The Bent Twig Part 38

There was, however, no struggle with Aunt Victoria in the morning.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith, encountering the same pa.s.sionate outcry, recognized an irresistible force when she encountered it; recognized it, in fact, soon enough to avoid the long-drawn-out acrimony of discussion into which a less intelligent woman would inevitably have plunged; recognized it almost, but not quite, in time to shut off from Sylvia's later meditations certain startling vistas down which she had now only fleeting glimpses. "Very well, my dear," said Mrs.

Marshall-Smith, her cherished clarity always unclouded by small resentments,--"very well, we will trust in your judgment rather than my own. I don't pretend to understand present-day girls, though I manage to be very fond of one of them. Judith is your sister. You will do, of course, what you think is right. It means, of course, Judith being what she is, that she will instantly cast him off; and Arnold being what he is, that means that he will drink himself into delirium tremens in six months. His father ..." She stopped short, closing with some haste the door to a vista, and poured herself another cup of coffee. They were having breakfast in her room, both in negligee and lacy caps, two singularly handsome representatives of differing generations. Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked calm, Sylvia extremely agitated. She had been awake at the early hour of deadly pale dawn when a swift, long-barreled car had drawn up under the porte-cochere and Arnold had been taken away under the guard of a short, broad, brawny man with disproportionately long arms. She was not able to swallow a mouthful of breakfast.

During the night, she had not looked an inch beyond her blind pa.s.sion of insistence. Now that Aunt Victoria yielded with so disconcerting a suddenness, she faced with a pang what lay beyond. "Oh, Judith wouldn't cast him off! She loves him so! She'll give him a chance. You don't know Judith. She doesn't care about many things, but she gives herself up absolutely to those that do matter to her. She adores Arnold! It fairly frightened me to see how she was burning up when he was near. She'll insist on his reforming, of course--she ought to--but--"

"Suppose he doesn't reform to suit her," suggested Mrs.

Marshall-Smith, stirring her coffee. "He's been reformed at intervals ever since he was fifteen. He never could stay through a whole term in any decent boys' school." Here was a vista, ruthlessly opened.

Sylvia's eyes looked down it and shuddered. "Poor Arnold!" she said under her breath, pus.h.i.+ng away her untasted cup.

"I'm dull enough to find you take an odd way to show your sympathy for him," murmured Mrs. Marshall-Smith, with none of the acidity the words themselves seemed to indicate. She seemed indeed genuinely perplexed.

"It's not been exactly a hilarious element in _my_ life either. But I've always tried to hold on to Arnold. I thought it my duty. And now, since Felix Morrison has found this excellent specialist for me, it's much easier. I telegraph to him and he comes at once and takes Arnold back to his sanitarium, till he's himself again." For the first time in weeks Morrison's name brought up between them no insistently present, persistently ignored shadow. The deeper shadow now blotted him out.

"But Aunt Victoria, it's for Judith to decide. _She_'ll do the right thing."

"Sometimes people are thrown by circ.u.mstances into a situation where they wouldn't have dreamed of putting themselves--and yet they rise to it and conquer it," philosophized Aunt Victoria. "Life takes hold of us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought. Judith will _mean_ to do the right thing. If she were married, she'd _have_ to do it! It seems to me a great responsibility you take, Sylvia--you may, with the best of intentions in the world, be ruining the happiness of two lives."

Sylvia got up, her eyes red with unshed tears. It was not the first time that morning. "It's all too horrible," she murmured. "But I haven't any right to conceal it from Judith."

Her eyes were still red when, an hour later, she stepped into the room again and said, "I've mailed it."

Her aunt, still in lavender silk negligee, so far progressed towards the day's toilet as to have her hair carefully dressed, looked up from the _Revue Bleue_, and nodded. Her expression was one of quiet self-possession.

