SYLVIA DRIFTS WITH THE MAJORITY
"No, they don't let you sit down in here if you're as shabby as I am,"
said the man, continuing his slow, feeble, shuffling progress. "They
know you're only a vagrant, here to get out of the rain. They won't
even let you stand still long."
Sylvia had not been inside the Pantheon before, had never been inside
a building with so great a dome. They stood under it now. She sent her
glance up to its vast, dim, noble heights and brought it down to the
saturnine, unsavory wreck at her side. She was regretting the impulse
which had made her call out to him. What could she say to him now they
were together? What word, what breath could be gentle enough, light
enough not to be poison to that open sore?
On his part he seemed entirely unconcerned about the impression he
made on her. His eyes, his sick, filmed eyes, looked at her with no
shrinking, with no bravado, with an entire indifference which gave,
through all the desolation of his appearance, the strangest, careless
dignity to the man. He did not care what she thought of him. He did
not care what any one thought of him. He gave the impression of a man
whose accounts are all reckoned and the balance struck, long ago.
"So this is Sylvia," he said, with the slightest appearance of
interest, glancing at her casually. "I always said you would make a
beautiful woman. But since I knew Victoria, I've seen that you must be
quite what she was at your age." It might have been a voice speaking
from beyond the grave, so listless, so dragging was its rhythm. "How
do you happen to be in Paris?" he asked. "Are your parents still
alive?"
"Oh _yes_!" said Sylvia, half startled by the preposterousness of the
idea that they might not be. "They're very well too. I had such a good
letter from Mother the other day. Do you remember Professor Kennedy?
He has just given up his position to be professor emeritus. I suppose
now he'll write that book on the idiocy of the human race he's been
planning so long. And old Mr. Reinhardt, he's still the same, they say
... wonderful, isn't it, at his age?" She was running on, not knowing
what to say, and chattering rather foolishly in her embarrassment.
"Judith is a trained nurse; isn't that just the right thing for her?
I'm visiting Aunt Victoria here for a while. Lawrence is a Freshman at...."
He broke in, his hollow voice resounding in the immense, vault-like
spaces around them. "You'd better go home," he said. "I'd leave
tonight, if I were you." She looked at him startled, half-scared,
thinking that she had been right to fancy him out of his mind. She saw
with relief a burly attendant in a blue uniform lounging near a group
of statuary. She could call to him, if it became necessary.
"You'd better go away from her at once," went on the man, advancing
aimlessly from one bay of the frescoes to another.
Sylvia knew now of whom he was speaking, and as he continued talking
with a slow, dreary monotony, her mind raced back over the years,
picking up a scrap here, a half-forgotten phrase there, an intercepted
look between her father and mother, a recollection of her own, a
half-finished sentence of Arnold's ...
"She can't be fatal for you in the same way she has been for the
others, of course," the man was saying. "What she'll do for you is to
turn you into a woman like herself. I remember now, I have thought
many times, that you _were_ like her ... of the same clay. But you
have something else too, you have something that she'll take away from
you if you stay. You can't keep her from doing it. No one can get the
better of her. She doesn't fight. But she always takes life. She has
taken mine. She must have taken her bogie-husband's, she took young
Gilbert's, she took Gilbert's wife's, she took Arnold's in another
way.... God! think of leaving a young, growing, weak soul in the care
of a woman like Victoria! She took that poet's, I forget his name; I
suppose by this time Felix Morrison is ..."
At this name, a terrible contraction of the heart told Sylvia that she
was listening to what he said. "Felix Morrison!" she cried in stern,
angry protest. "I don't know what you're talking about--but if you
think that Aunt Victoria--if you think Felix Morrison--" She was
inarticulate in her indignation. "He was married last autumn to a
beautiful girl--and Aunt Victoria--what an idea!--_no_ one was more
pleased than she--why--you are _crazy_!" She flung out at him the
word, which two moments before she would not have been so cruel as to
think.
It gave him no discomfort. "Oh no, I'm not," he said with a spectral
laugh, which had in it, to Sylvia's dismay, the very essence of
sanity. She did not know why she now shrank away from him, far more
frightened than before. "I'm about everything else you might mention,
but I'm not crazy. And you take my word for it and get out while you
still can ... _if_ you still can?" He faintly indicated an inquiry,
looking at her sideways, his dirty hand stroking the dishonoring gray
stubble of his unshaven face. "As for Morrison's wife ... let her get
out too. Gilbert tried marrying, tried it in all unconsciousness. It's
only when they try to get away from her that they know she's in the
marrow of their bones. She lets them try. She doesn't even care. She
knows they'll come back. Gilbert did. And his wife ... well, I'm sorry
for Morrison's wife."
"She's dead," said Sylvia abruptly.
He took this in with a nod of the head. "So much the better for her.
How did it happen that _you_ didn't fall for Morrison's ..." he looked
at her sharply at a change in her face she could not control. "Oh,
you did," he commented slackly. "Well, you'd better start home for La
Chance tonight," he said again.
They were circling around and around the shadowy interior, making no
pretense of looking at the frescoed walls, to examine which had been
their ostensible purpose in entering. Sylvia was indeed aware of great
pictured spaces, crowded dimly with thronging figures, men, horses,
women--they reached no more than the outer retina of her eye. She
remembered fleetingly that they had something to do with the story of
Ste. Geneviève. She wanted intensely to escape from this phantom whom
she herself had called up from the void to stalk at her side. But she
felt she ought not to let pass, even coming from such a source, such
utterly frenzied imaginings against one to whom she owed loyalty. She
spoke coldly, with extreme distaste for the subject: "You're entirely
wrong about Aunt Victoria. She's not in the least that kind of a
woman."
He shook his head slowly. "No, no; you misunderstand me. Your Aunt
Victoria is quite irreproachable, she always has been, she always will
be. She is always in the right. She always will be. She did nothing
to me but hire me to teach her stepson, and when my habits became too
bad, discharge me, as any one would have done. She did nothing to
Arnold except to leave him to the best schools and the best tutors
money could buy. What more could any one have done? She had not the
slightest idea that Horace Gilbert would try to poison his wife,
had not the slightest connection with their quarrel. The young
poet,--Adams was his name, now I remember--did not consult her before
he took to cocaine. Morphine is my own specialty. Victoria of course
deplored it as much as any one could. No, I'm not for a minute
intimating that Victoria is a Messalina. We'd all be better off if she
were. It's only our grossness that finds fault with her. Your aunt
is one of the most respectable women who ever lived, as 'chaste as
unsunned snow--the very ice of chastity is in her!' Indeed, I've often
wondered if the redoubtable Ephraim Smith himself, for all that he
succeeded in marrying her, fared any better than the rest of us.
Victoria would be quite capable of cheating him out of his pay. She
parches, yes, she dries up the blood--but it's not by her passion, not
even by ours. Honest passion never kills. It's the Sahara sands of her
egotism into which we've all emptied our veins."
Sylvia was frozen to the spot by her outraged indignation that any one
should dare speak to her thus. She found herself facing a fresco of a
tall, austere figure in an enveloping white garment, an elderly woman
with a thin, worn, noble face, who laid one fine old hand on a stone
parapet and with divine compassion and tenderness looked out over a
sleeping city. The man followed the direction of her eyes. "It's Puvis
de Chavannes' Ste. Geneviève as an old woman, guarding and praying for
the city. Very good, isn't it? I especially admire the suggestion of
the plain bare cell she has stepped out from. I often come here to
look at it when I've nothing to eat." He seemed as flaccidly willing
to speak on this as on any other topic; to find it no more interesting
than the subject of his former speech.
Sylvia was overcome with horror of him. She walked rapidly away,
towards the door, hoping he would not follow her. He did not. When she
glanced back fearfully over her shoulder, she saw him still standing
there, looking up at the gaunt gray figure of beneficent old age. His
dreadful broken felt hat was in his hand, the water dripped from his
frayed trousers over the rotting leather of his shoes. As she looked,
he began to cough, loudly, terribly, so that the echoing reaches of
the great nave resounded to the sound. Sylvia ran back to him and
thrust her purse into his hand. At first he could not speak, for
coughing, but in a moment he found breath to ask, "Is it Victoria's
money?"
She did not answer.
He held it for a moment, and then opening his hand let it drop. As she
turned away Sylvia heard it fall clinking on the stone floor. At the
door she turned for one last look, and saw him weakly stooping to pick
it up again. She fairly burst out of the door.
It was almost dusk when she was on the street again, looking down the
steep incline to the Luxembourg Gardens. In the rainy twilight the
fierce tension of the Rodin "Thinker" in front of the Pantheon loomed
huge and tragic. She gave it a glance of startled sympathy. She had
never understood the statue before. Now she was a prey to those same
ravaging throes. There was for the moment no escaping them. She felt
none of her former wild impulse to run away. What she had been running
away from had overtaken her. She faced it now, looked at it squarely,
gave it her ear for the first time; the grinding, dissonant note under
the rich harmony of the life she had known for all these past months,
the obscure vaults underlying the shining temple in which she had been
living.
What beauty could there be which was founded on such an action as
Felix' marriage to Molly--Molly, whose passionate directness had known
the only way out of the impasse into which Felix should never have let
her go?... An echo from what she had heard in the mass at Notre Dame
rang in her ears, and now the sound was louder--Austin's voice,
Austin's words: "A beauty that can't endure disharmony in conduct, the
fine true ear for the deeper values, the foundations--" It was Austin,
asking himself what beauty could be in any life founded, even remotely
as his was, on any one's misery?
For a long time she stood there, silent, motionless, her hands
clenched at her sides, looking straight before her in the rain. Above
her on his pedestal, the great, bronze, naked, tortured man ground his
teeth as he glared out from under the inexorable limitations of his
ape-like forehead, and strove wildly against the barriers of his
flesh....
Wildly and vainly, against inexorable limitations! Sylvia was aware
that an insolent young man, with moist protuberant eyes, had come up
where she stood there, alone, motionless on the public street. He put
his arm in hers, clasped her hand in a fat, soft palm, and, "_Allons,
ma belle!_" he said with a revolting gayety.
Sylvia pulled away from him, cried out fiercely in English, "Don't you
dare to touch me!" and darted away.
He made no attempt at pursuit, acknowledging his mistake with an easy
shrug and turning off to roam, a dim, predatory figure, along the
dusky street. He had startled and frightened the girl so that she was
trembling when she ventured to slow down to a walk under the glaring
lights of the Boulevard St. Michel. She was also shivering with wet
and cold, and without knowing it, she was extremely hungry. As she
fled along the boulevard in the direction of her own quarter of the
city, her eye caught the lighted clock at the kiosk near Cluny. She
was astonished to see that it was after seven o'clock. How long could
she have stood there, under the shadow of that terrific Thinker,
consumed quite as much as he by the pain of trying to rise above mere
nature? An hour--more than an hour, she must have been there. The
Pantheon must have closed during that time, and the dreadful, sick
man must have passed close by her. Where was he now? What makeshift
shelter harbored that cough, those dirty, skeleton hands, those awful
eyes which had outlived endurance and come to know peace before death....
She shivered and tried to shrink away from her wet, clinging clothing.
She had never, in all her life before, been wet and cold and hungry
and frightened, she had never known from what she had been protected.
And now the absence of money meant that she must walk miles in the
rain before she could reach safety and food. For three cents she could
ride. But she had not three cents. How idiotic she had been not to
keep a few sous from her purse. What a sickening thing it had been to
see him stoop to pick it up after he had tried to have the pride not
to touch it. That was what morphine had done for him. And he would buy
more morphine with that money, that was the reason he had not been
able to let it lie ... the man who had been to her little girlhood the
radiant embodiment of strength and fineness!
Her teeth were chattering, her feet soaked and cold. She tried to walk
faster to warm her blood, and discovered that she was exhausted, tired
to the marrow of her bones. Her feet dragged on the pavement, her arms
hung heavily by her side, but she dared not stop a moment lest some
other man with abhorrent eyes should approach her.
She set her teeth and walked; walked across the Seine without a glance
at its misted lights blinking through the rain, walked on past the
prison of Marie Antoinette, without a thought of that other harmless
woman who had loved bright and lovely things while others suffered:
walked on upon the bridge across the Seine again. This bewildered her,
making her think that she was so dazed she had doubled on her tracks.
