CHAPTER XX

MARGARET DEARING passed a restless, tumultuous night following the disturbing visit to Dora. In the evening she had joined her uncle at a game of whist in a nervous, abstracted way; she had played the piano in a spiritless fashion for her brother, who had come in tired from a long drive into the country, where he had performed a successful surgical operation; and then she had gone up to her bedchamber and thrown off the mask. She kept it off, for there was only the starlight to witness her white, blank face and piteously staring eyes as she sat at her window looking out. From the stretch of darkness below only one salient feature presented itself: it was the steadily burning light in Dora Barry’s window. In her fancy Margaret saw the beautiful young mother bending over a table writing—writing to Fred Walton in answer to the last letter he had written. She rose suddenly, exasperated beyond endurance, and threw herself on her bed.

She rose late the next morning and breakfasted in the big, sombre dining-room after the General and Wynn had gone to town. The servant said something she hardly heard, to the effect that Wynn had received a letter which called him to Augusta, and that he might be absent for several days. Breakfast over, Margaret strolled down to a favorite seat of hers on the lawn. Why was it, she asked herself, with poignant chagrin, that she welcomed the position as putting her into the full view of any one chancing to look from Dora Barry’s cottage? Had she been very subtle in self-analysis and very frank touching her own desires, she would have admitted the subtle suggestion of her attitude, her apparent absorption in the magazine that she held in hand; must it not convey to her watching neighbor a conviction that the conversation of the afternoon just passed had been of no possible moment to her—that it had, in fact, caused no ripple in the even current of her satisfied existence.

Indeed, the pages of the magazine were held so firmly before her unshifting eyes that she failed to notice that Lionel had crossed over the fence and was coming toward her holding an envelope in his little hand. He was dressed in a becoming gray suit, and his yellow, carefully brushed tresses caught the morning sunlight till they seemed a mass of delicate golden flames. The grass he daintily trod was wet with dew, and opalescent jewels seemed to blaze and fall at his feet. Margaret saw him from the corner of her eye as he timidly paused near her, and yet she did not at first deign to look up. The grim thought fastened itself on her distorted imagination that Dora was now watching, if at no other moment, so she lowered the magazine to her lap, taking studied care to turn down a leaf before glancing at the child.

“My mother sent this note,” Lionel said, when he caught her eye.

She took the envelope and opened it. It contained two separate communications. The first was to her from Dora. The other was in Fred Walton’s well-remembered hand. Dora’s note ran:

Dear Margaret,—I want you to do poor Fred the simple justice of reading his letter to me. I saw yesterday that you were angered by my mentioning him, and I don’t believe you could have been so if you had the faith in him which he deserves. You may doubt him, for some reason or other, but I am sure you could do so no longer if you would only read the tender things he has written about you. Sincerely, Dora Barry.

Margaret read and reread the note. Her prejudice was still playing riot with her better judgment, and, feeling sure that Dora’s eyes were on her, she scornfully swept both the communications from her lap to the grass at her feet and turned to her magazine.

Lionel stared, a pained expression slowly capturing his mobile features as he stood in rigid indecision for a moment; then, with a sigh, he stooped down and picked up the sheets of paper which were being blown about on the grass. The first page of Fred Walton’s letter to Dora was the last he secured, and, just as he was picking it up, Margaret, almost against her will, dropped her glance upon it, reading the introductory line at the top of the sheet.

“My dear old friend,” she saw quite plainly, in Fred’s bold writing, “You will be surprised to hear from me for the first time after all these years—”

“Old friend—after all these years!” Those words, so contradictory to what she expected, remained before Margaret’s sight even after the child had gathered the sheets in his offended arms and was turning away. What could they mean? Surely that was not the way a man would begin a letter to the woman he had betrayed and deserted. There must be some mystery, and the child was bearing its solution away. Her desire to know more was too strong to be resisted. Impulsively she cried out:

“Little boy! Lionel! Wait! Bring them back! I dropped them!” He turned, a look of mystification on his face, and came back doubtfully.

“I haven’t read them yet,” she explained, humbly enough, and she extended her hand. “Let me have them.”

“I thought you were angry,” he said, staring at her. “I thought you didn’t want my mother’s letter.”

“I’ll read them,” she promised, tremblingly. “Wait, won’t you? That’s a good boy.”

