"Yes, he could. Yer pappy has more money than anyone hereabouts, and it
ain't right--I tell you, it ain't _right_ to have a little boy like you
and not give him--eve-ry thing he wants!"
His last words ended in that slow climactic inflection that made
whatever he said so indisputable. It was not unlike the minister's
voice, I thought; and, my glance chancing to fall on the opened Bible, I
was about to question him, when the door was pushed back hurriedly,
admitting my father's lank, wiry figure along with a stream of chilling
air.
"G-ood morning, Mr. Breighton--a f-ine morning."
"Morning, Darton," said my father crisply. "Can I go directly upstairs?"
"No hurry n-ow, Doctor. It's all over. Mrs. Carn's been here all morning
and--"
It was at this moment that Mrs. Carn, her eyelids red from weeping, an
old bumpy, red worsted shawl over her head, came nervously into the
room; and, without so much as even a nod to any of us, edged quicky out
of the front door.
"Well--" began my father, his clear, scrutinizing eyes fixed on Darton.
"A-nother sign," expostulated Mr. Darton, "of what ye might call the
smallness of human van-ity. We must forgive 'er. Ye see Selma was
gettin' so upset with her rancorous gossipin'--perhaps I should have
been more careful--but it was a question of Selma and--"
"Quite right, Darton," my father nodded to him. "I'm going up for a
moment."
I had walked to the front window with its starched, lacy curtain; and
stood still, looking out in a puzzled maze at the strangeness of the
morning's happenings, a certain sense of disconsolateness stealing over
me. Beyond the row of dark, spare trees I could see a gaunt figure in a
black skirt and a bumpy red shawl moving along the road; and the picture
of her, scurrying away, remained, as such apparently unimportant figures
often will, sharply engraven on my mind. As I recall it in late years,
I often wonder how my father could have mistaken the lying, rancorous
woman of Con Darton's description for this stern-lipped creature, who
had gone by wordlessly, shutting the door gently behind her, a door that
she was never to re-open.
I turned to find myself alone in the room. Mr. Darton had disappeared as
unexpectedly but more quietly than he had entered. I could hear my
father's footsteps going softly about upstairs; and his voice, which
though quick and crisp, had a soothing quality, talking in a gentle
monotone to some one. After about ten minutes he came to the head of the
steps and called to me.
"Mrs. Darton says will you come up, Tom?"
Knees quivering with the queerness of it all as well as with the icy
frigidity of the hallway, I mounted the uncarpeted stairs.
Following in the direction of the voices, I came to a dark,
low-ceilinged room with a pine bed, on which lay a withered-looking
woman with sparsely lashed eyelids and fine, straight, straw-colored
hair. Near her was a small oblong bundle, wrapped round with a bright
patch-work quilt; and out of this bundle a cry issued. As I peered into
it, a red weazened face stared back at me, the eyes opening startlingly
round. I looked long in wonder. The woman sighed; and, my gaze reverting
to her, I thought suddenly of what a neighbor had once said to my
father, "Selma Perkins used to be the prettiest girl in school. She was
like the first arbutus flowers." Surely this woman with her pallid skin
and her faded spiritless eyes could not have been the one they meant!
There was some talk between my Father and his patient, the gist of which
I could not get, absorbed as I was with the face inside the patch-work
quilt. We went out silently, after I had taken a last, long look into
the bundle.--Lisbeth had come into my world.
* * * * *
Some twenty years were to go by before I was to realize the significance
of the scene that I had witnessed that winter morning at the old frame
farmhouse. It was the year of my return to America with Jim Shepherd,
whose career as a rising young painter had just begun to be heralded,
that I felt impelled to revisit the place of my childhood. Not my least
interest lay in seeing Lisbeth again. I remembered her as a fragile
upstanding girl of twelve with soft hair the color of dead leaves and
gray inquiring eyes. But whatever it was that I was to find I was
conscious that I would see it with new appreciation of values. For if my
eight years of medical work abroad had sharpened my discernment, even
more had my intimacy with Jim Shepherd swept my mind clean of prejudice
and casuistry.
