philadelphia the only place to practise it. And if I

can't be a doctor, I can break stones for my wife. Elizabeth, to love

you is the only career I want. But you--can you? Am I asking more than

you can give? Do you care what people say? We may not be able to be

married for a year. Longer, perhaps; the law takes time. They will call

it disgrace, you know, the people who don't know what love means. Could

you bear that--for me? Do you love me enough for that, Elizabeth?"

His voice was hoarse with passion. He was on his knees beside her, his

face hot against hers, his arms around her. Not only his bitterly

thought-out theories of individualism, but all his years of decent

living, contributed to his overthrow at that moment. He was a man; and

here was his woman, who had been torn from him by a thief: she had come

back to him, she had toiled back through the storm, she had fought back

through cruel and imprisoning ties that had held her for nearly three

years; should he not keep her, now that she had come? The cave-dweller

in him cried out "_Yes!_" To let her go now, would be to loosen his

fingers just as they gripped the neck of the thief who had robbed him!

In the madness of that moment of hate and love, his face on hers, his

arms around her, David did not know that his tears were wet on her lips.

"Mine," he said, panting; "_mine_! my own has come back to me. Say so;

tell me so yourself. Say it! I want to hear you say it."

"Why David, I have always been yours. But I am not worth taking. I am

not--"

[Illustration: "WILL YOU LIVE? WILL YOU GIVE ME LIFE?"]

"Hush! You are mine. They shall never part us again.

Elizabeth--to-morrow we will go away." She sank against him in silence;

for a while he was silent, too. Then, in a low voice, he told her how

they must carry out a plan which had sprung, full-winged, from his

mind; "when he knows you have been here to-night," David said,--and

trembled from head to foot; "he will divorce you."

She listened, assenting, but bewildered. "I was going to die," she

said, faintly; "I don't know how to live. Oh, I think the other way

would be better."

But he did not stop to discuss it; he had put her back into the

reclining chair--once in a while the physician remembered her fatigue,

though for the most part the lover thought only of himself; he saw how

white she was, and put her in the big chair; then, drawing up a

footstool, he sat down, keeping her hand in his; sometimes he kissed

it, but all the time he talked violently of right and wrong. Elizabeth

was singularly indifferent to his distinctions; perhaps the deep and

primitive experience of looking into the face of Death made her so. At

any rate, her question was not "Is it right?" it was only "Is it best?"

Was it best for him to do this thing? Would it not injure him? David,

brushing away her objections with an exultant belief in himself, was

far less elemental. Right? What made right and wrong? Law? Elizabeth

knew better! Unless she meant God's law. As far as that went, she was

breaking it if she went on living with Blair. As for dying, she had no

right to die! She was his. Would she rob him again?

It was all the everlasting, perfectly sincere sophistry of the man who

has been swept past honor and prudence and even pity, that poured from

David's lips; and with it, love! love! love! Elizabeth, listening to

it, carried along by it, had, in the extraordinary confusion of the

moment, nothing to oppose to it but her own unworth. To this he refused

to listen, closing her lips with his own, and then going on with his

quite logical reasoning. His mind was alert to meet and arrange every

difficulty and every detail; once, half laughing, he stopped to say,

"We'll have to live on your money, Elizabeth. See what I've come to!"

The old scruples seemed, beside this new reality, merely

ridiculous--although there was a certain satisfaction in throwing

overboard that hideous egotism of his, which had made all the trouble

that had come to them. "You see," he explained, "we shall go away for a

while, until you get your divorce. And it will take time to pick up a

practice, especially, in a new place. So you will probably have to

support me," he ended, smiling. But she was too much at peace in the

haven of his clasping arms even to smile. Once, when he confessed his

shame at having doubted her--"for I did," he said; "I actually thought

you cared for him!" she roused herself: "It was my fault. I won't let

you blame yourself; it was all my fault!" she said; then sank again

into dreaming quiet.

It was midnight; the fire had died down; a stick of drift-wood on the

iron dogs, gnawed through by shimmering blue and copper flames, broke

apart, and a shower of sparks flew up, caught in the soot, and

smoldered in spreading rosettes on the chimney-back. The night,

pressing black against the windows, was full of the murmurous silence

of the rain and the soft advancing crash of the incoming tide; the man

and woman were silent, too. Sometimes he would kiss the little scar on

her wrist; sometimes press his lips into the soft cup of her palm;

there seemed no need of words. It was in one of these silences that

David suddenly raised his head and frowned.

"Listen!" he said; then a moment later: "wheels! _here?_ at this time

of night!"

Elizabeth crouched back in her chair. "It is Blair. He has followed

me--"

"No, no; it is somebody who has lost his way in the rain. Yes, I hear

him; he is coming in to ask the road."

There were hurried steps on the porch, and Elizabeth grew so deadly

white that David said again, reassuringly: "It's some passer-by. I'll

send him about his business."

Loud, vehement knocking interrupted him, and he said, cheerfully:

"Confound them, making such a noise! Don't be frightened; it is only

some farmer--"

He took up a lamp and, closing the door of the living-room behind him,

went out into the hall; some one, whoever it was, was fumbling with the

knob of the front door as if in terrible haste. David slipped the bolt

and would have opened the door, but it seemed to burst in, and against

it, clinging to the knob, panting and terrified, stood his mother.

"David! Is she--Am I too late? David! Where is Elizabeth? _Am I too

late?_"

CHAPTER XXXIII

The rainy dawn which Elizabeth had seen glimmering in the steam and

smoke of the railroad station filtered wanly through Mercer's yellow

fog. In Mrs. Maitland's office-dining-room the gas, burning in an

orange halo, threw a livid light on the haggard faces of four people

who had not slept that night.

When Blair had come frantically back from his fruitless quest at the

hotel to say, "Is she here, _now?_" Mrs. Richie had sent him at once to

Mr. Ferguson, who, roused from his bed, instantly took command.

"Tell me just what has happened, please?" he said.

Blair, almost in collapse, told the story of the afternoon. He held

nothing back. In the terror that consumed him, he spared himself

nothing; he had made Elizabeth angry; frightfully angry. But she didn't

show it; she had even said she was not angry. But she said--and he

repeated that sword-like sentence about "David's money and David's

wife." Then, almost in a whisper, he added her question

about--drowning. "She has--" he said; he did not finish the sentence.

Robert Ferguson made no comment, but his face quivered. "Have you a

carriage?" he asked, shrugging into his overcoat. Blair nodded, and

they set out.

It was after five when they came back to Mrs. Maitland's dining-room,

where the gaslight struggled ineffectually with the fog. They had done

everything which, at that hour, could be done.

"Oh, when will it ever get light!" Blair said, despairingly. He pushed

aside the food Nannie had placed on the table for them, and dropped his

face on his arms. He had a sudden passionate longing for his mother;

she would have _done_ something! She would have told these people,

these dazed, terrified people! what to do. She always knew what to do.

For the first time in his life he needed his mother.

Robert Ferguson, standing at the window, was staring out at the blind,

yellow mist. "As soon as it's light enough, we'll get a boat and go

down the river," he said, with heavy significance.

"But it is absurd to jump at such a conclusion," Mrs. Richie protested.

"You don't know her," Elizabeth's uncle said, briefly.

Blair echoed the words. "No; you don't know her."

"All the same, I don't believe it!" Mrs. Richie said, emphatically.

"For one thing, Blair says that her comb and brush are not on her

bureau. A girl doesn't take her toilet things with her when she goes

out to--"

"Elizabeth might," Mr. Ferguson said.

Blair, looking up, broke out: "Oh, that money! It's that that has made

all the trouble. Why did I say I wouldn't give it up? I'd throw it into

the fire, if it would bring her back to me!"

