Part 5

She had almost a fear to venture beyond the shelter of this cheerless home--a fear of what she longed for unspeakably and as unspeakably dreaded. She told herself that Daunt was gone, that he had returned to the city, that she would not see him again at Warne. And yet her inmost wish belied the thought. He had gone away believing her cruel. The memory tortured her. An instinctive modesty, as innate as her conscience, had made it impossible for her to express in words the distinction which her own sensitiveness had drawn. To think of it was an intangible agony; to voice it was to penetrate the veiled sanctuary of her woman-soul.

But the afternoon following Melwin’s outburst in the dining-room, her flagging spirits and the smell of the cropped fields drew her out of doors. She was sore with a sense of reproach at her own unthinking blunder. Since then she had not seen Melwin. She felt how awkward would be the next meeting.

The sunlight splintered against low-sailing clumps of vapor which extended to the horizon, and the chill of the air prompted her to walk briskly. She did not take the wood road, but kept to the open country, following the maple-lined footpath that boarded the rusting hedgerows. There was little promise in the drooping, despondent sky. A shiver of wind was in the tall grasses and a far whistling of a flock of marsh-birds came to her over the moist fallow.

A darting chipmunk made her turn her head, and she became conscious that a figure was close behind her. An intuitive knowledge flashed upon her that it was Daunt. A vibrant thrill shot through her limbs and she felt her cheeks heating.

“Margaret! Margaret!”

She turned her head where he stood uncovered behind her. His left wrist was bound tightly with a black band, and he carried his arm thrust between the buttons of his jacket.

“I am disabled for riding, you see,” he said, smiling. “My wrist has gone lame on me. You see I am stopping at Tenbridge, and I walked over the hill.”

The ease and naturalness of his opening disarmed her. She caught herself smiling back at him.

“I’m so sorry about your wrist,” she said. “Does it pain you much?”

“Only when I forget and use it. Did you think I would come back again?” This with blunt directness.

She made him no answer.

“Do you know, I have been here every day since I saw you. I’ve spent the hours haunting the road through the woods and tramping these paths between the fields.”

“I have not been out of the house since then,” she answered.

“Why not?”

“Can’t you guess why?”

“Were you afraid you might see me?”

“I--I didn’t know.”

“Look here, dear,” he said, “you know I don’t want to persecute you. If you will only tell me truly that you don’t love me, I will go away at once and never see you again. But I believe that there is no other thing in life worth setting against love. It means my happiness and yours, and it would be cowardly for me to give you up for anything but your happiness. Can’t we reason a little about it?”

She shook her head hopelessly. “It wouldn’t help. I have reasoned and reasoned, and it only makes me wretched.”

His brows knit perplexedly. He stopped and faced her in the path. “Do you think that I have come to you for any other reason than that I want you, that you mean more to me now than you ever did? That I love you more--_more_--since I know you love me wholly? You have loved me, absolutely. Now you are refusing to marry me! Why? Why? Why?”

Margaret’s flush had deepened. While he had been speaking, she had several times flung out her hand in mute protest. “Oh!” she said, “how can I make you understand? Love is strange and terrible. It isn’t enough to love with the earth-side of us! Why”--her voice vibrated with a little tremor--“I would love you just the same if I knew you _had_ no soul--if there was only the human feel of you, and if I knew you must die like a dumb beast and not go to my heaven. If I knew that I should never see you again after this life, I would love you and long for you, just the same, now and afterward! Oh, there must be something wrong with my soul! That kind of a love is wrong. It’s the love of the flesh! Don’t you see? Can’t you see it’s wrong?”

Daunt struck savagely at the wiry beard-grasses with the stick he carried. This doubt was so irrational, so unwholesome to his healthy mind that to argue it filled him with a dumb anger. He groaned inwardly. She was impossible!