To strangers Jim must often have appeared naive and undevious. The fact
was that his passion for truth-probing and his worship of the
undiscovered loveliness of life had obscured whatever self-consciousness
had been born in him. Meeting him for the first time was like entering
another element. It left you a little flat. That candor and eagerness of
his at first balked you, it made negligible your traditions of thought
and speech. One ended by loving him.
On our arrival at the sparse little village I told him of the Dartons. I
had had no news of them for the past four years, and inquiries among the
neighbors left me only the more at sea. Lisbeth they seldom saw, they
said; she never went to church or meetings; and, especially since her
mother, in an unprecedented flare of rebellion, had gone to live with a
married sister in town, she had grown silent and taciturn. As for old
Con Darton, he was going to seed, in spite of the remnants of an earlier
erudition that still clung to him. That is, though he went about
unshaven and in slovenly frayed clothing, he still quoted fluently from
the Bible and Gray's "Elegy." Among the villagers he had come to have
the reputation of a philosopher and an ill-used man. He was poor, it
seemed, so poor that he had abandoned the white farmhouse and had come
to live in a box-like, unpainted shack at the foot of the hill, the new
boarding of which stood out harshly against the unturfed soil. Built
just across the way from a disused mill, near the creek, it had become
known as the "mill house." In spite of this thriftiness, Con always had
money for a new horse, which he would soon trade off for a better;
although these transactions had, of late, become fewer, as Con was
feared as a "shrewd one." The fact seemed to call forth his neighbors'
admiration, just as the tale that he had been "deserted" called forth
their pity. Lisbeth, they averred, who had stuck to him, was "a hard
piece to get close to."
She was standing at the bottom of the hill where the creek ran between
the deserted mill and the new shack; and, as I came down the hill, I
felt a sharp twinge of pain at the contrast of the fragile line of her
profile against the coarse, dark sweater, at the slender grace of her
body against that dead, barn-sprinkled background. I could observe her
easily without her knowledge, for she was looking up, as we so often
used to at twilight, to the old plank high above the sagging mill, where
the turkeys fly to roost towards evening, so awkwardly and comically,
with a great breathless whirring of wings. I saw her lift her arms to
them with a swift, urging gesture, as though to steady their ungainly
flight, and I could not be certain that she was not talking to them.
Again a pang for the contracting loneliness of those bitter winters that
she had lived through and must still live through, stabbed me.
She turned with a low cry and a momentary flush of gladness. But I
noticed, as I questioned her as an old friend might, that the flush
melted into a level pallor, and her eyes, deeper and more unquiet than I
had remembered them, either wandered up the road or reverted to the last
of the turkeys soaring heavily to rest.
"I used to do all those things, Tom," she said in answer to my question.
"Used to?" I laughed. "Why, it's only five years ago I was hearing that
you were the best little lady on skis and skates at the West-Highlands."
Her eyelids quivered at the word.
"That year--yes," she said and averted her face.
"You mean--" I had to prod, there was no other way about it--"that you
only stayed--one year?"
She nodded.
"My Freshman year prep school."
"And then--?"
"I was needed here."
"Your father--?"
"Yes,--he needed me."
"There was Grega," I insisted. "She was the man of the family."
"She's married, you know."
I recalled having heard of an unsatisfactory marriage. So she had
escaped!
"And Martie?"
"Working at a store in town."
A dull rage charred at the inner fibres of my being. Here was Lisbeth,
the most delicate and responsible of them all, with, I supposed, much of
her mother's early gentleness and beauty, interred in this--. I did not
like to dwell on it. I switched back to skating.
"Come now. One does not forget these things at twenty or twenty-one."
She smiled at me ever so faintly, a smile that sent the winter chill of
that arid spot scurrying into my veins.
"One grows old fast--in the country," was all she said.
I thought of the flying figures that I had met in Norway and Sweden. It
was a moment before I spoke, and then I said the wrong thing.
