At the third window, which was open, a stalwart Irish house-maid barred his progress. He told her, hurriedly, he was a fire-escape inspector for the City Department. Seeing that she doubted his word, he thrust a five dollar bill in her hand. She looked at it, laughed cynically—and time, he felt, was worth so much to him!—looked out at him again dubiously, and then in silence led him through the passage and down to the street-door.
As he turned hurriedly into Madison Avenue, toward the Grand Central station, he heard the clang of a bell, and saw an ambulance clatter down the street. Then, to make sure of it, he repeated her message to himself: “Hotel Cecil—two months—C-N.”
For a moment or two the “C-N” puzzled him. Then he remembered that only the day before he had been telling her the episode of the Charleston earthquake, how every wire was “lost” after the final shock, and how every operator for hundreds of miles about, during the next day of line-repairing, kept calling “C-N” until an answer finally came from the debris of the dead city.
Through some trick of memory, he then knew, she had recalled the Morse signal for that southern city, in her emergency. There had been no time for thought, no chance for even momentary deliberation. “Charleston!” From that day the very name took on a newer and stranger meaning. He knew that during weeks of loneliness and wandering it would be the one city toward which his eyes and his heart would turn.
CHAPTER V
“Tomorrow for the States—for me England, and Yesterday,”—murmured Frances Candler as she stood at her window looking down over the tangle and tumult of the Strand. “For me, England and Yesterday!” she repeated, and it was not until she had said the lines twice over that she remembered how she had first copied them into her day-book, during her early homesick weeks in New York.
It was the lassitude of her week at sea, and the loneliness of her second week in a London hotel, she told herself, that had brought about the change. If there were deeper and more dormant reasons, she was content to let sleeping dogs lie. But she did not deceive herself as to the meaning of the move. It was more than flight; it was surrender. It was, indeed, the bitter and desperate remedy for a bitter and desperate condition. For, inappositely, on the very brink of what seemed the waiting and widening vista of all her life, she had decided to go back to Oxford and her uncle’s home.
The steps that led to this determination were no longer clear to her questioning mind. She was also able, hour by brooding hour, to pile up against it ever new objections. But she clung to it blindly, with a forlorn tenacity of spirit that swept aside all momentary issues and all dread of the future. For out of that seeming defeat, she contended, she would wring her belated and her inner victory, even while her active imagination, playing lambently ahead of dragging reality, showed her how painful would be that return to old conditions and outgrown surroundings.
For a woman who has known the world to go back to such a roof is always a sign and a confession of defeat. Yet the sweep of her aggressive young mind, once made up, flung blindly aside each half-accumulated bar of indecision.
But was it fair to them?—she suddenly demanded of herself, as she pictured the scenes and the faces that would confront her, the gentle and mild-mannered women, the venerable and upright-hearted curate, so jealous of equity and honor, with his unbending singleness and narrowness of outlook. And as she asked this question each familiar figure seemed to stalk grimly from its muffling childhood memories and confront her, a challenging sentinel at the very threshold of that quiet little home which she had dreamed as always open to her, as always a harbor of ultimate refuge.