CHAPTER XL

Night had fallen, dull, black, the sky overhung with great masses of heavy clouds. Like a ghost of herself Marie sat staring out of the window into the depths of the deserted garden. Still, calm with the calmness that comes after storm, her unseeing eyes gazed straight ahead of her. How long she had sat there she knew not. She was filled with that curious, numb quiet that comes to one when all fear, all hate, all terror has departed. She was resigned to anything fate might decree for her.

When she had told Gerome all the bitter truth, he had left her without a word. Later she had heard vague shuffling sounds in the hall, the closing of the outer door, his steps crunching on the gravel. Her staring eyes had tried vainly to pierce the velvet blackness outside the window. Instinctively she knew what errand had taken him out into the garden. She could almost hear the thud of earth falling on the dead face of Von Pfaffen.

The guns still muttered and boomed, lighting the black horizon with sullen, intermittent flashes. As she sat waiting her whole brief life unfolded before her. The years at the convent, her unhappiness, her struggles with poverty, the tragedy, as she saw it now, of her lost honor, her escape from it all, the new, peaceful life, and then the coming of wonderful happiness, the happiness of requited love, the culmination of which was the knowledge that she was to be the mother of Gerome's child. She knew that, although she had drained the cup of bitterness and misery to its very dregs, still the pendulum had swung as far the other way. She had had those few short months of supreme joy. The price had been a heavy one. But in the light of retrospection she knew that it was worth it.

Far into the night she sat thinking, dreaming, staring out into the blackness. Then she heard Gerome's step again on the path, heard him stumble in the darkness of the hall. After a moment he came in and sank heavily into a chair. The clouds had lifted, and an ominous red moon had risen, and by its faint light she could see him sitting, his chin in his hands. He was thinking, brooding, comparing. Almost as though he spoke them aloud, she could follow his thoughts.

After the first bitter shock that had sent his idol crashing to earth he had been shaken, frenzied, filled with a curse for God and man. But Marie's voice, as she told him more of her story, had calmed him in spite of himself, and some of the terrible rage and horror he had felt had been laid with the body of his enemy in the grave he had dug in the garden. Alone, by the side of that little mound he had battled with himself, fought as great a fight with his soul as that being waged by his country. It became plain to him that in a small way his problem with this woman who was his wife reflected the mighty struggle going on outside, which was to decide the destiny of nations. It was as though he stood apart and looked down from some height on a warring world. Clearly the great issues that were at stake rose before him, this terrible war, which was to bring about perpetual peace, establishing now and forever the brotherhood of men, which was to build anew mankind and the arts of civilization, was a baptism of blood out of which would arise a new creation. Through the vision he became aware of the smallness of all things else.

Marie, sitting silently in the chair by the window, timidly broke into his revery, hesitatingly, as one who fears to waken a dreamer.

"Gerome," she whispered, "Gerome!"

Across the silent garden, up from the distant horizon, came a louder roll of guns, a fitful crash of bursting shells, and then silence. He sat motionless, inert, as though he heard only his own thoughts, as though he were deaf to outward sounds.

After a moment she began again:

"I had no one to tell me--no one to advise me. I was alone, more alone than you can ever understand. At first just being happy was a thing so wonderful, I clung to it, desired it above all else in the world. But there was something more than that." Slowly he turned his head toward her. She went on, her voice firmer, steadier, "I realized that another life was to come into the world, for whose happiness I would be responsible! The glory of it--your child!"

Across the mind of the man sitting motionless in his chair flashed something of what she had suffered. This child, the symbol of the love that had seemed so perfect! Perhaps it would be a daughter who must be spared the sorrows, the privations, the lack of protection, that had been her mother's undoing. He began to see more clearly that in his first wild grief and disappointment in her he had failed to fully understand. She had not succumbed to temptation. What she had done had never attracted her. She had been like one who wanders alone in a wilderness, and who falls a prey to wild beasts, or is overcome by fatigue or hunger. That she had sinned was not her fault, rather it was her misfortune. He became conscious again of her voice, low, vibrant.

"In the beginning I withheld the truth from you because I feared to lose your love. Then when I realized that a new life was to come into the world, I could not bear that our child should know of its mother's guilt. I tried to save it the bitterness that knowledge would bring. Gerome, it was for that!"

His thoughts raced on. She had been tempted, then, not to shield herself, but because of her great love for him, and to save one who was wholly innocent, perhaps a lifetime of unhappiness. He listened while she told him little by little of her starved life, her empty childhood in the colorless walls of the convent, the far-between visits of her father, of those short months of happiness in the little house in the _Blumen Strasse_. Her voice shook a little when she told of her father's illness and his death, and her terror at facing the world penniless and alone. She went over all her short life, her home with the kind old Schultzes, her struggles to find employment, finally, her singing in the café, her meeting with her evil genius.

