Front matter (continued 3)

When he wrote that same day, he assured her again, as he had assured her in his cable, that she had a right to every one of the words of comfort he had sent. “And you have a right to lean on that unseen wall of love I told you about,” he repeated. “It is close to you, and meant to lean on. There can be no disloyalty to any one in resting against it. The love that exists for you on the other side of the Great Sea is too vast to be selfish. It asks nothing from you that you ought not to give. It only begs you to be happy, for there’s a kind of happiness without which we fall out of tune with the universe. Don’t say you can have no happiness of any kind. Don’t think it, or that it would be ‘wrong’ or light-minded to be happy if you could. You have seen life draped in black. But black is a concentration of all colors. No opal has such lights as a black opal. The great adventure of life is learning the terror and the beauty and the splendor of it all as one and inseparable.

“I have to confess that I’m no guide for you or any other. I am just groping my way up, out of my own dark places; but I believe that great secrets reveal themselves in flashes, just as—in some mysterious, inspired moments—a sunrise or a sunset tells you the truth of a thing you’ve been groping for years to find out. This obligation to your own soul (and Heaven knows how many others), the obligation of happiness—is one secret which has been opened for me by a magic key. That key is my strong wish to be of use to you. It helps me to feel that I may help you. Perhaps you’ll care to know that? And you can help me, and yourself, and the man who has passed on, by trying to gain the kind of happiness I speak of. It’s the kind that makes you one with the sunlight, a true note in the great music, ringing in tune with the universe.

“I wonder if you happen to remember about the music which the man in my book (the man who was passing) heard over the battlefield, the music of life for which the music of war and death was only the bass, the necessary undertone? I caught just a few snatches of that life music, but once heard it goes on echoing in the ears, teaching you the harmony of all things, if you listen deeply enough. Those young soldiers I tried to write about, who had thrown off their bodies, and even their enmities, with the rags and dirt and blood they left on the battlefield—they were listening to the great music, and hearing in it the call to some special mission which only they were fitted to fulfil, going to it in the summer of their youth, before they had grown tired of anything. I do believe that was more than a dream of mine; that this torrent of splendid youth, this vast crowd of ardent souls suddenly rushed from one plane to another, has some wonderful work to do, which can be done only by souls who go out with the wine of courage on their lips. But we others, we have our mission too. We can’t perform it if we make false notes in the music for the passing souls to hear. And we shall make false notes if we let our high vibrations drop down weakly to depression’s minor tones.

“Perhaps you’ll turn away from this idea of mine. But it’s one that interests me, as you know, because you’ve honored my little book by caring for it. In the dreams I had of things on the other side of sight and hearing, I thought that I saw the real meaning of the war—the hidden cause of this landslide of civilization. I saw a whole nation scintillating with dull red vibrations of fear: fear of attack by other nations, fear of letting neighbors grow stronger than they. Then I saw the dull red glowing brighter with vibrations of anger, a furious desire to grow strong at the expense of others, and to kill and conquer at any cost. Beautiful blue vibrations of intellect, and clear green vibrations of hope and successful perseverance were lost, swallowed up by the all-pervading blood-red. I saw the heavy crimson flood spreading into and lowering the golden vibrations of other great peoples, who had not yet fallen; and in the strange dream of colors pulsing through the ether of earth and heaven, I realized the immensity of the fight; how it reached far beyond the forces we know, being in truth a battle between the light of cosmic day and the darkness of cosmic night. I saw that the danger was defeat of the golden vibrations by the red which would lower the life-force of the whole world; but something told me—some snatch of the great music which interprets secrets—that progress is an integral, unalterable part of evolution; that evil, which is only negative good, can never conquer; and that the gold vibrations must win in the end. In the dream, that knowledge gave me rest. It seemed a pronouncement from the tribunal of the Power which causes all worlds and all beings to take form and exist by vibrations.

“That’s a long homily on my dreams and the theories I’m clumsily founding on them. But I am trying hard myself to vibrate and resound in tune, because each vibration and each note count quite as much as individual soldiers count in war. In this time of earth stress, and after, when civilization is remaking itself in men’s minds, with the loyal ‘spirit of the time’ we must all think gold and blue, the gold of the sun by which our bodies live, blue of the sky when inspirations come. You’ll believe me a ‘mystic’ (whatever that misused word may mean!), but I’m only trying to see the Reality behind the Thing upon which I’ve harped to you already. We are needing to know the Reality as we never needed such knowledge before.

“Be happy then, in the way that unites you with everything in heaven and on earth, all the sweet, kind children of Nature close around you, so that you may learn the different languages of flowers from their perfumes, and what the trees say in the wind. You can’t feel alone in the world if the trees talk to you, and they will if you open your heart to them. You will get to know the oak language, the pine, the elm, the beech languages; and next you will learn how they and the sea and the rivers and brooks, and everything else that makes up the music of nature, give out the same message in a thousand different ways: Be happy. To be happy with your soul, no matter what has hurt your body and tried to spoil your life, is to be strong. Go into your garden, and walk by the lake you tell me of, and don’t be afraid to call the Memory you love to walk with you there or anywhere. The one you have loved understands all, and so there could never be even a question of forgiveness.”

Denin longed to add to his letter the request that she would write often; but he would not ask that of Barbara. He must be ready to give all that she wanted, and beg for nothing in return. Perhaps if she found any small comfort in what he had written this time, she would be satisfied, and feel that nothing more was left to be said on either side. This possibility he tried to keep before his mind, and to think of even as a probability, in order to soften the blow of disappointment if he never heard again. But in his heart he knew that she would write. It seemed to him when he walked in the little garden of the Mirador, or stretched his long body on the warm grass under a big olive tree he loved, that he could hear her thoughts in the garden of Gorston Old Hall. With his ear close to the earth the message Barbara would send by and by seemed to come to him before it had left her mind and taken form on paper.

She answered his cable without waiting for the letter that followed.

“Thank you a thousand times,” she said. “I have always something new to thank you for. What should I have done if your book hadn’t come to me, and given me you for my friend? For a little while, I almost stopped believing in God, for life looked so cruel, not only to me but to every one—or nearly every one—I know, since the war began. Far and wide as I looked, I could find no mercy, no pity. How ungrateful I was, when all the time God was putting it into your mind to write that book, and sending your friendship to me when I needed it as one needs air to breathe!

“Do you know, you are teaching me to think? I feel now as if I had never really thought before. I just dreamed, or brooded. If he had lived, I should have learned from him. That is, I should, if our souls hadn’t gone on forever being shy of one another. When I had him with me, I was too busy loving him and being afraid that he wouldn’t love me, to think about anything outside, though his mind had given my mind a great lift, even then. And another thing I want to tell you. Your way of thinking reminds me of him. I believe you must be a little like him—mentally, I mean. Believing this will make me trust and turn to you, as one who knows the things I long to know. You have his name, too, ‘John.’ And I am going to sign my name always after this, not a mere impersonal initial.

“I am yours, oh, so gratefully, Barbara Denin.

“P.S. Strange, I didn’t notice at first where your cable was dated! I suppose, like the help you send me, it seemed just to come out of space! But reading the message again, I broke open the envelope I had already sealed, to tell you what a throb of the heart I had in seeing ‘Santa Barbara.’ Can it be that you live at Santa Barbara? I was christened after that dear old place, because I was born there, or very near. It’s good—it’s wonderful to have your words come to me from home.”

It was a direct question which she asked. Did he live at Santa Barbara? But Denin thought best not to answer it. She would forget, maybe, or would suppose that he had been staying for a short time in California. Each of his letters to her before, though posted not far from the Mirador itself, had been enclosed in an envelope to Eversedge Sibley. In all but one case, other letters to correspondents brought the author by his book had been sent off in the wrapper with Barbara’s. Denin had taken pains to settle the difficulty of writing to Gorston Old Hall in this way, in order that neither the name of the woman nor the name of the place should be remarked by Sibley. He kept this rule with the letter which followed Barbara’s question, but her next broke the plan in pieces. It crossed one from him, and was written after receiving his letter about the garden.

“Dear Friend,” she named him. “Before I say anything else—and I feel that there are a thousand things, each pressing forward to be said first—I must tell you what I have found out. I’ve learned that you are living in the house my father built for me. Of course that won’t be important to you. Why should it be so? I have to remind myself over and over that I am surely just one of many women who have written to you after reading your book; one of many women you are kind to, out of the goodness of your heart, and the knowledge that’s in it. Can knowledge be in a heart? Yes, yours is there, I think, even more than in your brain. I am nothing to you except a poor drowning creature to whom you have held out a firm hand. But the drowning creature feels that your living in a place she knew and loved gives her a kind of personal right in you.