Sylvia came closer to her and sat down on a straight-backed chair. She was dressed for the street, and hatted, as though she herself had gone out to mail the letter. "And now, Tantine," she said, with the resolute air of one broaching a difficult subject, "I think I ought to be planning to go home very soon." It was a momentous speech, and a momentous pause followed it. It had occurred to Sylvia, still shaken with the struggle over the question of secrecy, that she could, in decency, only offer to take herself away, after so violently antagonizing her hostess. She realized with what crude intolerance she had attacked the other woman's position, how absolutely with claw and talon she had demolished it. She smarted with the sense that she had seemed oblivious of an "obligation." She detested the sense of obligation. And having become aware of a debt due her dignity, she had paid it hastily, on the impulse of the moment. But as the words still echoed in the air, she was struck to see how absolutely her immediate future, all her future, perhaps, depended on the outcome of that conversation she herself had begun. She looked fixedly at her aunt, trying to prepare herself for anything. But she was not prepared for what Mrs. Marshall-Smith did.

She swept the magazine from her lap to the floor and held out her arms to Sylvia. "I had hoped--I had hoped you were happy--with me," she said, and in her voice was that change of quality, that tremor of sincerity which Sylvia had always found profoundly moving. The girl was overcome with astonishment and remorse--and immense relief. She ran to her. "Oh, I am! I am! I was only thinking--I've gone against your judgment." Her nerves, stretched with the sleepless night and the strain of writing the dreadful letter to Judith, gave way. She broke into sobs. She put her arms tightly around her aunt's beautiful neck and laid her head on her shoulder, weeping, her heart swelling, her mind in a whirling ma.s.s of disconnected impressions. Arnold--Judith ... how strange it was that Aunt Victoria really cared for her--did she really care for Aunt Victoria or only admire her?--did she really care for anybody, since she was agreeing to stay longer away from her father and mother?--how good it would be not to have to give up Helene's services--what a heartless, materialistic girl she was--she cared for nothing but luxury and money--she would be going abroad now to Paris--Austin Page--he had kissed her hand ... and yet she felt that he saw through her, saw through her mean little devices and stratagems--how astonis.h.i.+ng that he should be so very, very rich--it seemed that a very, very rich man ought to be different from other men--his powers were so unnaturally great--girls could not feel naturally about him ... And all the while that these varying reflections pa.s.sed at lightning speed through her mind, her nervous sobs were continuing.

Aunt Victoria taking them, naturally enough, as signs of continued remorse, lifted her out of this supposed slough of despond with affectionate peremptoriness. "Don't feel so badly about it, darling.

We won't have any more talk for the present about differing judgments, or of going away, or of anything uncomfortable"; and in this way, with nothing clearly understood, on a foundation indeed of misunderstanding, the decision was made, in the haphazard fas.h.i.+on which characterizes most human decisions.

The rest of the month was no more consecutive or logical. Into the midst of the going-away confusion of a household about to remove itself half around the world, into a house distracted with packing, cheerless with linen-covers, desolate with rolled-up rugs and cold lunches and half-packed trunks, came, in a matter-of-fact manner characteristic of its writer, Judith's answer to Sylvia's letter.

Sylvia opened it, shrinking and fearful of what she would read. She had, in the days since hers had been sent, imagined Judith's answer in every possible form; but never in any form remotely resembling what Judith wrote. The letter stated in Judith's concise style that of course she agreed with Sylvia that there should be no secrets between betrothed lovers, nor, in this case, were there any. Arnold had told her, the evening before she left Lydford, that he had inherited an alcoholic tendency from his father. She had been in communication with a great specialist in Wisconsin about the case. She knew of the sanitarium to which Arnold had been taken and did not like it. The medical treatment there was not serious. She hoped soon to have him transferred to the care of Dr. Rivedal. If Arnold's general const.i.tution were still sound, there was every probability of a cure.

Doctors knew so much more about that sort of thing than they used to. Had Sylvia heard that Madame La Rue was not a bit well, that old trouble with her heart, only worse? They'd been obliged to hire a maid--how in the world were the La Rues going to exist on American cooking? Cousin Parnelia said she could cure Madame with some Sanopractic nonsense, a new fad that Cousin Parnelia had taken up lately. Professor Kennedy had been elected vice-president of the American Mathematical a.s.sociation, and it was funny to see him try to pretend that he wasn't pleased. Mother's garden this autumn was ...

