The cable

WHEN Tom put the key of Nan’s front door into the keyhole and swung the door open for Cis to precede him into the house, she darted forward and began swiftly to mount the stairs.

“Oh, say, Cis, hold on!” Tom remonstrated. “What am I to tell Nan?”

“Anything you like, but beg her to give me a little time to myself to straighten out my thoughts. I’m—I suppose I’m tired, Tom,” Cis paused to say, then continued upstairs, not answering as Nan called from the dining room:

“Cis, oh, Cis! Come in here a minute! I’ve just finished the baby’s new coat and pressed it. Come, see it!”

Tom joined Nan, flushed and happy over the ironing board, with baby Matt kicking and cooing in the clothes basket, liking the flavor of its edge, over which he had fallen and was chewing it.

“Say, Nan, what do you think?” asked Tom mysteriously. “Talk about melodramas and adventure stories! Life can give the best author cards and spades and beat him out on plots! Rodney Moore’s wife was sitting on a park bench, committing suicide, all by herself, when along came Cis and your brother. Cis saw the bottle, ran like a Marathon victor, jumped at her, knocked the bottle to smithereens, and then we took the lady to the Good Shepherd! She’s a wreck in every way a woman can wreck herself. How’s that? Rodney Moore’s ex-wife!”

Nan had dropped into a chair, her iron in her lap, and was staring at Tom with a horrified face.

“Tom, it can’t be!” she gasped. “That woman doesn’t live here.”

“Don’t know as to that, but she was certainly going to die here,” insisted Tom.

“What do you suppose it means? If she had taken the stuff that chap would have been free; not divorced, free. And Cis could have married him, if she pleased. Yet it was Cis hit the woman’s arm and saved her! What about it? What does it mean?”

“It must mean that the poor wretch is going to have a chance to repent and die decently some day,” said pious little Nan. “But Rodney Moore’s wife! And Cis saved her! What a story! Why, Tom, it makes me shake! Oh, I must go to Cis! I’ll take the baby up to her. He’ll comfort her.”

“No, no! Cis told me to ask you to let her alone awhile, till she pulls herself together,” Tom said. “Nan, the woman looked about all in. If she dies will Cis—?”

“I don’t know, I can’t tell,” cried Nan. “I hope not. Yet I see it would do everything for that man. It may be the way he’ll come right. We never can see ahead of the day. But, Tommy dear, don’t mind too much. I’m quite sure, whether it is Rodney Moore again or not, that it will never be you. I’m sorry, buddy, but that is true.”

“No need of your saying so,” growled Tom. “Cis said it herself, so plain that it doesn’t need footnotes for me to get it. All the same—” Tom stopped, turning away.

“Yes, I say so, too! All the same I’d hate it to be Rodney Moore. But maybe it is Cis’s work to save his soul,” said Nan, picking up her son, finding him an effectual restorative.

“Oh, his soul!” exclaimed Tom, and his tone sounded like an anathema. “I call it going pretty far to make a nice girl marry a man to save his soul!”

“We ought to be willing to die to save a soul,” Nan reminded him.

“I’m perfectly willing that lots of people should die to save a soul, but I ain’t willing one girl should marry to save one, not when the girl is Cis,” said Tom stalking off in disgust the stronger that he had been badly shaken in nerves.

Up in her room Cis knelt before the window, staring out into the top of a spruce tree outside Nan’s little house. It was a long time before she could think coherently. The horror of the suicide so nearly accomplished; the almost equal horror of the woman’s degradation; the unmistakable stamp upon her of vice, upon her who was Rodney’s wife, yet who was not in any true sense his wife, nor could be the wife of any honest man, filled Cicely with shuddering confusion. It was as if she had a vision of what it meant when one said: “A lost soul.” Pity for Rodney overwhelmed her, yet, unjustly or justly, Cis felt as though he were stained by the vileness of this bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. “And they two shall be as one flesh.” The words echoed within her mind, empty of connected thoughts, tense with fragments of thoughts which at once confused and tortured her poignantly.

After a time Cis began to realize fully what had befallen her. She had parted from Rod because this woman lived. She had chanced upon her at barely the right time to secure her continuing to live; she had saved her from suicide, kept her alive to shackle Rodney, according to the law which had bound them together, but had given her another chance for Eternal Life. Now she lay within the spotless physical and spiritual purity of the House of the Good Shepherd. It was Cicely Adair, who had been so sore beset with temptation to marry this woman’s husband, who had been allowed to lead her inside the Good Shepherd’s field where she might, if she would, become that sheep which He bore upon His shoulders into safety.

Cicely’s bright head bowed on the window sill; her breath came short; her cheeks grew wet with tears such as she had never before shed, as the realization came to her that this was her superabounding reward. Because she had renounced Rodney for God’s sake, He was making her as the little crook which He laid around the neck of Rodney’s errant wife, compelling her to turn and return.

