The Bent Twig Part 41

She read on from the letter: "'All of us at St. Mary's are feeling very sore about lawyers. Old Mr. Winthrop had left the hospital fifteen thousand dollars in his will, and we'd been counting on that to make some changes in the operating-room and the men's accident ward that are awfully needed. And now comes along a miserable lawyer who finds something the matter with the will, and everything goes to that worthless Charlie Winthrop, who'll probably blow it all in on one grand poker-playing spree. It makes me tired! We can't begin to keep up with the latest X-ray developments without the new apparatus, and only the other day we lost a case, a man hurt in a railroad wreck, that I know we could have pulled through if we'd been better equipped!

Well, hard luck! But I try to remember Mother's old uncle's motto, "Whatever else you do, _don't_ make a fuss!" Father has been off for a few days, speaking before Alumni reunions. He looks very well. Mother has got her new fruit cellar fixed up, and it certainly is great.

She's going to keep the carrots and parsnips there too. I've just heard that I'm going to graduate first in my cla.s.s--thought you might like to know. Have a good time, Sylvia. And don't let your imagination get away with you.

"'Your loving sister,

"'JUDITH,'"

"Of all the perfect characterizations!" murmured Page, as Sylvia finished. "I can actually see her and hear her!"

"Oh, there's n.o.body like Judith!" agreed Sylvia, falling into a reverie, her eyes on the fire.

The peaceful silence which ensued spoke vividly of the intimacy between them.

After a time Sylvia glanced up, and finding her companion's eyes abstractedly fixed on the floor, she continued to look into his face, noting its fine, somewhat gaunt modeling, the level line of his brown eyebrows, the humor and kindness of his mouth. The winter twilight cast its first faint web of blue shadow into the room. The fire burned with a steady blaze.

As minute after minute of this hushed, wordless calm continued, Sylvia was aware that something new was happening to her, that something in her stirred which had never before made its presence known. She felt very queer, a little startled, very much bewildered. What was that half-thought fluttering a dusky wing in the back of her mind? It came out into the twilight and she saw it for what it was. She had been wondering what she would feel if that silent figure opposite her should rise and take her in his arms. As she looked at that tender, humorous mouth, she had been wondering what she would feel to press her lips upon it?

She was twenty-three years old, but so occupied with mental effort and physical activity had been her life, that not till now had she known one of those half-daring, half-frightened excursions of the fancy which fill the hours of any full-blooded idle girl of eighteen. It was a woman grown with a girl's freshness of impression, who knew that ravished, scared, exquisite moment of the first dim awakening of the senses. But because it was a woman grown with a woman's capacity for emotion, the moment had a solemnity, a significance, which no girl could have felt. This was no wandering, flitting, winged excursion.

It was a grave step upon a path from which there was no turning back.

Sylvia had pa.s.sed a milestone. But she did not know this. She sat very still in her chair as the twilight deepened, only knowing that she could not take her eyes from those tender, humorous lips. That was the moment when if the man had spoken, if he had but looked at her ...

But he was following out some thought of his own, and now rose, went to Mrs. Marshall-Smith's fine, small desk, snapped on an electric light, and began to write.

When he finished, he handed a bit of paper to Sylvia. "Do you suppose your sister would be willing to let me make up for the objectionable Charlie Winthrop's deficiences?" he asked with a deprecatory air as though he feared a refusal.

Sylvia looked at the piece of paper. It was a check for fifteen thousand dollars. She held there in her hand seven years of her father's life, as much money as they all had lived on from the years she was sixteen until now. And this man had but to dip pen into ink to produce it. There was something stupefying about the thought to her.

She no longer saw the humor and tenderness of his mouth. She looked up at him and thought, "What an immensely rich man he is!" She said to him wonderingly, "You can't imagine how strange it is--like magic--not to be believed--to have money like that!"

His face clouded. He looked down uncertainly at his feet and away at the lighted electric bulb. "I thought it might please your sister," he said and turned away.

Sylvia was aghast to think that she had perhaps wounded him. He seemed to fear that he had flaunted his fortune in her face. He looked acutely uncomfortable. She found that, as she had thought, she could say anything, anything to him, and say it easily. She went to him quickly and laid her hand on his arm. "It's splendid," she said, looking deeply and frankly into his eyes. "Judith will be too rejoiced! It _is_ like magic. And n.o.body but you could have done it so that the money seems the least part of the deed!"

He looked down at her, touched, moved, his eyes very tender, but sad as though with a divination of the barrier his fortune eternally raised between them.

