She returned safely. Jane opened the door for her, mysteriously, as though she enjoyed her share in the conspiracy. Maggie sped upstairs, and now with Martin's words in her ears, had enough to stiffen her back for the battle.
The next move in the affair was on the following afternoon when Maggie, alone in the drawing-room, beheld Caroline Smith in the doorway.
"She's got cheek enough for anything," was Maggie's first thought, but she was not aware of the true magnificence of that young woman's audacity until she found her hand seized and her cheek kissed.
Caroline, in fact, had greeted her with precisely her old spontaneous enthusiasm.
"Maggie, darling, where have you been all these days--but WEEKS it is indeed! You might at least have sent me just a word. Life simply hasn't been the same without you! You pet! . . . and you look tired! Yes, you do. You've been overworking or something, all because you haven't had me to look after you!"
Maggie gravely withdrew, and standing away from the shining elegance of her friend said:
"Caroline--I want to know something before we go any further. What I want to know is--why did you read that note that I asked you to give to Martin Warlock?"
Caroline stared in amazement. "My dear, what IS the matter? Are you ill or something? Oh, you are. I can see you are! You poor darling! Read your note? What note, dear?"
"The note I gave you a month ago--one evening when you were here."
"A note! A month ago. My dear! As though I could ever remember what I did a MONTH ago! Why, it's always all I can manage to remember what I did yesterday. Did you give me a note, dear?"
Maggie began to be angry. "Of course I did. You remember perfectly well. I gave it to you for Martin Warlock. You let him have it, but meanwhile you read it, and not only that but told everybody else about it."
Caroline's expression changed. She was suddenly sulky. Her face was like that of a spoilt child.
"Well, Maggie Cardinal, if you call that being a friend! To say that I would ever do such a thing!"
"You know you did!" said Maggie quietly.
"Read your letters? As though I'd want to! Why should I? As though I hadn't something more interesting to do! No thank you! Of course you have been getting yourself into a mess. Every one knows that. That's why I came here to-day--to show you that I was a REAL friend and didn't mind WHAT people said about you! When they were all talking about you last night, and saying the most DREADFUL things, I defended you and said it wasn't really your fault, you couldn't have told what a rotten sort of a man Martin Warlock was--"
"That's enough," said Maggie. "I don't want your defence, thank you. You're mean and deceitful and untrue. You never have been a friend of mine, and I don't want ever to see you again!"
Caroline Smith was horrified. "Well, upon my word. Isn't that gratitude? Here am I, the only person in this whole place would take any trouble with you! When the others all said that you were plain and stupid and hadn't anything to say for yourself I stuck to you. I did all I could, wasting all my time going to the dressmaker with you and trying to make you look like something human, and this is the way you repay me! Well, there's a lesson for me! Many's the time mother's said to me, 'Carry, you'll just ruin yourself with that kind heart of yours, laying yourself out for others when you ought to be seeing after yourself. You've got too big a heart for this world.' Doesn't it just show one? And to end it all with accusing me of reading your letters! If you choose to sit in the park after dark with a man who everybody knows--"
"Either you're going to leave this room or I am," said Maggie.
"Thank you!" said Caroline, tossing her head. "I haven't the slightest desire to stay, I assure you! Only you'll be sorry for this, Maggie Cardinal, you will indeed!"
With a swish of the skirts and a violent banging of the door she was gone.
"The only friend I had," thought Maggie.
The next development was an announcement from Aunt Anne that she would like Maggie to accompany her to a meeting at Miss Avies'. Aunt Anne did not explain what kind of a meeting it would be, and Maggie asked no questions. She simply replied that she would go. She had indeed by this time a very considerable curiosity of her own as to what every one thought was going to happen in ten days' time. Perhaps this meeting would enlighten her. It did.
On arriving at Miss Avies' gaunt and menacing apartment she found herself in the very stronghold of the Inside Saints. It was a strange affair, and Maggie was never to see anything quite like it again. In the first place, Miss Avies' room was not exactly the place in which you would have expected to discover a meeting of this kind.
