And she knew that it was too late for that. She had lived, and she could not blot out what life had brought to her. She could never now, with a tranquil heart, go into the ivory tower. It would do her no good to shut and bar the golden door a hundred times behind her, because she would have with her, everywhere she went, wrought into the very fiber of her being, a guilty sense of all the effort and daily strain and struggle in which she did not share.

She saw no material good accomplished by taking her share. The existence in the world of so much drudgery and unlovely slavery to material processes was an insoluble mystery; but a life in which her part of it would be taken by other people and added to their own burdens ... no, she had grown into something which could not endure that!

Perhaps this was one of the hard, unwelcome lessons that the war had brought to her. She remembered how she had hated the simple comforts of home, the safety, the roof over her head, because they were being paid for by such hideous sufferings on the part of others; how she had been ashamed to lie down in her warm bed when she thought of Neale and his comrades in the trench-mud, in the cold horror of the long drenching nights, awaiting the attack; and she had turned sick to see the long trains of soldiers going out while she stayed safely behind and bore no part in the wretchedness which war is. There had been no way for her to take her part in that heavy payment for her safety and comfort; but the bitterness of those days had shocked her imagination alive to the shame of sharing and enjoying what she had not helped to pay for, to the disharmony of having more than your share while other people have less than theirs.

This was nothing she had consciously sought for. She felt no dutiful welcome that it had come; she bent under it as under a burden. But it was there. Life had made her into one of the human beings capable of feeling that responsibility, each for all, and the war had driven it home, deep into her heart, whence she could not pluck it out.

She might never have known it, never have thought of it, if she had been safely protected by ignorance of what life is like. But now she knew, living had taught her; and that knowledge was irrevocably part of the woman she had become.

Wait now! Was this only habit, routine, dulled lack of divining imagination of what another life could be? That was the challenge Vincent would throw down. She gazed steadily at the wall before her, and called up, detail by detail, the life which Vincent Marsh thought the only one that meant richness and abundance for the human spirit. It hung there, a shimmering ma.s.s of lovely colors and exquisite textures and fineness and delicacy and beauty. And as she looked at it, it took on the shape of a glorious, uprooted plant, cut off from the very source of life, its glossy surfaces already beginning to wither and dull in the sure approach of corruption and decay. But what beauties were there to pluck, lovely fading beauties, poignant and exquisite sensations, which she was capable of savoring, which she sadly knew she would live and die without having known, a heritage into which she would never enter; because she had known the unforgettable taste of the other heritage, alive and rooted deep!

This faded out and left her staring at the blank wall again, feeling old and stern.

Nothing more came for a moment, and restless, feeling no bodily fatigue at all, she got out of her bed, took up the candle, and stepped aimlessly out into the hall. The old clock at the end struck a m.u.f.fled stroke, as if to greet her. She held up her candle to look at it.

Half-past two in the morning. A long time till dawn would come.

She hesitated a moment and turned towards the door of a garret room which stood open. She had not been in there for so long,--years perhaps; but as a child she had often played there among the old things, come down from the dead, who were kept in such friendly recollection in this house. Near the door there had been an old, flat-topped, hair-covered trunk ... yes, here it was, just as it had been. Nothing ever changed here. She sat down on it, the candle on the floor beside her, and saw herself as a little girl playing among the old things.

A little girl! And now she was the mother of a little girl. So short a time had pa.s.sed! She understood so very little more than when she had been the little girl herself. Yet now there was Elly who came and stood by her, and looked at her, and asked with all her eyes and lips and being, "Mother, what is the meaning of life?"

What answer had she to give? Was she at all more fit than anyone else to try to give Elly the unknowable answer to that dark question? Was there any deep spiritual reality which counted at all, which one human being could give to another? Did we really live on desert islands, cut off so wholly from each other by the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea? And if we did, why break one's heart in the vain effort to do the impossible, to get from human beings what they could not give?

Her heart ached in an old bitterness at the doubt. Did her children ...

could they ... give her the love she wanted from them, in answer to her gift of her life to them? They were already beginning to go away from her, to be estranged from her, to shut her out of their lives, to live their lives with no place for her in them.

She sat there on the old trunk and saw the endless procession of parents and children pa.s.sing before her, the children so soon parents, all driven forward by what they could not understand, yearning and starving for what was not given them, all wrapped and dimmed in the twilight of their doubt and ignorance. Where were they going? And why? So many of them, so many!

Her humbled spirit was prostrate before their mystery, before the vastness of the whole, of which she and her children were only a part, a tiny, lowly part.

With this humbling sense of the greatness of the whole, something swollen and sore in her heart gave over its aching, as though a quieting hand had been laid on it. She drew a long breath. Oh, from what did it come, this rest from that sore bitterness?

It came from this, that she had somehow been shown that what she wanted was not love from her children for herself. That was trying to drive a bargain to make them pay for something they had never asked to have.

