"I give them my life, my all,--I am giving them this, too. A woman"s heart is not filled with the love of children. A woman"s life is not closed at thirty-two! ... I have a soul--a life to be satisfied,--ah, dearest, a soul of my own to be filled, in order to give. Most men don"t know that a woman has a life of her own--apart from her children, from her husband, from all.
It"s hers, hers, her very own!" she cried with a sob of joy and anguish.
In these words escaped the essence of that creed which had taken the place of the Bishop"s teaching,--the creed that is breathed insensibly in the atmosphere of the age,--"I, the woman, have a soul that is mine which has its rights, and what it bids me take, that I will take and hold!"
The man listened to the solemn rhythm of the sea pounding upon the rocky coast, and it spoke to him of fatality, of the surge of life striking blindly, carrying in its mighty grip the little human atoms. It had borne him up to the stars, and in a few hours it would roll him back, down into the gulf, from which no effort of his will could take him. With this hunger, which was his human birthright, he must labor on, unappeased. It was given him merely to know what would recreate living for him, what would make of the days joy instead of pain, and it was not to be his, except for this moment of time.
"I think," he said, "there is enough to suffer and endure. We will not quibble about the law. In the face of the gulf, why argue?" and he took her once more in his arms, where she rested content....
Lawlor"s Point was a little neck of shingle, curving inwards from the open sea, making a small harbor. On the landward side the still, salty marsh was fringed by evergreens that rose dark in the night. Once it had been a farm, its few acres swept by the full Atlantic winds, its sh.o.r.e pounded by the rock drift of the coast. Within the shingle the waves had washed a sandy beach.... Margaret knew the place years before, and they had found it to-night in the dark. The abandoned farm-house, windowless, loomed above them, desolate, forlorn, emitting an odor of the past from its damp rooms.
About the old walnut tree where they had been sitting there grew in the long gra.s.s fleur-de-lys and myrtle.
"Let us go nearer to the water!" Margaret exclaimed. "I want to hear its voice close to my ears. This place is musty with dead lives. Dead lives!"
She laughed softly. "I was like them once, only I walked and spoke, instead of lying still in a grave. And then you found me, dearest, and touched me.
I shall never be dead like that again."
And when they had picked their way over the rough shingle to the water, she said in another pa.s.sionate outburst, as if nature dammed for a long time were pouring itself forth in torrent:--
"Pain! Don"t say the word. Do you think that we can count the pain--ever?
Now that we have lived? What is Pain against Being!"
"A man"s thought, that!" he reflected, surprised by the piercing insight, the triumphant answer of the spirit to the backward dragging surge of circ.u.mstance. "A woman suffers--always more than a man."
Margaret, flinging up her head to the dark heaven, the deep guttural note of the sea in her ears, chanted low, "Some pain is tonic.... Though to-night we are together, one and undivided--for the last time, the last time," she whispered, "yet I cannot feel the pain."
The man rebelled:--
"The last time? ... But we are not ready, Margaret,--not yet!"
"We should never be ready!"
"We have had so little."
"Yes! So little--oh, so little of all the splendid chance of living."
The same thought lay between them. They had come but to the edge of experience, and beyond lay the vision of recreated life. Like souls that touched the confines of a new existence and turned back, so must they turn back to earth. So little! A few hours of meeting, a few spoken words, a few caresses, a few moments like this of mute understanding, out of all conscious time, and then nothing,--the blank!
There was something cowardly, thus to turn back at the edge of experience, incomplete and wistfully desirous. Yet the man would not ask her to venture on. What the woman would gladly give, he would not take as sacrifice. She understood.
"Would it be easier?" she asked slowly, "if for a time we had all?"
"Yes!"
"If for a little while we left the world behind us and went away--to know--all?"
"We should be happier then, always.... But I cannot ask it."
"It would be better so," she whispered dreamily. "I will go!"
Her hands clasped about him and her lips trembled.
"We will take our life!" She smiled as the vision of joy--food for a lifetime--filled her heart. "For a few hours I will be yours, all yours."
Thus, there beside the grumbling sea, these two--full man and woman, having weighed the issues of this life, the complex threads of soul and body, obligation and right, willed that they would take to themselves out of all eternity a few days, a few nights, a few mornings and a few evenings,--entire hours to be theirs, from which must be born courage for the future.
Old Mrs. Pole looked up at the sound of Margaret"s step. The younger woman"s face was pale, but still radiant with a complete joy. She patted the old lady"s cheek and glanced down at the magazine in her lap. Between these two there was a depth of unspoken sympathy.
"Found a good story, mother dear?" Margaret asked.
The old woman"s lips trembled. Many times that evening she had resolved to speak to Margaret of something her heart ached over. For she had seen far these last days with those old eyes that had seen so much. She could divine the dead waste in her daughter-in-law"s heart, having lived with father and son, and out of the wisdom of suffering years endured she wished to speak to-night. But the deeper wisdom of age restrained her.
"Yes, my dear,--a very good story."
Each ache must find its own healing.
CHAPTER x.x.xIX
The long train pulled slowly into the station of the little seaport town.
It was late, as always at this turning-point of the season, when the summer population was changing its roost from sea to mountain or from the north to the south sh.o.r.e. Falkner, glancing anxiously along the line of cars for a certain figure, said again to himself, "If she shouldn"t come--at the last moment!" and ashamed of his doubt, replied, "She will, if humanly possible." ... At last his eye caught sight of Margaret as she stepped from the last car. She had seen him at the instant, and she smiled rapidly above the crowd, one of her fleeting smiles, like a ray of April sun. Another smile, he took her bag from the porter"s hand, and their meeting was over.
It was not until they were seated at a table in a sheltered corner of the station restaurant that he spoke:--
"The _Swallow_ is waiting at the wharf. But we had best get something hot to eat here. We shall have a long sail."
He took charge, at once, and while he ordered the luncheon, she looked at the travellers swarming to their food. Once during the long ride she had thought, "If we were seen by some one!" and her face had burned at the miserable fear. Now looking at the pa.s.sing faces, she had a fierce wish that she might be seen by all the world! To speak out, to act unashamed,--but not yet,--no; the time was not ripe. As her look returned to Falkner, who was dressed in yachting flannels with a white sweater she smiled again:--
"I am so hungry!"
"I am afraid it will be bad. However--"
"It doesn"t matter. Nothing matters--to-day!"
Neither of them, she reflected, cared for the detail of life, for luxury, mere comfort. They had shed superfluity, unlike those around them, who lived for it.
"Is it all right?" he asked as the waitress slung the dishes on the table.
"Everything!" and she added: "I can telephone Ned? I promised to speak to him every day."
"Of course!"
"Now let us forget.... What a lot of people there are in the world running about!"
"We"ll say good-by to them all very soon," he replied.