FOR three days Fox had been under an almost unbearable strain. Before
and after speaking to Margaret of their marriage he had plunged in the
same agonizing struggle with himself. What diabolical power had been at
work to ruin his life, to frustrate his ambitions? The strong egotism
of his nature was aroused in all its absorbing passion. On every hand
he saw disaster; he had builded well in all respects but one; in
that he had miserably failed, and behold the inevitable result! Like
Margaret herself, he saw clearly at last; if he had kept away from her,
if he had broken from the spell of her fascination and remained out of
reach, this would never have been; he had no one to thank but himself.
It is usually so; when we get down to the fundamental principles we
have ourselves to blame for the fall of the Tower of Siloam.
As he faced the immediate prospect of marriage with another woman, he
realized the strength and hopelessness of his love for Rose. To think
of her even in the same moment with Margaret was abhorrent to him; he
did poor Margaret scant justice at such times, and the vivid realities
of her newspaper celebrity was a scourge to his sensitive pride. For
these things he must give up all, he must pay the price. He who crossed
his path when this mood was on him was unfortunate,--Fox was not a man
to spare. His cruel irony, his poignant wit had never been more feared
on the floor of the House than they were in those few days before
Christmas.
The day after his decisive interview with Margaret he was late at the
Capitol, lingering in his committee-room after the others had left.
On his way home he dined at the club and was detained there by some
out-of-town friends until nearly eleven o’clock. When he finally left
the building he started home on foot, and even stopped at a news-stand
to buy some papers and magazines. It was twelve o’clock when he went up
to his rooms, and he was startled as he walked down the corridor to see
his door open and the vestibule lighted. Sandy came to meet him with
the air a dog wears who knows that a friend is waiting for his master.
Allestree was sitting by the table in the study, and as Fox entered he
rose with a sober face, “I’ve been waiting for you for an hour,” he
said; “I have bad news.”
Fox stopped abruptly, his thoughts leaping instantly to Rose. “Bad
news?” he repeated in a strange voice.
Allestree met his eye, perhaps read his thoughts. “Yes, the worst,” he
replied; “Margaret is dead.”
“Margaret?” Fox dropped the papers he held, on the table, and looked at
him, bewildered; “impossible!”
“I wish it were so,” Allestree said quietly, hurrying on with his
disagreeable task; “it seems that she was out to-day for a long time
alone; no one apparently knows much about it except the elevator boy
and he says she was away from the hotel four hours or more. As nearly
as we know she was on foot and in the streets most of that time. I know
she was in my studio while I was out;” he colored as he spoke; he had
found his mother’s letter on the floor and piecing the facts together
had divined much. “She came home alone, went to her rooms and was found
there later, unconscious, on the floor.”
“Good God, where was Gerty?” Fox exclaimed, with a gesture of horror.
“Margaret had sent her to Mrs. White with Estelle; there was some
painful scene in the street with the child--” Allestree stopped an
instant and then meeting his cousin’s eye he hurried on--“when Gerty
finally got to the hotel and found her it was too late; the doctors say
that if help had been at hand she might have been saved. As it was she
never regained consciousness. Gerty telephoned to my mother, but she
will not be back until to-morrow morning; when I got there Margaret was
gone.”
Fox sank into a chair by the table, and propping his head on his hands
stared blankly at a sheet of paper before him. “Why was I not told?” he
demanded hoarsely.
“Gerty tried to get you, both at the Capitol and here, but we could not
find you.”
“I was at the club,” Fox exclaimed and then: “Merciful heaven,
Allestree, how terrible, how harrowing! How impossible to realize!”
Allestree looked at him thoughtfully. “Do you think so?” he said, “it
has seemed to me for more than a year that I saw death in her face; she
had, poor girl, a face of tragedy.”
