Part 15

To her surprise the studio was empty; she called to Allestree, supposing him to be, perhaps, in his storeroom above, but there was no answer and she sank down in the nearest chair, too weary and helpless to frame her thoughts. An open fire was burning low on the hearth, and a half smoked cigarette lay on the mantel edge. He had evidently gone out for a moment and would soon return. Margaret roused herself and looked about her with a wretched feeling of strangeness and separation from her own life. She seemed suddenly detached, a mere onlooker where once she had been the centre of the stage. There had stood the portrait of her, and there the picture of Rose; both were gone! She even noticed that the little tea-table was pushed away, and divined Allestree’s secret feeling. She knew every detail of the room, the tapestries, the worn Turkey rug, Robert’s old cigarette-case. It was intolerable; she rose, and going to the table, where the telephone stood, saw Allestree’s portfolio and the pen and ink. She would leave a line to explain her visit before she called a cab, and she opened the portfolio to look for a scrap of paper; as she did so her eye fell on the page of a letter written in old Mrs. Allestree’s clear hand; unconsciously she read the lines before her:

“Margaret has broken up Fox’s happiness twice, once when she broke her own engagement to him, and now in separating him from Rose--”

She closed the book sharply, suddenly aware of what she did and deeply shamed by it, but the thought of the personal dishonesty of her heedless act was lost in the sharper pang of realization; she saw at last the light in which her actions had appeared to others. She stood still, her face frozen, and a cry sprang to her lips from the depths of hidden passion, the cry of some mortally wounded wild creature who faces death alone. She knew it, she did not need to be told it, but others knew it too! It was the bitter drop in her cup of gall; the wild anguish which swept away all other realities, even the desire for life, amazed her. For one moment she hated Rose with all the strength of her undisciplined soul, the next a great wave of humiliation submerged her being. She turned, forgetting the telephone, forgetting everything but a desire to escape the meeting with Allestree, groped her way to the door like a blind woman and went down stairs. At the foot she hesitated; a step in the street made her fear to meet Robert at the door, and she turned and plunged into the curiosity-shop. She found herself behind the chintz curtain, in the place which evidently served as a living-room for Daddy Lerwick, and she saw a table spread for supper, while the scent of garlic streamed from a pot on the stove. Hurrying across the room she lifted the curtain and entered the shop.

Daddy Lerwick was leaning on the counter talking to a young girl and passing a necklace back and forth in his fat hands. At the sound of Margaret’s step they both turned and looked at her in surprise, a surprise which gave place on his part to servile courtesy. But Margaret scarcely noticed him; instead she saw the pale, worn face of the girl, the pinched misery of her look as she glanced at the stones in Lerwick’s coarse fingers. Margaret’s eyes following hers, lighted, too, on the jewels; it was a topaz necklace, the mate to the bracelet which she had prized so long ago. The intuition of misery, the sixth sense of the soul which--no longer atrophied with selfishness--had suddenly awakened within her, divined the secret. She read the suspended bargain in Lerwick’s eye, the hopeless anguish in the girl’s. It was only an instant; the thought came to her like the opening of a dungeon door on the glare of midday. Then she drew back to avoid an encounter with two more customers who had entered the shop and who began at once to ask the prices of the objects in the windows. Lerwick went forward to answer them; the girl leaned on the counter, hiding her face in her hands; a shiver of misery passed over her and Margaret saw it. Moved by an impulse, as inexplicable as it was unnatural, she touched the shabby sleeve. “What is the matter?” she asked softly.

The young woman looked up startled, but only for an instant, the next the dull misery of her look closed over her face like a mask, though her lip trembled. “He’s offered me fifteen dollars,” she faltered; “I--I suppose I’ll have to take it.”

Margaret quietly put out her hand. “Will you sell it to me?” she said; “I will give more and you will not have to give your name.”

The girl’s cheek crimsoned; she hesitated and gathered the necklace into her hands; the gesture was pathetic, it bespoke the actual pang of parting with an old keepsake.

Margaret saw it. “Come, come with me,” she said and led her back through the door to the studio entrance; she no longer feared to meet Allestree; a new impulse stirred her heart.

