THE SCARS OF SLAVERY
And from the gloomy caves of Mem'ry came
The bandits of Repentance in the night
And left her naked, and in spirit torn.
John Hartley, "Street Dust."
Every Klondike of achievement has its Chilkoot of adversity.—"The Silver Poppy."
The next afternoon they were on the Grand Battery, leaning against one of the obsolete old mortars that frowned down over the river. A calm sky of robin's-egg blue stretched over them. Golden and quiet as were the Laurentides about them, there was a touch of chilliness in that clear, northern air, a muffled coldness which Hartley likened to a naked saber-blade buried in rose-leaves. The wide St. Lawrence lay beneath them like a pool of silver. In the remoter distance stretched the blue and purple foot-hills of the Laurentians themselves.
Miles beneath them they could see the valleys of gloomy greenness, dotted with their little flashing whitewashed habitant houses, and over everything the mellow, autumnal sunlight lay; over the gray walls of the Citadel, burning like fire on the windows and spires, gemming the long hillside sloping down to the river, making opals and pearls of the little sails and softening the very grimness of the dark and more distant headlands frowning so sternly out over the peaceful water.
It had been a day full of quiet happiness for both of them, and a feeling of vague regret, of languid sorrow, fell over them, as they stood in silence, looking on the beauty of river and foot-hill and mountain bathed in autumnal silence and gold.
"Oh, if we never grew old!" Cordelia said, with a wistful little shake of the head, drawing closer to Hartley, and slipping her hand through his arm.
He looked down at her with a strange sternness that was not all sternness in his eyes. She turned away, gazing across the wide stretch of river dotted with its shifting opals and pearls.
"Cordelia," he said, softly.
She did not answer. Her musing eyes were far away, on a drifting bank of gray cloud that was slowly shrouding the glory of the sunset and bringing with it a breath of colder wind.
"Cordelia," he repeated, even more softly, "will you marry me?"
She fell back from him, startled, amazed. It came as a bolt out of the blue.
It was the one thing she had not looked for, had not hoped for, had never thought to ask for.
"Marry you!" she repeated, as though the words were words she did not know. "Marry you!"
The molten silver of the river so far beneath her seemed to rise and fall and fade, and the purple line of the foot-hills wavered and darkened and went out. A new voice had come to her in the wilderness of her doubt, a new path seemed to lead out of the two-fold desert of her despair.
"Yes, dear," he said, quietly, taking her gloved hand in his, "will you marry me?—be my wife?"
No words came to her tongue, and her face was white; but the slowly awakening light that crept into her eyes and illuminated all her pallid face made a new, a transformed woman of her. A belated song-sparrow alit on one of the old guns near them, and sang thinly for a moment or two. Never had the man beside her seen that tender light which came to her that minute and hung over her like a halo.
She drew back from him for a moment again, still doubting, still perplexed, still hesitating. He held out his two arms for her as one does for a child.
"I love you, my darling; I love you!" she murmured, as he folded them about her. And he knew it was true. He bent over her, and she gave him her mouth to kiss, reluctantly, as though it had never been kissed before. He kissed her, not passionately, but gravely, almost reverentially; and she was happier at the thought that he had done it so.
"I used to half fear you, dear," he said, still holding her hand through his arm. "I thought you were cold. I looked on you only as the woman who wrote books, as one who worked for praise and fame and success, as a woman hardened and schooled by a selfish world. That suspicion of selfishness, I believe, made me selfish. No, no; you must listen, dear, for this is a confession. What I took for coldness in you challenged a certain coldness in me, and for weeks and weeks I misunderstood you and misjudged you. Now I know better. What has happened during the last week has shown me how wrong I was. And now I want you to forgive me, if you can, for all those old misunderstandings. Will you, Cordelia, dear?"
"You believe in me? You trust me, fully?" she cried, thrilling through all her frail body, trembling with the fierceness of some newer, finer fire.
For one silent minute he looked deeply into her eyes, and, seeing that great and glorious light in them, he responded: "I do, Cordelia! I do, my own!" And there was no shadow of doubt in his voice.
"But I have done so much that is—that is not right!" she hesitated, almost imploringly, leaning over the grim old gun-carriage and burying her face shudderingly in her hands.
"But now I love you because I know you could never deceive me, just as I would never deceive you. I can read it in your eyes, dear. In the past we have both done things which we ought not to have done, perhaps. But that was because we were both misguided, and both hemmed in by the wrong influences, wasting all the best of our lives, and the best of our hearts, on the things that were wrong."
"It is too late!" she almost wailed.