Mrs. Richie was silent. Her face was tense with anxiety, but it was not

the same anxiety that plowed the other faces. "Did you go to the

depot?" she said. "Perhaps she took the night train. The ticket-agent

might have seen her."

"But why should she take a night train?" Blair said; "where would she

go?"

"Why should she do a great many things she has done?" Mrs. Richie

parried; and added, softly, "I want to speak to you, Blair; come into

the parlor for a minute." When they were alone, she said,--her eyes

avoiding his; "I have an idea that she has gone to Philadelphia. To see

me."

"You? But you are here!"

"Yes; but perhaps she thought I went home yesterday; you thought so."

Blair grasped at a straw of hope. "I will telegraph--" "No; that would

be of no use. The servants couldn't answer it; and--and there is no one

else there. I will take the morning express, and telegraph you as soon

as I get home."

"But I can't wait all day!" he said; "I will wire--" he paused; it

struck him like a blow that there was only one person to whom to wire.

The blood rushed to his face. "You think that she has gone to him?"

"I think she has gone to me," she told him, coldly. "What more natural?

I am an old friend, and she was angry with you."

"Yes; she was, but--"

"As for my son," said Mrs. Richie, "he is not at home; but I assure

you,"--she stumbled a little over this; "I assure you that if he were

he would have no desire to see your wife."

Blair was silent. Then he said, in a smothered voice: "If she is at

your house, tell her I won't keep the money. I'll make Nannie build a

hospital with it; or I'll ... tell her, if she will only just come back

to me, I'll--" He could not go on.

"Blair," Robert Ferguson said, from the doorway, "it is light enough

now to get a boat."

Blair nodded. "If she has gone to you, if she is alive," he said, "tell

her I'll give him the money."

Helena Richie lifted her head with involuntary hauteur. "My son has no

interest in your money!"

"Oh," he said, brokenly, "you can't seem to think of anything but his

quarrel with me. Somehow, all that seems so unimportant now! Why, I'd

ask David to help me, if I could reach him." He did not see her

relenting, outstretched hand; for the first time in a life starved for

want of the actualities of pain, Blair was suffering; he forgot

embarrassment, he even forgot hatred; he touched fundamentals: the need

of help and the instinctive reliance upon friendship. "David would help

me!" he said, passionately; "or my mother would know what to do; but

you people--" He dashed after Mr. Ferguson, and a moment later Mrs.

Richie heard the carriage rattling down the street; the two men were

going to the river to begin their heart-sickening search.

It was then that she started upon a search of her own. She made a

somewhat lame excuse to Nannie--Nannie was the last person to be

intrusted with Helena Richie's fears! Then she took the morning express

across the mountains. She sat all day in fierce alternations of hope

and angry concern: Surely Elizabeth was alive; but suppose she was

alive--with David! David's mother, remembering what he had said to her

that Sunday afternoon on the beach, knew, in the bottom of her heart,

that she would rather have Elizabeth dead than alive under such

conditions. Her old misgivings began to press upon her: the conditions

might have held no danger for him if he had had a different mother! She

found herself remembering, with anguish, a question that had been asked

her very long ago, when David was a little boy: Can _you_ make him

brave; can _you_ make him honorable; can _you_--"I've tried, oh, I have

tried," she said; "but perhaps Dr. Lavendar ought not to have given him

to me!" It was an unendurable idea; she drove it out of her mind, and

sat looking at the mist-enfolded mountains, struggling to decide

between a hope that implied a fear and a fear that destroyed a

hope;--but every now and then, under both the hope and the fear, came a

pang of memory that sent the color into her face: Robert Ferguson's

library; his words; his kiss....

As the afternoon darkened into dusk, through sheer fatigue she relaxed

into certainty that both the hope and the fear were baseless: Elizabeth

had not gone to David; she couldn't have done such an insane thing!

David's mother began to be sorry she had suggested to Blair that his

wife might be in Philadelphia. She began to wish she had stayed in

Mercer, and not left them all to their cruel anxiety. "If she has done

what they think, I'll go back to-morrow. Robert will need me, and David

would want me to go back." It occurred to her, with a lift of joy, that

she might possibly find David at home. Owing to the bad weather, he

might not have gone down to the beach to close the cottage as he had

written her he meant to do. She wondered how he would take this news

about Elizabeth. For a moment she almost hoped he would not be at home,

so that she need not tell him. "Oh," she said to herself, "when will he

get over her cruelty to him?" As she gathered up her wraps to leave the

car, she wondered whether human creatures ever did quite "get over" the

catastrophes of life. "Have I? And I am fifty,--and it was twenty years

ago!"

When with a lurch the cab drew up against the curb, her glance at the

unlighted windows of her parlor made her sigh with relief; there was

nobody there! Yes; she had certainly been foolish to rush off across

the mountains, and leave those poor, distressed people in Mercer.

"The doctor is at Little Beach, I suppose?" she said to the woman who

answered her ring; "By-the-way, Mary, no one has been here to-day? No

lady to see me?"

"There was a lady to see the doctor; she was just possessed to see him.

I told her he was down at the beach, and she was that upset," Mary

said, smiling, "you'd 'a' thought there wasn't another doctor in

Philadelphia!" Patients were still enough of a rarity to interest the

whole friendly household.

"Who was she? What was she like? Did she give her name?" Mrs. Richie

was breathless; the servant was startled at the change in her; fear,

like a tangible thing, leaped upon her and shook her.

"Who was she?" Mrs. Richie said, fiercely.

The surprised woman, giving the details of that early call, was, of

course, ignorant of the lady's name; but after the first word or two

David's mother knew it. "Bring me a time-table. Never mind my supper! I

must see the lady. I think I know who she was. She wanted to see me,

and I must find her. I know where she has gone. Hurry! Where is the new

time-table?"

"She didn't ask for you, 'm," the bewildered maid assured her.

Mrs. Richie was not listening; she was turning the leaves of the

_Pathfinder_ with trembling fingers; the trains had been changed on the

little branch road, but somehow she must get there,--_"to-night!"_ she

said to herself. To find a train to Normans was an immense relief,

though it involved a fourteen-mile drive to Little Beach. She could not

reach them ("them!" she was sure of it now), she could not reach them

until nearly twelve, but she would be able to say that Elizabeth had

spent the night with her.

The hour before the train started for Normans seemed endless to Helena

Richie. She sent a despatch to Blair to say:

_"I have found her. Do not come for her yet. This is imperative. Will

telegraph you to-morrow."_

After that she walked about, up and down, sometimes stopping to look

out of the window into the rainswept street, sometimes pausing to pick

up a book but though she turned over the pages, she did not know what

she read. She debated constantly whether she had done well to telegraph

Blair. Suppose, in spite of her command, he should rush right on to

Philadelphia, "then what!" she said to herself, frantically. If he

found that Elizabeth had followed David down to the cottage, what would

he do? There would be a scandal! And it was not David's fault--she had

followed him; how like her to follow him, careless of everything but

her own whim of the moment! She would have recalled the despatch if she

could have done so. "If Robert were only here to tell me what to do!"

she thought, realizing, even in her cruel alarm, how greatly she

depended on him. Suddenly she must have realized something else, for a

startled look came into her eyes. "No! of course I'm not," she said;

but the color rose in her face. The revelation was only for an instant;

the next moment she was tense with anxiety and counting the minutes

before she could start for the station.

