"Begin doing what you told me from the first--begin to start again--to get it under my feet--to stand on it--to be that much higher up--and not be"--he fumbled with his cap, his head hung guiltily--"not be ridden by remorse--any more than--than I can help."

"You'll do it, Thor; you'll do it n.o.bly--"

What she had to say, however, got no further, for the front door was flung open to allow of Mrs. Willoughby's excited entrance, with Len puffing heavily behind her.

"Oh, so you're here, Thor!" Bessie cried in the tone of a woman at the limit of her strength. "Well, I'm glad. You may as well know it first as last." Breathless, she dropped into one of the hall chairs, endeavoring to get air by agitating an enormous pillow-m.u.f.f. "Len's been having--No, it's too extraordinary!--and I predicted it, didn't I? If you've kept my letters you've got it down in black and white! Len's been having--It's just as I said!--it's the shroud and the lighted candle! Len's been having the strangest, the very _strangest_, talk with Archie."

Lois crept near to her mother, bending down toward her. "But, mother dear, what about?"

Bessie answered, wildly: "Oh, I don't know what about. I wasn't there. I was in the drawing-room with Ena. I knew something was going on, from Ena's manner. What's come over Ena I can't imagine. I've heard of trial turning human beings into angels, but I never believed it and I can hardly believe it now. Archie began it himself--I mean with your father.

He beckoned him into the library in the solemnest way. That was after he had finished his speech and the crowd had stopped cheering. If it _is_ the shroud and the taper--well, all I can say is that he carries them off just in the way you would expect. No one could do it better, as far as _that_ goes."

"As far as what goes, mother? I wish you'd tell us."

"It's exactly what I said when I wrote you from London last year. If you've kept my letters you've got it all down in black and white. He wants us, and Ena wants us, all to come to dinner. I'm not a bit surprised--not a bit--though I never counted on it--_never_!"

Thor also bent over her, standing before her, with his hand stretched out to the back of her chair. "Is it about money, Mrs. Willoughby?"

But she was too far beyond coherence to explain. "He says he wants to talk to us both after dinner--to Len and me. He's been going over the accounts again and he finds--he finds--" But she beat with her high heels on the floor and buried her face in her m.u.f.f. "Oh, tell them, Len!--for goodness' sake, tell them! They'll never believe it--not any more than me."

But her emotion was too much for the big man's shattered nerves. As he stood just within the doorway, looking with his snowy beard and bushy white hair like some spectral, aureoled apostle, he began to cry.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

Thor and Lois were glad of this interruption. They were glad of the new and exciting topic. They were glad of the family dinner at the other house, where they could be together and yet apart. Taking refuge from each other in any society they could find, they kept close to Mrs.

Masterman when, after dinner, Thor's father retained his two old friends in the dining-room for the promised explanations. Later in the evening it was with an emotion like alarm that Lois heard that her parents had gone home without waiting to bear her company. Secretly she began to plan methods for stealing away alone. Her shyness of Thor was like nothing she had known in the days of courtship and marriage, or during the months in which they had been holding off from each other for scrutiny and reflection.

It was a shyness which, when they were at last side by side in the avenue, drove her to affect an over-elaboration of ease. She talked, not merely because there were so many things to say, but also for the sake of talking. She talked because he did not, because he towered above her in the moonlight, dumb, mysterious, waiting. It was that sense of his waiting that thrilled and terrified her most. It was a large waiting, patient and deep, the waiting for something predestined and inevitable that could take its time. It was like the waiting of the ocean for the streams, of sleep for the day's activities, or of death for all. It seemed to brood over her like the violet sky, and to quiver with radiance as the crisp air quivered with the moonlight. It was wide and restful and bracing. She was walking toward it, she was walking into it, as she walked over this virginal carpet of snow.

She talked with a kind of desperation--of Thor's father and mother first of all, of how good they were, each with a special variety of goodness.

