The Silver Poppy Part 32

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 auth.o.r.ess.

"Your request, Miss Vaughan, was an impossible one."

"But it _must_ be done!" she cried, pa.s.sionately.

He shrugged his shoulders, ambiguously.

"And it _shall_ be done!" she cried again, even more pa.s.sionately. 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 a.s.sistants.

"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.

CHAPTER XXIX

DESINAT IN PISCEM, MULIER FORMOSA SUPERNE

... A life By love's black frost all blighted and foregone, Glad that it suffers not; with sorrow in Its poor thin laughter sadder far than tears.

Ah, more than pain in that abysmal breast Each broken, dark, irresolute delight!

JOHN HARTLEY, "Street Dust."

To wear love's brand you must bear love's burn.--"The Silver Poppy."

It was the second morning after Cordelia's seemingly whimsical return to New York that Hartley awoke in an indeterminate gray vapor of impending evil. A feeling of chill nausea crept over him as he dressed, and, in a sudden fit of weakness, he fell back on the bed, filled with the strong man's unreasoning, weak terror of illness.

He ate no breakfast whatever, and, as the morning wore miserably away and his torpor of mind and body seemed to increase, he at last ventured dizzily out into the streets, looking up and down the little French-Canadian city for the sign-board of an English doctor. He found one, finally; and in response to his ring a homesick young surgeon just over from London, after cheerily pounding him about and casually looking down his throat, handed him an antiseptic gargle for tonsillitis, and then talked for an hour of home, of the London music-halls, and of his hatred for the Colonies.

When Hartley made his escape from the sickeningly odorous, drug-scented little surgery, a new irrational hatred of the subdued, bustling, big-roomed hotel took hold of him. Following a sudden impulse, he bought a pair of heavy walking-shoes and a little leather knapsack, madly determined by a few days of open-air tramping through the valley of the St. Lawrence to walk himself once more into health and strength.

He had covered five dreary miles of what seemed endless, undulating dust and gravel when he tottered weakly to the whitewashed palings of a _habitant's_ cottage and gave up. Crawling and staggering to the door, he incoherently cried for water.

The swarthy, keen-eyed little French doctor who, two hours later, came bustling to his straw-mattress bedside, grew suddenly serious as he bent over his stalwart patient, while the patient himself, as he sank from soft gray heights of silence into black pits of torturing desolation, listened languidly to a thin, far-away voice that seemed to be telling somebody that he was in a bad way, with black diphtheria, and that above all things he must be kept quiet, and must not be moved. It was the last declaration that left the sick man so dreamily content. He felt that he could rest there forever, almost--that nothing better could come to him than to lie there for countless years, resting.

When, three days later, the Spauldings returned to New York with no news of Hartley or his where-abouts, Cordelia went through a second day of silent torture. She wrote to him twice, and, receiving no reply, telegraphed in Henry Spaulding's name to Hartley's Quebec hotel for information. No definite news could be given her, so she wrote to him still again, imploring him to come back at once, saying that she needed him, that she had much to confess to him and ask of him. In the course of a few weeks her different letters were returned to her, unopened.

In those first days of silence and suspense she vacillated miserably between two fears: one, that Hartley had already learned the truth about The Unwise Virgins; the other, that Repellier had at last intervened and written to him the actual history of The Silver Poppy. But in some way, she knew, he had found her out.

At the end of a long week of tormenting uncertainty, in sheer despair she flung herself into the currents of activity that rose about her, like a hundred inviting Lethes, with the first success of The Unwise Virgins. For the triumph of that volume did not long remain a matter of doubt. Gaily designed posters, cl.u.s.tering flamboyantly about bill-boards and blind-walls, about street-cars and elevated-railway platforms, about even urban and suburban ash-barrels, told of its merits and its unprecedented sales. More than one of the larger department stores gave the volume a table by itself, above which hung a huge photographic print of the auth.o.r.ess, showing the frailest of white shoulders emerging from a swathing cloud of lace-work, and above them a face with femininely appealing eyes and the pensive shadow of a half-bitter and yet half-girlish smile. An English edition was soon called for, and was more than moderately successful, while even The Silver Poppy itself appeared in a new binding, to reappear still again as a newspaper serial, and to bring yet a little more publicity to the young auth.o.r.ess, in the very heyday of a fame for which it was commonly said she was at heart most contemptuous.

