“Yes; she is my daughter, but she is above me in a thousand ways. She suffered untold agonies after you desert—after you left Stafford, and all through her trouble; but when the baby came, and we were all shut up here away from human sight, the choicest blessings from on high seemed to fall on her. With her close work in her studio, and her devotion to the child, she grew into something more of heaven than of earth. I suppose there is such a thing as rising too high to love, in a human sort of way, and I tremble when I think of how she may now take your proposal. I want her to be sensible and think of the boy's interests, but the idea of helping him in just that way may be—be repulsive to her. She's done without your aid all these years, you see, Kenneth Galt. She has leaned on a Higher Power than any earthly one, and has already received her reward. You knew her as she was once, but not as she is now. She was hardly more than a child then. Her father used to say she would be a great genius, and I think she really is. Her isolation from mankind has done her more good in one way than harm. It has put something into her work that couldn't have got there any other way. Only yesterday a letter came from a high authority on art—But I have no right to speak of her private affairs. If she sees fit to tell you about it she may. That's another matter. She has never been ashamed, as this town, no doubt, thinks she is. She looked on what passed between you and her before the trouble as a true marriage in the sight of God. It wasn't the way persons generally look at such matters, but she wasn't a common, ordinary person, and she didn't think the man she loved was—that is, I mean she thought you looked at it exactly as she did. She took you at your word. If what I say pains you, I'm sorry. I must be blunt to express what is in me, for I have long ago justified her. If she had been worldly minded, back there when she was glorying in the secret between you and her, she would have had worldly caution and forethought. You may get forgiveness even from her, Kenneth Galt, in time, but there can be nothing quite as unforgivable in the sight of God, it seems to me, as taking advantage of just that sort of faith.”
The light of hope had died out of Galt's parchment-like face. He dropped his horrified gaze to the floor.
“I see,” he groaned. “I am too late!” and sat as if stunned. “I was never up to her level. It was only her girlish fancy that told her I was.”
“Oh, I don't know!” Mrs. Barry said, almost sympathetically. “Now that you feel as you do, her old trust might come back. There is one thing that has touched her, I'll tell you that much, for certain, and that has been your love for Lionel. One day I caught her shedding tears over it as she stood concealed by the window-curtain watching you play with him in the swing. If anything ever brings her back to you, it will be that one thing. He loves you, too; he is always talking of you, and, if I am any judge, she rather likes to hear it. It may be that—it may not; I never can be sure I am reading her right.”
He rose. “I am going to find her now,” he said. “At any rate, she shall know how I feel. She may spurn me, but from this day on I shall devote my life to her interests and those of our child.”
CHAPTER XXIV
INTO the wood, a wild, unbrageous tract of land lying back of the cottage, he strode, full of ponderous fears as to the outcome of his undertaking, and yet vaguely buoyed up by the natural beauty on all sides. Soon the town lay behind him; only the low hum of its traffic, the occasional clanging of a locomotive's bell, the whistle of an engine at a factory, the clatter of a dray followed him. The reverent, almost peaceful thought was borne in upon him that the meandering, little-used path he was pursuing had been traversed many times by Dora. In that secluded and picturesque spot she had breathed in the inspiration which had lifted her far above those by whom she had been misunderstood and traduced. Along that path she and his child, perchance, had plucked flowers through the years in which he had shunned them—denied them before the world, whose good opinion he had coveted to his moral undoing.
Half a mile from the cottage the path began to descend to the river valley, a vast swampy tangle of dense undergrowth. Here in the marshes, impassable during the overflow of winter and spring, but now dank, cool, and seductive, were many nooks of indescribable beauty. Here moss-grown willows bowed over seeping, crystal pools and silently trickling water. There were the armies of cattails, the solitary clumps of broom-sedge, the banks of delicate ferns, and the pond-lilies which had formed the background of her pictures. There she had found the wild rose-bushes, the papaw, the sumac, and the mazes of grape and muscadine vines into the reproduction of which she had poured her crushed and yet awakening soul.