CHAPTER XX
"Love is begun: this much is come to pass.
The rest is easy."
The heavy door of the Inebriate Asylum closed with a thud behind Mrs. Kent. She turned her face toward home. The wicked old woman was safe at last behind that iron door.
All about, laughing Italian children were playing in the sun. Above was the glory of May sunshine. Mrs. Kent felt a sudden reaction from a long strain. Her anger with the unnatural mother was melting into a sense of deep kinship. Her pity came back upon herself with a sense of forgiven sin.
"For none may walk in perfect white
Till every soul be clean,"
she murmured.
Across the warm air came strains of funeral music. There was a beat of muffled drums. The Roman Catholic church near by was draped for a soldier's funeral.
Mrs. Kent stood still while the slow procession passed. The colours of the flag shone bright against the sombre crepe. She watched the faces of the mourners, comic in their self-importance, or tear-stained with real grief. Then she went on.
The rude music turned her walk into a march of triumph. She had found at last the way of the wandering of her feet. These grimy alleys had led her to a goal. Grief had solved her problem in making her aware of the encompassing grief. Life with sorrow in it was a better thing than life without sorrow could be.
"After knowing joy like that and pain like that, one has a right to share every trouble," she whispered.
She looked at the passing faces and smiled. A larger life was hers. This was her people. Her life was one with theirs, the sin of it, the suffering of it. The music of their funerals was sounding for her dead. She had cared for that child as if it had been her own, and the touch of its mother's hands had been as the touch of dear dead hands upon hers.
Then her own sorrow came sharply back to her.
"Oh," she cried under her breath, "if I could only forget, forget"
Would forgetting her own hurt mean forgetting the world's pain? She walked swiftly on in half-ecstatic weariness. Just now it seemed that the glory and the grief of life are one.
As she entered the Square she was conscious of colour and of fragrance. The young leaves on the elms and the willows shimmered in the sun. Flower-boys stood at the corners with their baskets. The odour of new grass was in the air.
At the entrance to the studio building stood Anne with Howard Stanton. He stooped and picked a bunch of violets from a basket for her. The sound of their laughter and the chirping of the birds drifted to Mrs. Kent's ears.
Mrs. Kent looked at them with pity in her eyes. They were so happy, she thought, misunderstanding. She, who had suffered the extreme hurt, was safe and sheltered in her great grief. She could not be afraid again.
Then once more that sudden sense of her own hurt smote her, and her life went out in the cry of the human heart for its own. A pitying wind had blown her long black veil across her face.