I
Four days without incident ... and then Eileen fainted at the
dressmaker’s. The afternoon was hot and she had stood for a long
fitting. It was nothing unusual to the seamstress, but it was a
thrilling experience for the girl who had never known oblivion other
than that of normal sleep. She went home with a bump on her head, to
tell how near she came to being impaled on Miss Denison’s shears.
Saturday morning she fainted again. It was after a long telephone
conversation with Kitten Henderson. Lavinia sent for Dr. Schubert. He
was making a country call. In a panic of fear she summoned Mrs. Ascott.
When they had chafed the girl’s hands and bathed her temples with
brandy, consciousness returned slowly.
“I thought I was dying,” she murmured between stiffened lips. “My hands
felt like clubs, and all at once my whole body seemed to be climbing
into my head.”
A cry--the sudden baffled scream of a trapped animal--burst from
Lavinia Trench, as she sprang to the side of the divan. “What have you
done? Oh, my God, what have you done?”
“My dear Mrs. Trench,” Judith expostulated, “what has come over you!”
“You don’t know what it means. You haven’t been through it six times. I
never fainted at any other time--and that scapegrace of a Hal Marksley
off to college without a word. Oh, I’ll go mad!”
Relief came in a torrential flood of abuse, of self-pity. All the
store that had been repressed since the early days of July poured its
acrid waters over the girl. In vain Eileen sought to defend herself,
to declare furiously that her mother’s accusation was untrue. In such
moods, Lavinia was never careful to choose her words. When the tirade
became insulting, beyond endurance, she sprang from the couch and fled
to a room on the third floor where she could lock herself in and defy
the family to drag her forth.
Judith went home, dumb with anguish. Would Eileen do violence to
herself? Would David’s heart break? Would Lary.... She paused, panting,
to frame the question: “Would Lary rise to the occasion?” On the answer
hung all her hope. After an hour of thinking, such as she had never
done before, she went again through the wicket gate. She would take the
girl with her for the laboratory experiment--an unusually important
one, that called for an extra pair of hands. Lavinia was nowhere in
sight; but from the cellar came the sound of mop and broom. Absinthe
might give surcease to the roué in the boulevard restaurant but for
Lavinia Trench the safety-valve was hard manual labor.