He went back to his work happy, light-hearted, assured. He felt come over him a new sense of power and freedom. With it the fires of creation seemed to burn and rage within him. For all time the week that followed remained a blurred and vague memory to him—a memory of hurried and half-eaten meals of chuck steak and strong coffee, of much tobacco-smoke, of feverish snatches at the fresh air by night, of unsettled sleep and an aching anxiety to be once more at work. His brain seemed to have taken the bit in its teeth and run away with him, though not, he knew, as Cordelia's had once bolted despairingly over the same pages.
When several days later he received a plaintive little note from that lady herself, it remained unnoticed. Little Pietro Salvatore crept timidly up to see him, but was not admitted. He could give no time to the empty graces and accidents of life. He was in the world of the spirit. The man in him flickered and went out; and the creator, the artist, awoke, and taking possession of his soul, claimed its own.
How long this mood, or madness—he did not stop to ask which it was—might have lasted he could never tell. But early one day a sharp pounding on his door angered him unreasonably. When it had sounded for the third time he answered it, and found a uniformed messenger-boy with a note from Cordelia. He tossed it aside, and plunged once more into his work. But three hours later he was interrupted again. This time it was a telegram. He opened it belligerently and read it. It was from Cordelia. He remembered that her note had asked something about when he could get up to see her. Now she had wired, "You must come at once."
Hartley sighed wearily. Then he walked his room resentfully. Then, like one awakening from a long sleep, he rubbed his eyes and looked abstractedly up and down his litter of manuscript and notes. He tried to go back to them, but some hand seemed leashing in his whimpering ideas. The spell was broken. He sat back in his chair and stretched himself wearily. He pictured a pale oval face, with its abundance of massed golden-yellow hair like a great crown, and remembered the little hands that seemed to flutter about like butterfly wings. And all at once his room stood before him an unspeakably squalid and lonely place. He wondered why he had been penning himself up for so long.
That afternoon, being unable to work, he walked twelve long miles and blistered his feet and tired his legs. He was in bed, weary of both mind and body before it was dark, and the sun was high before he wakened next morning. The world seemed gray and flat. The singing April of inspiration had passed. But he knew that he had broken the back of his work. The foundations of his labor had been laid, and thereafter he felt his toil on those half-completed twenty chapters of The Unwise Virgins must be that work which is done in cold blood, critical, calculating, dispassionate. But the thread of creation was snapped.
"I thought you were never coming," Cordelia lamented in her unconsciously soft contralto, as he stepped into the Spauldings' large, softly lighted library.
He laughed good-naturedly—he felt that a week of brain-work had burned out of him some excess of solemnity—and with boyish precipitancy thrust his twenty rough chapters of The Unwise Virgins into her arms.
"Behold my redemption!" he cried gaily, and felt that he should like to follow the twenty chapters and be held there as she held the crumpled leaves to her breast.
She had been waiting for him, and was dressed in a gown of old gold with yellow roses at her throat and in her hair. He threw his admiration of the picture she made into the glance he let linger abstractedly on her face. For the first time he noticed some touch of trouble about her quiet lips, a new tiredness about the pleading eyes.