“I read this very morning in a London paper an extract from a New York one—an article about John Sanbourne. Perhaps you never even knew it was written? I’m sure you gave no permission to have it done. I think you would not like the way the man wrote about you; but I felt, in reading, that he tried hard to bring his work up to a high level and make it worthy of the subject. If you realized the good it has done me to know that you cared enough for my dear little Mirador to want it for your own, and to restore it from ruin, why, you could not be so very angry with the newspaper man!

“That time in California, when I was a little girl, seemed a hundred years ago, or even in another state of existence, till I read the description of you in your garden—once my garden. Then that part of my life came back as if it were yesterday. I can see the big olive tree, which had been let grow as it liked, with all sorts of flowing, dancing gestures of its branches and twisting of its trunk, the way olives grow in Italy and the south of France. I used to call it my ‘silver fountain.’ And under it there was always a look of moonlight, even in the brightest noon. I do hope nothing has happened to the tree? Say kind things to the silver fountain from its little friend Barbara. Write me about it, and tell me, please, if it means anything fairylike to you as it did to me. But I know it must, because of what you say about your garden. How little I thought when the letter came four days ago, that my long-ago garden and your garden of now, were one and the same!

“That letter was more than a letter. It was a saving force. Because it was so much to me, and I wanted to think it all over and over, I couldn’t have dared to answer at once in any case. But it came on an anniversary, August 18th, the day of his passing. I can’t say or write the word ‘death,’ since I have begun to learn from you. It was always a dreadful word, like a bludgeon. But now it’s impossible. For me it has gone out of the language.

“As you walk in your little California garden of the Mirador, will it please you at all to know that you have given me back the joy of the English garden, the beautiful garden and the lake, and the sweet, old, history-haunted house which he left to be mine? Because you, who know so much, say that he understands and doesn’t even need to forgive me, I take your word. I am not afraid to walk with his memory now. I can speak to it as I shouldn’t have had the courage to with him, when he was here in the flesh. And because of your letter, August 18th was not a terrible day. It was more like the wedding day of two spirits than the anniversary of a great grief, and one of the spirits—mine—just released from prison. Not that it can stay out of prison forever. It’s too weak, yet, to feel its freedom for long at a time. I’ve had horrible hours, ever since that day. I shall have them often, I know, for the thing I have done has made daily life a torture. But at worst I can steal away by myself sometimes to read your letters over. They, and my new thoughts, will be for me the tonic of courage; and so I can go on from day to day, not looking too far ahead, into the dark.

“If I haven’t trespassed upon your time and imposed upon your great kindness too much already, will you write me little things about the Mirador and your life there? Will you, if you take photographs, send a snapshot of the wee house as it is now, and perhaps the silver fountain, to—Your grateful friend, Barbara Denin?

“P. S. You will think I am very old-fashioned and early Victorian about my postscripts, and I suppose I am, though I don’t remember tacking many onto other letters, only those to you. This one is just a thought put into my head by some of the last things you said. It is about the war, and it came to me in the garden on August 18th.

“In a world war like this, with all its anguish, can it be meant for the nations, each one that suffers and strives, to develop by and by a new individuality, a great unselfish, selfless Self? Can it be that the Power behind the worlds throws this one now into the furnace because development must come for progress’ sake? When the earth was first created, every least thing that lived fought for itself, and there was no holding together in a large way, anywhere. When civilizations came, they brought no real improvement, for politics and greed divided nations against themselves as well as against each other. Is the true excuse for creation unity, with all the experience of ages to give it value? If it is so, and if each nation can attain to unity through sacrifice and heroism, won’t the next thing to follow be the unity of the whole world? Can this be coming to pass, slowly yet surely, not only with our grain of sand, but with all the worlds, while the Power who created watches through the cosmic days you spoke of? It would make one’s own tears of sorrow seem small, if one could believe this; and yet if we did not grudge the tears, they might count as pearls, poured into a golden cup, to brim it full of jewels worthy of God’s acceptance.

“Perhaps this isn’t much of a thought. But such as it is, there has been light in it for me, on dark days. And as I owe it to you, I felt I should like to tell you about it. It is going to make me realize more than I could before, the brotherhood of all men in war time, even the ones we call the enemy. Why, I used to be stupid and unseeing as a mole! I hardly thought about common people, pasty-faced waiters and weedy under-gardeners and grocer’s boys, as men at all. Now, out of every town and village they are marching with their faces turned to the front, brave and smiling. They are as glorious soldiers as any, and I pray for them as I would pray for my own brothers. Is that a step for me towards the great unity? I wonder—and hope.

“You see, I begin to warm myself at the fire your friendship has kindled. Each letter you write will be a fresh log piled on to feed the flame.”

CHAPTER XII

When Denin wrote again he ventured to give Barbara the name that she had given him, “Dear Friend.” And he enclosed photographs of the Mirador, with its flower-draped balcony, and of the “silver fountain.”

“What you say about my helping you is wonderful to hear, and makes me feel like a comet stuffed with stars,” he wrote. “It is a great honor for me that you care for my letters. It’s true, as you surmise, that others have written and do write to the author of ‘The War Wedding,’ and that is an honor too, in its way. But it’s an altogether different way. I can’t explain why. I won’t try to explain why the call you have sent half across the world is different from any other call. Yet I want you to believe that it is so, that I count it an immense privilege to write to you, and an immense delight to get your answers. What you call your ‘gratitude’ is the highest compliment ever paid to me. In trying to study out your problems, I have solved some of my own. In advising you to be happy, I’ve found a certain happiness for myself; so you see that I have far more cause to be grateful to you than you could possibly have to me.

“For one thing—just a small instance—I had never taken a photograph in my life, until you asked me for snapshots of the Mirador garden. In order to make them for you myself, I learned how. Now I am deep in it. Do you remember the little room that is half underground, yet not quite a cellar? I’ve turned it into a dark room for developing my negatives. I was up all one night watching the birth of my first work. But I don’t tell you that to bid for thanks. I did it because I was too infatuated with the work itself to think of going to bed. These things I send are crude. I am going to try to become what they call—don’t they?—an ‘artist photographer.’ When I can give myself a medal for my achievements, I’ll take some better pictures for you, of the house and garden, and of the Mission and other places in the neighborhood of your old home if you would like to have them. Of course it interests me immensely to know that you once lived here.”

The last sentence Denin added after a long moment of hesitation. It seemed brutal not to protest against that humble supposition of Barbara’s that her past ownership of the Mirador would be unimportant to him. But what he burned to say was so much more, that the few conventional words he dared to dole out looked churlish in black and white. Still, he had to let them stand.

After these letters, which crossed, the woman in England and the man in California caught the habit of writing to one another oftener than before—and differently. They did not wait for something definite to answer, for their thoughts so rushed to meet each other that it seemed as if they knew by wireless what was best to say each time. Often what they said might have read commonplacely to an outsider, for now they told each other the little things of every-day life. After her first outburst of confidence and confession, Barbara did not again for many weeks refer directly to Trevor d’Arcy. But Denin thought that he understood, and felt his veins fill full with a sudden jerk, as do those of a man electrocuted, when he read, “I am rather desperate to-day:” or, “To keep myself from going all to pieces, just now, I turned my thoughts off my own life, as you turn a tap, and sent them to your garden—my old garden of the Mirador. I strolled there with you, and you consoled me. It was evening. We were in the pergola (Father’s old head gardener used to call it the ‘paragolla’), and I forgot the iron grayness here that weighs down my spirit. Over you and me, as we talked, glittered my old, loved stars of California. And the pergola with its velvet drapery of leaves and flowers, and the three dark cypresses barring the sea view at one end, was like a corridor hung with illuminated tapestry ‘come alive.’ You can’t think how real it was for a few minutes, walking there and hearing your generous words of comfort, like magic balm on a wound that only magic balm could heal. I’ve decided that when things are very bad with me here, I’ll try that way of escape again. I will send my thoughts to the Mirador garden, and the comfort that nobody but you—who understand so marvelously—can even be asked to give. Do you mind my flying to you? Will you ‘pretend’ too, sometimes in those starlit nights, that I have come to ask your advice and help? Will you feel as if I were actually there, and will you put the advice into words? Maybe they’ll reach me so. I do believe they will. And I am needing such words more than ever lately. I can hardly wait for them to come in letters. Though I have the ‘invisible wall of love’ to lean against, that you told me of (and I do lean hard!), there is an influence which tries always to drag me away from that dear support, making it seem not to belong to me after all. There’s a voice which tells me I was never really loved by the one whose memory I worship; that he asked me to marry him only because mother practically forced him to do so. This isn’t an inner voice. It’s the voice of a person whose jealousy and cruelty I must forgive, or be as cruel myself. The voice says it has reason to be sure that all it tells me is true; that it’s useless for me to ask mother, because she would deny it; besides, she is too ill to be troubled or reproached about anything. You know, I have two invalids now, so I can’t do much for any one outside, except send money—his money, to the poor and the wounded.