She saw, a long way off, a solitary hooded sergent de ville, and
dragged herself across an endless expanse of wet asphalt to ask him
her way. But just before she reached him, she remembered suddenly that
of course she was on the island and was obliged to cross the Seine
again before reaching the right bank. She returned weary and
disheartened to her path, crossed the bridge, and then endlessly,
endlessly, set one heavy foot before the other under the glare of
innumerable electric lights staring down on her and on the dismal,
wet, and deserted streets. The clocks she passed told her that it
was nearly eight o'clock. Then it was past eight. What must they be
thinking of her on the Rue de Presbourg? She tried again to hurry, but
could force her aching muscles to no more than the plod, plod, plod of
her dogged advance over those interminable miles of pavement. There
was little of her then that was not cold, weary, wet flesh, suffering
all the discomforts that an animal can know. She counted her steps for
a long time, and became so stupidly absorbed in this that she made a
wrong turning and was blocks out of her way before she noticed her
mistake. This mishap reduced her almost to tears, and it was when she
was choking them weakly back and setting herself again to the cruel
long vista of the Champs-Elysées that an automobile passed her at top
speed with a man's face pressed palely to the panes. Almost at once
the car stopped in answer to a shouted command; it whirled about
and bore down on her. Felix Morrison sprang out and ran to her with
outstretched arms, his rich voice ringing through the desolation of
the rain and the night--"Sylvia! Sylvia! Are you safe?"
He almost carried her back to the car, lifted her in. There were
wraps there, great soft, furry, velvet wraps which he cast about her,
murmuring broken ejaculations of emotion, of pity, of relief--"Oh,
your hands, how cold! Sylvia, how _could_ you? Here, drink this! I've
been insane,--absolutely out of my mind! Let me take off your hat--Oh,
your poor feet--I was on my way to--I was afraid you might have--Oh,
Sylvia, Sylvia, to have you safe!" She tried to bring to mind
something she had intended to remember; she even repeated the phrase
over to herself, "It was an ugly, ugly thing to have married Molly,"
but she knew only that he was tenderness and sheltering care and
warmth and food and safety. She drew long quivering breaths like a
child coming out of a sobbing fit.
Then before there was time for more thought, the car had whirled them
back to the door, where Aunt Victoria, outwardly calm, but very pale,
stood between the concierge and his wife, looking out into the rainy
deserted street.
At the touch of those warm embracing arms, at that radiant presence,
at the sound of that relieved, welcoming voice, the nightmare of the
Pantheon faded away to blackness....
Half an hour later, she sat, fresh from a hot bath, breathing out
delicately a reminiscence of recent violet water and perfumed powder;
fresh, fine under-linen next her glowing skin; shining and refreshed,
in a gown of chiffon and satin; eating her first mouthful of Yoshido's
ambrosial soup.
"Why, I'm so sorry," she was saying. "I went out for a walk, and then
went further than I meant to. I've been over on the left bank part of
the time, in Notre Dame and the Pantheon. And then when I started to
come home it took longer than I thought. It's so apt to, you know."
"Why in the world, my dear, did you _walk_ home?" cried Aunt Victoria,
still brooding over her in pitying sympathy.
"I'd--I'd lost my purse. I didn't have any money."
"But you don't pay for a cab till you come to the end of your journey!
You could have stepped into a taxi and borrowed the money of the
concierge here."
Sylvia was immensely disconcerted by her rustic naïveté in not
thinking of this obvious device. "Oh, of course! How could I have been
so--but I was tired when I came to start home--I was very tired--too
tired to think clearly!"
This brought them all back to the recollection of what had set her off
on her walk. There was for a time rather a strained silence; but they
were all very hungry--dinner was two hours late--and the discussion
of Yoshido's roast duckling was anything but favorable for the
consideration of painful topics. They had champagne to celebrate her
safe escape from the adventure. To the sensation of perfect ease
induced by the well-chosen dinner this added a little tingling through
all Sylvia's nerves, a pleasant, light, bright titillation.
All might have gone well if, after the dinner, Felix had not stepped,
as was his wont, to the piano. Sylvia had been, up to that moment,
almost wholly young animal, given over to bodily ecstasy, of which not
the least was the agreeable warmth on her silk-clad ankle as she held
her slippered foot to the fire.
But at the first chords something else in her, slowly, with extreme
pain, awoke to activity. All her life music had spoken a language to
which she could not shut her ears, and now--her face clouded, she
shifted her position, she held up a little painted screen to shield
her face from the fire, she finally rose and walked restlessly about
the room. Every grave and haunting cadence from the piano brought to
her mind, flickering and quick, like fire, a darting question, and
every one she stamped out midway, with an effort of the will.
The intimacy between Felix and Aunt Victoria, it was strange she had
never before thought--of course not--what a hideous idea! That book,
back in Lydford, with Horace Gilbert's name on the fly-leaf, and Aunt
Victoria's cool, casual voice as she explained, "Oh, just a young
architect who used to--" Oh, the man in the Pantheon was simply
brutalized by drugs; he did not know what he was saying. His cool,
spectral laugh of sanity sounded faintly in her ears again.
And then, out of a mounting foam of arpeggios, there bloomed for her
a new idea, solid enough, broad enough, high enough, for a refuge
against all these wolfish fangs. She sat down to think it out, hot on
the trail of an answer, the longed-for answer.
It had just occurred to her that there was no possible logical
connection between any of those skulking phantoms and the golden
lovely things they tried to defile. Even if some people of wealth
and ease and leisure were not as careful about moral values as about
colors, and aesthetic harmonies--that meant nothing. The connection
was purely fortuitous. How silly she had been not to see that. Grant,
for purposes of argument, that Aunt Victoria was self-centered and
had lived her life with too little regard for its effect on other
people,--grant even that Felix had, under an almost overpowering
temptation, not kept in a matter of conduct the same rigid nicety of
fastidiousness which characterized his judgment of marbles--what of
it? That did not mean that one could only be fine and true in conduct
by giving up all lovely things and wearing hair-shirts. What an
outgrown, mediaeval idea! How could she have been for a moment under
its domination! It was just that old Puritanism, Spartanism of her
childhood, which was continually reaching up its bony hand from the
grave where she had interred it.
The only danger came, she saw it now, read it plainly and
clear-headedly in the lives of the two people with her, the only
danger came from a lack of proportion. It certainly did seem to be
possible to allow the amenities and aesthetic pleasures to become so
important that moral fineness must stand aside till they were safe.
But anybody who had enough intelligence could keep his head, even
if the temptation was alluring. And simply because there was that
possible danger, why not enjoy delightful things as long as they did
not run counter to moral fineness! How absurd to think there was any
reason why they should; quite the contrary, as a thousand philosophers
attested. They would not in her case, at least! Of course, if
a decision had to be taken between the two, she would never
hesitate--never! As she phrased this conviction to herself, she turned
a ring on her white slim finger and had a throb of pleasure in the
color of the gem. What harmless, impersonal pleasures they were! How
little they hurt any one! And as to this business of morbidly probing
into healthy flesh, of insisting on going back of everything, farther
than any one could possibly go, and scrutinizing the origin of every
dollar that came into your hand ... why, that way lay madness! As
soon try to investigate all the past occupants of a seat in a railway
before using it for a journey. Modern life was not organized that way.
It was too complicated.
Her mind rushed on excitedly, catching up more certainty, more and
more reinforcements to her argument as it advanced. There was,
therefore, nothing inherent in the manner of life she had known these
last months to account for what seemed ugly underneath. There was no
reason why some one more keenly on his guard could not live as they
did and escape sounding that dissonant note!
The music stopped. Morrison turned on the stool and seeing her bent
head and moody stare at the fire, sent an imploring glance for help to
Mrs. Marshall-Smith.
Just let her have the wealth and leisure and let her show how worthily
she could use it! There would be an achievement! Sylvia came around to
another phase of her new idea, there would be something worth doing,
to show that one could be as fine and true in a palace as in a
hut,--even as in a Vermont farmhouse! At this, suddenly all thought
left her. Austin Page stood before her, fixing on her his clear and
passionate and tender eyes. At that dear and well-remembered gaze, her
lip began to quiver like a child's, and her eyes filled.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith stirred herself with the effect of a splendid ship
going into action with all flags flying. "Sylvia dear," she said,
"this rain tonight makes me think of a new plan. It will very likely
rain for a week or more now. Paris is abominable in the rain. What do
you say to a change? Madeleine Perth was telling me this afternoon
that the White Star people are running a few ships from Portsmouth by
way of Cherbourg around by Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean to
Naples. That's one trip your rolling-stone of an aunt has never taken,
and I'd rather like to add it to my collection. We could be in Naples
in four days from Cherbourg and spend a month in Italy, going north as
the heat arrived. Felix--why don't you come along? You've been wanting
to see the new low reliefs in the Terme, in Rome?"
Sylvia's heart, like all young hearts, was dazzled almost to blinking
by the radiance shed from the magic word Italy. She turned, looking
very much taken aback and bewildered, but with light in her eyes,
color in her face.
Morrison burst out: "Oh, a dream realized! Something to live on all
one's days, the pines of the Borghese--the cypresses of the Villa
Medici--roses cascading over the walls in Rome, the view across the
Campagna from the terraces at Rocca di Papa--"
Sylvia thought rapidly to herself: "Austin _said_ he did not want me
to answer at once. He _said_ he wanted me to take time--to take time!
I can decide better, make more sense out of everything, if I--after I
have thought more, have taken more time. No, I am not turning my back
on him. Only I must have more time to think--"
Aloud she said, after a moment's silence, "Oh, nothing could be
lovelier!"
She lay in her warm, clean white bed that night, sleeping the sound
sleep of the healthy young animal which has been wet and cold and
hungry, and is now dry and warmed and fed.
Outside, across the city, on his bronze pedestal, the tortured
Thinker, loyal to his destiny, still strove terribly against the
limitations of his ape-like forehead.
BOOK IV;
_THE STRAIT PATH_
CHAPTER XL
A CALL FROM HOME
It was quite dark when they arrived in the harbor at Naples; and
they were too late to go through the necessary formalities of harbor
entering. In company with several other in-and outward-bound steamers,
the _Carnatic_ lay to for the night. Some one pointed out a big liner
which would sail for New York the next morning, lying like a huge,
gaily lighted island, the blare of her band floating over the still
water.
Sylvia slept little that night, missing the rolling swing of the ship,
and feeling breathless in the stifling immobility of the cabin. She
tossed about restlessly, dozing off at intervals and waking with a
start to get up on her knees and look out through the port-hole at the
lights of Naples blazing steadily in their semicircle. She tried to
think several times, about her relations to Felix, to Austin--but
nothing came to her mind except a series of scenes in which they had
figured, scenes quite disconnected, which brought no enlightenment to
her.
As she lay awake thus, staring at the ceiling, feeling in the intense
silence and blackness that the fluttering of her eyelids was almost
audible, her heart beating irregularly, now slow, now fast, it
occurred to her that she was beginning to know something of the
intensity of real life--real grown-up life. She was astonished to
enjoy it so little.
She fell at last, suddenly, fathoms deep into youthful slumber, and
at once passed out from tormented darkness into some strange, sunny,
wind-swept place on a height. And she was all one anguish of longing
for Austin. And he came swiftly to her and took her in his arms and
kissed her on the lips. And it was as it had been when she was a child
and heard music, she was carried away by a great swelling tide of joy
... But dusk began to fall again; Austin faded; through the darkness
something called and called to her, imperatively. With great pain she
struggled up through endless stages of half-consciousness, until she
was herself again, Sylvia Marshall, heavy-eyed, sitting up in her
berth and saying aloud, "Yes, what is it?" in answer to a knocking on
the door.
The steward's voice answered, announcing that the first boat for shore
would leave in an hour. Sylvia sprang out of bed, the dream already
nothing more than confused brightness in her mind. By the time she was
dressed, it had altogether gone, and she only knew that she had had
a restless night. She went out on the deck, longing for the tonic of
pure air. The morning was misty--it had rained during the night--and
clouds hung heavy and low over the city. Out from this gray smother
the city gleamed like a veiled opal. Neither Felix nor her aunt was to
be seen. When she went down to breakfast, after a brisk tramp back and
forth across the deck, she was rosy and dewy, her triumphant youth
showing no sign of her vigils. She was saying to herself: "Now I've
come, it's too idiotic not to enjoy it. I _shall_ let myself go!"
Hélène attended to the ladies' packing and to the labeling and care
of the baggage. Empty-handed, care-free, feeling like a traveling
princess, Sylvia climbed down from the great steamer into a dirty,
small harbor-boat. Aunt Victoria sat down at once on the folding
camp-chair which Hélène always carried for her. Sylvia and Felix stood
together at the blunt prow, watching the spectacle before them. The
clouds were lifting from the city and from Vesuvius, and from Sylvia's
mind. Her spirits rose as the boat went forward into the strange,
foreign, glowing scene.
The oily water shimmered in smooth heavings as the clumsy boat
advanced upon it. The white houses on the hills gleamed out from their
palms. As the boat came closer to the wharf, the travelers could see
the crowds of foreign-looking people, with swarthy faces and cheap,
ungraceful clothes, looking out at the boat with alert, speculative,
unwelcoming eyes. The noise of the city streets, strange to their ears
after the days of sea silence, rose clattering, like a part of the
brilliance, the sparkle. The sun broke through the clouds, poured a
flood of glory on the refulgent city, and shone hotly on the pools of
dirty water caught in the sunken spots of the uneven stone pavement.