"But it's this very sort of air, they say, that makes for vigor--and--"
"Yes," she said thinly, "those who live in cities--say so."
She turned, her meagre dress flapping about her knees like a flag. But
at the foot of the rickety outer steps that ran across the bare front of
the shack crookedly, like a broken arm, I caught her by the wrist.
"You'll be going to Mrs. Carn's funeral tomorrow, Lisbeth?"
She shook her head and I thought she paled.
It was an unheard of thing for the whole population not to turn out for
the funeral of one of the villagers, and Mrs. Carn, I knew, had
befriended Lisbeth, in spite of Old Con's displeasure. She must have
noted my surprise, for she turned on me squarely, facing me with what
seemed at the time an unnecessary display of staunchness.
"Perhaps you didn't know," she said very softly, "that the
Minister--couldn't come--and--"
She paused, while I made some inadequate reply, for I, too, seemed
caught in the sort of mirthless evasion that engulfed her.
"He--" she made a slight backwards motion of the head towards the upper
room of the shack--"is going to--preach."
My startled exclamation must have disclosed all the horror I felt at
this announcement, but, before I could speak again, she had gone swiftly
up the rickety steps and pushed shut the flimsy board door behind her.
The next afternoon was one that I have never been able to erase from my
mind, for even more vividly than my earlier impressions of Con Darton,
it marked the wizardry as well as the fearfulness of his power. A
hundred times during that burial service the sound of a banged door and
a rasped voice sounded in my ears and the sight of a tense, hurrying
figure in a black dress and a bumpy red shawl moved before my eyes. The
thin figure was lying there now and over it, his rusty black coat tails
curving in the wind, like wings bent to trap the air, his gray eyes
misty with emotion, hovered the man whose door she had never entered
since that fateful day of Lisbeth's birth. I could not but feel that the
vision of him standing there told the story of his triumphs more grimly
than any recital.
The service began in a sharp, fine drizzle of rain, through which his
voice sang in shifting cadences, now large and full, now drooping to a
premonitory whisper with an undeniably dramatic quality. In spite of
myself the words stirred within me. As he read and spoke he laid aside
the turns of speech that had become his through years of association
with country folk. Almost he was another man.
"Man that is born of woman--"
The words reached down through the overlying structure of thought and
habit. I felt a giving and a drawing away; saw the crowd sway to his
will.
"In the midst of life we are--in death."
Again the tones woke me to a sharper sense of the scene. Tears stood in
many eyes. The people had melted at his touch. They were his. For a
while I lost myself in watching them, until again a changed intonation
drew me back to the man before us.
"We therefore commit her body to the ground--earth to earth--ashes to
ashes--dust to dust--"
My will was powerless to resist the beautifully delivered lines, to
doubt the integrity of the man who uttered them. The little lumps of wet
earth that he threw against the coffin struck against my heart with a
sense of the futility of all things. And then as suddenly, drawn by
something compellingly alive and pervading, I glanced at Jim, who stood
next to me; and catching the slant of his vision followed it to the edge
of the crowd, where, her thin dress clinging to her knees, her face
almost blue with cold, stood Lisbeth; and there was across her eyes and
mouth an expression of contempt and loathing such as I had never seen in
a girl so young. Jim was watching her intently, noting, with that
certain appraisal of his, the etched profile; and, with all an artist's
sensibility, reading life into the line of head and shoulders. What
if--the idea went through my mind with the intensity of sudden
pain--what if Jim and Lisbeth--? The sound of sobbing broke in upon my
reverie. Con Darton was delivering the funeral oration.
"My friends," I heard him saying through the streams of thought that
encompassed me, "we are here out of respect for a woman all of ye
knew,--and whose life--and whose character--ye all--knew." He paused to
give more weight to what he was about to say. "Margaret Carn was like
the rest of us. She had her qualities--and she had her--failings. I want
to say to you today that there's a time fur knowing these things--and a
time fur--forgettin' them." His voice on the last words dropped abruptly
away. There was the sound of rain spattering among the loosened lumps of
clay. "Such a time is now." His left hand dropped heavily to his side.
