"I must be alone, dearest, for the rest of this day," she said, happily.

He understood, and left her to her own woman's thoughts.

When she knew him to be safely in his own room she slipped stealthily down to the hotel telegraph-office and hurriedly wrote out a message for her New York publisher. It said:

"Subst.i.tute name John Hartley for Cordelia Vaughan on t.i.tle-page of novel The Unwise Virgins. For this I agree to relinquish all royalty claims. Will explain later. Answer."

She signed the message and handed it to the operator with a slightly shaking hand, asking nervously how soon she could get a reply. There was no reason why she should not receive one in two hours, perhaps three hours, at the latest.

When that time had expired, and no answer came to her, she repeated the message, this time sending the despatch to Henry Slater's home address.

Late into the night she sat up in her room, frantically waiting for some word from him. As the hours dragged on she paced the little chamber in a fever of unrest, pausing and listening at every footstep that pa.s.sed her door. Midnight came and went, and still no word arrived. Then she knew that there was but one thing for her to do.

In the gray of the morning, when Hartley and all the hotel were still sleeping, she called a carriage, and, hurrying to the railway station, caught the early morning express for Montreal, on her way to New York.

It was no time for half measures.

Three hours later, when Hartley went down to breakfast, after a night of mysteriously depressing restlessness, he found awaiting him an incoherent little note from Cordelia. Bewildered, only after many readings he gathered from it that she had been called away because of some business tangle about which she would tell him later.

"If that isn't like her, the crazy child!" was Mrs. Spaulding's cry when she heard of it all, less disturbed in spirit than Hartley had expected.

And while, indeed, he was still pondering over his surprising note from her, Cordelia herself was speeding along past the old French settlements on the banks of the upper St. Lawrence, gazing absently out at the low-eaved little cottages, and desperately asking herself, again and again, if it would be too late.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE ALTAR OF EMINENCE

Hate wrong, as a bull hates red; Fight strong, till the wrong lies dead, For to him, just G.o.d, the fight Who smites for the sake of the right!

JOHN HARTLEY, "Juvenilia."

A woman's heart never breaks, but O how often it withers!--CORDELIA VAUGHAN, "Motherhood."

Cordelia's train crept into Montreal one hour and twenty minutes late, and it was already after three before she stepped out of the overheated car into the cool, crisp air of the station platform. She saw a uniformed attendant, and hurried to him at once.

"Can I catch the New York express?" she asked, breathlessly.

"Yes, ma'm!" he answered, promptly.

Her heart gave a sudden great bound of joy; she was not yet too late; she felt that it was a good omen, that luck was with her.

"What time does it leave?" she asked, hurriedly.

"From the other station, ma'm, some time this evenin'."

Her heart went down like lead. That meant hours more of suspense, hours more of waiting, and when time was so much to her!

She could never remember just how those dreary hours were pa.s.sed. She had a dim recollection of walking, walking without a stop, along narrow and hilly little city streets, of turning restlessly stationward once more and pacing feverishly up and down platforms, with ghost-like trains coming in and going out, with ghost-like pa.s.sengers hurrying this way and that way on every side of her. She heard the jangle of far-away bells, and the m.u.f.fled voice of the guard calling the departing trains.

She looked out at it all vaguely, and wondered if it would never end.

Once in the express for New York she felt tired and faint. She attempted to read, but it was useless. The rhythm of the speeding wheels seemed pulsing against her very brain itself. It seemed to pound, like a hammer on an anvil, and she repeated its cries again and again under her breath: "Hurry-Hurry, Hurry-Hurry, Hurry-Hurry!"

She called the porter and asked him to make up her berth. In the curtained, stifling gloom she flung herself down, in the forlorn hope that sleep would come to her tired eyes and wearied limbs. But that, too, was useless. She tossed from side to side in the hot berth, listening to the maddening rhythm of the speeding wheels' "Hurry-Hurry, Hurry-Hurry!"

She had known such nights before, but none had ever seemed so long. She raised the window-blind beside her, as she lay in the berth, and looked out. It was a clear, star-lit night. A great, lonely sea of black country with a fleeting light or two in the distance, seeming to make its blackness even lonelier, was all that she could distinguish. Toward the east she thought she saw a thin rind of pearl and pink on the horizon, and looked at her watch feverishly.

