The Bacillus of Beauty Part 45

A BURST OF SUNLIGHT.

June 8.

They say the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. It was so with me.

My troubles grew too great to bear, then vanished in an hour.

Fate couldn't forever frown. I knew there must be help; some hand outstretched in a pitiless world.

Really I am almost happy, for in the most unexpected and yet the most natural fashion, my perplexities have vanished; and I believe that my life will not be, after all, a failure.

The hour before the dawn was more than dark. It was dreary. In the morning I did not care to go out, and no one came except one strange man who besieged the door--there have been many such here recently, dunning and dunning and dunning, until my patience was worn to shreds. This was a decent-looking fellow with a thin face, a mustache dyed black and a carefully unkeen expression that noticed everything.

"Miss Winship?" he said, and upon my acknowledging the name, he placed a paper in my hands and went away. I was so relieved because he said nothing about wanting "a little money on account;" he wasn't even coa.r.s.ely insolent, like so many of them. He did look surprised at my appearance; so surprised that his explanation of his errand died away into an unintelligible murmur. But I wasn't curious about it.

I tried to read a newspaper, only to gather from some headlines that Strathay and his cousin were pa.s.sengers by an out-going steamship. I wonder if it was all money, money, that kept him from me--or was it more than half the fear of beauty?

I couldn't read anything else, not even a note from Mrs. Marmaduke; it was dated from her country place; she hoped to see me--"in the autumn!" Peggy is in Europe; the General's going if she's not gone already. "May see you at the wedding of that odd Miss Bryant," ran her last brusque message. "I begged an invitation; really I like her. But the chances are against my being here."

All gone, I thought; my last hope, all my friends.

There was a note from Mrs. Baker; I compelled myself to glance at that, and when I had done so, seized my hat and veil. She would call, it said, that afternoon!

With no thought but of escape, I left the house; I cared not where I went, nor what I did. I knew the Judge had sent Aunt Frank to pry into my troubles; I walked with feverish haste, I would have liked to fly to avoid her. My hands shook.

Oh, I was wretched!

As I pa.s.sed the Park, I saw that spring had leaped to summer and the trees waved fresh, green branches in the air--just such trees as John and I walked under, less than a year ago, making great plans for a golden future; and a golden future there must be, but I had then no hope of it, no joy in life, no happiness even in my beauty. One only thought spurred me on, to forget past, present and future; to buy forgetfulness by any caprice; to win diversion by any adventure.

After some time I saw that I was in a side street whose number seemed familiar; self-searching at last recalled to me that on this street lived two rival faith healers, about whose lively compet.i.tion for clients Cadge had once told us girls a funny story.

Could there have come to my thought some hope of finding rest from sorrow in the leading of another mind? Impossible to say. I was near insanity, I think. I chose the nearer pract.i.tioner and rang the bell.

I can smile now at memory of the stuffy little parlour into which I was ushered, but I did not smile then at it, nor at the middle-aged woman who received me with a set smile of stereotyped placidity. Her name, I think, was Mallard.

"Have you a conviction of disease, my daughter?" she asked, in a low voice with a caressing overtone gurgling in its cadences. "You look as radiant as the morn. You should not think ill."

"I am not ill," I replied; "but the world is harsh."

"The world is the expression of our sense life to the spirit," she cooed.

"We do not live or die, but we pa.s.s through the phenomena. Through the purifying of our thoughts we will gradually become more and more ethereal until we are translated."

I felt that momentary shiver that folk tales tells us is caused by some one walking over our graves.

"I'm in no haste to be translated," I said.

"No one need be translated until she is ready--unless she has enemies. Are you suffering from the errors of others? Has any one felt fear for you?

That would account for what the world calls unhappiness. Is some one trying to influence your subjective state?"

"I am convinced of it," I said with wasted sarcasm. "But you can do nothing for me; you can't--can you work on unbelievers?"

"Most a.s.suredly. We are channels through which truth must flow to our patients. I need not tell you what I myself have done."--Mrs. Mallard modestly cast down her eyes.--"Mrs. Eddy has healed carous bones and cancers. I--some of our healers can dissuade the conviction of decayed teeth. The 'filling,' as the world calls it, is, in such cases, pink and very durable. If these marvels can be wrought upon the body, why may not the mind be led toward healing? Confide; confide."

