"My husband wrote that they were to be divorced--he had heard so."
"I don"t believe it," Margaret replied evenly. "His wife hasn"t been down there.... It isn"t exactly the place for a woman, at least for one who can"t stand monotony, loneliness, and hardship. She has been in Europe with her mother, this last year."
"You know I used to know her very well years ago. She was very pretty then.
Everybody liked Bessie," Isabelle mused.
And later she remarked:--
"Singular that _her_ marriage should be such a failure."
"Is it singular that any given marriage should be a failure?" Margaret asked with a touch of her old irony. "It is more singular to me that any marriage, made as they must be made to-day, should be anything but a dismal failure."
"But Bessie was the kind to be adored. She was pretty, and clever, and amusing,--a great talker and crazy about people. She had real social instinct,--the kind you read of in books, you know. She could make her circle anywhere. She couldn"t be alone five minutes,--people cl.u.s.tered around her like bees. Her life might have been a romance, you would suppose,--pretty girl, poor, marries an ambitious, clever man, who arrives with her social help, goes into politics--oh, anything you will!"
"But the real thing," Margaret observed.
"What do you mean?"
"Love! ... Love that understands and helps."
"Well, I saw the most dazzling future for her when she used to give garden parties in Torso, with only two unattached men who were possible in the place! And at least she might have had a small home in the suburbs and an adoring husband home at five-thirty,--but she wasn"t that kind.... Poor Bess! I am sorry for her."
"I suppose the reason why a man and a woman hurt instead of help each other in marriage is never known to any one but themselves," Margaret observed dryly, urging on the horse. "And perhaps not even to themselves!"
There was a change in Margaret, an inner ferment that displayed itself in the haze in her clear eyes,--the look of one whose mind broods over the past,--a heightened color, a controlled restlessness of mood. "No, it is not settled," thought Isabelle. "Poor Margaret!" She went about her many duties with the same silent sureness, the same poise as before. Whatever was happening to her was according to the discipline of her nature, controlled, suppressed. "If she would only splutter," Isabelle wished, "instead of looking like a glowing sphinx!"
"Margaret!" she exclaimed in the evening, after a long silence between them. "You are so young--so pretty these days!"
"You think so? Thanks!" Margaret replied, stretching her thin arms above her head, which was crushed against one of Mrs. Short"s hard pillows. "I suppose it is the Indian summer, the last warm glow before the end!" She opened her trembling lips in one of her ironical smiles. "There always comes a time of ripeness to a woman before she goes over the hill into old age."
"Nonsense! You are younger than you were twelve years ago!"
"Yes, I am younger in a sense than I ever was. I am well and strong, and I am in equilibrium, as I never was before.... And it"s more than that. We become more vital if we survive the tangle of youth. We see more--we feel more! When I hear girls talk about love, I always want to say: "What do you know, what _can_ you know about it! Love isn"t born in a woman before she is thirty,--she hasn"t the power. She can have children, but she can"t love a man.""
Margaret pressed her hands tensely together and murmured to herself, "For love is born with the soul,--and is the last thing that comes into the heart!"
Isabelle with caressing impulsiveness put her arms about the slight figure.
"I love you, Margaret; it seems as if you were the only person I really loved now! It has been heaven to be with you all these weeks. You calm me, you breathe peace to me.... And I want to help you, now."
Margaret smiled sadly and drew Isabelle"s dark head to her and kissed it.
"n.o.body can help, dear.... It will come right! It must come right, I am sure."
With the feelings that are beyond expression they held each other thus.
Finally Margaret said in a low voice:--
"Rob comes day after to-morrow; he will be at the Inn."
Isabelle rose from the couch with a sudden revulsion in her heart. After all, was this calm, this peace that she had admired in Margaret and longed to possess herself, this Something which she had achieved and which seemed to put her beyond and above ordinary women, nothing but the woman"s satisfaction in love, whose lover is seeking her? She found herself almost despising Margaret unreasonably. Some man! That created the firmament of women"s heaven, with its sun and its moon and its stars. Remembered caresses and expected joys,--the woman"s bliss of yielding to her chosen master,--was that all!
