Together Part 68

She liked to look at Margaret, to feel her near, but she mused over her.

She was changed. Margaret had had this disease, too, this weariness of living, the torturing doubt,--if this or that, the one thing or the other, had happened, it might have been different,--the haggling of defeated will!

No wonder she was glad to be out of the city up here at peace....

"But one can't stay out of life for always," she remonstrated.

"Why not? What you call the world seems to get along very well without us, without any one in particular. And I don't feel the siren call, not yet!"

"But life can't be over at thirty-three,--one can't be really dead, I suppose."

"No,--just beginning!" Margaret responded with an elasticity that amazed Isabelle, who remembered the languid woman she had known so many years.

"Just beginning," she murmured, "after the journey in the dark."

'Of course,' mused Isabelle, 'she means the relief from Larry, the anxiety over the boy,--all that she has had to bear. Yes, for her there is some beginning anew. She might possibly marry Rob Falkner now, if his wife got somebody else to look after her silly existence. Why shouldn't she?

Margaret is still young,--she might even be pretty again.' And Isabelle wished to know what the situation was between Margaret and Falkner.

Nothing, it seemed, could make any difference to herself! She ached to tell some one of the despair in her heart, but even to Margaret she could not speak. Since that summer morning six months before when Vickers had died without a spoken word, she had never said his name. Her husband had mutely respected her muteness. Then she had been ill,--too ill to think or plan, too ill for everything but remembrance. Now it was all shut up, her tragedy, festering at the bottom of her heart like an undrained wound, poisoning her soul.... Suddenly in the midst of her brooding she woke with a start at something Margaret was saying, so unlike her reticent self.

... "You knew, of course, about Larry's death?"

"Yes, John told me."

"It was in the papers, too."

"Poor Margaret!--I was so sorry for you--it was terrible!"

"You mustn't think of it that way,--I mean for me. It was terrible that any human being should be where Larry got,--where he was hunted like a dog by his own acts, and in sheer despair made an end of himself. I often think of that--think what it must be not to have the courage to go on, not to feel the strength in yourself to live another hour!"

"It's always insanity. No sane person would do such a thing!"

"We call it insanity. But what difference does the name make?" Margaret said. "A human being falls into a state of mind where he is without one hope, one consideration,--all is misery. Then he takes what seems the only relief--death--as he would food or drink; that is sad."

"It was Larry's own doing, Margaret; he had his chance!"

"Of course, more than his chance--more than many chances. He was the kind of protoplasm that could not endure life, that carried in itself the seed of decay,--yet--yet--" She raised her pale face with the luminous eyes and said softly: "Sometimes I wonder if it had to be. When I look at little Ned and see how health is coming to that crippled body--the processes are righting themselves--sound and healthy, ready to be helped back to life--I wonder if it may not be so with other processes not wholly physical. I wonder! ... Did you ever think, Isabelle, that we are waiting close to other worlds,--we can almost hear from them with our ears,--but we only hear confusedly so far. Some day we may hear more clearly!"

Margaret had reverted, Isabelle concluded, to the religion of her father, the Bishop! What she was vaguely talking about was the Bishop's heaven, in which the widow and orphan were counselled to take comfort.

"I wish I could feel it,--what the church teaches," Isabelle replied. "But I can't,--it isn't real. I go to church and say over the creed and ask myself what it means, and feel the same way when I come out--or worse!"

"I don't mean religion--the church," Margaret smiled back. "That has been dead for me a long time. It's something you come to feel within you about life. I can't explain--only there might have been a light even for poor Larry in that last dreadful darkness! ... Some day I want to tell you all about myself, something I have never told any one,--but it will help to explain, perhaps.... Now you must go to bed,--I will send my black Sue up with your coffee in the morning."...

Isabelle, as she lay awake in the stillness, the absolute hush of the snowy night, thought of what Margaret had said about her husband. John had told her how Larry had gradually gone to the bad in a desultory, weak-kneed fashion,--had lost his clerkship in the A. and P. that Lane had got for him; then had taken to hanging about the downtown hotels, betting a little, drinking a little, and finally one morning the curt paragraph in the paper: "Found, in the North River, body of a respectably dressed man about forty years. Papers on him show that he was Lawrence Pole of Westchester," etc., etc.

And John's brief comment,--"Pity that he hadn't done it ten years ago."

Yes, thought Isabella, pity that he was ever born, the derelict, ever came into this difficult world to complicate further its issues. Margaret apparently had towards this worthless being who had marred her life a softened feeling. But it was absurd of her now to think that she might have loved him!

