THE ALTAR OF EMINENCE
Hate wrong, as a bull hates red;
Fight strong, till the wrong lies dead,
For to him, just God, the fight
Who smites for the sake of the right!
JOHN HARTLEY, "Juvenilia."
A woman's heart never breaks, but O how often it withers!--CORDELIA
VAUGHAN, "Motherhood."
Cordelia's train crept into Montreal one hour and twenty minutes late,
and it was already after three before she stepped out of the overheated
car into the cool, crisp air of the station platform. She saw a
uniformed attendant, and hurried to him at once.
"Can I catch the New York express?" she asked, breathlessly.
"Yes, ma'm!" he answered, promptly.
Her heart gave a sudden great bound of joy; she was not yet too late;
she felt that it was a good omen, that luck was with her.
"What time does it leave?" she asked, hurriedly.
"From the other station, ma'm, some time this evenin'."
Her heart went down like lead. That meant hours more of suspense, hours
more of waiting, and when time was so much to her!
She could never remember just how those dreary hours were passed. She
had a dim recollection of walking, walking without a stop, along narrow
and hilly little city streets, of turning restlessly stationward once
more and pacing feverishly up and down platforms, with ghost-like trains
coming in and going out, with ghost-like passengers hurrying this way
and that way on every side of her. She heard the jangle of far-away
bells, and the muffled voice of the guard calling the departing trains.
She looked out at it all vaguely, and wondered if it would never end.
Once in the express for New York she felt tired and faint. She attempted
to read, but it was useless. The rhythm of the speeding wheels seemed
pulsing against her very brain itself. It seemed to pound, like a hammer
on an anvil, and she repeated its cries again and again under her
breath: "Hurry-Hurry, Hurry-Hurry, Hurry-Hurry!"
She called the porter and asked him to make up her berth. In the
curtained, stifling gloom she flung herself down, in the forlorn hope
that sleep would come to her tired eyes and wearied limbs. But that,
too, was useless. She tossed from side to side in the hot berth,
listening to the maddening rhythm of the speeding wheels' "Hurry-Hurry,
Hurry-Hurry!"
She had known such nights before, but none had ever seemed so long. She
raised the window-blind beside her, as she lay in the berth, and looked
out. It was a clear, star-lit night. A great, lonely sea of black
country with a fleeting light or two in the distance, seeming to make
its blackness even lonelier, was all that she could distinguish. Toward
the east she thought she saw a thin rind of pearl and pink on the
horizon, and looked at her watch feverishly.
It was twenty-seven minutes to two. She shut out the night and the
star-light, and listened once more to the pulsing rhythm of the
car-wheels.
Then her thoughts went back to the happy week that lay behind her. She
reviewed each day, hour by hour, and event by event. From that her
restless mind leaped still farther back to the scene with Repellier, to
that unspeakable hour of shame and despair. Then she went even farther
back, to the very beginning, and step by step lived over her life, as
she lay there, trying to shut out from her ears the maddening
"Hurry-Hurry" of the wheels. She recalled the day that a tall,
hollow-cheeked stranger came swinging up the path of her father's
red-tiled home and inquired with his wistful smile if this was where the
Rice who took in boarders lived. She remembered her sense of shame at
her plain gingham dress, and how she had forgotten both shame and dress
at the stranger's admiration of her yellow hair, twisted into a loose
knot at the back of her head. "Why, child, it's a second Golden Fleece
that should call for the outfit of a second Argo!" he had said to her,
as though speaking to a girl not yet in her teens. That speech and that
moment had marked the turning of all her life's tide. She was no longer
the happy and petted belle of a little Kentucky village. She was a woman
with aspirations toward the larger world of which he seemed a harbinger,
of the knowledge and power of which he seemed an apostle. From that day
innocence and content fell from her, leaf by leaf. Yet she remembered
how she had clung to the lonely invalid, how for weeks together they had
wandered about that far-away land of clover meadows and blue-tinted
grasses, and sunsets made golden with gentle frosts. She remembered how
she had labored with him on his Great Book, how his cough had grown
faster than his manuscript, and how he had called for her when he was
dying, and entrusted to her all his precious work, and wrung from her
frightened lips the promise that she would copy it out, word for word,
and when that task was finished take it herself to a publisher. She
remembered how he had turned, then, and died in peace. She remembered
her weeks of secret toil, her long, strange, first journey to New York,
her trembling visit to the publisher, how later he had sent for her, and
made her his dazzling offer--so unconsciously bewildering, so
unconsciously tragical--on condition that she discard the masculine _nom
de plume_ which he imagined a shrinking timidity had forced her to
adopt, how he had enlarged on the advantages of the woman's name on the
title-page, how he had unthinkingly paved the way for that first
duplicity, how he was prepared to push the book, and in the end, he
believed, make both her name and her fortune. She recalled that brief
and most bitter struggle which took place within her, how she had gone
back to her publisher still vacillating, how she had learned, when he
had thrust his crisp, new check into her hand, how narrow one's ethical
Rubicon can be, and how much one can suffer when once that narrow stream
is crossed. She remembered the day she had discarded her own name, how
one morning she was Frances Rice, or often plain Fanny Rice, and the
next morning Cordelia Vaughan. She took the name from the Virginia
branch of her family, after much hesitation, she recalled, because
Valerie Vaughan, her cousin, had already identified that patronymic with
the gentle art of letters, smiling bitterly at the thought that under
that new name she had sprung into being as an artist as maturely and as
miraculously as the goddess Minerva herself.
