“I forgot. That is a rather stiff beginning for you, isn’t it? I’m so sorry! I hope you didn’t see; it looks like a bad one. Don’t watch it, dear. That’s right! You won’t mind it a bit after a while. You’re quite worn out now. Come, we’ll go around this other way.”
“It happened at Warne,” said Margaret, tremulously. “I saw them take him on.”
“Poor dear! and you must have been worrying about it all the way in. Do you see the ambulance at the curb? That’s ours. You see, they telegraphed, and now he will be cared for sooner than you get your tea. There goes the ambulance gong! They’re off. And now here’s the cab.”
XIV.
An hour later, Margaret, somewhat composed from her ride, waited in the homelike bedroom for Lois to come and take her to Mrs. Goodno, the Superintendent of Nurses. From her post at the window she could look down upon the street.
It had begun to rain, and the electric lights hurled misshapen Swedish-yellow splotches on the wet asphalt. The wind had risen, rending the clouds into shaggy lines and made a dreary, disconsolate singing in the web of telephone wires bracketed beneath the window. Margaret felt herself to be in a state of unnatural tension. She gazed out into the swathing darkness, trying desperately to make out the landscape. Her eyes wandered from the clumps of wet and glistening foliage to the starting lights in a far-off apartment house, which thrust its massive top, fortress-like, and, with proportions exaggerated by the lowering scud, up into the air. Do what she would, her mind recurred, as though from some baleful necessity, to the details of the long train-ride. The never-ending clack of the wheels was in her ears. She clenched her hands as the landscape resolved itself into the dim station at Warne, and she saw again the grimy brakemen carrying something by covered with a dirty canvas.
She shut her eyes to drag them away from the window. How could she ever stand it! It had been a mistake—a horrible, ghastly mistake! She had turned cold and sick when they had carried it past the car window. How could she ever bear to see things like that? Lois did. Lois liked it! So did all of them. But they were different. There must be something hideously wrong about her—it was part of her unwomanliness—part of her guilty lack. The others saw the quivering soul beneath the sick flesh; she could never see within the bodily tenement. She was handcuffed to her lower side. She remembered the story of the criminal, chained by wrist and ankle to a comrade; how he woke one day to find the other dead—dead—and himself condemned to drag about with him, day and night, that horrible, inert thing. She, Margaret Langdon, was like this man. She must drag through life this corpse of a dead spirituality, this finer comrade soul of hers which had somehow died! Her life must be one long hypocrisy—one unending deceit. She was even there under false pretences. They would not want her if they knew.
She turned toward the fireplace. Over it hung a sepia print of the Madonna of the Garden. The glow touched the rounded chin and chubby knees of the little St. John with a soft flesh-tint, and left in shadow the quaint incongruity of the distant church-spire. Margaret’s whole spirit yearned toward its placid purity. She had had the same print hung in her bedroom at home, and it had looked down upon her when she prayed. She gazed at it now with eyes of wretchedness, filmed with tears. Her throat ached acutely with a repressed desire to sob. She fancied that the downcast lids lifted and that the luminous, wide eyes followed her wonderingly, reproachfully.