“The terrible voice hammers constantly on my heart, and is breaking it to pieces, in spite of your help. For even you can’t help me there. How could you, when about that one thing—that principal thing of all, it seems now—you have no knowledge? You can’t know whether he ever loved me as a man loves one woman, or whether he was simply willing to spread his generous protection round me for the future, when he was going away to risk his life. It would have been like him to do that, I have to admit in some moods. And I hate the moods, and hate the voice for putting the idea—which mercifully hadn’t struck me before—into my head. I oughtn’t to hate the voice, because it may be that its wickedness—almost fiendish at times—is caused only by hopeless suffering. I strive to say to myself, as I think you would wish me to say, ‘Could a bird who had been blinded and thrown into a cage where it never saw sunshine, do better than croak, or peck the hand that tried to feed it?’

“I need to walk with you in your garden, you see! Send me kind thoughts from there, without waiting to write. Then, if I send you questions in the same way, I shall feel that you hear and answer. I shall listen for the answers. Tell me, first of all, do you, as a man, think another man would ask a girl to marry him just because she was poor and without prospects, and he was going away to face death? Of course it’s true that you can’t know, but what do you think? Remember, I’m not speaking of an ordinary man, but one almost too generous and chivalrous for these days. Do you think such an one might have done that?”

Denin wrote back, “I think no man would have done that. You need have no fear that you were married for any motive but love. A man—even such a man as you describe—must have argued that a young, attractive girl would have plenty of chances in life, at least as good as that which he could offer. She would have no need of his protection, and he would have no right to press it upon her, unless he gave all his love as well.”

This assurance Denin tried to send Barbara in the way she asked, as well as by the letter which would take weeks to reach its destination. He made of his ardent thought for her a carrier pigeon with golden wings, which could travel swiftly as the light. Thus he rushed to her the answers to many questions,—questions which seemed to come to him from far off, as he walked in the garden. He could hear her voice calling, when the wind came over the sea, from the east where England lay.

Denin had bought the Mirador and begun his life there, with some echo of Ernest Dowson’s words in his mind:

Now will I take me to a place of peace:

Forget my heart’s desire,

In solitude and prayer work out my soul’s release.

But his heart’s desire was with him, as it could have been nowhere else, so vividly, flamingly with him, that there could be no thought of finding peace. He no longer even wished for peace. He would not have exchanged a peace pure as the crystal stillness of a mountain lake, for the dear torture of seeing Barbara’s soul laid bare. He was never in a state calm enough to analyze his feelings. He could only feel. Yet the strangeness of his position and hers swept over him sometimes, as with a hot gust from the tropics. John Denin had had to die, in order to learn that his wife adored him. The price would not have been too big, if he alone had to pay, but she was paying too. He could not take the payment all upon himself; yet he could help to make it less of a strain for her, and all his life was poured into the giving of this help. Every thought, every heart-beat was for Barbara. He lived to give himself to her, and to take what she had for him in return. With each day that passed he realized how much more they were to each other at this vast distance—these two, parted forever—than most men and women living side by side in legal union. He knew that John Sanbourne was absolutely necessary to Barbara Denin, as she was to him; and all the incidents of their daily lives, big and small, though lived separately, drew them together when recounted, as pearls are drawn together on a lengthening string.

Now that the secret was out, and Lady Denin knew where John Sanbourne had made his home, without suspecting any hidden mystery in the coincidence, he was thankful that she had learned the truth. A barrier was down, and they seemed to gaze straight into each other’s eyes, across the space where it had been. In return for his snapshots of the Mirador and its garden, Barbara sent photographs taken by herself of Gorston Old Hall. One of these showed the lake, with a bow-windowed corner of the black and white house mirrored in it—the very spot where Sir John Denin had asked Barbara Fay to be his wife. “The place I love best,” she said. Though she did not say why, it thrilled him to guess. And in the same letter she sent faintly fragrant specimens from the “Shakespeare border.”

How the sweetness of the dear old-fashioned things, whose very names distilled a perfume, floated back to Denin from the garden he had given to his love!

“My husband had the border planted,” Barbara explained. “Don’t you think it a delicious idea? Not a single flower or herb mentioned by Shakespeare has been forgotten, and you can hardly imagine what a noble company has been brought together. Once we walked in the garden, he and I, on a moonlight night, when a breeze came up and drove the evening mists slowly, slowly along the paths and borders like a procession of spirits in silver cloaks. We played that it had driven away the ghosts of Shakespeare’s people, kings and queens and knights and ladies called back to earth by the perfume—which, you say, is the voice—of those well-remembered flowers. That’s one of the memories I cherish now, when I walk past the Shakespeare borders in the moony dusk. And thanks to you—who have helped me literally to move into my dreams and live there—I don’t seem to walk alone. For a few moments then, I am neither lonely nor sad. The moonlight still drips into my heart, like water into a fountain, as it dripped on that night I remember: and my thoughts lead me along a beautiful, mysterious road that nobody else can see—a road to wonderful things I’ve never known, but have always longed for, such a road as certain music seems to open out before you.”

The pressed leaves and petals in Barbara’s letter were those of pansies, rosemary, and rue: the dark blue pansies he had once thought like her eyes at night; rosemary for the never-absent remembrance of them; rue for an ever aching regret, because of what might have been and could not be.

She asked him to tell her what he had done inside as well as outside of the Mirador since he had taken it, and how he had furnished the rooms. This was a difficult question to answer, because Denin had surrounded himself with everything she had described in her old environment: white dimity curtains, rag-woven rugs of pale, intermingled tints, the “Mission” made chairs and tables, and copies of her old pictures on the walls. If he detailed his chosen surroundings, would not the added coincidence strike her as almost incredibly strange?

Denin ignored the request in his following letter, but Barbara repeated it in her next. “After all, it isn’t possible that she should suspect the truth,” he argued, and at last took what risk there was, rather than appear secretive. Not that there was a risk, he assured himself over and over again; yet when a letter came which must be a reply to his, the man’s fingers trembled on the envelope. In a revealing flash like lightning which shows a chasm to a traveler by night, he glimpsed a hidden side of his own nature. He saw that it would be a disappointment, not a relief to him, if Barbara passed over his description of the new-born Mirador without stumbling on any vague suspicion. He realized that he must have been hoping for her to guess at the truth, and so break the thin crust of lava on that crater’s brink where they both stood, gathering flowers.

“Good God, I thought I had gained a little strength!” he said, and opened the letter quickly, though with all accustomed tenderness of touch. Then he tried to be glad, and remind himself that he had known it would be so, when he read that she wondered only, without suspecting.

“If I hadn’t been certain of it before,” she wrote, “I should believe now that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. It must indeed be that our thoughts do travel far, and impress themselves upon the thoughts of others, for it can’t be a mere coincidence—as your taking the Mirador was—that you have made the place over again just as I had it. I must have gone there in a dream, and told you things in your sleep. Then you waked up, and supposed that the ideas were all your own original fancies. The strangest part is about the pictures. I had Rossetti’s ‘Annunciation’ in my bedroom. I chose it myself, because of the lilies, and the little flames on the angel’s feet. I chose ‘La Gioconda’ too, because it seemed to me that I should some day discover what made her smile so secret, yet so enchanting, just as if, could one listen long enough, one might catch the tune in the music of a brook or river. I used to stand before the mirror of my dressing-table at the right of the big window, and practise smiling like her, but I could never manage it. I thought, if I could, when I grew up I should be able to make a man I loved fall in love with me, even if he didn’t care at first. Poor child Me! I remembered that wish, when I wanted the One Man to love me, and yet was too proud and ashamed to try and make him do it.

