CHAPTER XXXII.
THE HIGHWAY OF HAPPINESS.
EMILY often rebelled. Her common sense was always catching her at demanding, with the irrational arrogance of human vanity, that the course of the universe be altered and adjusted to her personal desires. But these moods came only after she and Stilson had not been together for a longer time than usual. When she saw him again, saw the look in his eyes—love great enough to deny itself the delight of expression and enjoyment—she forgot her complaints in the happiness of loving such a man, of being loved by him. “It might be so much worse, unbearably worse,” she thought. “I might lose what I have. And then how vast it would seem.”
Stilson always felt the inrush of a dreary tide when they separated. One day the tide seemed to be sweeping away his courage. Unhappiness behind him in the home that was no longer made endurable by Mary’s presence, now that her mother’s condition compelled him to keep her at the convent; contention, the necessity of saying and doing disagreeable things, ahead of him at the office—“I have always been a fool,” he thought, “a sentimental fool. No wonder life lays on the lash.” But he gathered a bundle of newspapers from the stand at Fifty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue and, seating himself in the corner of the car, strapped on his mental harness and began to tug and strain at his daily task—“like a dumb ox,” he muttered.
He was outwardly in his worst mood—the very errand boy knew that it was not a good day to ask favours. A man to whom he had loaned money came in to pay it and, leaving, said: “God will bless you.” Stilson sat staring at a newspaper. “God will bless me,” he repeated bitterly. “I shall have some new misfortune before the day is over.”
And late that afternoon a boy brought him a note—he recognised the handwriting of the address as Marguerite’s. “The misfortune,” he thought, tearing it open. He read:
This won’t be delivered to you until I’m out at sea. I’m going abroad. You’ll not see me again. I’m only in the way—a burden to you and a disgrace to Mary. You’ll find out soon enough how I’ve gone, without my telling you. Perhaps I’m crazy—I never did have much self-control. But I’m gone, and gone for good, and you’re left free with your beloved Mary.
I know you hate me and I can’t stand feeling it any longer. I couldn’t be any more miserable, no, nor you either. And we may both be happier. I never loved anybody but you—I suppose I still love you, but I must get away where I won’t feel that I’m always being condemned.
Don’t think I’m blaming you—I’m not so crazy as that.
Try to think of me as gently as—no, don’t think of me—forget me—teach Mary to forget me. I’m crying, Robert, as I write this. But then I’ve done a lot of that since I realised that not even for your sake could I shake off the curse my father put on me before I was born.
Good-bye, Robert. Good-bye, Mary. I put the ring—the one you gave me when we were married—in the little box in the top drawer of your chiffonière where you keep your scarf-pins. I hope I shan’t live long. If I had been brave, I’d have killed myself long ago.
Good-bye,
MARGUERITE.
One sentence in her letter blazed before his mind—“You’ll find out soon enough how I’ve gone, without my telling you.” What did she mean? In her half-crazed condition had she done something that would be notorious, would be remembered against Mary? He pressed the electric button. “Ask Mr. Vandewater to come here at once, please,” he said to the boy. Vandewater, the dramatic news reporter, hurried in. “I’m about to ask a favour of you, Vandewater,” he said to him, “and I hope you’ll not speak of it. Do you know any one at the Gold and Glory—well, I mean?”
“Mayer, the press agent, and I are pretty close.”
“Will you call him up and ask him—tell him it’s personal and private—what he knows about Miss Feronia’s movements lately. Use this telephone here.”
At “Miss Feronia,” Vandewater looked conscious and nervous. Like all the newspaper men, he knew of the “romance” in Stilson’s life, and, like many of the younger men, he admired and envied him because of the fascinating mystery of his relations with the famous dancer.
The Gold and Glory was soon connected with Stilson’s branch-telephone and he was impatiently listening to Vandewater’s part of the conversation. Mayer seemed to be saying a great deal, and Vandewater’s questions indicated that it was an account of some unusual happening. After ten long minutes, Vandewater hung up the receiver and turned to Stilson.
“I—I—it is hard to tell you, Mr. Stilson,” he began with mock hesitation.
“No nonsense, please.” Stilson shook his head with angry impatience. “I must know every fact—every fact—and quickly.”