The door opened suddenly and Mrs. Marshall-Smith came in quickly, not looking at them at all. From the pale agitation of her face they recoiled, startled and alarmed. She sat down abruptly as though her knees had given way under her. Her gloved hands were perceptibly trembling in her lap. She looked straight at Sylvia, and for an instant did not speak. If she had rushed in screaming wildly, her aspect to Sylvia's eyes would scarcely have been more eloquent of portentous news to come. It was a fitting introduction to what she now said to them in an unsteady voice: "I've just heard--a despatch from Jamiaca--something terrible has happened. The news came to the American Express office when I was there. It is awful. Molly Sommerville driving her car alone--an appalling accident to the steering-gear, they think. Molly found dead under the car."

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

THE ROAD IS NOT SO CLEAR

It shocked Sylvia that Molly's death should make so little difference.

After one sober evening with the stunning words fresh before their eyes, the three friends quickly returned to their ordinary routine of life. It was not that they did not care, she reflected--she _did_ care. She had cried and cried at the thought of that quivering, vital spirit broken by the inert crus.h.i.+ng ma.s.s of steel--she could not bring herself to think of the soft body, mangled, b.l.o.o.d.y. Austin cared too: she was sure of it; but when they had expressed their pity, what more could they do? The cabled statement was so bald, they hardly could believe it--they failed altogether to realize what it meant--they had no details on which to base any commentary. She who had lived so intensely, was dead. They were sorry for her. That was all.

As an apology for their seeming callousness they reiterated Aunt Victoria's dictum: "We can know nothing about it until Felix comes.

Let us hold our minds in suspense until we know what to think." That Morrison would be in Paris soon, none of them doubted. Indeed, they united in insisting on the number of natural--oh, perfectly natural--reasons for his coming. He had always spent a part of every winter there, had in fact a tiny apartment on the Rue St. Honore which dated from his bachelor life; and now he had a double reason for coming, since much of Molly's fortune chanced to be in French bonds.

Her father had been (among other things) American agent for the Comptoir National des Escomptes, and he had taken advantage of his unusual opportunities for acquiring solid French and remunerative Algerian securities. Page had said at once that Morrison would need to go through a good many formalities, under the French laws. So pending fuller information, they did not discuss the tragedy. Their lives ran on, and Molly, dead, was in their minds almost as little as Molly, living but absent, had been.

It was only two months before Felix Morrison arrived in Paris. They had expected him. They had spoken of the chance of his arrival on this or that day. Sylvia had rehea.r.s.ed all the possible forms of self-possession for their first meeting; but on the rainy February afternoon when she came in from representing Aunt Victoria at a reception and saw him sitting by the fire, her heart sank down and stopped for an instant, and when it went on beating she could hear no sound but the drumming of her pulse. The back of his chair was towards her. All she could see as she stood for a moment in the doorway was his head, the thick, graying dark hair, and one long-fingered, sensitive, beautiful hand lying on the arm of the chair. At the sight, she felt in her own palm the soft firmness of those fingers as palpably as ever she had in reality.

The instant's pause before Aunt Victoria saw her standing there, gave her back her self-control. When Mrs. Marshall-Smith turned and gravely held out her hand, Sylvia came forward with a sober self-possession.

The man turned too, sprang up with an exclamation apparently of surprise, "Miss Marshall, you _here_!" and extended his hand. Sylvia, searching his face earnestly, found it so worn, saw in it such dark traces of suffering and sorrow, that the quick tears of sympathy stood in her eyes.

Her dread of the meeting, a morbid dread that had in it an acknowledged element of horror, vanished. Before that moment she had seen only Molly's face as it had looked the day of their desperate talk, white and despairing, and resolutely bent over the steering-wheel. She had not been able to imagine Felix' face at all, had instinctively put it out of her mind; but as she looked into it now, her fear of it disappeared. It was the fine, sensitive face of a fine, sensitive man who has known a great shock. What had she feared she would see there? He was still holding her hand, very much affected at seeing her, evidently still in a super-sensitive condition when everything affected him strongly. "She loved you--she admired you so!"

he said, his wonderful voice wavering and uncertain. Sylvia's tears fell openly at this. She sat down on a low stool near her aunt's knees. "I can't believe it--I haven't been able to believe it!" she told him; "Molly was--she was more alive than anybody I ever saw!"

"If you had seen her that morning," he told them both,--"like a flame of vitality--almost frightening--so vivid. She waved good-bye, and then that was not enough; she got out of the car and ran back up the hotel-step to say good-bye for just those few moments--and was off--such youth! such youth in all her--"

Sylvia cried out, "Oh, no! no! it's too dreadful!" She felt the horror sweep down on her again; but now it did not bear Felix' face among its baneful images. He stood there, shocked, stricken, but utterly bewildered, utterly ignorant--for the moment in her relief she had called his ignorance utter innocence ...