It was twenty-seven minutes to two. She shut out the night and the star-light, and listened once more to the pulsing rhythm of the car-wheels.

Then her thoughts went back to the happy week that lay behind her. She reviewed each day, hour by hour, and event by event. From that her restless mind leaped still farther back to the scene with Repellier, to that unspeakable hour of shame and despair. Then she went even farther back, to the very beginning, and step by step lived over her life, as she lay there, trying to shut out from her ears the maddening "Hurry-Hurry" of the wheels. She recalled the day that a tall, hollow-cheeked stranger came swinging up the path of her father's red-tiled home and inquired with his wistful smile if this was where the Rice who took in boarders lived. She remembered her sense of shame at her plain gingham dress, and how she had forgotten both shame and dress at the stranger's admiration of her yellow hair, twisted into a loose knot at the back of her head. "Why, child, it's a second Golden Fleece that should call for the outfit of a second Argo!" he had said to her, as though speaking to a girl not yet in her teens. That speech and that moment had marked the turning of all her life's tide. She was no longer the happy and petted belle of a little Kentucky village. She was a woman with aspirations toward the larger world of which he seemed a harbinger, of the knowledge and power of which he seemed an apostle. From that day innocence and content fell from her, leaf by leaf. Yet she remembered how she had clung to the lonely invalid, how for weeks together they had wandered about that far-away land of clover meadows and blue-tinted gra.s.ses, and sunsets made golden with gentle frosts. She remembered how she had labored with him on his Great Book, how his cough had grown faster than his ma.n.u.script, and how he had called for her when he was dying, and entrusted to her all his precious work, and wrung from her frightened lips the promise that she would copy it out, word for word, and when that task was finished take it herself to a publisher. She remembered how he had turned, then, and died in peace. She remembered her weeks of secret toil, her long, strange, first journey to New York, her trembling visit to the publisher, how later he had sent for her, and made her his dazzling offer--so unconsciously bewildering, so unconsciously tragical--on condition that she discard the masculine _nom de plume_ which he imagined a shrinking timidity had forced her to adopt, how he had enlarged on the advantages of the woman's name on the t.i.tle-page, how he had unthinkingly paved the way for that first duplicity, how he was prepared to push the book, and in the end, he believed, make both her name and her fortune. She recalled that brief and most bitter struggle which took place within her, how she had gone back to her publisher still vacillating, how she had learned, when he had thrust his crisp, new check into her hand, how narrow one's ethical Rubicon can be, and how much one can suffer when once that narrow stream is crossed. She remembered the day she had discarded her own name, how one morning she was Frances Rice, or often plain f.a.n.n.y Rice, and the next morning Cordelia Vaughan. She took the name from the Virginia branch of her family, after much hesitation, she recalled, because Valerie Vaughan, her cousin, had already identified that patronymic with the gentle art of letters, smiling bitterly at the thought that under that new name she had sprung into being as an artist as maturely and as miraculously as the G.o.ddess Minerva herself.

Then she let her busy thoughts dwell on her first triumphant year in New York, on many memories of the growing belief of her friends that she was the daughter of an old and aristocratic Kentucky family, of her interviews and her invitations, of her first intoxicating draught of publicity, of her gradual dismay as she found herself being forgotten, of her months of silent and agonized effort, that resulted in nothing, of her restless nights and her feverish days, when her spirit cried out for some balm for the itch which was burning and consuming her. She was no fool, she knew; she was as clever as other women. But some essential touch of imagination, some necessary element of creativeness, was not hers; and it had been imposed upon her to seek by sheer strategy and despairing strife that which came so lightly to the hand of others.

As she lay there alone in her rocking berth her withered and barren heart itself grew appalled at the thought of those years of smallness, of meanness, of deceit and duplicity, and endless lies. The enormity of her wrong-doing overwhelmed her. And the bitterest sting of all lay in the fact that so much of it was irreparable, that she had wronged not only the living, but the dead as well.

The one appeasing oasis in that arid desert of deceit and self-seeking was the memorial week she had journeyed back to the little Kentucky town of her childhood and there watched over the erection of a granite shaft beside the sadly neglected grave of a young Northerner who had once come so intimately into her girlhood life.

