Authors: Isabel Paterson
"No; I haven't heard anything. What do you mean?" Hope felt alarmed despite herself.
"About Ned—poor Ned."
Hope shook her head, unable to speak.
"He died three months ago," said Mary simply.
"Ah!" said Hope sharply, and sat down, feeling strangely befooled, played with, and weak. "If I had known! So it was all for nothing!"
But she did not explain under Mary's gentle pressing; and they avoided the subject, with a little shiver.
Over Ned's death Hope was unable to define her true feelings—some sorrow, but only for the futility of his life and its going out.
There was, at least, no shameful sense of relief. She thought, with a shudder, of the essential brutality of the rigid system that tried to compel all unhappy creatures in like bonds to her own to look only to death for help. How it must corrode even the finest natures; and under what strange masks morality has been miscalled and defamed.
Well, she could give all her pity to herself now. What was it she had applied to Edgerton:
"Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives, And marriage, and death, and division, Make barren our lives."
Yes, marriage, too; for the married closed off their lives into a little walled garden, where more than two could hardly walk with comfort. Mary's garden would be very beautifully tended; it would probably include an orchid house. Mary herself, so dark and white and with her gold-grey eyes, would become such a setting; she had always been faintly exotic, hardily exotic, one might say. How well she would set off diamonds in that dusky hair of hers and on her quick white hands. Edgerton had chosen very well for himself. If it was he who chose! There was no disloyalty in that thought. Mary would not be meanly calculating, but she had a fine sense of the fitness of things.
"Yes," said Hope, when they had returned, after many pauses, to that topic, "you'll be quite a great lady now. Will you ask me to tea and rehabilitate me socially? What a joke!"
"I will," said Mary, her eyes sparkling. "You shall yet patronise the whole town, with my able assistance. You're a born devil, Hope, and the salt of the earth, and I love you. How soon will you come back to me? Do you return to New York?"
"I don't know yet what I'm going to do," said Hope.
"Mary, have you ever known what you were going to do?"
"Why—why—" said Mary thoughtfully, "no, not if you mean that literally. None of us do. We are not gods, you know?"
"Not even knowing good and evil?" asked Hope.
"Oh—good and evil!" Mary paused a long time. "It's not so simple as that, I don't think—you can't talk of it as if it were, say, sweet and sour! Maybe Adam and Eve did know good and evil after they ate the apple; but observe, they never explained the matter to anyone else. So might you 'if you could win to the Eden tree, where the four great rivers flow,' but you can't. No, we are not gods—and I must say, in this age, we ought to be! I can't think of a time in human history when every man and woman has been so carelessly entrusted with the charge of his own soul! It's rather a glorious experiment for humanity, but a little alarming."
"Is it?" asked Hope the radical. "Why should I be more alarmed at having charge of my own soul than at giving it in charge of someone else? If I don't know my right hand from my left, do I know enough to pick the guardian of my soul?"
"Oh, you... Shut up," said Mary candidly. "I wasn't talking to you; I was talking to that non-existent creature, the Average Woman. I know
you'll
upset my theoretical apple-cart as soon as I get it nicely filled with platitudes. Consider this, as an Average Woman, you'd never have been allowed to choose that guardian—the guardian would have been chosen ages before you were born—up to a century ago..."
"And my Good and Evil would have been as much a matter of chance as it ever could be now if I came down to flipping a nickel for decisions," Hope pointed out. "Only then I'd never have questioned results, which perhaps I might now, and so may learn something."
"My dear," said Mary, "you'd have benefited by the wisdom of the ages, embodied in law and custom."
"Fine," said Hope, "if nothing but wisdom were embodied in law and custom."
"Ah, what are we talking about?" said Mary. "You are only trying to tell me you're grown up. And I knew it, the moment I looked at you a second time. And that is all you mean to tell me. Isn't it? No, I am not asking. Plague take her; who is there?"
Mrs. Dupont it was; the news of Mary's engagement was still fresh, and she had been deluged with callers. Her surprise at seeing Hope was slightly ludicrous, since it was evident she was uncertain how great a degree of cordiality was called for. After she had congratulated Mary in a moment of confusion, she turned affably to Hope and asked:
"You have been married, too, haven't you, since we met?"
"Oh, once or twice," said Hope, and dropped her eyes demurely.
Mary coughed slightly, and with extreme gravity said:
"What've you done with them all?"
"Poisoned them," said Hope lugubriously. "Awful nuisance, don't you think? They do get under foot so."
To her surprise, Mary turned suddenly to Mrs. Dupont, with that touch of studied impulsiveness she could make so fetching, and dropped the little burlesque.
"Hope is a widow, Bessie," she said. "Perhaps you never heard that Ned Angell is dead? I knew you would be sorry. And you must congratulate Hope, not me—" smiling slightly. She went into details.
Here was something Mrs. Dupont could grasp; to Hope's great surprise, she found genuine sympathy, if not great comprehension of anything but material details, in this woman, with whom she had never been able to exchange a spontaneous word in the old days. There was something sincere about Mrs. Dupont, a certain
bonhomie.
Well, at least, she was one of those people who help one to appreciate and enjoy success.