"_Well_!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Sylvia, stopping short. Mrs. Marshall-Smith had stopped to listen in the midst of the exhausting toil of telling Helene which dresses to pack and which to leave hanging in the Lydford house. She now resumed her labors unflaggingly, waving away to the closet a mauve satin, and beckoning into a trunk a favorite black-and-white chiffon. To Sylvia she said, "Now I know exactly how a balloon feels when it is p.r.i.c.ked."

Sylvia agreed ruefully. "I might have known Judith would manage to make me feel flat if I got wrought up about it. She hates a fuss made over anything, and she can always take you down if you make one."

She remembered with a singular feeling of discomfiture the throbbing phrases of her letter, written under the high pressure of the quarrel with Aunt Victoria. She could almost see the expression of austere distaste in the stern young beauty of Judith's face. Judith was always making her appear foolis.h.!.+

"We were both of us," commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith dryly, "somewhat mistaken about the degree of seriousness with which Judith would take the information."

Sylvia forgot her vexation and sprang loyally to Judith's defense.

"Why, of course she takes it like a trained nurse, like a doctor--feels it a purely medical affair--as I suppose it is. We might have known she'd feel that way. But as to how she really feels inside, personally, you can't tell anything by her letter! You probably couldn't tell anything by her manner if she were here. You never can.

She may be simply wild about a thing inside, but you'd never guess."

Mrs. Marshall-Smith ventured to express some skepticism as to the existence of volcanic feelings always so sedulously concealed. "After all, can you be so very sure that she is ever 'simply wild' if she never shows anything?"

"Oh, you're _sure_, all right, if you've lived with her--you feel it.

And then, after about so long a time of keeping it down, she breaks loose and _does_ something awful, that I'd never have the nerve to do, and tears into flinders anything she doesn't think is right. Why, when we were little girls and went to the public schools together, two of our little playmates, who turned out to have a little negro blood, we ..." Sylvia stopped, suddenly warned by some instinct that Aunt Victoria would not be a sympathetic listener to that unforgotten episode of her childhood, that episode which had seemed to have no consequences, no sequel, but which ever since that day had insensibly affected the course of her growth, like a great rock fallen into the Current of her life.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith, deliberating with bated breath between broadcloth and blue panama, did not notice the pause. She did, however, add a final comment on the matter, some moments later, when she observed, "How any girl in her senses can go on studying, when she's engaged to a man who needs her as much as Arnold needs Judith!" To which Sylvia answered irrelevantly with a thought which had just struck her thrillingly, "But how perfectly fine of Arnold to tell her himself!"

"She must have hypnotized him," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith with conviction, "but then I don't pretend to understand the ways of young people nowadays." She was now forty-five, in the full bloom of a rarely preserved beauty, and could afford to make remarks about the younger generation. "At any rate," she went on, "it is a comfort to know that Judith has set her hand to the wheel. I have not in years crossed the ocean with so much peace of mind about Arnold as I shall have this time," said his stepmother. "No, leave that blue voile, Helene, the collar never fitted."

"Oh, he doesn't spend the winters in Paris with you?" asked Sylvia.

"He's been staying here in Lydford of late--crazy as it sounds. He was simply so bored that he couldn't think of anything else to do. He has, besides, an absurd theory that he enjoys it more in winter than in summer. He says the natives are to be seen then. He's been here from his childhood. He knows a good many of them, I suppose. Now, Helene, let's see the gloves and hats."

It came over Sylvia with a pa.s.sing sense of great strangeness that she had been in this spot for four months and, with the exception of the men at the fire, she had not met, had not spoken to, had not even consciously seen a single inhabitant of the place.

And in the end, she went away in precisely the same state of ignorance. On the day they drove to the station she did, indeed, give one fleeting glimpse over the edge of her narrow prison-house of self-centered interest. Surrounded by a great many strapped and buckled pieces of baggage, with Helene, fascinatingly ugly in her serf's uniform, holding the black leather bag containing Aunt Victoria's jewels, they pa.s.sed along the street for the last time, under the great elms already almost wintry with their bare boughs.

