AVOIDING the crowded thoroughfares, and no longer remembering her
physical weariness or that she had walked for hours without food or
drink, Margaret hurried on.
She had thought of death, and the means to attain it most swiftly and
easily, but as she passed the brilliantly lighted chemist’s window,
with its arch hung with bright red Christmas bells, she put away the
thought; it was too cheap and sensational and, after all, if there
really were a God could she take that swift, shuddering plunge through
the blackness of death to meet Him? _The wages of sin is death!_
It thundered in her ears, making God the avenging Deity of the Old
Testament, for how little do those who preach sometimes divine the
pictures which they frame of Him who was lifted up, as Moses lifted up
the serpent in the wilderness, that all men might be saved!
A strange new light began to come into Margaret’s soul, and against it
her thoughts took on dark and sharply outlined forms like the shadows
thrown on a white screen by the stereopticon; she began to understand.
Happiness, after all, was a dream, an imagination, a word; it came
not from any visible cause, but lay hidden in every man’s heart like
hope imprisoned in Pandora’s box. The secret of it came to her at
last,--life moved in an orbit; the past held the future, the future
the past, the present was but the connecting link in the inexorable
circle, it could not be broken while memory existed, while a reckoning
was required. She could no more break the links with her past than she
could destroy her immortal soul.
In her heart a new, secret thought, born of the strange girl’s
gratitude, moved her out of herself. She remembered Mrs. Allestree’s
words, and her love for Fox suddenly purged itself of its passionate
agony, its jealousy, its pain. Like a woman in a dream she found her
way at last to the hotel and climbed the stairs. Her face bore too
terrible signs of anguish, and she shrank from the elevator and the
curious stare of the servants. It was the dinner hour and the corridors
were deserted. She went quietly to her own room and did not ring for
her maid. She noticed that her evening gown had been put out and the
fire tended. Gerty was not there, she would scarcely be there before
nine o’clock, and Margaret went to her desk and sat down and began
to write in feverish haste; if she delayed, if she stopped to think
she might never do it and she was determined. She bent to her task,
white lipped and haggard, writing page after page to Rose Temple. She
poured out her heart; in righting Fox she scarcely thought of herself,
except that she should never see him again, that Rose must and should
marry him! For abruptly the divine impulse of self-immolation had been
born in the midst of the tumult of her soul; a woman’s heart, like
a eucalyptus tree, trembles with the remembrance of anguish and the
eternal sacrifice of love.
As she finished it the clock struck and she looked up startled; it was
eight o’clock; she had been out more than four hours. She sealed her
letter, stamped it and rose. For a moment her strength failed her and
she stood irresolute, but she was unwilling to trust another hand, and
she opened the door and took Rose’s letter down to the post herself,
avoiding the elevator again. After she had dropped it in the letter-box
in the lower hall, she climbed the long flight wearily to her room. The
fearful energy of the last few hours dropped from her like a cloak,
the effort was too much and she felt an overpowering weakness, a
sinking sensation; she had had such moments before and the doctor had
furnished her with some restoratives with a grim injunction to avoid
tiring herself. A vision of his grave face flashed across her now and
warned her. With the sudden ineffable sinking and yielding, which came
over her like a cloud and seemed to drop her slowly, softly into space,
was born a keen desire to live; Estelle’s voice pierced her memory like
a knife; she seemed to hear that plaintive cry--“Mamma, mamma, come
home!”
She made one more supreme effort to reach the medicines and was,
indeed, but a few yards from the cabinet which held them when her
strength yielded to that awful dark cloud which seemed to be pressing
down upon her, pushing her lower and lower into the depths of silence.
She slipped like water to the floor, her head upon her outstretched
arms, a faint shudder ran through her; she was dimly conscious of
sinking down, down into a black, fathomless abyss. Again Estelle’s
voice quivered through the clouds and mists and reached her heart; she
tried to struggle back, up through vague distances, to answer it, but
the mists grew thicker; she heard it once again, no more! The soft,
ineffable clouds pressed closer, enfolded her; she sank lower, floated
off over the edge of space and lost even thought itself.