Yet Cordelia flung herself into it all as into a cooling stream, drugging herself during the following month or two with an incessant, opiate rush of activity that, spread thinly, might easily have irrigated a less tumultuous lifetime. The newspapers were full of her doings; one day she was winning the prize in a world's beauty compet.i.tion; another day she was to go on the stage and star in a dramatized version of her new book; and at still another time she was to return to the South and devote the rest of her life to a cycle of novels dealing comprehensively with American national life. Hanchett was commissioned to paint a portrait of her for the Southern Women's Club; and, while she remained a guest in the little, yellow-tinted study on Seventy-second Street, there was never a day when either the yellow Victoria or the more ma.s.sive brougham of the Spauldings was not in use. But she had grown strangely averse to many of her former friends, and Mrs. Spaulding soon realized that the older feeling no longer held them together, though, indeed, it was not until after the first announcements of Cordelia's proposed lecturing tour that the yellow-tinted study was actually deserted by her. When the author of The Unwise Virgins did migrate, she sought apartments in one of the handsomest of those lower Fifth Avenue private hotels, consecrated, in the words of Miss Short, "to white-gloved attendants, lap-dogs, and opulent valetudinarianism."

Cordelia felt that there must be no shadow of excuse for her enemies--and how many of them she had!--to claim that the social tide had turned against her. The cost of these apartments frightened her a little at first; but until they had been well photographed and the views in turn reproduced in the evening newspapers, with appropriate descriptions--until, indeed, she actually started out on her hurried and yet much-heralded lecturing tour--she kept them up sumptuously, with a studious recklessness of expense, receiving as her guests many long-haired men and many heavy-jawed women, bristlingly aggressive of intellect and eminence. Yet all of them, in her heart, she knew she despised, though again and again she found it useless to fight against her new strange dread of old friends, bitterly realizing that once more her tree-like growth to fame must be marked by its new and ever-widening circle.

Then came the lecture tour itself. It was preceded by a campaign of advertising, artfully laid out by her manager, and in the end proved so marked a financial success that Cordelia herself was a.s.sured--whatever else might happen--of a generous competency for the remainder of her natural life. And many times, brooding over and making the most of this fact, she thought of those earlier and sadly uncertain days when she had frugally washed out her own towel and hung it to dry before her little studio window.

If the lecture itself--prepared by an expert in the employ of her manager, and dealing gravely, yet with flashes of facetiousness, with The American Woman--was a somewhat qualified success in the larger Eastern cities, effetely tending to a flippant view of life's more vital problems, Cordelia's tour through the South, and also the West, partook not a little of the nature of a Roman triumph.

Not that this triumph was without its trials, from the blunt suggestion of her manager that her next lecture deal with How I Wrote My First Novel, to the long and agonizing night of nervous collapse after the ordeal of her first appearance on the platform. Though frail in body, she could withstand much, and was seldom ill. But the ordeal of that first lecture had left her white and shattered and limp; and it was then, the first time for many a long day, that she gave herself over to tears. She wept long and bitterly, and walked the room of her hotel till morning. Then she sent for a doctor, and clung to that kindly eyed man, when he came, with the pitiful forlornness of a lost and homesick child.

In many of the towns, particularly in the West, she became the guest of different women's clubs, and sometimes after her lecture a reception was held, and often hundreds of admiring and anxious-eyed women would press up to shake her hand. Through all this she carried herself well, and with a certain dignity. But many of those who met her at once remarked how different she was from her pictures, and asked, perhaps a little bewildered, just how young--or how old--she was.