“Downstairs I had Carpaccio’s dreaming St. Ursula, with the tiny dog asleep, and the little slippers by the bedside. And you have that picture hanging almost in the same place! Yes, I must unknowingly have cast some influence upon you. That seems exquisite to me. I hope you do not mind? If you don’t, I shall try again in other ways. Indeed, I shall begin at once by influencing you to do me a favor, I’ve been waiting a long time to ask, and never quite found the courage to put into words. Send me a photograph of yourself. I want it very much, to make sure that my mental picture of you is right.”

It was hard to refuse the first request she had ever spoken of as a “favor.” Denin was half tempted to buy the portrait of some decent-looking fellow and label it “John Sanbourne”; but only half tempted. He could not lie to Barbara, and was reduced to the excuse that he “took a bad photograph.” It would be better for her to keep the friendly mental picture she had painted, rather than be disillusioned. “This sounds as if I were vain,” he added, “but unfortunately I have every reason not to be.”

“Either she won’t care at all about not getting the photograph, or else she’ll be offended,” Denin prophesied gloomily. “Time will show.” And when the day to which he had looked forward for an answer burst upon him like a thunderclap, bringing no letter, he thought that time had shown. She was angry, or worse still, hurt, feeling that like Psyche with the oil-dropping lantern, she had been rebuked for curiosity. He saw himself losing her again, through this small and miserable misunderstanding which he could not, must not, set right. A second loss would be a thousand times worse than the first, because this time her soul had belonged to his soul. Their letters, their need of each other, had circled them as if in a magic ring, or under a glass case which, transparent to invisibility, had housed them warmly together. A spiritual nausea of fear, fear of loss, turned his heart to water, so that over and over again he asked himself what to do, without having power to answer.

He remembered the old fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast, and how the Beast lay down despairingly, to die in his garden, because Beauty, who had made his life bearable, even happy, went away voluntarily and for a long time forgot her promise to come back.

The Mirador garden lost something of its old spell for Denin. A glowworm which had come to live at the end of the pergola, and evidently believed in itself as a permanent family pet, was no longer an intelligent and charming companion. He had valued it only, he saw now, because he had meant to amuse Barbara by describing it to her, as his newest friend. On nights when letters from her had come, all the passion and romance of the world since its beginning had streamed along the sea to his eyes, by the path of the moon. But now the white light had a hard, steely radiance that dazzled his eyes.

While the link held between him and Barbara, it had been easy for Denin to feel kinship with nature, with the world and worlds beyond. His mind had traveled hand in hand with hers over the whole earth and on, on to unknown immensities, as rings from a dropped stone spread endlessly on the surface of water.

Expecting answers from Barbara, he had had an incentive to live, and had looked eagerly forward to each new day, as to opening the door of a room he had never seen before, a room full of beautiful things, made ready for him alone. Now, when day after day passed, bringing no word from her, the rooms of the House of the Future were empty.

He had advised her, when she needed counsel, to look and listen inside herself, for a voice. But now, no such voice spoke to him, except to say, “You have been a fool. You must unconsciously have expressed yourself in some blundering way that disgusted her, broke the statue she’d set up on a pedestal. She is ‘disillusioned’ indeed!”

A week dragged itself on into a fortnight after the day when Barbara’s answer ought to have come. Still Denin had done nothing but wait, because it appeared to him that no explanation of his seeming ungraciousness was possible. If Barbara did not want him any more, he could not make her want him.

Had he not loved her so much, he might have thought her silence due to illness; but he was sure that he should know if she were ill. She had let him walk into the home of her soul and its secret garden of thought; she had offered him the flowers of her childhood and girlhood which no one else had ever seen; and if a blight had fallen upon her body, he was so near that he would feel the chill of it in his own blood. No, he told himself, Barbara was not ill. She had shut herself away from him, that was all; and the very nature of his relationship with her forbade his claiming anything which she did not wish to give.

He lost all hope of hearing again, at the end of a month, yet would not let himself accuse her of injustice. Had she not a right to drop him if she chose? He had no cause for complaining. He had received from the “tankard of love” those two drafts which are said to recompense a man for the pains of a lifetime, and he could expect no more. Yet he seemed always to be listening, as if for some sound to come to him through space, or even the faint echo of a sound, like the murmur in a bell after it has ceased to chime.

One day, when five weeks lay between him and hope, a telegram was brought to the Mirador. Denin opened it indifferently, for his publisher often wired to him when a new edition of “The War Wedding” came out, or if anything of special interest happened in connection with the book. But this time the message was from England. It was unsigned, yet he knew that it was from Barbara. She said, “My mother has been at death’s door for many weeks. Now she is gone. I am writing.”

“Thank God!” Denin heard himself gasp, and then was struck with remorse for his hard-heartedness. He had thanked God because Barbara had not taken herself away from him, and in the rush of joy had forgotten what it would mean for her to be without her mother.

She was alone now with Trevor d’Arcy, at Gorston Old Hall.

CHAPTER XIII

Denin cabled an answer to Barbara, and then began a letter to her. He was in the midst of it, when he was disturbed by a caller, a man he had never seen before. Expecting no one, the hermit of the Mirador had been writing out of doors, in the pergola, and so was caught without a chance of escape. He sprang up and stood in front of the little table on which were his paper and ink, as if to protect the letter from the touch of a stranger’s eyes. But the visitor, who had caught sight of John Sanbourne through the network of leaves and flowers, appeared blissfully ignorant that he was unwelcome.

He was tall, almost as tall as Denin himself, though he looked less than his height, because of a loose stoutness which hung upon him as if his clothes were untidily padded. His large face, and the whites of his eyes, and his big teeth, were all of much the same shade of yellow; and his hair, turning gray, had streaks of that color under the Panama hat which he did not remove.

“Good afternoon. I suppose you are Mr. Sanbourne?” he remarked, in a throaty voice, with a certain air of condescension which told that here was no author-worshiping pilgrim. “My name is Carl Pohlson Bradley.”

“Ah! How do you do?” replied Denin aloofly. He wanted to go on with his letter.

“I’m pretty well, thank you,” responded the other, accepting the suggested solicitude for his health as fact, not a fiction of politeness. “I got here this morning. Staying at the Potter, of course. I been taking a look round the place.”

“Ah!” said Denin again. He could not think—and did not much care to think—of anything else to say. But the large yellow face changed slightly, in surprise. “I expect you heard I was likely to come, didn’t you?”

“No,” said Denin. “Not to my recollection.” Then more kindly, “I’m rather a hermit. I go out very little, and have only a few callers. I don’t get much news, except what I see in the papers.”

“It was in the papers.” The tone in which Mr. Carl Pohlson Bradley gave this piece of information suggested that his prominence was international as well as physical.

“Can he be a New York reporter?” thought Denin, his heart sinking.

But the caller had pulled from a pocket of his brown tweed coat a newspaper, folded in such a way as to make conspicuous a marked paragraph in the middle column. This he handed to Denin as if it had been a visiting card.

The paper was a local one, and the very first line of the paragraph mentioned Mr. Carl Pohlson Bradley as a St. Louis millionaire. It went on to state that, having retired from business with a great fortune at the early age of fifty-nine, Mr. Bradley intended to buy an estate in California, as a winter residence for his family. Having read so far, Denin supposed that he had sufficiently informed himself, and offered to give the paper back.

Bradley, however, waved it away. “Read the rest,” he advised.

Denin did so, and with a shock learned that his tall yellow visitor had become the owner of what was still known as “the old Fay place.”

“This is a surprise,” he said, not making any attempt to look pleased. “I didn’t even know the place was for sale.”

“Most places are, if the price is big enough to be tempting. When I want a thing I’m willing to pay for it. And that brings us to my call on you, sir. I hear you’re an author, and have written a story that’s sold about a million copies or some other big figure which makes a lot of folks want to come here and see what you’re like. But that isn’t what I’m here for. I don’t read stories. I’ve called on business. I want to know how much you’ll take to sell me this bit of land you’ve bought on my place?”

Denin’s nerves had been on edge for the last few weeks, and he felt an unreasonable impulse of anger against the fat, self-complacent man. “I won’t sell,” he said. “I’m sorry if you don’t like having so near a neighbor, but I was on the spot first.”

“I don’t see what that’s got to do with it,” said Bradley. “To my notion, this bit walled off from my place is a regular eyesore. The Mirador, or whatever they call it, is a rotten little den anyhow, if you’ll excuse my saying so, more fit for a child’s playhouse than a gentleman.”

“I believe it was built for a child’s playhouse,” said Denin. “But it happens to suit me, though I’ve never thought of dignifying it by the name of ‘residence.’”

