Fate Knocks at the Door Part 40

The man perceived that he had hurt her mortally; that his meaning to her had vanished. He arose to approach her, but a gesture of her hand made him sink again into the low chair. He seemed trying to realize that she had pa.s.sed beyond him, indeed,--trying to realize what it would mean to him.... Pitiful, boyish and unfinished, he struggled to adjust his own life to her going--and watched her bind her hair.

Every movement of the conflict held a globe of meaning for the son of this woman, a third of a century afterward. Her tragedy had marked it imperishably upon the tissue of his life, with Beethoven's _Andante_ movement for the key. Strains of it may have come to that music-room with these towering emotions.... More than this Andrew Bedient saw the sources of his own heritage! From another aspect he viewed the deathlessness of time, the beauty of physical death, the radiance of the future, the immortality of love. It was revealed how all the agony of the world arises from the knitting together of soul and flesh, the evolving of soul through flesh. Spirit is given birth in flesh--and birth is pain. Death is the ecstasy of the grown spirit. Spirit prospers alone through giving, and greatly through the giving of love.

Spirit s.h.i.+nes star-like in the giving of woman--in the fineness and fullness which she _loves_ into her children, binding glory upon them with her dreams. Thus is expressed her greatness; thus women are nearest the sources of spirit; thus they fulfill the first meaning of life on earth. And the woman who preserves the n.o.bility of her conception of Motherhood--against the anguish of a broken heart and a destroyed love--G.o.d sends his Angels to sustain her!...

Bedient was aroused at last in the silence and in the dark.... He knelt in a pa.s.sion of tribute to his immortal heroine, whose spirit had danced with him above the flesh and the world. He saw again that he was ordained to look within for the woman; that his heart was his mother's heart; his spirit, her spirit--this twain one in loving and giving.

IV

NEW YORK

_Allegro Finale_

THIRTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

THE GREAT PRINCE HOUSE

There were calms and conquests on the brow of Vina Nettleton. She had been in Nantucket one whole day alone, before David Cairns came. Such a day availeth much, but she shuddered a little at the joy she took in the prospect of his coming. Vina had learned what his absence meant a month before, when three entire days elapsed without a call from Cairns at the studio. He had been away on a certain happiness venture....

There had been no word yet, but here, Nantucket--Vina breathed deeply at the name. Almost every day their thoughts had turned a sentence upon this meeting.... He stepped forth from the little steamer late in the afternoon in a brisk proprietory fas.h.i.+on, but the treasures of boyhood were s.h.i.+ning in his eyes; and he searched her face deeply, as if to detect if mortal illness had begun its work amid the terrible uncertainties of separation.

"Do you remember, at first, I was to find you down among the wharves with _Moby d.i.c.k_?" she said.

"To-morrow morning--for that," he replied.

She showed him the way to his hotel, and the house where she was a guest. But they supped together.

... They walked in Lily Lane in the dusk.

"It's too dark to see the Prince Gardens," she told him. "They're the finest on the Island, and the house is the finest in Lily Lane....

There doesn't seem to be a light. I wonder if the old sisters are gone?... The Princes were a great family here years and years ago, but gradually they died out and dwindled away, until last summer there were only two old maiden-aunts left--lovely, low-voiced old gentlewomen, whom it was so hard to _pay_ for their flowers. But they lived from their gardens and now _they're_ gone, it seems. I must ask to-morrow what has become of them. And yet, the gardens are kept up. Can you see the great house back in the shadows among the trees?"

Cairns believed he could make out something like the contour of a house in denser shadow.

"The fragrance of the gardens is lovelier than ever," Vina went on, "and listen to the great trees whispering back to the sea!"

They walked along the sh.o.r.e, and stared across toward Spain, and talked long of Beth and Bedient.... And once Vina stretched out her arms oversea, and said:

"Oh, I feel so strange and wonderful!"

Cairns started to speak, but forbore....

They met early in the morning, down upon the deserted water-front. An hour of drifting brought them back to Lily Lane. There was a virginal pallor in the sunlight, different from the ruddy summer of the Mainland, as the honey of April is paler and sweeter than the heartier essence of July flowerings. The wind breathed of a hundred years ago, and the sublime patience of the women who hurried down Lily Lane (faded but mystic eyes that lost themselves oversea through thousand-day voyages), to welcome their knight-errants, bearing home the marrow of leviathans....

"The gardens are kept up," Vina said, standing on the walk, before the Prince house. "Perhaps the old sisters are still there, and we may get some flowers from them----"

"I think, if you'll let me walk ahead and talk with the gardener,"

Cairns said, "we'll be allowed to go in--at least, for some flowers."

She laughed at the audacity of a stranger in Nantucket, but bade him try.

"If you fail, it's my turn," she added.

Cairns seemed to have little trouble in negotiating with the gardener, and presently beckoned.

"I've done very well for a stranger," he whispered. "We're to have the flowers. More than that, we are to look through the house. The sisters are away----"

"David----"

"But I told him who you were--about your friends and relatives in Nan--here.... I a.s.sure you, he believes we have never set foot out of New England."

There was a sweet seasoning in the house; decades of flowers and winds, spare living, gentle voices and infallible cleanliness--that perfumed texture which years of fineness alone can bring to a life or to a house.

"See, the table is set for two!" Vina whispered, "as if the sisters were to be back for dinner. Everything is just as they left it."

They moved about the front rooms, filled with trophies from the deep, a Nantucketer's treasures--bits of pottery from China, weavings from the Indies, lacquers from j.a.pan--over all, spicy reminders of far archipelagoes, and the clean fragrance of cedar.

On the mantel in the parlor stood a full-rigged s.h.i.+p, a whaling-s.h.i.+p, with her trying-house and small-boats--a full s.h.i.+p, homeward bound....

The gardener had left them to their own ways.

"That's because he knows your _folks_," Cairns said softly. "Shall we look upstairs?"

"Oh, do you think we'd better?"

"Don't you want to?"

"Yes----"

"It isn't a liberty--when we have the proper spirit."

"Isn't it, David?" ... With hushed voices and light steps, they pa.s.sed up and through the sunny rooms. Fresh flowers everywhere, and one bright room with two small white beds.

"The maiden-aunts," Cairns said hoa.r.s.ely.

At length, he held open for her to enter, the door of the great front room, filled with Northern brightness from a skylight of modern proportions.

"Why, David," she whispered raptly, "it's like a studio! It _is_ a studio!"

And then she saw the scaffoldings, the ladders and panels which do not belong to a painter.

She faced him....

The room was filled with adoration that enchanted the light. The branches of the trees about the lower windows, softly harped the sound of the sea ... Vina's hands were pressed strangely to her breast, as she crossed to an open window.... And there she stood, face averted, and not moving her hands, until she felt him near.