"You are still radiant!" Falkner said wonderingly.
"It can"t fade--never wholly! I cherish it." She drew her arms close about her. "Sacred things never utterly die!"
They had found it, they had lived it, they knew--what the unspiritual and carnal millions that clutter G.o.d"s earth may never know--ecstasy, the secret behind the stars, beyond the verge of the sea, in the great lunar s.p.a.ces of spirit.
On they glided through the thoroughfares, around island points, across reaches of the sea, sweeping onward now with an audible gurgle in their wake, the sails bellying forward; veering this way, falling off there, as the impa.s.sive man touched the tiller, obeying an instinct, seeing into the dark beyond. Now a bit of cliff loomed in the fog, again a shingled roof or a cl.u.s.ter of firs, and the whistling buoy at the harbor"s mouth began to bellow sadly,--reminders all of the sh.e.l.l of that world towards which they sailed. And at last the harbor, with its echoing bells and fog-whistles, the protesting shrieks of its man-machines; suddenly the colossal hull of a schooner at anchor. Then the ghostly outlines of the huddled shipping, the city roofs, the steeples, the shriek of engines in the freight yards--they touched the earth! It had ended. The noise of living reverberated in their ears.
Margaret rose with a sigh, and looked back through the closing curtain of fog to an island headland misty and vague.
"My heaven--oh, my heaven! our haven, my master!"
Like two newly wakened beings, stunned by the light and sound around them, they stumbled over the wharf. A large sailing vessel was loading there for its voyage,--a Portuguese ship bound for Demerara, so the black sailor said whom Falkner questioned. With a last look at its tall masts they took their way into the city and so to the station.
Here was the same crowd coming from the trains,--the little human motes pushing hither and thither, hurrying from train to train, dashing, dawdling, loitering. Were they the same motes as two days before? Were they always the same,--marionettes wound to perform the clamorous motions of life? Or were they men and women like themselves, with their own great secrets in their hearts? Above all, the secret that transforms! Had these others, too, gone into the great high places?
They walked to the bridge while they waited for the Bedmouth train. Far down the harbor rose the tall masts of the Portuguese ship.
"Bound for Demerara," murmured Falkner, with a smile; "we might be sailing for the Windward Islands?"
"No," Margaret smiled back; "we love too much for that,--you and I."
CHAPTER XLII
Within the old parlor of the Bedmouth house Mrs. Pole was waiting for a step. It came at last.
"The children?" Margaret demanded, kissing the old lady.
"Perfectly well."
"I must go up to them," and she started for the door.
"Wait!" Mrs. Pole said, looking up sadly into the younger woman"s pale face, which still held the glow.
"Yes, mother?" The voice rang with a note of vitality, of life, as if to chant, "I have come back to you from a long way off!" Mrs. Pole said slowly:--
"Lawrence is upstairs. He came on from New York yesterday."
"Oh!"
At the head of the stairs she met her husband, who had heard her voice below.
"You have been away!" he said sharply, an unwonted touch of authority in his voice.
It was in her heart to say: "Yes, in heaven! Can"t you see it in my face?"
She replied gently:--
"Yes, I have been--away!"
"Where?"
She looked at him out of her deep eyes, and said slowly:--
"Do you wish me to tell you?"
And after a moment, as if her husband was not there and she were looking through him at something beyond, she went on into the children"s room.
Pole, steadying himself by the hand-rail, descended the stairs.
He no longer existed, even as a convention, for his wife.
PART FIVE
CHAPTER XLIII
Isabelle had not succeeded in bringing Vickers home with her that first time she had gone abroad. They had had a very pleasant month in the Dolomites, and he had taken her to Paris to join the Woodyards, with whom she returned. Whenever she had spoken to Vickers of coming home he had smiled and made a little joke. Once he said, "Not yet,--I cannot go yet, Belle," and she understood that it was "that beast of a woman," as she called Mrs. Conry, who kept him. She wanted to say to him, "Well, Vick, if you won"t leave her, why don"t you marry her then!" But gentle as her brother was to her, she did not like to touch on that topic.
She had meant to go over the next spring, but the new house was under way then. A year later a letter from Fosd.i.c.k, who was returning from Russia by the way of Venice, made her start for Europe at once.
... "Madam," Fosd.i.c.k wrote, "having sucked our Vickers dry, has left him at last, I am happy to say. Gone off with a fresh orange. Vick doesn"t realize his luck,--he"s plain dazed. Before the other orange becomes dry, it is our simple duty--yours and mine--to remove the stranded hero out of reach. I think you can do it now.... I forgot to say that the Conry left with him a pledge of her return in the shape of a lump of a girl, her daughter by Conry. Vick seems idiotically tied to this little Conry.... Oh, it is a shame, a shame!"
Isabelle cabled Fosd.i.c.k to bring Vickers with him to Paris and started with her mother. "No sermons, you know, mother," she warned Mrs. Price. "It"s something you and I don"t understand."
When Vickers came to their hotel in Paris, it seemed to Isabelle that the last two years had worked more damage than the previous six. There was a dazed and submissive air about her brother that brought the tears to her eyes. In the languid, colorless face before her, she could scarcely find a trace of the pale, tense boy, who had roused her in the middle of the night the day before he left St. Louis....
"Why don"t you come to this hotel?" Mrs. Price had demanded.
Vickers had made an excuse, and when his mother had left the room, he said to Isabelle, "You will have to explain to mother that I am not alone."
Isabelle gasped, and Vickers hastened to say, "You see Delia is with me."
"d.i.c.k wrote me that she left her child!"
"Yes.... I am really very fond of the poor little thing."
"The beast!" Isabelle muttered.
Vickers shuddered, and Isabelle resolved that no matter what happened she would not allow herself to refer again to either mother or child. Later she walked back with him to his rooms and saw the girl. Delia Conry was a heavily built and homely girl of thirteen, with light gray eyes. All but the eyes were like her father, the builder. There was no hint of the mother"s soft, seductive physique.