A Woman of Genius Part 20

"Well, of course, your contract----"

"I'm going anyway ... and I know the lines." He was as considerate, I suppose, as could be expected.

"I can give you three days," he calculated.

"Four," I stipulated.

"Well, four," he grudged. That would allow two days for the funeral.

CHAPTER III

As it turned out I was more than a month in Taylorville and so saved myself from the Coleman players for a more kindly destiny, though at the time it did not appear so. It grew out of my realizing, in Effie's first clasp of me, something more than our common loss, more than family, something that I felt myself answer to before we could have any talk together that did not relate to the funeral and the manner of my mother's death.

They thought from little things that came to mind afterward, that she must have been prepared for it, but forebore to trouble them with a presentiment of what could not in any case have been much longer delayed: she had clung to them more and been still more loath to trouble them with her wants. The Sat.u.r.day before, she had made Effie understand that she wished all the photographs of my father brought together, queer, little old daguerrotypes of him as a young man, a tintype of him in his volunteer soldier dress, and a large, faded photo of him as an officer leaning on his sword. She kept them by her and would be seen poring upon them, as though she tried to fix the ident.i.ty of one about to be met under unfamiliar or confusing circ.u.mstances, though they did not think of this until afterward. The Sunday of her death Cousin Judd had come in to sit with her, as his custom was, an hour earlier than the morning service. He had read the day's lesson from the Bible and sung the hymn, and then after an interval Effie, who was busy about the back of the house, heard him sing again my mother's favourite hymn,

"Come, Thou fount of every blessing, Tune my heart to sing Thy praise."

and as he sung she saw the tears rolling down his face. So she turned her back on them and let them say their good-byes without her, though she had no notion how near the final parting was.

Forester was dressing--he and Effie had taken turns at church-going ever since mother's stroke--and he was surprised to find that Cousin Judd had gone off without him. Mother clung to him when he went to kiss her good-bye; she struggled with her impotence, but they made out that it was not because she wanted him to stay at home with her; and for the first time since her illness she wished not to be propped up at the window where she could sign to the neighbours going by, but seemed to want greatly to sleep. Effie wheeled her into the corner of the sitting room; and a little later she noticed that mother's head had slipped down on the pillow as it did sometimes, past her power to lift it up again.

So my sister straightened the poor head with a kiss and went back to getting the dinner. She moved softly because mother seemed asleep, but at last when she went as usual to tell her that Forester was visible at the end of the street, on the way home, she saw that the head had slipped down again, and this time as she lifted it up there was no life in it at all.

One of the strange incidents of that morning, and yet not strange when you think how much they had been to one another, was that Cousin Judd, though he had started home directly after church, could not get there, but when he had driven a little way out of town, drawn by he knew not what unseen force, turned back and pulled up in front of our door just as the doctor who had been summoned hastily was saying that mother had been dead an hour.

It was Monday morning when I arrived, and the funeral could not be until Tuesday, to allow time for the news to penetrate to all the distant country places from which my mother's relatives would be drawn to it, moved and anxious to come, though many of them had not seen her for a matter of years. I think I realized at once how it would be about my getting back to Chicago, especially when I spoke to Effie about it. She cried out and clung to me in a way that made me see that I stood for something more to her than just sisterliness. Without saying anything I wrote to Mr. Coleman that I should be detained a week or longer, and that though I hoped he would be able to save my place for me, I didn't really expect that he would.

It was not in the Taylorville cemetery that we buried my mother, but in a little plot set aside from the old Judd place, along with the rest of the Wilsons, Judds, and Jewetts, those that had dropped back peacefully to their native sod, and those sent home from Gettysburg and Appomattox.

It was a longish ride; from turn to turn of the country road, teams dropped into the procession that led out from town. On either side the woods blazed like the ranked Cherubim, host on host; great shoals of fiery leaves lay in the shallows of the burying ground. At the last, shaken by the light breeze that sprung up, little flamy darts from the oak whirled into the grave with her. They were to say in their own fashion that there was nothing more natural. I think my mother must have found it so.