What she wanted was not to get love, to get a place in their lives for herself, to get anything from them, but to give them all that lay in her to give. If that was what she wanted, why, nothing, nothing could take it away. And it was truly ... in this hour of silence and searching ...

she saw that it was truly what she wanted. It was something in her which had grown insensibly to life and strength, during all those uncounted hours of humble service to the children. And it was something golden and immortal in her poor, flawed, human heart.

A warm bright wave of feeling swept over her ... there, distinct and rounded against the shadowy confused procession of abstract ideas about parents and children, there stood looking at her out of their clear loving eyes, Paul and Elly and little Mark, alive, there, a part of her; not only themselves but her children; not only her children but themselves; human life which she and Neale had created out of the stuff of the universe. They looked at her and in their regard was the clear distillation of the innumerable past hours when they had looked at her with love and trust.

At the sight of them, her own children, her heart swelled and opened wide to a conception of something greater and deeper in motherhood than she had had; but which she could have if she could deserve it; something so wide and sun-flooded that the old selfish, possessive, never-satisfied ache which had called itself love withered away, its power to hurt and poison her gone.

She had no words for this ... she could not even try to understand it.

It was as solemn a birth-hour to her, as the hour when she had first heard the cry of her new-born babies ... she was one mother then, she had become another mother now. She turned to bless the torment of bitter, doubting questioning of what she had called mother-love, which had forced her forward blindly struggling, till she found this divination of a greater possibility.

She had been trying to span the unfathomable with a mean and grasping desire. Now she knew what she must try to do; to give up the lesser and receive the greater.

This pa.s.sed and left her, looking straight before her at the flickering shadows, leaping among the dusky corners of the dark slant-ceilinged room. The old clock struck three in the hall behind her.

She felt tired now, as she had after the other travail which had given her her children, and leaned her head on her hand. Where did she herself, her own personal self come in, with all this? It was always a call to more effort which came. To get the great good things of life how much you had to give! How much of what seemed dearly yourself, you had to leave behind as you went forward! Her childhood was startlingly called up by this old garret, where nothing had changed: she could still see herself, running about there, happily absorbed in the vital trivialities of her ten years. She had not forgotten them, she knew exactly the thrill felt by that shadowy little girl as she leaned over the old chest yonder, and pulled out the deep-fringed shawl and quilted petticoat.

It had been sweet to be a little girl, she thought wistfully, to have had no past, to know only the shining present of every day with no ominous, difficult future beyond it. Ineffably sweet too was the aroma of perfect trust in the strength and wisdom of grown-up people, which tinctured deep with certainty every profoundest layer of her consciousness. Ineffably sweet ... and lost forever. There was no human being in the world as wise and strong as poor old Cousin Hetty had seemed to her then. A kingdom of security from which she was now shut out.

And the games, the fantastic plays,--how whole and rounded and entire, the pleasure in them! She remembered the rainy day she had played paper-dolls here once, with little Margaret Congdon ... dead, years ago, that much-loved playmate of past summer days ... and how they had taken the chest for the house for Margaret's dolls, and the hair-trunk where she sat, for hers; how they had arranged them with the smallest of playthings, with paste-board furniture, and bits of colored tissue paper for rugs, and pieces of silk and linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes; how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part of their deep content.

Nothing had changed in that room, except the woman who sat there.

She got up with a sudden impulse, and threw back the lid of the trunk. A faint musty odor rose from it, as though it had been shut up for very long. And ... why, there it was, the doll's room, just as they had left it, how long ago! How like this house! How like Cousin Hetty never to have touched it!

She sat down on the floor and, lifting the candle, looked in at the yellowed old playthings, the flimsy, spineless paper-dolls, the faded silk rags, the discolored bits of papers, the misshapen staggering paste-board chairs and bed, which had seemed so delightful and enchanting to her then, far better than any actual room she knew. A homesickness for the past came over her. It was not only Margaret who was dead. The other little girl who had played there, who had hung so lovingly over this creation of her fancy, was dead too, Marise thought with a backward look of longing.

And then the honest, unsparing habit of her life with Neale shook her roughly. This was sentimentalizing. If she could, would she give up what she had now and go back to being the little girl, deeply satisfied with make-shift toys, which were only the foreshadowings of what was to come?

If she could, would she exchange her actual room at home, for this, even to have again all the unquestioning trust in everyone and everything of the child who had died in her heart? Would she choose to give up the home where her living children had been born, at no matter what cost of horrid pain to herself, and were growing up to no matter what dark uncertainties in life, for this toy inhabited by paper-dolls? No, no, she had gone on, gone on, and left this behind. Nor would she, if she could, exchange the darker, heavier, richer gifts for the bright small trinkets of the past.

