She was sitting in the same chair, her umbrella still in her hand, waiting, when Agnes came in to say that she had lunch ready. She turned eyes of astonished anger and rebuke on her. "I don't want anything to eat," she said in so strange a voice that Agnes crept back to the kitchen, shuffling and scared.

She was still sitting there, looking fixedly before her, and frowning, when Agnes came to the door to say timidly that the gentleman had come about using his car to meet the train, and wanted to know if he could see Mrs. Crittenden.

Marise looked at her, frowning, and shook her head. But it was not until late that night that she understood the words that Agnes had spoken.

She was still sitting there, rigid, waiting, when Agnes brought in a lighted lamp, and Marise saw that evening had come. The light was extremely disagreeable to her eyes. She got up stiffly, and went outdoors to the porch, sitting down on the steps.

The stars were beginning to come out now. The sight of them suggested something painful, some impression that belonged to that other world that had existed before this day, before she had conceived the possibility that Neale might not be Neale, might never have been Neale, that there was no such thing for her as human integrity. Was it she who had leaned out from the window and felt herself despised by the height and vastness of the stars? From the height and vastness of her need, she looked down on them now, and found them nothing, mere pin-p.r.i.c.ks in the sky, compared to this towering doubt of her, this moral need which shouted down all the mere matter on the earth and in the heavens above the earth. Something eternal was at stake now, the faith in righteousness of a human soul.

She had thought childishly, shallowly last night that she had had no faith, and could live with none. That was because she had not conceived what it would be to try to live without faith, because she had not conceived that the very ground under her feet could give way. At that very moment she had had a faith as boundless as the universe, and had forgotten it. And now it was put in doubt. She could not live without it. It was the only vital thing for her.

Was she the woman who had felt forced into acquiescing when Vincent Marsh had said so boldly and violently, that she loved her husband no more, that he was nothing to her now? It seemed to her at this moment that it was a matter of the utmost unimportance whether she _loved_ him or not; but she could not live without believing him. That was all. She could not live without that. Life would be too utterly base ...

Neale nothing to her? She did not know _what_ he was to her, but the mere possibility of losing her faith in him was like death. It was a thousand times worse than death, which was merely material. This mattered a great deal more than the physical death of someone's body ...

it was the murder, minute by minute, hour by hour, month by month, year by year of all her married life, of all she had found lovable and tolerable and beautiful and real in life.

Of course this could not be true ... of course not ... but if it were true, she would find the corrosive poison of a false double meaning in every remembered hour. She did not believe any of those hideously marshaled facts, but if they were true, she would go back over all those recollections of their life together and kill them one by one, because every hour of her life had been founded on the most unthinking, the most absolute, the most recklessly certain trust in Neale. To know that past in peril, which she had counted on as safe, more surely than on anything in life, so surely that she had almost dismissed it from her mind like a treasure laid away in a safe hiding-place ... to know those memories in danger was a new torture that had never before been devised for any human being. No one had the safe and consecrated past taken from him.

Its pricelessness shone on her with a blinding light. What if it should be taken away, if she should find she had never had it, at all ... ?

The idea was so acute an anguish to her that she startled herself by a cry of suffering.

Agnes' voice behind her asked tremblingly, "Did you call me, Miss Marise?"

Marise shifted her position, drew a breath, and answered in a hard tone, "No."

She knew with one corner of her mind that Agnes must be terrified. What if she were? Marise's life-long habit of divining another's need and ministering to it, vanished like a handful of dust in a storm. What did she care about Agnes? What did she care about anything in the world but that she should have back again what she had valued so little as to lose it from her mind altogether? All of her own energy was strained in the bitterness of keeping her soul alive till Neale should come. She had not the smallest atom of strength to care about the needs of anyone else.

She looked up at the stars, disdainful of them. How small they were, how unimportant in the scheme of things, so much less able to give significance to the universe, than the presence of integrity in a human soul.

If she could have Neale back again, as she had always had him without thinking of it, if she could have her faith in him again, the skies might shrivel up like a scroll, but something eternal would remain in her life.

It seemed to her that she heard a faint sound in the distance, on the road, and her strength ran out of her like water. She tried to stand up but could not.

Yes, it was the car, approaching. The two glaring headlights swept the white road, stopped, and went out. For an instant the dark ma.s.s stood motionless in the starlight. Then something moved, a man's tall figure came up the path.

"Is that you, Marise?" asked Neale's voice.

She had not breath to speak, but all of her being cried out silently to him the question which had had all the day such a desperate meaning for her, "Is that _you_, Neale?"

PART IV

CHAPTER XXIV

NEALE'S RETURN

July 22. Evening.

He stooped to kiss her and sank down beside her where she sat cowering in the dark. Although she could not see his face clearly Marise knew from his manner that he was very tired, from the way he sat down, taking off his cap, and his att.i.tude as he leaned his head back against the pillar. She knew this without thinking about it, mechanically, with the automatic certainty of a long-since acquired knowledge of him. And when he spoke, although his voice was quiet and level, she felt a great fatigue in his accent.

But he spoke with his usual natural intonation, which he evidently tried to make cheerful. "I'm awfully glad you're still up, dear. I was afraid you'd be too tired, with the funeral coming tomorrow. But I couldn't get here any sooner. I've been clear over the mountain today. And I've done a pretty good stroke of business that I'm in a hurry to tell you about.

