Off his guard, he showed in flooding color and staring eye how profoundly it shocked him.Susan saw, but she did not explain; she was not keeping accounts in emotion with the world.She waited patiently.After a long pause he said in a tone that contained as much of rebuke as so mild a dependent dared express:
"He left about thirty thousand a year, Miss Lenox."The exultant light that leaped to Susan's eye horrified him.
It even disturbed Clelie, though she better understood Susan's nature and was not nearly so reverent as Garvey of the hypocrisies of conventionality.But Susan had long since lost the last trace of awe of the opinion of others.She was not seeking to convey an impression of grief.Grief was too real to her.She would as soon have burst out with voluble confession of the secret of her love for Brent.She saw what Garvey was thinking; but she was not concerned.She continued to be herself--natural and simple.And there was no reason why she should conceal as a thing to be ashamed of the fact that Brent had accomplished the purpose he intended, had filled her with honest exultation--not with delight merely, not with triumph, but with that stronger and deeper joy which the unhoped for pardon brings to the condemned man.
She must live on.The thought of suicide, of any form of giving up--the thought that instantly possesses the weak and the diseased--could not find lodgment in that young, healthy body and mind of hers.She must live on; and suddenly she discovered that she could live _free!_ Not after years of doubtful struggles, of reverses, of success so hardly won that she was left exhausted.But now--at once--_free!_ The heavy shackles had been stricken off at a blow.She was free--forever free! Free, forever free, from the wolves of poverty and shame, of want and rags and filth, the wolves that had been pursuing her with swift, hideous padded stride, the wolves that more than once had dragged her down and torn and trampled her, and lapped her blood.Free to enter of her own right the world worth living in, the world from which all but a few are shut out, the world which only a few of those privileged to enter know how to enjoy.Free to live the life worth while the life of leisure to work, instead of slaving to make leisure and luxury and comfort for others.Free to achieve something beside food, clothing, and shelter.Free to live as _she_ pleased, instead of for the pleasure of a master or masters.Free--free--free! The ecstasy of it surged up in her, for the moment possessing her and submerging even thought of how she had been freed.
She who had never acquired the habit of hypocrisy frankly exulted in countenance exultant beyond laughter.She could conceal her feelings, could refrain from expressing.But if she expressed at all, it must be her true self--what she honestly felt.Garvey hung his head in shame.He would not have believed Susan could be so unfeeling.He would not let his eyes see the painful sight.He would try to forget, would deny to himself that he had seen.For to his shallow, conventional nature Susan's expression could only mean delight in wealth, in the opportunity that now offered to idle and to luxuriate in the dead man's money, to realize the crude dreamings of those lesser minds whose initial impulses toward growth have been stifled by the routine our social system imposes upon all but the few with the strength to persist individual.
Free! She tried to summon the haunting vision of the old women with the tin cups of whisky reeling and staggering in time to the hunchback's playing.She could remember every detail, but these memories would not assemble even into a vivid picture and the picture would have been far enough from the horror of actuality in the vision she formerly could not banish.As a menace, as a prophecy, the old women and the hunchback and the strumming piano had gone forever.
Free--secure, independent--free!
After a long silence Garvey ventured stammeringly:
"He said to me--he asked me to request--he didn't make it a condition--just a wish--a hope, Miss Lenox--that if you could, and felt it strongly enough----""Wished what?" said Susan, with a sharp impatience that showed how her nerves were unstrung.
"That you'd go on--go on with the plays--with the acting."The violet eyes expressed wonder."Go on?" she inquired, "Go on?" Then in a tone that made Clelie sob and Garvey's eyes fill she said:
"What else is there to live for, now?"
"I'm--I'm glad for his sake," stammered Garvey.
He was disconcerted by her smile.She made no other answer--aloud.For _his_ sake! For her own sake, rather.
What other life had she but the life _he_ had given her? "And he knew I would," she said to herself."He said that merely to let me know he left me entirely free.How like him, to do that!"At the hotel she shut herself in; she saw no one, not even Clelie, for nearly a week.Then--she went to work--and worked like a reincarnation of Brent.
She inquired for Sperry, found that he and Rod had separated as they no longer needed each other; she went into a sort of partnership with Sperry for the production of Brent's plays--he, an excellent coach as well as stage director, helping her to finish her formal education for the stage.She played with success half a dozen of the already produced Brent plays.At the beginning of her second season she appeared in what has become her most famous part--_Roxy_ in Brent's last play, "The Scandal." With the opening night her career of triumph began.Even the critics--therefore, not unnaturally, suspicious of an actress who was so beautiful, so beautifully dressed, so well supported, and so well outfitted with actor-proof plays even the critics conceded her ability.She was worthy of the great character Brent had created--the wayward, many-sided, ever gay _Roxy Grandon_.
