The Bent Twig Part 48

Professor Marshall's eyes were fixed on his wife's old cousin. "Come in," he said in a hoa.r.s.e voice. They were almost the first words Sylvia had heard him say.

Cousin Parnelia hastened up the path to the house. Sylvia followed with her father, at the last extremity of agitation and perplexity.

When Cousin Parnelia reached the dining-room table, she sat down by it, pushed the cloth to one side, and produced a fresh sheet of yellow paper from her shabby bag. "Put yourselves in a receptive frame of mind," she said in a glib, professional manner. Sylvia stiffened and tried to draw her father away, but he continued to stand by the table, staring at the blank sheet of paper with a strange, wild expression on his white face. He did not take his eyes from the paper. In a moment, he sat down suddenly, as though his knees had failed him.

There was a long silence, in which Sylvia could hear the roaring of the blood in her arteries. Cousin Parnelia put one deeply veined, shrunken old hand on planchette and the other over her eyes and waited, her wrinkled, commonplace old face a.s.suming a solemn expression of importance. The clock ticked loudly.

Planchette began to write--at first in meaningless flourishes, then with occasional words, and finally Sylvia saw streaming away from the pencil the usual loose, scrawling handwriting. Several lines were written and then the pencil stopped abruptly. Sylvia standing near her father heard his breathing grow loud and saw in a panic that the veins on his temples were swollen.

Cousin Parnelia took her hand off planchette, put on her spectacles, read over what had been written, and gave it to Professor Marshall.

Sylvia was in such a state of bewilderment that nothing her father could have done would have surprised her. She half expected to see him dash the paper in the old woman's face, half thought that any moment he would fall, choking with apoplexy.

What he did was to take the paper and try to hold it steadily enough to read. But his hand shook terribly.

"I will read it to you," said Cousin Parnelia, and she read aloud in her monotonous, illiterate voice: "'I am well and happy, dearest Elliott, and never far from you. When you call to me, I hear you.

All is not yet clear, but I wish I could tell you more of the whole meaning. I am near you this moment. I wish that--' The message stopped there," explained Cousin Parnelia, laying down the paper.

Professor Marshall leaned over it, straining his eyes to the rude scrawls, pa.s.sing his hand over his forehead as though to brush away a web. He broke out in a loud, high voice. "That is her handwriting....

Good G.o.d, her very handwriting--the way she writes Elliott--it is from _her!_" He s.n.a.t.c.hed the paper up and took it to the window, stumbling over the chairs blindly as he went. As he held it up to the light, poring over it again, he began to weep, crying out his wife's name softly, the tears streaming down his unshaven cheeks. He came back to the table, and sank down before it, still sobbing, still murmuring incessantly, "Oh, Barbara--Barbara!" and laid his head on his outstretched arms.

"Let him cry!" whispered Cousin Parnelia sentimentally to Sylvia, drawing her away into the hall. A few moments later when they looked in, he had fallen asleep, his head turned to one side so that Sylvia saw his face, tear-stained and exhausted, but utterly relaxed and at peace, like that of a little child in sleep. Crushed in one hand was the yellow sheet of paper covered with coa.r.s.e, wavering marks.

CHAPTER XLV

"_That our soul may swim We sink our heart down, bubbling, under wave_"

The two sisters, their pale faces grave in the shadow of their wide hats, were on their knees with trowels in a border of their mother's garden. Judith had been giving a report of Lawrence's condition, and Sylvia was just finis.h.i.+ng an account of what had happened at home, when the gate in the osage-orange hedge clicked, and a blue-uniformed boy came whistling up the path. He made an inquiry as to names, and handed Sylvia an envelope. She opened it, read silently, "Am starting for America and you at once. Felix." She stood looking at the paper for a moment, her face quite unmoved from its quiet sadness. The boy asked, "Any answer?"

"No," she said decisively, shaking her head. "No answer."

As he lingered, lighting a cigarette, she put a question in her turn, "Anything to pay?"

"No," said the boy, putting the cigarette-box back in his pocket, "Nothing to pay." He produced a worn and greasy book, "Sign on this line," he said, and after she had signed, he went away down the path, whistling. The transaction was complete.