When she lectured at Lexington her father came in secret--for she had written to him pleading with him not to do so--to hear his wonderful daughter, whom even he himself had never quite understood. And when, toward the close of the lecture, the sound of quiet sobs rose from the back of the audience, there was a dramatic moment when the woman on the platform stopped speaking and caught hurriedly at the little table beside her for support.

It was in her own State, too, that she delivered her much-talked-of address on Motherhood before the Four-O'clock Club--an address which later appeared in a tiny _edition de luxe_, and was looked on by certain of her admirers as the most tender and most human utterance of all her career.

There appeared but one small cloud on the horizon of all that open success, remarkable for the unexpected strangeness of its appearance, and notable because of the equal abruptness of its pa.s.sing.

It was during the dull and quiescent days following the alleviatingly active weeks of the lecture tour. Cordelia felt that she would go mad if she remained longer with nothing to take up her mind. Her restless feet had worn a dull pathway in the pile of the over-gaudy carpet that ornamented her soberly magnificent apartment-hotel. In despair, she turned once more to literature, and once more alone and most bitterly she struggled to wrest from a reluctant Muse some solitary bay-leaf of her own, some final shred of laurel to which no other hand might lay claim, aspiring to climb once more to the pinnacle of that most delectable mountain about whose dangerous fringe she had now fretted for many months.

It was a courageous struggle. But it proved a futile one. Then casting desperately about her, in a new-born terror of helplessness, hidden away on the obscure shelf of an obscure library she stumbled across a badly bound, age-yellowed little volume which bore the t.i.tle The Spirit Child.

It had been conceived and written by one Florence Hitch, of Boston, and dedicated to "all seekers after Truth and the Spirit." Could there be, Cordelia asked herself, another such book so obviously dead and forgotten!

It had, indeed, been lost to the world, unremembered this many a year.

But it still remained the first-born of that aspiring heart which had once conceived and laid it in the lap of unapproving mankind. When, in the despair on her new-found sterility, Cordelia made not ungenerous use of that faded and grotesquely bound little volume, during the creation of her own remarkable spiritualistic story which appeared in one of the Sunday papers under the t.i.tle of A Daughter of Dream, the fair snapper-up of unconsidered trifles had antic.i.p.ated no slightest word of reproof. But that elderly maiden lady, Miss Florence Hitch, at once beheld and recognized her first-born, stripped as it was of its original swaddling-clothes, and with a maternal and quite natural fury proceeded to fight to the end for her own. It was a spirited and moving struggle, in which the daily press at once took issue, and though Miss. .h.i.tch mysteriously and unexpectedly subsided at the end of a two-weeks'

warfare, and in carefully dictated phrases attempted to explain away the entire matter as a singular and interesting example of literary parallelism, lingering echoes of that disturbing explosion came to Cordelia from quarters least expected. And those were most unhappy days, when she sat waiting for her daily envelope of carefully labeled articles and news items from her clipping agency, among which she lingered for hours, like a pale dryad amid the thickly falling leaves of autumn.

One November night of constant rain, when she could not sleep, her brooding fancy half conceived the thing she was. John Hartley had once told her of that strangest of sights, a salmon-run. She felt that she must live a life like one of those poor creatures, that she must fight, and push, and shoulder, and battle ever up some dark river whose tide was ever against her--must struggle madly on, day by day, losing day by day a little of herself, shoal by shoal and rapid by rapid shedding a little of what had been best and beautiful in her, still panting and pus.h.i.+ng on for those unknown and cruelly distant head waters of peace, into which she might finally creep a tattered and half-naked, hideous thing, stripped to the vertebra, a toy of a pa.s.sionate instinct stronger than her own will, and sweeter, perhaps, than her own life.

Yet rest and peace was the one thing which she reached out for, in those troubled days, with thin and futile arms, feeling, even as she did so, that it could never be attained.