And oh, when hope began to die, I saw it all; saw it in the weary eyes; heard it in the step that lagging past my door, climbed to its task, its hopeless task, again. I saw it in the cheek where hunger,—the hunger of the common herd—had set its fangs upon the delicate bloom. To ask for bread meant to receive a stone, a stone like unto the stones cast at her, that one in old Jerusalem. Perhaps she hungered too; who dares judge, since Christ himself refused to condemn.
She tried at shops at last, but no man wanted modest Quaker maids to measure off their goods. The shop-girl’s smile was part and parcel of the bargain, and if the smile beguiled a serpent in man’s clothing, why the girl must look to that.
One night I sought her room, her tidy little nest—my poor solitary birdling—and found her at her work, her old task of writing. She had gone back to it. There were rings about the eyes where tears were forbidden visitors. I took the poor head in my arms.
“Don’t, Claudia,” I cried. “The youth is all gone from your face.” “That’s right,” she said. “It left my heart long ago, and face and heart should have a common correspondence.”
And then she laughed, as if to cheat my old ears with the sound of merriment.
“I needed stamps,” she said. “The question rested, stamps vs. supper. Like a true artist I made my choice for art. But see here. That manuscript when it is finished, means no more hunger. Something tells me it will succeed, and save me. So I have called it Refuge, and on it I have staked my last hope.”
She playfully tapped the tidy page, and laughed again. But her words had a solemn earnestness about them to which her pale pinched face lent something still of awe.
Day after day I watched her, as day after day the battle became too much for her. Too much? I spoke too quickly when I said so. She was a mystery to me. I felt but could not understand her life, and its grand, heart-breaking changes. She had planned for something which she could not reach. The doors to it were closed. Her starving woman’s soul called for food; the husks were offered in its stead; the bestial, grovelling, brutish swine’s husks. She refused them. Her soul would make no compromise with swine. She was so strong, and had been so full of hope I could not understand her. You who have studied the tricks of the human heart, you who have held your own while faith died in your bosom, or you who have felt it stabbed and crushed refuse to die, perhaps you can understand that strange and fitful strength that came and went; that outburst of hope, that silence of despair which made, in turn, my dear one’s torture.
One night I found her sitting in the moonlight with her face dropped forward on the windowsill. So pure, so white, so frail of body, and so strong of soul, she might have been some marble priestess waiting there for God’s breath to move in passion through the pulseless stone.
“Claudia, dear, are you asleep?” I whispered.