Aunt Victoria made her way up the gang-plank to the landing dock,
achieving dignity even there. Felix sprang after her, to hand her her
chair, and Helene and Sylvia followed. Mrs. Marshall-Smith sat down
at once, opening her dark-purple parasol, the tense silk of which was
changed by the hot Southern sun into an iridescent bubble. "We will
wait here till the steward gets our trunks out," she announced."
It will be amusing to watch the people." The four made an oasis of
aristocracy in the seething, shouting, frowzy, gaudy, Southern
crowd, running about with the scrambling, undignified haste of ants,
sweating, gesticulating, their faces contorted with care over their
poor belongings. Sylvia was acutely conscious of her significance in
the scene. She was also fully aware that Felix missed none of the
contrast she made with the other women. She felt at once enhanced and
protected by the ignobly dressed crowd about her. Felix was right--in
America there could be no distinction, there was no background for it.
The scene about them was theatrically magnificent. In the distance
Vesuvius towered, cloud-veiled and threatening, the harbor shone and
sparkled in the sun, the vivid, outreaching arms of Naples clasped
the jewel-like water. From it all Sylvia extracted the most perfect
distillation of traveler's joy. She felt the well-to-do tourist's
care-free detachment from the fundamentals of life, the tourist's
sense that everything exists for the purpose of being a sight for him
to see. She knew, and knew with delight, the wanderer's lightened,
emancipated sense of being at a distance from obligations, that
cheerful sense of an escape from the emprisoning solidarity of
humanity which furnishes the zest of life for the tourist and the
tramp, enabling the one light-heartedly to offend proprieties and
the other casually to commit murder. She was embarked upon a moral
vacation. She was out of the Bastile of right and wrong. She had a
vision of what freedom from entangling responsibilities is secured by
traveling. She understood her aunt's classing it as among the positive
goods of life.
A man in a shabby blue uniform, with a bundle of letters in his hand,
walked past them towards the boat.
"Oh, the mail," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "There may be some for us."
She beckoned the man to her, and said, "Marshall-Smith? Marshall?
Morrison?"
The man sorted over his pile. "Cable for Miss Marshall," he said,
presenting it to the younger lady with a bold, familiar look
of admiration. "Letter for F. Morrison: two letters for Mrs.
Marshall-Smith." Sylvia opened her envelope, spread out the folded
sheet of paper, and read what was scrawled on it, with no realization
of the meaning. She knew only that the paper, Felix, her aunt, the
crowd, vanished in thick blackness, through which, much later, with a
great roaring in her ears, she read, as though by jagged flashes of
lightning: "Mother very ill. Come home at once. Judith."
It seemed to her an incalculably long time between her first glance at
the words and her understanding of them, but when she emerged from the
blackness and void, into the flaunting sunlight, the roaring still
in her ears, the paper still in her hands, the scrawled words still
venomous upon it, she saw that not a moment could have passed, for
Felix and her aunt were unfolding letters of their own, their eyes
beginning to run quickly over the pages.
Sylvia stood quite still, feeling immeasurably and bitterly alone.
She said to herself: "Mother is very sick. I must go home at once.
Judith." But she did not know what she said. She felt only an impulse
to run wildly away from something that gave her intolerable pain.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith turned over a page of her letter, smiling to
herself, and glanced up at her niece. Her smile was smitten from her
lips. Sylvia had a fantastic vision of her own aspect from the gaping
face of horror with which her aunt for an instant reflected it. She
had never before seen Aunt Victoria with an unprepared and discomposed
countenance. It was another feature of the nightmare.
For suddenly everything resolved itself into a bad dream,--her aunt
crying out, Hélène screaming and running to her, Felix snatching the
telegram from her and reading it aloud--it seemed to Sylvia that she
had heard nothing for years but those words, "Mother very sick. Come
home at once. Judith." She heard them over and over after his voice
was silent. Through their constant echoing roar in her ears she heard
but dimly the babel of talk that arose--Aunt Victoria saying that she
could not of course leave at once because no passage had been engaged,
Hélène foolishly offering smelling-salts, Felix darting off to get a
carriage to take them to the hotel where she could be out of the crowd
and they could lay their plans--"Oh, my poor dear!--but you may have
more reassuring news tomorrow, you know," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith
soothingly.
The girl faced her aunt outraged. She thought she cried out angrily,
"tomorrow!" but she did not break her silence. She was so torn by the
storm within her that she had no breath for recriminations. She turned
and ran rapidly some distance away to the edge of the wharf, where
some small rowboats hung bobbing, their owners sprawled on the seats,
smoking cigarettes and chattering. Sylvia addressed the one nearest
her in a strong, imperious voice. "I want you to take me out to that
steamer," she said, pointing out to the liner in the harbor.
The man looked up at her blankly, his laughing, impertinent brown face
sobered at once by the sight of her own. He made a reply in Italian,
raising his shoulders. Some ill-dressed, loafing stragglers on the
wharf drew near Sylvia with an indolent curiosity. She turned to them
and asked, "Do any of you speak English?" although it was manifestly
inconceivable that any of those typical Neapolitans should. One of
them stepped forward, running his hand through greasy black curls. "I
kin, lady," he said with a fluent, vulgar New York accent. "What ye
want?"
"Tell that man," said Sylvia, her lips moving stiffly, "to take me out
to the ship that is to leave for America this morning--and now--this
minute, I may be late now!"
After a short impassioned colloquy, the loafer turned to her and
reported: "He says if he took you out, you couldn't git on board. Them
big ships ain't got no way for folks in little boats to git on. And
he'd ask you thirty lire, anyhow. That's a fierce price. Say, if
you'll wait a minute, I can get you a man that'll do it for--" Mrs.
Marshall-Smith and Hélène had followed, and now broke through the line
of ill-smelling loungers. Mrs. Marshall-Smith took hold of her niece's
arm firmly, and began to draw her away with a dignified gesture. "You
don't know what you are doing, child," she said with a peremptory
accent of authority. "You are beside yourself. Come with me at once.
This is no--"
Sylvia did not resist her. She ignored her. In fact, she did not
understand a word that her aunt said. She shook off the older woman's
hand with one thrust of her powerful young arm, and gathering her
skirts about her, leaped down into the boat. She took out her purse
and showed the man a fifty-lire bill. "Row fast! Fast!" she motioned
to him, sitting down in the stern and fixing her eyes on the huge bulk
of the liner, black upon the brilliance of the sunlit water. She heard
her name called from the wharf and turned her face backward, as the
light craft began to move jerkily away.
Felix had come up and now stood between Mrs. Marshall-Smith and her
maid, both of whom were passionately appealing to him! He looked over
their heads, saw the girl already a boat-length from the wharf, and
gave a gesture of utter consternation. He ran headlong to the edge of
the dock and again called her name loudly, "Sylvia! _Sylvia!_" There
was no mistaking the quality of that cry. It was the voice of a man
who sees the woman he loves departing from him, and who wildly,
imperiously calls her back to him. But she did not return. The boat
was still so close that she could look deeply into his eyes. Through
all her tumult of horror, there struck cold to Sylvia's heart the
knowledge that they were the eyes of a stranger. The blow that had
pierced her had struck into a quivering center of life, so deep within
her, that only something as deep as its terrible suffering could seem
real. The man who stood there, so impotently calling to her, belonged
to another order of things--things which a moment ago had been
important to her, and which now no longer existed. He had become for
her as remote, as immaterial as the gaudy picturesqueness of the
scene in which he stood. She gave him a long strange look, and made a
strange gesture, a gesture of irrevocable leave-taking. She turned her
face again to the sea, and did not look back.
They approached the liner, and Sylvia saw some dark heads looking over
the railing at her. Her boatman rowed around the stern to the other
side, where the slanting stairs used in boarding the harbor-boats
still hung over the side. The landing was far above their heads.
Sylvia stood up and cried loudly to the dull faces, staring down at
her from the steerage deck. "Send somebody down on the stairs to speak
to me." There was a stir; a man in a blue uniform came and looked over
the edge, and went away. After a moment, an officer in white ran down
the stairs to the hanging landing with the swift, sure footing of a
seaman. Sylvia stood up again, turning her white face up to him, her
eyes blazing in the shadow of her hat. "I've just heard that my mother
is very sick, and I must get back to America at once. If you will let
down the rope ladder, I can climb up. I must go! I have plenty of
money. I _must_!"
The officer stared, shook his head, and ran back up the stairs,
disappearing into the black hole in the ship's side. The dark, heavy
faces continued to hang over the railing, staring fixedly down at the
boat with a steady, incurious gaze. Sylvia's boatman balanced his
oar-handles on his knees, rolled a cigarette and lighted it. The boat
swayed up and down on the shimmering, heaving roll of the water,
although the ponderous ship beside it loomed motionless as a rock.
The sun beat down on Sylvia's head and up in her face from the molten
water till she felt sick, but when another officer in white, an
elderly man with an impassive, bearded face, came down the stairs, she
rose up, instantly forgetful of everything but her demand. She called
out her message again, straining her voice until it broke, poised so
impatiently in the little boat, swinging under her feet, that she
seemed almost about to spring up towards the two men leaning over to
catch her words. When she finished, the older man nodded, the younger
one ran back up the stairs, and returned with a rope ladder.
Sylvia's boatman stirred himself with an ugly face of misgiving.
He clutched at her arm, and made close before her face the hungry,
Mediterranean gesture of fingering money. She took out her purse, gave
him the fifty-lire note, and catching at the ladder as it was flung
down, disregarding the shouted commands of the men above her to
"wait!" she swung herself upon it, climbing strongly and surely in
spite of her hampering skirts.
The two men helped her up, alarmed and vexed at the risk she had
taken. They said something about great crowds on the boat, and that
only in the second cabin was there a possibility for accommodations.
If she answered them, she did not know what she said. She followed the
younger man down a long corridor, at first dark and smelling of hemp,
later white, bright with electric light, smelling strongly of fresh
paint, stagnant air, and machine-oil. They emerged in a round hallway
at the foot of a staircase. The officer went to a window for a
conference with the official behind it, and returned to Sylvia to say
that there was no room, not even a single berth vacant. Some shabby
woman-passengers with untidy hair and crumpled clothes drew near,
looking at her with curiosity. Sylvia appealed to them, crying out
again, "My mother is very sick and I must go back to America at
once. Can't any of you--can't you--?" she stopped, catching at the
banisters. Her knees were giving way under her. A woman with a flabby
pale face and disordered gray hair sprang towards her and took her in
her arms with a divine charity. "You can have half my bed!" she cried,
drawing Sylvia's head down on her shoulder. "Poor girl! Poor girl! I
lost my only son last year!"
Her accent, her look, the tones of her voice, some emanation of deep
humanity from her whole person, reached Sylvia's inner self, the
first message that had penetrated to that core of her being since the
deadly, echoing news of the telegram. Upon her icy tension poured a
flood of dissolving warmth. Her hideous isolation was an illusion.
This plain old woman, whom she had never seen before, was her sister,
her blood-kin,--they were both human beings. She gave a cry and flung
her arms about the other's neck, clinging to her like a person falling
from a great height, the tears at last streaming down her face.
CHAPTER XLI
HOME AGAIN
The trip home passed like a long shuddering bad dream in which one
waits eternally, bound hand and foot, for a blow which does not fall.
Somehow, before the first day was over, an unoccupied berth was found
for Sylvia, in a tiny corner usually taken by one of the ship's
servants. Sylvia accepted this dully. She was but half alive, all her
vital forces suspended until the journey should be over. The throbbing
of the engines came to seem like the beating of her own heart, and
she lay tensely in her berth for hours at a time, feeling that it was
partly her energy which was driving the ship through the waters. She
only thought of accomplishing the journey, covering the miles which
lay before her. From what lay at the end she shrank back, returning
again to her hypnotic absorption in the throbbing of the engines. The
old woman who had offered to share her berth had disappeared at the
first rough water and had been invisible all the trip. Sylvia did not
think of her again. That was a recollection which with all its sacred
significance was to come back later to Sylvia's maturer mind.
The ship reached New York late in the afternoon, and docked that
night. Sylvia stood alone, in her soiled wrinkled suit, shapeless from
constant wear, her empty hands clutching at the railing, and was the
first passenger to dart down the second-class gang-plank. She ran to
see if there were letters or a telegram for her.
"Yes, there is a telegram for you," said the steward, holding out a
sealed envelope to her. "It came on with the pilot and ought to have
been given you before."