“You give no credit,” he slowly said at last, “to your humanity. In a woman of your soul-sensitiveness, it is unthinkable that the one should exist without the other. Soul and sense react upon each other. Bodily love, in people who possess spirituality, who are not mere clods, dependent upon their eyes and appetites for all life gives them, presupposes spiritual affinity. The physical may be the lesser side of us, but it is not necessarily the lower. Whatever there is in Nature is there because it ought to be. If we cannot see its beauty or its meaning, let us not blame Nature; let us blame ourselves.”

“Don’t think,” said Margaret, “that I haven’t thought all that! It is so easy to reason around to what we _want_ to believe. It doesn’t make me happy to think as I do, but I can’t help it! We can’t make ourselves _feel_. _I_ can’t! What good would it do me to make myself _think_ I believed that? You would soon see what I lacked, and I would know it, and we would be chained to each other while our souls shrivelled. Oh,” she ended with almost a sob, “I am so utterly miserable!”

Daunt felt a mad desire to take that near-by form in his arms, to soothe her and comfort her. He felt as if she were squeezing his heart small with her hands. He was silent. Then his resentful will rose in an ungovernable flood.

“Do you suppose I intend to break my life in two for a quibble--for a baseless fancy? I tell you, you’re wrong! You’re wrong! You’ve tangled yourself up in a lot of sophistry! Don’t think I am going to give up. I won’t! You shall come to yourself! You shall! You _shall_!”

Margaret felt the leap of his will as an unbroken pacer the unexpected flick of a whip-thong. It was a new sensation. It had a tang of mastery, of domination, that was strange to her. She was unprepared for such a situation. She looked at him half stealthily. In the lines of his mouth there was an unfamiliar sovereignty. She felt that deliciousness of revolt which every strong woman feels at the first contact with an overbearing masculinity. A swift suggestion of the potentiality of his unyielding purpose stabbed her.

“And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.” A flitting memory brought the parable to her mind. Could it be that the house of her defence was built upon the sands? “And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew”--the first promise of the tempest was in his eyes. A fear of yielding insinuated itself darkly. The set intentness of his obstinacy lingered after his words, hung about her in the air and pressed upon her with the weight of an unescapable necessity. Her breath strained her.

All at once she turned, speaking rapidly, incoherently. “Don’t--don’t talk to me like that! Don’t argue with me! I can’t bear it--now! I’m all at sea; I’m a ship without a captain. Don’t bend me; I was never made to be bent. I have got to think for myself. You must go away--indeed, you must! Somehow, to talk about it makes it so much worse. I can’t discuss it! Don’t ask me any more! Oh, I know you think I’m unreasonable. It sounds unreasonable sometimes, even to myself. I wish you wouldn’t blame me, but I know you must. You can’t help it. I blame myself, and I hurt myself, and the blame and the want and the hurt are all mixed up together! If you care--if you care anything for me, you will go away! You won’t come again. I hurt you when you do, and I can’t bear to do it.”

Daunt nodded, took her hand, held it a moment, and then released it. “Very well,” he said quietly and sadly. He did not offer to kiss her. The fire had died out of his voice and there was left only a constrained sorrow. But it had no note of despair. Its resignation was just as wilful as had been its assertive passion. He looked at her a moment lingeringly, then turned and vaulting the hedge, with squared shoulders and swinging stride, struck off across the stubble of the fields.

Margaret did not look back, but she knew he had not turned his head. Then a long sigh escaped her.

XI.

Her blood coursed drummingly as she went back along the road, half running, her hat fallen, held by the loose ribbon under her chin, her hands opening and closing nervously. Her head was high and her mood struck through her like the smell of turned earth to a wild thing of the jungle. She wanted action, hard movement, and she ran with fingers spread to feel the breeze. Her thoughts were a tumult--her feelings one massing, striving storm of voices, through which ran constant, vibrating, a single, insistent, dominant chord.

“You _shall_! You SHALL!” she repeated under her breath. “Why do I like that? It’s sweeter than bells! I can hear him say it yet. It was like a hand, pulling me!”

