"I'm all right," he said voicelessly. "Bad--bad cold!"

He shut his eyes, and with them shut, added in a whisper: "Sweet, sweet woman, Martie! Remember that day--in Pittsville--when you had on--your brother's--coat? Mabel--and old Jesse--!"

Heavenly tears rushed to her eyes; she felt the yielding of her frozen heart. She caught his hand to her lips, bowing her face over it.

"Ah, Wallace dear! We were happy then! We'll go back--back to that time--and we'll start fresh!"

A long silence. Then he opened his eyes, found her, with a start, as if he had not been quite sure what those opening eyes would see, and smiled sleepily.

"I'll make it--up to you, Martie!" he said heavily She had her arms about him as he sank into unnatural sleep. At eight, whispering in the kitchen with John, who had come for Teddy, she said that Wallie was better; and busy with coffee and toast for Miss Swann, she began to plan for Costa Rica. Beaten, crushed, purified by fire, healed by tears, she was ready for life again.

But that was not to be. Wallace was dead, and those who gathered about Martie wondered that she wept for her husband more than for her child.

Wept for the wasted life, perhaps, and for the needless suffering and sorrow. But even in the first hours of her widowhood Martie's heart knew a deep and pa.s.sionate relief. Vague and menacing as was the future, stretching before her, she knew that she would never wish Wallace back.

BOOK III

CHAPTER I

There were times when Martie found it difficult to believe that she had ever been away from Monroe at all; evenings, when she and Lydia sat talking in the shabby sitting room of the old house; or mornings when she fed the chickens in the soft fog under the willow trees of the yard. Len and Sally were married and gone, dear Ma was gone, and Belle had married, too; a tall gaunt woman called Pauline was in her place.

But these things might all have transpired without touching Martie's own life directly. She might still, in many ways, have been the dreaming, ambitious, helpless girl of seven years ago. Sometimes the realization of all she had endured came to her with an odd sense of shock. She would glance down at her thin hand, in its black cuff, and fall into deep musing, her face grave and weary. Or she would call Teddy from his play, and hold his warm little body close, staring at him with a look that always made the child uneasy. Third Avenue, barred with sun and shade, in the early summer mornings; Broadway on a snowy winter afternoon with the theatre crowd streaming up and down, spring and babies taking possession of the parks--were these all a dream?

No; she had gained something in the hard years; she saw that more and more. Her very widowhood to Monroe had the stamp of absolute respectability. Even Pa was changed toward her; or was it that she was changed toward him? However caused, in their relationship there was a fundamental change.

Pa had been a figure of power and tyranny seven years ago. Now he seemed to Martie only an unreasonable, unattractive old man, thwarted in his old age in everything his heart desired. Lydia was still tremblingly filial in her att.i.tude toward Pa, but Martie at once a.s.sumed the maternal. She scolded him, listened to him, and dictated to him, and he liked it. Martie had never loved him as Lydia did; she had defied and disobeyed and deserted him, yet he transferred his allegiance to her now, and clung to her helplessly.

He liked to have her walk down to his office beside him in the mornings, in her plain black. While they walked he pointed out various pieces of property, and told her how cheaply they had been sold forty years ago. The whole post-office block had gone for seven hundred dollars, the hotel site had been Mason's cow-yard! Old man Sark had lived there, and had refused to put black on his house when Lincoln was a.s.sa.s.sinated.

"And didn't he go to jail for that, Pa?"

"Yes, ma'am, he did!"

"But YOU--"

"I was in jail, too." Malcolm Monroe would chuckle under his now gray moustache that was yellowed with tobacco stains. "Yes, sir, I rounded up some of the boys, the Twentyonesters, we called ourselves, and we led a riot 'round this town! The ringleaders were arrested, but that was merely a form--merely a form!"

"You must have been a terror, Pa."

"Well--well, I had a good deal of your grandmother's spirit! And I suppose they rather looked to me to set the pace--"

Smiling, they would go along in the sunlight, past the little homes where babies had been turned out into gra.s.sy yards, past the straggling stables and the smithy, and the fire-house, and the office of the weekly Zeus. There was more than one garage in Monroe now and the squared noses of Ford cars were at home everywhere. Mallon's Hardware Emporium, the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store, still with its pillars of twisted handkerchiefs, Mason and White's--how familiar they were! And the old Bank, with its wide windows and double roller shades was familiar, too. Martie learned that the Bank had duly worn black a year or two ago for kindly old Colonel Frost; his name had been obliterated from the big window, and Clifford Frost was vice-president now.