“Well, anyhow, if you like a little bungalow, you can buy a better one than this with more ground around it, without troubling yourself to move a mile,” Bradley persisted. “I’m no bargainer. As I said just now, when I want a thing I’m willing to pay for it. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mr. Sanbourne. I’ll give you, for this little corner lot, as you might call it, not only twice what it’s worth, but the price of any other bungalow within reason you choose to select. And I’ll pay your moving expenses, too. Now, what do you say to that?”

“Just what I said before. I don’t wish to sell.”

“Say, this is a holdup!” blustered the St. Louis millionaire.

Suddenly Denin’s good temper came back, with a laugh.

“So you think I’m trying to ‘hold you up’ for a higher price!” he exclaimed. “I assure you I’m not. If you offered me twenty thousand dollars I wouldn’t accept.”

“What!” gasped Mr. Bradley. “Twenty thousand dollars for this little rabbit hutch in a back yard? Good Lord, it ain’t worth a thousand, at top price.”

“Not to you, but it is to me. So, don’t you see, it’s useless to argue further?” asked Denin, his eyes still laughing at the big man’s ruffled discomfiture and surprise that such things could happen between a poor author and a millionaire.

“Argue! I didn’t come here expecting to argue!” spluttered Bradley, looking like a bull stopped at full gallop by a spider web. “I came here to—to—”

“I quite understand, and I’m sorry to be disobliging, but I’m afraid I must,” Denin cut in. “Anyhow, I needn’t be inhospitable too. Will you lunch with me, Mr. Bradley? I can’t offer you much, but if we’re to be neighbors—”

“Great Scott, man, I’m staying at the Potter!” exploded Bradley, with a glance almost of horror at the little table in the pergola where writing materials had pushed aside dishes on a white cloth already laid. The look contrasted John Sanbourne’s hospitality so frankly with the fare awaiting him at Santa Barbara’s biggest hotel, that Denin laughed again.

“Well, then,” he said, “if ever I change my mind I’ll send you word. We’ll let it stand at that.”

With a reluctance pathetic in a man so large and yellow, Bradley saw himself forced for the present to swallow the humble author’s dictum. His jaundiced eyes traveled over the little pink house, with its balcony shaded by pepper trees, over the garden which he had called a “corner lot,” and over the simple pergola which for its owner was a “corridor of illuminated tapestry.” It seemed to Denin that the man could have burst out crying, like a spoiled child suddenly thwarted.

“I think you’re da— mighty foolish!” Bradley amended, remembering the need to be conciliatory. “But I’m sure you’ll think better of it. I’m sure you will change your mind. I only hope for your sake I won’t have changed mine when that time comes!”

On that he made a dramatic exit, with a mixture of stride and waddle suited to one who felt that he had had the last word.

When he had gone, Denin finished his letter and forgot all about Mr. Carl Pohlson Bradley. Also he forgot about luncheon. But that did not matter, for his meals were movable feasts. He had them, or did not have them, according to his mood, like the hermit he was becoming. Mr. Bradley, however, he was forced to remember at short intervals, nearly every day, while he lived through the time of waiting for the letter promised in Barbara’s cable. “Changed your mind yet?” the new owner of the “Fay place” would yell from his huge automobile, spraying dust over John Sanbourne on the white road to Santa Barbara. Or he would prowl, grumbling, on the other side of the flower-draped barrier which separated the Mirador garden from his newly acquired property. At last he sent a lawyer to his irritating neighbor with a definite offer of twenty thousand, five hundred dollars—just temptingly over the price Sanbourne had said that he would not take. But Denin answered, “The Mirador is my ewe lamb.”

CHAPTER XIV

“When my mother was taken so desperately ill,” Barbara wrote, “every moment had to be for her, except those I could spare now and then for the other invalid. I wanted to wire you; but to do that seemed to be conceited, as if I took your personal interest in me very much for granted. I knew you would be too kind to laugh at anything I did; but perhaps, in spite of yourself, the idea might flash through your mind, ‘Poor thing, she telegraphs because she has no time to write. She must think I value her letters a lot!’ This was just after you had said that you wouldn’t send me your photograph, you may remember. But no, why should you remember? You will recall it now, though, when I bring it up to you again. And if you do, please don’t think I was foolish and small enough to be offended or piqued. I wasn’t—oh, not for a moment. I was only disappointed and a little—let down, if you know what I mean. I felt as if I had been taking a liberty with the best and kindest friend a girl or woman ever had, and laying myself open to be misunderstood. I felt, if I followed up that request by cabling to you that you mustn’t expect letters for some time, it would be another blunder. But oh, how I missed my friend!

“Two letters from you came to me, after I had been obliged to stop writing, but because I’d been able to send none, nothing seemed right. I felt as if I had lost hold upon you. I groped for you in the darkness, but because I had dropped your hand, I was punished by not finding it again.

“Mother suffered so much that I could not wish to keep her. For two days and nights after she went, I lay in a kind of stupor. You see, I hadn’t slept more than an hour out of the twenty-four, for weeks, so I suppose I had to make up somehow, or break. I was hardly conscious at all, and they let me lie without rousing me up to eat or drink. But at last I waked of my own accord, out of a dream, it must have been, though I don’t remember the dream. I remember only that I thought you were calling me, though the voice sounded like his. Immediately after, I seemed to hear the words, ‘John Sanbourne believes you’ve stopped writing to him because you were vexed at his refusal of the photograph.’ I started up, tingling all over with shame, for I saw that it might easily be true. I didn’t go to sleep again. I asked for a telegraph form, and sent the cable to you which I know you received next day, because of the date of your answer.

“I beg of you not to take your friendship away from me. I shall need it more than ever now, if possible, because my mother is gone. I don’t feel that she will come back to me in spirit, because she was unhappy here, and at the end was glad to go. She loved me, I’m sure, but not in the way which makes one spirit indispensable to the other. I think after the war gloom of this world, and her own pain, she will want to be very quiet and peaceful for a while in beautiful surroundings, where she can feel young and gay again, and not trouble herself to remember that she was the mother of a grown-up, sad woman down on earth. I want her spirit to be happy in its own way, so I’m not even going to try and call her to me.

“She looked no more than seventeen in her white dress, in a white-lined coffin; and seeing her like that, so young and almost coquettishly pretty, made me realize why she had so bitterly regretted the passing of her youth, and had clung desperately to its ragged edges. I gave her a bed and a covering of her favorite flowers, though they were not those I care for most: gardenias and camellias and orchids. I associate them always with hot-houses and florists’ shops, which seem to me like the slave markets of the flower world—don’t they to you?

“I beg of you not to believe that I forgot, or did not keep turning in thought to my friend, in those long days and nights when I hadn’t time to write, or couldn’t risk the rustle of a sheet of paper, or the scratch of a pen. I thought of you constantly, especially in the night when I sat beside mother, not daring to stir or draw a long breath if she slept. I reviewed all the past, since August 18th, 1914, and as if I had been an outsider, saw myself as I was before I read your book—before I wrote to you, and gained your friendship for my strong prop.

“I was a child in those days. I couldn’t face grief and realize that it must be borne. All the small, dear, warm, cushiony things of life as I had lived it, seemed the only ones which ought to be real. I clung to them. I wanted to shut out sorrow and hide away from it by drawing rose-colored blinds across my windows. I was a shivering creature who had been caught in a sleety rain and soaked through to the skin. I ran home out of the sleet, thinking to pull those rose-colored curtains and put on dry clothes and warm myself at the fire. But the curtains had been ripped away. There were no dry clothes, and no fire. There was no help or comfort anywhere. The world marched in an army against me. Only misery was real; in vain to writhe away from it; it was everywhere. Horror and anguish poured through me, as water pours into a leaking ship. My soul was withering in the cold. The bulwarks of my character were beaten down. Then you came into my life. You didn’t give me back my rose-colored curtains to hide the face of sorrow, but you taught me how to look into sorrow’s eyes, and find beauty and wonder beyond anything I had ever known. You let me creep into a temple you had built, and learn great truths which you had found out through your own suffering. I knew you had written your book with your heart’s blood, or you couldn’t have made my heart fill with life and beat again. You couldn’t have reached me where I was cowering, far, far below tear-level.

“Even when I could see by your letters that you hadn’t quite been able to shake off chains of depression from yourself, you had the power to release others. What a splendid power! Did you realize that you had it, when you wrote your book, I wonder?