Now that it was too late, Sylvia felt a momentary curiosity about the unseen humanity which had been so near her all the summer. She looked out curiously at the shabby vehicles (it seemed to her that there were more of them than in the height of the season), at the straight-standing, plainly dressed, briskly walking women and children (there seemed to be a new air of life and animation about the street now that most of the summer cottages were empty), and at the lounging, indifferent, powerfully built men. She wondered, for a moment, what they were like, with what fort.i.tude their eager human hearts bore the annual display of splendor they might never share. They looked, in that last glimpse, somehow quite strong, as though they would care less than she would in their places. Perhaps they were only hostile, not envious.

"I dare say," said Aunt Victoria, glancing out at a buck-board, very muddy as to wheels, crowded with children, "that it's very forlorn for the natives to have the life all go out of the village when the summer people leave. They must feel desolate enough!"

Sylvia wondered.

The last thing she saw as the train left the valley was the upland pa.s.s between Windward and Hemlock mountains. It brought up to her the taste of black birch, the formidably clean smell of yellow soap, and the rush of summer wind past her ears.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

"WHOM G.o.d HATH JOINED ..."

They were to sail on the 23d, and ever since the big square invitation had come it had been a foregone conclusion, conceded with no need for wounding words, that there was no way out of attending the Sommerville-Morrison wedding on the 21st. They kept, of course, no constrained silence about it. Aunt Victoria detested the awkwardness of not mentioning difficult subjects as heartily as she did the mention of them; and as the tree toad evolves a skin to answer his needs, she had evolved a method all her own of turning her back squarely on both horns of a dilemma. No, there was no silence about the wedding, only about the possibility that it might be an ordeal, or that the ordeal might be avoided. It could not be avoided. There was nothing to be said on that point. But there was much talk, during the few days of their stay in New York, about the elaborate preparations for the ceremony. Morrison, who came to see them in their temporary quarters, kept up a somewhat satirical report as to the magnificence of the performance, and on the one occasion when they went to see Molly they found her flushed, excited, utterly inconsecutive, distracted by a million details, and accepting the situation as the normal one for a bride-to-be. There were heart-searchings as to toilets to match the grandeur of the occasion; and later satisfaction with the moss-green chiffon for Sylvia and violet-colored velvet for her aunt. There were consultations about the present Aunt Victoria was to send from them both, a wonderfully expensive, newly patented, leather traveling-case for a car, guaranteed to hold less to the square inch and pound than any other similar, heavy, gold-mounted contrivance. Mrs. Marshall-Smith told Morrison frankly, in this connection, that she had tried to select a present which Molly herself would enjoy.

"Am I not to have a present myself?" asked Morrison. "Something that you selected expressly for me?"

"No," said Sylvia, dropping the sugar into his tea with deliberation.

"You are not to have any present for yourself."

She was guiltily conscious that she was thinking of a certain scene in "The Golden Bowl," a scene in which a wedding present figures largely; and when, a moment later, he said, "I have a new volume of Henry James I'd like to loan you," she knew that the same scene had been in his head. She would not look at him lest she read in his eyes that he had meant her to know. As she frequently did in those days, she rose, and making an excuse of a walk in the park, took herself off.

She was quite calm during this period, her mind full of trivial things. She had the firm conviction that she was living in a dream, that nothing of what was happening was irrevocable. And besides, as at Lydford, for much of the day, she was absorbed in the material details of her life, being rubbed and dressed and undressed, and adorned and fed and catered to. They were spending the few days before sailing in a very grand hotel, overlooking Central Park. Sylvia had almost every day the thought that she herself was now in the center of exactly the same picture in which, as a child, she had enviously watched Aunt Victoria. She adored every detail of it. It was an opening-out, even from the Lydford life. She felt herself expanding like a dried sponge placed in water, to fill every crack and crevice of the luxurious habits of life. The traveling along that road is always swift; and Sylvia's feet were never slow. During the first days in Vermont, it had seemed a magnificence to her that she need never think of dish-was.h.i.+ng or bed-making. By this time it seemed quite natural to her that Helene drew and tempered the water for her bath, and put on her stockings. Occasionally she noticed with a little surprise that she seemed to have no more free time than in the laborious life of La Chance; but for the most part she threw out, in all haste, innumerable greedy root-tendrils into the surcharged richness of her new soil and sent up a rank growth of easeful acquiescence in redundance.