Under the light there she opened her purse and hastily counted her money, she had a little over a hundred dollars in small bills. Hurriedly thrusting a dollar or two back into her pocketbook, she pressed the remainder into her companion’s hands, saying at the same time: “Keep your necklace, I do not want it; I only wished to help you save it.”

The young stranger looked at her in dull amazement, stunned by the incomprehensible sympathy and generosity when she had long since ceased to look for either. She drew a long shuddering breath. “Oh, I can’t take so much!” she gasped out, “you--you must keep the necklace!”

Margaret regarded her sadly. “Child,” she replied, “I’m more unhappy than you are; I do not want either the money or the necklace; keep them both!”

“Do you really mean it?” the girl whispered, her eyes fastened on the face opposite in absolute wonder and doubt; “you really mean to give me all this--and you want nothing?”

Margaret smiled with stiff lips. “Nothing!”

The pinched, childlike features of the stranger quivered; it seemed as if the frozen sensibilities were melting under this touch of common humanity. Suddenly she burst into an agony of tears, slipping down upon the stairs, her slender shabby figure racked with sobs. “He heard me!” she cried, “there is a God!”

Margaret looked at her strangely. “Do you think so?” she asked vaguely, with parched lips, “do you believe in God?”

“Yes,” the girl cried, clasping her hands, “I prayed--oh, God, how I prayed! It seemed as if He didn’t hear me, no help came and I couldn’t pay; I couldn’t pay, and they didn’t believe me any more because I’d failed--you don’t know, you’ve never failed like that! I thought God didn’t care, that He had forgotten--but now--” she rose from her knees, her face still wet with tears but singularly changed, “I shan’t have to do it!” she cried, “here’s enough to begin all over again, I can go on, I’m saved! He heard! Don’t you believe it? Don’t you see it must be so?” she persisted, unconsciously catching at Margaret’s draperies and her thin toil-worn hand closing on their richness.

“For you, yes,” the older woman replied slowly; “good heavens, I never knew how much money meant before!” she murmured, passing her hand over her eyes again, “and you think--God heard you--_God?_”

“He sent you!” the girl cried, exultantly, wildly happy; “oh, yes, I’m sure of it--oh, God bless you!”

A strange expression passed over Margaret’s face. She leaned back against the wall, pressing her hand to her heart. Then, as the girl still sobbed softly, she touched her shoulder. “Open the door,” she said quietly, “I--I must go, can you help me? I’m a little dizzy.”

The young woman sprang to her and put out her arm eagerly. “Let me help you; oh, I’d do anything for you!”

Margaret smiled, a wan little smile that made her haggard brilliant face weirdly sad. “It is nothing. There, the air from the outside makes me well again, this place is choking!”

The stranger walked with her to the corner, eager to help her, to call a cab, to put her on the cars, but as Margaret’s faintness passed she refused, putting aside her protests with firm dismissal. “No, no, I can go home,” she said bravely; “good-bye, I’m glad I could help you.”

“Oh, let me go with you, let me do something!” the girl appealed to her eagerly.

But Margaret dismissed her and they parted, the young stranger hurrying away down a narrow by-street while her benefactress walked slowly toward the nearest avenue. But she had gone only a few steps when she turned and looked after the shabby figure, which was only a short distance from her. A vivid recollection of that cry that God had heard her prayer, the absolute conviction of it, swept over the stricken woman, and moved by an impulse which she did not pause to question, Margaret ran after the girl through the gathering mist and overtook her, breathless. She turned with a frightened look, full of dread, no doubt, that she must yet give up the miraculously acquired wealth, and she started when Margaret laid a thin, ungloved hand on her arm.

“I wanted to ask you,” she began,--and then changed the sentence swiftly into a command,--“pray for me to-night! You believe there is a God--perhaps He’ll hear you again!”

“Indeed I will!” the girl cried, bewildered; “oh, I wish--”

But the unfinished speech was lost; Margaret had turned and swiftly disappeared again into the folds of the mist; like a shadow the girl saw her vanishing into deeper shadows; something uncanny and marvellous seemed to lurk in the very thought of her beautiful haggard face, the wildness of her smile, and the young woman hurried away, hugging her treasure close, almost persuaded that she had talked face to face with a being from another world.

