"Then I still have the advantage of you, Lena. I love you, not in the old way I once dreamed of loving--but still I love you. All this that I've said to-night was not spoken in the heat of anger. I've known these facts for a long time, and you have never felt any change in my manner; but gradually I have come to see that there could never be any genuine relations between us--you and me--so long as you thought me just a silly dupe for you to get everything you could from, to be played on as you pleased. We must begin again, a new way. You don't love me, you say. I do love you, sweetheart, not for what I thought you were, but for what you are, because you are my wife, because you need my tenderness and help. But I'm not going to let you lead any longer. We can't even walk side by side as some husbands and wives do." d.i.c.k seemed to hear the voices of Ellery and Madeline by their own fireside, and he went on hurriedly. "You needn't look at me that way, Lena, as if you were afraid of me. I shall want you to be comfortable and happy. I shall try to give you the things you want--things--things--things! But I have some purposes in life, and they, not you, are to be my master-spirits."

d.i.c.k turned away and stared out of the winter window, stirred by his own words into a strange new understanding of himself--a mere fatuous self-believer, a man who trusted to fate not fight, to fortune not to mastery, who had not made his standards, but let them make themselves.

And now it was come to this, that a half-hour in a room with a foolish girl was the turning-point in his life.

He seemed strange to himself, as though he were examining a life from the outside rather than from the inside, and fumbling at its real meaning.

He had done no wrong; but what does the march of events care whether the failure be intentional or careless? Results follow just the same.

There flashed before his inward eye the face of his long-dead father, white and set with some inward pain of which he did not speak. d.i.c.k remembered that as a boy that had seemed to him a pitiful thing. Now he saw it somewhat as the believers once saw the face of the martyr, the visible manifestation of triumph--the success of being true to yourself in spite of all the world.

d.i.c.k drew a long breath and dropped his boyhood without even a regret.

He knew he could accept conditions and limitations and not kick against the p.r.i.c.ks, but quietly, as one who is capable of being superior to them. The bitterness, the depression of an hour, two hours, ago faded into trifles, and the thing nearest to his consciousness was that dead father who had had his wound and lived his life in spite of it; nearer, infinitely nearer, than the living wife whom a slight noise brought to his remembrance. He had forgotten her. She belonged now to the elements outside his dearest life.

He turned toward Lena, waiting, silent, uncomprehending,--poor little Lena, a woman who could never be anything more. He felt a wave of strange new pity for her, unlike the pity he had once experienced for her poverty of body, a sorrow, this, for what she was in herself, his wife--poor, poor little child!

Lena sat still, picking at the bit of paper, but she looked up now, moved in spite of herself by the exultant ring in d.i.c.k's voice, as he strode over to her and held out both his hands.

"And so we begin again--honestly, this time. Perhaps some day you'll come to accept my standards inwardly as well as outwardly. Perhaps you'll even come to love me, some day, little wife."

Lena took his hands submissively. Her small tyranny, her stock of little ambitions had slipped from her and she shivered as though she was stripped and cold; but behind there was a kind of delight in this new d.i.c.k, with authoritative eyes into which she stared, wondering still, with trepidation, what he was going to make of her life.

CHAPTER XXII

ANOTHER BEGINNING

Norris, as he left Percival's house, had a glimpse of Lena coming down the hall, wonderful in her shimmering evening gown, brave in jewels. She dazzled him, though he despised his eyes for admiring her and told himself that she was tinsel.

He bowed in response to her curt nod, well aware that she thought him too unimportant to merit her courtesy, while she resented her husband's inexplicable regard for him. He went out into a cold winter drizzle and turned his face toward home and Madeline, those new and thrilling possessions. For the moment, however, there was no exhilaration in his heart, rather a depressed questioning whether, after all, everything beautiful was a sham. Was the daily grind a mechanical millwheel? d.i.c.k and d.i.c.k's marriage, were they but samples of the way life deals with hope? A pang stabbed through him as his own marriage rose and stood beside d.i.c.k's in his mind. It meant so much to him; yet only a few months before his friend had been bubbling with an exultation more open-voiced than his own.

There are not only great Sloughs of Despond waiting here and there for the pilgrim, but there are in almost every day little gutters of despond that must be jumped if one does not wish cold and soiled feet; so here his healthy mind cried out against morbid thoughts and he reviled himself for companioning the thing he held sacred with the thing he had always felt foredoomed to failure. He told himself that middle-age was not a dead level of hopes grown gray and withered, but rather a heightening of the contrasts between success and failure. A word of Mr.

