Harriet T. Comstock

Priscilla had gone straight from Margaret Moffatt's to her own little apartment. She had no sense of suffering; no sensation at all. She must pack and get away! And like a dead thing she set to work, although it was midnight and she had been so weary before; and then she smiled quiveringly:

"Before!"

She stood and stretched out her arms to the empty space where Travers had been.

"Oh! my dear, dear man!" she moaned. "My beloved!"

She had set the spark to the powder; by to-morrow the devastation would be complete. That, she knew full well. And he—the man she loved above all else in life—in order to escape must seek safety with those others! All those others—men! men! men! Only she and Margaret, suffering and alone, would stand in the ruins. But from those ruins! Her eyes shone as with a vision of what must be.

"I wish I could tell you—all about it!" the weak, human need called to the absent love. The whispered words brought comfort; even his memory was a stronghold. It always would be, even when she was far away in her In-Place, never to see him again.

How thankful she was that he did not know, really. He could not follow; she would not be able to hurt him—after to-morrow. Her changed name had saved her!

"Priscilla Glynn," she faltered, "hide her, hide her forever, hide poor Priscilla Glenn."

Then her thoughts flew back to the recent past. She had found Margaret alone in her own library.

"Now how did you know I wanted you more than any one else in the world?" Margaret had said. "When did you get back? You baddest of the bad! Why did you hide from me? Where were you?"

"In—Bermuda." How ghastly it sounded, but it caught Margaret's quick thought.

"Sit down, you little ghost of bygone days of bliss. You'll have to play again. Work is killing you. In Bermuda? What doing?"

"Wearing—my cap and apron, dear, dear——"

"Your cap and apron? I thought you burned them! I shall tell Travers, you deceitful, money-getting little fraud! Well, who has taken it out of you so? You are as white as ivory. Do you know the Traverses came in on the St. Cloud to-day?"

"Yes. Doctor Travers came to see me."

"Ha! ha! He doesn't seem to have cheered you much. I wager he's told you what he thinks of you, tossing to the winds all the beautiful health and spirits of the summer! When are you to be married? I must tell him to bully you as—as my dear love is bullying me! Has Doctor Ledyard growled at you? I can twist him easily! He is a darling, and just wears that face and voice for fun in order to scare little redheaded nurses. Cilla, dear heart, I'm going to be married in June! Dear, old-fashioned June, with roses and good luck and—oh! the heaven seems opening and the glory is pouring down! There, girlie! cuddle here! I'm going to tell you everything; even to the mentioning of names! I've always hated to label my joy before. But, first, take some chocolate; it's hot and piping. Now! Who did you nurse in Bermuda? I'm going to tell him, or her, what I think of him!"

"I—nursed—Mr. Clyde Huntter. We were in New York all the time. That is why—I had to keep—still——"

"Mr. Clyde Huntter?" Margaret set the cup she held, down sharply. The quick brain was alert and in action.

"Mr. Clyde Huntter?" And then Margaret Moffatt came close to Priscilla, and looked down deep into the unfaltering eyes raised to hers.

"Mr. Clyde Huntter—is the man I am to marry!" she said in a voice from which the girlish banter had gone forever. It was the voice of a woman in arms to defend all she worshipped.

"Yes, I know. I was in his room the day you called. I thought I should die. I hoped he would tell you. I was ready to stand beside you; but he did not tell!"

"Tell—what? As God hears you, Priscilla, as you love me, and—and as I trust you, tell me what?"

And then Priscilla had told her. At first Margaret stood, taking the deadly blow like a Spartan woman, her grave eyes fixed upon Priscilla. Slowly the cruel truth, and all it implied, found its way through the armour of her nobility and faith. She began to droop; then, like one whose strength has departed, she dropped beside Priscilla's chair and clung to her. It had not taken long to tell, but it had lain low every beautiful thing but—courage!