CHAPTER LVI

Long before it was light the next morning Isabelle heard the heavy tread of the blacksmith as he was going his rounds to light the fires; then she snuggled deeper into bed. When Margaret's maid finally came with the coffee and pushed back the heavy shutters, Isabelle looked out into another world from the one she had come to half frozen the afternoon before. She had entered the village from the rear, and now she looked off south and west from the level shelf on which the houses sat, across a broad valley, to black woods and a sloping breast of hills, freshly powdered with snow, to the blue sky-line, all as clear in the snow-washed mountain air as in a desert. The sun striking down into the valley brought out the faint azure of the inner folds of the hills.

There was scarcely a footprint in the road to break the soft ma.s.s of new-fallen snow. Isabelle could see a black cat deliberately stealing its way from the barn across the road to the house. It lifted each paw with delicate precision and pushed it firmly into the snow, casting a deep shadow on the gleaming surface of white. The black cat, lean and muscular, stretching itself across the snow, was the touch of art needed to complete the silent scene....

A wood-sled drawn by two heavy horses came around the corner of the house, softly churning the new snow before its runners. A man clad in a burly sheepskin coat and fur cap, his feet in enormous rubber shoes, stood on the sled, slowly thrashing his arms and breathing frostily.

"h.e.l.lo, Sol!" the man cried to the blacksmith, who was shovelling a path from the barn to the house.

"Morning, Ed. Going up to Cross's lot?"

"Ye--as--"

"Hard sledding?"

The two men exchanged amicable nothings in the crisp, brilliant air through which their voices rang with a peculiar timbre. To Isabelle, looking and listening from her window, it was all so fresh, so simple, like a picture on a j.a.panese print! For the first time in months she had a distinct desire,--to get outside and look at the hills.

"You are commanded," announced Margaret, a little later, "to the doctor's for supper at six. That wasn't the way it was put exactly, but it amounts to the same thing. The doctor's least word is a command here.... Now I am off to help the housekeeper with the accounts,--it's all I am good for!"...

So Isabelle was left to set forth on her ramble of exploration by herself.

She pushed through the snow to the last house on the village street, where the road dipped down a long hill, and the wide arc of northern mountains was revealed in a glittering rampart. Her eyes filled involuntarily with tears.

"I must be very weak," she said to herself, "to cry because it's beautiful!" And sitting down on a rock by the road, she cried more, with a feeling of self-pity and a little self-contempt. An old woman came to the door of the house she had just pa.s.sed with a dish-pan of water and looked curiously at the stranger. At first the countrywoman opened her lips as if she intended to speak, but stood with her dish-pan and said nothing.

Isabelle could see through her tears the bent figure and battered face of the old woman,--a being without one line of beauty or even animal grace.

What a fight life must have been to reduce any woman's body to that! And the purpose,--to keep the breath of life in a worn old body, just to live?

"Pleasant morning!" Isabelle said with a smile through her tears.

"It ain't bad," the old woman admitted, emptying her dish-pan.

As Isabelle retraced her steps into the village the old woman followed her with curious eyes, thinking no doubt that a woman like this stranger, well dressed, young, and apparently well fed, ought not to be sitting on a rock on a winter's day crying!

"And she's quite right!" Isabelle said to herself.

The jewelled morning was the same to them both,--the outer world was imperturbable in its circular variety. But the inner world, the vision,--ah, there was the extraordinary variation in human lives! From heaven to h.e.l.l through all gradations, and whether it were heaven or h.e.l.l did not depend on being like this crone at the end of the road or like herself in its sheltered nooks,--it was something else.

"I will have to see Margaret's wonderful doctor, if this keeps on," she said, still dropping tears.

The blacksmith stood beside the open door of his shop, gazing reflectively across the white fields to the upland. Beside him was a broken wood-sled that he was mending. Seeing Isabelle, he waved her a slow salute with the sled-runner he had ready in his hand.

"Morning!" he called out in his deep voice. "Seeing the country? The hills are extra fine this morning."

He proceeded slowly to brush the snow from the frame of the sled, still glancing now and then over the fields. Isabelle felt that she had caught his characteristic moment, _his_ inner vision.

"You have a good view from your shop."

"The best in the town! I've always been grateful to my father for one thing,--well, for many things,--but specially because he had the good sense to set the old smithy right here where you can see something. When there isn't much going on, I come out of doors here and take a long look at the mountains. It rests your back so."