She lived over a house-agent's in John Street, Adelphi. Her sitting- room was low-ceilinged with little diamond-paned windows. The place was let furnished, and the green and red vases on the mantelpiece, the brass clock and the bright yellow wallpaper were properties of the landlord. To the atmosphere of the place Miss Avies, although she lived there for a number of years, had contributed nothing.
It had all the desolate forlornness of a habitation in which no human being has dwelt for a very long time; there was dust on the mantelpiece, a melancholy sputtering of coal choked with cinders and gasping for breath in the fireplace, stuffy hot clamminess beating about the unopened windows. Along the breadth of the faded brown carpet some fifty cane-bottomed chairs were pressed tightly in rows together, and in front of the window, facing the chairs, was a little wooden table with a chair beside it, on the table a glass of water and a Bible.
When Maggie and her aunts entered the chairs were almost all occupied and they were forced to sit at the end of the last row but one. The meeting had apparently not yet begun, and many heads were turned towards them as they took their places. Maggie fancied that the glances directed at herself were angry and severe, but that was very possibly her imagination. She soon recognised people known to her--Miss Pyncheon, calm and placid; Mrs. Smith, Caroline's mother, very stout, hot, and self-important; Amy Warlock, proud and severe; and Miss Avies herself standing, like a general surveying his forces, behind the table.
The room was draughty and close and had a confused smell of oil- cloth and geraniums, and Maggie knew that soon she would have a headache. She fancied that already the atmosphere was influencing the meeting. From where she sat she could see a succession of side faces, and it was strange what a hungry, appealing look these pale cheeks and staring eyes had. Hungry! Yes, that's what they all were. She thought, fantastically, for a moment, of poor Mr. Magnus's Treasure Hunters, and she seemed to see the whole of this company in a raft drifting in mid-ocean, not a sail in sight and the last ship's biscuit gone.
They were not, taken altogether, a very fine collection, old maids and young girls, many of them apparently of the servant class, one or two sitting with open mouths and a vacancy of expression that seemed to demand a conjurer with a rabbit and a hat. Some faces were of the true fanatic cast, lit with the glow of an expectancy and a hope that no rational experience had ever actually justified. One girl, whom Maggie had seen with Aunt Anne on some occasion, had especially this prophetic anticipation in the whole pose of her body as she bent forward a little, her elbows on her knees her chin on her hands, gazing with wide burning eyes at Miss Avies. This girl, whom Maggie was never to see again hung as a picture in the rooms of her mind for the rest of her life--the youth, the desperate anxiety as of one who throws her last piece upon the gaming-table, the poverty of the shabby black dress, the real physical austerity and asceticism of the white cheeks and the thin arms and pale hands-- this figure remained a symbol for Maggie. She used to wonder in after years, when fortune had carried her far enough away from all this world, what had happened to that girl. But she was never to know.
There were faces, too, like Miss Pyncheon's, calm, contented, confident, old women who had found in their religion the panacea of all their troubles. There were faces like Mrs. Smith's, coarse and vulgar, out for any sensation that might come along, and ready instantly to express their contempt if the particular "trick" that they were expecting failed to come off; other faces, again, like Amy Warlock's, grimly set upon secret thoughts and purposes of their own, faces trained to withstand any sudden attack on the emotions, but eager, too, like the rest for some revelation that was to answer all questions and satisfy all expectations.
Maggie wondered, as she looked about her, how she could have raised in her own imagination, around the Chapel and its affairs, so formidable an atmosphere of terror and tyrannic discipline. Here gathered together were a few women, tired, pale, many of them uneducated, awaiting like children the opening of a box, the springing into flower of a dry husk of a seed, the raising of the curtain on some wonderful scene. Maggie, as she looked at them, knew that they must be disappointed, and her heart ached for them all, yes, even for Amy Warlock, her declared enemy. She lost, as she sat there, for the moment all sense of her own personal history. She only saw them all tired and hungry and expectant; perhaps, after all, there WAS something behind it all--something for which they had a right to be searching; even of that she had not sure knowledge-- but the pathos and also the bravery of their search touched and moved her. She was beginning to understand something of the beauty that hovered like a bird always just out of sight about the ugly walls of the Chapel.