She stopped stock-still, suddenly, gazing at the fallen purple-and-crimson autumn leaves, a poured-out glory of color at her feet. “Splendid!” she said. She bent and swept up a great armful and tossed the clean, wispy, crackling things in the air. They fell in a whirling shower over her face, catching in her hair. In the midst of them she laughed aloud, every chord of her body sounding. Then, with a quick revulsion, she threw out her arms and sank panting on the selvage of the field.

“What can I do? What can I do?” she said. “I’m afraid! I can’t go on fighting this way! It--drags me so.” Her fingers were pulling up the tapery grass-spears in a sinister terror. “I felt so strong the last few weeks, and it’s gone--utterly gone! Why--it went when I first looked at his face. If he had kissed me again, this time; if--if he had held me as he did that other day--in the woods--oh, my heart’s water! There’s something in me that _won’t_ fight. The ground goes from under my feet. It’s dreadful to feel this way! His hair smelled like--roses! If I had dared kiss it! I ought to be sorry and I’m--not! I’m ashamed to be glad, and I’m glad to be ashamed!”

She felt herself shivering, resentful of the ecstasy of sweetness that lapped and folded her. The dull glow of the sky irritated her with its very serenity.

“If I only hadn’t seen him! If I had been strong enough not to! It’s ungenerous of him. He ought to leave. He ought to have gone away after that last time! He _ought_!”

But if he had! The thought obtruded itself. She had longed for him to come; she knew, down in her soul, she had. Her heart had given her lips the lie. The woman in her had betrayed her conscience.

“It’s the truth!” she cried, lifting her hand. “It’s the truth! Oh, if he hadn’t come--_if--he--hadn’t_!” She muttered it to the wind by the loneliness of the slashed hedges. “That would have been the one last terrible thing. It would have crushed me! I could never have been glad again. I’m sick now with desolation at the thought of it! It’s easier not to be able to forgive myself than it would be not to be able to forgive him! But he _did_ come! He wants me!” Her voice had a quiver of exultation. “Nothing on earth ever can rob me of that!--nothing!”

She pressed her arm against her eyes till her sight blent in golden-lettered flashes. The one presence was all about her; she could even feel his breath against her hair. His eyes had been the color of deep purple grapes under morning dew. The old hunger for him, for his hand, his voice, swept down upon her, and she crouched closer to the ground wet with fog-dew, striking the sod hard with her hands. He had come. He was there. He never would go--she knew that. If he stayed, she must yield. She had been perilously close to it that day.

* * * * *

After a time she became quieter and drew from her skirt pocket a crumpled letter, received that morning after three re-forwardings. It was in a decisive feminine hand, and spreading it before her, Margaret turned several pages and began to read:

“Your letter has somehow distressed me,” it read. “It seemed unlike your old self. It seemed sad. I imagine that you are troubled about something. Is it only that you are tired and dissatisfied? I have wondered much about you since you left the city in the spring. What have you been doing? How have you spent the time in the stale places of idleness? I have been so busy here at the hospital that I have seen none of our old friends. Time goes so quickly when you like your work! And I enjoy mine. It has come to mean a great deal to me. Dr. Goodno intends soon, he says, to put me in charge of the children’s ward. Poor little things! They suffer so much more uncomplainingly than grown folks. Dr. Goodno is our superintendent and Mrs. Goodno is superintendent of nurses. She has been so dear and kind to me, one could not help loving her. It hardly seems possible that I have been here three whole years.

“Margaret, have you ever thought seriously of the last letter I wrote you? There is a great deal of compensation in this life, and I have thought sometimes (I know you’ll forgive me for saying it) that you needed some experience like this. Every woman ought to be the better for it. You are my dearest friend, and if I could only show you something--some new satisfaction in living--something to take you out of yourself more, I would be so glad.

“I have told Mrs. Goodno so much about you, and she would welcome you here, I know. It might be just what you need. You know the nurses are taken on three months’ probation, and there is no compulsion to stay. If you did not like it, you could leave at any time, and you would be the gainer by the experience. You need no preparation. Just telegraph me at any time and come.”

