CHAPTER XXII
ANOTHER BEGINNING
Norris, as he left Percival’s house, had a glimpse of Lena coming down the hall, wonderful in her shimmering evening gown, brave in jewels. She dazzled him, though he despised his eyes for admiring her and told himself that she was tinsel.
He bowed in response to her curt nod, well aware that she thought him too unimportant to merit her courtesy, while she resented her husband’s inexplicable regard for him. He went out into a cold winter drizzle and turned his face toward home and Madeline, those new and thrilling possessions. For the moment, however, there was no exhilaration in his heart, rather a depressed questioning whether, after all, everything beautiful was a sham. Was the daily grind a mechanical millwheel? Dick and Dick’s marriage, were they but samples of the way life deals with hope? A pang stabbed through him as his own marriage rose and stood beside Dick’s in his mind. It meant so much to him; yet only a few months before his friend had been bubbling with an exultation more open-voiced than his own.
There are not only great Sloughs of Despond waiting here and there for the pilgrim, but there are in almost every day little gutters of despond that must be jumped if one does not wish cold and soiled feet; so here his healthy mind cried out against morbid thoughts and he reviled himself for companioning the thing he held sacred with the thing he had always felt foredoomed to failure. He told himself that middle-age was not a dead level of hopes grown gray and withered, but rather a heightening of the contrasts between success and failure. A word of Mr. Elton’s spoken long ago, flashed back to him: “Don’t build your attics before you’ve finished your cellars.” That, after all, was a test. If one could but get a good solid foundation under hope, one might trust it to lift its pinnacle as far toward Heaven as the ethereal upper air. Alas for Dick!
Then, though he still loved his one-time hero, Ellery put Dick from his mind. His feet quickened and his heart began to beat joyously again. He ran up his steps, delighting in the commonplace performance of putting a latch-key into a lock. The cold and drizzle were shut outside, and Madeline waited in the warmth and light of the hall to insist on helping him off with his overcoat, a task so absurdly difficult that when it was finished they laughed and kissed each other in mutual delight at their own foolishness.
Then Madeline took his hand and drew him into the living-room, where the light was low and shaded, but blazing logs painted even far-shadowed corners with warmth, and pranked the girl’s white dress into glowing pink, while the fire hummed and crackled its own triumph:
“I consumed the deep green forest with all its songs,
And all the songs of the forest now sing aloud in me.”
Ellery stood with his arm around his wife’s waist and looked about with a quizzical expression that made her ask,