From the Portier’s bed was coming a rhythmic
respiration!
She roused him, standing over him with the iron candlestick,
now lighted, and gazing at him with eyes in which
alarm struggled with suspicion.
“Thou hast been out of thy bed!”
“But no!”
“An hour since the bed was empty.”
“Thou dreamest.”
“The chain is off the door.”
“Let it remain so and sleep. What have
we to steal or the Americans above? Sleep and
keep peace.”
He yawned and was instantly asleep again. The
Portier’s wife crawled into her bed and warmed
her aching feet under the crimson feather comfort.
But her soul was shaken.
The Devil had been known to come at night and take
innocent ones out to do his evil. The innocent
ones knew it not, but it might be told by the soles
of the feet, which were always soiled.
At dawn the Portier’s wife cautiously uncovered
the soles of her sleeping lord’s feet, and fell
back gasping. They were quite black, as of one
who had tramped in garden mould.
Early the next morning Harmony, after a restless night,
opened the door from the salon of Maria Theresa into
the hall and set out a pitcher for the milk.
On the floor, just outside, lay the antlers from the
deer across the street. Tied to them was a bit
of paper, and on it was written the one word, “Still!”
In looking back after a catastrophe it is easy to
trace the steps by which the inevitable advanced.
Destiny marches, not by great leaps but with a thousand
small and painful steps, and here and there it leaves
its mark, a footprint on a naked soul. We trace
a life by its scars, as a tree by its rings.
Anna Gates was not the best possible companion for
Harmony, and this with every allowance for her real
kindliness, her genuine affection for the girl.
Life had destroyed her illusions, and it was of illusions
that Harmony’s veil had been woven. To Anna
Gates, worn with a thousand sleepless nights, a thousand
thankless days, withered before her time with the struggling
routine of medical practice, sapped with endless calls
for sympathy and aid, existence ceased to be spiritual
and became physiological.
Life and birth and death had lost their mysteries.
The veil was rent.
To fit this existence of hers she had built herself
a curious creed, a philosophy of individualism, from
behind which she flung strange bombshells of theories,
shafts of distorted moralities, personal liberties,
irresponsibilities, a supreme scorn for modern law
and the prophets. Nature, she claimed, was her
law and her prophet.
In her hard-working, virginal life her theories had
wrought no mischief. Temptation had been lacking
to exploit them, and even in the event of the opportunity
it was doubtful whether she would have had the strength
of her convictions. Men love theories, but seldom
have the courage of them, and Anna Gates was largely
masculine. Women, being literal, are apt to absorb
dangerous doctrine and put it to the test. When
it is false doctrine they discover it too late.
