THE BREAK
Marley went to Lavinia the next morning, and told her as they sat there
on the veranda in the spring sunlight. She looked at him with distress
in her wide blue eyes.
"When?" she asked.
"To-night!"
"Tonight? Oh Glenn!"
Her eyes had filled with tears, and she was winking hard to keep them
back.
"To-night."
She repeated the word over and over again.
"And to think," she managed to say at last, "to think that the last
night I should have been away from you! How can I ever forgive myself!"
Her lip trembled, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. She drew out her
handkerchief and said:
"Let's go in."
All that day Marley went about faltering over his preparations. Wade
Powell was the only one of the few who were interested in him that was
enthusiastic over his going, and he praised and congratulated him, and
pierced his already sore heart by declaring that he had known all along
it was what Marley would be compelled to do. He would give him a letter
to his old friend, Judge Johnson, he said; the judge would be a great
man for him to know, and Powell sat down at once, with more energy and
enterprise than Marley had ever known him to show, and began to
elaborate his letter of introduction.
Marley dreaded saying good-by; he wished to shirk it as to Powell as he
intended to shirk it in the cases of his few friends; he was to return
to the office a last time in the afternoon to get the letter; and then
he would bid Powell good-by. He had the day before him, but that thought
could give him no comfort. He would see Lavinia again in the afternoon;
he would see her once more, for the last time, in the evening, and in
the meantime he would see his father and his mother, and his home; he
had still two meals to eat with them, but it was as if he had already
gone; there was no reality in his presence there among them; the blow
that fate had decreed had fallen, and all that was to be was then
actually in being; all about him the men and women of Macochee were
pursuing their ordinary occupations just as if he were not so soon to go
away and be of this scene no more; a few hours, and another day, and
they would be going on with their concerns just the same, and he would
have disappeared out of their lives and out of their memories.
He looked at everything that had been associated with his life, and
everything called up some memory,--the little office where he had tried
to study law, the Court House, and the blind goddess of justice holding
aloft her scales, the familiar Square, the cloaked cavalryman on the
monument, every tree, every fence, every brick in the sidewalk somehow
called out to him--and he was leaving them all. He looked up and down
Main Street, wide and ugly, littered with refuse, ragged with its
graceless signs; he thought of the people who had gossiped about him,
the people whom he had hated, but now he could not find in his heart the
satisfaction he had expected in leaving them. He felt tenderly, almost
affectionately, toward them all. But it was worse at home. He wandered
about the house, looking at every piece of furniture, at every trinket;
he went into the woodshed, and the old ax, the old saw, everything he
had known for years, wrung his heart; he went to the barn, he looked at
the muddy buggy in which he had driven so often with his father; he
reproached himself because he had not kept the buggy cleaner for him; he
went into the stall and patted the flank of Dolly, finally he put his
arms about her warm neck, laid his face against it, and the tears rolled
down his cheeks.
One of the preachers that were always dropping in on them was there to
dinner, and in the blessing he invoked on the temporalities, as he
called them, he prayed with professional unction for the son who was
about to leave the old roof-tree, and this made the ordeal harder for
them all. Doctor Marley spoke to the preacher of little things that he
was to do within the next few days and Marley wondered how he could
mention them, for they were to be done at a time when he would be there
no more. Because he conceived of life, as all must conceive of it,
solely in its relation to himself, he could not imagine life going on in
Macochee without him.
The afternoon wore on, he passed his hour with Lavinia; they were to
meet then but once again; he returned home, his mother had packed his
trunk; it was waiting. He was tender with his mother, and he wondered
now, with a wild regret, why he had not always been tender with her; he
was tender now with all things; a tenderness suffused his whole being;
it seemed as if it might dissolve in tears.
Still he shrank back; there was one thing more to do; he was to go
up-town and get his ticket, and the letter to Judge Johnson, and bid
Wade Powell good-by. A wild hope leaped in his heart; perhaps--but no,
it was irrevocable now. He went, and got his letter, but Powell refused
to bid him good-by; he said he would be at the train to see him off. He
bought his ticket and went home. Old man Downing had been there with his
dray and hauled away his trunk; it was settled. He could only wait and
watch the minutes tick by.
It seemed to Marley that all things that evening conspired to accentuate
all that he was leaving behind, and to make the grief of parting more
poignant. His mother, who was then in that domestic exigency described
by the ladies of Macochee as being without a girl, had prepared an
unusually elaborate supper, and while there was no formal observance of
the fact, it was eaten, so far as any of them could eat that evening,
under a sense of its significance as a parting ceremonial. They talked,
or tried to talk, indifferently of commonplace things, and Doctor Marley
even sought to add merriment to their feast by a jocularity that was
unusual with him. Marley, who knew his father so well, could easily
detect the heavy heart that lay under his father's jokes, and he
suffered a keener misery from the pathos of it. Then he would catch his
mother looking at him, her eyes deep and sad, and it seemed to him that
his heart must burst.
