The Silver Poppy Part 33

She at last determined, in a sudden fury of daring, that she would endure it all no longer, crying out within herself that life owed her more than it was giving. As a result of that new spirit of audaciousness, she appeared early the next day at the studio of Repellier; yet even as she stepped into the familiar, high-ceilinged room she quailed inwardly, and found herself with little to say. She was dressed in a tightly fitting whip-cord gown--her eye for outward apparel had in no way dimmed--and on her breast she wore a huge bunch of English violets. Repellier's quick eye noticed that her cheeks were rouged, and that a touch of crimson had been added to her usually pale lips. During all her brief visit she appeared ill at ease--so ill at ease that the kind-hearted old Repellier did not have the courage to speak of anything but the lightest commonplaces, even showing her his newer canvases and, from his windows, pointing out to her the city m.u.f.fled in rain.

When she rose to say good-by he went with her to the door, wondering why she had not spoken, and marveling at the change in her. From his open door he gazed after her, musingly. It was at the top of the stairs that she turned hesitatingly back.

"Mr. Repellier!"

He waited for her to speak, though some subterranean medium seemed to carry her words to him before they were uttered.

"Do you ever," she hesitated, "I mean have you ever heard anything of--of Mr. Hartley?"

The picture of a humbled and half-wistful supplicant, of a woman withered and broken, weighed down by the monotony and starvation of an empty life, yet consumed by a still insatiable greed, of a being who had grown old unwillingly, clinging there weakly to his bal.u.s.ter-rail and looking back at him through the half-light of a gloomy hallway, photographed itself indelibly on Repellier's memory, as there flashed over him the incongruous image of Hanchett's new portrait of her, hung but a week before in the hall of the Southern Women's Club, where, he knew, she was to look down for all time from her great gilt frame, beautiful to the eye, frail and tender, mysteriously seductive, the drooping eyes luminous and mutely pleading, the mouth pensive, almost pathetically weak in its excess of timorous femininity, the proudly poised head weighed down with its heavy burden of golden-red hair, the whole figure touched with a fervor hinting at the inner fire consuming the all too frail flesh. It was aeschylean, Repellier felt, in its piercing irony.

"Yes, I have heard from Hartley," he answered, slowly, as she raised a suddenly vivid face to him. "He has been ill, and alone, for weeks."

"Ill!" she cried, in a hard, thin voice; and a baffled life seemed to ebb away with that one little cry. Through the half-lights the woman did not move.

"For six weeks the poor fellow lay ill with malignant diphtheria, in a _habitant's_ cottage, below Quebec," Repellier went on, more compa.s.sionately. "His strength did not come back to him, so they advised him to take the sea voyage, on a freighter, round to New York. They had a rough time of it, and they landed him here a little worse than when he crawled aboard."

"And then?"

"He's been strengthening up in a Brooklyn hospital--only last week he sent for me. I might as well tell you, Miss Vaughan, that he wrote to you three times, from Canada, and that only yesterday, on his way to his rooms to pack up his things, he picked up a copy of The Unwise Virgins!"

"And then--then you told him everything?" she whispered, tensely.

The old artist went over to her, and placed a hand gently on her arm.

"I told him only what I had to; the rest, I fear, he guessed." She drew back from him quickly.

"It was better for you both, I know now," he said, with his hand still touching her rigid arm. "And some day I think you will both forgive me for it!"

She turned from him where he stood, and groped her way blindly down the long stairs, her brain reeling with the mockery of it all, while her heart still cried blindly out for the man who had crowned her with his love, as she frantically told herself that she must still find him, and that in some devious way it might not yet be too late.

CHAPTER x.x.x

THE WORLD AND THE MAN

We dared so long, and doubted not, The saddest is that you should fail Now all the battle has been fought, And doubt, or daring, no avail!

JOHN HARTLEY, "Pale Souls."

It is the ebb-tide of love that shows the mud-flats of the soul.--"The Silver Poppy."

For two days Cordelia drove irrationally up and down beneath the windows of Hartley's apartments, hiding timorously back in the shadows of the curtained brougham, yet every alert moment watching the crowded sidewalks and carriage-lined drive, half-hoping that through some vague operation of the irenics of affection she might still find a way back to him, and to the life she had so miserably lost.

Then, as the second day of her tacit search wore fruitlessly on, she once more grew audacious with the last courage of desperation. Driving briskly up to the apartment-house which had been the pivot of her dreary two-days' reconnaissance, she alighted and peremptorily asked if she might see the rooms recently occupied by Mr. Hartley.