"No; no, indeed; we can go back and begin all over again, this time with a clean slate. I have been thinking these things over, trying, the last few days, to work them out by myself, and I believe I have learned more than one lesson in that time. Think how easily it can be done! We can slip around to that haven of the love-tossed, to the Little Church Around the Corner, and then we can hunt us out some little nook of our own in the big city, and there we can live our lives, and dream our dreams, and do our work, and be happy together! And how happy I shall be, working for you, dearest," he said, with the tremble of emotion in his voice.
"No, no; not back to New York!" she pleaded. "Couldn't we go to England, to Oxford—your own Oxford, and live there, alone, away from them all?"
"Yes, we could, if you thought best!"
The idea of it was new to him.
"John," she said, suddenly, and her voice seemed to lose its softness as she spoke. "John, I have something to tell you! I did not intend to tell you so soon, but now I must!"
She felt that in that exalted moment she must burn every bridge behind her; she must give herself no further chance of defeating herself.
"It is about your book—I could not take it; I have not taken it. I have given it back to you. It is being published now, but—but not in my name!"
Oh, if that could have been the whole truth, she thought, as the first thorn of her poor rose of abnegation pierced her. But it was the best that she could do, she told her aching heart pitifully. It was not too late; she could still make it the truth. In that moment of new birth she felt that she must tell him everything, from the first to the last. But as she framed the very words of her confession she saw that she must still wait a little—that was the most agonizing part of it. Yet nothing, she said to herself sternly, nothing, in the end, should be kept back from him. By her very frankness and openness of soul she would hold him and bind him the closer to her.
"It is being printed now—but not in my name!" she repeated, weakly, clinging to that one prospective act of redemption.
"I thought you would do it," he said, showing no surprise. "And I am glad of it, for your sake, dearest. I don't mind about the book; I do not want that. But it is You, the true You, that I want!" And as he said it his hand sought her hand once more.
"But I have done other things, oh, so many other things, that were—were ignoble, that were wrong!" she cried, pitifully, a terror of her past growing up within her.
"Do you love me?" he said, suddenly, turning to her.
"I would die for you, this day!" she said. And by the beauty and the sudden glory that swept over her face once more he knew her word was not to be doubted.
"Then the other things can never count!" he answered, kissing her tenderly on her cold cheek.
A cold wind blew up the river, and the dusk was falling. Their day was almost gone. Cordelia looked up at the darkening sky, and held her hands out before her.
"See," she said, "the snow-flakes!"
A few white flakes drifted and fluttered down between them; she caught at them with her hands, but they eluded her.
"Yes," he said, standing close beside her, happily, and gazing with her up into the darkening air. "It is snow, falling already!"
Then through the sober autumn air they walked slowly back to the hotel, arm in arm, and silent.
"I must be alone, dearest, for the rest of this day," she said, happily. He understood, and left her to her own woman's thoughts.
When she knew him to be safely in his own room she slipped stealthily down to the hotel telegraph-office and hurriedly wrote out a message for her New York publisher. It said:
"Substitute name John Hartley for Cordelia Vaughan on title-page of novel The Unwise Virgins. For this I agree to relinquish all royalty claims. Will explain later. Answer."
She signed the message and handed it to the operator with a slightly shaking hand, asking nervously how soon she could get a reply. There was no reason why she should not receive one in two hours, perhaps three hours, at the latest.
When that time had expired, and no answer came to her, she repeated the message, this time sending the despatch to Henry Slater's home address.
Late into the night she sat up in her room, frantically waiting for some word from him. As the hours dragged on she paced the little chamber in a fever of unrest, pausing and listening at every footstep that passed her door. Midnight came and went, and still no word arrived. Then she knew that there was but one thing for her to do.
In the gray of the morning, when Hartley and all the hotel were still sleeping, she called a carriage, and, hurrying to the railway station, caught the early morning express for Montreal, on her way to New York. It was no time for half measures.
Three hours later, when Hartley went down to breakfast, after a night of mysteriously depressing restlessness, he found awaiting him an incoherent little note from Cordelia. Bewildered, only after many readings he gathered from it that she had been called away because of some business tangle about which she would tell him later.
"If that isn't like her, the crazy child!" was Mrs. Spaulding's cry when she heard of it all, less disturbed in spirit than Hartley had expected.
And while, indeed, he was still pondering over his surprising note from her, Cordelia herself was speeding along past the old French settlements on the banks of the upper St. Lawrence, gazing absently out at the low-eaved little cottages, and desperately asking herself, again and again, if it would be too late.