What comfort could he give her, what hope could he hold out that the twist, now gnarled and knotted, might be removed, that she might gain peace of soul and body and the "happiness" of which he had talked with Alison Parr?... He raised his eyes, to discover that the woman"s were fixed upon him, questioningly.
"I suppose I was a fool to tell you," she said, with a shade of her old bitterness; "it can"t do any good." Her next remark was startlingly astute. "You"ve found out for yourself, I guess, that all this talk about heaven and h.e.l.l and repentance don"t amount to anything. h.e.l.l couldn"t be any worse than I"ve been through, no matter how hot it is.
And heaven!" She laughed, burst into tears, and quickly dried them.
"You know the man I"ve been talking about, that bought me off. I didn"t intend to tell you, but I see you can"t help knowing--Eldon Parr. I don"t say he didn"t do right from his way of looking at things,--but say, it wasn"t exactly Christian, was it?"
"No," he said, "it wasn"t." He bowed his head, and presently, when he raised it again, he caught something in her look that puzzled and disturbed him--an element of adoration.
"You"re white through and through," she said, slowly and distinctly.
And he knew not how to protest.
"I"ll tell you something," she went on, as one who has made a discovery.
"I liked you the first time you came in here--that night--when you wanted me to be friends; well, there was something that seemed to make it impossible then. I felt it, if you didn"t." She groped for words. "I can"t explain what it was, but now it"s gone. You"re different. I think a lot more of you. Maybe it"s because of what you did at Harrod"s, sitting down with me and giving me supper when I was so hungry, and the champagne. You weren"t ashamed of me."
"Good G.o.d, why should I have been!" he exclaimed.
"You! Why shouldn"t you?" she cried fiercely.
"There"s hardly a man in that place that wouldn"t have been. They all know me by sight--and some of "em better. You didn"t see "em grinning when I came up to you, but I did. My G.o.d--it"s awful--it"s awful I...."
She burst into violent weeping, long deferred.
He took her hand in his, and did not speak, waiting for the fit to spend itself.... And after a while the convulsive shudders that shook her gradually ceased.
"You must trust me," he said. "The first thing tomorrow I"m going to make arrangements for you to get out of these rooms. You can"t stay here any longer."
"That"s sure," she answered, trying to smile. "I"m broke. I even owe the co--the policeman."
"The policeman!"
"He has to turn it in to Tom Beatty and the politicians"
Beatty! Where had he heard the name? Suddenly it came to him that Beatty was the city boss, who had been eulogized by Mr. Plimpton!
"I have some good friends who will be glad to help you to get work--and until you do get work. You will have to fight--but we all have to fight.
Will you try?"
"Sure, I"ll try," she answered, in a low voice.
Her very tone of submission troubled him. And he had a feeling that, if he had demanded, she would have acquiesced in anything.
"We"ll talk it over to-morrow," he went on, clinging to his note of optimism. "We"ll find out what you can do easiest, to begin with."
"I might give music lessons," she suggested.
The remark increased his uneasiness, for he recognized in it a sure symptom of disease--a relapse into what might almost have been called levity, blindness to the supreme tragedy of her life which but a moment before had shaken and appalled her. He shook his head bravely.
"I"m afraid that wouldn"t do--at first."
She rose and went into the other room, returning in a few moments with a work basket, from which she drew a soiled and unfinished piece of embroidery.
"There"s a bureau cover I started when I was at Pratt"s," she said, as she straightened it over her knees. "It"s a copy of an expensive one. I never had the patience to finish it, but one of the sales-ladies there, who was an expert, told me it was pretty good: She taught me the st.i.tch, and I had a notion at that time I might make a little money for dresses and the theatre. I was always clever with my hands."
"The very thing!" he said, with hopeful emphasis. "I"m sure I can get you plenty of it to do. And I"ll come back in the morning."
He gave it back to her, and as she was folding it his glance fell on a photograph in the basket.
"I kept it, I don"t know why," he heard her say; "I didn"t have the heart to burn it."
