I
“Sister Judy,” Jack Denslow called, “there’s a bully fire down the
avenue. Come and watch the motor engine go by. Good-bye, old horse,
your day is done.”
Judith Trench crossed to the window and stood beside her young brother;
but her mind was not on the marvel of metal and speed that had gone
from sight almost before its clanging bell-note reached her ears.
Another fifth of March. A year ago ... Eileen ... there, in that very
room. And now.... Did Eileen remember? Did any of the family remember?
She and Lary had spent the winter in New York, going to Springdale only
when business demanded, and each brief visit brought its fresh surprise.
With the Marksley contract off his hands, David improved in health so
rapidly that he had long since ceased to be a source of anxiety. Eileen
and her mother had effected an _entente cordiale_ which apparently
worked well for both. The woman who had wrought the bridge, however
frail and inadequate, over which mother and daughter might pass to an
understanding hitherto unknown in their association, reflected with
grave misgivings that the bridge was not the end of the journey.
Once she was on the point of telling Lary about his mother, their sharp
dispute and the subsequent ethical discussion. The change in Lavinia,
since that day, was so marked that the neighbours made comment. The
woman who had spent her mature years surging from officious sweetness
to the most violent outbursts of temper, went about in a state of
tranquil meditation that could not be accounted for by anything
external to herself. There was none of the rapturous devotion to David
that had characterized her return from Bromfield; but at least she was
not unkind. Of all those who watched her, only Judith could surmise
what was going on in her mind. Might it be that Lavinia had achieved
her Indian Summer without the killing frost? Had there, perhaps, been a
revision of her _credo_ from the simple tenets of the catechism to the
complex philosophy of Robert Browning? Judith shivered as she faced the
thought and its possible consequences.
She had told the troubled woman that sin consisted, not in action,
but in desire. Could Lavinia, literal-minded and creed-ridden, handle
a concept so foreign to her convictions? Had Lary’s mother torn away
the solid foundation of her existence, and was she building again--a
substructure that would sustain her through the barren years to come?
Could this be done, at Lavinia’s age and with the rigid material of
Lavinia’s soul? Would the house of her being come crashing down, when
she sought to shift from what she had been to what she hoped to be?
Judith was glad when Lary told her, that evening, that he must return
to Springdale. Her mother-in-law might seek counsel of her, in the
privacy of the library where their two natures had clashed again and
yet again. All the tedious journey to the West, she turned over in her
mind a working corollary to that elusive proposition, the nature of
sin. How tenuous, how like shifting sand, the thought-mass on which our
concrete actions must rest! Had she any assurance that her conception
of duty, of principle, of right-thinking, was better for humanity than
the set of fatuous concepts she had sought to displace?