She took the envelope, but was unable to open it. The arc lights
flared and winked above her in the high roof of the wharf; the crowds
of keen-faced, hard-eyed men and women in costly, neat-fitting
clothing were as oblivious of her and as ferociously intent on their
own affairs as the shabby, noisy crowd she had left in Naples,
brushing by her as though she were a part of the wharf as they bent
over their trunks anxiously, and locked them up with determination. It
seemed to Sylvia that she could never break the spell of fear which
bound her fast. Minute after minute dragged by, and she still stood,
very white, very sick.
She was aware that some one stood in front of her, looking into her
face, and she recognized one of the ship's officials whom she had
noticed from a distance on the ship, an under-officer, somehow
connected with the engines, who had sat at table with the second-class
passengers. He was a burly, red-faced man, with huge strong hands and
a bald head.
He looked at her now for a moment with an intent kindness, and taking
her arm led her a step to a packing-case on which he made her sit
down. At the break in her immobility, a faintness came over Sylvia.
The man bent over her and began to fan her with his cap. A strong
smell of stale and cheap tobacco reached Sylvia from all of his
obese person, but his vulgar, ugly face expressed a profoundly
self-forgetful concern. "There, feelin' better?" he asked, his eyes
anxiously on hers. The man looked at the envelope comprehendingly:
"Oh--bad news--" he murmured. Sylvia opened her hand and showed him
that it had not been opened. "I haven't looked at it yet," she said
pitifully.
The man made an inarticulate murmur of pity--put out his thick red
fingers, took the message gently from her hand, and opened it. As he
read she searched his face with an impassioned scrutiny.
When he raised his eyes from the paper, she saw in them, in that
grossly fleshy countenance, such infinite pity that even her swift
intuition of its meaning was not so swift as to reach her heart first.
The blow did not reach her naked and unprotected in the solitude of
her egotism, as it had at Naples. Confusedly, half-resentfully, but
irresistibly she knew that she did not--could not--stand alone, was
not the first thus to be struck down. This knowledge brought the tonic
summons to courage. She held out her hand unflinchingly, and stood
up as she read the message, "Mother died this morning at dawn." The
telegram was dated three days before. She was now two days from home.
She looked up at the man before her and twice tried to speak before
she could command her voice. Then she said quite steadily: "I live in
the West. Can you tell me anything about trains to Chicago?"
"I'm going with ye, to th' train," he said, taking her arm and moving
forward. Two hours later his vulgar, ugly, compassionate face was the
last she saw as the train moved out of the station. He did not seem a
stranger to Sylvia. She saw that he was more than middle-aged, he must
have lost _his_ mother, there must have been many deaths in his past.
He seemed more familiar to her than her dearest friends had seemed
before; but from now on she was to feel closer to every human being
than before to her most loved. A great breach had been made in the
wall of her life--the wall which had hidden her fellows from her. She
saw them face the enigma as uncomprehendingly, as helplessly as she,
and she felt the instinct of terror to huddle close to others, even
though they feel--_because_ they feel--a terror as unrelieved. It was
not that she loved her fellow-beings more from this hour, rather that
she felt, to the root of her being, her inevitable fellowship with
them.
The journey home was almost as wholly a period of suspended animation
for Sylvia as the days on the ocean had been. She had read the
telegram at last; now she knew what had happened, but she did not yet
know what it meant. She felt that she would not know what it meant
until she reached home. How could her mother be dead? What did it mean
to have her mother dead?
She said the grim words over and over, handling them with heartsick
recklessness as a desperate man might handle the black, ugly objects
with smoking fuses which he knows carry death. But for Sylvia no
explosion came. No ravaging perception of the meaning of the words
reached her strained inner ear. She said them over and over, the sound
of them was horrifying to her, but in her heart she did not believe
them. Her mother, _her_ mother could not die!
There was no one, of course, at the La Chance station to meet her,
and she walked out through the crowd and took the street-car without
having seen a familiar face. It was five o'clock in the afternoon
then, and six when she walked up the dusty country road and turned in
through the gate in the hedge. There was home--intimately a part of
her in every detail of its unforgotten appearance. The pines stood up
strong in their immortal verdure, the thick golden hush of the summer
afternoon lay like an enchantment about the low brown house. And
something horrible, unspeakably horrible had happened there. Under the
forgotten dust and grime of her long railway journey, she was deadly
pale as she stepped up on the porch. Judith came to the door, saw her
sister, opened her arms with a noble gesture, and clasped Sylvia to
her in a strong and close embrace. Not a word was spoken. The two
clung to each other silently, Sylvia weeping incessantly, holding fast
to the dear human body in her arms, feeling herself dissolved in a
very anguish of love and pain. Her wet cheek was pressed against
Judith's lips, the tears rained down in a torrent. All the rich,
untapped strength of her invincible youth was in that healthful flood
of tears.
There were none such in the eyes of Professor Marshall as he came down
the stairs to greet his daughter. Sylvia was immeasurably shocked by
his aspect. He did not look like her father. She sought in vain in
that gray countenance for any trace of her father's expression. He
came forward with a slow, dragging step, and kissed his daughter,
taking her hand--his, she noticed, felt like a sick man's, parched,
the skin like a dry husk. He spoke, in a voice which had no resonance,
the first words that had been uttered: "You must be very tired,
Sylvia. You would better go and lie down. Your sister will go with
you." He himself turned away and walked slowly towards the open door.
Sylvia noticed that he shuffled his feet as he walked.
Judith drew Sylvia away up the stairs to her own slant-ceilinged room,
and the two sat down on the bed, side by side, with clasped hands.
Judith now told briefly the outline of what had happened. Sylvia
listened, straining her swollen eyes to see her sister's face, wiping
away the tears which ran incessantly down her pale, grimy cheeks,
repressing her sobs to listen, although they broke out in one burst
after another. Her mother had gone down very suddenly and they had
cabled at once--then she grew better--she had been unspeakably
brave--fighting the disease by sheer will-power--she had conquered
it--she was gaining--they were sorry they had cabled Sylvia--she had
not known she was going to die--none of them had dreamed she was going
to die--suddenly as the worst of her disease had spent itself and the
lungs were beginning to clear--suddenly her heart had given way, and
before the nurse could call her husband and children to her, she was
gone. They had been there under the same roof, and had not been with
her at the last. The last time they had seen her, she was alive and
smiling at them--such a brave, wan shadow of her usual smile--for a
few moments they went about their affairs, full of hope--and when they
entered the sick-room again--
Sylvia could bear no more, screaming out, motioning Judith imperiously
to stop;--she began to understand what had happened to her; the words
she had repeated so dully were like thunder in her ears. Her mother
was dead.
Judith took her sister again in her arms, holding her close, as though
she were the older. Sylvia was weeping again, the furious, healing,
inexhaustible tears of youth. To both the sisters it seemed that they
were passing an hour of supreme bitterness; but their strong young
hearts, clinging with unconscious tenacity to their right to joy,
were at that moment painfully opening and expanding beyond the narrow
bounds of childhood. Henceforth they were to be great enough to harbor
joy--a greater joy--and sorrow, side by side.
Moreover, as though their action-loving mother were still watching
over them, they found themselves confronted at once with an inexorable
demand for their strength and courage.
Judith detached herself, and said in a firm voice: "Sylvia, you
mustn't cry any more. We must think what to do."
As Sylvia looked at her blankly, she went on: "Somehow Lawrence must
be taken away for a while--until Father's--either you or I must
go with him and stay, and the other one be here with Father until
he's--he's more like himself."
Sylvia, fresh from the desolation of solitude in sorrow, cried out:
"Oh, Judith, how can you! Now's the time for us all to stay together!
Why should we--?"
Judith went to the door and closed it before answering, a precaution
so extraordinary in that house of frank openness that Sylvia was
struck into silence by it. Standing by the door, Judith said in a low
tone, "You didn't notice--anything--about Father?"
"Oh yes, he looks ill. He is so pale--he frightened me!"
Judith looked down at the floor and was silent a moment. Sylvia's
heart began to beat fast with a new foreboding. "Why, what _is_ the
matter with--" she began.
Judith covered her face with her hands. "I don't know what to _do_!"
she said despairingly.
No phrase coming from Judith could have struck a more piercing alarm
into her sister's heart. She ran to Judith, pulled her hands down, and
looked into her face anxiously. "What do you mean, Judy--what do you
mean?"
"Why--it's five days now since Mother died, three days since the
funeral--and Father has hardly eaten a mouthful--and I don't think
he's slept at all. I know he hasn't taken his clothes off. And--and--"
she drew Sylvia again to the bed, and sat down beside her, "he says
such things ... the night after Mother died Lawrence had cried so I
was afraid he would be sick, and I got him to bed and gave him some
hot milk,"--the thought flashed from one to the other almost palpably,
"That is what Mother would have done"--"and he went to sleep--he was
perfectly worn out. I went downstairs to find Father. It was after
midnight. He was walking around the house into one room after another
and out on the porch and even out in the garden, as fast as he could
walk. He looked so--" She shuddered. "I went up to him and said,
'Father, Father, what are you doing?' He never stopped walking an
instant, but he said, as though I was a total stranger and we were in
a railway station or somewhere like that, 'I am looking for my wife. I
expect to come across her any moment, but I can't seem to remember
the exact place I was to meet her. She must be somewhere about, and
I suppose--' and then, Sylvia, before I could help it, he opened the
door to Mother's room quick--and the men were there, and the coffin--"
She stopped short, pressing her hand tightly over her mouth to stop
its quivering. Sylvia gazed at her in horrified silence.
After a pause, Judith went on: "He turned around and ran as fast as
he could up the stairs to his study and locked the door. He locked
me out--the night after Mother died. I called and called to him--he
didn't answer. I was afraid to call very loud for fear of waking
Lawrence. I've had to think of Lawrence too." She stopped again to
draw a long breath. She stopped and suddenly reached out imploring
hands to hold fast to Sylvia. "I'm so _glad_ you have come!" she
murmured.
This from Judith ran like a galvanic shock through Sylvia's
sorrow-sodden heart. She sat up, aroused as she had never been before
to a stern impulse to resist her emotion, to fight it down. She
clasped Judith's hand hard, and felt the tears dry in her eyes. Judith
went on: "If it hadn't been for Lawrence--he's sick as it is. I've
kept him in his room--twice when he's been asleep I've managed to get
Father to eat something and lie down--there seem to be times when he's
so worn out that he doesn't know what he's doing. But it comes back to
him. One night I had just persuaded him to lie down, when he sat up
again with that dreadful face and said very loud: 'Where is my wife?
Where is Barbara?' That was on the night after the funeral. And the
next day he came to me, out in the garden, and said,--he never seems
to know who I am: 'I don't mind the separation from my wife, you
understand--it's not that--I'm not a child, I can endure that--but I
_must_ know where she is. I _must_ know where she is!' He said it over
and over, until his voice got so loud he seemed to hear it himself and
looked around--and then he went back into the house and began walking
all around, opening and shutting all the doors. What I'm afraid of is
his meeting Lawrence and saying something like that. Lawrence would go
crazy. I thought, as soon as you came, you could take him away to the
Helman farm--the Helmans have been so good--and Mrs. Helman offered to
take Lawrence--only he oughtn't to be alone--he needs one of us--"
Judith was quiet now, and though very pale, spoke with her usual
firmness. Sylvia too felt herself iron under the pressure of her
responsibilities. She said: "Yes, I see. All right--I'll go," and the
two went together into Lawrence's room. He was lying on the bed, his
face in the pillows. At the sound of their steps he turned over and
showed a pitiful white face. He got up and moved uncertainly towards
Sylvia, sinking into her arms and burying his face on her shoulder.
But a little later when their plan was told him, he turned to
Judith with a cry: "No, _you_ go with me, Judy! I want _you_! You
'know'--about it."
Over his head the sisters looked at each other with questioning eyes;
and Sylvia nodded her consent. Lawrence had always belonged to Judith.
CHAPTER XLII
"_Strange that we creatures of the petty ways,
Poor prisoners behind these fleshly bars,
Can sometimes think us thoughts with God ablaze,
Touching the "fringes of the outer stars_.""
And so they went away, Lawrence very white, stooping with the weight
of his suitcase, his young eyes, blurred and red, turned upon Judith
with an infinite confidence in her strength. Judith herself was pale,
but her eyes were dry and her lips firm in her grave, steadfast face,
so like her mother's, except for the absence of the glint of humor.
Sylvia kissed her good-bye, feeling almost a little fear of her
resolute sister; but as she watched them go down the path, and noted
the appealing drooping of the boy towards Judith, Sylvia was swept
with a great wave of love and admiration--and courage.
She turned to face the difficult days and nights before her and forced
herself to speak cheerfully to her father, who sat in a chair on the
porch, watching the departing travelers and not seeing them. "How
splendid Judith is!" she cried, and went on with a break in the voice
she tried to control: "She will take Mother's place for us all!"