They did not see him again for many days, and when he came, very briefly, speaking of business technicalities which absorbed him, he was noticeably absent and careworn. He looked much older. The gray in his thick hair had increased. He looked very beautiful and austere to Sylvia. They exchanged no more than the salutations of arrival and farewell.

Then one day, as she and Aunt Victoria and Austin Page strolled down the long gallery of the Louvre, they came upon him, looking at the Ribera Entombment. He joined them, walking with them through the Salon Carre and out to the Winged Victory, calling Sylvia's attention to the Botticelli frescoes beyond on the landing. "It's the first time I've been here," he told them, his only allusion to what lay back of him.

"It is like coming back to true friends. Blessed be all true friends."

He shook hands with them, and went away down the great stairway, a splendid figure of dignity and grace.

After this he came once and again to the apartment of the Rue de Presbourg, generally it would appear to use the piano. He had none in his own tiny _pied-a-terre_ and he missed it. Sylvia immensely liked his continuing to cling for a time to the simple arrangements of his frugal bachelor days. He could now of course have bought a thousand pianos. They understood how he would miss his music, and stole in quietly when, upon opening the door, Tojiko told them that Mr.

Morrison had come in, and they heard from the salon his delicately firm touch on the keys. Sometimes they listened from their rooms, sometimes the two women took possession of the little octagonal room off the salon, all white paneling and gilt chairs, and listened there; sometimes, as the weeks went on and an especially early spring began to envelop Paris in a haze of suns.h.i.+ne and budding leaves, they stepped out to listen on the wrought-iron balcony which looked down the long, s.h.i.+ning vista of the tree-framed avenue. For the most part he played Bach, grave, courageous, formal, great-hearted music.

Sometimes he went away with no more than a nod and a smile to them, but more and more, when he had finished, he came out where they were, and stood or sat to exchange brief impressions on the enchanting season, or on some social or aesthetic treat which "_ces dames_" had been enjoying. Austin Page was frequently with them, as in the earlier part of the winter, and it was finally he himself who one day took the step of asking Morrison if he would not go with them to the Louvre.

"No one could appreciate more than Miss Marshall what has always been such a delight to us all."

They went, and not only once. That was the beginning of another phase; a period when, as he began to take up life again, he turned to his old friends to help him do it. He saw almost no one else, certainly no one else there, for he was sure to disappear upon the arrival of a caller, or the announcement of an expedition in which other people were included. But he returned again and again to the Louvre with them, his theory of galleries necessitating frequent visits. Nothing could be more idiotic, he held, than to try to see on one occasion all, or even half, or even a tenth part, of a great collection of works of art. "It is exactly as reasonable," he contended, "as to read through on the same day every poem in a great anthology. Who could have anything but nausea for poetry after such a gorge? And they _must_ hate pictures or else be literally blind to them, the people who look at five hundred in a morning! If I had looked at every picture in the Long Gallery in one walk through it, I should thrust my cane through the t.i.tian Francis-First itself when I came to the Salon Carre."

So he took them to see only a few, five or six, carefully selected things--there was one wonderful day when he showed them nothing but the Da Vinci Saint Anne, and the Venus of Melos, comparing the dissimilar beauty of those two divine faces so vitally, that Sylvia for days afterwards, when she closed her eyes and saw them, felt that she looked on two living women. She told them this and, "Which one do you see most?" he asked her. "Oh, the Saint Anne," she told him.

He seemed dissatisfied. But she did not venture to ask him why. They lived in an atmosphere where omissions were vital.

Sylvia often wondered in those days if there ever had been a situation so precariously balanced which continued to hang poised and stable, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. There were moments when her head was swimming with moral dizziness. She wondered if such moments ever came to the two quiet, self-controlled men who came and went, with cordial, easy friendliness, in and out of the appartement on the Rue de Presbourg. They gave no sign of it, they gave no sign of anything beyond the most achieved appearance of a natural desire to be obliging and indulgent to the niece of an old friend. This appearance was kept up with such unflagging perseverance that it almost seemed consciously concerted between them. They so elaborately avoided the slightest appearance of rivalry that their good taste, like a cloth thrown over an unknown object, inevitably excited curiosity as to what was concealed beneath it.

And Sylvia was not to be outdone. She turned her own eyes away from it as sedulously as they. She never let a conscious thought dwell on it--and like all other repressed and strangled currents of thought, it grew swollen and restive, filling her subconsciousness with monstrous, unformulated speculations. She was extremely absorbed in the luxury, the amenity, the smooth-working perfection of the life about her.