A resolution had formed itself rapidly in Margaret’s mind. Thrusting the letter deep into her pocket, she walked swiftly up the path to the house. She sent Creed with a telegram before she entered the library. Melwin was standing with his back to her, staring out through the leaded diamonds of the window. He turned slowly, gazing over her shoulder. His face had lapsed into its habitual neutral passiveness. His pupils had contracted into their peculiar unrefracting dulness, and his hands hung without motion.

“Melwin,” she said, “I’m going back to the city. I have received a letter which makes it necessary. I think I will take the evening train.”

He turned again to the window. “Must you--go?” His voice was toneless and dull.

“Yes,” she answered. “I will look in and say good-by to Lydia.” She waited a moment uncertainly, but he did not speak, and she left him standing there.

* * * * *

Turning the knob of Lydia’s door softly, she pushed it open and entered. Lydia lay with her face turned toward the wall; her regular breathing showed that she slept. Margaret could not bear to awaken her. A wavering smile was on her parted lips and gave a fragile loveliness to the delicate transparency of her skin. Perhaps a happy dream had come for awhile to beckon her from ever-present pain. Perhaps she was dreaming that she was well and knew and filled a strong man’s yearning.

Margaret closed the door noiselessly. Going to her room, she pencilled a little note, and tiptoeing cautiously back through the hall, slipped the missive under Lydia’s door.

And this was her farewell.

XII.

Across the country Daunt strode, paying little heed to his direction. He skirted one field, crossed another, swung through a gully, scrambled along a gravel-pit, climbed a hilly slope, and cut across in a wide circuit. He thought that physical weariness might bring mental relief. He paused for a moment by the edge of a clayey bank, in which a multitude of tiny sand-swallows--winged cliff-dwellers--had pecked them vaulted homes. He thrust his stick gently into one of the openings and smiled to see the bridling anger of its feathered inhabitant.

Seating himself upon a pile of split rails in a fence corner, he dropped into reverie. He was conscious of an immense depression. The past few weeks had brought him nearer to realizing how much Margaret meant, not only to himself, but to his labor in the world, than he had ever been before. His artistic temperament had pointed him a dreamer, but his natural earnestness had made him a laborious one. His ideals were fresh and strong, and the world of tangled interests and woven ambitions had stood before him always, mute, importunate, a place to make them real. In man’s ear there sound ever three voices: the brazen-throated throng, the silver-throated few and the golden-throated one. This last voice Daunt had learned to listen to. He had made Margaret his unconscious motive. The best of his written work had been done at the huge antique mahogany desk under her picture. What she had been to his work, what she was then, showed him what her presence or absence in his life must inevitably mean. He realized the truth of what he had once scoffed at, that behind every man’s success lies the heart of a woman.

He felt a profound disheartenment. His mind skimmed the waste of his younger years. It saw his toils as little things and the work he had praised in himself as that of a trifler. He knew now his capacities for ambition. He saw inspiration for the first time as, on a twilit highway, one sees a fancied bush, with a sudden movement, resolve itself into a human figure. He saw his past, harvestless. Fate had taken his youth, like a handful of sand, and fed it to the sea! Since Margaret had gone, his work had been purposeless, barren--it wanted her presence.

He had lighted his pipe mechanically, and through the blue-pale smoke whorls, a near bush took on the outline of her clear profile, reclined against a dusky cushion. His longing filled the silence with an inward voice:

“You are the woman,” it said, “that I have always wanted! I want you all! I want your childish shallows and your womanly deeps! I want your weakness and your strength! I want you just as you are, no different--you, yourself.”

She was sitting before him now in the firelight of her room, where the tongues of the burning drift-wood and salt-dusted larch sprang up, blue, magenta and purplish-green, prickling the brass-work of the fireplace into a thousand many-colored points, and he was leaning forward, speaking, with his bare heart behind set lips: “I love you. All that I have for you that you will not own! All that you might be to me that you will not give!”

