Told in a French Garden Part 7

The realizing sense of departed years had reached her heart at last, and the shock was terrible. With a violent effort she recovered herself. But the firm step, the fearless, hopeful face with which she had approached the coffin of her dead lover were very different from the blind manner in which she stumbled back to his bier, and the hand which a second time raised the lantern trembled so that its wavering light shed an added weirdness on the still face, so strange to her eyes, and stranger still to her heart.

He had been a young man when they parted. To her he had remained young. Now the hair about the brows was thin and white, the drooping mustache that entirely concealed the mouth was grizzled; lines furrowed the forehead, outlined the sunken eyes, and gave an added thinness to the nostrils. She bent once more over the face, to her only a strange cold mask. A painful fascination held her for several minutes, forcing her to mark how love, that had kept her young, proud, content in its very existence, had sapped his life, and doubled his years.

The realization bent her slender figure under a load of self-reproach and self-mistrust. She drooped lower and lower above the sad, dead face until she slid to the ground beside him. Heavy tearless sobs shook her slight frame as it stretched its length beside the dead love and the dead dream. The ideal so long treasured in her soul had lost its reality. The present had wiped out the past as a sponge wipes off a slate.

If she had but heeded his warning, and refrained from coming until later, she would have escaped making a stranger of him forever. Now the sad, aged face, the dead, strange face which she had seen but five minutes before, had completely obscured in her memory the long-loved, young face that had been with her all these years. The spirit whose consoling presence she had thought to feel upholding her at this moment made no sign. She was alone in the world, bereft of her one supporting ideal, alone beside the dead body of one who was a stranger alike to her sight and her emotions; alone at night in an isolation as unexpected as it was terrible to her, and which chilled her senses as if it had come to oppress her forever.

The shadows which she had not noticed before, the dark corners of the tomb, the motionless gleam of the moon as it fell through the open door, and laid silently on the floor like light stretched dead, the low rustle of the wind as if Nature restlessly moved in her sleep, came suddenly upon her, and brought her--fear. She held her breath as she stilled her sobs to realize that she alone lived in this city of the Dead. The chill of fright crept along the surface of her body, which still vibrated with her storm of grief.

She seemed paralyzed. She dared not move.

Every sense rallied to her ears in dread.

Suddenly she heard her name breathed: "Margaret!"

It was whispered in a voice once so familiar to her ears, a voice that used to say, "Madge."

She raised herself on her elbow.

She dared not answer.

She hardly dared breathe.

She was afraid in every sense, and yet she hungered for another sound of that loved voice. Every hour of its banishment was regretted at that moment. There seemed no future without it.

Every nerve listened.

At first she heard nothing but the restless moving of the air, which merely emphasized her loneliness, then she caught the pulsation of slow regular breathing.

She started to her feet.

She s.n.a.t.c.hed up the lantern and quickly mounted to the bier. She looked sharply down into the dead face.

Silent, with its white hair, and worn lines, it rested on its white pillows.

No sound came from the cold still lips.

Yet, while her eyes were riveted on them, once more the longed-for voice breathed her name. "Margaret!"

It came from behind her.

She turned quickly.

There in the moonlit doorway, with a sad, compa.s.sionate smile on his strong, young face--as if it were yesterday they had parted--stood the man she remembered so well.

Her bewildered eyes turned from the silent, unfamiliar face among the satin cus.h.i.+ons, to the living face in the moonlight,--the young, brown eyes, the short, brown hair falling forward over the left temple, the erect, elastic figure, the strong loving hands stretching out to her.

She was so tired, so heart sick, so full of longing for the love she had lost.

"Felix," she sobbed, and, blindly groping to reach what she feared was a hallucination, she stumbled down the steps, and was caught up in the arms flung wide to catch her, and which folded about her as if forever. She sighed his name again, upon the pa.s.sionate young lips which had inherited the great love she had put aside so long before.

As the last words died away, the Critic drew himself up and laughed.

He had told the story very dramatically, reading the letter from the envelope he had called a "property," and he had told it well.

The laugh broke the spell, and the Doctor echoed it heartily.

"All right, old man," said the Critic, "you owed me that laugh. You're welcome."

"I was only thinking," said the Doctor, his face still on a broad grin, "that we have always thought you ought to have been a novelist, and now we know at last just what kind of a novelist you would have been."

"Don't you believe it," said the Critic, "That was only improvisatore--that's no sample."

"Ho, ho! I'll bet you anything that the ma.n.u.script is up in your trunk, and that you have been committing it to memory ever since this idea was proposed," said the Doctor, still laughing.

"No, _that_ I deny," replied the Critic, "but as I am no _poseur_, I will own that I wrote it years ago, and rewrote it so often that I never could forget it. I'll confess more than that, the story has been 'declined with thanks' by every decent magazine in the States and in England. Now perhaps some one will tell me why."

"I don't know the answer," said the Youngster, seriously, "unless it is 'why not?'"

"I shouldn't wonder if it were sentimental twaddle," sighed the Journalist, "but I don't _know_."

"I noticed," expostulated the Critic, "that you all listened, enthralled."

"Oh," replied the Doctor, "that was a tribute to your personal charm.

You did it very well."

"Exactly," said the Critic, "if editors would let me read them my stories, I could sell them like hot cakes. I never believed that Homer would have lived as long as he has, if he had not made the reputation of his tales by singing them centuries before any one tried to read them. Now no one _dares_ to say they bore him. The reading public, and the editors who cater to it, are just like some stupid theatrical managers I know of, who will never let an author read a play to them for fear that he may give the play some charm that the fool theatrical man might not have felt from mere type-written words on white or yellow paper. By Jove, I know the case of a manager who once bought the option on a foreign play from a scenario provided by a clever friend of mine--and paid a stiff price for it, too, and when he got the ma.n.u.script wrote to the chap who did the scenario--'Play dashety-dashed rot. If it had been as good as your scenario, it would have gone.' And, what is more, he sacrificed the tidy five thousand he had paid, and let his option slide. Now, when the fellow who did the scenario wrote: 'If you found anything in the scenario that you did not discover in the play, it is because I gave you the effect it would have behind the footlights, which you have not the imagination to see in the printed words,' the Manager only replied 'You are a nice chap.

I like you very much, but you are a blanketty-blanketty fool.'"

"Which was right?" asked the Journalist.

"The scenario man."

"How do you know?"

"How do I know? Why simply because the play was produced later--ran five years, and drew a couple of million dollars. That's how I know."

"By cricky," exclaimed the Youngster, "I believe he thinks his story could earn a million if it had a chance."

"I don't say 'no,'" said the Critic, yawning, "but it will never get a chance. I burned the ma.n.u.script this morning, and now being delivered of it, I have no more interest in it than a sparrow has in her last year's offspring."

"The trouble with you is that you haven't any patience, any staying power. That ought to have been a three volume novel. We would have heard all about their first meeting, their first love, their separation, his marriage, her _debuts_, etc., etc.," declared the Journalist.

"Oh, thunder," said the Doctor. "I think there was quite enough of it.

Don't throw anything at me--I liked it--I liked it! Only I'm sorry she died."

"So am I," said the Critic. "That really hurt me."