Now the white sheets on her table were no longer barren. Slow, painful writing covered them. She wrote and discarded, and wrote again. Day after day, she sat there at her table, engaged, as she came at last to perceive, in her final, her ultimate tragedy.

For when the thing that she had visioned as a little golden masterpiece was finished, she knew it for what it was. There was no felicity of phrase, no cunning art of construction, no conviction of truth, no throb of vitality within it. As surely as a still-born child had it been brought into the world dead. And it was incredibly ugly and deformed. There was not a gleam of gold upon it!

She recognized all this with unsparing clearness. Not one illusion was left to her, not one merciful deception; with a single glance at her completed story, illusions and self-deceptions were swept from her--and hope was swept from her with them.

Her gift was dead--or, at the least, it was forever ineffectual. There would be no more mad, glad flights; no more songs high in the sunlit heavens. The flights and songs and ecstasies were over for all time.

Not for an instant did she cheat herself with sophistries of an eventual recovery. She knew that if it lived at all--this gift of hers which had once been more alive than she herself--it would but live within her as the pain of a thing balked and futile, restless still perhaps, but not restless with any power. Always--always now--the too exquisite note of a violin, the sight of blossoming trees at dawn, of silver, inscrutable stars at night would waken in her the hunger, the grief, of the unsatisfied. There would never be a time when she could look on poignant beauty with the peace of one who is herself a part of all beauty--having created something beautiful. For the ultimate calamity had befallen her; her gift had been killed, or hopelessly maimed.

Under the tremendous impact of this blow she was curiously unresentful.

She wondered a little how it had happened. She wondered if she had suffered too much, suffered to the point of numbness--a thing fatal to one whose work had been fine largely through her capacity for emotion; or if the habit, the superst.i.tion, of her vow, persisting within her after the vow itself had been cast aside, had thus finally broken the wings of her talent. She wondered if her marriage alone, or her motherhood, or her shamed and hopeless love for Peter had been most disastrous to her. She had been conscious of them all as she had sat there trying to write. Eric's face and Peter's had drifted between her and her pages. Ted's cold declaration that talent was a bad thing for a married woman, and her own impa.s.sioned promise to G.o.d to renounce her work for Eric's life had both drowned for her the voice of her gift.

It was as if all these factors in her destiny had had too much of her; it was as if they had claimed her too entirely and tenaciously ever to release her. Even in silence and solitude and a belated sense of liberty and rights, she could not be free of them. She could not decide whether one or all of them had been responsible for this final frustration. She wondered--and then she ceased to wonder at all. She knew that the frustration had been accomplished--and that she was suddenly too weary even to cry out.

It was at the moment when she realized all this fully, when she sat staring at the deformed and lifeless thing which she had brought forth, that a letter from Charlotte was handed to her. It came from New York--where was Peter. Sheila opened it with shaking fingers--and found what she desired:

I have seen Peter [wrote Charlotte] and he seems to have fitted himself, very happily, into the right place. I say happily, but I do not use the word literally, for Peter is scarcely happy. But he is appreciated here, and he likes his work. I'm sure you'll be glad of that.

As for happiness--I sometimes question whether those of us who catch a glimpse of a happiness perfect and transcendent ever experience the reality. I doubt, in fact, if any reality could stand, unimpaired, by that vision. It may be that we have to choose between the vision--beheld for an instant and forever remembered--and an earthy, faulty, commonplace little happiness. We may have to choose between a fairy tale that can never be anything but a wonderful fairy tale, and a grubby reality that will spoil fairy tales for us evermore. If that be true, Peter is not to be pitied. He is manifestly one of the chosen; he's had his matchless vision; he still believes in the fairy tale.

I told you, once, that I might marry him--in spite of him, as it were!

Now I know that I will never marry him. But you must not be sorry for me, my dear. I, too, have had my vision. I'll always believe in the fairy tale.

Sheila laid the letter down--beside the stillborn child of her gift.