Sitting there, touched by the soft moonlight, motionless, calm, without a shadow of the tears that had so long been her refuge, she told her story with the simple directness of a child.

Seeing her, hearing her story in its completeness, realizing some of the pity that Christ must have felt for the penitent Magdalene, more of the bitterness died in Gerome's heart. Had he not, in his blind fury, judged too hastily this woman, whose weakness and ignorance had made her the victim of unscrupulous force and who had kept her sin secret through the generous motive of saving him and his unborn child, sorrow, shame? Perhaps, after all, if regarded in its true light, her soul was as pure as he had believed.

Secure in his own strength, firm in his own knowledge of right and wrong, had he not condemned her too quickly?

The muttering of the guns on the distant horizon again reminded him of the struggle his country was undergoing. If strength could reproach weakness for being overwhelmed by a force greater than itself, then Belgium, ravished, devastated, bleeding Belgium, deserved the reproach of the world, rather than its pity.

The night was lifting; he looked at her silhouetted against the gray square of the window. Her white dress was crumpled and torn, her yellow hair hung loose over her shoulders. She seemed to him a symbol of Belgium, ravished, buffeted, beaten.

The greater part of human unhappiness is the result of misunderstanding. This terrible war, some of the horrors of which were printed indelibly on his soul, had come because of the misunderstanding that existed between man and his brother. Titanic force in combat with Titanic force simply destroyed itself. If the world was to endure, the great problems of man must be answered by some other means. There would be a New Heaven and a New Earth to take the place of those that had passed away. Out of the ashes of this war must rise a new era. Old traditions were falling away. Superstition with regard to the Divine Right of Kings, that Old Man of the Sea, which mankind had carried on his back for so long, retarding his efforts, using his strength and substance, would be cast aside forever, and with the freedom of unimpeded, reborn youth, man would rise to that plane of development which was to fulfill his destiny.

Surely then, since the life and history of each individual was a world in itself, he and this woman who was his wife could begin again, awaken into a resurrection that would break the shackles of prejudice and tradition and with that mutual understanding which comes after such a storm as that through which they had passed, work out their destinies with a more certain knowledge of the things in life which really make for happiness.

He rose to his feet and came and stood before her. Silently she waited, motionless, still. Her sentence was about to be pronounced. She was ready.

"Listen," he said at last; "out there the old world is destroying itself in a flood of fire and hate. Old ideals are passing away. Ambition, greed, love, even hope itself is tottering into nothingness."

Hopelessly she echoed his words.

"Nothingness!"

"Marie, I have been thinking all night, and because of the sorrow and suffering through which I have gone, things seem clearer than ever before. My rage has been terrible. My unhappiness almost unbearable. When you told me what you had done, I thought life was not worth living another day. I had determined that both of us must die. But all that has passed away. After this great struggle which is going on between the nations of the earth is over, something new and better must come. Shall we be part of it, begin life afresh, and see if, after all, there is not some happiness left for us?"

Her face was transfigured with a great light.

"You can say that to me?" she asked.

He took both her hands in his, his voice gentle, through his suffering and hers.

"Shall there be a resurrection that shall be built on perfect understanding?"

"Gerome," she whispered.

The vigil he had kept with his soul through this long and terrible night, the task he had made for himself when he buried Von Pfaffen's body in the garden, the knowledge of her ordeal, of her lifting of herself above the weakness that had threatened to engulf her, the strength that had made her confess when there had been no need of confession, had shown him what the new life for both of them might mean.

"A resurrection," he went on, "where it shall be clear that the world can live only so long as love shall live."

She lifted her eyes to his.

"'Love shall wipe away all tears,'" she whispered, almost as though she were uttering a prayer.

Gerome held her hands against his breast.

"You and I, dear," he said earnestly, "shall we start anew, and when we reach the far horizon look back on this hour as a story that is told? For to understand all is to forgive all!"

The traces of her bitter suffering were still on her face, but she looked at him happily.

"An hour ago," she said softly, "I thought I had nothing left to live for, but the doors of life are just opening. Look----" Together they turned toward the window.

Toward the West, the clouds hung black and ominous, the last draperies of departing night, from whence came the persistent thunder of the guns, where men strove, destroying the old world in a hell of blood and steel. But on the Eastern horizon, turning all the hills to ruddy gold, was the rising sun.

Somewhere in a hidden thicket a bird twittered on its nest.

She looked up into his face, the light of her great love shining in her eyes, and whispered almost as though it were a prophecy:

"I can see the light of a new day!"

THE END