Chapter XVI

Closing the door, Margaret opened her trunk and from the very bottom produced a slender bunch of letters. She lit the small metal lamp and placed it on the wicker chair, kneeling beside it with an unreasoning sense that there was a fitness in the posture. Her fingers trembled as she touched the black ribbon which held the letters, and she stayed herself, swaying against a chair, as she unknotted it. There were a few folded sheets of paper--pencilled notes left for her--a telegram or two, and four letters. Before she read the first letter, she laid it against her face, lovingly, as though it were a sentient thing. She read them one by one very slowly, sometimes smiling faintly with a childish trembling of the lips--smiles that were followed quickly by tears which gathered in her great eyes and rolled down her cheeks. When she had finished reading the last one, she made a little pile of them. Then, taking from her trunk writing paper, ink and pen, she laid them upon the floor beside the pile of letters and stretched herself full length upon the heavy rug. As she lay leaning upon her elbows, with eyes gazing straight before her, she looked like some desolate, wind-broken reed over which the storm had passed. She wrote slowly, with careful fingers, forming her letters with almost laborious precision, like a little child who writes for a special and fond eye:

“My Beloved: Please forgive me. Please try to forget how cruel I was
and think kindly of me. I have been so wretched. All through the
slow days since I went away, I have longed so for you. All the many
dark nights I have dreamed of you and cried for you. If you could
only know now while you are suffering so. If you could only know
how I longed for you all that time, I would not suffer so now. I
want so much to tell you. I want to tell you that I love you every
way and all ways. I loved you this way all the time, only I didn’t
know it, and I wanted to love you the way I know I do now. I must
have been mad, I think. I was so selfish and so cruel, and I thought
I was trying to be so good. I could die when I think that it was I
who brought all this suffering upon you. To think that you might
have been killed and that I might never have been able to tell you!
Richard, I have learned what love is. Do other women ever have to
learn it as hardly, I wonder?

“Do you know, it was not until to-day that I knew you were here--that
you were hurt? And yet we came here on the same train together. If
God had let me know it then, I think I should have died on that long,
terrible journey. You did not know what you were saying, and I heard
you call ‘Ardee! Ardee!’ just as you used to at the beach. That cry
reached out of the dark and took hold of my heart as though it were
an invisible hand drawing me to you.

“And I had been running away from you when I came--running away from
you and myself. I knew you meant to stay at Warne and see me again.
And I knew if I saw you again, I could not struggle any longer--you
were so strong. And you were right, too; I know that now, dear.

“The last time I met you in the field, my heart leaped to tell you
‘yes.’ I was so hungry--hungry--hungry for you. And I was afraid of
my own self. I distrusted my own heart, but it was only because I
wanted to love you with my soul--with the other side of me--the side
that I did not know, that I could not feel sure you filled. Oh, you
must have thought me unnatural, abnormal, hateful. Dear, such doubts
come to women, and they are terrible things. There is more of the
elemental in men. The finer--the further passion of love they know,
when women fail to grasp it. We have to learn it--it is one of the
lessons which men teach us. When my heart was so full of doubt, I
made up my mind to crucify my bodily sensibilities. It seemed to me
that I must let my soul come uppermost.

“Don’t you remember how I never could bear to look at your collie
that was sick, and how terribly ill I got when I tried to tie up your
hand the day you cut it? All through my life, I have never been able
to look on suffering or pain. I always used to avoid it or shirk it.
When I got to thinking, at Warne, of my own soul, it seemed to me
that I had been unwomanly and selfish, cruelly, heartlessly selfish,
and that I had dwarfed that soul that I must make grow again.

“So I came down here.

“All along I have had such a horror of this place. I could not
overcome it. Every hour was full of misery.

“To-day I went through the wards and I found you.

“Dearest, I am so happy and I am so miserable--miserable because
I have found you suffering. Every moment is a long agony to me.
And happy because I have found myself. My soul and I are friends
again. Some wonderful miracle was worked for me to-day, and it is
so brilliant, so wonderful, that it has left no room in my mind for
anything else.

“It was not the old familiar face that I saw against the pillows
to-night. It was not the old dear voice that called to me. It was not
the old Daunt. The wavy hair is gone, and there is no color in your
cheeks. But, dear, when I saw your poor face all drawn and your lips
all cracked with fever, my heart came up in my throat so that I could
not breathe. I wanted to kiss your face, your hands. I wanted to kiss
even the bandages that were around your head. I wanted to put my arms
around you. I felt strong enough to keep anything from you--even
death. All in a moment it seemed to me that I was your mother,
and you were my little child who was sick. And yet so much more
so--infinitely much more than that. It came to me then like a flash,
how wrong--wickedly wrong I had been. Everything disappeared but you
and me. It was not your body that I loved. It was not the body that
that broken thing had been that I loved, but it was you--_you_, the
inner something for whose sake I had loved the Richard Daunt that I
knew.

“You could not speak to me. You did not know that I was there. You
could not plead with me, but my own self pleaded. You’ll never have
to beg me to stay or go with you again. You need me now--only I know
how much. You cannot even know that I am near you, that I am talking
to you, that I am telling you all about it. I know that you will
never see this letter, and yet somehow it eases my heart a little to
write it. I have read over all the letters that you have sent me,
and they are such brave, such true letters. I understand them now.
They have been read and cried over a great many times since you wrote
them.

“I am waiting now every day, every hour when I can tell you all this
with my own lips, and when your dear eyes will open again and smile
up into mine with the old boyish smile--and when you will put your
arms around my neck and tell me that you know all about it, and that
you forgive me.”

Her tears had been dropping fast upon the page, and she stopped from time to time to wipe them with the draping meshes of her loose, rust-colored hair. She did not even turn as she heard a hand at the door.

“Why, Margaret!” said Lois, “it is two o’clock in the morning, and I have just finished my last round. Come, child, you must go to bed at once. I see that I have got to be a stern chaperon. What! writing?”

“It is a letter,” said Margaret. “I have just finished it.” She lifted the tongs and poked the fire-logs until there was a crackling blaze, then she gathered up the loose ink-stained sheets carefully, and, leaning forward, laid them in a square white heap upon the red embers. The flame sprang up and around them, reaching for them voraciously. And Lois, seeing the action, but making no comment, came and sat down on the rug beside Margaret, and wistfully and tenderly drew the brown, bowed head into her sisterly arms.