And fleetingly she saw again the pure gold of her idea--saw it gleaming through the misshapen thing she had actually fashioned. After all, though she could never create masterpieces, she had had her vision of them; that, at least, had been vouchsafed to her. And she had had her vision of the perfect love; not even unspeakable sorrow and humiliation had dimmed it. She, also, was one of the chosen; she would always believe in the fairy tale.

CHAPTER XVIII

It is, perhaps, only after we have put many dreams and hopes behind us that we stumble upon life's real gift to us. And thus it happened for Sheila. It was as if, seeing that she held out her hands for gifts no longer, life capriciously resolved to thrust one upon her. But beneath the apparent caprice was a fine justice--for life was at last kind to Sheila through her son.

As Eric grew older, there sprang up between them such a comradeship as, even in her gladdest moments of motherhood, Sheila had never foreseen.

He was a manly boy, fond of other boys and of boyish sports, but for all that his companionship with his mother persisted, and as he matured somewhat, deepened into an intimate, understanding relation such as Sheila had not thought to know again. Their kinship was not of the flesh only; that was the thing that Sheila began presently to see.

It was then that she began to dream once more; to visualize a future beyond her own unrealized future. But she didn't so much as stretch out a shaping hand; she didn't say an illuminating, a determining word.

She remembered instances--many of them--of children's lives having been moulded by their parents, and with pitiful mischance. She had known men and women who, with entirely unconscious tyranny, had thrust ready-made destinies on their sons and daughters, saying in extenuation:

"We want our children to do all the brave deeds we've failed to do. We want them to fulfill our defeated ambitions and to become what we have never become. We want to save them from our mistakes and our regrets.

We haven't done much with our own lives--but we're going to live again, more wisely and effectually, in our children's lives."

And so they had advised and coerced, and destroyed individuality and independence, and extinguished, only too often, the very joy of life itself by striving to transfer the flame to a vessel of their own choosing.

This she must not do to Eric, Sheila told herself. From the despotic impulse of parenthood--queer mixture that it was of too zealous love and a thoroughly selfish desire for a second chance through the medium of the child--she must protect Eric. Therefore she restrained herself; she simply waited--as she might have waited for a seed to spring up from the secret sprouting place of some deep garden bed. It requires a sort of earthy, benign patience thus to hold back one's hand and pa.s.sively wait--especially when one has, in spite of oneself, the dominating parent instinct!--but Sheila forced herself to it.

And then, when Eric was fourteen years old, the seed sprang up through the soil and turned its face to the light. The boy came to Sheila one day, obviously bent upon a confidence. Shy, hesitant, shamefaced he was, but so eager. She wanted to kiss him as he stood there before her, awkward and winsome, a little too tall for his knickerbockers, child and adolescent contending in his face and the flush of some portentous thing upon his cheek. She wanted to kiss him--but she didn't. For she divined that the moment was for sterner stuff than kisses.

"Mother, here's--here's a story I've written."

That was all; but Sheila saw her own youth, her hopes, her dreams in his eyes. What there was in her eyes she did not know, but at something there Eric suddenly exclaimed and put his arms around her.

And then Sheila knew that she was crying.

It was not a marvellous story--that first effort of her young son's--but _something was there_; something that raised the crude, immature pages above immaturity and crudity and made the little tale better than itself. And sensing it--that evanescent, impalpable, but infinitely promising thing--she saw the future shining through the present.

But it was not to Eric that she went first with her discovery. She longed to make the boy's path smooth for him before she sped him on it, and so she went first to Ted, story in hand.

Ted had not desired talent in his wife. Would he desire it in his son?

Would he cheer and encourage, would he even tolerate, a dreamer, a poet, a worker in mere beauty? Would he ever regard art as more than a shadow of life?

Sheila sought him now to learn that--with Eric's story to plead for itself.

Ted was in his den, a place sacred to those masculine pursuits and possessions which he did not share with her. Only for momentous affairs did she invade the shabby, comfortable, littered room, and now Ted glanced up at her from his pipe and papers with serious expectancy.

"I'd like you to read this," she said, holding out the little ma.n.u.script.

"Now? Is it important?"

"Yes, now. It is very important. I must have a talk with you when you've read it."