He felt her present trouble vaguely and with the same impotent resentment that he had felt in that far-off yet ridiculously near child-life, when in all the lofty manhood of his eight years he had defied the cliff-winds--that childhood which lived in his memory as a stretch of sun-drowned sea-beach swept by wind; a dim background in a frame of sharp outline, which held little images of delicate fragrance, clear and sweet, on the retina of his memory. This woman met him in a pain, measured by his added years, that he was powerless to appease.

Knocking the cold ashes from his pipe, Daunt rose and stretched his arms wide along the topmost rail of the shambling fence and gazed out across the evening hills, blurred by the blue of distance, into the red sunset. Far to the left, glooming from encircling elms, lay the house that sheltered Margaret. Down below him, in the railroad cut, crawled a deliberate tank-train. From where he stood, he could see the ungainly arm of the slung pipe, through which the thirsty engine drank deep draughts. Sitting in the chill air had told him his fatigue, and his wrist had grown stiff and painful. He felt unequal to the long walk across to Tenbridge, and, consulting his watch, reflected that the city-bound train, almost due, would carry him to the little Guthrie junction, shortening his walk by half.

He pushed rapidly down the hill road, grateful for the heat of renewed motion. The station was deserted. One shabby hack drowsed driverless under the shed, and even the ticket agent had apparently forsaken his grating.

Sauntering across the platform, Daunt leaned against the signal-post, on whose swinging arm a round, fevered eye watched, unwinkingly and angry, for the distant train, fast growing from a bright pin point to a blazing blotch of yellow, between the spun-out rails. Its attenuated rumbling had swelled to a trembling roar. His pre-occupation was so deep that the clamorous iron thing was upon him almost before he heard it. The surprise jarred him into sudden movement, and it was then that his tired limbs lurched under him; the sucking vortex of the hurtling mass threw him off his balance, he wavered, stumbled, fell--and the pitiless armored monster, plunging, gigantic, regardless, caught him on its mailed side and passed on, to shudder, to slow, to stop--too late!

XIII.

The gas lamps had been early lit and threw flaring streaks of white across the dingy platform as Margaret reached the station. She had stood on the top of the little slope, looking back across the fields, grown dim and mysterious in the purpling dusk, with a tightening of the throat. However unhappy she had been here, yet she had seen Daunt. He had stood with her by those dwarfed hedges, he had pleaded with her under the flaming boughs of those woods. She could still feel the strong pressure of his lips upon her hand as he besought her for what she could have given him so eagerly, so gladly, so joyously if she had dared. She was leaving him there, and the parting now seemed so much more than that other seaside flight, when she had been stung to action by her own self-reproach. Making her mute farewell, she heard a shriek of steam, as the train came shuddering into the station, drawing long, labored breaths like some chained serpent monster, overtired, and she hastened stumblingly, uncertainly over the stony road. When she reached the platform, she was out of breath and panting, and did not notice the knot of trainmen, with beckoning arms and dangling lanterns, by the side of the track.

She sank into her Pullman seat wearily. Several windows were open and inquiring heads were thrust forth. She was conscious of a subdued excitement in the air. A conductor passed hurriedly through the coach and swung himself deftly off the end. People about her asked each other impatiently why the train did not start, and a sallow-faced woman with a false front hoped nervously and audibly that nothing was the matter. A sudden whisper spread itself from chair to chair, and a man came back from the smoking compartment to seat himself beside his wife, and pulled down the window-shade with low whisperings.

“An accident. A man hurt.”

Margaret heard it with a tremor. She tried to raise her window, but the latch caught, and she placed her face close to the pane to peer out. Up the platform tramped four trainmen, bloused and grimy with coal-dust, carrying between them a board, covered with tarpaulin, under which showed clearly the outlines of a human figure.

Margaret caught her breath and drew back with a sudden feeling of faintness. There were a few tense moments of waiting. Then a quiver ran through the heavy trucks, there was a sharp whistle, a snort of escaping steam, and past her window moved slowly back the station lamps. A porter went toward the baggage-car, his arms piled high with white towels, which threw his ebony face into sharp contrast. The forward conductor leaned over the occupant of the chair across from Margaret to borrow his flask, and went out with it. She realized from this that the injured one was on the train.