Her father frowned slightly, as though she had interrupted him in some
effort where concentration was necessary, but otherwise gave no sign
that he heard her.
Sylvia watched him anxiously through the window. Presently she saw
him relax from his position of strained attention with a great sigh,
almost a groan, and lean back in his chair, covering his eyes with
his hands. When he took them down, his face had the aged, ravaged
expression of exhaustion which had so startled her on her arrival. Now
she felt none of her frightened revulsion, but only an aching pity
which sent her out to him in a rush, her arms outstretched, crying to
him brokenly that he still had his children who loved him more than
anything in the world.
For the first time in her life, her father repelled her, shrinking
away from her with a brusque, involuntary recoil that shocked her,
thrusting her arms roughly to one side, and rising up hastily to
retreat into the house. He said in a bitter, recriminating tone, "You
don't know what you are talking about," and left her standing there,
the tears frozen in her eyes. He went heavily upstairs to his study on
the top floor and locked the door. Sylvia heard the key turn. It shut
her into an intolerable solitude. She had not thought before that
anything could seem worse than the desolation of her mother's absence.
She felt a deathlike sinking of her heart. She was afraid of her
father, who no longer seemed her father, created to protect and
cherish her, but some maniac stranger. She felt an impulse like that
of a terrified child to run away, far away to some one who should
stand before her and bear the brunt. She started up from her chair
with panic haste, but the familiar room, saturated with recollections
of her mother's gallant spirit, stood about her like a wall, shutting
her in to the battle with her heart. Who was there to summon whom she
could endure as a spectator of her father's condition? Her mother's
empty chair stood opposite her, against the wall. She looked at it
fixedly; and drawing a long breath sat down quietly.
This act of courage brought a reward in the shape of a relaxation
of the clutch on her throat and about her heart. Her mother's wise
materialism came to her mind now and she made a heartsick resolve that
she would lead as physically normal a life as possible, working out of
doors, forcing herself to eat, and that, above all things, she would
henceforth deny herself the weakening luxury of tears. And yet but an
hour later, as she bent over her mother's flower-beds blazing in the
sun, she found the tears again streaming from her eyes.
She tried to wipe them away, but they continued to rain down on her
cheeks. Her tongue knew their saltness. She was profoundly alarmed and
cowed by this irresistible weakness, and stood helplessly at bay among
the languid roses. The sensation of her own utter weakness, prostrate
before her dire need for strength, was as bitter as the taste of her
tears.
She stood there, among the sun-warmed flowers, looking like a symbolic
figure of youth triumphant ... and she felt herself to be in a black
and windowless prison, where the very earth under her feet was
treacherous, where everything betrayed her.
Then, out of her need, her very great need, out of the wide and empty
spaces of her inculcated unbelief, something rose up and overwhelmed
her. The force stronger than herself which she had longed to feel,
blew upon her like a wind out of eternity.
She found herself on her knees, her face hidden in her hands, sending
out a passionate cry which transcended words. The child of the
twentieth century, who had been taught not to pray, was praying.
She did not know how long she knelt there before the world emerged
from the white glory which had whirled down upon it, and hidden it
from her. But when she came to herself, her eyes were dry, and the
weakening impulse to tears had gone. She stretched out her hands
before her, and they did not tremble. The force stronger than herself
was now in her own heart. From her mother's garden there rose a
strong, fragrant exhalation, as sweet as honey.
* * * * *
For more than an hour Sylvia worked steadily among the flowers,
consciously wrought upon by the healing emanations from the crushed,
spicy leaves, the warm earth, and the hot, pure breath of the summer
wind on her face.
Once she had a passing fancy that her mother stood near her ...
smiling.
CHAPTER XLIII
"_Call now; is there any that will answer thee?_"--JOB.
When she went back to the silent, echoing house, she felt calmer than
at any time since she had read the telegram in Naples. She did not
stop to wash her earth-stained hands, but went directly up the stairs
to the locked door at the top. She did not knock this time. She stood
outside and said authoritatively in a clear, strong voice, the sound
of which surprised her, "Father dear, please open the door and let me
in."
There was a pause, and then a shuffle of feet. The door opened and
Professor Marshall appeared, his face very white under the thick
stubble of his gray, unshaven beard, his shoulders bowed, his head
hanging. Sylvia went to his side, took his hand firmly in hers, and
said quietly: "Father, you must eat something. You haven't taken a bit
of food in two days. And then you must lie down and rest," She poured
all of her new strength into these quietly issued commands, and
permitted herself no moment's doubt of his obedience to them. He
lifted his head, looked at her, and allowed her to lead him down the
stairs and again into the dining-room. Here he sat, quite spent,
staring before him until Sylvia returned from the kitchen with a plate
of cold meat and some bread. She sat down beside him, putting out
again consciously all her strength, and set the knife and fork in his
nerveless hands. In the gentle monologue with which she accompanied
his meal she did not mention her mother, or anything but slight,
casual matters about the house and garden. She found herself speaking
in a hushed tone, as though not to awake a sleeping person. Although
she sat quite quietly, her hands loosely folded on the table, her
heart was thrilling and burning to a high resolve. "Now it is my turn
to help my father."
After he had eaten a few mouthfuls and laid down the knife and fork,
she did not insist further, but rose to lead him to the couch in the
living-room. She dared not risk his own room, the bed on which her
mother had died.
"Now you must lie down and rest, Father," she said, loosening his
clothes and unlacing his shoes as though he had been a sick child.
He let her do what she would, and as she pushed him gently back, he
yielded and lay down at full length. Sylvia sat down beside him,
feeling her strength ebbing. Her father lay on his back, his eyes wide
open. On the ceiling above him a circular flicker of light danced and
shimmered, reflected from a glass of water on the table. His eyes
fastened upon this, at first unwinkingly, with a fixed intensity,
and later with dropped lids and half-upturned eyeballs. He was quite
quiet, and finally seemed asleep, although the line of white between
his eyelids made Sylvia shudder.
With the disappearance of the instant need for self-control and
firmness, she felt an immense fatigue. It had cost her dearly, this
victory, slight as it was. She drooped in her chair, exhausted and
undone. She looked down at the ash-gray, haggard face on the pillow,
trying to find in those ravaged features her splendidly life-loving
father. It was so quiet that she could hear the big clock in the
dining-room ticking loudly, and half-consciously she began to
count the swings of the pendulum: One--two--three--four--five--six--
seven--eight--nine--ten--eleven--twelve--thirteen--fourteen--
She awoke to darkness and the sound of her mother's name loudly
screamed. She started up, not remembering where she was, astonished to
find herself sitting in a chair. As she stood bewildered in the
dark, the clock in the dining-room struck two. At once from a little
distance, outside the window apparently, she heard the same wild
cry ringing in her ears--"_Bar-ba-ra!_" All the blood in her body
congealed and the hair on her head seemed to stir itself, in the
instant before she recognized her father's voice.
The great impulse of devotion which had entered her heart in the
garden still governed her. Now she was not afraid. She did not think
of running away. She only knew that she must find her father quickly
and take care of him. Outside on the porch, the glimmering light from
the stars showed her his figure, standing by one of the pillars,
leaning forward, one hand to his ear. As she came out of the door, he
dropped his hand, threw back his head, and again sent out an agonizing
cry--"_Bar-ba-ra!_ Where are you?" It was not the broken wail of
despair; it was the strong, searching cry of a lost child who thinks
trustingly that if he but screams loudly enough his mother must hear
him and come--and yet who is horribly frightened because she does not
answer. But this was a man in his full strength who called! It seemed
the sound must reach beyond the stars. Sylvia felt her very bones
ringing with it. She went along the porch to her father, and laid
her hand on his arm. Through his sleeve she could feel how tense and
knotted were the muscles. "Oh, Father, _don't!_" she said in a low
tone. He shook her off roughly, but did not turn his head or look at
her. Sylvia hesitated, not daring to leave him and not daring to try
to draw him away; and again was shaken by that terrible cry.
The intensity of his listening attitude seemed to hush into
breathlessness the very night about him, as it did Sylvia. There was
not a sound from the trees. They stood motionless, as though carved in
wood; not a bird fluttered a wing; not a night-insect shrilled; the
brook, dried by the summer heat to a thread, crept by noiselessly. As
once more the frantic cry resounded, it seemed to pierce this opaque
silence like a palpable missile, and to wing its way without hindrance
up to the stars. Not the faintest murmur came in answer. The silence
shut down again, stifling. Sylvia and her father stood as though
in the vacuum of a great bell-glass which shut them away from the
rustling, breathing, living world. Sylvia said again, imploringly,
"Oh, _Father_!" He looked at her angrily, sprang from the porch, and
walked rapidly towards the road, stumbling and tripping over the laces
of his shoes, which Sylvia had loosened when she had persuaded him to
lie down. Sylvia ran after him, her long bounds bringing her up to
his side in a moment. The motion sent the blood racing through her
stiffened limbs again. She drew a long breath of liberation. As she
stepped along beside her father, peering in the starlight at his
dreadful face, half expecting him to turn and strike her at any
moment, she felt an immense relief. The noise of their feet on the
path was like a sane voice of reality. Anything was more endurable
than to stand silent and motionless and hear that screaming call lose
itself in the grimly unanswering distance.
They were on the main road now, walking so swiftly that, in the hot
summer night, Sylvia felt her forehead beaded and her light dress
cling to her moist body. She took her father's hand. It was parched
like a sick man's, the skin like a dry husk. After this, they walked
hand-in-hand. Professor Marshall continued to walk rapidly, scuffling
in his loose, unlaced shoes. They passed barns and farmhouses, the
latter sleeping, black in the starlight, with darkened windows. In
one, a poor little shack of two rooms, there was a lighted pane, and
as they passed, Sylvia heard the sick wail of a little child. The
sound pierced her heart. She longed to go in and put her arms about
the mother. Now she understood. She tightened her hold on her father's
hand and lifted it to her lips.
He suffered this with no appearance of his former anger, and soon
after Sylvia was aware that his gait was slackening. She looked at him
searchingly, and saw that he had swung from unnatural tension to spent
exhaustion. His head was hanging and as he walked he wavered. She put
her hand under his elbow and turned him about on the road. "Now we
will go home," she said, drawing his arm through hers. He made no
resistance, not seeming to know what she had done, and shuffled along
wearily, leaning all his weight on her arm. She braced herself against
this drag, and led him slowly back, wiping her face from time to time
with her sleeve. There were moments when she thought she must let him
sink on the road, but she fought through these, and as the sky was
turning faintly gray over their heads, and the implacably silent stars
were disappearing in this pale light, the two stumbled up the walk to
the porch.
Professor Marshall let himself be lowered into the steamer chair.
Sylvia stood by him until she was sure he would not stir, and then
hurried into the kitchen. In a few moments she brought him a cup of
hot coffee and a piece of bread. He drank the one and ate the other
without protest She set the tray down and put a pillow under her
father's head, raising the foot-rest. He did not resist her. His head
fell back on the pillow, but his eyes did not close. They were fixed
on a distant point in the sky.
Sylvia tiptoed away into the house and sank down shivering into a
chair. A great fit of trembling and nausea came over her. She rose,
walked into the kitchen, her footsteps sounding in her ears like her
mother's. There was some coffee left, which she drank resolutely, and
she cooked an egg and forced it down, her mother's precepts loud in
her ears. Whatever else happened, she must have her body in condition
to be of use.
After this she went out to the porch again and lay down in the hammock
near her father. The dawn had brightened into gold, and the sun was
showing on the distant, level, green horizon-line.
* * * * *
It was almost the first moment of physical relaxation she had known,
and to her immense, her awed astonishment it was instantly filled with
a pure, clear brilliance, the knowledge that Austin Page lived and
loved her. It was the first, it was the only time she thought of
anything but her father, and this was not a thought, it was a vision.
In the chaos about her, a great sunlit rock had emerged. She laid hold
on it and knew that she would not sink.
* * * * *
But now, _now_ she must think of nothing but her father! There was no
one else who could help her father. Could she? Could any one?
She herself, since her prayer among the roses, cherished in her
darkened heart a hope of dawn. But how could she tell her father of
that? Even if she had been able to force him to listen to her, she had
nothing that words could say, nothing but the recollection of that
burning hour in the garden to set against the teachings of a lifetime.
That had changed life for her ... but what could it mean to her
father? How could she tell him of what was only a wordless radiance?
Her father had taught her that death meant the return of the spirit to
the great, impersonal river of life. If the spirit had been superb and
splendid, like her mother's, the river of life was the brighter for
it, but that was all. Her mother had lived, and now lived no more.
That was what they had tried to teach her to believe. That was what
her father had taught her--without, it now appeared, believing it
himself.