“Mayer says she sailed on the Fürst Bismarck to-day—that she’s—she’s taken a man named Courtleigh, an Englishman—a young fellow in the chorus. Mayer says she sent a note to the manager, explaining that she was going abroad for good, and that Courtleigh came smirking in and told the other part. He says Courtleigh is a cheap scoundrel, and that her note read as if she were not quite right in her head.”
“Yes—and what’s Mayer doing? Is he telling everybody? Is he going to use it as an advertisement for the house?”
Vandewater hesitated, then said: “He’s not giving it to the afternoon papers. He’s writing it up to send out to-night to the morning papers.”
“Um!” Stilson looked grim, savage. “Go up there, please, and do your best to have it suppressed.”
“Yes.” Vandewater was swelling with mystery and importance. “You may rely on me, Mr. Stilson. And I shall respect your confidence.”
“I assume that you are a gentleman,” Stilson said sarcastically. He had taken Vandewater into his confidence because he had no choice, and he had little hope of his being able to hold his tongue. “Thank you. Good day.”
As soon as he was alone he seated himself at the telephone and began calling up his friends or acquaintances in places of authority on the newspapers, morning and evening. Of each he made the same request—“If a story comes in about Marguerite Feronia, will you see that it’s put as mildly as possible, if you must print it?” And from each he got an assurance that the story would be “taken care of.” When he rose wearily after an hour of telephoning, he had done all that could be done to close the “avenues of publicity.” He locked the door of his office and flung himself down at his desk, and buried his face in his arms.
In a series of mournful pictures the progress of Marguerite to destruction flashed across his mind, one tragedy fading into the next. Youth, beauty, joyousness, sweetness, sensibility, fading, fading, fading until at last he saw the wretched, broken, half-insane woman fling herself headlong from the precipice, with a last despairing glance backward at all that her curse had stripped from her.
And the tears tore themselves from his eyes. The evil in her was blotted out. He could see only the Marguerite who had loved him, had saved him, who was even now flying because to her diseased mind it seemed best for her to go. “Poor girl!” he groaned. “Poor child that you are!”
Emily, on her way downtown the next morning in an “L” train, happened to glance at the newspaper which the man in the next seat was reading. It was the Herald, and she saw a two-column picture of Marguerite. She read the bold headlines: “Marguerite Feronia, ill. The Gold and Glory’s great dancer goes abroad, never to return to the stage or the country.”
She left the train at the next station, bought a Herald and read:
Among the passengers on the Fürst Bismarck yesterday was Marguerite Feronia, who for more years than it would be kind to enumerate has fascinated the gilded youth that throng the Gold and Glory nightly. Miss Feronia has been in failing health for more than a year. Again and again she has been compelled to disappoint her audiences. At last she realised that she was making a hopeless fight against illness and suddenly made up her mind to give up. She told no one of her plans until the last moment. In a letter from the steamship to the manager of the Gold and Glory she declared that she would never return and that she did not expect to live long.
The account was brief out of all proportion to the headlines, and to the local importance of the subject. Emily went at once to the newspaper files when she reached her office. In no other paper was there so much as in the Herald. She could find no clue to the mystery.
“At least he is free,” she thought. “And that is the important point. At least he is free—we are free.”
Although she repeated this again and again and tried to rouse herself to a sense of the joy it should convey, she continued in a state of groping depression.
Toward three o’clock came a telegram from Stilson—“Shall you be at home this evening? Most anxious to see you. Please answer, Democrat office.” She telegraphed for him to come, and her spirits began to rise. At last the dawn! At last the day! And her eyes were sparkling and she was so gay that her associates noted it, and “the old lady” confided to Mr. Burnham that she “had been wondering how much longer such a sweet, beautiful girl would have to wait before some man would have the sense to propose to her.” Nor was she less gay at heart when Stilson was shown into her little drawing-room, although she kept it out of her face—Marguerite’s departure might have been sad.
“I saw it in the Herald,” she began.
“Then I needn’t tell you.” He seemed old and worn and gray—nearer fifty than thirty-five. “I’ve come to say good-bye.”
