Priscilla had gone straight from Margaret Moffatt's to her own little
apartment. She had no sense of suffering; no sensation at all. She must
pack and get away! And like a dead thing she set to work, although it was
midnight and she had been so weary before; and then she smiled
quiveringly:
"Before!"
She stood and stretched out her arms to the empty space where Travers had
been.
"Oh! my dear, dear man!" she moaned. "My beloved!"
She had set the spark to the powder; by to-morrow the devastation would
be complete. That, she knew full well. And he--the man she loved above
all else in life--in order to escape must seek safety with those others!
All those others--men! men! men! Only she and Margaret, suffering and
alone, would stand in the ruins. But from those ruins! Her eyes shone as
with a vision of what must be.
"I wish I could tell you--all about it!" the weak, human need called to
the absent love. The whispered words brought comfort; even his memory was
a stronghold. It always would be, even when she was far away in her
In-Place, never to see him again.
How thankful she was that he did not know, really. He could not follow;
she would not be able to hurt him--after to-morrow. Her changed name
had saved her!
"Priscilla Glynn," she faltered, "hide her, hide her forever, hide poor
Priscilla Glenn."
Then her thoughts flew back to the recent past. She had found Margaret
alone in her own library.
"Now how did you know I wanted you more than any one else in the world?"
Margaret had said. "When did you get back? You baddest of the bad! Why
did you hide from me? Where were you?"
"In--Bermuda." How ghastly it sounded, but it caught Margaret's quick
thought.
"Sit down, you little ghost of bygone days of bliss. You'll have to play
again. Work is killing you. In Bermuda? What doing?"
"Wearing--my cap and apron, dear, dear----"
"Your cap and apron? I thought you burned them! I shall tell Travers, you
deceitful, money-getting little fraud! Well, who has taken it out of you
so? You are as white as ivory. Do you know the Traverses came in on the
_St. Cloud_ to-day?"
"Yes. Doctor Travers came to see me."
"Ha! ha! He doesn't seem to have cheered you much. I wager he's told you
what he thinks of you, tossing to the winds all the beautiful health and
spirits of the summer! When are you to be married? I must tell him to
bully you as--as my dear love is bullying me! Has Doctor Ledyard growled
at you? I can twist him easily! He is a darling, and just wears that face
and voice for fun in order to scare little redheaded nurses. Cilla, dear
heart, I'm going to be married in June! Dear, old-fashioned June, with
roses and good luck and--oh! the heaven seems opening and the glory is
pouring down! There, girlie! cuddle here! I'm going to tell you
everything; even to the mentioning of names! I've always hated to label
my joy before. But, first, take some chocolate; it's hot and piping. Now!
Who did you nurse in Bermuda? I'm going to tell him, or her, what I think
of him!"
"I--nursed--Mr. Clyde Huntter. We were in New York all the time. That is
why--I had to keep--still----"
"Mr. Clyde Huntter?" Margaret set the cup she held, down sharply. The
quick brain was alert and in action.
"Mr. Clyde Huntter?" And then Margaret Moffatt came close to Priscilla,
and looked down deep into the unfaltering eyes raised to hers.
"Mr. Clyde Huntter--is the man I am to marry!" she said in a voice from
which the girlish banter had gone forever. It was the voice of a woman in
arms to defend all she worshipped.
"Yes, I know. I was in his room the day you called. I thought I should
die. I hoped he would tell you. I was ready to stand beside you; but he
did not tell!"
"Tell--what? As God hears you, Priscilla, as you love me, and--and as I
trust you, tell me what?"
And then Priscilla had told her. At first Margaret stood, taking the
deadly blow like a Spartan woman, her grave eyes fixed upon Priscilla.
Slowly the cruel truth, and all it implied, found its way through the
armour of her nobility and faith. She began to droop; then, like one
whose strength has departed, she dropped beside Priscilla's chair and
clung to her. It had not taken long to tell, but it had lain low every
beautiful thing but--courage!
"Back there," Margaret had said at last, "back there where we played, I
told you I was ready for sacrifice. I thought my God was not going to
exact that, but since he has, I am ready. Priscilla, I still have God! I
wonder"--and, oh! how the weak, pain-filled voice had wrung Priscilla's
heart--"I wonder if you can understand when I tell you that I love my
love better now--than ever? Shall always love him, my poor boy! Can you
not see that he did not mean--to be evil? It was the curse handed down to
him, and when he found out--his love, our love, had taken possession of
him, and he could not let me--go! I feel as if--as if I were his mother!