And yet she divined that it was not that he would not, but that he
could not now believe it. He was like a man set in a vacuum fighting
for the air without which life is impossible. And she knew no way
to break the imprisoning wall and let in air for him. _Was_ there,
indeed, any air outside? There must be, or the race could not live
from one generation to the next. Every one whose love had encountered
death must have found an air to breathe or have died.
Constantly through all these thoughts, that day and for many days and
months to come, there rang the sound of her mother's name, screamed
aloud. She heard it as though she were again standing by her father
under the stars. And there had been no answer.
She felt the tears stinging at her eyelids and sat up, terrified at
the idea that her weakness was about to overtake her. She would go
again out to the garden where she had found strength before. The
morning sun was now hot and glaring in the eastern sky.
CHAPTER XLIV
"_A bruised reed will He not break, and a dimly burning wick will He
not quench_,"--ISAIAH.
As she stepped down the path, she saw a battered black straw hat on
the other side of the hedge. Cousin Parnelia's worn old face and
dim eyes looked at her through the gate. Under her arm she held
planchette. Sylvia stepped through the gate and drew it inhospitably
shut back of her. "What is it, Cousin Parnelia?" she said
challengingly, determined to protect her father.
The older woman's face was all aglow. "Oh, my dear; I've had such a
wonderful message from your dear mother. Last night--"
Sylvia recoiled from the mad old creature. She could not bear to have
her sane, calm, strong mother's name on those lips. Cousin Parnelia
went on, full of confidence: "I was sound asleep last night when I
was awakened by the clock's striking two. It sounded so loud that I
thought somebody had called to me. I sat up in bed and said, 'What is
it?' and then I felt a great longing to have planchette write. I got
out of bed in my nightgown and sat down in the dark at the table.
Planchette wrote so fast that I could hardly keep up with it. And when
it stopped, I lighted a match and see ... here ... in your mother's
very handwriting"--fervently she held the bit of paper up for Sylvia
to see. The girl cast a hostile look at the paper and saw that the
writing on it was the usual scrawl produced by Cousin Parnelia, hardly
legible, and resembling anything rather than her mother's handwriting.
"Read it--read it--it is too beautiful!" quivered the other, "and then
let me show it to your father. It was meant for him--"
Sylvia shook like a roughly plucked fiddle-string. She seized the
wrinkled old hand fiercely. "Cousin Parnelia, I forbid you going
anywhere near my father! You know as well as I do how intensely he
has always detested spiritualism. To see you might be the thing that
would--"
The old woman broke in, protesting, her hat falling to one side, her
brown false front sliding with it and showing the thin, gray hairs
beneath. "But, Sylvia, this is the very thing that would save
him--such a beautiful, beautiful message from your mother,--_see_! In
her own handwriting!"
Sylvia snatched the sheet of yellow paper. "_That's_ not my mother's
handwriting! Do you think I am as crazy as _you_ are!" She tore the
paper into shreds and scattered them from her, feeling a relief in the
violence of her action. The next moment she remembered how patient her
mother had always been with her daft kinswoman and seeing tears in the
blurred old eyes, went to put placating arms about the other's neck.
"Never mind, Cousin Parnelia," she said with a vague kindness, "I know
you mean to do what's right--only we don't believe as you do, and
Father _must_ not be excited!" She turned sick as she spoke and shrank
away from the hedge, carrying her small old cousin with her. Above the
hedge appeared her father's gray face and burning eyes.
He was not looking at her, but at Cousin Parnelia, who now sprang
forward, crying that she had had a beautiful, beautiful message from
Cousin Barbara. "_It_ came last night at two o'clock ... just after
the clock struck two--"
Professor Marshall looked quickly at his daughter, and she saw that he
too had heard the clock striking in the dreadful night, and that he
noted the coincidence.
"Just after the clock struck two she wrote the loveliest message for
you with planchette. Sylvia tore it up. But I'm sure that if we try
with faith, she will repeat it ..."
Professor Marshall's eyes were fixed on his wife's old cousin. "Come
in," he said in a hoarse voice. They were almost the first words
Sylvia had heard him say.
Cousin Parnelia hastened up the path to the house. Sylvia followed
with her father, at the last extremity of agitation and perplexity.
When Cousin Parnelia reached the dining-room table, she sat down by
it, pushed the cloth to one side, and produced a fresh sheet of yellow
paper from her shabby bag. "Put yourselves in a receptive frame of
mind," she said in a glib, professional manner. Sylvia stiffened and
tried to draw her father away, but he continued to stand by the table,
staring at the blank sheet of paper with a strange, wild expression on
his white face. He did not take his eyes from the paper. In a moment,
he sat down suddenly, as though his knees had failed him.
There was a long silence, in which Sylvia could hear the roaring of
the blood in her arteries. Cousin Parnelia put one deeply veined,
shrunken old hand on planchette and the other over her eyes and
waited, her wrinkled, commonplace old face assuming a solemn
expression of importance. The clock ticked loudly.
Planchette began to write--at first in meaningless flourishes, then
with occasional words, and finally Sylvia saw streaming away from the
pencil the usual loose, scrawling handwriting. Several lines were
written and then the pencil stopped abruptly. Sylvia standing near her
father heard his breathing grow loud and saw in a panic that the veins
on his temples were swollen.
Cousin Parnelia took her hand off planchette, put on her spectacles,
read over what had been written, and gave it to Professor Marshall.
Sylvia was in such a state of bewilderment that nothing her father
could have done would have surprised her. She half expected to see him
dash the paper in the old woman's face, half thought that any moment
he would fall, choking with apoplexy.
What he did was to take the paper and try to hold it steadily enough
to read. But his hand shook terribly.
"I will read it to you," said Cousin Parnelia, and she read aloud
in her monotonous, illiterate voice: "'I am well and happy, dearest
Elliott, and never far from you. When you call to me, I hear you.
All is not yet clear, but I wish I could tell you more of the whole
meaning. I am near you this moment. I wish that--' The message stopped
there," explained Cousin Parnelia, laying down the paper.
Professor Marshall leaned over it, straining his eyes to the rude
scrawls, passing his hand over his forehead as though to brush away a
web. He broke out in a loud, high voice. "That is her handwriting....
Good God, her very handwriting--the way she writes Elliott--it is from
_her!_" He snatched the paper up and took it to the window, stumbling
over the chairs blindly as he went. As he held it up to the light,
poring over it again, he began to weep, crying out his wife's name
softly, the tears streaming down his unshaven cheeks. He came back to
the table, and sank down before it, still sobbing, still murmuring
incessantly, "Oh, Barbara--Barbara!" and laid his head on his
outstretched arms.
"Let him cry!" whispered Cousin Parnelia sentimentally to Sylvia,
drawing her away into the hall. A few moments later when they looked
in, he had fallen asleep, his head turned to one side so that Sylvia
saw his face, tear-stained and exhausted, but utterly relaxed and at
peace, like that of a little child in sleep. Crushed in one hand was
the yellow sheet of paper covered with coarse, wavering marks.
CHAPTER XLV
"_That our soul may swim
We sink our heart down, bubbling, under wave_"
The two sisters, their pale faces grave in the shadow of their wide
hats, were on their knees with trowels in a border of their mother's
garden. Judith had been giving a report of Lawrence's condition, and
Sylvia was just finishing an account of what had happened at home,
when the gate in the osage-orange hedge clicked, and a blue-uniformed
boy came whistling up the path. He made an inquiry as to names, and
handed Sylvia an envelope. She opened it, read silently, "Am starting
for America and you at once. Felix." She stood looking at the paper
for a moment, her face quite unmoved from its quiet sadness. The boy
asked, "Any answer?"
"No," she said decisively, shaking her head. "No answer."
As he lingered, lighting a cigarette, she put a question in her turn,
"Anything to pay?"
"No," said the boy, putting the cigarette-box back in his pocket,
"Nothing to pay." He produced a worn and greasy book, "Sign on this
line," he said, and after she had signed, he went away down the path,
whistling. The transaction was complete.
Sylvia looked after the retreating figure and then turned to Judith
as though there had been no interruption. "... and you can see for
yourself how little use I am to him now. Since he got Cousin Parnelia
in the house, there's nothing anybody else could do for him. Even you
couldn't, if you could leave Lawrence. Not for a while, anyhow. I
suppose he'll come slowly out of this to be himself again ... but I'm
not sure that he will. And for now, I actually believe that he'd be
easier in his mind if we were both away. I never breathe a word of
criticism about planchette, of course. But he knows. There's that much
left of his old self. He knows how I must feel. He's really ever so
much better too, you know. He's taken up his classes in the Summer
School again. He said he had 'a message' from Mother that he was to go
back to his work bravely; and the very next day he went over to the
campus, and taught all his classes as though nothing had happened.
Isn't it awfully, terribly touching to see how even such a poor,
incoherent make-believe of a 'message' from Mother has more power to
calm him than anything we could do with our whole hearts? But how
_can_ he! I can't understand it! I can't bear it, to come in on him
and Cousin Parnelia, in their evenings, and see them bent over that
grotesque planchette and have him look up at me so defiantly, as
though he were just setting his teeth and saying he wouldn't care what
I thought of him. He doesn't really care either. He doesn't think of
anything but of having evening come when he can get another 'message'
from Mother ... from Mother! Mother!"
"Well, perhaps it would be as well for us not to be here for a while,"
murmured Judith. There were deep dark rings under her eyes, as though
she had slept badly for a long time. "Perhaps it may be better later
on. I can take Lawrence back with me when I go to the hospital. I want
to keep him near me of course, dear little Lawrence. My little boy!
He'll be my life now. He'll be what I have to live for."
Something in the quality of her quiet voice sent a chill to Sylvia's
heart. "Why, Judy dear, after you are married of course you and Arnold
can keep Lawrence with you. That'll be the best for him, a real home,
with you. Oh, Judy dear," she laid down her trowel, fighting hard
against a curious sickness which rose within her. She tried to speak
lightly. "Oh, Judy dear, when _are_ you going to be married? Or don't
you want to speak about it now, for a while? You never write long
letters, I know--but your late ones haven't had _any_ news in them!
You positively haven't so much as mentioned Arnold's name lately."
As she spoke, she knew that she was voicing an uneasiness which had
been an unacknowledged occupant of her mind for a long time. But she
looked confidently to see one of Judith's concise, comprehensive
statements make her dim apprehensions seem fantastic and far-fetched,
as Judith always made any flight of the imagination appear. But
nothing which Sylvia's imagination might have been able to conceive
would have struck her such a blow as the fact which Judith now
produced, in a dry, curt phrase: "I'm not going to be married."
Sylvia did not believe her ears. She looked up wildly as Judith rose
from the ground, and advanced upon her sister with a stern, white
face. Before she had finished speaking, she had said more than Sylvia
had ever heard her say about a matter personal to her; but even so,
her iron words were few. "Sylvia, I want to tell you about it, of
course. I've got to. But I won't say a word, unless you can keep
quiet, and not make a fuss. I couldn't stand that. I've got all I can
stand as it is."
She stood by an apple-tree and now broke from it a small, leafy
branch, which she held as she spoke. There was something shocking in
the contrast between the steady rigor of her voice and the fury of her
fingers as they tore and stripped and shredded the leaves. "Arnold is
an incurable alcoholic," she said; "Dr. Rivedal has pronounced him
hopeless. Dr. Charton and Dr. Pansard (they're the best specialists in
that line) have had him under observation and they say the same thing.
He's had three dreadful attacks lately. We ... none of their treatment
does any good. It's been going on too long--from the time he was
first sent away to school, at fourteen, alone! There was an inherited
tendency, anyhow. Nobody took it seriously, that and--and the other
things boys with too much money do. Apparently everybody thought it
was just the way boys are--if anybody thought anything about it,
except that it was a bother. He never had anybody, you know--_never,
never_ anybody who ..." her voice rose, threatened to break. She
stopped, swallowed hard, and began again: "The trouble is he has
no constitution left--nothing for a doctor to work with. It's not
Arnold's fault. If he had come out to us, that time in Chicago when he
wanted to--we--he could--with Mother to--" Her steady voice gave way
abruptly. She cast the ravaged, leafless branch violently to the
ground and stood looking down at it. There was not a fleck of color in
her beautiful, stony face.
Sylvia concentrated all her will-power on an effort to speak as Judith
would have her, quietly, without heroics; but when she broke her
silence she found that she had no control of her voice. She tried to
say, "But, Judith dear, if Arnold is like that--doesn't he need you
more than ever? You are a nurse. How can you abandon him now!" But
she could produce only a few, broken, inarticulate words in a choking
voice before she was obliged to stop short, lest she burst out in the
flood of horror which Judith had forbidden.
