Part 25 (1/2)

He laughed again--and Madison joined him in the laugh, slapping him a cordial good-by on the shoulder.

Madison started on once more--but now his progress was slow, frequently interrupted, for he stopped a score of times to chat and exchange a few words with those whom he pa.s.sed on the road. There were cheery faces everywhere--even those of the sufferers who straggled out along the road coming back from the Patriarch's cottage. It was a cheery afternoon, warm and balmy and bright--everything was cheery. The farmers, their vocations for the moment changed, waved their whips at him and shouted friendly pleasantries as they drove by with those who were unable to make the trip from the Patriarch's unaided.

Madison began to experience a strange, exhilarating sense of uplift upon him, a sort of rather commendatory and gratified feeling with himself.

Marvin had hit it pretty nearly right with his ”clean-wholesomeness”

idea--it kind of made one feel good to be a part of it. Madison, for the time being, relegated Helena and his immediate mission to a secondary place in his thoughts.

Young girls, young men, middle-aged men, elderly women, all ages of both s.e.xes he pa.s.sed as he went along; some alone, some in couples, some in little groups, some on crutches, some in wheel-chairs, some walking without extraneous aid--he had turned into the woods now, and he could see them strewn out all along the wagon track under the cool, interlacing branches overhead.

Now he stepped aside to let a wagon pa.s.s him, and answered the farmer's call and the smile of the occupants in kind; now some one stopped to tell him again the story of the afternoon--there had been cures that day and the Patriarch had come amongst them. Some laughed, some sang a little, softly, to themselves--all smiled--all spoke in glad, hopeful words, clean words--there seemed no base thought in any mind, only that cleanness, that wholesomeness that had so appealed to Marvin--that somehow Madison found he was taking a delight in responding to, and, because it afforded him whimsical pleasure, chose to pretend that he was quite a genuine exponent of it himself.

He reached the end of the wagon track, and paused involuntarily on the edge of the Patriarch's lawn as he came out from the trees. Like low, lulling music came the distant, mellowed noise of waters, the breaking surf. And the cottage was a bower of green now, clothed in ivy and vine--upon the trellises the early roses were budding--fragrance of growing things blended with the salt, invigorating breeze from the ocean. And upon the lawn, flanked with its st.u.r.dy maples, all in leaf, that toned the suns.h.i.+ne in soft-falling shadows, stood, or sat, or reclined on cots, the supplicants who still tarried though the Patriarch had gone. And now one came reverently out of the cottage door from that room that was never closed; now another went in--and still another.

Madison smiled suddenly, broadly, with immense satisfaction and contentment--and then his eyes fixed quite as suddenly on the single-seated buggy that was coming toward him on the driveway across the lawn. That was Mamie Rodgers driving--and that was Helena beside her.

Madison recalled instantly the object of his visit--and instantly he whistled a rather surprised little whistle under his breath. How alluringly Helena's brown hair coiled in wavy wealth upon her head; there wasn't any need of rouge for color in the oval face; the dark eyes were soft and deep and glorious; and she sat there in a little white muslin frock as dainty as a medallion from a master's brush.

”Say,” said Madison to himself, ”say, I never quite got it before. Say, she's--she's lovely--and that's my Helena. It's no wonder Thornton stared at her that day we touched him for the fifty, and”--suddenly--”d.a.m.n Thornton!”

But the buggy was beside him now, and he lifted his hat as Mamie Rodgers pulled up the horse.

”Good afternoon, Miss Rodgers,” he said. ”Good afternoon, Miss Vail--how is the Patriarch to-day?”

”He is very well, thank you,” Helena answered--and being custodian of the whip brushed a fly off the horse's flank.

”I was just coming out to pay you a little visit,” remarked Madison, trying to catch her eye.

”Oh, I'm _so_ sorry!” said Helena sweetly, still busy with the fly.

”Mamie is going to take me for a drive--and afterwards we are going to her house for tea.”

”Oh!” said Madison, a little blankly.

Helena smiled at him, nodded, and touched the horse with the whip--and then she leaned suddenly out toward him, as the buggy started forward.

”Oh, Mr. Madison,” she called, ”I forgot to tell you! I had a letter from Mr. Thornton to-day--and he's coming back to-morrow.”

--XVII--

IN WHICH HELENA TAKES A RIDE

The wind kissed Helena's face, bringing dainty color to her cheeks, tossing truant wisps of hair this way and that, as the car swept onward.

But she sat strangely silent now beside Thornton at the steering wheel.

It seemed to her that she was living, not her own life, not life as she had known and looked upon it in the years before, but living, as it were, in a strange, suspended state that was neither real nor unreal, as in a dream that led her, now through cool, deep forests, beside clear, sparkling streams where all was a great peace and the soul was at rest, serene, untroubled, now into desolate places where misery had its birth and shame was, where there was fear, and the mind stood staggered and appalled and lost and knew not how to guide her that she might flee from it all.

At moments most unexpected, as now when motoring with Thornton in the car that he had brought back with him on, his return to Needley, when laughing at the Flopper's determined pursuit of Mamie Rodgers, when engaged in the homely, practical details of housekeeping about the cottage, there came flas.h.i.+ng suddenly upon her the picture of Mrs.

Thornton lying on the bra.s.s bed in the car compartment that night, every line of the pale, gentle face as vivid, as actual as though it were once more before her in reality, and in her ears rang again, stabbing her with their unmeant condemnation, those words of sweetness, love and purity that held her up to gaze upon herself in ghastly, terrifying mockery.