Sylvia looked after the retreating figure and then turned to Judith as though there had been no interruption. "... and you can see for yourself how little use I am to him now. Since he got Cousin Parnelia in the house, there's nothing anybody else could do for him. Even you couldn't, if you could leave Lawrence. Not for a while, anyhow. I suppose he'll come slowly out of this to be himself again ... but I'm not sure that he will. And for now, I actually believe that he'd be easier in his mind if we were both away. I never breathe a word of criticism about planchette, of course. But he knows. There's that much left of his old self. He knows how I must feel. He's really ever so much better too, you know. He's taken up his cla.s.ses in the Summer School again. He said he had 'a message' from Mother that he was to go back to his work bravely; and the very next day he went over to the campus, and taught all his cla.s.ses as though nothing had happened.

Isn't it awfully, terribly touching to see how even such a poor, incoherent make-believe of a 'message' from Mother has more power to calm him than anything we could do with our whole hearts? But how _can_ he! I can't understand it! I can't bear it, to come in on him and Cousin Parnelia, in their evenings, and see them bent over that grotesque planchette and have him look up at me so defiantly, as though he were just setting his teeth and saying he wouldn't care what I thought of him. He doesn't really care either. He doesn't think of anything but of having evening come when he can get another 'message'

from Mother ... from Mother! Mother!"

"Well, perhaps it would be as well for us not to be here for a while,"

murmured Judith. There were deep dark rings under her eyes, as though she had slept badly for a long time. "Perhaps it may be better later on. I can take Lawrence back with me when I go to the hospital. I want to keep him near me of course, dear little Lawrence. My little boy!

He'll be my life now. He'll be what I have to live for."

Something in the quality of her quiet voice sent a chill to Sylvia's heart. "Why, Judy dear, after you are married of course you and Arnold can keep Lawrence with you. That'll be the best for him, a real home, with you. Oh, Judy dear," she laid down her trowel, fighting hard against a curious sickness which rose within her. She tried to speak lightly. "Oh, Judy dear, when _are_ you going to be married? Or don't you want to speak about it now, for a while? You never write long letters, I know--but your late ones haven't had _any_ news in them!

You positively haven't so much as mentioned Arnold's name lately."

As she spoke, she knew that she was voicing an uneasiness which had been an unacknowledged occupant of her mind for a long time. But she looked confidently to see one of Judith's concise, comprehensive statements make her dim apprehensions seem fantastic and far-fetched, as Judith always made any flight of the imagination appear. But nothing which Sylvia's imagination might have been able to conceive would have struck her such a blow as the fact which Judith now produced, in a dry, curt phrase: "I'm not going to be married."

Sylvia did not believe her ears. She looked up wildly as Judith rose from the ground, and advanced upon her sister with a stern, white face. Before she had finished speaking, she had said more than Sylvia had ever heard her say about a matter personal to her; but even so, her iron words were few. "Sylvia, I want to tell you about it, of course. I've got to. But I won't say a word, unless you can keep quiet, and not make a fuss. I couldn't stand that. I've got all I can stand as it is."

She stood by an apple-tree and now broke from it a small, leafy branch, which she held as she spoke. There was something shocking in the contrast between the steady rigor of her voice and the fury of her fingers as they tore and stripped and shredded the leaves. "Arnold is an incurable alcoholic," she said; "Dr. Rivedal has p.r.o.nounced him hopeless. Dr. Charton and Dr. Pansard (they're the best specialists in that line) have had him under observation and they say the same thing.

He's had three dreadful attacks lately. We ... none of their treatment does any good. It's been going on too long--from the time he was first sent away to school, at fourteen, alone! There was an inherited tendency, anyhow. n.o.body took it seriously, that and--and the other things boys with too much money do. Apparently everybody thought it was just the way boys are--if anybody thought anything about it, except that it was a bother. He never had anybody, you know--_never, never_ anybody who ..." her voice rose, threatened to break. She stopped, swallowed hard, and began again: "The trouble is he has no const.i.tution left--nothing for a doctor to work with. It's not Arnold's fault. If he had come out to us, that time in Chicago when he wanted to--we--he could--with Mother to--" Her steady voice gave way abruptly. She cast the ravaged, leafless branch violently to the ground and stood looking down at it. There was not a fleck of color in her beautiful, stony face.

Sylvia concentrated all her will-power on an effort to speak as Judith would have her, quietly, without heroics; but when she broke her silence she found that she had no control of her voice. She tried to say, "But, Judith dear, if Arnold is like that--doesn't he need you more than ever? You are a nurse. How can you abandon him now!" But she could produce only a few, broken, inarticulate words in a choking voice before she was obliged to stop short, lest she burst out in the flood of horror which Judith had forbidden.