He cannot have the thing he would die for, but I shall love him to the
end of life. I shall try to make it up to him--in some way; help him to
be willing and brave, to do the right; teach him that my way is the
only--honourable way. I am sure both he and I will be--glad not--not to
let others, oh! such sad, little others, pay the debt for us. Our day
is--is short at best, but the--the eternity! And you, dear, faithful
Cilla! You, with your blessed love, how will it be when I have done what
I must do? I must go to--to father and tell the truth, and then----"
"I know," Priscilla had said. "Doctor Travers told me what would follow.
I shall not be here for him to suffer for; I am going----"
"Where, my precious friend?"
"To--the Place Beyond the Winds! You do not understand. You cannot; no
one can follow me; but I cannot bear the hurting blasts any more. I want
the In-Place."
Then it was over, and now she was back in her lonely rooms. She packed
her few, dear possessions, and toward morning lay down upon her bed. At
daylight she departed, after settling her affairs with the night clerk
and leaving no directions that any one could follow.
"It is business," she had cautioned, and the sleepy fellow nodded his
head.
The rest did not matter. She would travel to the port from which the
boats sailed to Kenmore. Any boat would do; any time. Some morning,
perhaps, at four o'clock, if the passage had not been too rough, she
would find herself on the shabby little wharf with the pink morning light
about her, and the red-rock road stretching on before.
Then Priscilla, like a miser, gripped her purse. Never before had money
held any power over her, but the hundreds she had saved were precious to
her now. Her father's doors were still, undoubtedly, closed to her. She
could not be a burden to the two men living in Master Farwell's small
home. There was, to be sure, Mary McAdam! By and by, perhaps, when the
hurt was less and she could trust herself more, she would go to the White
Fish Lodge and beg for employment; but until then----
The morning Priscilla departed, Ledyard, unequal to any further strain,
was called upon to bear several. By his plate, at the breakfast table,
lay a scrawled envelope that he recognized at once as a report from
Tough Pine.
"What's up now?" muttered he. "This thing isn't due for--three weeks
yet."
Then he read, laboriously, the crooked lines:
I give up job. Dirty work. Money--bad money. I take no more--or I be
damned! He better man--than you was; you bad and evil, for fun--he grow
big and white. No work for bad man--friend now to good mens.
Pine.
"The devil!" muttered Ledyard; but oddly enough the letter raised, rather
than lowered, his mental temperature. Those ill-looking epistles of
Pine's had nauseated him lately. He had begun to experience the sensation
of over-indulgence. Some one had told him, a time back, of Boswell's
leaving the city, and he had been glad of the suspicion that arose in him
when he heard it.
Later in the day the forces Priscilla had set in motion touched and drew
him into the maelstrom.
"Ledyard"--this over the telephone--"my daughter has just informed me
that she is about to break her engagement. May I see you at--three?"
"Yes. Here, or at your office?"
"I will come to you."
They had it out, man to man, and with all the time-honoured and hoary
arguments.
"My girl's a fool!" Moffatt panted, red-faced and eloquent. "Not to
mention what this really means to all of us, there is the girl's own
happiness at stake. What are we to tell the world? You cannot go about
and--explain! Good Lord! Ledyard, Huntter stands so high in public esteem
that to start such a story as this about him would be to ruin my own
reputation."
"No. The thing's got to die," Ledyard mused. "Die at its birth."
"Die in my girl's heart! Good God! Ledyard, you ought to see her after
the one night! It wrings my heart. It isn't as if the slander had killed
her love for him. It hasn't; it has strengthened it. 'I must bear this
for him and for me,' she said, looking at me with her mother's eyes. She
never looked like her mother before. It's broken me up. What's the world
coming to, when women get the bit in their teeth?"
"There are times when all women look alike," Ledyard spoke half to
himself; "I've noticed that." The rest of Moffatt's sentence he ignored.
"Why, in the name of all that is good," Moffatt blazed away, "did you
send that redheaded girl into our lives? I might have known from the hour
she set her will against mine that she was no good omen. Things I haven't
crushed, Ledyard, have always ended by giving me a blow, sooner or later.
Think of her coming into my home last night and daring----" The words
ended in a gulp. "Let me send Margaret to you," pleaded the father at his
wits' end. "Huntter is away. Will not be back until to-morrow. Perhaps
you can move her. You brought her into the world; you ought to try and
keep her here."
