Lavinia’s usual solvent, a flood of tears, failed her. Dry-eyed she
left the room, forgetting to ask for the paper, which had been the real
object of her call. Judith returned to the library and took down the
volume of Browning. In some unfathomable way it was responsible for the
distressing situation. As she turned the pages, pencil marks caught
her eye. A line, a word or two, in some instances an entire stanza had
been underscored. They were, without exception, love passages. Well
over towards the back, a sheet of note paper came to view, covered
with Lavinia’s tight, precise writing. If Browning _would_ change the
subject, just when you thought you had grasped his meaning ... at
least, you could fling your net over the elusive concept and carry it
away--isolate it from the confusing wealth of context.
But no! This was more than random copying. Widely separated passages
had been woven together into a kind of confession of faith ... like
lemon jelly in a mould. Judith, as she read, forgot that she was
looking into another woman’s soul, forgot Lavinia, in the fascination
of following the curious windings of Lavinia’s mind.
“Come back with me to the first of all. Let us lean and love it
over again. Let us now forget and now recall, and gather what we
let fall. Each life’s incomplete, you see. I follow where I am led,
knowing so well the leader’s hand. Oh, woman, wooed, not wed! When
we loved each other, lived and loved the same, till an evening came
when a shaft from the devil’s bow pierced to our ingle-glow, and the
friends were friend and foe. Never fear but there’s provision of the
devils to quench knowledge, lest we walk the earth in rapture--making
those who catch God’s secret just so much more prize their capture.
The true end, sole and single, we stop here for is this love-way with
some other soul to mingle. How is it under our control to love or not
to love? Heart, shall we live or die? The rest ... settle by and by.”
Judith laid the sheet in its place and returned the volume to the
bookcase. Yes, David was right. But what a weird obsession! Lavinia,
out of the pregnant depths of her misery, had fashioned a lover to her
liking, a phantom lover, to be communed with in secret. Had she gone to
Detroit, not to visit Sylvia, but to seek some fantastic realization of
her yearning for the perfect romance? Why had she come home, shattered
and undone. A real man ... the man she met in the Pullman when she was
returning from Bromfield--the man who had fallen in love with her?
She paused beside the table where, an hour ago, she had laid the
Bromfield paper. She looked at it with vacant eyes, striving to clarify
her turbid thoughts. Gradually, out of the emptiness, words came up
to her, the words that David had read, at the head of the “personal”
column.
“Our distinguished citizen, Mr. Calvin Stone, has just returned from
a ten days’ business trip to Chicago.”
The room with its delicate furnishings faded, as when the lights are
suddenly turned off. Judith stared, her heart leaping in unrhythmic
cadence, her eyes following the monstrous panorama that unrolled before
her. Long ago she had gone to a little cinema theatre with Lary and the
girls, where black dots had danced on a white screen. Black dots were
dancing now, on the white screen of her memory.
A dozen disjointed fragments of conversation; an old story her
grandmother had told her, of a secret wedding in Rochester; Lavinia’s
greedy interest in the story, in all that pertained to Calvin and
Lettie Stone; her determination to revisit Bromfield the summer
following Mrs. Stone’s death; the miracle of her regeneration when she
returned home; the yellow pallor on her face when she put the question:
“Do people ever really get over things?” The dots had woven themselves
into a succession of preliminary shapes, and all at once the picture
was complete. Lavinia’s secret lay bare before her daughter-in-law’s
gaze.