Elton's spoken long ago, flashed back to him: "Don't build your attics before you've finished your cellars." That, after all, was a test. If one could but get a good solid foundation under hope, one might trust it to lift its pinnacle as far toward Heaven as the ethereal upper air.

Alas for d.i.c.k!

Then, though he still loved his one-time hero, Ellery put d.i.c.k from his mind. His feet quickened and his heart began to beat joyously again. He ran up his steps, delighting in the commonplace performance of putting a latch-key into a lock. The cold and drizzle were shut outside, and Madeline waited in the warmth and light of the hall to insist on helping him off with his overcoat, a task so absurdly difficult that when it was finished they laughed and kissed each other in mutual delight at their own foolishness.

Then Madeline took his hand and drew him into the living-room, where the light was low and shaded, but blazing logs painted even far-shadowed corners with warmth, and pranked the girl's white dress into glowing pink, while the fire hummed and crackled its own triumph:

"I consumed the deep green forest with all its songs, And all the songs of the forest now sing aloud in me."

Ellery stood with his arm around his wife's waist and looked about with a quizzical expression that made her ask,

"What are you thinking?"

"I was remembering."

"And pray what business have you, sir, to live in anything but the present?"

"Perhaps I get more from to-day because I don't forget yesterday. When I first came to St. Etienne, sweetheart, d.i.c.k took me to his home. You know, with your mere mind, but you can not appreciate, how unrelated my life had been. You can't imagine how hungrily I looked at that restful room and at d.i.c.k's mother. I felt as though I would give anything--my soul--to have a home. And now, behold, I have one."

"And you had to pledge your soul to me to get it."

"True. I paid dearly," he said. "But I was wondering how it was that you had managed to put so much atmosphere into so untried a place. It looks to me as impossible as a miracle. Here are some new walls, and new furniture and new curtains and new vases and new pictures. Even the books are mostly new. I always resented new books. They are like green fruit. A book isn't ripe until it begins to be frayed around the edges.

It would seem to me a hopeless job to make a home out of all this raw material. Yet this room already reminds me of Mrs. Percival's library, Madeline, and it isn't only because it is a long room with a big fireplace."

"I think it is a good beginning," she answered. "Now all we have to do is to live in it."

"You talk as though 'living' were a very easy matter," he remonstrated.

"I think it must be the hardest thing in the world, judging by the failures. I know heaps of people who are drifting, or grubbing, or wallowing, or stumbling, or racing, but only a handful that are living.

The thought of it made me blue all the way home."

"d.i.c.k?" Madeline asked with ready intuition.

"Yes, d.i.c.k. He voted with the combine and against the reform element in last night's council meeting; and he did it on some one's compulsion. I can't tell you how it has stirred and disheartened me."

"Have you seen him?"

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"That he could not explain."

"Then," said his wife decisively, "it is some of Lena's doings. About anything else--anything--he would have told you, Ellery."

"Very likely, though it is hard to see how Mrs. Percival could be mixed up in affairs like this."

Madeline was moving about restlessly.

"Ellery," she said at last, "I feel as though you and I had to be a sort of pair of G.o.d-parents to d.i.c.k. He is so dear, so lovable, so fine--and so unable to go alone. You, particularly, dearest, are the stanchest thing he has. I know just how he feels about you, for I feel so, too.

You are going to push behind him and understand him and back up all his resolves, aren't you, even if he does half disappoint you? You aren't going to let anything alienate you or come between your friendship and his, are you? I know you love him, and I'm sure he needs you."

Ellery smiled down at her questioning eyes and the intoxicating appeal of her confidence in him--Madeline's!

"I rather think I am d.i.c.k's friend for all I'm worth," he said slowly, at last. "Even if I were tempted to disloyalty, I should be ashamed to harbor it with your faithfulness standing before me. And I believe this very afternoon was a kind of crisis with him--that he was gathering himself together when I came away."

"And by your help, I dare say," added his wife.

"I hope so. I know but one thing that seems to me more worth while than the purpose of helping d.i.c.k Percival to be what it is in him to be."

"And what is that other better thing?"

"You arrant fraud! Do you need to ask?" he said, laughing.

"Well, comfort yourself. You are to go on fulfilling your two purposes in life--you and I together."