Cis rose up at last when Nan, unable to leave her to herself longer, came softly knocking at her door, and, with a loving kiss, laid the baby in Cicely’s arms, offering her thus the best clue that she knew to the mysteries of life, the sweetest panacea for its ills. And as she did so, Nan, with a sudden sinking of heart, was sure that Cis would marry Rodney; that his wife would die and she would marry him, because she had known what it was to worship at the shrine of this baby.

Cis had little to say to Nan of the tremendous experience of that day; what was there to say? It was far too great for comment, and of the possible import of it, its strange connection with her recent past, Cis had no desire to talk to Nan. She did go with it to Jeanette Lucas, whose understanding was perfect, but to her Cis found herself unequal to say much. She wrote to Father Morley, and received from him a long letter that formulated and expressed for Cis all that she had been trying to correlate in herself. However, it was in her daily visits to the House of the Good Shepherd that Cis received the best fruit of these experiences.

Every day Cis made time to go to see Myrtle Moore, and every day she sat for a while with the white robed nun whom they called Sister Bonaventure, properly so called her, Cis thought, for her coming was always good for her.

She was wise with a wisdom that must have been the direct reception of that gift from the Holy Ghost, for she “had entered religion,” she told Cis, at twenty-two.

She had spent but one year at home after her graduation from a convent school, so that she had encountered nothing of the world’s wickedness and weakness, yet she seemed to have plumbed the depths of the science of souls; her talk was illuminative and tonic to Cis.

“Will she die, Sister?” Cis asked, speaking of their patient.

“Surely; we all shall,” smiled the nun. “But yes; I think Myrtle will not live long. You see, she has used up all her capital of strength, burned it like a fuel that yields cold, not heat. I think she will not last long.”

“And will she die well—sorry, you know?” Cis hesitated; she found it hard to talk of Rodney’s wife’s state, even to Sister Bonaventure.

“My dear,” said Sister Bonaventure with her smile, which Cis found at once illuminative and baffling, “as to that we can only pray and hope; pray that she may have the grace she so sorely needs; hope that when she receives the sacraments they may have the soil to work on in which they always are fruitful. The poor things who die in our infirmary rarely refuse the last offices, and we try to make them fit to receive them; after that—” Sister Bonaventure waved her hands expressing the Infinite Mercy, and the incomprehensibility of human minds. “I think they are probably sorry, and God is anxious to go half-way to meet a parting soul. Habit dulls us all; perhaps God has to come farther toward all of us than we think He does, even to the best of us.”

“What a miracle to be where Myrtle Moore was, yet to die with you Sisters praying around her!” cried Cis, tears in her eyes.

“What a miracle it is to die anywhere, yet with immortality and infinity around us!” cried Sister Bonaventure. “Cicely, we are so surrounded with miracles, so accustomed to handling them, that we are obtuse! Now, my dear, this woman’s former husband, who is still her husband, for they were married by a priest, and their divorce does not touch the fact—what about him? He should be sent for, if she grows as much worse within a week as our doctor and our Sister Infirmarian expects her to. She does not know where he is, and we are completely at sea as to how to look for him. Could you make a suggestion?”

“Did you know, Sister, that I was going to marry him, not knowing that he had ever been married? And that he would not deceive me, so, at the last minute—our home was preparing—he told me that he was divorced?” cried Cis.

“Was that the way of it?” asked Sister Bonaventure serenely. “No, I did not know anything whatever, but I surmised that there was something to know, that your interest in the patient was not fully explained by your rescue of her. Have you his address, my dear?”

“He can always be reached through his firm, the main house, in Chicago,” replied Cis. “I have that address; yes, Sister. Shall I give it to you?”

She wondered at the matter-of-course way in which the nun received her brief statement that she had almost, though innocently, married a man already married. She had not dealt enough with the Religious of her faith to know that they rarely seem to be surprised by human vagaries, and still more rarely betray a shock.

“No, on the whole, I think it were better that you should write,” said Sister Bonaventure. “Mr. Moore might not come if we wrote him. He has divorced the woman, and it is not likely that he feels tolerant of her sins against him. If you write to him, telling him how you saved her from death by her own hand, and that he must come at once to see her, bid her farewell, and forgive her, that she may die in peace, hoping for a higher forgiveness, I think that he may come on. Especially that you have a claim upon him for the wrong that he so nearly did you.”

“Oh, Sister, you don’t, you can’t ask me to write to him!” cried Cis. “How can I write him? And what may he not think? That I want to see him, even that I may—”

“You will write to him as a disembodied spirit would write; you can easily show him your motive. You really cannot refuse to write. The poor woman wants to see him, to receive his pardon; she cannot die in peace without it. I must tell you that we did write to him, to Beaconhite. We know that the letter was forwarded, for otherwise it was to have been returned in three days. He has not replied in any way. You must write, Cicely; you must still further help Myrtle to die. As to the man’s misinterpreting you, that will not outlast his coming, and cannot harm you. If I did not know that you were wholly free from personal desire in the matter, I would not let you write. I have watched you, talking with you, and I understand you. As it is, I ask you to write—at once.”

