At the Crossroads Part 52

"Well, I came to a cabin in the woods, I don't know why, but something made me think it was yours. You would be so likely to take such a place as that, dear. I went in--to wait for you; to sit and think about you, to calm myself--and then----"

"Yes, Kathryn!" Northrup was seeing it all--the cabin, the silent red-and-gold woods.

"And then--she came! Oh! Brace, a man can never know how a woman feels at such a moment--you see there were some sheets of your ma.n.u.script on the table--I was looking at them when the girl came in. Brace, she was quite awful; she frightened me terribly. She asked who I was and I told her--I thought that would at least make her see my side; explain things--but it did not! She was--she was"--Kathryn ventured a bolder dash--"she was quite violent. I cannot remember all she said--she said so much--a girl does when she realizes what _she_ must have realized.

Oh! Brace, I tried to be kind, but I had to take your part and she turned me out!"

In all this Northrup felt his way as one does along a narrow pa.s.sage beset on either side with dangers. Characteristically he saw his own wrong in originally creating the situation. Not for an instant did he doubt Kathryn's story; indeed, she rose in his regard; for he felt for her deeply. He had, unwittingly, set a trap for her innocent, girlish feet; brought her to bay with what she could not possibly understand; and the belief that she had been merciful, had accepted, in silence, at a time when his trouble absorbed her, touched and humiliated him; and yet, try as he did to consider only Kathryn, he could not disregard Mary-Clare. He could not picture her in a coa.r.s.e rage; the idea was repellent, but he acknowledged that the dramatic moment, lived through by two stranger-women with much at stake, was beyond his powers of imagination. The great thing that mattered now was that his duty, since a choice must be made, was to Kathryn. By every right, as he saw it, she must claim his allegiance. And yet, what was there to be done?

Northrup was silent; his inability to express himself condemned him in her eyes, and yet, strangely enough, he had never been more desirable to her.

"Marry me, dear. Let me prove my love to you. No matter what lies back there, I forgive everything! That is what love means to a woman like me."

Love! This poor, shabby counterfeit.

With a sickening sense of repulsion Northrup drew back, and maddeningly his book, not Kathryn, seemed to fill his aching brain. With this conception of love revealed--how blindly he had misunderstood. He tried to speak; did speak at last--he heard his words, but was not conscious of their meaning.

"You are wrong, child. Whatever folly was committed in King's Forest was mine, not that girl's. I suppose I was a bit mad without knowing it, but I will not accept your sacrifice, Kathryn, I will not ask for forgiveness. When I come home, if you still love me, I will devote my life to you. We will start afresh--the whole world will."

"You are going at once?" Kathryn clutched at what was eluding her.

"Yes, my dear."

"And you won't marry me? Won't--prove to me?"

"No."

"Oh! how can you leave me to think----"

"Think what, Kathryn?"

"Oh! things--about her. It would be such a proof of what you've just said--if only you would marry me now."

"Kathryn, I cannot. I am--I wish that you could understand--I am stepping out into the dark. I must go alone."

"That is absurd, Brace. Absurd." A baffled, desperate note rang in Kathryn's voice. It was not for Northrup, but for her first sense of failure. Then she looked up. All the resentment gone from her face, she was the picture of despair.

"I will wait for you, Brace. I will prove to you what a woman's real love is!"

So, cleverly, did she bind what she intuitively felt was the highest in Northrup. And he bent and laid his lips on the smooth girlish forehead, sorrowfully realizing how little he had to offer.

A few moments later Northrup found himself on the street. The snow was falling thicker, faster. It had the smothering quality that is so mysterious. People thudded along as if on padded feet; the lights were splashed with clinging flakes and gleamed yellow-red in the whiteness.

Sounds were m.u.f.fled; Northrup felt blotted out.

He loved the sensation--it was like a great, absorbing Force taking him into its control and erasing forever the bungling past. He purposely drifted for an hour in the storm. He was like a moving part of it, and when at last he reached home, he stood in the vestibule for many moments extricating himself--it was more that than shaking the snow off. He felt singularly free.

Once within the house, he went directly to his mother's room. She was lying on a couch by the fire. In the shelter of her warm, quiet place Helen seemed to have gained what Brace had won in the storm. She was smiling, almost eager.

"Yes, dear?" she said.

Northrup sat down in the chair that was his by his mother's hearth.

"Kathryn wanted to marry me, Mother, at once."

"That would be like her, bless her heart!"

"I could not accept the sacrifice, Mother."

"That would be like you--but is it a sacrifice?"

"It seems so to me."

"You see, son, to many women this is the supreme offering. All _they_ can give, vicariously, at this great demanding hour."

"Women must learn to stop that rubbish, Mother. We men must refuse it."

"Why, Brace!" Then: "Are you quite, quite sure it was all for Kathryn, son?"

"No, partly for myself; but that must include and emphasize Kathryn's share."

"I see--at least I think I do."

"But you have faith, Mother?"

"Yes, faith! Surely, faith."

After a silence, broken only by the sputtering of the fire and that soft, mystic pattering of the snow on the window gla.s.s, Northrup asked gently:

"And you, Mother, what will you do? I cannot bear to think of you waiting here alone."

Helen Northrup rose slowly from the couch; her long, loose gown trailed softly as she walked to the fireplace and stood leaning one elbow on the shelf.

"I'm not going to--wait, dear, in the sense you mean. I'm going to work and get ready for your return."

"Work?" Northrup looked anxious. Helen smiled down upon him.

"While you have been preparing," she said, "so have I. There is something for me to do. My poor little craft that I have pottered at, keeping it alive and praying over it--my writing job, dear; I have offered for service. It has been accepted. It is my great secret--I've kept it for you as my last gift. When you come home, I'll tell you about it. While you are away you must think of me, busy--busy!"

Then she bent and laid her pale fine face against the dark bowed head.

"You are tired, dear, very, very tired. You must go to bed and rest--there is so much to do; so much."

CHAPTER XXI

In King's Forest many strange and awe-inspiring things had happened--but, as far as the Forest people knew, they were so localized that, like a cancer, they were eating in, deeper and deeper--to the death.