"Back there," Margaret had said at last, "back there where we played, I told you I was ready for sacrifice. I thought my God was not going to exact that, but since he has, I am ready. Priscilla, I still have God! I wonder"—and, oh! how the weak, pain-filled voice had wrung Priscilla's heart—"I wonder if you can understand when I tell you that I love my love better now—than ever? Shall always love him, my poor boy! Can you not see that he did not mean—to be evil? It was the curse handed down to him, and when he found out—his love, our love, had taken possession of him, and he could not let me—go! I feel as if—as if I were his mother! He cannot have the thing he would die for, but I shall love him to the end of life. I shall try to make it up to him—in some way; help him to be willing and brave, to do the right; teach him that my way is the only—honourable way. I am sure both he and I will be—glad not—not to let others, oh! such sad, little others, pay the debt for us. Our day is—is short at best, but the—the eternity! And you, dear, faithful Cilla! You, with your blessed love, how will it be when I have done what I must do? I must go to—to father and tell the truth, and then——"

"I know," Priscilla had said. "Doctor Travers told me what would follow. I shall not be here for him to suffer for; I am going——"

"Where, my precious friend?"

"To—the Place Beyond the Winds! You do not understand. You cannot; no one can follow me; but I cannot bear the hurting blasts any more. I want the In-Place."

Then it was over, and now she was back in her lonely rooms. She packed her few, dear possessions, and toward morning lay down upon her bed. At daylight she departed, after settling her affairs with the night clerk and leaving no directions that any one could follow.

"It is business," she had cautioned, and the sleepy fellow nodded his head.

The rest did not matter. She would travel to the port from which the boats sailed to Kenmore. Any boat would do; any time. Some morning, perhaps, at four o'clock, if the passage had not been too rough, she would find herself on the shabby little wharf with the pink morning light about her, and the red-rock road stretching on before.

Then Priscilla, like a miser, gripped her purse. Never before had money held any power over her, but the hundreds she had saved were precious to her now. Her father's doors were still, undoubtedly, closed to her. She could not be a burden to the two men living in Master Farwell's small home. There was, to be sure, Mary McAdam! By and by, perhaps, when the hurt was less and she could trust herself more, she would go to the White Fish Lodge and beg for employment; but until then——

The morning Priscilla departed, Ledyard, unequal to any further strain, was called upon to bear several. By his plate, at the breakfast table, lay a scrawled envelope that he recognized at once as a report from Tough Pine.

"What's up now?" muttered he. "This thing isn't due for—three weeks yet."

Then he read, laboriously, the crooked lines:

I give up job. Dirty work. Money—bad money. I take no more—or I be damned! He better man—than you was; you bad and evil, for fun—he grow big and white. No work for bad man—friend now to good mens.

Pine.

"The devil!" muttered Ledyard; but oddly enough the letter raised, rather than lowered, his mental temperature. Those ill-looking epistles of Pine's had nauseated him lately. He had begun to experience the sensation of over-indulgence. Some one had told him, a time back, of Boswell's leaving the city, and he had been glad of the suspicion that arose in him when he heard it.

Later in the day the forces Priscilla had set in motion touched and drew him into the maelstrom.

"Ledyard"—this over the telephone—"my daughter has just informed me that she is about to break her engagement. May I see you at—three?"

"Yes. Here, or at your office?"

"I will come to you."

They had it out, man to man, and with all the time-honoured and hoary arguments.

"My girl's a fool!" Moffatt panted, red-faced and eloquent. "Not to mention what this really means to all of us, there is the girl's own happiness at stake. What are we to tell the world? You cannot go about and—explain! Good Lord! Ledyard, Huntter stands so high in public esteem that to start such a story as this about him would be to ruin my own reputation."

"No. The thing's got to die," Ledyard mused. "Die at its birth."

"Die in my girl's heart! Good God! Ledyard, you ought to see her after the one night! It wrings my heart. It isn't as if the slander had killed her love for him. It hasn't; it has strengthened it. 'I must bear this for him and for me,' she said, looking at me with her mother's eyes. She never looked like her mother before. It's broken me up. What's the world coming to, when women get the bit in their teeth?"

