And again: “Where in the world can Jason have gone? I didn’t think he’d have the spunk. He might have killed him.”
And later: “After the wreck of my life, after all the lies he’s told me—to be cast off among strangers like this—I might have known!”
Then a last sobbing breath: “I did know. It’s been coming for a long time. This is only a poor excuse—I did know!”
She was awakened in the morning by a burning ray of sunlight falling on her face. At first she was too dazed to realize where she was or how she came to be there. Slowly she arose and went to a window. She saw that she was on a pretty street of a village, the outskirts of which gave promise of being more attractive than had been her corresponding location in Ashwater. Turning slowly, she went through the small house. There were only three rooms, but they were much more attractive than the rooms in which she had been living. Mechanically she began picking up the expensive furnishings of her private room that had been hurriedly bundled together and dumped roughly anywhere there was space to drop them. In working at this business a few minutes, she collected her thoughts and remembered that she had been through tense excitement and nerve strain. She was dreadfully hungry. Through no fault of her own that she could recall, she had been picked up in one place and set down in another as if she were a piece of furniture instead of a woman endowed with some degree of intelligence. She had not been asked whether she would go, or, if she must move, where she wanted to locate. She had not been given time to exercise any care with the really beautiful things which had furnished her personal room. She had only a small sum in her purse. There was no one in Bluffport with whom she was acquainted. For over fifteen years she had cared for Jason. She had become accustomed to him. One of the very greatest fights of her difficult life had been to keep herself from becoming fond of him. The threat that he would be taken from her any day had been constant. Dimly she had realized for a long time that this hour was coming; and now it had arrived. For a mistake of her youth, for the giving of her heart when only her body had been coveted, she had paid the price of menial position, of isolation, of spiritual degradation. She realized that speedily she must face the town asking work with which to keep up her long-time pretense of being self-supporting.
Her stomach reminded her that she must have food, or very speedily, torturing headache would ensue. Marcia sat down on the mattress, took her head between her hands, and for the first time in eighteen years thought about herself instead of Martin Moreland. Suddenly there came to her the sickening realization that she was no longer young. Looking her mental problem in the face, she admitted that she was thirty-six. As youth was reckoned in her day, a woman was considered reasonably aged at forty. No doubt this was Martin Moreland’s first step in letting her know that her reign was over. In retrospect, what a sorry reign it had been!—veiled suspicion, mental humiliation, isolating employment, heart-hunger for freedom to lift up her head and walk abroad with pride. She felt reasonably certain that the problem facing her now was not one of further concealment, but the necessity of being equal to taking over the entire care of herself and making provision for hopeless old age.
Under the urge of hunger, she arose, found her hat, straightened her clothing as best she could, and hunted her mirror. Setting it up, she studied herself, not the self that Jason had known for nearly sixteen years, but the secret self which was her real self—Marcia Peters without the disfiguration of unbecomingly dressed hair and concealing clothing.
Every fibre of womanhood in her being rebelled against a return to the disguise in which she had faced Jason and Ashwater all her life with Martin Moreland. In starting a new life, in strange environment, whether as formerly or alone, why should she not appear before the people as she was? Why should she not seek occupation less humiliating than that of washing the dirty clothes of another village? Staring into the mirror and thinking, Marcia began pulling out drawers from her dresser, and when she emerged from the house presently and locked its door behind her, she was not a figure that Jason would have recognized before his night of illumination.
She followed the street to the heart of the village, and entering a restaurant, secured her breakfast. Then she decided, under the spiritual reinforcement that developed from nourishing food, that she would at least step into a few of the stores in Bluffport and look around her. Possibly she could summon courage to ask if any of them were in need of help. There, too, was her needle. She knew herself to be expert with that. With small practice in fitting, she could make dresses for other women as beautifully as she made them for herself. Why not a room over some of these down-town stores, a modest sign announcing herself as a dressmaker? Some attractive, progressive occupation, the stimulus of ever so small a degree of human association, some relation—no matter how remote—to the lives of other people. Never before had she allowed a cloud of doubt and protest to gather to a storm head. Now the culmination came quickly in a tempest that shook her being. She knew that she was facing men, walking straightly; she felt as if she were at the mercy of a tornado, half-blinded, feeling her way before her with protesting, outstretched hands. For the first time in her thwarted, unnatural life she needed friends so badly, that she felt the despair and the hunger of that need, and while she walked mechanically, as the storm in her heart grew in intensity, she realized that even more than she needed friends, she needed God. That need made her think of Rebecca, scorching under summer suns, struggling through winter snows, on her self-imposed task of urging her world to pass under an emblem of purity—poor Rebecca, demented, isolated, searching, ever searching, for what? Preaching—scourged by the whips of adversity into thrusting her timid self before the gaze of her world, preaching purity—why? Who sent her on those missions? Marcia said to herself: “At least, it is a mercy that her brain is dulled. Maybe she does not suffer mentally.”
As she went slowly along the street, after a time she found herself interestedly studying the windows she passed. Her feet stopped in front of a small wooden building centrally located. In either window of it, flanking the entrance door, there were examples of exceedingly attractive fall millinery miserably displayed. Marcia gripped her purse tighter.
“A veil. I’ll say I need a veil,” she told herself.