"I am not strong enough," she said, "for martyrdom—alas! I am no child of light! But where I love—be it strength or be it weakness—I love forever!"
His arms closed about her, her weary head sank upon his breast. He stooped and kissed her tenderly, solemnly. She lifted her heavy eyes and added "My fidelity shall be my purification!"
CHAPTER XXVI
THE OPAL
Three years had passed, and Sybil, now the reigning queen of the New York stage, still lived in the quiet little red brick house among the West Thirtieths, to the great indignation of Mrs. Lawton. Inside there was a frank luxury clearly explained to love-sealed eyes by that one elastic word "salary"; though an observant outsider, noting the age-darkened, carved wood, the rare polar-bear robes, and the exquisite bits of bronze, must have thought her a marvellously lucky buyer, or a remarkably well-paid actress. But there were no such observers at hand; perhaps that was why Sybil's vine-dripping, flower-crowded windows seemed to laugh in the face of the grim, shade-drawn propriety of the entire block.
At the rear of the red brick house was a small cooper or carpenter shop that faced on the other street. It had long been unoccupied, so that when Stivers took a notion to hire it for a store-room and sort of laundry, she got it cheap; and after the neighbors had once or twice seen her going in and out, and hanging a few pieces of linen to dry, there was no further heed paid to the matter. But if one was very intimate with Mrs. Stivers, and received from her a shop key, why, one could both enter and leave the house from the back street without bothering with the front door bell.
Sybil had "overflowed," as Dorothy said, and had swept away Stivers's too dreadful parlor, and in its stead there was now a library and sitting-room combined—a nook glorious in winter because of an open fire and in summer made dim and cool by many clambering vines, and sweet by boxes of mignonette crowding the small balcony, a room full of the scattered riches of rare books, of carved ivories, of miniatures, of bubbles of Venetian glass, beautiful as jewels and almost as precious, a room for study, for dreams, for love, and sometimes a room for bitter brooding and regret.
Visitors to this house were a rare occurrence, but Sybil had just been speeding the parting guest in the person of her mother, who was "to pick up" John at Forty-second Street, and thus receive protection on the homeward ride to Riverdale; for "positively in these days," she declared, "unless you're perfectly white and doubled together with age, men ogle you as if you were twenty. There was a dreadful little pot-bellied, Hebraic person—that sounds queer, doesn't it, but it's an absolutely correct expression and perfectly descriptive of the man's shape—and I declare to you he kept his eyes on my face until I felt quite agitated, and everyone in the car must have noticed his conduct. Yet John Lawton was so unfeeling as to tell me that if I stopped looking at the man, I wouldn't know that he was staring. Not know it, indeed! Why, I could feel anyone ogling me through the back of my neck! Still, after such an experience, I hope I shall not miss John!"
Mrs. Lawton had devoted one of her three days to her old friend, Mrs. Van Camp, and to shopping, and two days to Sybil. She had arrived in state, and after a supercilious glance at her, had addressed the owner and mistress of the house as "Stivers"—though Sybil was most punctilious in calling her Mrs. Stivers. She had so traduced the coffee (which was perfect) by asking "if the blackness was not the result of licorice," that, though Jane Penny had maintained a strictly respectful attitude, murder had shown so plainly in her eye that Letitia had not dared to take the second cup she longed for, for fear of poison. And when she was alone with her daughter she remarked: "She's a cat, that Stivers! Clean and neat, like any other cat, and purry! Oh, yes, she can purr about you, but she's crafty, cunning, shrewd! You keep your desk locked, my dear! She's too soft-footed for my taste; she's got an eye for a key-hole, too!"