It was a great relief when she found herself at last on the little

local train, rattling out into the rainy night. When she reached

Normans it was not easy to get a carriage to go to Little Beach. No

depot hack-driver would consider such a drive on such a night. She

found her way through the rainy streets to a livery-stable, and

standing in the doorway of a little office that smelled of harnesses

and horses, she bargained with a reluctant man, who, though polite

enough to take his feet from his desk and stand up before a lady, told

her point-blank that there wasn't no money, no, nor no woman, that he'd

drive twenty-eight miles for--down to the beach and back; on no such

night as this; "but maybe one of my men might, if you'd make it worth

his while," he said, doubtfully.

"I will make it worth his while," Mrs. Richie said.

"There's a sort of inlet between us and the beach, kind of a river,

like; you'll have to ferry over," the man warned her.

"Please get the carriage at once," she said.

So the long drive began. It was very dark. At times the rain sheeted

down so that little streams of water dripped upon her from the top of

the carryall, and the side curtains flapped so furiously that she could

scarcely hear the driver grumbling that if he'd 'a' knowed what kind of

a night it was he wouldn't have undertook the job.

"I'll pay you double your price," she said in a lull of the storm; and

after that there was only the sheeting rain and the tugging splash of

mud-loaded fetlocks. At the ferry there was a long delay. "The

ferry-man's asleep, I guess," the driver told her; certainly there was

no light in the little weather-beaten house on the riverbank. The man

clambered out from under the streaming rubber apron of the carryall,

and handing the wet reins back to her to hold--"that horse takes a

notion to run sometimes," he said, casually; made his way to the

ferry-house. "Come out!" he said, pounding on the door; "tend to your

business! there's a lady wants to cross!"

The ferry-man had his opinion of ladies who wanted to do such things in

such weather; but he came, after what seemed to the shivering passenger

an interminable time, and the carryall was driven onto the

flat-bottomed boat. A minute later the creak of the cable and the slow

rock of the carriage told her they had started. It was too dark to see

anything, but she could hear the sibilant slap of the water against the

side of the scow and the brush of rain on the river. Once the dripping

horse shook himself, and the harness rattled and the old hack quivered

on its sagging springs. She realized that she was cold; she could hear

the driver and the ferryman talking; there was the blue spurt of a

match, and a whiff of very bad tobacco from a pipe. Then a dash of rain

blew in her face, and the smell of the pipe was washed out of the air.

It was after twelve when, stumbling up the path to her own house, she

leaned against the door awaiting David's answer to her knock; when he

opened it to the gust of wet wind and her drawn, white face, he was

stunned with astonishment. He never knew what answer he made to those

first broken, frantic words; as for her, she did not wait to hear his

answer. She ran past him and burst into the fire-lit silence that was

still tingling with emotion. She saw Elizabeth rising, panic-stricken,

from her chair. Clutching her shoulder, she looked hard into the

younger woman's face; then, with a great sigh, she sank down into a

chair.

"Thank God!" she said, faintly.

David, following her, stammered out, "How did you get here?" The full,

hot torrent of passion of only a moment before had come to a crashing

standstill. He could hardly breathe with the suddenness of it. His

thoughts galloped. He heard his own voice as if it had been somebody

else's, and he was conscious of his foolishness in asking his question;

what difference did it make how she got here! Besides, he knew how: she

had come over the mountains that day, taken the evening train for

Normans, and driven down here, fourteen miles--in this storm! "You must

be worn out," he said, involuntarily.

"I am in time; nothing else matters. David, go and pay the man. Here is

my purse."

He glanced at Elizabeth, hesitated, and went. The two women, alone,

looked at each other for a speechless instant.

[Illustration: CLUTCHING HER SHOULDER, SHE LOOKED HARD INTO THE YOUNGER

WOMAN'S FACE]

CHAPTER XXXIX

"You ought not to be here, you know," Helena Richie said, in a low

voice.

Elizabeth was silent.

"They are all very much frightened about you at home."

"I am sorry they are frightened."

"Your coming might be misunderstood," David's mother said; her voice

was very harsh; the gentle loveliness of her face had changed to an

incredible harshness. "I shall say I was here with you, of course; but

you are insane, Elizabeth! you are insane to be here!"

"Mother," David said, quietly, "you mustn't find fault with Elizabeth."

He had come back, and even as he spoke retreating wheels were heard.

They were alone, these three; there was no world to any of them outside

that fire-lit room, encompassed by night, the ocean, and the storm.

"Elizabeth did exactly right to come down here to--to consult me,"

David said; "but we won't talk about it now; it's too late, and you are

too tired."

Then turning to Elizabeth, he took her hand. "Won't you go up-stairs

now? You are as tired as Materna! But she must have something to eat

before she goes to bed." Still holding her hand, he opened the door for

her. "You know the spare room? I'm afraid it's rather in disorder, but

you will find some blankets and things in the closet."

Elizabeth hesitated; then obeyed him.

David was entirely self-possessed by this time; in that moment while he

stood in the rain, counting out the money from his mother's purse for

the driver, and telling the man of a short cut across the dunes, the

emotion of a moment before cooled into grim alertness to meet the

emergency: _there must be no scene_. To avoid the possibility of such a

thing, he must get Elizabeth out of the room at once. As he slipped the

bolt on the front door and hurried back to the living room, he said a

single short word between his teeth. But he was not angry; he was only

irritated--as one might be irritated at a good child whose ignorant

innocence led it into meddling with matters beyond its comprehension.

And he was not apprehensive; his mother's coming could not alter

anything; it was merely an embarrassment and distress. What on earth

should he do with her the next morning! "I'll have to lie to her," he

thought, in consternation. David had never lied to his mother, and even

in this self-absorbed moment he shrank from doing so. He was keenly

disturbed, but as the door closed upon Elizabeth he spoke quietly

enough: "You are very tired, Materna; don't let's get to discussing

things tonight. I'll bring you something to eat, and then you must go

up to your room."

"There is nothing to discuss, David," she said; "of course Elizabeth

ought not to have come down here to you. But I am here. To-morrow she

will go home with me."

She had taken off her bonnet, and with one unsteady hand she brushed

back the tendrils of her soft hair that the rain had tightened into

curls all about her temples; the glow in her cheeks from the cold air

was beginning to die out, and he saw, suddenly, the suffering in her

eyes. But for the first time in his life David Richie was indifferent

to pain in his mother's face; that calm declaration that Elizabeth

would go home with her, brushed the habit of tenderness aside and stung

him into argument--which a moment later he regretted. "You say she'll

'go home.' Do you mean that you will take her back to Blair Maitland?"

"I hope she will go to her husband."

"Why?" He was standing before her, his shoulder against the

mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets; his attitude was careless, but

his face was alert and hard; she no longer seemed a meddlesome good

child; she was his mother, interfering in what was not her business.

"Why?" he repeated.

"Because he is her husband," Helena Richie said.

"You know how he became her husband; he took advantage of an insane

moment. The marriage has ended."

"Marriage can't end, David. Living together may end; but Blair is not

unkind to Elizabeth; he is not unfaithful; he is not unloving--"

"No, my God! he is not. My poor Elizabeth!"

His mother, looking at the suddenly convulsed face before her, knew

that it was useless to pretend that this was only a matter of

preserving appearances by her presence. "David," she said, "what do you

mean by that?"

"I mean that she has done with that thief." As he spoke it flashed into

his mind that perhaps it was best to have things out with her now; then

in the morning he would arrange it, somehow, so that she and Elizabeth

should not meet;--for Elizabeth must not hear talk like this. Not that

he was afraid of its effect; certainly this soft, sweet mother of his

could not do what he had declared neither Blair Maitland, nor death,

nor God himself could accomplish! But her words would make Elizabeth

uncomfortable; so he had better tell her now, and get it over. In the

midst of his own discomfort, he realized that this would spare him the

necessity of a lie the next morning; and he was conscious of relief at

that. "Mother," he said, gently, "I was going to write to you about it,

but perhaps I had better tell you now.... She is coming to me."

