“Oh, let me go with you, let me do something!” the girl appealed to her eagerly.
But Margaret dismissed her and they parted, the young stranger hurrying away down a narrow by-street while her benefactress walked slowly toward the nearest avenue. But she had gone only a few steps when she turned and looked after the shabby figure, which was only a short distance from her. A vivid recollection of that cry that God had heard her prayer, the absolute conviction of it, swept over the stricken woman, and moved by an impulse which she did not pause to question, Margaret ran after the girl through the gathering mist and overtook her, breathless. She turned with a frightened look, full of dread, no doubt, that she must yet give up the miraculously acquired wealth, and she started when Margaret laid a thin, ungloved hand on her arm.
“I wanted to ask you,” she began,—and then changed the sentence swiftly into a command,—“pray for me to-night! You believe there is a God—perhaps He’ll hear you again!”
“Indeed I will!” the girl cried, bewildered; “oh, I wish—”
But the unfinished speech was lost; Margaret had turned and swiftly disappeared again into the folds of the mist; like a shadow the girl saw her vanishing into deeper shadows; something uncanny and marvellous seemed to lurk in the very thought of her beautiful haggard face, the wildness of her smile, and the young woman hurried away, hugging her treasure close, almost persuaded that she had talked face to face with a being from another world.
VI
AVOIDING the crowded thoroughfares, and no longer remembering her physical weariness or that she had walked for hours without food or drink, Margaret hurried on.
She had thought of death, and the means to attain it most swiftly and easily, but as she passed the brilliantly lighted chemist’s window, with its arch hung with bright red Christmas bells, she put away the thought; it was too cheap and sensational and, after all, if there really were a God could she take that swift, shuddering plunge through the blackness of death to meet Him? The wages of sin is death! It thundered in her ears, making God the avenging Deity of the Old Testament, for how little do those who preach sometimes divine the pictures which they frame of Him who was lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, that all men might be saved!
A strange new light began to come into Margaret’s soul, and against it her thoughts took on dark and sharply outlined forms like the shadows thrown on a white screen by the stereopticon; she began to understand. Happiness, after all, was a dream, an imagination, a word; it came not from any visible cause, but lay hidden in every man’s heart like hope imprisoned in Pandora’s box. The secret of it came to her at last,—life moved in an orbit; the past held the future, the future the past, the present was but the connecting link in the inexorable circle, it could not be broken while memory existed, while a reckoning was required. She could no more break the links with her past than she could destroy her immortal soul.
In her heart a new, secret thought, born of the strange girl’s gratitude, moved her out of herself. She remembered Mrs. Allestree’s words, and her love for Fox suddenly purged itself of its passionate agony, its jealousy, its pain. Like a woman in a dream she found her way at last to the hotel and climbed the stairs. Her face bore too terrible signs of anguish, and she shrank from the elevator and the curious stare of the servants. It was the dinner hour and the corridors were deserted. She went quietly to her own room and did not ring for her maid. She noticed that her evening gown had been put out and the fire tended. Gerty was not there, she would scarcely be there before nine o’clock, and Margaret went to her desk and sat down and began to write in feverish haste; if she delayed, if she stopped to think she might never do it and she was determined. She bent to her task, white lipped and haggard, writing page after page to Rose Temple. She poured out her heart; in righting Fox she scarcely thought of herself, except that she should never see him again, that Rose must and should marry him! For abruptly the divine impulse of self-immolation had been born in the midst of the tumult of her soul; a woman’s heart, like a eucalyptus tree, trembles with the remembrance of anguish and the eternal sacrifice of love.