It was wonderful what sorrow had done for Mrs. Masterman. "I never see her now, Thor dear, without thinking of that look in Claude's face that seemed to us like dawn. I see it in her. Don't you?" Without waiting for an answer she hurried on. "And your father, Thor. He is good. No one but a good man could have been so n.o.ble toward poor old Fay, when he knows--when _every one_ knows--no matter what was proved or wasn't proved in court--when he _knows_ the truth." She seemed to be answering some unspoken argument on his side as she continued: "Oh yes, I remember what mamma wrote about it--about the hoodoo or the voodoo--mamma's so amusing!--but you and I have nothing to do with that, have we, Thor? We can only take what we see, and judge by what is best. And so with this wonderful new thing for papa and mamma--that they're to have some of their money back--we _can't_ go behind it, can we? If he says it was a mistake we must accept it as that, and never, never let any other thought come into our minds. I know that papa and mamma, dear, innocent things--they _are_ dear and innocent, you know, in spite of everything!--I know they'll only be too glad to take it in the same way."

Except for an occasional word he had hardly spoken by the time he had reached the corner of Willoughby's Lane and County Street. Lois had a renewal of the terror from which her own conversation had distracted her. The crucial minute was at hand. The door was but a few yards away.

He would either go in with her--or he would go back. She hardly knew which would be the more supportable--the joy or the dismay.

She caught at the first possibility of postponing both. "Oh, it's so lovely! Let us walk on a little farther. It isn't half-past nine yet. I looked at the clock as we were coming out. Papa and mamma ran off so early. Don't you adore these windless winter nights?--when the air is as if it had been distilled." She paused in the middle of the road and looked around. "What's that star, Thor--over there--the one like a great white diamond?" He told her it was Sirius, adding that its light took eight years to travel to the earth, and going on to trace with his finger the constellation of the Dog. The minute's return to the old habits took some of the feverishness from her sense of tension as they continued their walk up the hill.

Up the hill there were only two directions in which to go--along the prosaic road to Marchfield or into the quiet winter woods where ma.s.ses of shadow lay interspersed with patches of white moonlight, while, on this soundless night there was not a murmur in the tree-tops. By instinct rather than intention they followed a faint, familiar path running under pines.

Lois was now speaking of the Fays. "Mrs. Fay _knows_. The others don't--not certainly. Rosie has brought herself round to thinking him innocent, and Matt and Jim only suspect what happened--but Mrs. Fay _knows_. It must be a tragic thing to spend your life with a man who's done a thing like that. Poor soul! We must do what we can to help her, mustn't we?"

She pursued the theme not for its interest alone, but for the sake of the objective point to which it was leading her. By speaking freely, first of Matt and then of Jim Breen, she came at last to Rosie. She spoke freely of her, too, at the risk of opening up old wounds, at the risk of lacerating that which was probably still sensitive. Her main purpose was to speak, and if possible to make him speak, so that this name should no longer be kept as an inviolable symbol between them.

Since the day when it began to have significance for them both it had scarcely been p.r.o.nounced by either otherwise than allusively or of necessity. She was resolute to make it as little to be shunned as his or her own.

Not that she was successful, for the minute at any rate. His responses continued to be brief, so brief that they were hardly responses at all.

They were not grudged or ungracious; they were only like those first little flashes of lightning which hint that the heavens will soon be alive. As a frightened boy whistles from bravado, she talked to conceal her trembling at this coming of celestial wonders.

"Oh, Thor, there'll be so much now to do! It's really only beginning, isn't it? And it brings in so many elements of our life--I mean of our whole national life. I like that. I like getting out of our own little groove--so futile and narrow as it generally is--and being in touch with what is stronger, even if it's terrific. That's what I feel about Matt Fay--that he's terrific. He represents a terrific movement, doesn't he?

and one we can't ignore. When I say terrific I don't mean that I'm afraid of it. I'm not. It seems to me too strengthening to be afraid of.

With all you can say against it, it strikes me as a tonic in our rather flaccid life, like iron in the blood. I've sympathy with it, too, to some extent; I've sympathy with _him_. You know, I do belong to the people. I'm glad we know him, and that in a way we've a right to get near to him. It puts us in touch with our own national realities as perhaps otherwise we shouldn't be. Oh, Thor, there's so much to work out! Isn't it a splendid thing that we can help even to the slightest degree in doing it!"