"I shall have some gossip to carry about; I'll be very popular for a day or two," she said in parting. ''Sorry you're not in town long enough to come over and see me. I shall insist on it when you return. I'm going to see Cora now."
"And tell her," added Mary. "She'll thank you."
They laughed, to the bewilderment of Hope, to whom Mary said later:
"You're even with Cora, anyway. She weighs quite two hundred and fifty now."
"She never did anything to me," said Hope.
Mary shook her head hopelessly.
"But at least," she said, "you're humanised. You'll never have right sense, of course, but you can go through the motions. You made Mrs. Dupont like you! But you'll never, never be an Average Woman. What a pity!"
CHAPTER XXIX
NO, she did not yet know what she was going to do, not even on a day in Autumn when her visit home had extended to several months. It was to find out, if possible, that she was stretched out quite by herself, prone in the grass a half-mile from the new ranch-house her father had built since her last visit home, arraigning her soul and weighing her life.
She had gone out to meet life as a brave adventure, and life had taken her captive and led her blindfold., through strange and devious ways, here to her starting point. She, that would have, her will, saw now that life made beggars of the best of us, and that we can do no more than ask graciously, saving our pride so as not to cry for things denied, or, worse, for things granted. If there was any sense in it at all, any meaning, beyond that, it was past her understanding. Ready-made explanations for bargain-counter needs one found at every street corner, but she could not make them fit her individual soul, and it stood naked before her to be judged. So, seeing it on the one side and the great universe on the other, she felt she could only laugh at the disparity, and let it go in search of a better arbiter. Never having judged another, she could not do it for herself.
Having made nothing of it all, save amazement at the absurdity of her own actions and wonder at the inevitableness of them, she opened the gates of memory to all she had striven to forget for sanity's sake. Being dead, Ned's memory took on a seeming of unreality; in a sense, he had never been. Oddly, she could find no great regret for anything. "Things are as they must be," she remembered the words gropingly, "and will be brought to their destined end."
So her destiny awaited her still. The days when desire should fail were far from her.
Nay, destiny awaited no one, but stood always by one's side, so that one went neither to it nor from it, but with it. It walked with her here, on his wide stretch of golden grassy plain, as it had gone with her through the thronged streets and brought her to the one among five million she should choose to love. That was fatalism, perhaps; but a healthy fatalism; it avoided brooding, and invested all things with a quality and significance beyond their intrinsic value. As it had brought Nick to her, across the world, before either of them was awake to its purpose, and let them drift again for years until they had grown to understanding, when they were led again to look on each other's faces, so it had taken him from her.
By what agency? She could think of it now without that surge of revolt, of wild demanding, which made reason a mockery; though she loved him no less. That he was dead she still would not believe. He had merely gone away—something much less explicable—to Chicago? to Europe?
The impossibility of his having done both these things smote her on a sudden. So positively had she been told, her dazed mind at the time actually accepted one statement as reinforcing the other. Now they made each other absurd. There had been something, something unexpected, like that episode which threatened so menacingly down at the shore, and dissolved into nothing when confronted boldly. A word, a look, might have removed it, if she but knew the cause. And after all, she had not fought, as she promised she would. She had left it all, and gone away weeping, like a child in a dark room. Destiny, if it had a sense of humour, might be chuckling sardonically now over her easy discomfiture. Women, she thought disgustedly, gave destiny good cause to laugh. They never did fight back; they simply sat down and cried foolishly over any misadventure. A man got up and went on. When women learned to do that, to throw away their luxury of despair, to cease taking morbid pride in their own fragility, they might also come near finding themselves liberated from many more palpable inequalities. They needed the lesson of cheerful old Sir John of the ballad: "I am a little hurt, but I am not slain!"
Well, it was time to "arise and fight again." She obeyed the thought literally, and flung out her arms in a gesture of gladness. She would go back and claim from her glittering city some of its promise, go on with her life, still follow the unknown as her father had. Find Nick, if she could. But if that might never be, she saw her life enriched through him still.
She might have asked Edgerton to help her find him, before she left New York. He would have, but it would have struck her as a little unkind, because of the things she did not know. How little we ever know!
In the light, crystalline air her vision was sharpened like her wits. Very far away, so far that not the faintest murmur of sound came to her from its thunderous progress, she saw the express from the East crawling across the face of the prairie, a line of black with wavering plumes of smoke floating pridefully backward. There was a station, a mere water-tower garnished with a stately name borrowed from overseas, within sight of the hill above the ranch-house. That was not very near, for things within sight are not near on the prairies. The sight of the train roused her to activity by an unconscious sympathy; she began walking homeward, to meet it— though with no such thought. But to see her going steadily, with that quick light step under which the grass bent and sprang again as to a small wind, one would have thought she knew the train was bringing her something. Her face was eager, her eyes alight. But again, if she had known, she would have sped like Atalanta. For now Destiny, having wearied perhaps of attending her wilful, stumbling course, was bringing her heart's desire to her.
Aboard the train, Nick, sighting the water-tower, saw instead the gates of Paradise. And whether he really won to them or not, there are few who may even see them. For Hope, she had always said, and still maintained, that the earth was very good, and Paradise could wait its turn.
THE END