"Coming to you!"

He sat down beside her, and took her hand in his; the terror in her

face made him wince. For a moment he wished he had not undertaken to

tell her; a letter would have been better. On paper, he could have

reasoned it out calmly; now, her quivering face distressed him so that

he hardly knew what he said.

"Materna, I am awfully sorry to pain you! I do wish you would realize

that things _have_ to be this way."

"What way?"

"She and I have to be together," he said, simply. "She belongs to me.

When I keep her from going back to Blair I merely keep my own. Mother,

can't you understand? there is something higher than man's law, which

ties a woman to a man she hates; there is God's law, which gives her to

the man she loves! Oh, I am sorry you came to-night! To-morrow I would

have written to you. You don't know how distressed I am to pain you,

but--poor mother!"

She had sunk back in her chair with a blanched face. She said, faintly,

"_David!_"

"Don't let's talk about it, Materna," he said, pitifully. He could not

bear to look at her; it seemed as if she had grown suddenly old; she

was broken, haggard, with appalled eyes and trembling lips. "You don't

understand," David said, greatly distressed.

Helena Richie put her hands over her face. "Don't I?" she said. There

was a long pause; he took her hand and stroked it gently; but in spite

of tenderness for her he was thinking of that other hand, young and

thrilling to his own, which he had held an hour before; his lips stung

at the memory of it; he almost forgot his mother, cowering in her

chair. Suddenly she spoke:

"Well, David, what do you propose to do? After you have seduced another

man's wife and branded Elizabeth with a--a dreadful name--"

His pity broke like a bubble; he struck the arm of his chair with a

clenched hand. "You must not use such words to me! I will not listen to

words that soil your lips and my ears! Will you leave this room or

shall I?"

"Answer my question first: what do you mean to do after you have taken

Elizabeth?"

"I shall marry her, of course. He will divorce her, and we shall be

married." He was trembling with indignation: "I will not submit to this

questioning," he said. He got up and opened the door. "Will you leave

me, please?" he said, frigidly.

But she did not rise. She was bending forward, her hands gripped

between her knees. Then, slowly, she raised her bowed head and there

was authority in her face. "Wait. You must listen. You owe it to me to

listen."

He hesitated. "I owe it to myself not to listen to such words as you

used a moment ago." He was standing before her, his arms folded across

his breast; there was no son's hand put out now to touch hers.

"I won't repeat them," she said, "although I don't know any others that

can be used when a man takes another man's wife, or when a married

woman goes away with a man who is not her husband."

"You drag me into an abominable position in making me even defend

myself. But I will defend myself. I will explain to you that, as things

are, Elizabeth cannot get a divorce from Blair Maitland. But if she

leaves him for me, he will divorce her; and we can marry."

"Perhaps he will not divorce her."

"You mean out of revenge? I doubt if even he could be such a brute as

that."

"There have been such brutes."

"Very well; then we will do without his divorce! We will do without the

respectability that you think so much of."

"Nobody can do without it very long," she said, mildly. "But we won't

argue about respectability; and I won't even ask you whether you will

marry her, if she gets her divorce."

His indignation paused in sheer amazement. "No," he said. "I should

hardly think that even you would venture to ask me such a question!"

"I will only ask you, my son, if you have thought how you would smirch

her name by such a process of getting possession of her?"

"Oh," he said, despairingly, "what is the use of talking about it? I

can't make you understand!"

"Have you considered that you will ruin Elizabeth?" she insisted.

"You may call happiness 'ruin,' if you want to, mother. We don't--she

and I."

"I suppose you wouldn't believe me if I told you it wouldn't be

happiness?"

Her question was too absurd to answer. Besides, he was determined not

to argue with her; argument would only prolong this futile and

distressing interview. So, holding in the leash of respect for her,

contempt for her opinions, he listened with strained and silent

patience to what she had to say of duty and endurance. It all belonged,

he thought, to her generation and to her austere goodness; but from his

point of view it was childish. When at last he spoke, in answer to an

insistent question as to whether Elizabeth realized how society would

regard her course, his voice as well as his words showed his entire

indifference to her whole argument. "Yes," he said; "I have pointed out

to Elizabeth the fact that though our course will be in accordance with

a Law that is infinitely higher than the laws that you think so much

of, there will be, as you say, people to throw mud at her."

"A 'higher law,'" she said, slowly. "I have heard of the 'higher law,'

David."

"That Elizabeth will obey it for me, that she is willing to expose

herself to the contempt of little minds, makes me adore her! And I am

willing, I love her enough, to accept her sacrifice--"

"Though you did not love her enough to accept the trifling matter of

her money?" his mother broke in.

Sarcasm from her was so totally unexpected that for a moment he did not

realize that his armor had been pierced. "God knows I believe it is for

her happiness," he said; then, suddenly, his face began to burn, and in

an instant he was deeply angry.

"David," she said, "you seem very sure of God; you speak His name very

often. Have you really considered Him in your plan?"

He smothered an impatient exclamation; "Mother, that sort of talk means

nothing to me; and apparently my reason for my course means nothing to

you. I can't make you understand--"

"I don't need you to make me understand," she interrupted him; "and

your reason is older than you are; I guess it is as old as human

nature: You want to be happy. That is your reason, David; nothing else."

"Well, it satisfies us," he said, coldly; "I wish you wouldn't insist

upon discussing it, mother, you are tired, and--"

"Yes, I am tired," she said, with a gasp. "David, if you will promise

me not to speak to Elizabeth of this until you and I can talk it over

quietly--"

"Elizabeth and I are going away together, to-morrow."

"You shall not do it!" she cried.

His eyes narrowed. "I must remind you," he said, "that I am not a boy.

I will do what seems to me right,--right?" he interrupted himself, "why

is it you can't see that it is right? Can't you realize that Elizabeth

is _mine?_ It is amazing to me that you can't see that Nature gives her

to me, by a Law that is greater than any human law that was ever made!"

"The animals know that law," she said. He would not hear her: "That

unspeakable scoundrel stole her; he stole her just as much as if he had

drugged her and kidnapped her. Yes; I take my own!"

His voice rang through the house; Elizabeth, in her room, shivering

with excitement, wondering what they were saying, those two--heard the

jar of furious sound, and crept, trembling, halfway down-stairs.

"I take my own," he repeated, "and I will make her happy; she belongs

in my arms, if, my God! we die the next day!"

"Oh," said Helena Richie, suddenly sobbing, "what _am_ I to do? what am

I to do?" As she spoke Elizabeth entered. David's start of dismay, his

quick protest, "Go back, dear; don't, don't get into this!" was

dominated by his mother's cry of relief; she rose from her chair and

ran to Elizabeth, holding out entreating hands. "You will not let him

be so mad, Elizabeth? You will not let him be so bad?"

"Mother, for Heaven's sake, stop!" David implored her; "this is awful!"

"He is not bad," Elizabeth said, in a low voice, passing those

outstretched hands without a look. All her old antagonism to an

untempted nature seemed to leap into her face. "I heard you talking,

and I came down. I could not let you reproach David."

"Haven't I the right to reproach him?--to save him from dishonoring

himself as well as you?"

"You must not use that word!" Elizabeth cried out, trembling all over.

"David is not dishonorable."

"Not dishonorable! Do you say there is nothing dishonorable in taking

the wife of another man?"

