THE SCARS OF SLAVERY
And from the gloomy caves of Mem'ry came
The bandits of Repentance in the night
And left her naked, and in spirit torn.
JOHN HARTLEY, "Street Dust."
Every Klondike of achievement has its Chilkoot of adversity.--"The
Silver Poppy."
The next afternoon they were on the Grand Battery, leaning against one
of the obsolete old mortars that frowned down over the river. A calm sky
of robin's-egg blue stretched over them. Golden and quiet as were the
Laurentides about them, there was a touch of chilliness in that clear,
northern air, a muffled coldness which Hartley likened to a naked
saber-blade buried in rose-leaves. The wide St. Lawrence lay beneath
them like a pool of silver. In the remoter distance stretched the blue
and purple foot-hills of the Laurentians themselves.
Miles beneath them they could see the valleys of gloomy greenness,
dotted with their little flashing whitewashed _habitant_ houses, and
over everything the mellow, autumnal sunlight lay; over the gray walls
of the Citadel, burning like fire on the windows and spires, gemming
the long hillside sloping down to the river, making opals and pearls of
the little sails and softening the very grimness of the dark and more
distant headlands frowning so sternly out over the peaceful water.
It had been a day full of quiet happiness for both of them, and a
feeling of vague regret, of languid sorrow, fell over them, as they
stood in silence, looking on the beauty of river and foot-hill and
mountain bathed in autumnal silence and gold.
"Oh, if we never grew old!" Cordelia said, with a wistful little shake
of the head, drawing closer to Hartley, and slipping her hand through
his arm.
He looked down at her with a strange sternness that was not all
sternness in his eyes. She turned away, gazing across the wide stretch
of river dotted with its shifting opals and pearls.
"Cordelia," he said, softly.
She did not answer. Her musing eyes were far away, on a drifting bank of
gray cloud that was slowly shrouding the glory of the sunset and
bringing with it a breath of colder wind.
"Cordelia," he repeated, even more softly, "will you marry me?"
She fell back from him, startled, amazed. It came as a bolt out of the
blue.
It was the one thing she had not looked for, had not hoped for, had
never thought to ask for.
"Marry you!" she repeated, as though the words were words she did not
know. "Marry you!"
The molten silver of the river so far beneath her seemed to rise and
fall and fade, and the purple line of the foot-hills wavered and
darkened and went out. A new voice had come to her in the wilderness of
her doubt, a new path seemed to lead out of the two-fold desert of her
despair.
"Yes, dear," he said, quietly, taking her gloved hand in his, "will you
marry me?--be my wife?"
No words came to her tongue, and her face was white; but the slowly
awakening light that crept into her eyes and illuminated all her pallid
face made a new, a transformed woman of her. A belated song-sparrow alit
on one of the old guns near them, and sang thinly for a moment or two.
Never had the man beside her seen that tender light which came to her
that minute and hung over her like a halo.
She drew back from him for a moment again, still doubting, still
perplexed, still hesitating. He held out his two arms for her as one
does for a child.
"I love you, my darling; I love you!" she murmured, as he folded them
about her. And he knew it was true. He bent over her, and she gave him
her mouth to kiss, reluctantly, as though it had never been kissed
before. He kissed her, not passionately, but gravely, almost
reverentially; and she was happier at the thought that he had done it
so.
"I used to half fear you, dear," he said, still holding her hand through
his arm. "I thought you were cold. I looked on you only as the woman who
wrote books, as one who worked for praise and fame and success, as a
woman hardened and schooled by a selfish world. That suspicion of
selfishness, I believe, made _me_ selfish. No, no; you must listen,
dear, for this is a confession. What I took for coldness in you
challenged a certain coldness in me, and for weeks and weeks I
misunderstood you and misjudged you. Now I know better. What has
happened during the last week has shown me how wrong I was. And now I
want you to forgive me, if you can, for all those old misunderstandings.
Will you, Cordelia, dear?"
"You believe in me? You trust me, fully?" she cried, thrilling through
all her frail body, trembling with the fierceness of some newer, finer
fire.
For one silent minute he looked deeply into her eyes, and, seeing that
great and glorious light in them, he responded: "I do, Cordelia! I do,
my own!" And there was no shadow of doubt in his voice.
"But I have done so much that is--that is not right!" she hesitated,
almost imploringly, leaning over the grim old gun-carriage and burying
her face shudderingly in her hands.
"But now I love you because I know you could never deceive me, just as I
would never deceive you. I can read it in your eyes, dear. In the past
we have both done things which we ought not to have done, perhaps. But
that was because we were both misguided, and both hemmed in by the wrong
influences, wasting all the best of our lives, and the best of our
hearts, on the things that were wrong."
"It is too late!" she almost wailed.