To this there was no response whatever. She was not sure that he listened. Beside her the tall form strode on dumb and dark, crunching the frozen snow with a creaking sound that roused the winged and furry things of the wood and silenced her half-hysterical efforts to fight against that which awaited her like a glory or a doom. Growing suddenly aware of the uselessness of speaking, she said no more.

After an interval in which her mind seemed to stop working, that of which she became conscious next was a world of extraordinary purity.

Nothing was ever so white as this snow or this moonlight; nothing was ever so like the ether beyond the atmosphere as this air; nothing was ever so golden as the stars in this purple sky, or so mystically solemn as these pines. As they climbed upward it was like mounting into some crystal sphere, where evil was not an element.

They came out on that spot in which all the wood-paths converged, that treeless ridge that rose like a great white altar. It was an end which neither had foreseen when a half-hour earlier they had prolonged their walk; otherwise they might have shrunk from it. As it was, the a.s.sociation of the past with the present startled them, startled them into pausing long enough to become conscious, to seeing each in the eyes of the other such things as could not pa.s.s into words, before renewing the ascent. As they continued the way upward it was as if in fulfilment of some symbolic ceremonial.

They had stood for some minutes silent on the summit, looking out over the wide, white radiance at their feet, when Thor spoke. "I'm not thinking about the things you've been talking of. I'm not primarily interested in them any more."

"You mean--?"

"I mean the helping of others--in the way I've tried it. I see the mistake in that."

She was faintly surprised. "Indeed?"

"Through the things that have been happening I've worked out--I may say I've stumbled out--to a great truth."

There was not only surprise in her tone, but curiosity. "Yes, Thor dear.

What is it?"

"It's that a man's first occupation is not with others, but with himself. It's not to put them right; it's to be right on his own account." As for the moment she was too disconcerted to comment on this, he continued: "If reaching this conclusion seems to you like discovering the obvious, I can only say that it hasn't been obvious to me. It's just beginning to come to me that I was so busy casting out other people's devils that I'd forgotten all about my own."

"You've been so generous in all you've thought about other people, Thor--"

He interrupted with decision. "The most effective way in which to be generous to other people is to be strict with one's self; but it never occurred to me till lately. I've been so eager that my neighbor's garden should be trim and productive, that mine has been overrun with weeds."

Against this self-condemnation she felt it her duty to protest. "But Uncle Sim says you've always been on the side of the--"

"Yes, I know," he broke in, with what was nearly a laugh. "But it's just where the dear old fellow has been wrong about me. I've wanted every one else to be there, on the side of the good things--I admit that--but I was to have plenty of rope. Now I'm coming to understand--and it's taken all this trouble to drive it home to my stupidity--that if I want to see any one else on the side of the angels I must get there first. That's where the ax must go to the root of the tree. In the main other people will take care of _them_selves if I take care of _my_self--and I'm going to try."

She was hurt on his behalf. "Oh, Thor, please don't say such things when you're so--so n.o.ble."

"I'm only saying them, Lois, to show you that I see what's been wrong with me from the start. You've tried to say it yourself at times, only I couldn't take it in. Do you remember the day in my office when you came to tell me that"--he nerved himself to approach the subject with the simple directness he knew she desired--"that Rosie had--?"

She hastened to come to his aid. "Yes, but I didn't mean it in just that way."

"No; but I do. I mean it because I can look back and trace it as the cause of all our disasters from--"

"Oh, Thor!" she pleaded.

He went on, steadily: "From the way in which I asked you to marry me right up to what--to what happened about Claude." He was obliged to draw a long, hard breath before saying more. "I was so determined that every one else should be right that I didn't care how wrong _I_ was--which is like handing out water from a poisoned well."

She wished she could touch him, or slip her hand into his, by way of comfort, but the distance between them was still too great. She could only say: "That's putting it unjustly to yourself, Thor. If you've made mistakes they've been splendid ones. They've been finer than the ways in which most of us have been right."