"There are times when all women look alike," Ledyard spoke half to himself; "I've noticed that." The rest of Moffatt's sentence he ignored.

"Why, in the name of all that is good," Moffatt blazed away, "did you send that redheaded girl into our lives? I might have known from the hour she set her will against mine that she was no good omen. Things I haven't crushed, Ledyard, have always ended by giving me a blow, sooner or later. Think of her coming into my home last night and daring——" The words ended in a gulp. "Let me send Margaret to you," pleaded the father at his wits' end. "Huntter is away. Will not be back until to-morrow. Perhaps you can move her. You brought her into the world; you ought to try and keep her here."

At four Margaret entered Ledyard's office. She was very white, very self-possessed, but gently smiling.

"Dear old friend," she said, drawing near him and taking the rÔle of comforter at once. "Do not think I blame you. I know you did your best with your blessed, nigh-to glasses on, but we younger folks have long vision, you know. Do you remember how you once told me to swallow your pills without biting them? I obeyed you for a long, long time; but I've bitten this one! It's bitter, but it is for the best. The medicine is in the pills; we might as well know."

"See here, Margaret, I'm not going to use your father's weapons. I only ask you—to wait! Do not break your engagement; let me see Huntter. Do not speak to him of this. I can explain, and—" he paused—"if the worse comes to the worst, the wedding can be postponed; then things can happen gradually."

"No," Margaret shook her head. "This is his affair and mine, and our love lies between us. I want—oh! I want to make him feel as I do, if I can; but above all else he must know that whatever I do is done in love. You see, I cannot hate him now; by and by it would be different if we were not just to each other."

"My poor girl! Do you women think you are going to be happier, the world better, because of—things like this? Men have thought it out!"

"Alone, yes. And women have let you bear the burden—alone. Happiness is—not all. And who can tell what the world will be when we all do the work God sent us to do? I know this: we cannot push our responsibilities off on any one else without stumbling across them sooner or later, for the overburdened ones cannot carry too much, or forever!"

Ledyard expected Travers for dinner, but, as the time drew near, he felt that his young partner would not come. At six a note was handed to him:

Ledyard ate no dinner that night; he seemed broken and ill; he pushed dish after dish aside, and finally left the table and the house.

Everything had failed him. All his life's work and hopes rustled past him like dead things as he walked the empty streets.

"Truth and conviction," he muttered. "Who has them? The young ass! What is truth? How can one be convinced? It's all bluff and a doing of one's best!"

And then he reached Helen Travers's house and found her waiting for him.

"I have a—a note from Dick," she said. Ledyard saw that she had been crying.

"Poor boy! He has gone to—his mother; his real mother. We"—she caught her breath—"we have, somehow, failed him. He is in trouble."

"I wonder—why?" Ledyard murmured. Never had his voice held that tone before. It startled even the sad woman.

"We have tried to do right—have loved him so," she faltered.

"Perhaps we have been too sure of ourselves, our traditions. Each generation has its own ideals. We're only stepping-stones, but we like to believe we're the—end-all!"

"That may be."

Then they sat with bowed heads in silence, until Ledyard spoke again.

"I'm going to retire, Helen. Without him, work would be—impossible. His empty place would be a silent condemnation, a constant reminder, of—mistakes."

"If he leaves me, I shall close this house. I could not live—without him here. I never envied his mother before. I have pitied, condoned her, but to-night I envy her from my soul!"

"Helen"—and here Ledyard got up and walked the length of the room restlessly; he was about to put his last hope to the test—"Helen, this world is—too new for us; for you and me. We belong back where the light is not so strong and things go slower! We get—blinded and breathless and confused. I have nothing left, nor have you. Will you come with me to that crack in the Alps, as Dick used to call it, and let me—love you?"

"Oh! John Ledyard! What a man you are!"

"Exactly! What a man I am! A poor, rough fool, always loving what was best; never daring to risk anything for it. I'm tired to death——"

She was beside him, kneeling, with her snow-touched head upon his knee.

