CHAPTER XIX

WHEN he had disappeared down the street, Margaret sat staring at the ground, her color still high, her eyes holding a delicate, spiritual effulgence, her breast rising and falling under stress of fiercely contending impulses, my Christian duty to forgive,” she argued. “I know he has repented, and he couldn’t have been wholly to blame. His grosser nature was tempted. He fell, but he loved me in a different way. He loves me still, or he wouldn’t want me now. He showed it in New York. He has suffered enough, and I ought to take him back. But can I? Can I? How could I forget, with her and his child right under my eyes? Perhaps, if I went to see her, that might help me decide. I ought to have gone, anyway. She really has had a hard life.”

With her hand on her breast, as though the thought had given her actual physical pain, she bowed for a few minutes; then she calmly rose, fastened the strings of her graceful hat under her pretty chin, and walked deliberately down to Mrs. Barry’s. Lionel was playing with some colored building-blocks on the porch, and looked up in vast surprise.

“Where is your mother?” Margaret asked, timidly. “May I see her?”

“She is in the studio,” the child said. “She is making a picture.”

At this moment Dora stepped out into the hall from a room on the right, and with a look of undisguised and almost perturbed surprise she came forward.

“Oh, she is beautiful—beautiful!” ran like a dart through the visitor’s brain. “She is a thousand times more now than she used to be; she has grown, developed. Such hair, such eyes, such color, such a perfect figure!”

“I think I heard you asking for me,” Dora said, calmly, something—perhaps it was the sheer immunity of genius and conscious purity of purpose—lifting her above the embarrassment of the situation.

“Yes, I came to see you,” Margaret said, bewildered by Dora’s appearance and the growing sense of her wonderful and forceful personality. “I ought to have come before, I am well aware; but I hope you won’t turn me away.”

“Why should I, Margaret?” Even in the unruffled voice of the recluse there was a mellow hint of oblivion to the social degradation the outside world had draped her with. “Would you mind coming into my workroom? It is about as cheerful as our stuffy little parlor.”

“Oh, you stilt paint?” Margaret cried, as she stood in the doorway and saw the pictures leaning here and there and tacked to the wooden partition.

“Yes, I had to have some occupation,” Dora responded, quite frankly, “and I took it up. I think I should have died but for my art.”

“And did you really do all these?” Margaret stared in admiration. “Oh, they are lovely, lovely!”

“I’m glad you like them,” Dora said, appreciatively. “I am sorry I happen to have only these. Just last week I sent a box of the best away. I may as well tell you that I sell them—or, rather, have them sold for me.”

“Oh, you do, really? How nice!—how very nice!” Margaret sat down almost in utter bewilderment. The whole thing was like a dream—the wonderful intellectual poise of the girl-like artist; her beauty; her charm; the far-away look of almost conscious superiority in the long-lashed, indescribable eyes. “And you intend to go on with your art?”

“Oh yes, to the end—to the very end of life, and beyond, too, perhaps,” answered Dora, with a merry, philosophical laugh. “I am working toward a glorious goal. Far-off Paris beckons me, Margaret, even in my sleep. Mother and I read of nothing else now, and think of nothing else. We study French in our poor way, and speak it together. Even Lionel lisps a word of it now and then. Yes, Paris and my boy mean all to me now. This has been a prison for our little family, but there the breath of art animates all life. The people are not narrow; they rank essential purity above the sordid hypocrisy of mere convention. There my boy might grow up unconscious of—but you know what I mean.”

“Yes, yes,” Margaret said, a vast womanly sympathy springing up within her that fairly swept her from the condemnatory position she had so long held.

“And we hope to manage it very soon now,” the artist continued. “We are hoarding up my earnings for that, and nothing else. Lionel has the soul of a poet, artist, or musician, and in Paris he can grow and expand, and there—there he will not have to face what would inevitably be his portion if he remained here. His misfortune, if it can be called that, was not of his making, and God will help me to wipe it out of his consciousness—to blot it from his fair young soul.”

“Yes, yes,” Margaret said, helplessly, and she rose to go. There was nothing she could say. Dora, in some unaccountable way, seemed beyond her mental reach, a glorious, sublimated creature more of spirit than of matter. The things she had striven for in her solitude had raised her higher than her surroundings. From a narrow point of view she had lost, from a higher and broader she had gained; she was the youthful forerunner of a future army of women who would be judged by the radiance of their souls rather than by the shadows of their bodies.

Dora seemed to feel her sudden nearness in spirit to her old friend. For a moment she was silent. There was a clatter of blocks on the floor of the porch, followed by the soft click-click of the pieces of wood as the child put them together again from the heap into which they had fallen.

“I have always wanted to have a good, long talk with you about Fred,” Dora suddenly began, “but I hardly knew how to propose it to you after—at least, after he went away so suddenly. I felt that I ought to see you personally, and yet my pride would not let me. He had his faults, Margaret, but there were many beautiful things in his character.”

“I know, I know.” Margaret’s heart fairly froze, and she stared coldly and held herself quite erect. Was it possible that the woman would dare to intimate that she cared to hear about that shameful intimacy? Had her ideas of art, her dreams of France and bohemian freedom from conventional laws, led her into the error of thinking that she, Margaret Dearing, would for a moment listen to such a confidence?

“Only to-day I received a long letter from him,” Dora went on, unobservant of the change that had come over her visitor. “Let me get it. I am sure you will think more kindly of him when you have read what he writes. His father has been out to see him, and they are quite reconciled now. It has made Fred very happy. You see, there is no reason now why he may not come home. I want you to see the letter, for he mentions you in it, and I am sure, seeing how sweet and kind you are to me, that—”

“I don’t care to see it!” Margaret broke in, frigidly. “Please don’t ask me. I am just going. I only had a few moments. I thank you very much for showing me your pictures.”

Dora dropped her eyes in surprise, for the gaze of her haughty visitor was full of undisguised anger.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” she said, humbly, “and I hope you will pardon me. I was only trying to do Fred a good turn, and I suppose I did it awkwardly. It is very good of you to come. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.” And Margaret swept from the room. As she crossed the porch and passed the little architect of a church of no mean design, he raised his eyes and said:

“Look, lady; that is the tower for the big bell (ding-dong!), and this is the door—” But she paid no heed to him, as, with a shrug, almost of disdain, she passed on to the gate.

“He is writing to her; he has been writing to her all these years,” she said within herself. “Perhaps he has even met her—she may have been to see him in other places. That is why she’s lived so quietly—it gave her the chance to go and come as she liked. Perhaps he has put those ideas of Paris and free-love into her head. When he talked to me in New York he didn’t mean that—that he cared for me deeply. He meant only that he wanted me and the rest of us here to overlook what he had done. When he told his silly old father that he would not come back unless I forgave him, he meant—he thought—he was trying to apologize—actually apologize—for having made love to me. I have lowered myself by going to her. It gave her that sly chance to stab me. She thinks I care. She thinks that I have been crying my eyes out about him. They have talked me over time after time. Oh, the shame of it—the utter shame of it!”