Part 45 (1/2)

A BURST OF SUNLIGHT.

June 8.

They say the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. It was so with me.

My troubles grew too great to bear, then vanished in an hour.

Fate couldn't forever frown. I knew there must be help; some hand outstretched in a pitiless world.

Really I am almost happy, for in the most unexpected and yet the most natural fas.h.i.+on, my perplexities have vanished; and I believe that my life will not be, after all, a failure.

The hour before the dawn was more than dark. It was dreary. In the morning I did not care to go out, and no one came except one strange man who besieged the door--there have been many such here recently, dunning and dunning and dunning, until my patience was worn to shreds. This was a decent-looking fellow with a thin face, a mustache dyed black and a carefully unkeen expression that noticed everything.

”Miss Wins.h.i.+p?” he said, and upon my acknowledging the name, he placed a paper in my hands and went away. I was so relieved because he said nothing about wanting ”a little money on account;” he wasn't even coa.r.s.ely insolent, like so many of them. He did look surprised at my appearance; so surprised that his explanation of his errand died away into an unintelligible murmur. But I wasn't curious about it.

I tried to read a newspaper, only to gather from some headlines that Strathay and his cousin were pa.s.sengers by an out-going steams.h.i.+p. I wonder if it was all money, money, that kept him from me--or was it more than half the fear of beauty?

I couldn't read anything else, not even a note from Mrs. Marmaduke; it was dated from her country place; she hoped to see me--”in the autumn!” Peggy is in Europe; the General's going if she's not gone already. ”May see you at the wedding of that odd Miss Bryant,” ran her last brusque message. ”I begged an invitation; really I like her. But the chances are against my being here.”

All gone, I thought; my last hope, all my friends.

There was a note from Mrs. Baker; I compelled myself to glance at that, and when I had done so, seized my hat and veil. She would call, it said, that afternoon!

With no thought but of escape, I left the house; I cared not where I went, nor what I did. I knew the Judge had sent Aunt Frank to pry into my troubles; I walked with feverish haste, I would have liked to fly to avoid her. My hands shook.

Oh, I was wretched!

As I pa.s.sed the Park, I saw that spring had leaped to summer and the trees waved fresh, green branches in the air--just such trees as John and I walked under, less than a year ago, making great plans for a golden future; and a golden future there must be, but I had then no hope of it, no joy in life, no happiness even in my beauty. One only thought spurred me on, to forget past, present and future; to buy forgetfulness by any caprice; to win diversion by any adventure.

After some time I saw that I was in a side street whose number seemed familiar; self-searching at last recalled to me that on this street lived two rival faith healers, about whose lively compet.i.tion for clients Cadge had once told us girls a funny story.

Could there have come to my thought some hope of finding rest from sorrow in the leading of another mind? Impossible to say. I was near insanity, I think. I chose the nearer pract.i.tioner and rang the bell.

I can smile now at memory of the stuffy little parlour into which I was ushered, but I did not smile then at it, nor at the middle-aged woman who received me with a set smile of stereotyped placidity. Her name, I think, was Mallard.

”Have you a conviction of disease, my daughter?” she asked, in a low voice with a caressing overtone gurgling in its cadences. ”You look as radiant as the morn. You should not think ill.”

”I am not ill,” I replied; ”but the world is harsh.”

”The world is the expression of our sense life to the spirit,” she cooed.

”We do not live or die, but we pa.s.s through the phenomena. Through the purifying of our thoughts we will gradually become more and more ethereal until we are translated.”

I felt that momentary s.h.i.+ver that folk tales tells us is caused by some one walking over our graves.

”I'm in no haste to be translated,” I said.

”No one need be translated until she is ready--unless she has enemies. Are you suffering from the errors of others? Has any one felt fear for you?

That would account for what the world calls unhappiness. Is some one trying to influence your subjective state?”