He stood beside her, studiously observant of the phenomenon of her changeableness, while she literally devoured Fred Walton’s letter. It ran:

My dear old friend,—You will be surprised to hear from me for the first time after all these years, and I have no valid excuse to offer. You may or may not have received the letter I wrote you telling you that I was leaving old Stafford forever. My bad conduct had driven my father to desperation, and I had grave reasons to believe that he would actually enforce the law against me. I had made up my mind to turn over a new leaf and fight it out on new lines at home, when the last straw came to break my purpose. Dear Dora, her brother Wynn approached me that very night and told me that her uncle intended positively to disinherit her if she kept faith in me. What was there for me to do? God knows I was unworthy of her, and the next morning was to bring things to light which would make her despise me; so I promised him then and there to go away and never communicate with her again. No human being ever suffered more keenly than I did at losing her, but I determined to fight my way to reformation, and by my own toil to restore to my father the funds I had misappropriated. After years of strife and hardship I have done it, and he has fully forgiven me. He has forgiven me and wants me to come home. Home! Just think of it! To me old Stafford would be a heaven on earth. I think I could fall face downward in the dear old streets and kiss the very pavement. But I may not come yet. Somehow I can’t, Dora. I believe most of the old town will forgive me, but she won’t. I know she won’t. Her ideas of honor are too high for that. The reason I am so sure is that I met her by chance in New York not long ago, and she gave me clearly to understand that I need never expect to regain her respect. I made my own case out pretty black to her brother, and I suppose he gave me my full dues in telling her about it. To my astonishment, my father told me that he had not spoken of my shortage at the bank, and that nothing had been said about it at home, but her brother told her. She got the confession straight from me, and there could be no better authority. I love her still, dear Dora, and more than ever. The very gulf between her and me has only made her the dearer.

But I mustn’t write so much about myself. My father says you are still unmarried. He couldn’t tell me whether you had carried your painting further. I was sure it would do great things for you, and it is not too late, even yet.

Another thing—I have always felt that I may have hurt your feelings past forgiveness by advising you as I did in that last letter not to trust too fully the man whom I mentioned. I now see that I had no right to go so far. You were hardly more than a child then, but you knew how to take care of yourself even with a man of the world like him, and I had no right to warn you. But I was going away, dear Dora, and I was so miserable about myself that I exaggerated your danger. I have seen by the papers that he has made a great success in life, and that old Stafford is very proud of him—





Margaret folded the letter in her lap and sat aflame with joy, staring with glowing eyes at the vacant air.

“Do you like it? Is it nice, lady?” the child asked.

“Yes, very nice, and I thank you,” she answered. The child said something, but she did not hear it. The pent-up ecstasy within her was like physical pain; she could have screamed to give it an outlet. She felt a womanly yearning to embrace the boy, and would have opened her arms to him had she not heard steps behind her. Looking over her shoulder, she saw Kenneth Galt approaching.

“I dropped in at the front to see you,” he said, with a bow. “They told me you were out here.” His eyes fell on the child, and a strange flare of inexpressible tenderness lighted his lack-lustre eyes as he drew a chair forward and sat down.

“Yes, I like it here,” she intoned, and her voice, in her own ears, sounded far off, and as if it had taken on the timbre of a new and exalted existence. She half feared that Galt would note it.

“You seem happy,” he said, thoughtfully, “and that is a condition that is most rare with humankind. I certainly envy a happy individual.”

“Yes, I am very happy,” she said—“more so than I ever was in my life before.”

“I certainly envy you,” he repeated, gloomily. “I have given up all hope of even touching the hem of the good dame’s garment.” The boy had gone to him, and stood with his little hand on his father’s knee, looking with trustful adoration into the dark, saturnine face above him. Something in the child’s profile, now that Margaret held the glass of revelation to her eyes, showed kinship to its paternal prototype, and a dazzling dart of conviction flashed through her. At that instant she had a motherly instinct to draw the child from the contaminating touch of the man who had disowned it. His attitude of denial was a desecration to the holiness of parenthood, and in her soul she resented it.

“Come to me, Lionel,” she said, gently. “I want you to kiss me. Won’t you, just once?”

The child stared as if scarcely believing that he had heard aright.

“What did you say, lady?” he asked, as he lingered hesitatingly.

She repeated her words more tenderly than before, and there was a mist before her sight as he came toward her.

“Do you like me now?” he asked, wonderingly. “Yes, and love you very, very much,” she answered, huskily.

“But you didn’t ever so long at first; you didn’t yesterday, when I asked you to see my church. You didn’t just this minute, when I brought my mother’s letter.”

“But I do now, ever and ever so much,” she said, adopting his tone, and, taking him into her arms, she pressed him passionately to her breast and kissed him on his brow, on his cheeks, and on his red lips. Then, holding him in her arms, and with no word of explanation to Galt, she rose. “Put your arms close around my neck,” she said, “and hug me tight. I am going to run over and see your mother.”

The child complied, timidly, a delicate flush of appreciation on his mobile face. Then she put him down, and, still not looking at Galt, she said:

“No, you needn’t come, Lionel; I’ll only be there a minute to return the letter. You may stay here and entertain your—your good friend.”

Galt, who had risen, stood looking after her for a moment, his countenance dark with the ever-constant despair within him. He felt the tiny, confident hands of his child as they pressed against his legs, and looked down into the sweetly smiling, upturned face.

“They all like me now,” Lionel said. “She was the only one that didn’t, but she says she does now. She kissed me. Did you see her? Oh, she’s so pretty! She is—no, she isn’t, but she is nearly as pretty as my mother.”

Galt sat down and drew the boy first to a seat on his knee and then into his arms.

“She knows the truth,” he said to himself, in a tone of desperate indifference to fate. “Something in that letter told her.”