"Elizabeth," David said, quietly, putting his arm around her, "my

mother is very excited. We are not going to talk any more to-night. Do

go up-stairs, dear." His one thought was to get her out of the room; it

had been dreadful enough to struggle with his mother alone--power and

passion and youth, against terror and weakness. But to struggle in

Elizabeth's presence would be shocking. Not, he assured himself, that

he had the slightest misgiving as to the effect upon her of the

arguments to which he had been obliged to listen, but. . .

"Do leave us, dearest," he said, in a low voice; the misgiving which he

denied had driven the color out of his face.

His mother raised her hand with abrupt command: "No, Elizabeth must

hear what I have to say." She heard it unmoved; the entreaty not to

wound her uncle's love, and hurt Nannie's pride, and betray old Miss

White's trust, did not touch her. All she said was, "I am sorry; but I

can't help it. David wants me."

Then Helena Richie turned again to her son. "How do you mean to support

your mistress, David? Of course the scandal will end your career."

Instantly Elizabeth quivered; the apprehension in her eyes made his

words stumble: "There--there are other things than my profession. I am

not afraid that I cannot support my _wife_."

But that flicker of alarm in Elizabeth's eyes had caught Helena

Richie's attention. "Why, Elizabeth," she said, in an astonished voice.

"_You love him!_" Then she added, simply: "Forgive me." Her words were

without meaning to the other two, but they brought a burst of hope into

her entreaty: "Then you won't ruin him! I know you won't ruin my

boy--if you love him."

Elizabeth flinched: "David! I told you--that is what I--"

He caught her hand and pressed it to his mouth. "Darling, she doesn't

understand."

"I _do_ understand!" his mother said. She paused for a breathless

moment, and stood gripping the table, looking with dilating eyes and

these two, who, loving each other, were yet preparing to murder Love.

"I thank God," she said, and the elation in her face was almost joy; "I

thank God, Elizabeth, that I understand the disgrace such wickedness

will bring! No honest man will trust him; no decent woman will respect

you! And listen, Elizabeth: even _you_ will not really trust him; and

he will never entirely respect you!"

Elizabeth slowly drew her hand from David's--and instantly he knew that

she was frightened. What! Was he to lose her again? He shook with rage.

When under that panic storm of words, that menace of distrust and

disgrace, Elizabeth, in an agony of uncertainty, hid her face in her

hands, David could have killed the robber who was trying to tear her

from him. He burst into denunciation of the littleness which could

regard their course in any other way than he did himself. He had no

pity because his assailant was his mother. He gave no quarter because

she was a woman; she was an enemy! an enemy who had stolen in out of

the night to rob him of his lately won treasure. "Don't listen to her,"

he ended, hoarsely; "she doesn't know what she is talking about!"

"But, David, that was what I said. I said it would be bad for you; she

says it will ruin you--"

"It is a lie!" he said.

It was nearly three o'clock. They were all at the breaking-point of

anger and terror.

"Elizabeth," Helena Richie implored, "if you love him, are you willing

to destroy him? You could not bear to have me, his mother, speak of his

dishonor; how about letting the world speak of it--if you love him?"

"David," Elizabeth said again, her shaking hands on his arm; "you hear

what she says? Perhaps she is right. Oh, I think she is right! What

shall I do?"

The entreaty was the entreaty of a child, a frightened, bewildered

child. Helena Richie caught her breath; for a single strange moment she

forgot her agony of fear for her son; the woman in her was stronger

than the mother in her; some obscure impulse ranged her with this girl,

as if against a common enemy. "My dear, my dear!" she said, "he shall

not have you. I will save you."

But Elizabeth was not listening. "David, if I should injure you"--

"You will ruin him," his mother repeated.

David gave her a deadly look. "You will kill me, Elizabeth, unless you

come to me," he said, roughly. "Do you want to rob me again?--You've

done it once," he reminded her; love made him brutal.

There was a moment of silence. The eyes of the mother and son crossed

like swords. Elizabeth, standing between them, shivered; then slowly

she turned to David, and held out her hands, her open palms falling at

her sides with a gesture of complete and pitiful surrender. "Very well,

David. I won't do it again. I won't hurt you again. I will do whatever

you tell me."

David caught her in his arms. His mother trembled with despair; the

absolute immovability of these two was awful!

"Elizabeth, he is selfish and wicked! David, have you no manhood? Shame

on you!" Contempt seemed her last resource; it did not touch him. "Wait

two days," she implored him; "one day, even--"

"I told you we are going to-morrow," he said. He was urging Elizabeth

gently from the room, but at his mother's voice she paused.

"Suppose," Helena Richie was saying--"suppose that Blair does not give

you a divorce?"

Elizabeth looked into David's eyes silently.

"And," his mother said, "when David gets tired of you--what then?"

"Mother!"

"Men do tire of such women, Elizabeth. What then?"

"I am not afraid of that," the girl said.

The room was very still. The two looking into each other's eyes needed

no words; the battling mother had apparently reached the end of effort.

Yet it was not the end. As she stood there a slow illumination grew in

her face--the knowledge, tragic and triumphant, that if Love would save

others, itself it cannot save! . . . "I'm not afraid that he will tire

of me," Elizabeth had said; and David's mother, looking at him with

ineffable compassion, said, very gently:

"I was not afraid of that, once, myself."

That was all. She was standing up, clinging to the table; her face

gray, her chin shaking. They neither of them grasped the sense of her

words; then suddenly David caught his breath:

"What did you say?"

"I said--" She stopped. "Oh, my poor David, I wouldn't tell you if I

could help it; if only there was any other way! But there isn't. I have

tried, oh, I have tried every other way." She put her hands over her

face for an instant, then looked at him. "David, I said that _I_ was

not afraid, once, myself, that _my_ lover would tire of me." There was

absolute silence in the room. "But he did, Elizabeth. He did. He did."

Then David said, "I don't understand."

"Yes, you do; you understand that a man once talked to me just as you

are talking to Elizabeth; he said he would marry me when I got my

divorce. I think he meant it--just as you mean it, now. At any rate, I

believed him. Just as Elizabeth believes you."

David Richie stepped back violently; his whole face shuddered. "You?"

he said, "my mother? No!--no!--no!"

And his mother, gathering up her strength, cringing like some faithful

dog struck across the face, pointed at him with one shaking hand.

"Elizabeth, did you see how he looked at me? _Some day your son will

look that way at you._"

CHAPTER XL

No one spoke. The murmuring crash along the sands was suddenly loud in

their ears, but the room was still. It was the stillness of finality;

David had lost Elizabeth.

He knew it; but he could not have said why he knew it. Perhaps none of

the great decisions of passion can at the moment say "why." Under the

lash of some invisible whip, the mind leaps this way or that without

waiting for the approval of Reason. Certainly David did not wait for it

to know that all was over between him and Elizabeth. He did not

reason--he only cringed back, his eyes hidden in his bent arm, and

gasped out those words which, scourging his mother, arraigned himself.

Nor was there any reason in Elizabeth's cry of "Oh, Mrs. Richie, I love

you"; or in her run across the room to drop upon the floor beside

David's mother, clasping her and pressing her face against the older

woman's shaking knees. "I _do_ love you--" Only in Helena Richie's mind

could there have been any sort of logic. "This," her ravaged and

exalted face seemed to say, "this was why he was given to me." Once he

had told her that her goodness had saved him; that night her goodness

had not availed. And God had used her sin! Aloud, all that she said was:

"David, don't feel so badly. It isn't as if I were your own mother, you

know; you needn't be so un-happy, David." Her eyes yearned over him.

"You won't do it?" she said, in a breathless whisper.

To himself he was saying: "It makes no difference! What difference can

it possibly make? Not a particle; not a particle." Yet some deeper self

must have known that the difference was made, for at that whispered

question he seemed to shake his head. But Elizabeth, weeping, said:

"No; we won't--we won't! Dear Mrs. Richie, I love you. David! Speak to

her."

