Armed with a second candlestick she stationed herself inside the door and waited. The stone floor was icy, but the fury of a woman scorned kept her warm. The Votivkirche struck one, two, three quarters of an hour. The candlestick in her hand changed from iron to ice, from ice to red-hot fire. Still the Portier had not come back and the door chain swung in the wind.
At four o’clock she retired to the bedroom again. Indignation had changed to fear, coupled with sneezing. Surely even the Schubert Society—What was that?
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!”
CHAPTER X
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.
Harmony was now a woman.
Anna would have cut off her hand sooner than have brought the girl to harm; but she loved to generalize. It amused her to see Harmony’s eyes widen with horror at one of her radical beliefs. Nothing pleased her more than to pit her individualism against the girl’s rigid and conventional morality, and down her by some apparently unanswerable argument.
On the day after the incident in the kitchen such an argument took place—hardly an argument, for Harmony knew nothing of mental fencing. Anna had taken a heavy cold, and remained at home. Harmony had been practicing, and at the end she played a little winter song by some modern composer. It breathed all the purity of a white winter’s day; it was as chaste as ice and as cold; and yet throughout was the thought of green things hiding beneath the snow and the hope of spring.
Harmony, having finished, voiced some such feeling. She was rather ashamed of her thought.
“It seems that way to me,” she finished apologetically. “It sounds rather silly. I always think I can tell the sort of person who composes certain things.”
“And this gentleman who writes of winter?”
“I think he is very reserved. And that he has never loved any one.”
“Indeed!”
“When there is any love in music, any heart, one always feels it, exactly as in books—the difference between a love story and—and—”
“—a dictionary !”
“You always laugh,” Harmony complained
“That’s better than weeping. When I think of the rotten way things go in this world I want to weep always.”
“I don’t find it a bad world. Of course there are bad people, but there are good ones.”