"Sarah," I questioned gently, "do you mean to say you've loved him all this time, that you love him now?" She left off sobbing to answer me with that steady, patient truth with which she met any issue of life.

"I loved him ... all the love I had I gave him. It's not the same now, of course; its wings are broken, but it is his. Once you've given you can't take it back again."

"But he--he has no claim on you now. Sarah, do you need to marry him?"

"I am married to him."

"But, Sarah ... look here, Sarah, it isn't true that I have never loved.

I didn't love the man I was married to, but I have learned something about love; I've learned that marriage without it is a thing no self-respecting woman should go into."

"Love," said Sarah, "is a thing that once you've gone into, binds you by something that grows out of it that is stronger than love itself.

Olivia, I am bound ... if you want to know, I'd rather be bound to--to Leon Lawrence by that tie than to the dearest love without it. Oh, Olivia, can't you see, can't you understand that I have to do _right_ ... that the way I see things there's a law ... not a civil law but a law of loving that goes on by itself; and being faithful to it is better to me than loving. You must see that, Olivia."

"I see that this is the happiest thing for you and I'll not put anything in your way, Sarah." I kissed her. What, after all, does one soul know of another.

It came to me as an extenuating circ.u.mstance when I looked him over the next morning, that Mr. Lawrence wouldn't live long enough to do her any particular harm. He had been so little of a man always to me, so much less so now, eaten through as he was by poverty and sickness, that I could never understand how he happened to be the vehicle of that appealing charm which even as I looked, drew me over to his side in something like a sympathetic frame.

I could see that he regarded me anxiously, and I thought it to his credit to be able to realize that there might be somebody not absolutely delighted at his marrying Sarah. But it wasn't, as I learned later, any sense of his shortcomings that waked in his eye toward me.

He was lying on the sofa in our little parlour, for the shock of the encounter had been too much for the abused and broken thing he was.

Sarah had gone out, to consult Jerry, I believed about their marriage;--she wouldn't have asked me knowing how I felt about it.

Griffin looked up at me with the old formless demand on my consideration.

"You've never told her, have you?"

"Told what?" On my part it was genuine amazement.

"About us, you know ... there in Chicago." He dropped his eyes; something almost like a blush of shame overcame him. I stared.

"Good heavens, Griff, I'd forgotten it."

"Oh, well, I didn't know--some women----" He stopped, embarra.s.sed by my sheer credulity of its having anything to do with his relation to Sarah.

"I told you I was a bad lot," he protested, "but I swear that since my wife died and I could come back to her, I've been straight. You believe that, don't you?"

"Oh, I'll believe it if it's any comfort to you." When I talked it over with Jerry afterward I could see the queer, twisted kind of moral standard by which he made it appear that any irregularity of his during his wife's life, was unfaithfulness to her, and not Sarah.

She had come back with Jerry and I was walking with him to the City Hall for the license; he had begun by protesting just as I had, and had surrendered to his conviction that nothing less would satisfy Sarah.

"After all," I said, "it shows that there is some sort of harmony between them, that he should realize that the only reparation he could make would be to come back to her."

"Cur!" Jerry kicked at the pavement, "to pollute the life of a woman like Sarah with his wretched existence."

"That's how you feel," I reminded him, "but remember how all these years Sarah has felt polluted by the thought that she wasn't married to him."

"Oh, _d.a.m.n_!"

"Sarah thinks, and I'm beginning to think so too, that there is something to marriage that binds besides the ceremony."

"I know." Jerry's wife had left him that summer and though he knew it was the best thing for both of them, he was trying to get her back again: "It binds of itself. If only they would tell us that in the beginning instead of putting up all this stuff about its being the law and religion. We think we can get out of it just by getting out of the law, and none of us know better until it is too late."

"People like Sarah know. They know just the way swallows know to go south in winter. You'll see; she will be happier married, not because it is pleasant but because it is right."

They were married that afternoon in our apartment, and it was not until I was settled in the hotel where I had elected to stay until I could find suitable quarters, that I realized that the chance of this marriage had accomplished for me the freedom that I had not known how to obtain for myself.

I lay awake a long time after I came from the theatre, and the mere circ.u.mstance of my being alone and in a hotel, as well as the events that led up to it, brought back to me the sense of my lover, of his being just in the next room and presently to come in to me. I felt near and warm toward him. And then I thought of Sarah and Griffin and how almost I had become the stop-gap to his affections that she dreaded most to find herself to have been. It didn't seem very real in retrospect. I shuddered away from it. Then I began to think how I had first been kindly disposed toward him, and that brought up an image of the dim corridor of the hotel where I had come to my first knowledge of such relations, and my abhorrence and terror of it. I thought of O'Farrell and of Miss Dean, and that suspicion of sickliness which her personality had for me, and saw how it must have arisen from her consciousness of what she had done to Griffin rather than her relation to Manager O'Farrell. Then I thought of Helmeth Garrett and one night in Sienna when the moonlight poured white over the cathedral ... and a linden tree in bloom outside the window ... and a nightingale singing in it ...

Suddenly it was mixed up in my mind with the slanting chandelier and the tin-faced clock, and slowly a sense of unutterable stain and shame began to percolate through and through me.

