She looked at him with a smile he had seldom seen on her lips. Her face that afternoon seemed sadly golden with the afterglow of an almost girlish tenderness that had long dropped beyond the horizon of the years, dignified with a light that seldom dwelt on it.
"And I want you to be happy and enjoy it," she added.
"How could you, Mrs. Spaulding! How could you!" he cried impetuously, taking her hand. It was not often that his Anglican coldness crept away from him, but when it did he was delightfully boyish.
"Is there anything so dreadful in it?"
"Only because it is all so dreadfully undeserved."
"Dear me, it's been the greatest fun for us. And then it's going to be so jolly to drop in every now and then and see you. And poor, dear Cordelia has tried so hard to fix things to please you. So if you shatter our faith in you, sir," she added, going to the window and gazing out where the great silver bosom of the Hudson glimmered and shone in the autumnal sunlight, "or if you fail to write a great book here, then—well, we'll never forgive you, that's all."
He had no answer to make, for he too was looking out over the wide river and already thinking his own great thoughts of the future. Rung by rung he saw the ladder of success before him, and now that he had his foot on it—now he would show them. He would be, he told himself, none the less active; he would allow himself to lose none of his old aggressive discontent. Hereafter, though, he would do only that work which lay nearest his heart. There should be no yielding to transient interests, no bending to the voice of the moment. There was, of course, still his book to finish for Cordelia; that was but a matter of a few weeks. Then he would be free. Then the artist and his opportunity would be face to face.
One small cloud hovered over the clear horizon of his happiness. On the very threshold of his freedom he was finding the lightest of golden chains clinking thinly at his wrists. It was the disquieting sense of obligation toward Cordelia. His liberty had not come to him unqualified.
Hartley could not leave his humble East Side room without a pang or two of regret. One can never turn over such a page in life, he knew, without a touch of sorrow for the chapter that is closed. He felt that he was losing the companionship of those whom a common poverty had drawn closely about him. He felt, too, that it was the death of the democrat in him. He had grown to take an unworded pride in classing himself as one of the People. There could be no more of the "glad confident morning again." And if, at times, he had rebelled against the squalor and discomfort of that older life, yet now, when the hour for stepping out of and above it had arrived, he hesitated still again before taking the upper path into that new and untried world. The heat and dust and clangor of the busy streets, the cries and odors where men and women hived closely together, the wailing of young and neglected children, the sense of feverish movement and stir, the hum of the ceaseless machines—all these in the old days had entered into his life and had brought with them a riddle which he had not quite read, a lesson which he had not quite learned. And life there, too, had known its shreds and patches of color. With all its poverty there was a Southern air of gaiety and lightness about this New World East Side. It had none of the dismal and monotonous hideousness and the hopelessness of a Bethnal Green and a Whitechapel. He felt that he was stepping out to light and to liberty, yet taking with him a heavy heart—a heart that had almost grown to love its very cell. And after all, was it liberty? The softer side of life had not been unknown to him, and had not brought him happiness in the old days. A touch of the flagellant in him still turned his eyes toward the more buffeting existence, while at the same time the artist, the apostle for form, cried out in him for its leisured contemplation. Yet better to be the crystal and be broken, he felt, than the tile upon the housetop.
And John Hartley was not altogether and unrestrictedly happy during that first hour in his new apartment.