He got up with a stupid look, then his eye fell on his mother's face.

"You are worn out," he said in a dazed way, "You'll come up-stairs now?

Elizabeth, make her go up-stairs."

She was worn out; she nodded, with a sort of meek obedience, and put

out her hand to Elizabeth. David opened the door for them and followed

them up-stairs. Would his mother have this or that? Could he do

anything? Nothing, nothing. No, Elizabeth must not stay with her,

please; she would rather be alone. As he turned away she called to him,

"Elizabeth and I will take the noon train, David."

And he said, "Yes, I will have a carriage here."

The door closed; on one side of it was the mother, exhausted almost to

unconsciousness, yet elate, remembering no more the anguish for joy of

what had been born out of it. On the other side these two, still

ignorant--as the new-born always are--of the future to which that

travail had pledged them. They stood together in the narrow upper hall

and their pitiful eyes met in silence. Then David took her in his arms

and held her for a long moment. Then he kissed her. She whispered,

"Good-by, David." But he was speechless. He went with her to her own

door, left her without a word, and went down-stairs.

In the clamorous emptiness of the living-room he looked about him;

noticed that the table-cover was still crumpled from his mother's hands

and smoothed it automatically; then he sat down. He had the sensation,

spiritually, that a man might have physically whose face had been

violently and repeatedly slapped. The swiftness of the confounding

experiences of the last nine hours made him actually dizzy. His

thoughts rushed to one thing, then to another. Elizabeth? No, no; he

could not think of her yet. His mother? No, he could not think of her,

either. It occurred to him that he was cold, and getting up abruptly,

he went to the fireplace, and kicked the charred sticks of driftwood

together over a graying bed of ashes. Then he heard a chair pushed back

overhead and a soft, tired step, and he wondered vaguely if his

mother's room was comfortable. Reaching for the bellows, he knelt down

and blew the reluctant embers into a faint glow; when a hesitant

flicker of flame caught the half-burned logs he got on his feet and

stood, his fingers on the mantelpiece, his forehead on the back of his

hand, watching the fire catch and crackle into cheerful warmth. He

stood there for a long time. Suddenly his cheek grew rigid: some man,

some _beast_, had--my God! wronged Materna! It was the first really

clear thought; instantly some other thought must have sprung up to meet

it, for he said, under his breath, "No, because I didn't mean . . . it

is different with us; quite different!" The thought, whatever it was,

must have persisted, for it stung him into restless movement. He began

to walk about; once or twice he stumbled over a footstool, that his

eyes, looking blindly at the floor, apparently did not see. Once he

stood stock-still, the blood surging in his ears, his face darkly red.

But his mind was ruthlessly clear. He was remembering; he was putting

two and two together. She was a widow; he knew that. Her marriage had

been unhappy; he knew that. There had been a man--he dimly remembered a

man. He had not thought of him for twenty years! . . . "Damn him,"

David said, and the tears stood in his eyes. Then again that thought

must have come to him, for he said to himself, violently, "But I _love_

Elizabeth, it is different with me!" Perhaps that persistent inner

voice said, "In what way?" for he said again, "Entirely different! It

is the only way to make him divorce her so we can be married." Again he

stood still and stared blindly at the floor. That a man could live who

would be base enough to take advantage of--_Materna!_ Between rage and

pity, and confusion he almost forgot Elizabeth, until suddenly the

whirl of his thoughts was pierced by the poignant realization that his

outcry of dismay at his mother's confession had practically told

Elizabeth that he was willing to let her do what he found unthinkable

in his mother. His whole body winced with mortification. It was the

first prick of the sword of shame--that sword of the Lord! Even while

he reddened to his forehead the sword-thrust came again in a flash of

memory. It was only a single sentence; neither argument nor entreaty

nor remonstrance; merely the statement of a fact: "_you did not love

her enough to accept her money._" At the time those ironical words were

spoken they had scarcely any meaning to him, and what meaning they had

was instantly extinguished by anger. Now abruptly they reverberated in

his ears. He forgot his mother; he forgot the "beast," who was, after

all, only the same kind of a beast that he was himself. "You, who could

not accept a girl's money could take her good name; could urge her to a

course which in your mother overwhelms you with horror; could ask her

to give you that which ranks a man who accepted it from your mother as

a 'beast.'" David had never felt shame before; he had known

mortification, and regret, too, to a greater or less degree; and

certainly he had known remorse; he had experienced the futile rage of a

man who realizes that he has made a fool of himself; these things he

had known, as every man nearly thirty years old must know them.

Especially and cruelly he had known them when he understood the effect

of the reasoning egotism of his letter upon Elizabeth. But the

beneficent agony of shame he had never known until this moment.

In the next hour or two, while the flame of the lamp still burning on

the table, whitened in the desolating morning light that crept into the

room, David Richie did not reason things out consecutively. His

thoughts came without apparent sequence; sometimes he wondered, dully,

if it were still raining; wondered how he would get a carriage in the

morning; wondered if Elizabeth was asleep; wondered if she would go

back to Blair Maitland? "No, no, no!" he said aloud; "not that; that

can't be." Yet through all this disjointed thought his eyes, cleared by

shame, saw Reason coming slowly up to explain and confirm his

conviction that, whatever Elizabeth did or did not do, for the present

he had lost her. And Reason, showing him his likeness to that other

"beast," showing him his arrogance to his mother, his cruelty to his

poor girl, his poor, pitiful Elizabeth! showed him something else: his

assertions of his intrinsic right to Elizabeth--how much of their force

was due to love for her, how much to hatred of Blair? David's habit of

corroborating his emotions by a mental process had more than once

shackled him and kept him from those divine impetuosities that add to

the danger and the richness of life; but this time the logical habit

led him inexorably into deeper depths of humiliation. It was dawn when

he saw that he had hated Blair more than he had loved Elizabeth. This

was the most intolerable revelation of all; he had actually been about

to use Love to express Hate!

Up-stairs Elizabeth had had her own vision; it was not like David's.

There was no sense of shame. There was only Love! Love, pitiful,

heart-breaking, remorseful. When David left her she sank down on the

edge of her bed and cried--not for disappointment or dread or

perplexity, not for herself, not for David, but for Helena Richie. Once

she crept across the hall and listened at the closed door. Silence.

Then she pushed it open and listened again. Oh, to go to her, to put

her arms about her, to say, "I will be good, I will do whatever you

say, I love you." But all was still except for soft, scarcely heard,

tranquil breathing. For David's mother slept.

When Elizabeth came down the next morning it was to the crackle of

flames and the smell of coffee and the sight of David scorching his

face over toasting bread. It was so unheroic that it was almost heroic,

for it meant that they could keep on the surface of life. David said,

simply, "Did you get any sleep, Elizabeth?" and she said: "Well, not

much. Here, let me make the toast; you get something for your mother."

But when she carried a little tray of food up to Mrs. Richie, and

kneeling by the bedside took the soft mother-hand in hers, she went

below the surface.

"I am going back to him," she said; and put Mrs. Richie's hand against

her lips.

David's mother gave her a long look, but she had nothing to say.

Later, as they came down-stairs together, Elizabeth, still holding that

gentle hand in hers, felt it tremble when Helena Richie met her son.

Perhaps his trembled, too. Yet his tenderness and consideration for

her, as he told her how he had arranged for her journey to town was

almost ceremonious; it seemed as if he dared not come too near her. It

was not until he was helping her into the carriage that he made any

reference to the night before:

"I have given her up," he said, almost in a whisper, "but she can't go

back to him, you know--that can't be! Mother, that can't be?"