The wedding was quite as grand as the Sommervilles had tried to make it. The street was crowded with staring, curious, uninvited people on either side of the church, and when the carriage containing the bride drove up, the surge forward to see her was as fierce as though she had been a defaulting bank-president being taken to prison. The police had to intervene. The interior, fern and orchid swathed, very dimly lighted by rich purple stained gla.s.s and aristocratic dripping wax candles instead of the more convenient electric imitations, was murmurous with the wonderful throbbing notes of a great organ and with the discreet low tones of the invited guests as they speculated about the relative ages and fortunes of the bride and bridegroom. The chancel was filled with a vested choir which, singing and carrying a cross, advanced down the aisle to meet the bridal party. Molly, who had not been in a church since her childhood, had needed to be coached over and over again in the ins and outs of the complicated service.

Sylvia, seated several guests away from the aisle, saw little of the procession as it went up into the chancel. She caught a glimpse of a misty ma.s.s of white and, beside it, old Mr. Sommerville's profile, very white and nervous and determined. She did not at that time see the bridegroom at all. The ceremony, which took place far within the chancel, was long and interspersed with music from the choir. Sylvia, feeling very queer and callous, as though, under an anaesthetic, she were watching with entire unconcern the amputation of one of her limbs, fell to observing the people about her. The woman in front of her leaned against the pew and brought her broad, well-fed back close under Sylvia's eyes. It was covered with as many layers as a worm in a coc.o.o.n. There were beads on lace, the lace incrusted on other lace, chiffon, fish-net, a dimly seen filmy satin, cut in points, and, lower down, an invisible foundation of taffeta. Through the interstices there gleamed a revelation of the back itself, fat, white, again like a worm in a coc.o.o.n.

Sylvia began to plan out a comparison of dress with architecture, bringing out the insistent tendency in both to the rococo, to the burying of structural lines in ornamentation. The cuff, for instance, originally intended to protect the skin from contact with unwashable fabrics, degenerated into a mere bit of "tr.i.m.m.i.n.g," which has lost all its meaning, which may be set anywhere on the sleeve. Like a strong hand about her throat came the knowledge that she was planning to say all this to please Felix Morrison, who was now within fifty feet of her, being married to another woman.

She flamed to fever and chilled again to her queer absence of spirit.... There was a chorister at the end of the line near her, a pale young man with a spiritual face who chanted his part with s.h.i.+ning rapt eyes. While he sang he slipped his hand under his white surplice and took out his watch. Still singing "Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," he cast a hasty eye on the watch and frowned impatiently. He was evidently afraid the business in hand would drag along and make him late to another appointment, "--is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen!" he sang fervently. Sylvia repressed an hysterical desire to laugh.

The ceremony was over; the air in the building beat wildly against the walls, the stained-gla.s.s windows, and the ears of the wors.h.i.+pers in the excited tumult of the wedding-march; the procession began to leave the chancel. This time Sylvia caught one clear glimpse of the princ.i.p.als, but it meant nothing to her. They looked like wax effigies of themselves, self-conscious, posed, emptied of their personalities by the noise, the crowds, the congestion of ceremony. The idea occurred to Sylvia that they looked as though they had taken in as little as she the significance of what had happened. The people about her were moving in relieved restlessness after the long immobility of the wedding. The woman next her went down on her knees for a devout period, her face in her white gloves. When she rose, she said earnestly to her companion, "Do you know if I had to choose one hat-tr.i.m.m.i.n.g for all the rest of my life, I should make it small pink roses in cl.u.s.ters. It's perfectly miraculous how, with black chiffon, they _never_ go out!" She settled in place the great cl.u.s.ter of costly violets at her breast which she seemed to have exuded like some natural secretion of her plump and expensive person. "Why don't they let us out!" she said complainingly.

A young man, one of those born to be a wedding usher, now came swiftly up the aisle on patent leather feet and untied with pearl-gray fingers the great white satin ribbon which restrained them in the pew. Sylvia caught her aunt's eye on her, its anxiety rather less well hidden than usual. With no effort at all the girl achieved a flas.h.i.+ng smile. It was not hard. She felt quite numb. She had been present only during one or two painful, quickly pa.s.sed moments.