Then she let her busy thoughts dwell on her first triumphant year in New
York, on many memories of the growing belief of her friends that she was
the daughter of an old and aristocratic Kentucky family, of her
interviews and her invitations, of her first intoxicating draught of
publicity, of her gradual dismay as she found herself being forgotten,
of her months of silent and agonized effort, that resulted in nothing,
of her restless nights and her feverish days, when her spirit cried out
for some balm for the itch which was burning and consuming her. She was
no fool, she knew; she was as clever as other women. But some essential
touch of imagination, some necessary element of creativeness, was not
hers; and it had been imposed upon her to seek by sheer strategy and
despairing strife that which came so lightly to the hand of others.
As she lay there alone in her rocking berth her withered and barren
heart itself grew appalled at the thought of those years of smallness,
of meanness, of deceit and duplicity, and endless lies. The enormity of
her wrong-doing overwhelmed her. And the bitterest sting of all lay in
the fact that so much of it was irreparable, that she had wronged not
only the living, but the dead as well.
The one appeasing oasis in that arid desert of deceit and self-seeking
was the memorial week she had journeyed back to the little Kentucky town
of her childhood and there watched over the erection of a granite shaft
beside the sadly neglected grave of a young Northerner who had once come
so intimately into her girlhood life.
She was not all bad, not all bad, she cried out to herself, piteously!
It was not yet too late. It might cost her much, but Love would show her
the way. That old dead past should be wiped out. She would tell her
husband everything. She would hold nothing back from him, and, with her
slate once clean, from that day she would show him, by her devotion to
him and his work, by her patient help, by her humility and her
tenderness, how she could be good, as other women--as the best of other
women.
Yet it would be better, she decided, on second thoughts, to wait until
after their marriage. If he, too, should forsake her at the last moment
she would have nothing left to her in all the world. No, she must cling
to him, she said, whatever happened, at whatever cost. She needed him;
she was not strong enough to fight her fight alone. For him, and with
him, she could do it. But alone, by herself, she could not do it. She
would go with him to Repellier and tell them everything. Repellier could
do what he cared to, it would make little difference; other things,
after that, would scarcely count. And she could reason out her answer
and her excuses to the world later. Perhaps he might even be willing to
let bygones be bygones, when he saw and understood the new turn things
had taken. But on that one point she was decided--she would, some day,
tell her husband everything.
Then her thoughts traveled lightning-like back to the present moment,
and her one haunting fear crept up into the foreground of her
consciousness. What if she should yet be too late! What if the die had
already been cast? She felt that Hartley would never forgive her that
last and bitterest lie. Why had she let her heart run away with her; why
had she told him so soon? Why had she not made sure before she had
capitulated so utterly? Even to have confessed and repented, even to
have thrown herself to the utmost on his goodness and his generosity
would have been safer. But that chance now was gone.
Would she be too late? That was the question she asked herself again and
again as the rhythmical "Hurry-Hurry" of the car-wheels smote on her
ears once more. They used to tell her that she was lucky; she
remembered it to her joy; she clung to the belief that luck would still
be with her.
* * * * *
Cordelia had passed a sleepless night when the Montreal express drew
rumblingly down into the darkness of the Grand Central tunnel. She had
found it impossible to eat, but a cup of strong coffee seemed to have
refreshed her. The air was raw and cold as she finally stepped out into
the vaulted gloom of the depot, and her breath hung in little white
clouds as she pushed her way hurriedly toward the carriage-stand, where
a pack of yelping and barking cab-men surrounded her, like hounds about
a timorous quarry. She stepped into a public automobile, and started at
once for the office of her publisher.