“You showed me what to do with the strange forces I could feel blindly groping in my soul. You showed me that philosophy shouldn’t be a brew of poppies to drown regrets, but a tonic, a stimulant. You taught me that hope must live in the heart, because hope is knowledge wrapped up in our subconsciousness, and spilling rays of light through the wrappings. You gave me the glorious advice not to waste life, which must be lived, by trying to kill Time, making him die a dull death at bedtime every night, but to run hand in hand with him—run wherever he might be going, because things worth while might be ready to happen round the very next bend of the future.

“This was the lesson I needed most, because I’d forgotten that if there was no intimate personal joy left for me in this world, there was for others; and even I might help them to find it, by having the bright courage of my imagination, instead of the dull courage of convictions.

“You made me believe (even though I can’t always live up to the belief) that when we are horribly unhappy, we’re only seeing a beautiful, bright landscape reflected gray-green, in our own little cracked and dusty mirror, distorted in its cramped frame. While Mother was ill, and other troubles pressed on me heavily, I often reminded myself of those words of yours, in a many-times-read letter; and I tried to turn my eyes away from the poor cracked mirror, dim with the dust which I had stupidly thought was the dust of my own destiny; tried to look instead at the clear truth of things.

“In the same letter (one of those I treasure most; for I’ve kept all, and always shall keep them) you gave me another thought that has done me good. You said it had only just come to you as you wrote to me. Do you remember? You were wondering if our Real Selves (the ‘realities behind the Things’ you’ve spoken of so often) exist uninterruptedly on the Etheric Plane, to be joined there by the souls of the earthbound selves, each time they finish with their bodies. ‘Imagine the soul arriving from earth, pouring its new experiences into the mind of its Real Self,’ you said, ‘and receiving in return memories of all it had ever lived through, learning the reason why of every sorrow and joy, and never quite forgetting, though it might think it had forgotten.’

“Oh, I thank you, my friend, for every mental growing pain you have given me! Instead of forgetting what I owed you, in those weeks of silence, I realized it all more and more, and resolved to be worthier of my lessons when the strain on my new strength increased, as it is bound to do, with mother gone. I shall try, that’s all I can say. I don’t know how I shall win through. And I shall have more to thank you for, if you tell me that our friendship hasn’t been disturbed by my seeming ingratitude.

“Did you ever see those queer little dried-up Japanese flowers which seem utterly dead till you throw them into water? Then they expand and remember that they are alive. I am one of them. Don’t pour off the water. I’m afraid if you did, I might be weak enough to dry up again.”

CHAPTER XV

To get back the jewel he had thought lost, was to be born into a new life in a new world. Denin had to tell the portrait in the redwood frame, what he felt, for he dared not tell Barbara herself. To have given her a glimpse of his heart would have been to show that its fire had not been kindled by friendship. His answer to her letter was so tame, so lifeless compared to the song of his soul, that it seemed something to laugh at—or to weep over. But there was a line he must not pass. He knew this well, and that his only happiness could be in the Mirador and in Barbara’s friendly letters, as long as she cared to write. Mr. Carl Pohlson Bradley might go on bidding for the Mirador up to a million if he liked. There was no chance of his getting it! Denin was as sure of that, as he was of the shape of the world, or perhaps a little surer. Then, one day, a thunderbolt fell in the garden. It was dropped by the postman, in the form of a letter.

Barbara wrote, “Everything is changed since I wrote you six days ago. I can’t live here any longer, under the same roof with a man whose one pleasure is to torture and insult me. I haven’t spoken about him to you lately. There was no need, but things grew no better between us—worse, rather, for he resented the calmness I was finding through you. It made him furious apparently, that he had no longer the same power over me as at first, to drive me away from him, crying, or shaking all over with shame and anger at the dreadful things he said. I hardly cared at all of late days, when he called me a hypocrite, or a liar, or a damned fool, or other names far worse. I paid him a visit morning and evening, or at other times if he sent for me, and went out motoring or driving with him when he felt well enough to go. He refused to move without me, and so, as the doctor ordered fresh air for him, I couldn’t refuse. When he was at his worst—or what I thought the worst then—I could look straight ahead, and think of things you said, hardly bearing his abuse.

“‘This is my “bit” to do in the war days,’ I reminded myself, and thought maybe my kind of fighting was almost as hard to do as the fighting in the trenches. Besides, I never lost sight of what you answered when I first told you how hard it was, living up to obligations I’d taken on myself. You said, ‘We’re all sparks of the one Great Fire, some brighter than others. We can’t hate each other for long without finding out that it’s as bad as hating ourselves.’ Truly, I quite brought myself to stop hating him. I only pitied, and tried to help, as much as he would let me. But I see now that it was all in vain. I can’t do him any good by staying, and—well, I just simply can’t bear it! He is too ill to be moved. This dear old house will have to be his home while he drags on his death in life—which may mean years. So I, not he, must go.

“Lest you should blame me too much, I will tell you what happened, though I wasn’t sure I would do so when I began to write.

“His valet is a trained nurse, a repellent person, though competent, with dull eyes and a face which looks as if it had petrified under his skin, because his soul—if any—belongs to the Stone Age. The creature’s name happens to be Stone, too; and if he has any feeling it is love of money. His master has been bribing him, it seems, to spy upon me. While I was away from the house, at my mother’s funeral, Stone was searching the drawers of my desk in the octagon study I’ve told you about, where I like to sit because it was my dearest one’s favorite room.

“I had never thought of hiding your letters. There was nothing in them which needed to be hidden. Besides, it never occurred to me that cruel suspicions and disgusting ideas of baseness were wriggling round me, like little snakes that peep out from between the rough stones in a ruined wall. There they all were, bound together in a packet, the kind, brave letters that have been my salvation! Stone took them to his master, who sent for me when I came home after the funeral.

“As soon as I saw him, I knew that something unusual had happened. He flung his ‘discovery’ of the letters into my face. He told me that he had burnt all but a few which he would keep to ‘use’ against me, and tried to frighten me into promising never to write to ‘this John Sanbourne’ again. Of course I gave no promise. Instead, I told him that what he had done and said freed me from him forever. Then I went out of the room and left him there, helpless on his sofa. For the first time I felt no pity for him whatever—not so much as I should feel for a crushed wasp who had stung me. I haven’t seen him since. I don’t intend to see him again. But when I could get my thoughts in order after the fire of fury had cooled a little, I wrote to him. I said that I was sending for a lawyer, and would make some arrangement so that he should want for nothing. I told him that he might stay at Gorston Old Hall as long as he wished, but that I was going away almost immediately. Once gone, I should never return while he was in the house. I have always thought divorce very dreadful; but now I see how one’s point of view changes when one’s own interest is at stake. If I could, I would divorce this man, with whom my marriage has been a tragic farce. But I have no case against him legally. I knew when I consented to call myself his wife, that I should never be his wife really, and so, my solicitor says, I could not even sue for nullity of marriage. It wasn’t I who thought of that. I don’t remember having heard the term mentioned, though perhaps I have, without noticing, when such things seemed as far from my life as the earth from Mars. It was the lawyer who brought up the subject, but added the instant after, that nothing could be done, in the way of legal separation of any kind. He advised me to send the man away from Gorston Old Hall, saying that I should be more than justified. But I wouldn’t agree to do that. For one thing, it would be like physical cruelty to a wounded animal. For another thing—even a stronger reason—the temptation to send him away was—and is—terribly strong.

“I could feel myself trying to justify the idea to my own soul, as if I were pleading a case before a tribunal. I could hear myself argue that it was unfair to let such a man enjoy the home of my Dearest, whom he had already superseded too long. But I knew, deep within myself, that my Dearest would be the very one of all others to say, ‘Let him stay on,’ if he could come back and speak to us. In that same deep down, hidden place, was the knowledge of my real reason for wanting the man to go. To move him might easily break off the thread of his life. That was the temptation: to do a thing which might seem just to every one who heard the circumstances, and to get rid of the intolerable burden—to be absolutely free of it as I could be in no other way.

“Of my own self, I’m afraid I couldn’t have resisted the temptation. I should probably have thrown all responsibility on my solicitor, and let him settle everything as he thought best. The strength to resist has come through you, and what you have taught me. So it is that this man who has insulted you, and burned your letters, owes his comforts and perhaps his life itself, to you.

“There are many things which it is hard to forgive him, but I think the hardest of all is the loss of the letters. To lose them is like losing my talisman. But the ones he was keeping as a threat, I shall have again. The solicitor says he will force the man to give them up.

