The Silver Poppy Part 26

"Yes, who are you?" she went on wildly, catching ludicrously at ineffectual trifles, as the drowning do. "Who, indeed, _are_ you? You, with your pharasaical long face and your own underhand schemes? You, closeted alone with married women--with a woman who has made a fool of herself for you, who can't even hide her infatuation! Who are you, who have come into a home and stolen an honorable wife's love away from her husband--who are you to sit up and prate of honor and honesty?"

Again he threw up his hand, as though to ward back her termagancy, but she was not to be stopped.

"Yes, who are you to sit in judgment on me, a woman, alone in the world, a woman who has asked nothing of you! If you are so immaculate," she mocked, "if you are so above suspicion, denounce me as the thief you have said I am! Denounce me; but do not forget that you yourself will soon stand before the world in your true colors!"

He tried to silence her, but her pa.s.sionate torrent was not to be stayed.

"No, of course not," she went on in her fury. "Of course it hurts when it's the other way! But when you strike at _my_ name you plume yourself on being a hero, and prate about your debt to the dead!"

She stopped, at last, panting, out of breath. Her thin hands were shaking with the paroxysm of her fury, and her lips were bloodless. "Oh, if I were a man!" she cried at him. Then she sank into her chair, still breathing heavily, scarcely knowing where her fierce torrent of vituperation had left her.

"But you wouldn't do this wrong, you wouldn't?" she almost pleaded, holding her hand over her heart. "You don't know how hard I've struggled for my place in the world; you don't know what I've gone through; what I have suffered and known! Do you--do you think I would give that all up now, lightly, and without a word--and for an empty mistake? Do you think," she cried with a rising and more defiant voice as her strength came back to her again, "do you think that I would let any one come and rob me of this, without fighting them to the end? Do you think that because I'm a woman I can't fight? that you can throw me down in the dirt and walk over me, without a word? Do you? _You fool!_"

Through that turbulent darkness a far-away glimmer of light came to her, and she clutched at it eagerly.

"Now I will tell you the truth," she cried. "I will give you the truth about your dead man and his book. It was I who worked and slaved for that dead man. Without me his book would never have been written. While you, who call yourself his friend, who rant about being his defender, were loitering about the continent, I was at his bedside, tending him and watching him, wearing myself out for him, and keeping the life in him hour by hour. And it was to me, on his last day, that he gave the book, with his own hands made me take it, what there was of it. It was as much mine as his, he declared, and he gave it to me with his own hand. Do you hear?--with his own hand! And it was I who worked over it, and rewrote it word for word, and took it and made it my own!"

Repellier looked at her in silence for many minutes.

"But why did you take it?" he asked.

"It was mine! I had earned it!" Her eyes shone out at him hatefully. "I had earned it, I tell you!"

Repellier seemed deep in thought; then a new firmness came about the lines of his mouth, and he looked up at her.

"What new insult now?" she cried, tauntingly.

"It may be too late to repair the injustice to the dead, Miss Vaughan; but I can and will at least step in to save the living!"

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean Hartley! Have you ever stopped to think how you're ruining that man's life?"

"Ruined?--_his_ life ruined?"

"Yes, or it soon will be! And for his sake, remember, for his sake alone I can make one final proposal to you. It is the only thing to do, and it is very simple. I can offer you the choice of giving up Hartley, of releasing him absolutely and completely, on the one hand, or of giving up The Silver Poppy, and all it stands for, on the other!"

She caught desperately at her last straw.

"I would," she said. "I would--and could do it, but he--_he_ may refuse to accept his freedom!"

"You must take the one or the other. As for Hartley himself, I think when everything is laid before him plainly, he will see just how to act!"

"You," she cried in horror, "you wouldn't do that? You wouldn't tell him this--this lie?"

"I should have to; you have made it necessary."

"Him! Tell _him_!" she repeated, dazed. "You don't know how much he is to me," she added wistfully. It was no longer the face of a girl that looked up at Repellier. It was that of a woman, touched with age and sorrow.

"That is no reason why _his_ life should be soured and broken, no reason why he should go on in the way he has been doing."

"But they're lies! He would know they were lies!" she cried, her anger seizing her once more.

"He would know they were lies! He knows and believes in me! He loves me!

If I told him, he would _kill_ you! But you wouldn't tell him--you wouldn't tell _him_!" she cried again, reading nothing but relentlessness in the other's face.

Repellier turned away from her, sick of it all, degraded by it, demeaned by her very pa.s.sionate mendaciousness, but still resolute.

"I will give you two days to think it over," he said wearily, "and then--then I'll act on your decision!"

And she knew that he was in earnest.

CHAPTER XXIV

ROSES AND THORNS

Not for knaves like us she wept-- Yet who served or loved as we?-- Since her heart this many a day Went to one beyond the sea!

But, if in those lands afar, She her lightest word should say, Here are ten good knights and true With ten lives to cast away!

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Young Queen."

We are--only what we have been!--"The Silver Poppy."

Hartley lost no more time than was necessary before responding to Cordelia's message asking that he come to her at once.

There was a touch of imperativeness in the hurriedly written little note that indefinitely appealed to him. It seemed to show him how much she had grown to lean on him. He a.s.sumed, though, that the urgency at the most implied nothing more than some impending problem in connection with her new book, and consequently Cordelia waited three anxious and impatient hours before he finally appeared before her. And greedily she was counting the minutes of that last precious day.

The ordeal through which she had pa.s.sed the afternoon before had left its traces behind it. It still showed on her face in an unusual look of pensive weariness about the heavy eyelids, and a deepened and almost feverish glow to the eyes themselves. For once, too, her face was the true color of old ivory, with one small touch of the tenderest, sh.e.l.l-like pink burning on each of her cheeks. The languor of her voice, the calm pathos of her glance, and the heavier shadow about her lashes, suggested to Hartley, as it had done before, but never so vividly, the quiet, half-sorrowful beauty of an autumn twilight.

She was dressed in her riding-habit, of dark-green cloth, showing every line of the thin yet buoyant figure. It appeared to him as a figure with something bird-like in the very lightness and nervous quickness of movement beyond all its outward languor. The dark-green of her habit, too, seemed to give to the pale face above it a strangely heightened sense of isolation, like the gloom out of which the solitary figure of a Rembrandt portrait looks down on the world.

"Cordelia, what is it?" he asked anxiously, startled at the change, though unable to determine in just what it consisted.

She looked up quickly at the note of unusual tenderness in his voice.

"I am going away!" she said quietly.

A sudden sense of loss, of deprivation, swept over him, and both his voice and the startled face he turned to her showed his feeling.

"Going away?" he echoed.

"Yes." She shook her head sorrowfully.

"But where, Cordelia?"