"I tell you there is more rejoicing in Heaven over one sinner who
repenteth than over ninety-and-nine--"
I grabbed Jim's arm to assure myself of something warm and human. But
his eyes were still fixed on Lisbeth, whose gaze was in turn riveted on
her father's face. It occurred to me with a swift sense of helplessness
that she and I were probably the only two who could even vaguely realize
any of the inner motives of Con Darton's mind, as we certainly were the
only persons who knew how great a wrong had been done to Margaret Carn's
memory that day. To the rest she was stamped forever as a lying gossip,
forgiven by the very man she had striven to harm. I shuddered; and Jim,
feeling it, turned to me and drew me towards Lisbeth. Outside of the
scattering crowd she saw us and greeted me gravely; then gave her hand
to Jim with a little quickening gesture of trust.
We went down the road together, taking the longest way to the foot of
the hill, Jim loquacious, eager; Lisbeth silent. The rain had melted
into a soft mist, and through it her face took on a greater remoteness,
a pallid, elfin quality. At the foot of the hill, which had to be
climbed again to reach the old farmhouse, she stopped, glancing up to
the plank where the turkeys were already roosting.
"Not going up the hill, Lisbeth?" I asked.
She shook her head.
"We live here now," she said.
"Not--?"
"All the year round.--It's cheaper," she added with that little touch of
staunchness that had become hers.
"But it's too--"
I was cut short by the look of anguish in her eyes, the most poignant
sign of emotion that I had seen her show since my return. There was an
awkward silence, while I stood looking at her, thinking of nothing so
much as how her head would look against a worn, gold Florentine
background, instead of silhouetted against these flat unchanging
stretches of unbending roads and red barns. It seemed that she and Jim
were saying something to each other. Then just as she turned to go, he
stopped her.
"You'll forgive me, because I'm an old friend of Tom's," he was urging,
"if I ask you to drive to town with Tom and myself for supper."
There was an incongruity in the request that could not have escaped
either of them. I could see the color mounting to her temples and then
ebbing away, leaving her whiter than before. Her lips parted to answer,
but closed again sturdily.
"It couldn't--be arranged. If it could, I should have liked to," she
supplemented stiffly.
It was a stiffness that made me want to cry out to the hilltops in
rebellion.
"But suppose it _could_ be arranged?" suggested Jim.
She looked away from us.
"It couldn't be," she replied in that same inflectionless voice.
It was her voice that cut so sharply. I reflected that it was only in
the very old that we could bear that look of dead desire, that absence
of all seeking, that was settling over her face.
"But you'll try," insisted Jim. "You won't say no now?"
With one reddened hand she smoothed the surface of her dress. "I'll
try," she promised faintly.
Dinner over, prompted perhaps by a desire to look the old place over by
myself, perhaps half inclined to pay a visit to Con, I left Jim in the
library to his own devices, and stepped out alone along the road. The
air was clear now, and the sleet had frozen to a thin crystal layer, a
presage of winter, which glistened under the clear stars and sent them
shivering up at me again. As I neared the mill house, I could hear
voices through its scanty boarding, and decided, for the moment, to go
on, following the bed of the creek, when an intonation, oddly familiar,
brought me up like the crack of a whip. It is strange the power that
sounds have to transport us, and again I saw a withered woman with
straw-colored hair and a small, oblong bundle in a patch-work quilt.
But, as I drew nearer, my thoughts were all for Lisbeth.
"Have my girl in town with that young _puppy_!" Old Con was rasping at
her. "I know these artist-fellows, I tell you and--"
He ripped out an oath that took me bounding up the steps. My hand on the
front door knob, however, I paused, catching sight of Lisbeth through
the window. She was standing with her back towards the inner door her
moth-like dress blending oddly with the pallor of her cheeks, the
smudgy glow of the lamp light laying little warm patches on her hair.