"Heal the world of its hate of me," I cried out. "What you say is all so vague. Does the mind exist?"

"It Is the only thing that does exist. Without mind man and the universe would collapse; the winds would weary and the world stand still. Sin- tossed humanity, expressed in tempest and flood, the divine mind calms and limits with a word."

I rose hastily to go. Chance alone and weariness of life had led me to enter the woman's parlor, but there was no forgetfulness in it. Impatience spurred me to be moving, and I turned to the door, with the polite fiction that I was leaving town but might soon consult the healer.

"That makes no difference," she persisted, getting between me and the door. "We treat many cases, of belief in unhappiness by the absent method.

From 9 to 10 A. M. we go into the Silence for our Eastern patients. Our ten o'clock is nine o'clock for those living in the central time belt. At 11 A. M. it is nine for those in Denver or Rocky Mountain time region.

Thus we are in the Silence during the entire forenoon, but it is always nine for the patient. Will you not arrange for treatment; you really look very badly?"

"Not today." I pushed past her.

To my astonishment the woman followed me to the outer door, abruptly changing her tone.

"I know very well why you don't get healed," she said. "You fill your mind with antagonistic thoughts by reading papers that are fighting some one on every page. You want to get into some kind of society where you can pay $15 or $20 a week and get free healing, and you are disappointed because I won't give you my time and strength for nothing, so that you can have the money to go somewhere and have a good time. Oh, I know you society people!"

By degrees her voice had lost its cooing tone and had risen to a shriek. I was amazed--until I remembered the rival across the street, who was probably watching me from behind closed blinds.

As I walked away with the woman's angry words ringing after me from the doorstep, I was divided between amus.e.m.e.nt and despair; I cannot express it by any other phrase. And that cynical mingling of feelings was the nearest approach to contentment that I had known for days.

The feeling died away; reaction came. It was the worst hour of my life.

The thought of suicide--the respite I had always held in reserve against a day too evil to be borne--pressed upon my mind.

I wandered to a ferry and crossed the East River to some unfamiliar suburb where saloons were thicker than I had ever before seen them; and all the way over I looked at the turbid water and knew in my heart that I should never have the courage to throw my beautiful body into that foul tide.

From the ferry I presently reached a vast, forbidding cemetery, and as I went among the crowded graves there came floating out from a little chapel the sound of prayers intoned for the dead. I almost envied them; almost wished that I, too, might be laid to rest in the little churchyard at home.

Then I lay down flat upon the turf in a lonely place, and tried to think of myself as dead. Never had the pulse beat stronger in my veins then at that moment. There were little living things all around me, joying in the warm sun; tiny insects that crawled, unrebuked, over my gown, so busy, so happy in their way, with their petty affairs all prospering, that I wondered why I should be so out of tune with the world. And then a rain of tears gushed from my eyes. I do not think that any one who should have seen me there could have guessed that the p.r.o.ne and weeping woman was the most beautiful of created things; I do not think I have an enemy so bitter that she would not have pitied me.

I tried to think, but I was too tired. I had a vision of myself returning to the narrow round of farm life, to Ma's reproaches, to dreary, grinding toil that I might win back dollar by dollar the money I had squandered--my back bent, my face seamed, my hands marred, like Aunt Emily's; and I shuddered and wept and grovelled before fate.

Then I saw myself remaining in the city, seeking work and finding nothing.

Teach I could not; every door was barred except--I saw myself before the footlights, coa.r.s.ened, swallowing greedily the applause of a music hall audience, taking a husband from that audience perhaps--a brute like Bellmer! Better die!

But as the vision pa.s.sed, a great desire of life grew upon me. It seemed monstrous, hideous, that I should ever die or be unhappy; the fighting instinct sent the blood galloping. I sat erect.

Then I noticed that the sun was gone, and the evening cool was rapidly falling. The little people of the gra.s.s whose affairs I had idly watched I could no longer see--gone to their homes maybe; and I turned to mine, desolate as it was, hungry and chilled and alone.

And that evening John Burke brought the sunshine.

CHAPTER X.