Fox groaned, covering his own face with his hands. His anger against
her of a moment before smote him with horrible reproach. Living, he
had ceased to love her, dead, she seemed suddenly to fill his life
to the exclusion of all else; she came to him again in the guise of
her thoughtless, happy, inconsequent youth which had forged the links
between them. He rose and began to walk the floor, his pale face
distorted with passion. “My God!” he cried suddenly; “I--Allestree, is
it possible that she divined the truth? That she knew me for what I
was, a sham, a mockery, a whited sepulchre?”
Knowing him and the unhappy woman, whose love for him had wrecked her
life, Allestree knew too much to speak; he was silent.
The storm of his cousin’s passion rose and beat itself against the
inevitable refusal of death. Poor Margaret! a few hours ago she had
held the power to ruin his career, now she had slipped quietly away
from him into the great Silence; the mute appeal of her unhappy
love touched his very soul as it had never touched it in life; the
impossibility of laying the blame for life’s miseries on the dead came
to him with overwhelming force, and she, who a moment before had been
guilty, in his thoughts, of embarrassing his future and blighting his
life, became suddenly the victim of his vanity, his idle pleasure
seeking which she had mistaken for love. He remembered, with sudden
horror and self loathing, his coldness, his bitterness toward her, and
the manner in which she had received his proposal of marriage. A swift
electrifying realization of the scene tore away his selfish absorption;
his manner of asking her had been almost an insult to her high spirited
pride, to her love, which had humiliated itself by the first confession
on that night in the deserted ballroom where she had poured out the
wretchedness of her soul. She had come to him wounded, homeless, and he
had all but cast her off in his passionate selfishness, his hatred of
the loveless marriage which his honor had bound him to make.
If he had only loved her, if he had but dissembled and seemed to love
her! Overwhelmed with grief he searched his mind for one reassuring
recollection, for one instance which should acquit him of complicity
in the tragic agony of her death, but he found none. He had neglected
her, denied her, tried to evade that final moment when he must ask her
to be his wife, and through all she had borne with him with a sweetness
unusual in her stormy nature; she had loved him well enough to make
allowances, to forgive, to overlook! And now passing away from him
without a word, she had left only her final kiss of forgiveness on his
cheek, the wild rush of her tears at their last parting. Henceforth
he should never speak to her again, never hear her voice, never know
how deeply she had suffered, never ask her forgiveness. The fact that
the sequence of events was inevitable, that a woman no sooner seeks a
man’s love than she loses it, gave him no relief. In his own eyes he
had been little short of a monster of cruelty to a dying woman because,
forsooth, he loved another--younger and more beautiful!
Memory, too, tormented him with the thought of Margaret, young, sweet,
confiding as she had been when he had first known her and loved her;
he thought less of the moment when she broke faith and married White;
her fault was less now than his; the error of a beautiful, wilful girl
seemed but a little thing before the awful fact of her wrecked life,
her tragic death. Through all she had really loved him, that one thing
seemed certain; her spirit in all its wild sweet waywardness had held
to this one tie, her love for him, and when she had turned to him at
last in her wretchedness seeking happiness, asking it, pleading for it
like a child, she had received not bread but a stone! He knew now that
no living woman could have misunderstood his coldness, his tardiness,
his indifference, and in his cousin’s pale and averted face he read an
accusing understanding.
He threw himself into a chair again and sat staring gloomily at the
floor. “What madness!” he exclaimed at last, with sudden fury; “how
dared Gerty neglect her so? She was ill, weak, unprotected!”
“Gerty was no more to blame than others,” Allestree observed quietly.
Fox threw back his head haughtily, and their eyes met. “I was willing
to give her my life,” he said bitterly, “I had no more to give!”
Allestree rose. “It is over,” he replied gravely; “we cannot bring her
back; come, you will go there, she would wish it, I know,” he added,
“and there is no one else!”
The awful finality of those words and the reproach they carried was
indisputable. Fox rose with a deep groan and went out with him, without
a word, to face the greatest trial of all.