But she was silent. Then Elizabeth came up behind him and got into the

carriage; there were no good-bys between them.

"I shall come to town to-morrow on the noon train," he told his mother;

and she looked at him as one looks at another human creature who turns

his face toward the wilderness. There was nothing more that she could

do for him; he must hunger and know how he might be fed; he must hear

the lying whisper that if he broke the Law, angelic hands would prevent

the law from breaking him; he must see the Kingdom he desired, the

glory of it, and its easy price. He must save himself.

Elizabeth, groping for Mrs. Richie's hand, held it tightly in hers, and

the old carriage began its slow tug along the road that wound in and

out among the dunes....

The story of David and Elizabeth and Blair pauses here.

Or perhaps one might say it begins here. A decision such as was reached

in the little house by the sea is not only an end, it is also a

beginning. In their bleak certainty that they were parted, David and

Elizabeth had none of that relief of the dismissal of effort, which

marks the end of an experience. Effort was all before them; for the

decision not to change conditions did not at the moment change

character; and it never changed temperaments. Elizabeth was as far from

self-control on the morning after that decision as she had been in the

evening that preceded it. There had to be many evenings of rebellion,

many mornings of taking up her burden; the story of them begins when

she knew, without reasoning about it, that the hope of escape from them

had ceased.

Because of those gray hours of dawn and shame and self-knowledge, love

did not end in David, nor did he cease to be rational and inarticulate;

there had to be weeks of silent, vehement refusal to accept the

situation: something must be done! Elizabeth must get a divorce

"somehow"! It would take time, a long time, perhaps; but she must get

it, and then they would marry. There had to be weeks of argument: "why

should I sacrifice my happiness to 'preserve the ideal of the

permanence of marriage'?" There had to be weeks of imprisonment in

himself before a night came when his mother woke to find him at her

bedside: "Mother--mother--mother," he said. What else he said, how in

his agonizing dumbness he was able to tell her that she was the mother,

not, indeed, of his body, but of his soul--was only for her ears; what

his face, hidden in her pillow, confessed, the quiet darkness held

inviolate. This silent man's experiences of shame and courage, began

that night when, in the fire-lit room, besieged by darkness and the

storm, that other experience ended.

Blair's opportunity--the divine opportunity of sacrifice, had its

beginning in that same desolate End. But there had to be angry days of

refusing to recognize any opportunity--life had not trained him to such

courageous recognition! There had to be days when the magnanimity of

his prisoner in returning to her prison was unendurable to him. There

had to be months, before, goaded by his god, he urged his hesitating

manhood to abide by the decision of chance whether or not he should

offer her her freedom. There even had to be days of deciding just what

the chance should be!

There had to be for these three people, caught in the mesh of

circumstance, time for growth and for hope, and that is why their story

pauses just when the angel has troubled the water. All the impulses and

the resolutions that had their beginnings in that End, are like circles

on that troubled water, spreading, spreading, spreading, until they

touch Eternity. At first the circles were not seen; only the turmoil in

the pool when the angel touched it. And how dark the water was with the

sediment of doubt and fear and loss in the days that followed that

decision which was the beginning of all the circles!

Robert Ferguson and David's mother used to wonder how they could any of

them get through the next few months. "But good is going to come out of

it somehow," Helena Richie said once. "Oh, you mean 'character' and all

that sort of thing," he said, sighing. "I tell you what it is, I'm a

lot more concerned about my child's happiness than her 'character.'

Elizabeth is good enough for me as she is."

David's mother had no rebuke for him; she looked at him with pitying

eyes; he was so very unhappy in his child's unhappiness! She herself

was doing all she could for the "child"; she was in Mercer most of that

winter. "No, I won't hire the house," she told the persistent landlord;

"I can't afford it; I'm only here for a few days at a time. No, you

_sha'n't_ lower the rent! Robert, Robert, what shall I do to keep you

from being so foolish? I wouldn't live there if you gave me the house!

I want to stay at the hotel and be near Elizabeth."

In her frequent visits in those next few months she grew very near to

Elizabeth; it was a wonderfully tender relation, full of humility on

both sides.

"I never knew how good you were, Mrs. Richie," Elizabeth said.

"I never really understood you, dear child," Helena Richie confessed.

She drew near Blair, too; she knew how he had borne the story Elizabeth

told him when she came back to Mercer; she knew the recoil of anger and

jealousy, then the reaction of cringing acceptance of the fact; she

knew his passionate efforts, as the winter passed, to buy his way into

his wife's friendship by doing everything he fancied might please her.

She knew why he asked Mr. Ferguson to find a place for him in the

Works, and why he induced Nannie to take the money he believed to be

his, and build a hospital. "He is going to use the old house for it,"

Mrs. Richie told Mr. Ferguson; "well! it's one way of getting Nannie

out of it, though I'm afraid he'll have to turn the workmen in and

rebuild over her head before he can move her."

"It's the bait in the trap," Robert Ferguson said, contemptuously.

"Well, suppose it is? Can you blame him for trying to win her?"

"He'll never succeed. If he was half-way honest he would have offered

to let her go in the first place. If he expects any story-book business

of 'duty creating love' he'll come out the small end of the horn."

"I suppose he hopes," she admitted. But she sighed. She knew those

hopes would never be realized, and she felt the pain of that poor,

selfish, passionate heart until her own ached. Yes, of course he ought

to 'offer to let her go.' She knew that as well as Elizabeth's uncle

himself. "And he will," she said to herself. Then her face was softly

illuminated by the lambent flame of some inner serenity: "But she won't

go!"

Those were the days when Blair would not recognize his opportunity. It

was not because it was not pointed out to him.

"I'm certain that a divorce could be fixed up some way," Robert

Ferguson said once, "and I hinted as much to him. I told him she

couldn't endure the sight of him."

"Do you call that a hint?"

"Well, he didn't take it, anyway. Of course, if nothing moves him, I

suppose I can shoot him?"

She smiled. "You won't have to shoot him. He is very unhappy. Wait."

"For a change of heart? It will never come! No, the marriage was a

travesty from the beginning, and I ought to have pulled her out of it.

I did suggest it to her, but she said she was going to stick it out

like a man."

Blair was indeed unhappy. His god was tormenting him by contrasting

Elizabeth's generosity with his selfishness. It was then that he saw,

terror-stricken, his opportunity. He tried not to see it. He denied it,

he struggled against it; yet all the while he was drawn by an agonized

curiosity to consider it. Finally, with averted eyes, he held out

shrinking hands to chance, to see if opportunity would fall into them.

This was some six months after she had come back to him; six months on

her part of clinging to Mrs. Richie's strength; of wondering if David,

working hard in Philadelphia, was beginning to be happier; of wondering

if Blair was really any happier for her weariness of soul. Six months

on Blair's part, of futile moments of hope because Elizabeth seemed a

little kinder;--"perhaps she's beginning to care!" he would say to

himself; six months of agonizing jealousy when he knew she did not

care; of persistent, useless endeavors to touch her heart; of endless

small, pathetic sacrifices; of endless small, pathetic angers and

repentances. "Blair," she used to say, with wonderful patience, after

one of these glimmerings of hope had arisen in him because of some

careless amiability on her part, "I am sorry to be unkind; I wish you

would get over caring about me, but all I can do _ever_ is just to be

friends. No, I don't hate you. Why should I hate you? You didn't wrong

me any more than I wronged you. We are just the same; two bad people.

But I'm trying to be good, truly I am; and--and I'm sorry for you,

Blair, dear. That's all I can say."