“I will!” cried Cis, swayed to Sister Bonaventure’s will by something in her eyes.

“Oh, Sister Bonaventure, if you know me—and you do!—could I be one of you here? Or a nun anywhere? Am I fit to be? It is so lofty, so peaceful, so blessed!”

“You are entirely fit, my child, but not in the least fitted,” said the nun, with the smile that drew hearts to her. “It is not that the best come here, but the called come. The life is all that you say it is, but peace is denied to no one who follows after it. You do not belong with us, dear Cicely; not in any Community, but in a home whence you will overflow to bring happiness and help into other lives.”

“As though you nuns didn’t!” sighed Cis, rising to go.

“Ah, yes, I know. Little mirrors reflect wherever they are hung! Good-bye, my dear. Write that letter to-night and dispatch it,” said Sister Bonaventure.

Cis wrote when she got back to her room at Nan’s. She did not let herself pause for an instant to remember that she was writing to Rodney—again!

“Dear Rodney;” she wrote. “Myrtle Moore, your wife, is here, in this city. I came upon her in the park just as she was putting to her lips the deadly poison which was to kill her. I knocked the bottle from her hand. I took her to the House of the Good Shepherd. She is seriously ill there; dying. She cannot die without begging your forgiveness. Come on at once and give it to her. We shall all need mercy one day, as we have all done wrong. Come at once. Remember that Myrtle is still your wife. Think of her as she was when you first knew her; she is now a wreck, suffering, wretched, dying. Do not lose a day. You must see in this the Hand of God: that she had wandered here; that I came back here; that it was I who saved her from suicide to die with the sacraments, hope and sorrow in her miserable heart. If there is anything that I could add to urge you to come, I would add it, but what more is there? A woman whom you once loved, an outcast, broken-down, dying, begging your forgiveness! It is miserably sad, but still more pitiable; you are kind, Rodney; you will not say no. And God let me save her from a dreadful end, me, Cicely Adair.”

Cis read her letter several times, then she took it to Jeanette Lucas to read.

“I can’t tell whether it is right or wrong,” Cis said imploringly.

“I don’t think you could better it, dear. What can you do except lay before him the facts? He cannot refuse such a request as this, and from you! How strange it all is! Cis, when he comes—what?” Jeanette waited for Cis’s answer.

It came at last.

“Yes, what?” Cis echoed. “I don’t want to see him. Will you hide me, Jeanette?”

“But you know when this poor Myrtle is dead—” Jeanette stopped.

“No, no, no!” cried Cis. “What a curiously tangled web! I wonder why?”

“It is not tangled,” Jeanette reminded her. “It looks so to us; I’m sure the tangle is part of the pattern.”

Three days must pass before Rodney could reply to Cicely’s letter, and that would be making the best time possible for a letter to travel in each direction. It would be longer, if he were coming; time must be allowed, in either case, for Cicely’s letter to be forwarded to him. They were hard days to live through; dread, expectation, perhaps fear is not too strong a word, were in the air that Cis breathed; she spent the hours in feverish nervousness. And Myrtle was rapidly growing worse.

On the fourth day Rodney came. It was evening, and Cis was sitting with Nan under the light of her reading lamp, in her sitting room, when they heard Joe open the front door and tell someone to “walk right in.”

Before they had time to be startled by the realization that the step was not Tom’s, whom they had expected to see, Rodney Moore stood in the doorway.

Nan had seen him but once; however, she instantly recognized him and sprang up with an inarticulate sound that was almost a shocked cry. Cis sat still, staring up at him, her work fallen into her lap.

Rodney had changed; he looked older, worn, hard. Cis instantly felt great pity for him, but it was mingled with amazement that she had so lately found him all that was attractive in man. Something stood between them that was not the dying Myrtle. Cis had learned, had absorbed other standards of excellence than Rodney’s since she had parted from him; they asserted themselves without her volition, her consciousness of their presence.

“Cis!” said Rodney hoarsely, and Cis became aware that she had not spoken.

“Yes, Rodney. I am thankful that you have come,” Cis said.

She arose, went forward and gave Rodney an icy hand.

“I will telephone the Sisters and ask when you are to go to see Myrtle. She has sunk fast for two days; I found her quite low when I went there this afternoon, but they think that she is fighting to hold herself alive till you get here. Perhaps you must go there to-night.” Cis turned toward the telephone in the corner.

“For heaven’s sake, Cis, is this all that you have to say to me after—” Rodney’s angry grief stopped his utterance.

