An Omen
As I was trying to hurry past Gaby’s door, Danny opened it, and asked
me if I would come in and sit with her for a while.
I should have been there, long before. I went right in, apologizing,
and trying to explain. But, when I saw that she meant for us to sit in
Gaby’s room, I suggested that we go somewhere else.
“No, please Mary,” she said. “I don’t want to be alone; but I do want
to sit here. I feel as if here, with all her things around me, I
might—get in touch—I mean—something might come to me. They say, you
know, that people who have died—violent deaths, do not leave the earth
sphere at once. I don’t know whether I believe that or not. But, it
could be true. If she is still on earth, she would come here. Wouldn’t
she? And she would try, I am sure, to give me a sign. Something to
help me—to help all of us. If it should come, I want to be here to
receive it.”
“It won’t come, Danny, dear,” I said.
“No. I suppose not.” She leaned back in her chair and sighed, and her
arms dropped straight down over the chair’s arms—a position that
showed how tuckered she was. The engagement ring that John had given
her slipped from her finger and came rolling over toward me. I
scrambled to pick it up. When I rose from the floor she had jumped to
her feet. She was ashy, shaking and trembling as if she had a chill.
“Mary! Promise me that you’ll never tell that, not to anyone. It
didn’t—— It couldn’t mean anything.”
“It means,” I said, handing her the ring, “that you are wasting away.
You’d better let me go down and bring you up some good, hot soup; or
an eggnog.”
She clung to me. “Don’t leave me, Mary. I am afraid. I am dreadfully
afraid. Promise that you won’t tell about the ring. It—didn’t mean
anything.”
I will admit that I did not like it any too well myself. There, just
as she was asking for a sign, the ring, which had fitted snugly
enough, I had thought, had dropped off. But, of course I had to put up
a brave front to her.
“Nonsense,” I said. “I won’t tell anybody, because it is nothing to
tell. All that it means is that the ring is too large for you.”
“It is too large,” she agreed. “I’ve been losing weight, lately. I
have meant to ask John to send it to have it cut down—but I hated to
be without it. Still—just as I was asking for a sign. Though it has
dropped off several times before this. I shouldn’t think it meant
anything, this particular time, should I?”
“Of course not, dear,” I said, relieved to hear that it had dropped
off before. “You had your hands hanging straight down, that’s all. You
are all overstrung, and no wonder. Anyway, what could it have meant?”
How a person will babble along, seemingly for no reason. I had paid no
attention to what I was saying; but, the minute I had said it, the
question needed an answer.
It could have meant that Gaby did not want Danny to marry John. Or,
since nothing in the house could have signified John’s name as plainly
as that ring could, it might have meant—— I refused to go on with it.
Danny must have been answering the question to herself, as I had been
doing. She sat down in a deep chair, opposite me, her hands clasped on
her knees, and leaned forward, and looked into my eyes.
“Definite things, Mary,” she said, “are always so wise. A definite
answer to your definite question proves, as nothing else might have,
that this was a silly, futile little accident. The ring has dropped
off, I suppose, half a dozen times this week. Gaby’s last note to me
was all affection. Living, if Gaby could have taken John away from me,
for herself, she would have done it. Dead—she wants us to marry. I
know that. As for any other implication——” As I had done, and in spite
of her talk about definite things, she refused that. “If only Uncle
Sam were not so heartless,” she finished.
“Heartless!” I spoke sharply in spite of myself. “If the Creator ever
made a man with a bigger heart than Sam Stanley’s, nobody ever saw
him.”
“He has been good to you,” she said. “But you give him his own way
about everything.”
“Well, after all,” I said, “he does own the Desert Moon.”
“And everyone on it, body and soul,” she said. “Sometimes I think he
owns everyone in this county.”
I did not want to know what she meant by that; so I only reminded her
that Sam was John’s father.
Her voice, when she spoke next, came muffled from where she had hidden
her face in her curved arm on the back of the chair. “Uncle Sam is not
John’s father,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“John is uncle’s adopted son. They are so different, so utterly
different, they could not be father and son.”
“Maybe not,” I said, trying to keep pleasant, for I did not want to be
snapping at the poor child on this day, “but no real son ever loved
his father better than John loves Sam. He all but worships him, and he
has ever since he was a little fellow.”
“I know. I know. Sometimes I think John cares more for uncle than he
does for me. Mary, tell me, honestly. Do you think John loves me as
much as he loves Uncle Sam?”
It is hard to explain; but, ever since we had begun to speak of Sam, I
had had a fighting feeling, as if I were warding off danger; so I was
right down relieved to have the conversation take this silly turn.
“Love,” I told her, “though, mercy knows, I know little enough about
it, can’t be measured with a pint cup like flour. But John is a good,
normal boy. That means that his sweetheart comes first with him; first
and last.”
“I—don’t know,” she answered. “I should hate to have John have to
choose between uncle and me.”
“That is foolish talk. Why should John ever have to choose between you
and Sam?”
She sighed, and shook her head. A sudden certainty came to me.
Whatever it was that Danny had refused that morning to tell me,
whatever it was that she had said that she dared not tell, had had
something, somehow, to do with Sam.
I did not urge her again to tell me what it was. I did not wish to
know. I sat there, dumb, trying to think of some decent excuse that
would take me away from her and from that room, and from the need of
fighting; fighting, not in a fog, but the fog itself, trying to fell
nothingness with a blow, trying to catch smoke in a trap. My dull wits
worked too slowly. She began, again, to speak.