He started recovered himself, and rose.
"I"ll go to see the agent the first thing to-morrow," he said. "And then--you"ll be ready for me? You trust me?"
"I"d do anything for you," was her tremulous reply.
Her disquieting, submissive smile haunted him as he roped his way down the stairs to the street, and then the face in the photograph replaced it--the laughing eyes, the wilful, pleasure--loving mouth he had seen in the school and college pictures of Preston Parr.
Volume 5.
CHAPTER XVII. RECONSTRUCTION
I
Life had indeed become complicated, paradoxical. He, John Hodder, a clergyman, rector of St. John"s by virtue of not having resigned, had entered a restaurant of ill repute, had ordered champagne for an abandoned woman, and had no sense of sin when he awoke the next morning!
The devil, in the language of orthodox theology, had led him there. He had fallen under the influence of the tempter of his youth, and all in him save the carnal had been blotted out.
More paradoxes! If the devil had not taken possession of him and led him there, it were more than probable that he could never have succeeded in any other way in getting on a footing of friendship with this woman, Kate Marcy. Her future, to be sure, was problematical. Here was no simple, sentimental case he might formerly have imagined, of trusting innocence betrayed, but a mixture of good and evil, selfishness and unselfishness. And she had, in spite of all, known the love which effaces self! Could the disintegration, in her case, be arrested?
Gradually Hodder was filled with a feeling which may be called amazement because, although his brain was no nearer to a solution than before, he was not despondent. For a month he had not permitted his mind to dwell on the riddle; yet this morning he felt stirring within him a new energy for which he could not account, a hope unconnected with any mental process! He felt in touch, once more, faintly but perceptibly, with something stable in the chaos. In bygone years he had not seen the chaos, but the illusion of an orderly world, a continual succession of sunrises, "couleur de rose", from the heights above Bremerton. Now were the scales fallen from his eyes; now he saw the evil, the injustice, the despair; felt, in truth, the weight of the sorrow of it all, and yet that sorrow was unaccountably trans.m.u.ted, as by a chemical process, into something which for the first time had a meaning--he could not say what meaning. The sting of despair had somehow been taken out of it, and it remained poignant!
Not on the obsession of the night before, when he had walked down Dalton Street and beheld it transformed into a realm of adventure, but upon his past life did he look back now with horror, upon the even tenor of those days and years in the bright places. His had been the highroad of a fancied security, from which he had feared to stray, to seek his G.o.d across the rough face of nature, from black, forgotten capons to the flying peaks in s.p.a.ce. He had feared reality. He had insisted upon gazing at the universe through the coloured gla.s.ses of an outworn theology, instead of using his own eyes.
So he had left the highroad, the beaten way of salvation many others had deserted, had flung off his spectacles, had plunged into reality, to be scratched and battered, to lose his way. Not until now had something of grim zest come to him, of an instinct which was the first groping of a vision, as to where his own path might lie. Through what thickets and over what mountains he knew not as yet--nor cared to know. He felt resistance, whereas on the highroad he had felt none. On the highroad his cry had gone unheeded and unheard, yet by holding out his hand in the wilderness he had helped another, bruised and bleeding, to her feet!
Salvation, Let it be what it might be, he would go on, stumbling and seeking, through reality.
Even this last revelation, of Eldon Parr"s agency in another tragedy, seemed to have no further power to affect him... Nor could Hodder think of Alison as in blood-relationship to the financier, or even to the boy, whose open, pleasure-loving face he had seen in the photograph.
II
A presage of autumn was in the air, and a fine, misty rain drifted in at his windows as he sat at his breakfast. He took deep breaths of the moisture, and it seemed to water and revive his parching soul. He found himself, to his surprise, surveying with equanimity the pile of books in the corner which had led him to the conviction of the emptiness of the universe--but the universe was no longer empty! It was cruel, but a warring force was at work in it which was not blind, but directed. He could not say why this was so, but he knew it, he felt it, sensed its energy within him as he set out for Dalton Street.