"Whatever they want, poor dears," she thought, "I do hope they get it."
Miss Avies opened the meeting with an extempore prayer: then they all stood up and sang a hymn, and their quavering voices were thin and sharp and strained in the stuffy close-ceilinged room. The hymn, like all the other Chapel hymns that Maggie had heard, had to do with "the Blood of the Lamb," "the sacrifice of Blood," "the Blood that heals." There was also a refrain:
And, when Thou comest, Lord, we pray That Thou wilt spare Thy sword, Or on that grim and ghastly day Who will escape the Lord? WHO will escape the Lord?
There were many verses to this hymn, and it had a long and lugubrious tune, so that Maggie thought that it would never end, but as it proceeded the words worked their effect on the congregation, and at the last there was much emotion and several women were crying.
Then they all sat down again and the meeting developed a very business-like side. There was a great deal of discussion as to dates, places, appointments, and Maggie was amused to discover that in this part of the proceedings Mrs. Smith had a great deal to say, and took a very leading place.
The gathering became like any other assemblage of ladies for some charitable or social purpose, and there were the usual disputes and signs of temper and wounded pride; in all those matters Miss Avies was a most admirable and unflinching chairman.
Then at last the real moment came. Miss Avies got up to speak. She stood there, scornful, superior, and yet with some almost cynical appeal in her eyes as though she said to them: "You poor fools! No one knows better than I the folly of your being here, no one knows better than I how far you will, all of you, be from realising any of your dreams. Tricked, the lot of you!--and yet--and yet--go on believing, expecting, hoping. Pray, pray that I may be wrong and you may be right."
What she actually said was as follows: "This will be our last meeting before the end of the year. What will come to all of us before we all meet again no one can say, but this we all know, that we have, most of us, been living now for many years in expectation. We have been taught, by the goodness of God, to believe that we must be ready at any moment to obey His call, and that call may come, in the middle of our work, of our prayers, of our love for others, of our pursuit of our own ambitions, and that whenever it does come we must be ready to obey it. We have been told by our great and good Master, who has been set over us for our guidance by God Himself, that that call may now be very near. Whatever form it may take we must accept it, give up all we have and follow Him. That is understood by all of us. I will not say more now. This is not the time for any more directions from me. We must address ourselves, each one of us, to God Himself, and ask Him to prepare us so that we may be as He would have us on the day of His coming. I suggest now before we part that we share together in a few minutes of private prayer." They all rose, and Maggie, before she knelt down, caught a sudden glimpse of the pale girl whom she had noticed earlier standing for a moment as though she were about to make some desperate appeal to them all. Some words did indeed seem to come from her lips, but the scraping of chairs drowned every other sound. Nevertheless that figure was there, the hands stretched out, the very soul struggling through the eyes for expression, the body tense, sacred, eloquent, like the body of some young prophetess. Then all were on their knees, and Maggie, too, her face in her hands, was praying. It was, perhaps, the first time in her life that she had actively, consciously, of her own volition prayed. The appeal formed itself as it were without her own agency.
"God--if there is a God--give me Martin. I care for nothing else but that. If You will give me Martin for my own always, ever, I will believe in You. I will worship You and say prayers to You, and do anything You tell me if You give me Martin. Oh God! I ought to have him. He is mine. I can do more for him than any one else can--I can make him happy and good. I know I can. God give him to me and I will be your slave. God, give me Martin--God, give me Martin."
She rose, as it were, from the depths of the sea, from great darkness and breathlessness and exhaustion. For a moment she could not see the room nor any detail, but only one pale face after another, like a pattern on a wall, hiding something from her.
She stood bewildered beside her aunts, not hearing the strains of the last hymn nor the quaver of Aunt Anne's trembling voice beside her.
"God, give me Martin," was her last challenge in the strange pale silence that floated around her. Then suddenly, as though she had pushed open a door and gone through, she was back in the world again, a flood of sound was about her ears, and in front of her the red face of Mrs. Smith, her mouth wide open, like the mouth of an eager fish, singing about "the Blood of the Lamb" with unctuous satisfaction . . .