“Now that my leaving this dear house is settled, the next question is, What shall I do with my life, since my services as an untrained nurse are no longer pledged here? Already, though only a few days have passed, I’ve decided how to answer that question. I shall go into some hospital as a probationer, and as soon as I am qualified, I shall offer my services to the Red Cross. That may be sooner than with most amateurs, for already I’ve learned almost as much about nursing as hospital training of a year could have taught me. Wherever I’m sent, I’m willing to go. But before I take up this new work, I have a plan to carry out. Oh, how I wonder what you will say to it!

“Only a few weeks before she went out of the world, a cousin of my father’s left Mother some property in California, quite valuable property, near Bakersfield. I don’t know if you have ever been there, but of course you’ve heard that it is a great oil country. There are big wells on this property. If it had come to Mother earlier, she would have been overjoyed, because it would have made all the difference between skimping poverty and comparative riches. It came too late for her, and for me it isn’t very important, so far as the money is concerned. There’s another thing that makes it important, though. The place is in California! It seems like mending a link in a broken chain, to own land in dear California again.

“Mother always said she would hate to go back, but I never felt like that. Now, it seems to be rather necessary for me to go—or to send some one, to look into things which concern the property. We hear there has been mismanagement—perhaps dishonesty. Of course I know nothing about business myself, and should be of no use. But if I went to California, I would engage some good lawyer on the spot, to take care of my interests: and, I could meet you, my friend. That is, I could if you were willing. Would you be? Would you welcome me if I came one day to the gate of the little garden, and begged, ‘Dear Hermit of the Mirador, will you give a poor tired traveler lunch in your pergola?’

“You see now that the legacy is only an excuse. I confess it. I shouldn’t go to California just to straighten out things at the oil fields—no, not even if I lost the property by not going. But to see my friend who has given me back life, and love in the sweetness of memory and hope of future usefulness, I would travel with joy across the whole world instead of half.

“I know you refused to send your photograph, because I ‘might be disillusioned.’ But I couldn’t be disillusioned, because there’s no illusion. Do I care what your looks may be? If you are ugly, I’m sure it’s a beautiful, brave ugliness. Anyhow, I should think it so. Please, therefore, don’t put me off for any such reason as you gave about the photograph. It isn’t really worthy of you, or even of me. Let us dare to be frank with each other. I’ve told you how much I want to see you and what it would mean to me. In return you must tell me whether you want me to come, or whether, because of some real reason (which you may or may not choose to explain) you wish me to stay away.

“When you get this, there will be only time to telegraph to—Yours ever in unbreakable friendship, Barbara Denin.”

PART III

BEYOND THE MILESTONES

CHAPTER XVI

There was a great wind wailing over the sea, on the day that Barbara’s letter was brought to Denin. The wind seemed to come from the four corners of the earth, laden with all the stormy sorrow of the world since men and women first loved and lost each other. The voice was old as death and young as life, and the heartbreak of unending processions of lovers was the message it brought to the Mirador garden. Denin knew because he had heard through the fire-music of life, that there was another voice and another message for those who would listen. He knew that higher than tragedy rang the notes of endless triumph; that the message of love went on forever beyond the break of the note of loss. He knew the lesson he had so hardly taught himself and Barbara: that happiness is stronger than sorrow, as all things positive are stronger than all negative things. But the big truths of the universe were too big for him that day. The thought that he might see Barbara, and yet must not see her, shut out all the rest.

There had been, it seemed, only one honorable course open when he had decided to sacrifice his place in life to save Barbara from scandal and to let her keep her happiness. It was very different now. Her marriage with Trevor d’Arcy had not been a marriage of love. It had been worse than a failure. She had loved only one man, John Denin. Why not let her come and find him?

But no, the trial would be too great. It would not be fair to put the girl, still almost a child, to such a test. Her love for Denin had been a delicate poem. He had died, and his memory was cherished in her heart, as a rose of romance. There was no human passion in such a gentle love, and only the strongest passion could pass through the ordeal he proposed. She might hate him for his long silence, and blame him for deceit. She would see herself disgraced in the eyes of the world, and nothing that he could give would repay her for all that she must lose. No love could be expected to stand such a test, much less the love of a child for an ideal which had never, in truth, existed. It would break her heart to fail, and break his to have her fail. The memory of a meeting and a parting would be for him a second death—death by torture. The temptation to let things take their course was overcome. Indeed, he no longer felt it as a temptation; nevertheless he suffered.

Some reason for putting her off must be alleged, but there was time to think of that afterwards, between the telegram and letter which would follow. The great thing was to prevent her from coming to the Mirador, and finding out what a tragic tangle she had made of her life.

When he had sent the cable, and was at home again, Denin read once more all of Barbara’s closely written pages. At the end he kissed the dear name with a kiss of mingled passion and renunciation.

“She’ll think I have no more heart than a stone,” he said to himself. “Her friendship for Sanbourne will crumble to pieces.” Ineffably he longed to keep it—all that he had in life of sunshine. Yet he could not see how to account for his refusal without lying, and without appearing in her eyes cold as a block of marble. He looked at the letter—which might be her last—as a man might look at a beloved face about to be hidden in a coffin: and suddenly the date sprang to his eyes.

For all his reading and re-reading he had not noticed it before. There had been a delay. The letter had been several days longer than usual in reaching him. What if she had grown tired of awaiting the asked-for cable, and had chosen to take silence for consent?

The certainty that this was so seized upon Denin. He was suddenly as sure that Barbara was on the way to him, as if he had just heard the news of her starting. If, honestly and at the bottom of his heart he wanted to save her a tragic awakening from dreams, he must leave nothing to chance. He must be up and doing. It was not impossible, even if she had waited four days for a cable, and started impulsively off on the fifth, that she might walk in at the gate of the Mirador garden, a week from that night, so Denin hastily calculated. How was he to be gone before she came—if she did come—without humiliating the dear visitor by seeming deliberately to avoid her? How could John Sanbourne’s absence be accounted for in some reasonable and impersonal way, if Lady Denin arrived at Santa Barbara enquiring for him?

In his need of a pretext, he recalled the offer which he had laughed at; Carl Pohlson Bradley’s offer to buy the Mirador in its garden. The man would snap at the chance to get his way so soon. In a few days the business could be settled, and Sanbourne could be gone. But where? And Denin sought anxiously to provide the “good reason” at which he had hinted to Barbara, in his cable forbidding her to come.

Even if he had sold the Mirador before receiving his friend’s letter, he might have waited to see her. He could have stayed on in a hotel, if the new owner of the place had been impatient. No, selling his house was but one step of the journey. What should the next one be?

Almost instantly the solution of the whole difficulty presented itself to his mind. A few days before, he had sent a subscription to a fund for organizing a relief expedition to Serbia. The appeal had come to John Sanbourne through his publisher. And even as he wrote his check, he had thought, if it were not for the exquisite bond of friendship which tied him to a fixed address—the address of the Mirador—how easy it would be to give himself as well as his money, to the cause of Serbia in distress. Not only doctors and nurses were wanted for the expedition, but men of independent means, able to act as hospital orderlies and in other ways.

Physically, Denin had not yet got back the full measure of his old strength. After all these months, he would be of no use as a fighting man. He limped after a hard walk; and often with a change of weather he suffered sharp pain, as if his old wounds were new. But he could stand a long journey, and surely he would be equal to the work of an orderly, perhaps something better. If there were dangers to meet in Serbia, he would welcome them, whatever they might be. To die would be to adjust things as they could be adjusted in no other way. Since August 18, 1914, John Denin had had no right to live.

The more he thought of it, the wiser seemed the Serbian plan. With Bradley’s money, he could do five times more for the Red Cross fund than he had hoped to do. What mattered the wrench of parting from the Mirador? The only thing that really mattered, as before, was saving Barbara from pain. She would not be hurt if she came and found him gone on such an errand as this, for it was one which could not wait. Later, she would understand even more clearly, for he would write a letter and send it to Gorston Old Hall, where some servant would have been given a forwarding address. Thus he need not quite lose his friend. She would forgive his going away, and write to him in Serbia.

Denin calculated that Barbara could not have sailed from England until at least five or six days after sending her letter to him. Probably she would not have sailed so soon. Apparently, when writing, she had only just made up her mind that Gorston Old Hall was unbearable. There would have been many things to arrange, and business to settle with her solicitor, friends to say good-by to. She could not possibly reach Santa Barbara even if she traveled with the most unlikely haste, until the end of the week. That she should arrive on Saturday would be almost a miracle. It was Monday now, and Thursday might see him away from the place where he had dreamed of passing all his days. Now that he had thrown off the dream, he saw it a fantastic vision. As vigor of body and mind came back to him, the boundaries of the Mirador garden would soon, in any case, have become too narrow for his energies. He would have found it necessary to shoulder some useful burden, and work with the rest of the world. The hour had struck for him now, and John Sanbourne had got his marching orders, as John Denin had got them long ago.