At four Margaret entered Ledyard's office. She was very white, very
self-possessed, but gently smiling.
"Dear old friend," she said, drawing near him and taking the rôle of
comforter at once. "Do not think I blame you. I know you did your best
with your blessed, nigh-to glasses on, but we younger folks have long
vision, you know. Do you remember how you once told me to swallow your
pills without biting them? I obeyed you for a long, long time; but I've
bitten this one! It's bitter, but it is for the best. The medicine is in
the pills; we might as well know."
"See here, Margaret, I'm not going to use your father's weapons. I only
ask you--to wait! Do not break your engagement; let me see Huntter. Do
not speak to him of this. I can explain, and--" he paused--"if the worse
comes to the worst, the wedding can be postponed; then things can happen
gradually."
"No," Margaret shook her head. "This is his affair and mine, and our love
lies between us. I want--oh! I want to make him feel as I do, if I can;
but above all else he must know that whatever I do is done in love. You
see, I cannot hate him now; by and by it would be different if we were
not just to each other."
"My poor girl! Do you women think you are going to be happier, the world
better, because of--things like this? Men have thought it out!"
"Alone, yes. And women have let you bear the burden--alone. Happiness
is--not all. And who can tell what the world will be when we all do the
work God sent us to do? I know this: we cannot push our responsibilities
off on any one else without stumbling across them sooner or later, for
the overburdened ones cannot carry too much, or forever!"
Ledyard expected Travers for dinner, but, as the time drew near, he felt
that his young partner would not come. At six a note was handed to him:
Kindest of Friends:
To-morrow, or soon, I will come to you; not to-night. I have to be
alone. I am all in confusion. I can see only step by step, and must
follow as I may. Two or three things stand out clear. We haven't, we
men, played the game fair, though God knows we meant to. They--she
and such women as my girl--are right! Blindly, fumblingly right. They
are seeking to square themselves, and we have no business to curse them
for their efforts.
Lastly, I love Priscilla Glynn, and mean to have her, even at the
expense of my profession! You have set my feet on a broad path and
promised an honourable position. I have always felt that to try and
follow in your steps was the noblest ambition I had. I know now that I
could not accomplish this. You have truth and conviction to guide and
uphold you. I have doubt. I must work among my fellows with no hint of
distrust as to my own position. Forgive me! Go, if you will, to my
mother--to Helen. She will need you--after she knows. You will,
perhaps, understand when I tell you that, for a time at least, I must
be by myself, and I am going to the little town where my own mother and
I, long ago, lived our strange life together. She seems to be there,
waiting for me.
Ledyard ate no dinner that night; he seemed broken and ill; he pushed
dish after dish aside, and finally left the table and the house.
Everything had failed him. All his life's work and hopes rustled past him
like dead things as he walked the empty streets.
"Truth and conviction," he muttered. "Who has them? The young ass! What
is truth? How can one be convinced? It's all bluff and a doing of one's
best!"
And then he reached Helen Travers's house and found her waiting for him.
"I have a--a note from Dick," she said. Ledyard saw that she had been
crying.
"Poor boy! He has gone to--his mother; his real mother. We"--she caught
her breath--"we have, somehow, failed him. He is in trouble."
"I wonder--why?" Ledyard murmured. Never had his voice held that tone
before. It startled even the sad woman.
"We have tried to do right--have loved him so," she faltered.
"Perhaps we have been too sure of ourselves, our traditions. Each
generation has its own ideals. We're only stepping-stones, but we like
to believe we're the--end-all!"
"That may be."
Then they sat with bowed heads in silence, until Ledyard spoke again.
"I'm going to retire, Helen. Without him, work would be--impossible.
His empty place would be a silent condemnation, a constant reminder,
of--mistakes."
"If he leaves me, I shall close this house. I could not live--without him
here. I never envied his mother before. I have pitied, condoned her, but
to-night I envy her from my soul!"
"Helen"--and here Ledyard got up and walked the length of the room
restlessly; he was about to put his last hope to the test--"Helen, this
world is--too new for us; for you and me. We belong back where the light
is not so strong and things go slower! We get--blinded and breathless and
confused. I have nothing left, nor have you. Will you come with me to
that crack in the Alps, as Dick used to call it, and let me--love you?"
"Oh! John Ledyard! What a man you are!"