But it was her eyes, wide and dark, that stopped me. There was pain in
them, and purport, a certain fierce intention, that made me wonder if I
could not serve her better where I was. And, as I waited, her voice
seeped thinly through the boarding.
"I don't believe it."--Her voice came quietly, almost without
intonation. "Tom Breighton wouldn't be his friend then.--They're both
fine and straight--and--"
"They are, are they?" he jeered. "Ye've learned to tell such things out
here in th' country, I suppose--"
"There are things," she retorted, "I've learned."
He began drawling his words again, as he always did when he had got
himself under control.
"I suppose ye're _insinuatin'_ ye don't like it here--don't like what
ye're pore ol' Father c'n do fur ye?"
Her look of contempt would have cut short another man.
"Ye--wantta--go?" he finished.
She nodded mutely. And at that he flared at her terribly.
"It's like ye," he shouted, "like yere mother, like all the Perkinses.
Word-breakers! cowards! _shirkers!_"
The words seared. The careful articulation of the afternoon was gone.
"Promised--if I sent ye to school, ye'd stay here winters to look after
ye're pore ol' Father--didn't ye?" He looked at her through narrow,
reddish lids, where she had backed against the door. "Didn't ye?" he
repeated. "But soon's he's done fur--soon's his _money's gone_--"
"Stop!" she cried. "_Stop i_--" Her breath caught.
He stared at her, the words shaken from him by the sheer force of her.
She had not moved, but, somehow, as she stood there against the
unvarnished door facing him, fists at her side, eyes brilliant, she
appeared to tower over him.
"I'll stay," she was saying in a queer, fierce monotone, "I'll stay here
this winter anyhow if I freeze for it! I'll scrub and cook and haul wood
for ye till I've paid ye back--_paid ye_," she repeated more softly,
"till no one can say the Perkinses don't keep their word! And then--in
the spring--I'm going--it'll be for good--. _For always_," she added,
and turned limply towards the door.
To my surprise he sank heavily into the rickety chair by the stove.
"Go then," he muttered. "It's all I c'ld expect."
The door closed on her and still he sat there before the fire, head bent
forward, as though he had an audience. I shrank back closer into the
shadows, drawing my coat collar more snugly about my throat. It was
incredible that he should play a part before her--and now alone! His
very posture suggested a martyred, deserted old man. I felt myself in
the presence of something inexplicable.--Then, in a frenzy of suppressed
rancor, such as I had never felt before, I climbed the hill, the lumps
of mud and ice seeming to cling against my footsteps as I went.
* * * * *
The winter was a bitter one that year, such as only the winters in that
Northern, prostrate land can be. The countryside appeared to crouch
under a passive, laden-colored sky. Then the snow came settling in
deeper and deeper layers, and, as it packed down, a coating of thin ice
formed on its surface. One could walk on it at times, this crust that
had grown over the land like a new skin.
We smuggled sweaters and coats to Lisbeth, making them old lest Con
suspect us. But, even with all we could do for her, her suffering must
have been without comparison. There was no fire in the shack except that
in the old rusty cook stove which she tended, and the cold made an easy
entrance through the loose carpentry of the walls. With it all there
were the loneliness and the mental agony. At first, when she did not
know how deep was Jim's devotion, there must have been times when life
held out no promise to her except that of escape.
All this time the rest of the Dartons gave no sign. Old Con, I
discovered, made occasional obscure trips to the city where he saw Lin
Darton and Miss Etta, the former established as a second-rate
real-estate dealer, the latter, as buyer for a large department store.
Later it became more apparent that it was after these trips of his that
he was able to purchase another horse. He quoted more and more
frequently from the Bible and the "Elegy." Such feeling as any of the
neighbors may have had for Lisbeth was now completely turned aside by
her tight-lipped reticence and her deft evasion of all references to her
situation. Old Con was thoroughly established as a brilliant fellow,
ruined by his family.