Broken and inarticulate as they were, Judith knew what was the meaning
of those words. The corners of her mouth twitched uncontrollably. She
bit her marble lower lip repeatedly before she could bring out the few
short phrases which fell like clods on a coffin. "If I--if we--Arnold
and I are in love with each other." She stopped, drew a painful
breath, and said again: "Arnold and I are in love with each other. Do
you know what that means? He is the only man I could not take care
of--Arnold! If I should try, we would soon be married, or lovers. If
we were married or lovers, we would soon have--" She had overestimated
her strength. Even she was not strong enough to go on.
She sat down on the ground, put her long arms around her knees, and
buried her face in them. She was not weeping. She sat as still as
though carved in stone.
Sylvia herself was beyond tears. She sat looking down at the moist
earth on the trowel she held, drying visibly in the hot sun, turning
to dust, and falling away in a crumbling, impalpable powder. It was
like seeing a picture of her heart. She thought of Arnold with an
indignant, passionate pity--how could Judith--? But she was so close
to Judith's suffering that she felt the dreadful rigidity of her body.
The flat, dead tones of the man in the Pantheon were in her ears. It
seemed to her that Life was an adventure perilous and awful beyond
imagination. There was no force to cope with it, save absolute
integrity. Everything else was a vain and foolish delusion, a
two-edged sword which wounded the wielding hand.
She did not move closer to Judith, she did not put out her hand.
Judith would not like that. She sat quite motionless, looking into
black abysses of pain, of responsibilities not met, feeling press upon
her the terrifying closeness of all human beings to all other
human beings--there in the sun of June a cold sweat stood on her
forehead....
But then she drew a long breath. Why, there was Austin! The anguished
contraction of her heart relaxed. The warm blood flowed again through
her veins. There was Austin!
She was rewarded for her effort to bring herself to Judith's ways,
when presently her sister moved and reached out blindly for her hand.
At this she opened her arms and took Judith in. No word was spoken.
Their mother was there with them.
Sylvia looked out over the proud, dark head, now heavy on her bosom,
and felt herself years older. She did not try to speak. She had
nothing to say. There was nothing she could do, except to hold Judith
and love her.
There was nothing, _nothing_ left but love.
CHAPTER XLVI
A LONG TALK WITH ARNOLD
The tall, lean young man, sitting his galloping horse very slackly,
riding fast with a recklessly loose rein, and staring with bloodshot
eyes down at the dust of the road, gave an exclamation, brought the
mare upon her haunches, and sprang down from the saddle. A woman,
young, tall, grave, set like a pearl in her black mourning dress,
stood up from the roadside brook and advanced to meet him. They looked
at each other as people do who meet after death has passed by. They
stammered vague words, their eyes brimming.
"I--she was always so good to me," said Arnold, his voice breaking
and quavering as he wrung Sylvia's hand again and again. "I never
knew--saw much of her, I know--but when I was a little boy, I used--I
used to dream about her at night." His thin, sallow face flushed with
his earnestness. "I don't believe--honestly, Sylvia, I don't believe
her own children loved her any more than I did. I've thought so many
times how different everything would have been if I'd--I don't suppose
you remember, but years ago when you and she were in Chicago, I ran
away from school to go out there, and ask if--"
Sylvia remembered, had thought of nothing else from the moment she had
seen far down the road the horseman vainly fleeing the black beast
on his crupper. She shook her head now, her hand at her throat, and
motioned him to silence. "Don't! Don't!" she said urgently. "Yes, I
remember. I remember."
There was a moment's silence, filled by the murmur of the little brook
at their feet. The mare, which had been drinking deeply, now lifted
her head, the water running from the corners of her mouth. She gave a
deep breath of satisfaction, and began cropping the dense green grass
which grew between the water and the road. Her master tossed the reins
over the pommel and let her go. He began speaking again on a different
note. "But, Sylvia, what in the world--here, can't we go up under
those trees a few minutes and have a talk? I can keep my eye on the
mare." As they took the few steps he asked again, "How ever does it
happen that you're here at Lydford Junction of all awful holes?"
Sylvia took an abrupt resolution, sat down on the pine-needles, and
said, very directly, "I am on my way to Austin Farm to see if Austin
Page still wants to marry me." Her manner had the austere simplicity
of one who has been moving in great and grave emotions.
Arnold spoke with an involuntary quickness: "But you've heard, haven't
you, about his giving up all his Colorado ..."
Sylvia flushed a deep crimson and paid with a moment of bitter, shamed
resentment for the other bygone moments of calculation. "Yes, yes, of
course." She spoke with a stern impatience. "Did you suppose it was
for his fortune that--" She paused and said humbly, "Of course, it's
natural that you should think that of me."
Arnold attempted no self-exculpation. He sat down by her, his
riding-crop across his knees. "Could you--do you feel like telling me
about it?" he asked.
She nodded. It came to her like an inspiration that only if she opened
her heart utterly to Arnold, could he open his sore heart to her.
"There's not much to tell. I don't know where to begin. Perhaps
there's too much to tell, after all, I didn't know what any of it
meant till now. It's the strangest thing, Arnold, how little people
know what is growing strong in their lives! I supposed all the time
I only liked him because he was so rich. I thought it must be so.
I thought that was the kind of girl I was. And then, besides,
I'd--perhaps you didn't know how much I'd liked Felix Morrison."
Arnold nodded. "I sort of guessed so. You were awfully game, then,
Sylvia. You're game now--it's awfully white to fall in love with a man
because he's rich and then stick to him when he's--"
Sylvia waved her hand impatiently. "Oh, you don't understand. It's not
because I think _I ought_ to--Heavens, no! Let me try to tell you.
Listen! When the news came, about this Colorado business--I was about
crazy for a while. I just went to pieces. I knew I ought to answer
his letter, but I couldn't. I see now, looking back, that I had just
crumpled up under the weight of my weakness. I didn't know it then.
I kept saying to myself that I was only putting off deciding till I
could think more about it, but I know now that I had decided to give
him up, never to see him again--Felix was there, you know--I'd decided
to give Austin up because he wasn't rich any more. Did you know I was
that base sort of a woman? Do you suppose he will ever be willing to
take me back?--now after this long time? It's a month since I got his
letter."
Arnold bent his riding-crop between his thin, nervous hands. "Are you
sure now, Sylvia, are you sure now, dead sure?" he asked. "It would be
pretty hard on Austin if you--afterwards--he's such a square, straight
sort of a man, you ought to be awfully careful not to--"
Sylvia said quickly, her quiet voice vibrant, her face luminous:
"Oh, Arnold, I could never tell you how sure I am. There just isn't
anything else. Over there in Paris, I tried so hard to think about
it--and I couldn't get anywhere at all. The more I tried, the baser I
grew; the more I loved the things I'd have to give up, the more I hung
on to them. Thinking didn't do a bit of good, though I almost killed
myself thinking--thinking--All I'd done was to think out an ingenious,
low, mean compromise to justify myself in giving him up. And then,
after Judith's cablegram came, I started home--Arnold, what a journey
that was!--and I found--I found Mother was gone, just gone away
forever--and I found Father out of his head with sorrow--and Judith
told me about--about her trouble. It was like going through a long
black corridor. It seemed as though I'd never come out on the other
side. But when I did--A door that I couldn't ever, ever break
down--somehow it's been just quietly opened, and I've gone through
it into the only place where it's worth living. It's the last thing
Mother did for me--what nobody but Mother could have done. I don't
want to go back. I couldn't if I wanted to. Those things don't matter
to me now. I don't think they're wrong, the ease, the luxury, if you
can have them without losing something finer. And I suppose some
people's lives are arranged so they don't lose the finer. But mine
wouldn't be. I see that now. And I don't care at all--it all seems so
unimportant to me, what I was caring about, before. Nothing matters
now but Austin. He is the only thing that has lived on for me. I'm
down on my knees with thankfulness that he just exists, even if he
can't forgive me--even if he doesn't care for me any more--even if I
shouldn't ever see him again--even if he should die--he would be
like Mother, he couldn't die, for me. He's there. I know what he is.
Somehow everything's all right--because there's Austin."
She broke off, smiling palely and quietly at the man beside her. He
raised his eyes to hers for an instant and then dropped them. Sylvia
went on. "I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs of this
Colorado business. It may be that it was quixotic on Austin's part.
Maybe it _has_ upset business conditions out there a lot. It's too
complicated to be _sure_ about how anything, I suppose, is likely to
affect an industrial society. But I'm sure about how it has affected
the people who live in the world--it's a great golden deed that has
enriched everybody--not just Austin's coal-miners, but everybody who
had heard of it. The sky is higher because of it. Everybody has a new
conception of the good that's possible. And then for me, it means that
a man who sees an obligation nobody else sees and meets it--why, with
such a man to help, anybody, even a weak fumbling person like me, can
be sure of at least loyally _trying_ to meet the debts life brings.
It's awfully hard to know what they are, and to meet them--and it's
too horrible if you don't."
She stopped, aware that the life of the man beside her was one of the
unpaid debts so luridly present to her mind.
"Sylvia," said Arnold, hesitating, "Sylvia, all this sounds so--look
here, are you sure you're in _love_ with Austin?"
She looked at him, her eyes steady as stars. "Aren't there as many
ways of being in love, as there are people?" she asked. "I don't
know--I don't know if it's what everybody would call being in
love--but--" She met his eyes, and unashamed, regally, opened her
heart to him with a look. "I can't live without Austin," she said
quickly, in a low tone.
He looked at her long, and turned away. "Oh yes, you're in love with
him, all right!" he murmured finally, "and I don't believe that the
Colorado business or any of the rest of what you're saying has much to
do with anything. Austin's a live man and you're in love with him;
and that's all there is to it. You're lucky!" He took out his
handkerchief, and wiped his forehead and the back of his neck. Sylvia,
looking at him more closely, was shocked to see how thin and haggard
was his face. He asked now, "Did you ever think that maybe what Austin
was thinking about when he chucked the money was what you'd say, how
you'd take it? I should imagine," he added with a faint smile,' "that
he is hard to please if he's not pretty well satisfied."
Sylvia was startled. "No. Why no," she said, "I thought I'd looked at
every single side of it, but I never dreamed of that."
"Oh, I don't mean he did it _for_ that! Lord, no! I suppose it's been
in his mind for years. But afterwards, don't you suppose he thought
... he'd been run after for his money such a terrible lot, you know
... don't you suppose he thought he'd be sure of you one way or the
other, about a million times surer than he could have been any other
way; if you stuck by him, don't you see, with old Felix there with all
his fascinations, plus Molly's money." He turned on her with a sudden
confused wonder in his face. "God! What a time he took to do it! I
hadn't realized all his nerve till this minute. He must have known
what it meant, to leave you there with Felix ... to risk losing you as
well as--Any other man would have tried to marry you first and then--!
Well, what a dead-game sport he was! And all for a lot of dirty
Polacks who'd never laid eyes on him!"
He took his riding-cap from his head and tossed it on the dried
pine-needles. Sylvia noticed that his dry, thin hair was already
receding from his parchment-like forehead. There were innumerable fine
lines about his eyes. One eyelid twitched spasmodically at intervals.
He looked ten years older than his age. He looked like a man who would
fall like a rotten tree at the first breath of sickness.
He now faced around to her with a return to everyday matters. "See
here, Sylvia, I've just got it through my head. Are you waiting here
for that five-fifteen train to West Lydford and then are you planning
to walk out to the Austin Farm? Great Scott! don't do that, in this
heat. I'll just run back to the village and get a car and take you
there in half an hour." He rose to his feet, but Sylvia sprang up
quickly, catching at his arm in a panic. "No! no! Arnold, you don't
understand. I haven't written Austin a word--he doesn't know I'm
coming. At first in Paris I couldn't--I was so despicable--and then
afterwards I couldn't either,--though it was all right then. There
aren't any words. It's all too big, too deep to talk about. I didn't
want to, either. I wanted to _see_ him--to see if he still, if he
wants me now. He could _write_ anything. He'd feel he'd have to. How
would I ever know but that it was only because he thought he ought to?
I thought I would just go to him all by myself, without his knowing
I was coming. _I_ can tell--the first moment he looks at me I can
tell--for all my life, I'll be sure, one way or the other. That first
look, what's in him will show! He can't hide anything then, not even
to be kind. I'll know! I'll know!"
Arnold sat down again with no comment. Evidently he understood. He
leaned his head back against the rough bark of the pine, and closed
his eyes. There was a painful look of excessive fatigue about his
whole person. He glanced up and caught Sylvia's compassionate gaze on
him. "I haven't been sleeping very well lately," he said very dryly.
"It breaks a fellow up to lose sleep." Sylvia nodded. Evidently he was
not minded to speak of his own troubles. He had not mentioned Judith.
She looked up thoughtfully at the well-remembered high line of the
mountain against the sky. Her mother's girlhood eyes had looked at
that high line. She fell into a brooding meditation, and presently,
obeying one of her sure instincts, she sat down by Arnold, and began
to talk to him about what she divined for the moment would most touch
and move him; she began to talk about her mother. He was silent, his
worn, sallow face impassive, but she knew he was listening.