"Exactly! _What_ a man I am! A poor, rough fool, always loving what was
best; never daring to risk anything for it. I'm tired to death----"
She was beside him, kneeling, with her snow-touched head upon his knee.
"So am I. Tired, tired! I could not do without you. I have leaned on you
far too long; we all have. Now, dear, lean on me for the rest of the
way."
He bent his grizzled head upon hers and his eyes had the look of prayer
that Priscilla once discovered.
"Dick--has not told me his real trouble," Helen faintly said. "I know it
is somehow connected with a--nurse."
"The redheaded one," Ledyard put in; "a regular little marplot!" Then he
gave that gruff laugh of his that Helen knew to be a signal of surrender.
"It's odd," he went on, "how one can admire and respect when often he
disapproves. I disapprove of this--redheaded girl, but, if it will
comfort you any, my child, I will tell you this: Dick's future, in her
hands, would be founded on--on everlasting rock!"
"Perhaps--she won't have him!"
"Helen"--and Ledyard caught her to him--"you never would have said that
if you had been Dick's mother!"
"Perhaps--not!"
"No. You and I have only played second fiddles, first and last; but
second fiddles come in handy!"
The room grew dim and shadowy, and the two in the western window clung
together.
"Have you heard--John, that Margaret Moffatt has broken her engagement to
Clyde Huntter?"
"Yes. Where did you hear it?"
"She came--to see me; wanted to know how I was. She was very beautiful
and dear. She talked a good deal about that--that----"
"Redheaded nurse?" asked Ledyard.
"Yes. I couldn't quite see any connecting link then, but you know Dick
did go to that Swiss village last summer. I fear the party wasn't
properly chaperoned, for 'twas there he met--the nurse!"
"It--was!" grunted Ledyard.
"There is something sadly wrong with this broken engagement of
Margaret's, but I imagine no one will ever know. Girls are so--so
different from what they used to be."
"Yes," but a tone of doubt was in Ledyard's voice. Presently he said:
"Since Dick has left, or may leave, the profession, I suppose he'll take
to writing. He's always told me that when he could afford to, he'd like
to cut the traces and wollop the race with his pen. Many doctors would
like to do that. A gag and a chain and ball are not what they're cracked
up to be. The pen is mightier than the pill, sometimes, but it often
eliminates the butter from the bread."
Helen caught at the only part of this speech that she understood.
"There's the little income I'm living on," she said; "it's Dick's
father's. I wish--you'd let me give it to him--now. I am old-fashioned
enough to want to live on my husband's money."
"Exactly!" Ledyard drew her closer; "quite the proper feeling. It can be
easily arranged."
And while they sat in the gathering gloom, Travers was wending his way up
a village street, and wondering that he found things so little changed.
While his heart grew heavier, his steps hastened, and he felt like a
small boy again--a boy afraid of the dark, afraid of the mystery of
night--alone! The boy of the past had always known a heavy heart, too,
and that added reality to the touch.
There stood the old cottage with a sign "To Let" swinging from the porch.
Had no one lived there since they, he and the pretty creature he called
mother, had gone away?
There had been workmen in the house, evidently. They had carelessly left
the outer door open and a box of tools in the living-room. Travers went
in and sat down upon the chest, closed his eyes, and gave himself up to
his sad mood. Clearly he seemed to hear the low, sweet voice:
"Little son, is that you?" Yes, it was surely he! "Come home to--to
mother? Tired, dear?" Indeed he was tired--tired to the verge of
exhaustion. "Suppose--suppose we have a story? Come, little son! It shall
be a story of a fine, golden-haired princess who loves and loves, but--is
very, very wise. And you are to be the prince who is wise, too. If you
are not both very wise there will be trouble; and of course princesses
and princes do not have trouble." The old, foolish memory ran on with its
deeper truth breaking in upon the heart and soul of the man in the
haunted room.
Then Travers spoke aloud:
"Mother, I will make no mistake if I can help it, and as God hears me,
I will not cheat love. As far as lies in me, I will play fair for her
sake--and yours!"
When he uncovered his eyes he almost expected to see a creaky little
rocker and a sleepy boy resting on the breast of a woman so beautiful
that it was no wonder many had loved her.
"Poor, little, long-ago mother!"
Then he thought of Helen and her strong purpose in life, her devotion and
sacrifice.
"I must go to her!" he cried resolutely. "I owe her--much, much!"