All this ran fluently from her mind, with a swiftness and clarity which seemed as shallow as it was rapid; but now there sounded in her ears a warning roar of deeper waters to which this was carrying her.

Before she knew what was coming, she braced herself to meet it; and holding hard and ineffectually, felt herself helplessly swept out and flung to the fury of the waves ... and she met them with an answering tumult of welcome. That was what Vincent Marsh could do for her, wanted to do for her,--that wonderful, miraculous thing,--give back to her something she had thought she had left behind forever; he could take her, in the strength of her maturity with all the richness of growth, and carry her back to live over again the fierce, concentrated intensity of newly-born pa.s.sion which had come into her life, and gone, before she had had the capacity to understand or wholly feel it. He could lift her from the dulled routine of life beginning to fade and lose its colors, and carry her back to the glorious forgetfulness of every created thing, save one man and one woman.

She had had a glimpse of that, in the first year of her married life, had had it, and little by little had lost it. It had crumbled away insensibly, between her fingers, with use, with familiarity, with the hateful blunting of sensitiveness which life's battering always brings.

But she could have it again; with a grown woman's strength and depth of feeling, she could have the inheritance of youth. She had spent it, but now she could have it again. That was what Vincent meant.

He seemed to lean over her now, his burning, quivering hand on hers. She felt a deep hot flush rise to her face, all over her body. She was like a crimson rose, offering the splendor of its maturity to be plucked. Let her have the courage to know that its end and aim and fulfilment lay in being plucked and gloriously worn before the coming of the inevitable end! Thus and thus only could one find certainty, before death came, of having lived as deeply as lay in one to live.

Through the glowing pride and defiance with which she felt herself rise to the challenge, felt herself strong to break and surmount all obstacles within and without, which stood in the way of that fulfilment of her complete self, she had heard ... the slightest of trivialities ... a thought gone as soon as it was conceived ...

nothing of the slightest consequence ... harmless ...

insignificant ... yet why should it give off the betraying clink of something flawed and cracked? ... She had heard ... it must have come from some corner of her own mind ... something like this, "Set such an alternative between routine, traditional, narrow domestic life, and the mightiness and richness of mature pa.s.sion, before a modern, free European woman, and see how quickly she would grasp with all her soul for pa.s.sion."

What was there about this, the veriest flying mote among a thousand others in the air, so to awaken in Marise's heart a deep vibration of alarm? Why should she not have said that? she asked herself, angry and scared. Why was it not a natural thought to have had? She felt herself menaced by an unexpected enemy, and flew to arms.

Into the rich, hot, perfumed shrine which Vincent's remembered words and look had built there about her, there blew a thin cool breath from the outside, through some crack opened by that casual thought. Before she even knew from whence it came, Marise cried out on it, in a fury of resentment ... and shivered in it.

With no apparent volition of her own, she felt something very strong within her raise a mighty head and look about, stirred to watchfulness and suspicion by that luckless phrase.

She recognized it ... the habit of honesty of thought, not native to Marise's heart, but planted there by her relation with Neale's stark, plain integrity. Feeding unchecked on its own food, during the long years of her marriage it had grown insensibly stronger and stronger, till now, tyrant and master, with the irresistible strength of conscious power, it could quell with a look all the rest of her nature, rich in colored possibilities of seductive self-deceit, sweet illusions, lovely falsities.

She could no more stop its advance now, straight though it made its way over treasures she fain would keep, than she could stop the beating of her heart.

A ruthless question or two ... "Why did you say that about what a modern, free European woman would do in your place? Are you trying to play up to some trumpery notion of a role to fill? And more than this, did you really mean in your heart an actual, living woman of another race, such as you knew in Europe; or did you mean somebody in an Italian, or a French, or a Scandinavian book?" Marise writhed against the indignity of this, protested fiercely, angrily against the incriminating imputation in it ... and with the same breath admitted it true.

It was true. She was horrified and lost in grief and humiliation at the cheapened aspect of what had looked so rich before. Had there been in truth an element of such trashy copying of the conventional pose of revolt in what had seemed so rushingly spontaneous? Oh no, no ... not that!

She turned away and away from the possibility that she had been partially living up to other people's ideas, finding it intolerable; and was met again and again by the relentless thrust of that acquired honesty of thought which had worn such deep grooves in her mind in all these years of unbroken practice of it. "You are not somebody in a book, you are not a symbol of modern woman who must make the gestures appropriate for your part ..." One by one, that relentless power seated in her many-colored tumultuous heart put out the flaring torches.

It had grown too strong for her, that habit of honesty of thought and action. If this struggle with it had come years before she could have mastered it, flinging against it the irresistible suppleness and lightness of her ignorant youth. But now, freighted heavily with experience of reality, she could not turn and bend quickly enough to escape it.

It had profited too well by all those honest years with Neale ... never to have been weakened by a falsehood between them, by a shade of pretense of something more, or different from what really was there.