Broken and inarticulate as they were, Judith knew what was the meaning of those words. The corners of her mouth twitched uncontrollably. She bit her marble lower lip repeatedly before she could bring out the few short phrases which fell like clods on a coffin. "If I--if we--Arnold and I are in love with each other." She stopped, drew a painful breath, and said again: "Arnold and I are in love with each other. Do you know what that means? He is the only man I could not take care of--Arnold! If I should try, we would soon be married, or lovers. If we were married or lovers, we would soon have--" She had overestimated her strength. Even she was not strong enough to go on.

She sat down on the ground, put her long arms around her knees, and buried her face in them. She was not weeping. She sat as still as though carved in stone.

Sylvia herself was beyond tears. She sat looking down at the moist earth on the trowel she held, drying visibly in the hot sun, turning to dust, and falling away in a crumbling, impalpable powder. It was like seeing a picture of her heart. She thought of Arnold with an indignant, pa.s.sionate pity--how could Judith--? But she was so close to Judith's suffering that she felt the dreadful rigidity of her body.

The flat, dead tones of the man in the Pantheon were in her ears. It seemed to her that Life was an adventure perilous and awful beyond imagination. There was no force to cope with it, save absolute integrity. Everything else was a vain and foolish delusion, a two-edged sword which wounded the wielding hand.

She did not move closer to Judith, she did not put out her hand.

Judith would not like that. She sat quite motionless, looking into black abysses of pain, of responsibilities not met, feeling press upon her the terrifying closeness of all human beings to all other human beings--there in the sun of June a cold sweat stood on her forehead....

But then she drew a long breath. Why, there was Austin! The anguished contraction of her heart relaxed. The warm blood flowed again through her veins. There was Austin!

She was rewarded for her effort to bring herself to Judith's ways, when presently her sister moved and reached out blindly for her hand.

At this she opened her arms and took Judith in. No word was spoken.

Their mother was there with them.

Sylvia looked out over the proud, dark head, now heavy on her bosom, and felt herself years older. She did not try to speak. She had nothing to say. There was nothing she could do, except to hold Judith and love her.

There was nothing, _nothing_ left but love.

CHAPTER XLVI

A LONG TALK WITH ARNOLD

The tall, lean young man, sitting his galloping horse very slackly, riding fast with a recklessly loose rein, and staring with bloodshot eyes down at the dust of the road, gave an exclamation, brought the mare upon her haunches, and sprang down from the saddle. A woman, young, tall, grave, set like a pearl in her black mourning dress, stood up from the roadside brook and advanced to meet him. They looked at each other as people do who meet after death has pa.s.sed by. They stammered vague words, their eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g.

"I--she was always so good to me," said Arnold, his voice breaking and quavering as he wrung Sylvia's hand again and again. "I never knew--saw much of her, I know--but when I was a little boy, I used--I used to dream about her at night." His thin, sallow face flushed with his earnestness. "I don't believe--honestly, Sylvia, I don't believe her own children loved her any more than I did. I've thought so many times how different everything would have been if I'd--I don't suppose you remember, but years ago when you and she were in Chicago, I ran away from school to go out there, and ask if--"

Sylvia remembered, had thought of nothing else from the moment she had seen far down the road the horseman vainly fleeing the black beast on his crupper. She shook her head now, her hand at her throat, and motioned him to silence. "Don't! Don't!" she said urgently. "Yes, I remember. I remember."

There was a moment's silence, filled by the murmur of the little brook at their feet. The mare, which had been drinking deeply, now lifted her head, the water running from the corners of her mouth. She gave a deep breath of satisfaction, and began cropping the dense green gra.s.s which grew between the water and the road. Her master tossed the reins over the pommel and let her go. He began speaking again on a different note. "But, Sylvia, what in the world--here, can't we go up under those trees a few minutes and have a talk? I can keep my eye on the mare." As they took the few steps he asked again, "How ever does it happen that you're here at Lydford Junction of all awful holes?"

Sylvia took an abrupt resolution, sat down on the pine-needles, and said, very directly, "I am on my way to Austin Farm to see if Austin Page still wants to marry me." Her manner had the austere simplicity of one who has been moving in great and grave emotions.

Arnold spoke with an involuntary quickness: "But you've heard, haven't you, about his giving up all his Colorado ..."