Marley's train was to leave at eleven o'clock; he had arranged to go to
Lavinia's and remain with her until ten o'clock; then he was to stop in
at his home for his last good-by. Those last two hours with Lavinia were
an ordeal; into the first hour they tried to crowd a thousand things
they felt they must say, and a thousand things they could only suggest;
when the clock struck nine, they looked at each other in anguish; they
did little after that but mentally count the minutes. The clock ticked
loudly, aggressively, until in the soul of each, unconfessed, there was
a desire to hasten the moments they felt they would like to stay; the
agony was almost beyond endurance; it exhausted them, beat them down,
and rendered them powerless to speak. Finally the clock struck the
half-hour; they could only sit and look at each other now; at a quarter
of ten they began their good-bys.
At ten o'clock Mrs. Blair, Connie and Chad came into the room solemnly,
and bade Marley farewell; the judge himself came in after them, his
glasses in his hand and the magazine he had been reading, which, as
Marley thought with that pang of things going on without him, he would
in a few moments be reading again as calmly as ever. He took Marley's
hand, and wished him success; for the first time he spoke gently, almost
affectionately to him, and although Marley tried to bear himself
stoically, the judge's farewell touched him more than all the others.
The shameless children would have liked to remain and see the tragedy to
its close, but Mrs. Blair drew them from the room with her. The last
moment had come, and Marley held Lavinia in his arms; at last he tore
himself from her, and it was over. He looked back from out the darkness;
Lavinia was still standing in the doorway; he saw her slender, girlish
figure outlined against the hall light behind her; somehow he knew that
she was bravely smiling through her tears. She stood there until his
footfall sounded loud in the spring night, then the light went out, the
door closed as he had heard it close so often, and she was gone.
He saw the light in his father's study as he approached his home, and
there came again that torturing sense: the sermon his father then was
working on would be preached when he was far away; his mother, as he
knew by the light in the sitting-room window, was waiting for him; she
had waited there so many nights, and now she was waiting for the last
time. She rose at his step, and took him to her arms the minute he
entered the door.
"Be brave, dear," he said, stroking her gray hair; "be brave." He was
trying so hard to be brave himself, and she was crying. He had not often
seen her cry. She could not speak for many minutes; she could only pat
him on the shoulder where her head lay.
"Remember, my precious boy," she managed to say at last, "that there's a
strong Arm to lean upon."
He saw that she was turning now to the great faith that had sustained
her in every trial of a life that had known so many trials; and the
tears came to his own eyes. He would have left her for a moment but she
followed him. He had an impulse he could not resist to torture himself
by going over the house again; he went into the dining-room which in the
darkness wore an air of waiting for the breakfast they would eat when he
was gone; he went to the kitchen and took a drink of water, from the old
habit he was now breaking; then he went up stairs and looked into his
own room, at the neatly made bed where he was to sleep no more; at last
he stood at the door of the study.
He could catch the odor of his father's cigar, just as he had in
standing there so many times before; he pushed the door open and felt
the familiar hot, close, smoke-laden atmosphere which his father seemed
to find so congenial to his studies. Doctor Marley took off his
spectacles and pushed his manuscript aside, and Marley felt that he
never would forget that picture of the gray head bent in its earnest
labors over that worn and littered desk; it was photographed for all
time on his memory. His words with his father had always been few; there
were no more now.
"Well, father," he said, "I've come to say good-by."
His father pushed back his chair and turned about. He half-rose, then
sank back again and took his son's hand.
"Good-by, Glenn," he said. "You'll write?"
"Yes."
"Write often. We'll want to hear."
"Yes, write often," the doctor said. "And take care of yourself."
"I will, father."
"Wait a moment." Doctor Marley was fumbling in his pocket. He drew forth
a few dollars.
"Here, Glenn," he said. "I wish it could be more."
There was nothing more to do, or say. They went down stairs; Marley's
bag was waiting for him in the hall. He kissed his mother again and then
again; he shook his father's hand, and then he went.
"Write often," his father called out to him, as he went down the walk.
It was all the old man could say.
The door closed, as the door of the Blairs' had closed. Inside Doctor
Marley looked at his wife a moment.
"Well," he said, "he's gone."
Mrs. Marley made no answer.
"I suppose," he said, "I ought to have gone to the train with him."
Then he toiled up the stairs to his study and the sermon he was to
preach when Glenn was gone.
Marley walked rapidly down Market Street toward the depot; in the dark
houses that suddenly had taken on a new significance to him, people were
sleeping, people who would awake the next morning in Macochee. He could
not escape the torture of this thought; his mind revolved constantly
about the mystery of his being still in Macochee, still within calling
distance, almost, of Lavinia, of his father and mother, of all he loved
in life, when in reality they had in an instant become as inaccessible
to him as though the long miles of his exile already separated them.
Twenty minutes later, Lavinia, in her room, Mrs. Marley, at her prayers,
and Doctor Marley sitting in deep absorption at his desk, heard the
sonorous whistle of a locomotive sound ominously over the dark and quiet
town.