Now she saw that it could be otherwise, as perhaps with her this very moment: that Nature took the seed, however it might fall, and nourished it wherever it fell, and made of it, regardless of human will, the New Life—heedless of the emotion of the two that were concerned in the process. For the first time she saw that pitiless, indifferent face of Nature, intent only on the Result, the thing created, scorning the spiritual travail of the creator, ignoring any great revelation of the man and the woman that would seem to count for so much in this process of life-making. Thus a drunken beast might beget his child in the body of a loathing woman, blind souls sowing life blindly for a blind future.
The idea clutched her like fear: she would defy this fate that would use her like any other piece of matrix, merely to bear the seed and nourish it for a certain period of its way, one small step in the long process. Her heart demanded more than a passive part in the order of Nature. Her soul needed its share from the first moment of conception in making that which she was to give to the race. Some day a doctor would explain to her that she was but the soil on which the fertile germ grew like a vegetable, without her will, her consent, her creating soul! But she would reject that coarse interpretation—the very blasphemy of love.
And here, at this point, as she lay in the dark beneath the sighing firs, it dawned in her dimly that something was wanting in her marriage, in the union with the man she had chosen. She had taken him of her own free choice; she was willingly his; she would bear his children if they came. Her body and her soul were committed to him by choice, and by that ceremony of marriage before the people in the chapel—to take her part with him in the endless process of Fate, the continuance of life.
Nevertheless, lying there in full contemplation of this new life that might already be putting its clutch upon her life, to suck from her its own being, she rebelled at it all. Her heart cried for her part, her very own, for that mysterious exaltation that should make her really one with the father in the act of creation, in the fulfilment of Love. And somehow she knew assuredly that this could not be, not with this man by her side, not with her husband. …
She turned to him, pillowed there at her side, one hand resting fondly on her arm. Her eyes stared at him through the darkness, trying to read the familiar features. Did he, too, know this? Did he feel that it was impossible ever to be really one with her? Did he suspect the terrible defeat she was suffering now? A tear dropped from her eye and fell on the upturned face of the sleeper. He moved, murmured, "dearest," and settled back into his deep sleep; taking his hand from her arm. With a little cry she fell on him and kissed him, asking his forgiveness for the mistake between them. She put her head close to his, her lips to his lips; for she was his and yet not his—a strange division separating them, a cleavage between their bodies and their souls.
"Why did we not know?" something whispered within. But she answered herself more calmly—"It will all come right in the end—it must come right—for his sake!"
CHAPTER V
When young John Lane first came to St. Louis to work as a clerk in the traffic department of the Atlantic and Pacific, he had called on Colonel Price at his office, a dingy little room in the corner of the second story of the old brick building which had housed the wholesale hardware business of Parrott and Price for a generation. The old merchant had received the young man with the pleasant kindliness that kept his three hundred employees always devoted to him.
"I knew your father, sir!" he said, half-closing his eyes and leaning back in his padded old office chair. "Let me see—it was in sixty-two in camp before Vicksburg. I went to consult him about a boil on my leg. It was a bad boil—it hurt me. … Your father was a fine man—What are you doing in St. Louis?" he concluded abruptly, looking out of his shrewd blue eyes at the fresh-colored young man whose strong hands gripped squarely the arms of his chair.
And from that day Lane knew that the Colonel never lost sight of him. When his chance came, as in time it did come through one of the mutations of the great corporation, he suspected that the old hardware merchant, who was a close friend of the chief men in the road, had spoken the needed word to lift the clerk out of the rut. At any rate the Colonel had not forgotten the son of Tyringham Lane, and the young man had often been to the generous, ugly Victorian house—built when the hardware business made its first success.
Nevertheless, when, three years later John Lane made another afternoon visit to that dingy office in the Parrott and Price establishment, his hands trembed nervously as he sat waiting while the Colonel scrawled his signature to several papers.
"Well, John!" the old man remarked finally, shoving the papers towards the waiting stenographer. "How's railroadin' these days?"
"All right," Lane answered buoyantly. "They have transferred me to the
Indiana division, headquarters at Torso—superintendent of the Torso and
Toledo."
"Indeed! But you'll be back here some day, eh?"
"I hope so!"
"That's good!" The Colonel smiled sympathetically, as he always did when he contemplated energetic youth, climbing the long ladder with a firm grip on each rung.
"I came to see you about another matter," Lane began hesitantly.
"Anything I can do for you?"
"Yes, sir; I want to marry your daughter—and I'd like you to know it."
The old merchant's face became suddenly grave, the twinkle disappearing from his blue eyes. He listened thoughtfully while the young man explained himself. He was still a poor man, of course; his future was to be made. But he did not intend to remain poor. His salary was not much to offer a girl like the Colonel's daughter; but it would go far in Torso—and it was the first step. Finally he was silent, well aware that there was small possibility that he should ever be a rich man, as Colonel Price was, and that it was presumptuous of him to seek to marry his daughter, and therefore open to mean interpretation. But he felt that the Colonel was not one to impute low motives. He knew the very real democracy of the successful merchant, who never had forgotten his own story.
"What does Belle say?" the Colonel asked.
"I should not have come here if I didn't think—" the young man laughed.
"Of course!"
Then the Colonel pulled down the top of his desk, signifying that the day's business was done.
"We have never desired what is called a good match for our girl," he remarked slowly in reply to a further plea from Lane. "All we want is the best;" he laid grave emphasis on this watchword. "And the best is that Isabelle should be happy in her marriage. If she loves the man she marries, she must be that. … And I don't suppose you would be here if you weren't sure you could make her love you enough to be happy!"
The old man's smile returned for a fleeting moment, and then he mused.
"I am afraid it will be hard for her to settle down in a place like Torso—after all she's had," Lane conceded. "But I don't expect that Torso is the end of my rope. I shall give her a better chance than that, I hope."
The Colonel nodded sympathetically.
"I shouldn't consider it any hardship for my daughter to live in Torso or in any other place—if she has a good husband and loves him. That is all, my boy!"
Lane, who realized