It was after one of those miserable discussions between the husband and

wife that Blair had gone out of the hotel with violent words of

despair. He never knew just where he spent that day--certainly not in

the office at the Works; but wherever it was, it brought him face to

face with his opportunity. Should he accept it? Should he refuse it? He

said to himself that he could not decide. Perhaps he was right; he had

shirked decisions all his life; perhaps so great a decision was

impossible for him. At any rate, he thought it was. Something must

decide for him. What should it be? All that afternoon he tried to make

a small decision which should settle the great decision. Of course, he

might pitch up a penny? no, the swiftness of such judgment seemed

beyond endurance; he might say: "if it rains before noon, I'll let her

go;" then he could watch the skies, and meet the decision gradually;

no; it rained so often in March! If when he got back to the hotel he

found her wearing this piece of jewelry or that; if the grimy pigeon,

teetering up and down on the granite coping across the street, flew

away before he reached the next crossing. . . . On and on his mind

went, jibing away, terrified, from each suggestion; then returning to

it again. It was dusk when he came back to the hotel. David's mother

was sitting with Elizabeth, and they were talking, idly, of Nannie's

new house, or Cherry-pie's bad cold, or anything but the one thing that

was always on their minds, when, abruptly, Blair entered. He flung open

the door with a bang,--then stood stock-still on the threshold. He was

very pale, but the room was so shadowy that his pallor was not noticed.

"Why are you sitting here in the dark!" he cried out, violently. "Why

don't you light the gas? Good God!" he said, almost with a sob.

Elizabeth looked at him in astonishment; before she could reply that

she and Mrs. Richie liked the dusk and the firelight, he saw that she

was not alone, and burst into a loud laugh: "Mrs. Richie here? How

appropriate!" He came forward into the circle of flickering light, but

he seemed to walk unsteadily and his face was ghastly. Helena Richie

gave him a startled look. Blair's gentleness had never failed David's

mother before; she thought, with consternation, that he had been

drinking. Perhaps her gravity checked his reckless mood, for he said

more gently: "I beg your pardon; I didn't see you, Mrs. Richie. I was

startled because everything was dark. Outer darkness! Please don't

go,--it's so appropriate for you to be here!" he ended. Again his voice

was sardonic. Mrs. Richie said, coldly, that she had been just about to

return to her own room. As she left them, she said to herself,

anxiously, that she was afraid there was something the matter. She

would have been sure of it had she stayed in the twilight with the

husband and wife.

"I'll light the gas," Elizabeth said, rising. But he caught her wrist.

"No! No! there's no use lighting up now." As he spoke he pulled her

down on his knee. "Elizabeth, is there no hope?" he said; "none?

_none?_" She was silent. He leaned his forehead on her shoulder for a

moment, and she heard that dreadful sound--a man's weeping. Then

suddenly, roughly, he flung his arms about her, and kissed her

violently--her lips, her eyes, her neck; the next moment he pushed her

from his knee. "Why, why did you sit here in the dark to-night? I never

knew you to sit in the dark!" He got on his feet, leaving her, standing

amazed and offended, her hair ruffled, the lace about her throat in

disorder; at the window, his back turned to her, he flung over his

shoulder: "Look here--you can go. I won't hold you any longer. I

suppose your uncle can fix it up; some damned legal quibble will get

you out of it. I--I'll do my part."

Before she could ask him what he meant he went out. He had accepted his

opportunity!

But it was not until the next day that she really understood.

"He says," Mrs. Richie told Robert Ferguson, "that he will take Nannie

and go abroad definitely; she can call it desertion. Yes; on Nannie's

money of course; how else could he go? Oh, my poor Blair!"

"'Poor Blair'? He deserves all he gets," Elizabeth's uncle said, after

his first astonishment. Then, in spite of himself, he was sorry for

Blair. "I suppose he's hard hit," he said, grudgingly, "but as for

'poor Blair,' I don't believe it goes very deep with him. You say he

was out of temper because she had not lighted up, and told her she

could go? Rather a casual way of getting rid of a wife."

"Robert, how can you be so unjust?" she reproached him. "Oh, perhaps he

will be a man yet! How proud his mother would be."

"My dear Helena, one swallow doesn't make a summer." Then, a little

ashamed of his harshness, he added, "No, he'll never be very much of a

person; but he's his mother's son, so he can't be all bad; he'll just

wander round Europe, with Nannie tagging on behind, enjoying himself

more or less harmlessly."

"Robert," she said, softly, "I'm not sure that Elizabeth will accept

his sacrifice."

"What! Not accept it? Nonsense! Of course she'll accept it. I should

have doubts of her sanity if she didn't. If Blair had been half as much

of a man as his mother, he'd have made the 'sacrifice,' as you call it,

long ago. Helena, you're too extreme. Duty is well enough, but don't

run it into the ground."

Mrs. Richie was silent.

"Helena, you _know_ she ought to leave him!"

"If every woman left unpleasant conditions--mind, he isn't unkind or

wicked; what would become of us, Robert?"

Elizabeth's uncle would not pursue her logic; his face suddenly

softened: "Well, David will come to his own at last! I wonder how soon

after the thing is fixed up (_if_ it can be fixed up) they can marry?"

The color rose sharply in her face.

"You think they won't?" he exclaimed.

"I hope not. Oh, I hope not!"

"Why not?" he said, affronted.

"Because I don't want them, just for their own happiness, to do what

seems to me wrong."

"Wrong! If the law permits it, you can't say 'wrong.'"

"_I_ think it is," she said timidly; then tried to explain that it

seemed to her that no one, for his own happiness, had a right to do a

thing which would injure an ideal by which the rest of us live; "I

don't express it very well," she said, flushing.

Robert Ferguson snorted. "That's high talk; well enough for angels; but

no men and mighty few women are angels. I," he interrupted himself

hurriedly, "I don't like angel women myself."

She smiled a little sadly. "And besides that," she said, "it seems to

me we ought to take the consequences of our sins. I think they ought,

all three of them, to just try and make the best of things. Robert, did

it ever strike you that making the best of things was one way of

entering the Kingdom of Heaven?"

He gave her a tender look, but he shook his head. "Helena," he said,

gently, "do you mind telling me how you finally brought them to their

senses that night? Don't if you'd rather not."

Her face quivered. "I would rather. There was only one way; I ... told

them, Robert."

There was a moment of silence, then Robert Ferguson twitched his

glasses off and began to polish them. "You are an angel, after all," he

said. Then he lifted a ribbon falling from her waist, and kissed it.

"I sha'n't try to influence either David or Elizabeth," she said; "they

will do what they think right; it may not be _my_ right--"

"It won't be," he told her, dryly; "once a man is free to marry his

girl, mothers take a back seat."

She smiled wisely.

"Oh, you can smile; but, my dear Helena, the apron-string won't do for

a man who is thirty years old. Yes, they'll do as they choose, in spite

of either you or me--and _I_ know what it will be!"

"Poor Blair," she said, sighing. "Robert, if she leaves him you will be

kind to him, won't you? He's never had a chance--"

But he was not thinking of Blair; he was looking into her face, and his

own face moved with emotion: "Helena, don't be obstinate any longer. We

have so little time left! I don't ask you to love me, but just marry

me, Helena."

"Oh, my dear Robert--"

"Will you?"

"If I lived here," she said breathlessly, "my boy could not come to see

me."

"Is that the reason you won't say yes?"

She was silent.

"Will you?" he said again.

Her voice was so low he could hardly hear her answer: "No."

And at that his face glowed with sudden, amazed assurance. "Why," he

cried, "_you love me!_"

She looked at him beseechingly. "Robert, please--"

"Life has been good to me, after all," he said, joyously: "I've got

what I don't deserve!"

Helena was silent.

THE END