She told one incident after another of her mother's life, incidents
which, she told him, she had not noted at the time, incidents which
were now windows in her own life, letting in the sunlight her mother
loved so well. "All the time I was growing up, I was blind, I didn't
see anything. I don't feel remorseful, I suppose that is the way
children have to be. But I didn't see her. There were so many minor
differences between us ... tastes, interests. I always said hatefully
to myself that Mother didn't understand me. And it was true too. As
if it matters! What if she didn't! She never talked morality to us,
anyhow. She never talked much at all. She didn't need to. She was
herself. No words would express that. She lived her life. And there
it is now, there it always will be for me, food for me to live on. I
thought she had died. But she has never been so living for me. She's
part of me now, for always. And just because I see the meaning of her
life, why, there's the meaning of mine as clear as morning. How can
poor Father crave those 'messages' from her! Everything is a message
from her. We've lived with her. We have her in our hearts. It's all
brightness when I think of her. And I see by that brightness what's in
my heart, and that's Austin ... Austin!" On the name, her voice rose,
expanded, soared, wonderfully rang in the ensuing silence....
Arnold said slowly, without opening his eyes: "Yes, yes, I see. I see
how it is all right with you and Austin. He's big enough for you, all
of you. And Felix--he's not so bad either--but he has, after all, a
yellow streak. Poor Felix!"
This brought up to Sylvia the recollection of the day, so short a time
ago when she had sat on the ground thus, much as she now sat next to
Arnold, and had felt Judith's body rigid and tense. There was nothing
rigid about Arnold. He was relaxed in an exhausted passivity, a beaten
man. Let what would, befall. He seemed beyond feeling. She knew that
probably never again, so life goes, could they speak together thus,
like disembodied spirits, freed for once from the blinding, entangling
tragic web of self-consciousness. She wondered again if he would find
it in his heart to speak to her of Judith. She remembered something
else she had meant to ask him, if she could ever find words for her
question; and she found that, in that hour of high seriousness,
they came quite without effort. "Arnold, when I was in Paris, I met
Professor Saunders. I ran across him by accident. He told me
some dreadful things. I thought they couldn't all be true. But I
wondered--"
Arnold opened his eyes and turned them on her. She saw again, as she
had so many times, the honesty of them. They were bloodshot, yellowed,
set deep in dark hollows; but it was a good gaze they gave. "Oh, don't
take poor old Saunders too seriously. He went all to pieces in the
end. He had a lot to say about Madrina, I suppose. I shouldn't pay
much attention to it. Madrina's not such a bad lot as he makes her
out. Madrina's all right if you don't want anything out of her. She's
the way she is, that's all. It's not fair to blame her. We're all like
that," he ended with a pregnant, explanatory phrase which fell with an
immense significance on Sylvia's ear. "Madrina's all right when she's
got what she wants."
The girl pondered in silence on this characterization. After a time
Arnold roused himself to say again: "I mean she wouldn't go out of
her way to hurt anybody, for anything. She's not the kind that enjoys
seeing other folks squirm. Only she wants things the way she wants
them. Don't let anything old Saunders said worry you. I suppose he
laid all my worthlessness at Madrina's door too. He'd got into that
way of thinking, sort of dotty on the subject anyhow. He was terribly
hard hit, you know. I don't deny either that Madrina did keep him
strung on hot wire for several years. I don't suppose it occurred
to her that there was any reason why she shouldn't if he were fool
enough. I never could see that he wasn't some to blame too. All he had
to do--all they any of them ever had to do, was to get out and stay
out. Madrina'd never lift a finger to hinder. Even Saunders, I guess,
would have had to admit that Madrina always had plenty of dignity. And
as for me, great Scott! what could you expect a woman like Madrina to
do with a boy like me! She never liked me, for one thing; and then
I always bored her almost more than she could stand. But she never
showed her impatience, never once. She's really awfully good-natured
in her way. She wanted to make me into a salon sort of person,
somebody who'd talk at her teas--converse, don't you know. You see
_me_, don't you! It was hard on her. If she'd had you, now--I always
thought you were the only person in the world she ever really cared
for. She does, you know. All this year you've been with her, she's
seemed so different, more like a real woman. Maybe she's had her
troubles too. Maybe she's been deathly lonely. Don't you go back on
her too hard. Madrina's no vampire. That's just old Saunders' addled
wits. She's one of the nicest people in the world to live with, if you
don't need her for anything. And she really does care a lot for you,
Sylvia. That time out in Chicago, when we were all kids, when I wanted
to go to live with your mother, I remember that Madrina suggested to
her (and Madrina would have done it in a minute, too)--she suggested
that they change off, she take you to bring up and I go out to live
with your mother," He stopped to look at the woman beside him. "I
don't know about you, Sylvia, but I guess it would have made some
difference in my life!"
Sylvia drew back, horrified that he was even in thought, even for a
moment robbing her of her mother. "Oh, what I would have been--I can't
bear to _think_ of what kind of woman I would have been without my
mother!" The idea was terrible to her. She shrank away from her
aunt as never before in her life. The reminiscence brought an idea,
evidently as deeply moving, into Arnold's mind. The words burst from
him, "I might now be married to Judith!" He put his hands over his
eyes and cast himself down among the pine-needles.
Sylvia spoke quickly lest she lose courage. "Arnold! Arnold! What are
you going to do with yourself now? I'm so horribly anxious about you.
I haven't dared speak before--"
He turned over and lay on his back, staring up into the dark green of
the pine. "I'm going to drink myself to death as soon as I can," he
said very quietly. "The doctors say it won't take long."
She looked at his wasted face and gave a shocked, pitying exclamation,
thinking that it would be illness and not drink which was to come to
his rescue soon.
He looked at her askance, with his bloodshot eyes. "Can you give me
any single reason why I shouldn't?" he challenged her.
Sylvia, the modern, had no answer. She murmured weakly, "Why must any
of us try to be decent?"
"That's for the rest of you," he said. "I'm counted out. The sooner
I get myself out of the way, the better for everybody. That's what
_Judith_ thinks."
The bitterness of his last phrase was savage. Sylvia cried out against
it. "Arnold! That's cruel of you! It's killing Judith!"
"She can't care for me," he said, with a deep, burning resentment.
"She can't ever have cared a rap, or she wouldn't be _able_ to--"
Sylvia would not allow him to go on. "You must not say such a thing,
Arnold. You know Judith's only reason is--she feels if she--if she had
children and they were--"
He interrupted her with an ugly hardness. "Oh, I know what her reason
is, all right. It's the latest fad. Any magazine article can tell you
all about it. And I don't take any stock in it, I tell you. It's just
insanity to try to guess at every last obligation you may possibly
have! You've got to live your life, and have some nerve about it! If
Judith and I love each other, what is it to anybody else if we get
married? Maybe we wouldn't have any children. Maybe they'd be all
right--how could they be anything else with Judith for their mother?
And anyhow, leave that to them! Let them take care of themselves!
We've had to do it for ourselves! What the devil did my father do for
me, I'd like to know, that I should die to keep my children unborn? My
mother was a country girl from up here in the mountains. Since I've
been staying here winters, I've met some of her people. Her aunt told
me that my father was as drunk as a lord on his wedding night--What
did he think of _his_ son? Why should I think of mine?"
He was so evidently talking wildly, desperately, that Sylvia made no
attempt to stop him, divining with an aching pity what lay under his
dreadful words. But when he said again, "It's simply that Judith
doesn't care enough about me to stick by me, now I'm down and out. She
can't bear me in her narrow little good world!" Judith's sister could
keep her silence no more.
"Look here, Arnold, I haven't meant to tell you, but I _can't_
have you thinking that. Listen! You know Judith, how splendid and
self-controlled she is. She went all through the sorrow of Mother's
death without once breaking down, not once. But the night before I
started to come here, in the middle of the night, I heard such a sound
from Judith's room! It frightened me, so I could hardly get my breath!
It was Judith crying, crying terribly, so that she couldn't keep it
back any more. I never knew her to cry before. I didn't dare go into
her room--Mother would--but I didn't dare. And yet I couldn't leave
her there alone in such awful trouble. I stood by the door in the
dark--oh, Arnold, I don't know how long--and heard her--When it began
to be light she was quiet, and I went back to bed; and after a while
I tiptoed in. She had gone to sleep at last. Arnold, there under her
cheek was that old baseball cap of yours ... all wet, all wet with her
tears, Judith's tears."
Before she had finished she was sorry she had spoken. Arnold's face
was suffused with purple. He put his hand up to his collar and
wrenched at it, clenched his fists, and finally, flinging his
riding-crop far from him, hid his face in his hands and burst
into tears. "Isn't it damnable!" he said over and over. "Isn't it
damnable!"
Sylvia had nothing more to say. It seemed indeed damnable to her. She
wondered again at Judith's invincible force of will. That alone was
the obstacle--no, it was something back of Judith's will, something
which even Arnold recognized; for now, to her astonishment, he looked
up, his face smeared like a weeping child's, and said in a low tone,
"You know, of course, that Judith's right."
The testimony was wrung out of him. But it came. The moment was one
never to be forgotten.
Out of her passionate pity was born strength that was not to be
denied. She took his hand in hers, his dry, sick man's hand. "Arnold,
you asked me to give you a reason why you should get the best you can
out of yourself. I'll give you a reason. Judith is a reason. Austin is
a reason. I'm a reason. I am never going to let you go. Judith can't
be the one to help you get through the best you can, even though it
may not be so very well--poor, poor Judith, who would die to be able
to help you! Mother wasn't allowed to. She wanted to, I see that now.
But I can. I'm not a thousandth part as strong or as good as they; but
if we hang together! All my life is going to be settled for me in a
few hours. I don't know how it's going to be. But however it is, you
will always be in my life. For as long as you live," she caught her
breath at the realization of how little that phrase meant, "for as
long as you live, you are going to be what you wanted to be, what you
ought to have been, my brother--my mother's son."
He clung to her hand, he clung to it with such a grip that her fingers
ached--and she blessed the pain for what it meant.
CHAPTER XLVII
"... AND ALL THE TRUMPETS SOUNDED!"
They had told her at the farm, the old man and the old woman who had
looked so curiously at her, that Mr. Page had gone on up the wood-road
towards the upper pasture. He liked to go there sometimes, they said,
to look at the sunset from a big rock that stood in the edge of the
white birch woods. They added, in extenuation of this, that of course
somebody had to go up there anyhow, once in a while, to salt the
sheep.
Sylvia had passed on, passed the great, square, many-chimneyed house,
passed the old-fashioned garden, and struck into the wood-road beyond
the bars. The sun was so low now, almost below the edge of the Notch,
that the rays were level and long behind her. So she had walked,
bathed in luminous gold at Versailles, on the day when Austin had
first told her that he loved her, on the day she had told him the
truth. From the first moment she had seen him how he had always
brought out from her the truest and best, finer and truer than
anything she had thought was in her, like a reflection from his own
integrity. His eyes that day, what clear wells of loyalty and honor
... how her mother would have loved him! And that other day, when he
said farewell and went away to his ordeal ... she closed her eyes for
an instant, pierced with the recollection of his gaze on her! What was
she, what poor thing transfigured to divinity, that such passion, such
tenderness had been hers ... even for a moment ... even if now ...
She looked timidly up the green tunnel of the arching trees, fearing
to see him at any moment. And yet how she hastened her steps towards
where he was! The moments were too long till she should find her
heart's home!
After a time, there came a moment of such terrible throbbing of the
heart, such trembling, that she could not go on. She sat down on a
rock beside the road and pressed her shaking hands on her cheeks. No,
it was too awful. She had been insane to think of putting everything,
her whole life, to the test of a moment's shock. She would go back.
She would write him....
She looked up and saw her mother's gallant figure standing there
before her. She smiled, and started on. Strange that she had thought
her mother could be dead. Her first instinct had been right. Her
mother, _her_ mother could not die.
The road turned sharply to the left. She came out from the white
birches. She was in the edge of the pasture, sweet-fern at her feet,
a group of sheep raising startled heads to gaze at her, the sun's rim
red on the horizon below her. And up there, the sunlight on his face,
above her, stood Austin.
The sight of him was like a great burst of music in her heart, like a
great flood of light. Her doubts, her uncertainties, they were gone
out, as utterly as night goes before the sun. Her ears rang to a sound
like singing voices. For a moment she did not feel the ground under
her feet....
Austin looked down and saw her. He stood like a man in a dream.
And then he knew. He knew. And Sylvia knew. He gave a great cry
of welcome which was to ring in her ears for all her life, like a
benediction. He ran down to meet her, and took her in his arms.
THE END