She consciously concentrated all her faculties on her prodigious opportunity for aesthetic growth, for appreciation of the fine and marvelous things about her. She let go the last scruple which had held her back from accepting from Aunt Victoria the shower of beautiful things to wear which that connoisseur in wearing apparel delighted to bestow upon an object so deserving. She gave a brilliant outward effect of enjoying life as it came which was as impersonal as that of the two men who looked at her so frequently, and this effect went as deep as her will-power had command. But beneath--unacknowledged waves beating on the sh.o.r.e of her life and roughly, irresistibly, rudely fas.h.i.+oning it--rolled a ground-swell of imperious questionings....

Was Felix' perfect manner of impersonal interest solely due to the delicacy of his situation? Did he feel now that he was as rich as Austin ...? But, on the other hand, why did he come now and put himself in a situation which required the utmost efforts for unconsciousness on everybody's part if not because Austin's being there had meant he dared not wait? And Austin's change of manner since the arrival of the other man, the film of ceremony which had slid imperceptibly over the tender friendliness of his manner, did that mean that he would not take advantage of Morrison's temporarily tied hands, but, with a scrupulousness all his own, would wait until the race was even and they stood foot to foot on the same level? Or had he noticed at once, with those formidably clear eyes of his, some shade of her manner to Felix which she had not been able to command, and was he waiting for some move from her? And how could she move until she had some sign from Felix and how could he give a sign? There was nothing to do but to wait, to hope that the thin ice which now bent perilously under the pleasant ceremonies of their life in common, would hold them until.... Even the wildest up-leaping wave of that tossing tide never went beyond the blank wall which came after the "until...."

There were other moments when all that surge swung back and forth to the rhythm of the poisoned recollection of her unacknowledged humiliation in Lydford; when, inflamed with determination to avoid another such blow in the face, Sylvia almost consciously asked herself, self-contemptuously, "Who am I, an obscure, poverty-stricken music-teacher out of the West, to fancy that I have but to choose between two such men, two such fortunes?" but against this counted strongly the constantly recurring revelations of the obscure pasts of many of the women whom she met during those days, women who were now s.h.i.+ning, acknowledged firsts in the procession of success. The serene, stately, much-admired Princesse de Chevrille had been a Miss Sommers from Cleveland, Ohio, and she had come to Paris first as a governess.

The beautiful Mrs. William Winterton Perth, now Aunt Victoria's favorite friend, who entertained lesser royalty and greater men of letters with equal quiet dignity, had in her youth, so she chanced casually one day to mention, known what it was to be thrifty about car-fares. There was nothing intrinsically impossible in any of the glittering vistas down which Sylvia's quick eye cast involuntary glances.

But inevitably, when the heaving dark tide rose as high as this, there came a swift and deadly ebbing away of it all, and into Sylvia's consciousness (always it seemed to her with the most entire irrelevance) there flared up the picture of Molly as she had seen her last, s.h.i.+mmering like a jewel in her white veil--then the other picture, the over-turned car, the golden head bruised and b.l.o.o.d.y and forever stilled--and always, always beyond that, the gaunt, monstrous possibility, too awful ever to be put into words, too impossible for credence ...

From that shapeless, looming, black ma.s.s, Sylvia fled away actually and physically, springing to her feet wherever she was, entering another room, taking up some other occupation.

Just once she had the faintest sign from beyond the wall that she was not alone in her fear of this horror. She was sitting near Austin Page at a tea, one of the frequent, small, richly chosen a.s.semblages which Mrs. Marshall-Smith gathered about her. Part of the ensuing chatter on one of these occasions turned, as modern chatter frequently does, on automobiles. The husband of Mrs. William Winterton Perth was an expert on such matters, having for some years diverted by an interest in mechanics the immense enforced leisure of a transplanted male American. He was talking incessantly that day of the wonderful improvement in steering mechanism the last few years had brought about. "I tell you what, Miss Marshall!" he insisted, as though she had disputed the point with him, "I tell you _what_, there used to be some excuse for piling your car up by the side of the road, but nowadays any one who doesn't keep in the road and right side up must be just plain _looking_ for a chance to use his car like a dose of cold poison." For a moment Sylvia could not conceive why she felt so sickening a thrust at her heart. She turned her eyes from the speaker.

They fell on a man's hand, on the arm of the chair next hers. It was Austin's hand and it was shaking uncontrollably. As she gazed at it, fascinated, he thrust it deep into his pocket. She did not look at him. In a moment he rose and crossed the room. The husband of Mrs.

William Winterton Perth asked for another _pet.i.t four_, confessing his fondness for chocolate eclairs,--and embarked upon demountable rims.