The clerk glanced at her sharply, for a moment not recognizing the white, weary-looking face under its heavy veil but partly caught up. His hesitation was only momentary, for, immediately he had placed the familiar, flute-like contralto voice, he obsequiously called over a bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned attendant.

"Mr. Hartley, by the way, releases his rooms to-morrow," amiably commented the clerk, as he reached for the keys.

"Yes, I know!" murmured Cordelia, impa.s.sively, yet with a quailing heart, struggling to hide the tremor of dull fear that was shaking her.

She saw that she must act with decision.

"I wonder," she went on, evenly, "if Mr. Hartley explained to you my intention of occupying these rooms once more--until the lease runs out, at any rate?"

"He simply sent word that he would come for his things to-morrow, and that you would take possession of the furniture later."

"Yes, of course! But I should like to put things in order, at once." She turned to go, but looked back, toying nervously with the keys.

"You say Mr. Hartley comes for his trunks to-morrow?"

"Yes, Miss Vaughan, to-morrow afternoon."

Hartley hesitated before the familiar door, as he slipped his pa.s.s-key into the lock. He knew that it would be for the last time, that once more the continuity of life was to be rudely snapped. His thoughts went back to another day, wearily, when he had closed the door on those same rooms and hurried away careless, hopeful, light-hearted. He thought, too, as he stood there, with what different feelings, at different times, he had pa.s.sed in and out of those same apartments.

Within, he expected everything to be dust and neglect and disorder. To his surprise there was no sign of this; the very empty quietness of the rooms seemed still touched with an unknown presence. Everything had been put carefully to rights, the furniture and rugs were spotless, the curtains were looped back airily, cl.u.s.ters of freshly cut flowers stood on his desk and on his mantelpiece.

He looked about him, and sighed heavily, pacing the rooms impatiently for a bitter minute or two. Then, with an effort, he pulled himself together, and fell to hurriedly packing his trunks. A sudden new-born fever to get away from the place swept over him; he had made a grievous mistake in ever coming back; he was reaping his own reward of corroding memories. No, no, he told himself, he had no wish to see her again. She was like the dead to him; she belonged to the ghost-like past. He had no resentment against her now; he felt no hatred for her. All that he seemed to feel was a dubious pain, dull and faint and far-away, a pain for all those days he had blotted out and cut off from his actual life--as men are said to feel an ache in a limb that has been amputated.

When he had packed his many-labeled steamer-trunk--brooding absently over a half-obliterated label bearing the word "Turin," a word that conjured up strange memories for him--he stowed away the last of what belongings he cared to take with him in his larger box, inwardly rejoicing that he was carrying away nothing of hers, or nothing that should remind him of her, and the life of which she stood the center. He was forcing down the lid of his trunk when the sharp, metallic click of a key in the door-lock startled him into sudden uprightness.

The door opened slowly, timorously, and Cordelia stood before him, with her hand on the k.n.o.b.

She looked at him in silence, studying his impa.s.sive face with pleading, unwavering eyes, seeming to drink in every detail of feature and expression, searching for something she had, perhaps, half-hoped to find there, startled, too, at the change in him.

"John," she said, in a whisper, taking a step toward him. He looked at her, unrelaxed, without moving.

"John," she whispered once more, pitifully, creeping a step or two closer to him, and stopping again.

She was dressed all in black, and wore a heavy black-plumed hat that framed the white oval of her face; it was a face that looked tired and wan and touched with the twilight of lost happiness. In her hand she carried a great cl.u.s.ter of lilies of the valley. Their sickly, heavy, penetrating fragrance surrounded her and floated in with her, until Hartley himself could smell it. For all the rest of her days the odor of lilies of the valley was hateful to her.

She stood there for a moment, still hesitating, and then turned and closed the door, which had remained open behind her.

"You--you are not going away?" she gasped.

He was glad, inwardly, that it was all definitely settled, that no mischance could now turn him back, that even his own hand could no longer bar his outward way.

"I'm going to England to-morrow," he said, impa.s.sively. He stooped and turned the key in his steamer-trunk with a movement of determined conclusiveness that did not escape her.

"You are going," she echoed, "forever?"

She crept toward him, meekly, wistfully; she touched him with her hand.

He was sallow and shrunken, with new, hard lines about the once boyish mouth; but to the woman who clutched at his arm, he was a lover clothed in beauty and a liberating angel of redemption in one.