"No; no, indeed; we can go back and begin all over again, this time with
a clean slate. I have been thinking these things over, trying, the last
few days, to work them out by myself, and I believe I have learned more
than one lesson in that time. Think how easily it can be done! We can
slip around to that haven of the love-tossed, to the Little Church
Around the Corner, and then we can hunt us out some little nook of our
own in the big city, and there we can live our lives, and dream our
dreams, and do our work, and be happy together! And how happy I shall
be, working for you, dearest," he said, with the tremble of emotion in
his voice.
"No, no; not back to New York!" she pleaded. "Couldn't we go to England,
to Oxford--your own Oxford, and live there, alone, away from them all?"
"Yes, we could, if you thought best!"
The idea of it was new to him.
"John," she said, suddenly, and her voice seemed to lose its softness as
she spoke. "John, I have something to tell you! I did not intend to tell
you so soon, but now I must!"
She felt that in that exalted moment she must burn every bridge behind
her; she must give herself no further chance of defeating herself.
"It is about your book--I could not take it; I have not taken it. I have
given it back to you. It is being published now, but--but not in my
name!"
Oh, if that could have been the whole truth, she thought, as the first
thorn of her poor rose of abnegation pierced her. But it was the best
that she could do, she told her aching heart pitifully. It was not too
late; she could still make it the truth. In that moment of new birth she
felt that she must tell him everything, from the first to the last. But
as she framed the very words of her confession she saw that she must
still wait a little--that was the most agonizing part of it. Yet
nothing, she said to herself sternly, nothing, in the end, should be
kept back from him. By her very frankness and openness of soul she would
hold him and bind him the closer to her.
"It is being printed now--but not in my name!" she repeated, weakly,
clinging to that one prospective act of redemption.
"I thought you would do it," he said, showing no surprise. "And I am
glad of it, for your sake, dearest. I don't mind about the book; I do
not want that. But it is You, the true You, that I want!" And as he said
it his hand sought her hand once more.
"But I have done other things, oh, so many other things, that were--were
ignoble, that were wrong!" she cried, pitifully, a terror of her past
growing up within her.
"Do you love me?" he said, suddenly, turning to her.
"I would die for you, this day!" she said. And by the beauty and the
sudden glory that swept over her face once more he knew her word was not
to be doubted.
"Then the other things can never count!" he answered, kissing her
tenderly on her cold cheek.
A cold wind blew up the river, and the dusk was falling. Their day was
almost gone. Cordelia looked up at the darkening sky, and held her hands
out before her.
"See," she said, "the snow-flakes!"
A few white flakes drifted and fluttered down between them; she caught
at them with her hands, but they eluded her.
"Yes," he said, standing close beside her, happily, and gazing with her
up into the darkening air. "It _is_ snow, falling already!"
Then through the sober autumn air they walked slowly back to the hotel,
arm in arm, and silent.
"I must be alone, dearest, for the rest of this day," she said, happily.
He understood, and left her to her own woman's thoughts.
* * * * *
When she knew him to be safely in his own room she slipped stealthily
down to the hotel telegraph-office and hurriedly wrote out a message for
her New York publisher. It said:
"Substitute name John Hartley for Cordelia Vaughan on title-page of
novel The Unwise Virgins. For this I agree to relinquish all
royalty claims. Will explain later. Answer."
She signed the message and handed it to the operator with a slightly
shaking hand, asking nervously how soon she could get a reply. There
was no reason why she should not receive one in two hours, perhaps three
hours, at the latest.
When that time had expired, and no answer came to her, she repeated the
message, this time sending the despatch to Henry Slater's home address.
Late into the night she sat up in her room, frantically waiting for some
word from him. As the hours dragged on she paced the little chamber in a
fever of unrest, pausing and listening at every footstep that passed her
door. Midnight came and went, and still no word arrived. Then she knew
that there was but one thing for her to do.
In the gray of the morning, when Hartley and all the hotel were still
sleeping, she called a carriage, and, hurrying to the railway station,
caught the early morning express for Montreal, on her way to New York.
It was no time for half measures.
Three hours later, when Hartley went down to breakfast, after a night of
mysteriously depressing restlessness, he found awaiting him an
incoherent little note from Cordelia. Bewildered, only after many
readings he gathered from it that she had been called away because of
some business tangle about which she would tell him later.
"If that isn't like her, the crazy child!" was Mrs. Spaulding's cry when
she heard of it all, less disturbed in spirit than Hartley had expected.
And while, indeed, he was still pondering over his surprising note from
her, Cordelia herself was speeding along past the old French
settlements on the banks of the upper St. Lawrence, gazing absently out
at the low-eaved little cottages, and desperately asking herself, again
and again, if it would be too late.