Emily looked at him, stupefied. They sat in silence a long time. At last he spoke: “I may be gone—who can say how long? Perhaps it will be best to keep her over there. I don’t know—I don’t know,” he ended drearily.
Again there was a long silence. She broke it: “You—are—going—to—to join her?” She could hardly force the words from her lips.
He looked at her in surprise. “Of course. What else can I do?”
Emily sank back in her chair and covered her face.
“What is it?” he asked. “What did you—why, you didn’t think I would desert her?”
“Oh—I—” She put her face down into the bend of her arm. “I didn’t—think—you’d desert me,” she murmured. “I—I didn’t understand.” She faced him with a swift movement. “How can you go?” she exclaimed. “When fate clears the way for you—when this woman who had been hanging like a great weight about your neck suddenly cuts herself loose—then—Oh, how can you? Am I nothing in your life? Is my happiness nothing to you? Have you been deceiving yourself about her and—and me?” She turned away again. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she said brokenly. “I don’t mean to reproach you—only—I had—I had hoped—That’s all.”
The French clock on the mantel raised its swift little voice until the room seemed to be resounding with a clamorous reminder of flying time and flying youth and dying hope. When he spoke, his voice came as if from a great distance and out of a great silence and calm.
“It has been eleven years,” he said, “since in folly and ignorance I threw myself into the depths—how deep you will never know, you can never imagine. And as I lay there, a thing so vile that all who knew me shrank from me with loathing—she came. And she not only came, but she staid. She did her best to lift me. She staid until I drove her away with curses and—and blows. But she came again—and again. And at last she brought the—the little girl——”
He paused to steady his voice. “And I took the hand of the child and she held its other hand, and together we found the way back—for me. And now—she has gone out among strangers—enemies—gone with her mind all awry. She will be robbed, abused, abandoned, she will suffer cold and hunger, and she will die miserably—if I don’t go to her.”
He went over and stood beside her. “Look at me!” he commanded, and she obeyed. “Low as the depth was from which she brought me up, it would be high as heaven in comparison with the depth I’d lie in, if I did not go. And I say to you that if you gave me the choice, told me you would cut me off from you forever if I went—I say to you that still I would go!”
As she faced him, her breath came fast and her eyes seemed to widen until all of her except them was blotted out for him. “I understand,” she said. “Yes—you would go—nothing could hold you. And—that’s why I—love you.”
He gave a long sigh of relief and joy. “I had thought you would say that, when I knew what I must do. And then—when you protested—I was afraid. Everything crumbles in my hands. Even my dreams die aborning.”
“When do you sail?” she asked. “To-morrow?”
“Yes. I’ve arranged my affairs. I—I look to you to take care of Mary. There is no one else to do it.”
“If there were, no one else should do it,” she said, with a gentle smile.
He gave her a slip of paper on which were the necessary memoranda. “And now—I must be off.” He tried to make his tone calm and business-like. He put out his hand and, when she gave him hers, he held it. For an instant each saw into the depths of the other’s heart.
“No matter how long you may be away,” she said in a low voice, “remember, I shall be—” She did not finish in words.
He tried to speak, but could not. He turned and was almost at the door before he stopped and came back to her. He took her in his arms, and she could feel his heart beating as if it were trying to burst through his chest. “No matter how long,” she murmured. “And I shall not be impatient, my love.”
She expected a reaction but none came. Instead, she continued to feel a puzzling tranquillity. She had never loved him so intensely, yet she was braving serenely this separation full of uncertainties. She tried to explain it to herself, and finally there came to her a phrase which she had often heard years ago at church—“the peace that passeth all understanding.”
“This must be what they meant by it,” she said to herself. “Our love is my religion.”
The next time she was at Joan’s they were not together long before Joan saw that there had been a marvellous change in her. “What is it?” she asked. “Has the tangle straightened?”
“No,” replied Emily. “It is worse, if anything. But I have made a new discovery, I have found the secret of happiness.”
“Love?”
Emily shook her head. “That’s only part of it.”
“Self-sacrifice?”
“I shouldn’t call it sacrifice.” Emily’s face was more beautiful than Joan had ever before seen it. “I think the true name is—self forgotten for love’s sake.”
“Yes,” assented Joan, looking with expanding eyes at the baby-boy playing on the floor at her feet.