VI

AVOIDING the crowded thoroughfares, and no longer remembering her physical weariness or that she had walked for hours without food or drink, Margaret hurried on.

She had thought of death, and the means to attain it most swiftly and easily, but as she passed the brilliantly lighted chemist’s window, with its arch hung with bright red Christmas bells, she put away the thought; it was too cheap and sensational and, after all, if there really were a God could she take that swift, shuddering plunge through the blackness of death to meet Him? _The wages of sin is death!_ It thundered in her ears, making God the avenging Deity of the Old Testament, for how little do those who preach sometimes divine the pictures which they frame of Him who was lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, that all men might be saved!

A strange new light began to come into Margaret’s soul, and against it her thoughts took on dark and sharply outlined forms like the shadows thrown on a white screen by the stereopticon; she began to understand. Happiness, after all, was a dream, an imagination, a word; it came not from any visible cause, but lay hidden in every man’s heart like hope imprisoned in Pandora’s box. The secret of it came to her at last,--life moved in an orbit; the past held the future, the future the past, the present was but the connecting link in the inexorable circle, it could not be broken while memory existed, while a reckoning was required. She could no more break the links with her past than she could destroy her immortal soul.

In her heart a new, secret thought, born of the strange girl’s gratitude, moved her out of herself. She remembered Mrs. Allestree’s words, and her love for Fox suddenly purged itself of its passionate agony, its jealousy, its pain. Like a woman in a dream she found her way at last to the hotel and climbed the stairs. Her face bore too terrible signs of anguish, and she shrank from the elevator and the curious stare of the servants. It was the dinner hour and the corridors were deserted. She went quietly to her own room and did not ring for her maid. She noticed that her evening gown had been put out and the fire tended. Gerty was not there, she would scarcely be there before nine o’clock, and Margaret went to her desk and sat down and began to write in feverish haste; if she delayed, if she stopped to think she might never do it and she was determined. She bent to her task, white lipped and haggard, writing page after page to Rose Temple. She poured out her heart; in righting Fox she scarcely thought of herself, except that she should never see him again, that Rose must and should marry him! For abruptly the divine impulse of self-immolation had been born in the midst of the tumult of her soul; a woman’s heart, like a eucalyptus tree, trembles with the remembrance of anguish and the eternal sacrifice of love.

As she finished it the clock struck and she looked up startled; it was eight o’clock; she had been out more than four hours. She sealed her letter, stamped it and rose. For a moment her strength failed her and she stood irresolute, but she was unwilling to trust another hand, and she opened the door and took Rose’s letter down to the post herself, avoiding the elevator again. After she had dropped it in the letter-box in the lower hall, she climbed the long flight wearily to her room. The fearful energy of the last few hours dropped from her like a cloak, the effort was too much and she felt an overpowering weakness, a sinking sensation; she had had such moments before and the doctor had furnished her with some restoratives with a grim injunction to avoid tiring herself. A vision of his grave face flashed across her now and warned her. With the sudden ineffable sinking and yielding, which came over her like a cloud and seemed to drop her slowly, softly into space, was born a keen desire to live; Estelle’s voice pierced her memory like a knife; she seemed to hear that plaintive cry--“Mamma, mamma, come home!”

She made one more supreme effort to reach the medicines and was, indeed, but a few yards from the cabinet which held them when her strength yielded to that awful dark cloud which seemed to be pressing down upon her, pushing her lower and lower into the depths of silence. She slipped like water to the floor, her head upon her outstretched arms, a faint shudder ran through her; she was dimly conscious of sinking down, down into a black, fathomless abyss. Again Estelle’s voice quivered through the clouds and mists and reached her heart; she tried to struggle back, up through vague distances, to answer it, but the mists grew thicker; she heard it once again, no more! The soft, ineffable clouds pressed closer, enfolded her; she sank lower, floated off over the edge of space and lost even thought itself.

VII

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!