"So am I. Tired, tired! I could not do without you. I have leaned on you far too long; we all have. Now, dear, lean on me for the rest of the way."

He bent his grizzled head upon hers and his eyes had the look of prayer that Priscilla once discovered.

"Dick—has not told me his real trouble," Helen faintly said. "I know it is somehow connected with a—nurse."

"The redheaded one," Ledyard put in; "a regular little marplot!" Then he gave that gruff laugh of his that Helen knew to be a signal of surrender.

"It's odd," he went on, "how one can admire and respect when often he disapproves. I disapprove of this—redheaded girl, but, if it will comfort you any, my child, I will tell you this: Dick's future, in her hands, would be founded on—on everlasting rock!"

"Perhaps—she won't have him!"

"Helen"—and Ledyard caught her to him—"you never would have said that if you had been Dick's mother!"

"Perhaps—not!"

"No. You and I have only played second fiddles, first and last; but second fiddles come in handy!"

The room grew dim and shadowy, and the two in the western window clung together.

"Have you heard—John, that Margaret Moffatt has broken her engagement to Clyde Huntter?"

"Yes. Where did you hear it?"

"She came—to see me; wanted to know how I was. She was very beautiful and dear. She talked a good deal about that—that——"

"Redheaded nurse?" asked Ledyard.

"Yes. I couldn't quite see any connecting link then, but you know Dick did go to that Swiss village last summer. I fear the party wasn't properly chaperoned, for 'twas there he met—the nurse!"

"It—was!" grunted Ledyard.

"There is something sadly wrong with this broken engagement of Margaret's, but I imagine no one will ever know. Girls are so—so different from what they used to be."

"Yes," but a tone of doubt was in Ledyard's voice. Presently he said: "Since Dick has left, or may leave, the profession, I suppose he'll take to writing. He's always told me that when he could afford to, he'd like to cut the traces and wollop the race with his pen. Many doctors would like to do that. A gag and a chain and ball are not what they're cracked up to be. The pen is mightier than the pill, sometimes, but it often eliminates the butter from the bread."

Helen caught at the only part of this speech that she understood.

"There's the little income I'm living on," she said; "it's Dick's father's. I wish—you'd let me give it to him—now. I am old-fashioned enough to want to live on my husband's money."

"Exactly!" Ledyard drew her closer; "quite the proper feeling. It can be easily arranged."

And while they sat in the gathering gloom, Travers was wending his way up a village street, and wondering that he found things so little changed.

While his heart grew heavier, his steps hastened, and he felt like a small boy again—a boy afraid of the dark, afraid of the mystery of night—alone! The boy of the past had always known a heavy heart, too, and that added reality to the touch.

There stood the old cottage with a sign "To Let" swinging from the porch. Had no one lived there since they, he and the pretty creature he called mother, had gone away?

There had been workmen in the house, evidently. They had carelessly left the outer door open and a box of tools in the living-room. Travers went in and sat down upon the chest, closed his eyes, and gave himself up to his sad mood. Clearly he seemed to hear the low, sweet voice:

"Little son, is that you?" Yes, it was surely he! "Come home to—to mother? Tired, dear?" Indeed he was tired—tired to the verge of exhaustion. "Suppose—suppose we have a story? Come, little son! It shall be a story of a fine, golden-haired princess who loves and loves, but—is very, very wise. And you are to be the prince who is wise, too. If you are not both very wise there will be trouble; and of course princesses and princes do not have trouble." The old, foolish memory ran on with its deeper truth breaking in upon the heart and soul of the man in the haunted room.

Then Travers spoke aloud:

"Mother, I will make no mistake if I can help it, and as God hears me, I will not cheat love. As far as lies in me, I will play fair for her sake—and yours!"

When he uncovered his eyes he almost expected to see a creaky little rocker and a sleepy boy resting on the breast of a woman so beautiful that it was no wonder many had loved her.

"Poor, little, long-ago mother!"

Then he thought of Helen and her strong purpose in life, her devotion and sacrifice.

"I must go to her!" he cried resolutely. "I owe her—much, much!"