She was not all bad, not all bad, she cried out to herself, piteously!

It was not yet too late. It might cost her much, but Love would show her the way. That old dead past should be wiped out. She would tell her husband everything. She would hold nothing back from him, and, with her slate once clean, from that day she would show him, by her devotion to him and his work, by her patient help, by her humility and her tenderness, how she could be good, as other women--as the best of other women.

Yet it would be better, she decided, on second thoughts, to wait until after their marriage. If he, too, should forsake her at the last moment she would have nothing left to her in all the world. No, she must cling to him, she said, whatever happened, at whatever cost. She needed him; she was not strong enough to fight her fight alone. For him, and with him, she could do it. But alone, by herself, she could not do it. She would go with him to Repellier and tell them everything. Repellier could do what he cared to, it would make little difference; other things, after that, would scarcely count. And she could reason out her answer and her excuses to the world later. Perhaps he might even be willing to let bygones be bygones, when he saw and understood the new turn things had taken. But on that one point she was decided--she would, some day, tell her husband everything.

Then her thoughts traveled lightning-like back to the present moment, and her one haunting fear crept up into the foreground of her consciousness. What if she should yet be too late! What if the die had already been cast? She felt that Hartley would never forgive her that last and bitterest lie. Why had she let her heart run away with her; why had she told him so soon? Why had she not made sure before she had capitulated so utterly? Even to have confessed and repented, even to have thrown herself to the utmost on his goodness and his generosity would have been safer. But that chance now was gone.

Would she be too late? That was the question she asked herself again and again as the rhythmical "Hurry-Hurry" of the car-wheels smote on her ears once more. They used to tell her that she was lucky; she remembered it to her joy; she clung to the belief that luck would still be with her.

Cordelia had pa.s.sed a sleepless night when the Montreal express drew rumblingly down into the darkness of the Grand Central tunnel. She had found it impossible to eat, but a cup of strong coffee seemed to have refreshed her. The air was raw and cold as she finally stepped out into the vaulted gloom of the depot, and her breath hung in little white clouds as she pushed her way hurriedly toward the carriage-stand, where a pack of yelping and barking cab-men surrounded her, like hounds about a timorous quarry. She stepped into a public automobile, and started at once for the office of her publisher.

As she turned into the early morning quietness of Fifth Avenue, and the old, familiar, intangible smell of the city stole up into her nostrils, it seemed as though she had stepped back into life and the world again.

Had she not dreamed a dream, she asked, as the very intangibility of that city odor crept up to her, teasing to be remembered and named. Here was the world where she had lived and fought and worked, here was where her sterner and wider and darker life had opened out before her. Here she had pa.s.sed her happiest and her most miserable moments. That lost week in the sleepy old northern city on the St. Lawrence seemed mockingly unsubstantial. Which was the real, she asked herself, as she rolled down the familiar, smooth asphalt. And which, from that time on, was to be the unreal?

Her knees were shaking under her and her heart was beating tumultuously as she stepped into the offices of "Slater & Slater," and inquired for the senior member of that firm.

A chubby-faced office-boy, opening envelopes with a sharp steel paper-knife, was the only person to be seen. Mr. Slater had not come down yet; would not be there before half-past nine. Would she wait, and, if so, would she take a chair.

Cordelia could not wait; she left word that she would be back in half an hour, with a request that Mr. Slater keep himself disengaged until she saw him, as her business was most important. It was, indeed, vital, she tried to impress on the boy, who seemed, nevertheless, to give more attention to his envelopes than to his visitor.

Once back in her cab she instructed the driver to turn up the avenue and drive as far as the Plaza and back. At Twenty-ninth Street, in response to a sudden whim, she called out for him to turn east, and as her motor-cab slowly glided past the Church of the Transfiguration, the Little Church Around the Corner, she looked with veiled yet with curiously alert eyes at that diminutive edifice, at the ivy on the walls, at the garden-like greenness between its doors and the street, at the Gothic arches showing through bare tree-branches, and at the little roofed gateway, through which so many happy hearts, in their time, had pa.s.sed out and been forgotten.

Would it be too late, she asked herself again, with a sudden, new-born pa.s.sion of restlessness.