"You certainly made it plain you had no love left for me."
"I had need of it all for the child." Her voice had a curious crooning note in it.
He came closer. He bent down to put the low question, "Do you mean, then, that after all--it lived?"
"No. I mean that it was sacrificed. But it showed me no barrier is so impa.s.sable as the one a little child can raise."
It was as if lightning had flashed across the old picture. He drew back from the fierce illumination.
"Was _that_ why you----" he began, in a voice that was almost a whisper.
"Was that why?"
She nodded, speechless a moment for tears. "Day and night there it was between my thought of you and me."
He sat down, staring at her.
"When I was most unhappy," she went on, in that low voice, "I would wake thinking I heard it cry. It was my own crying I heard, but I seemed to have it in my arms. I suppose I was mad. I used to lie there in that lonely farmhouse pretending to hush it. It was so I hushed myself."
"I never knew----"
"I didn"t blame you. You couldn"t risk being with me."
"You agreed that, for both our sakes----"
"Yes, you had to be very circ.u.mspect. You were so well known. Your autocratic father, your brilliant political future----"
"Be fair. Our future--as I saw it then."
"Yes, everything hung on concealment. It must have looked quite simple to you. You didn"t know the ghost of a child that had never seen the light, the frail thing you meant to sweep aside and forget"--she was on her feet--"_have_ swept aside and forgotten!--you didn"t know it was strong enough to push you out of my life." With an added intensity, "It can do more!" she said. She leaned over his bowed figure and whispered, "It can push that girl out!" As again she stood erect, half to herself she added, "It can do more still."
"Are you threatening me?" he said dully.
"No, I am preparing you."
"For what?"
"For the work that must be done. Either with your help or that girl"s."
The man"s eyes lifted a moment.
"One of two things," she said--"either her life, and all she has, given to this new Service; or a ransom if I give her up to you."
"I see. A price. Well----?"
She looked searchingly at him for an instant, and then slowly shook her head.
"Even if I could trust you to pay the price," she said, "I"m not sure but what a young and ardent soul as faithful and as pure as hers--I"m not sure but I should make a poor bargain for my s.e.x to give that up for anything you could do."
He found his feet like a man roused out of an evil dream to some reality darker than the dream. "In spite of your a.s.sumption, she may not be your tool," he said.
"You are horribly afraid she is! But you are wrong. She"s an instrument in stronger hands than mine. Soon my little personal influence over her will be merged in something infinitely greater. Oh, don"t think it"s merely I that have got hold of Jean Dunbarton."
"Who else?"
"The New Spirit that"s abroad."
With an exclamation he turned away. And though his look branded the idea for a wild absurdity, sentinel-like he began to pace up and down a few yards from Jean"s door.
"How else," said the woman, "should that inexperienced girl have felt the new loyalty and responded as she did?"
""New," indeed!" he said under his breath, "however little "loyal.""
"Loyal, above all. But no newer than electricity was when it first lit up the world. It had been there since the world began--waiting to do away with the dark. _So has the thing you"re fighting._"
"The thing I"m fighting"--and the violence with which he spoke was only in his face and air; he held his voice down to its lowest register--"the thing I"m fighting is nothing more than one person"s hold upon a highly sensitive imagination. I consented to this interview with the hope"--he made a gesture of impotence.
"It only remains for me to show her that your true motive is revenge."
"Once say that to her, and you are lost."
He stole an uneasy look at the woman out of a face that had grown haggard.
"If you were fighting for that girl only against me, you"d win," she said. "It isn"t so--and you will fail. The influence that has hold of her is in the very air. No soul knows where it comes from, except that it comes from the higher sources of civilization."
"I see the origin of it before my eyes!"
"As little as you see the beginnings of life. This is like the other mysterious forces of Mother Earth. No warning given--no sign. A night wind pa.s.ses over the brown land, and in the morning the fields are green."
His look was the look of one who sees happiness slipping away. "Or it pa.s.ses over gardens like a frost," he said, "and the flowers die."
"I know that is what men fear. It even seems as if it must be through fear that your enlightenment will come. The strangest things make you men afraid! That"s why I see a value in Jean Dunbarton far beyond her fortune."
He looked at her dully.
"More than any other girl I know--if I keep her from you, that gentle, inflexible creature could rouse in men the old half-superst.i.tious fear----"
"Fear! Are you mad?"
"Mad!" she echoed. "Uns.e.xed"--those are the words to-day. In the Middle Ages men cried out "Witch!" and burnt her--the woman who served no man"s bed or board.
"You want to make the poor child believe----"
"She sees for herself we"ve come to a place where we find there"s a value in women apart from the value men see in them. You teach us not to look to you for some of the things we need most. If women must be freed by women, we have need of such as----" Her eyes went to the door that Stonor still had an air of guarding. "Who knows--she may be the new Joan of Arc."
He paused, and for that moment he seemed as bankrupt in denunciation as he was in hope. This personal application of the new heresy found him merely aghast, with no words but "That _she_ should be the sacrifice!"
"You have taught us to look very calmly on the sacrifice of women," was the ruthless answer. "Men tell us in every tongue, it"s "a necessary evil.""
He stood still a moment, staring at the ground.