“That I am thankful that you have come? That I will help you at once to accomplish what you came for? What else is there to say, Rodney?” Cis asked quietly, and took down the telephone receiver.

“Have I no claim? Am I no more than an undertaker, called in to lay out that miserable woman?” Rodney almost shouted.

Cis turned toward him and raised her hand.

“I am waiting for my connection; please be quiet,” she said. “You have a claim upon my pity and help; I am giving you both.”

Rodney stared at her as she turned back to the instrument and talked for a short time to someone on the other end of the wire. Cis hung up, and came back to the middle of the room, leaning her hand on the table as if she were tired.

“You are to go to the Good Shepherd to-night,” she said. “The Sister Infirmarian says that you have not come too soon. If Nan will give you supper we will start immediately after you have eaten. I will take you there, unless you prefer to go alone.”

“I can’t go alone; I’m afraid,” Rodney groaned.

Gentle Nan went over to him as she heard his boyish cry. She began to hope that Cicely would comfort him, as she alone could do, and lead him back to God, which seemed to her preëminently Cicely’s grace.

“I don’t want any supper, but have you coffee?” Rodney asked, and Nan hurried away to make it, followed by Cis, who had no mind to linger with Rodney alone.

Joe called a taxi; the coffee was quickly made on the gas range, and drunk. Cis found herself whirling as in a dream through the streets, beside Rodney.

He groped for her hand, but Cis withheld it.

“There is no you nor I, Rodney,” she said sternly. “Myrtle is dying. Pray that you may be able to help her out of the world which she has tragically spoiled for herself, for you, and for who can say how many others? Pray hard that you and she, both, may be allowed to atone.”

“Do you think that I am partly responsible for her wickedness?” Rodney demanded fiercely.

“I don’t know, oh, I don’t know; I hope not,” said Cis wearily. “I’m beginning to see that we are almost always sharer in a wrong that is within our own radius. We are so slow to see, so indifferent to save.”

The taxi stopped at the door of the House of the Good Shepherd, which opened at once to admit Cis and Rodney.

“Yes, very low,” the Sister answered Cicely’s question. “They say she will die to-night. She has made her confession, and received the last rites; she is conscious and lies watching the door for her husband to come.”

Rodney felt the word like a cord around him. None of these Catholics, whom he had tried to leave behind him, but who were again interwoven into his life, heeded the decree of divorce which annulled for him his title of husband. How unbending, everlasting, certain, were the ways of Rome even in all her least, most distant avenues!

“Oh, Rod!” Myrtle breathed his name as he entered. “Now I’ll die. Maybe it’s true God will forgive me, if you can. You’re harder than God. I’m sorry, honest. Forgive me, Roddie?”

Rodney looked down on her; at the fluttering hand feebly extended toward him; at the face which he had known young and pretty, now wasted, consumed by Myrtle’s life, the life now panting toward its final breath.

A great pity came upon him. There, on the other side of the bed, knelt Cis, the stainless girl whom he loved, her face white and tear-wet, sweet and grave with pity, and pain, and fear.

Who was he to condemn, to refuse mercy? Did he not need it, too? Had his life been so far beyond reproach? Cis, kneeling there, thought that he was worse than Myrtle, for she had sinned, but was absolved. She had broken God’s laws, but he had turned his back on God coldly, deliberately. And he had not confessed himself a sinner. He was not a hard-hearted man, and the awfulness of what lay there before him, what awaited Myrtle, now hoping for Rodney’s pardon, so soon to stand before God for His sentence, melted him, broke down his anger against his wife.

Rodney knelt beside the bed, and took the fluttering hand, folding its feeble fingers within his own.

“It’s all right, Myrtie; don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll forgive everything, and I’m sorry if I ever drove you an inch on your road. It’s all right, poor girl. Go to sleep and take your rest.”

“Well, God bless you, Rod!” sighed Myrtle. “I’m going to sleep; pray I’ll rest.” Beside that bed for three hours Cis, Myrtle’s divorced husband, who at last realized that there was no divorce but the one Myrtle, slipping away, was giving him, and a Sister recited the prayers for a parting soul. At the first hour of the morning the soul quietly, with a few deep drawn breaths, parted.

Rodney went back to Nan’s in the taxi with Cis. They did not speak during the drive. But as Rodney opened the door for Cis with her pass key, he put out his hand and Cis laid hers in it without a word.

“I’m going to the hotel. To-morrow I’ll attend to things, then—May I see you, Cis?” Rodney asked.

“Yes. I’ll see you, Rodney—to say good-bye,” Cis answered.

“I’ve no right to complain of that,” Rodney said humbly. “You’re a good girl, Cis. Whatever had been, you would have been too good for me. I’m thankful to you, Cis, for to-night.”

“I’m thankful to God. Good night, Rodney,” said Cis.