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 brass-buttoned 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, impassively, 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 pass-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 passed 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, clusters 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 knob.
She looked at him in silence, studying his impassive 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 cluster 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, impassively. 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.
"John," she said, in a low half-sob, "you won't—you can't leave me, without a word?"
He drew back from her; he, too, was humbled and broken, but the pride of his youth and the pride of his race still clung to him.
"There is nothing for me to say," he answered, coldly. He asked himself fiercely why he had half-heartedly wished, so many times, to see her but once, before going.
With a sudden impetuous movement she ran to him and flung her arms about him, clinging to him, panting and shaken.
"I love you; oh, I love you!" she cried out, passionately, locking each thin arm about his resisting body. He no longer tried to force her away, and she clung to him and cried out again and again: "I love you, my own, I love you!"
Yet he stood unmoved, feeling as though she had long since drained to the bottom his deepest springs of emotion; now he could neither care nor resist.
"I have done wrong," she cried to him, feverishly; "I have made mistakes, and I have suffered, and grown wise! But see, through it all, how humble I have come to be! See how I crawl back to you! It was all vile, that old life of mine, I know!—but I only stumbled into it at first, by the littlest, most miserable chance; and I had to keep it up, to the end! And you couldn't understand that old, ceaseless craving for what it brought, and how the passion for that world they thrust me into made me half-blind and half-drunk, and how I had to keep on, and on, and on!"
She tried to draw his face down to her own.
"If you knew what, or how, I have suffered! If you only knew—you'd forgive me! If you could understand how I love you now you would take me back, you would say that never in all the world would you find another love like mine! Oh, it isn't too late! It isn't too late! We have our lives still before us; we have both been living on the north side of life too long; we have been missing all the sun, and warmth, and color. And you can save me from myself; you were saving me from myself! With you I could begin over again, from the first!"
He broke away from her then, with a vehemence that she had not looked for in him, but still she went on, feverishly: "Oh, you are strong, where I am faltering and weak. I want to be honest, and good, and upright—but from the first they wouldn't let me! Oh, they wouldn't let me!"
"You have lied to me!" he cried out to her, harshly. "You lied to me from the first. You lied to me in the very hour when I asked you for all your open trust. Your life has been a lie! You are a lie—a living lie!"
She tried to muffle the words with her hand, but his passion swept him on.
"What you are now you'll be to the end! You have gone through life a cheat, an impostor, and you'll be one to the last! Even now you are acting a lie, even now, with me!"
He knew it was not the truth he spoke, but he felt safer after flinging it at her.
"No, no," she cried back. "This is no lie! What woman would come and say what I have said? I couldn't ever act a part with you! I have no one but you—I have no one but you!"
As he flung her from him, in his own sudden terror of himself, she fell back and crouched on his trunk, rocking her frail body weakly back and forth, and sobbing over and over again: "Let me go back with you! Oh, have mercy on me, my own, and let me go back with you!"
Then she crept up to him on her knees, and clung to him with her thin, white hands, her eyes streaming with tears.
"I have friends," she went on, hysterically. "I have power and influence! I will work for you; I will slave for you! I will help you on, to the end; I will make you, my own! Only love me, love me! I need your love! You have taught me what it means, and I must have it! See, see how humbled I am, here, on my knees to you!"
With a sudden passionate movement he seized her drooping head between his hands and looked down long and searchingly into her white, tear-stained, up-turned face. His penetrating glance took note, for the first time, of the golden tint in the iris of her gray-green eyes, of the golden tint in her face itself, as if pale gold had been infused under some translucent shell of rose-white. Something in its reckless, wan beauty mounted to his brain intoxicatingly, and with a gasp he broke away from her again. As he fell back from her touch, his foot crushed her copy of The Silver Poppy, and he looked down at it, liberated, remembering how he had flung it there from among his own books, when he had stumbled unexpectedly upon it as upon the hideous sloughed skin of a snake. Intuitively, as she watched him, the woman at his feet saw her last flickering glimmer of hope die away, and then, in her utter despair, she beat her forehead with her hands and flung herself down and sobbed out brokenly that the whole world was against her, that he had trapped and betrayed her into loving him, and that he, and he alone, could save her.
Then, seeing him still obdurate and unmoved, she fell to beating the floor with her clenched fists, raving insanely at his cruelty, imploring him to have pity on her. And again, as her impotent passion wore itself out, she lay there sobbing weakly, while he still stood above her, gazing out at the wheeling sea-gulls, into the blue distance beyond the lower Hudson.
Then a bell rang sharply, and she sat up, limp and exhausted, wiping the tears from her swollen face.
Hartley went to the door; a breath of relieving fresh air seemed to break in on him as he opened it. Two uniformed expressmen stood outside, waiting for his baggage. They had witnessed tearful farewells before, and their faces were respectfully expressionless, like masks, while they lifted the larger trunk out through the door and down the hallway.
Cordelia crept brokenly over to the window where Hartley stood, her shaking hands moving and feeling hesitatingly about his averted shoulders, as the hands of the blind do.
"Only kiss me—once!" she whispered, quietly, with a sudden white calm sweeping over her face. "Kiss me—once!"
She lifted her wet face, with its tumbled red-gold hair, up to his. Her eyes were closed, and she clung swaying to his coat-sleeves, waiting. He looked down at her, swept away from her by a sudden alienating, dispiriting wave of pity, and kissed her with a kiss that seemed to leave her shrouded and coffined.
"Now go! Oh, go!" she cried out to him quickly, with her face still uplifted, and her eyes still closed.
He turned away from her and crossed the room slowly, waiting to close the door after the expressmen stoically carrying down his remaining trunk. He felt, in that last minute, as he passed out, that she was richer by an indeterminate something that he himself had lost, although the sound of her broken sobbing crept out to him through even the closed door.