Fate Knocks at the Door: A Novel

by Will Levington Comfort

A day or two afterward he brought Bedient. To Vina he was like some tremendous vibration in the room. Her mind was roused as if by some great music…. It was in nothing that Bedient had said or looked, yet only a little while after the two men had gone, Vina realized she had a lover in David Cairns.

She was dismayed, filled with confusion and alarm, but this was the foreground of mind. She had the sense of glad singing in the distances. There was no sleep for hours this night, though of late, she had been sleeping unusually well…. Why had the realization been so slow in coming? An answer was ready enough: Because David was an old acquaintance. But another thought came: For years, except in rare reactionary hours, such as that afternoon in Beth's studio, she had put away the thought of man as a mate…. For years, she had tried to become a block instead of a battery; tried to give the full portion of her life to the thing called work, and hated herself because she couldn't. For years she had dreaded to go where men and women were, because the rare sight of human happiness brought upon her a torrent of dreams. The emptiness of her own life, together with the hatred of self, because she could not be glad for the simple object lesson of a man and woman happy in each other, made her miserable for hours. Late years she had not cared if she looked tacky. "What does it matter," she would ask, with a hateful glance into the glass, "when at best, I look like a water-nymph with hay-fever?"… A long and hard fight, but she had almost broken the habit of thinking what she might do with certain prerogatives of women, which were not granted to her. A bitter fight, and only she knew the hollowness of the honors her good work had brought. It was not the hard work that had left her at the end of many a long day—just a worn bundle of sparking nerve-ends.

And yet, this was the creature whom the new David Cairns had come to, again and again and again. This mighty fact arose from the vortex of confusion and alarm. "Ah, David," she thought, "is it not too late? Am I not too old and weathered a world-campaigner?… I am old, David. Older than my years. Older even than I look! I have warred so long, that I think all peace and happiness from now on would kill me. Oh, you don't want me. Surely you can't want me!"

But there were sad smilings upon the hundred hand-wrought faces in the room. The Marys, the Magdalens, and the Marthas were a strangely smiling Sisterhood…. "Child, you have been faithful in the little things," came to her. "You have thought of us and wept with us and loved us, and we have prevailed to bring you happiness."

And so the other side of the picture—Vina Nettleton's life picture—now turned. The "Stations" were like panels of fairies, after that. All the hidden shames and secrets of the years, the awful sense of being unwanted at the hearth of the human family, were taken from her, like the brittle and dusty packings from a glorious urn. Some marvel of freshness sped through her veins. She was not as yesterday—a little gray shade of an evil dream. Yesterday, and all the yesterdays, she had modelled alone, poor creatures of clay, and now the world suddenly called her to the academy of immortals….

Yes, he had come. He was brave and beloved…. She arose and knelt in the dark before that panel of greatest meaning—the Gethsemane. And long afterward, she stood by the open window. There were no stars, but the tired city was cut in light. And faint sounds reached her from below…. They were not Jews and Romans, but her own people, rushing to and fro for the happiness she had found.

TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER

BETH SIGNS THE PICTURE

Bedient walked up the Avenue, carrying one of his small leather-bound books to Beth. It was the day after the call of the Grey One there. He had learned to give—which may be made an exquisite art—little things that forbade refusal, but which were invested with cumulative values. Thus he brought many of his rare books of the world to the studio. In them she came upon his marginal milestones, and girdled them with her own pencillings. So their inner silences were broken, and they entered the concourse of the elect together.

The wonder of the woman rose and rose in his mind. His joy, apart from her, was to give joy to others, and so he had moved about New York for days and nights, reflecting her in countless ways. When he thought of his money at all, it was to realize with curious amazement that there was quite enough for anything he wished to do. Things to do were so many in New York, that numberless times each day he sent a prayer of thankfulness to Captain Carreras, always with a warm delight in the memory. And he liked to think it was Beth's hand. She had told him of her pilgrimages during holiday time to the infinite centres of sorrow—and it became a kind of dream of his—the time when they would go together, not holidays alone, but always. The great fortune slowly became identified in his mind with the work he had to do; but Equatoria, the base, amusingly enough, sank away into vaster remoteness. There were moments in which Bedient almost believed there was a little garden of his planting in the heart of the lustrous lady; moments, even, when he thought it was extending broader and broader upon an arable surface. Again, some bitterness from the world seemed to blast the young growths—and the delicate fragrance was far-blown. It was these reactions, and his sensitiveness to the beauty of the romance, which put off from day to day the time for words.