“And am I to be such a thing?” she said. “Surely all the world must bow down in pity for the solitary woman.” Some half-forgotten lines came back to her:
“Mine ear is full of the rocking of cradles.
For a single cradle, saith Nature, I would give every one of my graves.”
By her little practice piano her eyes fell on the pages of Schubert’s unfinished symphony.
“Unfinished!” she said. “And yet even there is the phrase that comes and comes again, sweeter and more full of meaning in every renewed variety. So I must have love to play through my life, or else it will be nothing but a medley. It must be my music’s theme; even if the symphony is unfinished. Are there women who can do without it, who can take a life alone and make it sweet and satisfying? Not I, oh God, not I! I’m no exceptional creature. I’m just a plain woman. And if life doesn’t give me wifehood and motherhood, it gives me nothing. I wonder if all women feel this way. This pretty little Lena,—is she bursting with primal need of giving and taking? At any rate she has put something in Dick’s face that was never there before—that I’d give my soul to see in a man’s face when he looks at me.”
Hitherto the world had ambled along in an amiable way; and now it suddenly turned and delivered a blow in the face. Every one is destined to receive such blows, some get little else. But the test comes in the way they are received. You may use belladonna as a poison, or you may use it to help the blind to see. So when pain comes, you may take it to your bosom and suckle it till it becomes a fine healthy child, too heavy for you to carry; or cast out the changeling and leave it on the doorstep to die. It matters little how much anguish skulks about the outside of life, so long as it finds no lodgment in the sacred shrines of the heart. Madeline met her first grief and fought it off; and, even while she thought it had given her a mortal wound, came the revelation of the powerlessness of the poor thing. She put her arms down on the window-sill to cry deliberately, but something dried her tears.
“I couldn’t put that look in Dick’s face, but could he put it in mine? Was this taking of things for granted the best love of which I am capable? I’ve found out to-day that there are all kinds of things in me that I have never dreamed of before, and passion is one of them, and rebellion. Great heavens! I might have married him and been serene and never found things out.”
She seemed to be looking at a new Madeline; and while she stared, startled, this self grew greater and stronger.
“This is not the end of life; it is the beginning,” she whispered. “I’ve been looking down the wrong road. Dick has no such power over me as to consign me to misery everlasting. I am mistress of my own fate. I have not handed it over to him. Happiness is not a thing to get. It is a state of mind to live in. It is my own affair, not that of others.” She rested her chin in her hands and fell into a girl’s day-dream, in which the nightmare was forgotten.
Twilight fell at last, and faint sounds came up to her to remind her that down stairs there were well-beloved people who did not know and should never know of her little vigil. Her father must be coming home. It was time for her to put on her armor and go down. Armor is one of the necessities of life. If we can’t wear it in steel plates on the outside, we must mask the face with impenetrability and the manner with pretense. Never let the heart be vulnerable. Yet, try as we may, something of our weakness is laid bare. Hereafter Miss Elton might be serene, but would never again be placid.
But now she was quite herself.