As she turned into the early morning quietness of Fifth Avenue, and the
old, familiar, intangible smell of the city stole up into her nostrils,
it seemed as though she had stepped back into life and the world again.
Had she not dreamed a dream, she asked, as the very intangibility of
that city odor crept up to her, teasing to be remembered and named. Here
was the world where she had lived and fought and worked, here was where
her sterner and wider and darker life had opened out before her. Here
she had passed her happiest and her most miserable moments. That lost
week in the sleepy old northern city on the St. Lawrence seemed
mockingly unsubstantial. Which was the real, she asked herself, as she
rolled down the familiar, smooth asphalt. And which, from that time on,
was to be the unreal?
Her knees were shaking under her and her heart was beating tumultuously
as she stepped into the offices of "Slater & Slater," and inquired for
the senior member of that firm.
A chubby-faced office-boy, opening envelopes with a sharp steel
paper-knife, was the only person to be seen. Mr. Slater had not come
down yet; would not be there before half-past nine. Would she wait, and,
if so, would she take a chair.
Cordelia could not wait; she left word that she would be back in half an
hour, with a request that Mr. Slater keep himself disengaged until she
saw him, as her business was most important. It was, indeed, vital, she
tried to impress on the boy, who seemed, nevertheless, to give more
attention to his envelopes than to his visitor.
Once back in her cab she instructed the driver to turn up the avenue and
drive as far as the Plaza and back. At Twenty-ninth Street, in response
to a sudden whim, she called out for him to turn east, and as her
motor-cab slowly glided past the Church of the Transfiguration, the
Little Church Around the Corner, she looked with veiled yet with
curiously alert eyes at that diminutive edifice, at the ivy on the
walls, at the garden-like greenness between its doors and the street, at
the Gothic arches showing through bare tree-branches, and at the little
roofed gateway, through which so many happy hearts, in their time, had
passed out and been forgotten.
Would it be too late, she asked herself again, with a sudden, new-born
passion of restlessness.
* * * * *
Mr. Henry Slater received Cordelia with a smile that was both
conciliating and commiserative. This was partly because of the firm line
of her thin and tightly closed lips and a latent fire that shone in her
eyes, and partly because of the ghastliness of her pale and worn and
withered face, as she stood between him and the chair he had blandly put
out for her to take.
"You received my telegram?" she asked, her voice dry, trembling in spite
of herself.
"Yes, I did," he answered, suavely, "but not, unfortunately, until this
morning. I leave the office at four in the afternoon, you know, and
every Thursday I am at our printing-plant at Newark. But in connection
with your wire, Miss Vaughan, while----"
"Have you done what I asked?"
Mr. Slater's smile waned and flickered and quite went out; he was
beginning to lose patience with his eccentric authoress.
"Your request, Miss Vaughan, was an impossible one."
"But it _must_ be done!" she cried, passionately.
He shrugged his shoulders, ambiguously.
"And it _shall_ be done!" she cried again, even more passionately. Then
she added, in a calmer voice, watching his face: "It must be done,
though I surrender everything to you, royalties, copyright,
_everything_!"
"Your book is out, Miss Vaughan!"
His words sounded to her like the snap of a steel trap. She said
nothing, and made no move, but looked up at him, dazed.
"In fact," he went on, "it has already received three reviews, in
response to my advance copies. And I might add that its career will be
phenomenal, simply phenomenal! Here are three clippings from yesterday's
papers; all of them, as you can see, highly favorable--in fact,
enthusiastic. What more could you ask for? Indeed, you are _made_, Miss
Vaughan--_made_!"
She took the three long ribbons of paper with unconscious hands, still
holding them at arm's length before her. Her eyes were still on Mr.
Henry Slater. Something in her look made him nervous. He smiled
slightly, bowed, and waited for her to speak.
"You are made, Miss Vaughan--_made_!" he repeated, with simulated
joyousness. Still she did not speak.
He turned to his desk with an expression which was intended, perhaps, to
denote that he was a very busy man, and that he himself had his
troubles. Then the shadow of a frown crept over his usually
well-controlled features. But still the woman with the ribbons of papers
did not move.
He called one of his assistants.
"Henry, show Miss Vaughan to her carriage, please--Miss Vaughan, this
lady here, Henry. I think she is not well!"
She had dreamed her dream.