He sent word to Bradley through his lawyer, that the Mirador was for sale, after all. Next, he telegraphed to the leader of the Serbian Relief Expedition, in New York, and asked if there was a place for him. Because the name of John Sanbourne was known, an enthusiastic answer came back with great promptness. This stirred Denin’s heart, which, despite his firm resolution, felt heavy and cold. He thought of Barbara coming to the Mirador, only to find Mr. Bradley’s workmen engaged in tearing down the barrier between the big garden and the little one. But now that his course of action was decided, he supplemented his first cable to her with another. This was in case his “presentiment” were wrong, and she had not started. He told her what his “good reason” was: that he had sold the Mirador and was starting at once for Serbia. Further explanations, he added, would be given when he wrote.

Never had a letter to Lady Denin been so difficult for John Sanbourne to compose, for he could say only the things he least wished to say; and so the result of his labor was, in the end, very short. Nevertheless, it took hours to write.

The day after the sending of the letter was largely taken up by a visit from Carl Pohlson Bradley and his man of business. Denin held the millionaire to the last price named by himself, for he intended to use the money largely for the benefit of the Serbian Red Cross. At last a contract was signed, and the check paid into John Sanbourne’s bank at Santa Barbara. He had still all Wednesday and part of Thursday for packing and disposing of his treasures. The task was easy, for the treasures were few. He could “fold his tent like an Arab, and silently steal away.”

Denin did not expect ever to return to Santa Barbara. Having loved the Mirador, and given it up, there was no longer anything tangible to call him back. More likely than not, death which had come close to him in France, would come closer still in Serbia. He would cast off his body like an outworn cloak, and free of it, would knock once more at the gate where, once, he had heard voices singing.

The one possession which Denin could not bear to give up, yet knew not how to take, was the portrait of Barbara which he had made, and framed in redwood. It was large, and the delicate tints of its pastels had to be carefully protected. He could not possibly include it in his slender “kit” for Serbia. At last he decided to pack frame and all with precaution, carry the case to New York, and leave it in charge of Eversedge Sibley. There would be time for a visit to Sibley before the sailing of the expedition; and Denin would make his friend promise to burn the wooden box unopened, if he died abroad.

Everything else, with the exception of some favorite books which could be slipped into his luggage, he determined to give away. Gossip about the sale of the Mirador, and Sanbourne’s intended departure for Serbia, ran like quicksilver, in all directions. The acquaintances he had made—or rather acquaintances who had fastened upon him—began calling to enquire if the news were true, and their question answered itself before it was asked. The hermit of the Mirador and his faithful dumb companion, a pipe, were surrounded with the aimless confusion of a hasty flitting. Souvenirs of John Sanbourne had their value, but he did not appear to know that. He offered his Lares and Penates recklessly, to any one who would accept. The parson’s daughter, to whom—all unconsciously—he was an ideal hero, took away the pictures, copies of those the child Barbara had loved. The parson himself got a valuable contribution of books for his library. The furniture was given to a young couple who had taken a bungalow not far off, and were getting it ready with an eye to economy. Dishes and linen went the same way, excepting a cup and saucer and teapot which were clamored for with tears by an old lady for whom “The War Wedding” ranked with the Bible.

Denin had allowed no one to enter the balconied bedroom, for he had left Barbara’s portrait until the last minute, and no eyes but his were to see that sacred thing. Once the picture was shut away and nailed up between layers of cotton and wood, it might be that he should never again be greeted by the dear, elusive smile. The furniture from upstairs he had added to the confusion of the sitting-room below, and early in the afternoon of Thursday everything had been carted away by the new owners. To strip the house while Sanbourne was still in it seemed heartless, they had protested; but he had begged them to do so. Mr. Bradley was to claim possession of the place next day.

When all those who called themselves his friends had bidden him good-by, a curious sense of peace, of pause between storms, fell upon the departing hermit of the Mirador. Because the little house was almost as empty and echoing as on the day when he had seen it first, that day lived again very clearly in Denin’s mind. He had sought a refuge, and had found happiness. The spirit of Barbara had come to him in the garden, and had brought him love. That love he was taking away with him, though he had to leave behind much that was very sweet; and now the time had come to say farewell to the memories of months. In three hours the motor car was due, which Denin had ordered to take him and his luggage to the station. The most important piece of that luggage was Barbara’s portrait, and it had still to be put into its case. But he was leaving the farewell to her eyes, till the last moment, the last second even.

Meanwhile he walked in the garden, and in the jeweled green tunnel of the pergola. There, in the pergola, he had read most of Barbara’s letters, and answered them. He was glad that no one was ever likely to stroll or sit in the corridor of illuminated tapestry after to-day. Carl Pohlson Bradley intended to have the pergola pulled down, and the whole place torn to pieces in order to carry out the grandiose scheme of a “garden architect” whom he had employed.

After the arrival of Barbara’s first letter, and the one in which she confessed her love for the dead John Denin, his sweetest association with the pergola was the companionship of a little child—only a dream child, but more real, it seemed, than any living child could be. It was the child-Barbara who had walked day after day, hand in hand with him in the pergola. She had welcomed him to the Mirador when he had come as its owner; but after a certain letter from England, she had changed in a peculiarly thrilling way. The letter was among the first half dozen; but in the growing packet, Denin kept it near the top. It was one of those which he re-read oftenest. In it Barbara had said to her friend, John Sanbourne, “If my dear love had lived, to make me his wife, perhaps by this time we should have had a baby with us. I think often of that little baby that might have been—so often, that I have made it seem real. It is a great comfort to me. I can almost believe that its soul really does exist, and that it comes to console me because its warm little body can never be held in my arms. I see the tiny face, and the great eyes. They are dark gray, like its father’s. And when mine fill with tears, it lays little fingers on them, fingers cool and light as rose petals. Oh, it must exist, this baby soul, for it is so loving, and it has such strong individuality of its own! I couldn’t spare it now. Already, since it first came and said, ‘I am the child who ought to be yours and his,’ it seems to have grown. It is the realest thing! Its hair is darker and longer and curlier than it used to be. Perhaps this baby will always stay with me, and I shall see it grow into boyhood, then, at last, into manhood. It’s wonderful to have this dream-baby! Tell me, have you ever had one? I know you are alone in life, for you have said so. But the more alone in life one was, the dearer a dream-baby might be.”

After that letter, which pierced Denin’s heart and then poured balm into the wound, the child-Barbara who haunted the Mirador had changed for him, except in name; or rather another child-Barbara had come, not a child of ten or twelve, but a baby thing with smoke-blue eyes and little satin rings of ruddy hair. The elder Barbara did not go away, but loved the baby as he did, helping him teach it how to walk, and talk, and think.

He wrote to Lady Denin after that letter of hers: “Yes, I too have a dream-child, but mine is a little girl. I hardly know how I got on without her before she came.”

“Thank Heaven for memory!” he said to himself now, as he took his last look at the tunnel of greenery starred with passion-flowers. “After all, does it so much matter whether we had a beloved thing one minute ago, or ten years ago, if it lives always in our hearts? Each tick of the watch turns the present into the past. But in our hearts there is no past.”

So he bade good-by to the pergola, and the garden he had made out of a tangled wilderness. Then he turned towards the house; for in the house he had to take leave of the portrait.

CHAPTER XVII

“I’ll get out here, please!” said a woman in black, stopping the automobile which had brought her from the railway station within sight of the Fay place. She was tall and slender, and apparently young, but her mourning veil was so thick that it lay like drifting coal-smoke between her face and the curious stare of the chauffeur.

“It’s a quarter of a mile to the gate yet. And I shan’t charge any more to take you right to it,” he explained.

“I know—thank you!” his passenger said. “But I want to walk the rest of the way.”

She had a pretty way of speaking, though rather a foreign sort of accent, he thought. Perhaps it was English. Her luggage had been left at the station, so she was free to do as she pleased, if it amused her to spoil her shoes with the white dust of the road. She paid the price agreed upon, and a dollar over, which the chauffeur acknowledged with a “Thank you, miss!” As he turned and drove away, however, he wondered if he ought to have called her “miss.” To be sure, she had the air of a girl; but her manner was grave. He didn’t know one sort of mourning from another; but being a foreigner like as not she was one of them war widows over there.