"One death is two deaths, they say," Lydia had sighed, telling Martie of the Colonel's death. "You know Cliff's wife died only two months before his father did. That was a terrible thing! Her little girl was seven years old, and she was going to have another--"

When Martie, in the early afternoon of a warm sweet day on mid-February, had stepped from the train, with Teddy's little fingers held tight in hers, Sally's face, running over with tears and smiles, had been the first she found. Curiously changed, yet wonderfully familiar, the sisters had clung together, hardly knowing how to begin their friendship again after six long years. There were big things to say, but they said the little things. They talked about the trip and the warm weather that had brought the b.u.t.tercups so soon, and the case that had kept Pa on jury duty in Pittsville.

Len--rather pompous, and with a moustache!--explained why his wife could not be there: the two-year-old daughter was not very well. Martie questioned him eagerly of his two children. Both girls, Len said gloomily; he asked his sister if she realized that there was not a Monroe yet.

Lydia wept a few tears; "Martie, dear, to see you in black!" and Martie's eyes watered, and her lip shook.

"Grace and all the others would have come," Sally said quickly, "but we knew you'd be tired, and then it's homecoming, Martie, and you'll have lots of time to see us all!"

She introduced Elizabeth, a lovely, fly-away child with bright loose hair, and Billy, a freckled, ordinary-looking boy, who gave his aunt a beautiful smile from large, dark eyes. The others were left with "Mother"--Joe's mother.

"But, Sally, you're so fat!"

"And, Mart, you're so thin!"

"Never mind; it's becoming to you, Sally. You look still like a little girl. Really, you do! And how's Joe?"

"Oh, Joe's lovely. I went down and spent a week with him. I had the choice of that or a spring suit, and I took that!"

"Went--but where is he? I suppose he hasn't been sent to San Quentin?"

"Oh, Martie, don't! You know Russell Harrison, 'Dutch's' cousin, that used to play with Len, really WAS sent there!"

"For Heaven's sake, what for?"

"Well, Hugh Wilson had some trouble with Paul King, and--it was about money--and Russell Harrison went to Hughie and told him--"

So the conversation was diverted over and over again; and the inessential things were said, and the important ones forgotten. Len had borrowed the firm's motor car, and they all got in. Martie, used to Wallace's careless magnificence, was accustomed enough to this mode of travel, but she saw that it was a cause of great excitement to the children, and even to Sally.

"You say the 'firm,' Len--I'll never get used to my little brother with a moustache! What do you mean by the 'firm?'" asked Martie. "My goodness--goodness--goodness, there's the Library and Lacey's!" she added, her eyes eagerly roving the streets.

"Miss f.a.n.n.y is still there; she always speaks so affectionately of you, Martie," said Lydia eagerly and tremulously. Martie perceived that in some mysterious way Lydia was ill at ease. Lydia did not quite know how to deal with a younger sister who was yet a widow, and had lived in New York.

"There was an awful lot of talk about getting her out of the Library,"

contributed Sally; "they said the Streets were at the back of it; they wanted to put a man in! There was the greatest excitement; we all went down to the Town Hall and listened to the speeches--it was terrific! I guess the Streets and their crowd felt pretty small, because they got--what was it, Len?"

"Seventeen votes out of one hundred and eleven!" Len said, not moving his eyes from the road before him.

"My house is right down there, next door to Uncle Ben's," said Sally, craning her neck suddenly. "You can't see it, but no matter; there's lots of time! Here's the Hawkes's place; remember that?"

"I remember everything," Martie said, smiling. "We're nearly home!"

The old Monroe house looked shabby, even in the spring green. Martie had seen the deeper, fresher green of the East for six successive springs. The eucalyptus trees wore their ta.s.sels, the willows' fresh foliage had sprung over the old rusty leaves. A raw gateway had been cut, out by the old barn, into Clipper Lane, and a driveway filled in.

Tired, confused, train-sick, Martie got down into the old yard, and the old atmosphere enveloped her like a garment. The fuchsia bushes, the marguerites so green on top, so brown and dry under their crown of fresh life, the heliotrope sprawling against the peeling boards under the dining-room windows, and tacked in place with strips of kid glove--how well she knew them!

They went in the side door, and through the dark dining room, odorous of vegetable soup and bread and b.u.t.ter. An unearthly quiet held the house. Pa's door was closed; Martie imagined the room darker and more grim than ever.

Lydia had given her her old room; the room in which she and Sally had grown to womanhood. It was as clean and bare as a hotel room. Lydia and Sally had discussed the advisability of a bowl of flowers, but had decided flowers might remind poor Mart of funerals. Martie remembered the counterpane on the bed and the limp madras curtains at the windows.

She put her gloves in a bureau drawer lined with folded newspaper, and hung her wraps in the square closet that was, for some unimaginable reason, a step higher than the room.