Margaret, following Isabelle with her eyes, seemed to comprehend this sudden change in her heart. But she merely remarked:--
"He cannot stay long,--only a couple of days, I believe."
"Tell me," Isabelle demanded sharply, as if she had the right to know, must know, "what are you going to do?"
Margaret closed her eyes, and after a time of utter stillness she said in a voice beseechingly tender:--
"Dear, perhaps I do not know, yet."
Her eyes were wet with unaccustomed tears. Stretching a hand to Isabelle and smiling again, she murmured:--
"Whatever it will be, you must trust that it will be right for me and for him,--you must know that."
Isabelle pressed her hand gently:--
"Forgive me."
"And some day I will tell you."
CHAPTER LXII
Mrs. Short peered through the dining-room window on the snow field,--a dazzling white under the March sun now well above the hills,--and watched the two black figures tracking their way on snow-shoes towards the forest.
Margaret"s slight figure swept ahead with a skill and a.s.surance that the taller one did not show. "I guess," mused the blacksmith"s wife, "that life on the Isthmus of Panama don"t fit a man much to distinguish himself on those things." Nevertheless, the man tramped laboriously behind the woman until the two were halted by a fence, now visible through the sunken drift.
They faced each other, and were evidently discussing mirthfully how the obstacle was to be met. The man stooped to untie the shoes, his pockets bulging with the day"s luncheon; but suddenly the woman backed away and began to climb the fence, a difficult feat. The man lumbered after her, catching one shoe in the top rail, finally freeing himself. Then the two black figures were lost over the dip of the hill. The smile still lingered on Mrs. Short"s face,--the smile that two beings, man and woman, still young and vital, must always bring, as though saying, "There"s spring yet in the world, and years of life and hope to come!"
Behind the hill in the hollow Margaret was showing Falkner how to squat on his shoes and coast over the crust. At the bottom of the slide the brook was gurgling under a film of ice. The upward slope untouched by the sun, was glare ice, and they toiled. Beyond was the forest with its black tree trunks amid the clotted clumps of snowy underbrush. Falkner pushed on with awkward strength to reach Margaret, who lingered at the opening of the wood. How wonderful she was, he thought, so well, so full of life and fire,--O G.o.d! all woman! And his heart beat hard, now that what he had seen these two years behind the curtain of his eyes was so near,--after all the weary months of heat and toil and desire! Only she was more, so much more--as the achieved beauty of the day is more than memory or antic.i.p.ation....
She smiled a welcome when he reached her, and pointed away to the misty hills. "The beauty of it!" she whispered pa.s.sionately. "I adore these hills, I worship them. I have seen them morning and night all these months.
I know every color, every rock and curving line. It is like the face, of a great austere G.o.d, this world up here, a G.o.d that may be seen."
"You have made me feel the hills in your letters."
"Now we see them together.... Isn"t it wonderful to be here in it all, you and I, together?"
He held his arms to her.
"Not yet," she whispered, and sped on into the still darkness between the fir branches. He followed.
So on, on over the buried bushes, across the trickly, thawing streams, through a thick swamp, close with alder and birch, on up the slope into woods more largely s.p.a.ced, where great oaks towered among the fir and the spruce, and tall white birches glimmered in the dusk--all still and as yet dead. And on far up the mountain slope until beneath the Altar they came to a little circle, hedged round with thick young firs, where the deep snow was tracked with footprints of birds and foxes. Margaret leaned against the root of a fallen birch and breathed deeply. She had come like the wind, swift and elusive, darting through the forest under the snowy branches, as if--so felt the man with his leashed desire of her--the mere physical joy of motion and air and sun and still woods were enough, and love had been lost in the glory of the day! ...
"Here," she murmured with trembling lips, "at last!"