You remember, don't you, how the Powers lost the t.i.tle to their big woodlot? I don't know if you happen to remember all the details, how a lawyer named Lowder ..."

"I remember," said Marise, speaking for the first time, "all about it."

"Well," went on Neale, wearily but steadily, "up in Nova Scotia this time, talking with one of the old women in town, I ran across a local tradition that, in a town about ten miles inland, some of the families were descended from Tory Yankees who'd been exiled from New England, after the Revolution. I thought it was worth looking up, and one day I ran up there to see if I could find out anything about them. It was Sunday and I had to ..."

Marise was beside herself, her heart racing wildly. She took hold of his arm and shook it with all her might. "Neale, quick! quick! Leave out all that. _What did you do?_"

She could see that he was surprised by her fierce impatience, and for an instant taken aback by the roughness of the interruption. He stared at her. How _slow_ Neale was!

He began, "But, dear, why do you care so much about it? You can't understand about what I did, if I don't tell you this part, the beginning, how I ..." Then, feeling her begin to tremble uncontrollably, he said hastily, "Why, of course, Marise, if you want to know the end first. The upshot of it all is that I've got it straightened out, about the Powers woodlot. I got track of those missing leaves from the Ashley Town Records. They really were carried away by that uncle of yours. I found them up in Canada. I had a certified copy and tracing made of them. It's been a long complicated business, and the things only came in yesterday's mail, after you'd been called over here. But I'd been in correspondence with Lowder, and when I had my proofs in hand, I telephoned him and made him come over yesterday afternoon. It was one of the biggest satisfactions I ever expect to have, when I shoved those papers under his nose and watched him curl up. Then I took him back today, myself, to his own office, not to let him out of my sight, till it was all settled. There was a great deal more to it ... two or three hours of fight. I bluffed some, about action by the bar-a.s.sociation, disbarment, a possible indictment for perjury, and seemed to hit a weak spot. And finally I saw him with my own eyes burn up that fake warranty-deed. And that's all there is to that. Just as soon as we can get this certified copy admitted and entered on our Town Records, 'Gene can have possession of his own wood-land. Isn't that good news?"

He paused and added with a tired, tolerant, kindly accent, "Now Nelly will have fourteen pairs of new shoes, each laced higher up than the others, and I won't be the one to grudge them to her."

He waited for a comment and, when none came, went on doggedly making talk in that resolutely natural tone of his. "Now that you know the end, and that it all came out right, you ought to listen to some details, for they are queer. The missing pages weren't in that first town I struck at all. Nothing there but a record of a family of Simmonses who had come from Ashley in 1778. They had ..."

Marise heard nothing more of what he said, although his voice went on with words the meaning of which she could not grasp. It did not seem to her that she had really understood with the whole of her brain anything he had said, or that she had been able to take in the significance of it. She could think of nothing but a frightening sensation all over her body, as though the life were ebbing out of it. Every nerve and fiber in her seemed to have gone slack, beyond anything she had ever conceived.

She could feel herself more and more unstrung and loosened like a violin string let down and down. The throbbing ache in her throat was gone.

Everything was gone. She sat helpless and felt it slip away, till somewhere in the center of her body this ebbing of strength had run so far that it was a terrifying pain, like the approach of death. She was in a physical panic of alarm, but unable to make a sound, to turn her head.

It was when she heard a loud insistent ringing in her head, and saw the stars waver and grow dim that she knew she was fainting away.

Then she was lying on the sofa in Cousin Hetty's sitting-room, Neale bending over her, holding a handkerchief which smelled of ammonia, and Agnes, very white, saying in an agitated voice, "It's because she hasn't eaten a thing all day. She wouldn't touch her lunch or supper. It's been turrible to see her."

Marise's head felt quite clear and lucid now; her consciousness as if washed clean by its temporary absence from life. She tried to sit up and smile at Neale and Agnes. She had never fainted away in all her life before. She felt very apologetic and weak. And she felt herself in a queer, literal way another person.

Neale sat down by her now and put his arm around her. His face was grave and solicitous, but not frightened, as Agnes was. It was like Neale not to lose his head. He said to Agnes, "Give me that cup of cocoa," and when it came, he held it to Marise's lips. "Take a good swallow of that," he said quietly.

Marise was amazed to find that the hot sweet smell of the cocoa aroused in her a keen sensation of hunger. She drank eagerly, and taking in her hand the piece of bread and b.u.t.ter which Neale offered to her, she began to eat it with a child's appet.i.te. She was not ashamed or self-conscious in showing this before Neale. One never needed to live up to any pose before Neale. His mere presence in the room brought you back, she thought, to a sense of reality. Sometimes if you had been particularly up in the air, it made you feel a little flat as she certainly did now.

But how profoundly alive it made you feel, Neale's sense of things as they were.

The food was delicious. She ate and drank unabashedly, finding it an exquisite sensation to feel her body once more normal, her usual home, and not a scaring, almost hostile ent.i.ty, apart from her. When she finished, she leaned against Neale's shoulder with a long breath. For an instant, she had no emotion but relieved, homely, bodily comfort.

"Well, for Heaven's sake!" said Neale, looking down at her.

"I know it," she said. "I'm an awful fool."