From the first I saw that the winter had to be endured like a famine.
Keep Jim away of course I could not, though I did persuade him, by dint
of much argument, that it would be for Lisbeth's good to meet her away
from the mill house; and what pleading he may have had with her to leave
all and come with him, then and there, I could only imagine. Each time
Lisbeth came back from these encounters a little paler, her lips a
little firmer, her eyes burning with a steadier purpose. But it was the
sort of purpose that robs instead of giving life, that strikes back on
itself while it still clings to a sort of bitter triumph. Knowing her, I
knew that it had to be so, for to despoil her of this high integrity
would be to take from her something as essentially hers as was her
sensitive spirit, her fine sureness of vision.
So we kept silence until, as the first signs of spring came on again,
while the country alternately was flooded or lay under rigid pools of
ice, the line of her mouth seemed to soften and a glow crept into her
eyes and a dreaming. I held my breath and waited. Thin she was, like
something worn to the thread. The fine color had given place to a blue
tint in the cold, and to a colorless gray as she bent over the old stove
within. But the exquisitely moulded line of cheek and chin, the grace of
motion and the deep questing light in her eyes nothing could destroy. I
believe that, to Jim, she grew more lovely as she appeared to fade.
At last the day came when the water ran in yellowed torrents in the
creek or stood in stagnant pools under a new sun, when the blood
bounded, overwarm, in the tired body. That day Old Con caught sight of
them, walking arm in arm at the top of the hill, looking down as though
to find a footing, and talking earnestly. They had never before ventured
so near the mill. Catching sight of them from some distance, I foresaw
the meeting before I could reach them. When I came close enough to see,
Lisbeth was trembling visibly, as though from a chill, and Jim stood
glowering down at Old Con.
Suddenly Lisbeth edged herself sidewise between them, shouldering Jim
away.
"Don't touch him!" she cried. "It's what he's waiting for you to do!
Can't you see the look on his face--that wronged look of a man that's
done nothing but wrong all his life?"
She stopped, the words swelling within her, too big for utterance. Jim
put a quieting arm about her; and just then Old Con made an abrupt
motion towards her wrist.
"I guess," he said, "that a father--"
But she was before him.
"Father! He's not my father, d'ye hear? I've kept my word to him and now
I'm going to keep it to myself! You see that sun over the hills?"--She
turned to Con.--"It's the spring sun--it's summer--summer, d'ye hear?
And it's _mine_--and I'm going to have it, before I'm dead like my
mother died with her body still living! You're no more my father than
that dead tree the sun can't ever warm again!--It's for good--I said it
would be for good--and it is!"
We took her, sobbing dryly, between us, up the road.
That night in our house Lisbeth was married to Jim. A deep serenity
seemed to hang about her as though for the moment the past had been shut
away from her by a mist. As for Jim, there was a wonder in his eyes, not
unlike that I had seen when he came upon an old Lippo Lippi, and a great
comprehending reverence. There were tears at the back of my eyes--then
the beauty of the scene drove all else back before it.
* * * * *
There is one more episode in the life of Con Darton and Lisbeth. Knowing
him, it would be incredible that there should not be. It happened some
five years later and I was concerned in it from the moment that I was
summoned unexpectedly to Mr. Lin Darton's office in the city, a dingy
though not unprosperous menage located in the cheaper part of the down
town district. I found him sitting amid an untidy litter of papers at
the table, talking through the telephone to some one who later
developed to be Miss Etta; and I had at once a feeling of suffocation
and closeness, due not alone, I believe, to the barred windows and the
steaming radiator. The family resemblance that Mr. Lin Darton bore to
Old Con threw into relief the former's honesty, and made more bearable
his heavy sentimentalism, upon which Con had played as surely as on a
bagpipe, sounding its narrow range with insistent evenness of response.
"I want to talk to you about Con," he said gravely, as soon as the
receiver had been hung up, "and--Lisbeth." He uttered his niece's name
as though it were a thing of which he could not but be ashamed.