CHAPTER VI

It is a great mistake to suppose that a.s.sertiveness is the only mannish trait taken on by successful women, nor is pliability the only feminine mark they lose. By what insensible degrees it came about I do not know, but I found myself on the peak of popularity, very much of the male propensity to be beguiled. I was willing to be played upon, and so it was skilfully done, to concede to it more than the situation had a right to claim for itself. I pulled myself up afterward, or was pulled up by the sharp rein of destiny, but for the time, while my success was new, I was aware not only of the possibility of my being handled, but of my luxuriating in it, of demanding it as the price of my favour, and in particular, of valuing Polatkin for the way in which, by my own moods, my drops and exaltations he brought me to his hand.

How much of the fact of my private life he was really acquainted with, I never knew, but he understood enough of its reaction to make even my resistences serve to push me on to the a.s.sured position of a theatre and a clientele of my own. It stood out for me as he described it, not so much as a means of dividing me from my beloved, but as a new and completer way of loving. I wanted more ways for that, s.p.a.ce and opportunity. I wished to lay my gift down, a royal carpet for Helmeth Garrett to walk on; I would have done anything for him with it except surrender it. Not the least thing that came of my condition was the extraordinary florescence of my art.

Every night as I drew its rich and shining fabric about me I was aware of all forms and pa.s.sions, the mere masquerade of our delight in one another. Every night I embroidered it anew, I adored and caressed him with my skill. Polatkin went about wringing his hands over it.

"You are a Wonder, a Wonder! And you are wasting it on them swine." That was his opinion of my support. "And to think you could have a theatre of your own, and what you like----"

"A theatre like me--_Me_ spread over it, expressed, exemplified, carried out to the least detail?"

"You shall have it even in the box office!" he responded magnificently.

"How soon?"

"I will bring the plans this afternoon; I got 'em ready in case you came around." But he was much too intelligent to undertake to bind me to them at that juncture.

Things went on like this until the last week in November, then I had a telegram from Helmeth saying that he would be detained still longer.

Every pulse of me had so been set to his coming on the twenty-seventh that I thought I should not be able to go on after that, I should go out like a light when the current is stopped. I had so little of him, not even a photograph, nothing but my ring and a few trinkets he had bought me in Italy. If I could have had a garment he had worn, a chair in which he had sat ... I went round and looked at the Astor House, because he told me that he had stopped there once, years ago.

I stood that for three days and then I went down to New Roch.e.l.le where he had written me earlier, his girls were at school; not on my own account, you understand, but as a possible patron of the school on behalf of my niece, who was, if the truth must be told, less than two years old. While I was being shown about, I had Helmeth's children pointed out to me. They looked, as I had surmised, like their mother. If they had in the least resembled their father I should have s.n.a.t.c.hed them to me. Everything might have turned out quite differently. They were, the princ.i.p.al said, nice girls and studious, but they did not look in the least like their father.

It was one of those dark, gusty days that come at the end of November, damp without rain, and of a penetrating cold. There had been a great storm at sea lately and you could hear the wash of its disturbances all along the Sound. There was no steady wind, but now and then the damp air gave a flap like an idle wing. It was like the stir in me of a formless, cold desire, not equal to the demand Life was about to make on it. As I turned into the station road after a formal inspection of the premises, I met the girls coming back from their afternoon walk with the teachers, two and two. The Garrett girls were next to the last, they were very near of an age; I waited half hidden by a tree to watch them as they pa.s.sed.

They were well covered up from the weather in large blue coats with capes, and blue felt hats with b.u.t.terfly bows to match at the ends of their flaxen braids. They looked like their mother ... I couldn't see them growing up to anything that would fit with Sarah and Jerry and Polatkin. The wing of the wind shook out some gathered drops of moisture as they pa.s.sed, the branches of the trees clashed softly together, and as they turned into the grounds I noticed that the older one had something in her walk that reminded me of her father.

I was pierced through with a formless jealousy of the woman who had borne them in her body. I was moved, but not with the impulse to draw them to my bosom. I felt back in the place where my boy had been, for the connecting link of motherliness and failed to find it. I had had it once, that knowledge of what is good to be done for small children and the wish to do it, but it was gone from me. It was as though I might have had a hand or a claw, any prehensile organ by which such things are apprehended, and when I reached it out after Helmeth's children it was withered.

What I found in myself was the familiar att.i.tude of the stage. I could have acted what swept through me then, I could have brought you to tears by it, but there was nothing I could do about it _but_ act. I wrote Helmeth that night that I had seen the children and then I burned the letter.

He came at last. He was greatly concerned about his enterprise which was not yet established on that footing which he would like to have for it, and I think it was a relief to him to have me without the conventions and readjustments of marriage. It was tacitly understood between us that things were better as they were until that business was settled. I think he could not have had a great deal of money at the time; all that racing to and fro between London and Mexico must have cost something. His anxiety about the girls, which occasioned his sending them to the most expensive schools, and his affection for them, which led to their being carted about by their aunt to meet him occasionally at far-called places, was an additional drain.

We were very happy; there is nothing whatever to tell about it. We met in brief intervals s.n.a.t.c.hed from our work and did as other lovers do.

Sometimes he would come for me at the theatre--the freshness of my acting never palled on him. Other times I would find him waiting for me in the little flat I had expressly chosen and furnished to be loved in.

The p.r.i.c.king warmth of his presence would meet me as I came up the stair. Not long ago I found myself unexpectedly in a part of the city where we used to walk because we were certain not to meet any of our friends there. There was a tiny cafe where we used often to dine, and the memory of it swept over me terrifyingly fresh and strong.

With all this, it was plain that we got on best when we were most alone.