Ridgwell Cullum - The Way of the Strong

The stranger's visit left an unsavory flavor behind him. Monica was disturbed, and sat thinking hard. She was striving hard to raise the curtain which shut out her view of the life lying behind all these people. She was striving to visualize something of that life with which poor Elsie had so long been associated. A number of vague pictures hovered before her mind's eye, but they were indistinct, unreal. She could not see with eyes of knowledge. How could she? Was not this life belonging to another world? A world she had never beheld, never been brought into contact with? No, it was useless to try to penetrate those dark secrets which she felt lay hidden behind the curtain she was powerless to draw aside.

Yet she knew these things had not come to her to be set aside and forgotten. They had come to her for a purpose. What was that purpose? She tried to see with her sister's eyes. What would Elsie have done, with Leo – threatened? Ah, that was it; that was the purpose. Her sister's responsibility had devolved upon her. Elsie would have taken some action to help – Leo. What would she have done?

She thought and puzzled for a long time. Then she pressed the bell under her desk once more. An inspiration had come.

When the boy appeared she demanded the proofs of the day's advertisements.

She waited impatiently until the boy returned, and then kept him waiting while she hastily extracted the one she required from the pile. She read it over carefully. Leo had worded it to suit her purpose well. Suddenly she took up her blue pencil. She dashed out the word "Winnipeg" and substituted "Toronto" in its place. And without another glance at it handed the papers back to the boy.

"That's all," she said briefly.

But the boy was full of the impertinence of his kind.

"Toronto?" he read. "Say, Miss, ain't that the place they have ice palaces an' things?" he demanded, with a grin.

Monica was in no mood to answer his questions.

"Take them back," she said sharply.

As the boy slouched off she leaned back in her chair with a sigh of relief. She had done her best to put the man calling himself Tug off the track of his quarry.

Monica Hanson stood in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom. For a long time she stood viewing her fair reflection with a smile at once half humorous, half tearful.

Thirty-five!

It sounded terrible as she muttered the age she knew herself to be. Thirty-five! Yet the perfect blue eyes were not a day older, as they looked back at her out of the glass. There was no hardening in their depths; there were no gathering lines about their fringed lids. Perhaps there was a deeper, wiser look in them; a look suggesting a wider knowledge, a more perfect sympathy with the life into which they had peeped during her years of struggling. But there was no aging in them. The rich, ripe mouth, too, so wonderfully firm, yet gentle, the broad, intelligent forehead with its fair, even brows. There was not one single unsightly line to disfigure these features which displayed so much of the strong character which lay behind them. Her wealth of fair, wavy hair, which since her earliest days had been her one little conceit, her constant joy and pride, was faultlessly dressed, nor had she ever yet found in its midst one of those silver threads whose discovery never fails to strike terror into the heart of an aging woman.

No, she beheld nothing in her reflection to cause her a single pang, a single heartache. Yet her heart was aching; and the pain of it was in the smile which came back to her from her reflection.

Had Monica only known it, the years had been more than kind to her. With a little more womanly vanity she would have understood that her girlish attractions had been increased a hundredfold. Not only had the years matured her figure to perfections which can never belong to early youth, but they had endowed her with a beauty of soul and mind, far more rarely found in one of such unusual physical attraction.

But such ponderings before her glass were useless, perhaps harmful. It was all so impossible. So she turned away with a little impatient gesture, and, picking up the letter lying on her bed, she passed through the folding doors into her sitting-room beyond.

The winter sun was shining in through frosty windows; that wonderful winter sun which brightens and makes joyous the Canadian dead season, without shedding sufficient warmth to disturb the thermometer from its despairing depths of cold.

She crossed to the window, and stood beside the heat radiator while she read her letter for perhaps the twentieth time. It was quite short, and intensely characteristic of the writer. Monica understood this. The lack of effusion in no way blinded her to the stormy passion which had inspired it.

"Dear Monica:

"I am going to call on you at 4 o'clock this afternoon, if you have no objection. If you have, 'phone me. I simply cannot rest until the subject of our talk the other night is settled.

"Yours,

"Alexander Hendrie."

There was a wistful longing in her eyes as the woman looked up from the brief note. The subject of their talk. He could not rest. Had she rested, or known peace of mind since that evening? She knew she had not. She knew that come what might that calm which belongs to a heart untouched by love could never again be hers. She knew that love, at last, had come knocking at the door of her soul; nor had it knocked in vain, in spite of the impossibility of it all. She had not 'phoned. Instead she had spent two hours over her toilet to receive the man who was her employer, and had now become her lover.

No one knew better than she the happiness that might have been hers in her newly found regard for this great wheat grower of Alberta, had things only been different. She loved him; she had admired him ever since she came into his employ, but now she loved him with all the long-pent passion of a woman who has for years deliberately shut the gates of her soul to all such feelings.

She knew her love must be denied. There was no hope for it.

The trials she had gone through for the sake of her pledge to her dying sister were far too vividly in her mind to leave her with any hope for this love of hers. She must crush it out. She must once more steel herself, that her faith with the dead might be kept.

She dropped upon the ottoman beside the window, and, gazing out on Winnipeg's busy main street, gave herself up to profound thought. Her incisive brain swiftly became busy, reviewing the career which had been hers since – since young Frank, her beloved boy, the child who had cost her a sister's life, had become her one object and care.

Her deep eyes grew introspective, and her pretty lips closed firmly.

She had not traveled an easy road during those years. Far from it. The rocks prophesied by the kindly doctor had been quickly realized. They had come well-nigh to wrecking her craft at the outset. Only that its ribs were so stout, and the heart that guided it so strong, it must inevitably have been doomed.

So much for her youthful conceit; so much for the boundless optimism of her years. She was caught among the very first shoals that presented themselves in the ebb tide of her fortunes six months before the completion of her contract on the Daily Citizen . Would she ever forget the – yes, tragedy of that moment? She thought not.

Everything had gone along so smoothly. Her fears had been lulled. There was no sign to point the coming of the disaster. Yes, that was it. There had been overconfidence. The complications at her sister's death had been forgotten. There had been no unpleasant developments to remind her of the pitfalls with which she was surrounded. So she had grown careless in her confidence. In the warmth of her girl's heart, her rapidly growing love for the little life in her charge, she found herself spending every moment of her spare time with the child she intended to teach to call her "mother."