He took it from her, and she sat down to await his verdict. The story was short. Her suspense could have lasted but a little while. But Eric's fate was at stake, and the minutes seemed as laggard as years.

She had given up her own talent; that it was now a crippled thing within her was because she had renounced it, long before, for Eric's life. But she would not easily sacrifice Eric's talent--if talent he really had. She was prepared to fight for it, if need be. Yet, as she watched Ted, reading with inscrutable face, her heart grew heavy within her for dread of dissension, of struggle between them. That hot, rebellious heart of hers had come at last to a sort of peace. The affection between herself and Ted, in the past few quiet years, had become for her, unconsciously, more and more of a haven. She had given up much to the end that she and Ted might live together in harmony, and she sickened now at the prospect of conflict. For at conflict, old wounds would open, regrets long firmly suppressed would rush upon her, a devastating flood. If she had to fight for Eric, she knew that she would fight with the strength of old bitterness, bitterness that she had striven to outlive. And she could not bear that this should happen. She could not bear that her affection for Ted should be thus jeopardized.

She remembered, as she sat there, the anger she had felt toward him when he had condemned Alice North for her art--and, however innocently, through Alice North, herself. She remembered how indignant she had felt, how hurt and _divided_. And she remembered, too--thinking, against her will, of Peter--how divided from Ted she had felt in later years, in years not so long gone that she could recall them calmly.

She remembered how she had come, finally, to see Ted, and his part in the destruction of her talent, all too clearly--and how her heart had turned from him then to one whom she had no right to love. She had driven her heart back to its appointed path; she had constrained it to its duty--in so far as the heart can be constrained. She had even achieved the supreme triumph of keeping alive for Ted, through disillusion and pa.s.sionate resentment, that very real affection with which they had begun life together--but she trembled now at thought of any further pressure being brought to bear upon it. It was as if she held out her hands to her husband, crying: "Oh, let me love you! Do nothing that shall make it impossible for me to love you!"

And yet--though conflict between them should destroy the love she had so endeavored, in spite of everything, to feel--if Ted opposed Eric's gift, there must be conflict.

For she considered what her own unappeased gift had cost her--the hunger, the restlessness, the pain. She considered how, throughout all the years of her marriage, she had suffered her gift's insistence and its reproach. She thought of how she had never been able to look upon the miracle of the spring, the majesty of the stars, without an aching heart. All beauty had been trans.m.u.ted for her into una.s.suageable sorrow--because she had been born to create beauty and had failed of her destiny. And it would be trans.m.u.ted into sorrow for Eric, too--unless he were given the freedom she had foregone. He, too, would face the stars with an aching heart; all high and exquisite creation would be for him the material of suffering--unless he were allowed to create also.

She had nerved herself to any effort, any struggle that might be necessary, when Ted at last laid down Eric's story and turned to his desk without a word. Was there as little hope as that?

"Ted?" she cried.

"Wait," he answered, rummaging in a drawer of his desk, with his back toward her. And his voice sounded queer--almost as if it were choked with tears. "Wait, Sheila."

He rose, directly, and walked toward her, and his face was queer, too, unsteady with some rarely deep emotion. Thus he had looked when he first bent over her after Eric's birth. That flashed through Sheila's mind, touched her to sudden faith in his being, now, what she prayed to have him. Then she saw that in his hand he had, not Eric's story, but a bulky package of yellowed ma.n.u.scripts, tied clumsily with a faded ribbon. In such fashion a romantic man might have tied love letters.

But Ted was not romantic, and, never having been separated from him at any time since their marriage, she had written him no letters.

Besides, these papers were large, business-like sheets. She stared at them curiously. What had they to do with Eric and Eric's future?

But to Ted they had their significance. He carefully untied the dingy ribbon and spread the loosened pages on the table before her--and she noticed that his fingers were shaking.

"Look," he said, in that queer, blurred voice.

She picked up one of the discolored pages--and her own writing confronted her; for the page was from the unfinished story she had been working on when Eric was taken ill with scarlet fever--the story that, in obedience to her vow, she had put aside, still uncompleted.