We had scarcely got home again, still sitting about, veiled and voluminous, when I was drawn out of grief to meet Effie's emergency. It was Almira Jewett who brought me face to face with it. Almira had taken off her things and was getting tea for us in her brisk, capable way.

"Anyhow," she said, "I 'spose you'll stay with your sister until she gets sort of used to things." It flashed on me that what she was expected to get used to, was going on just as she had been without the excuse of my mother's needing her.

"Oh, I'll stay till the breaking up," I met her promptly.

"My land!" said Almira Jewett, "you talking of the breakin' up and your mother ain't hardly out of the house yet. They do say there's nothing like play-acting to make you nimble in your feelings." I knew of course that they would lay it to the defibricating influence of my profession that I should take the breaking up of my mother's home so lightly, but I had caught a brief hiatus in Effie's sobs and I realized that what the poor child was afraid of, was being hypnotized into a situation against which her natural good sense revolted. I was bracing myself against the tradition of filial obligation that I felt was going to be put in force against me, when suddenly help arrived from an unsuspected quarter.

"I 'spose you're going with a troupe yet?" Cousin Lydia interposed, for the first time in her life, I believe, delivering herself of a conclusion. "It's a pity, because if you was anyways settled you could take Effie with you. Forester was a good son;" she ruminated on that for a while. "He was what you call a real model son, but I don't know as I want to see Effie married to him the same as your mother was." It gave me a shock to think that all these years she must have been seeing how things were.

"She shan't," I a.s.sured her, "not if I have to stay with Forrie myself."

I had thought a good many times what was to become of Effie. I couldn't take her with me, of course, but I wasn't in the least prepared to see her intrigued by the popular sentiment into becoming a mere figurehead for Forester's _role_ of provider. "Keeping up a home" they called it in Taylorville, as though the house and furniture and the daily habit of coming back to it, were the pivotal facts of existence.

It almost seemed as if it might come to that. After the others were all gone and the night closed in on us three, the spirit of the dead came and stood among us. Effie wept in Forrie's arms and said that he should not be quite bereft, he should have her anyway.

"You poor child ... you've got a brother left; you too, Olivia. You shan't want for a home while I live." That of course was the sort of thing Taylorville expected of him. It began to seem as if I might have to make good my word about staying with my brother to let Effie free. I believe he would have accepted that without even a suspicion of what I surrendered by it. If anything, he would have seen in it only another dramatization of his _role_ of dutifulness. That a woman had any preferred employment beside cushioning life for the males of her family, had not impinged on the consciousness of Taylorville.

But the very next morning I awoke anew to the purpose of rescuing Effie, and to the recollection of an incident of the funeral, noted but not taken into the reckoning in the stress of more absorbing emotions.

"Effie, wasn't that Mrs. Jastrow I saw at the cemetery yesterday with her head done up in a black veil--c.r.a.pe, too? I have just recalled it."

Effie nodded.

"One would have thought," I resented, "that she was one of the family."

"Ah, that's it; she thinks she is."

"One of the family? Oh! you don't mean that Forrie----Where was Lily then?" I demanded.

"She wouldn't come, of course, not being recognized as one of the family and yet counting herself one."

"But, explain ... how could she? I thought that was broken off long ago."

"When mother was first taken," Effie agreed, "but you see she made such a dead set at him, she had to keep it up somehow; she couldn't admit that Forrie hadn't wanted her. So they made it up between them, Lily and her mother, I mean, that she and Forrie had really been engaged, but it had been broken off because Forrie couldn't marry so long as mother----"

She broke off with tears again, remembering how mother was now.

"That was two years ago; you don't mean to say they've kept it up all the time?"

"They've had to. You see Lily hadn't been careful about not getting herself talked about with Forester. Oh, not scandal, of course, but you know how it is when a girl is crazy after a man; everybody gets to hear of it. And then they had to make so much of the engagement never coming to anything on mother's account, it quite spoiled Lily's chances, and you know, Forester...."

"Oh, he was taken in by it, no doubt; it was something to sentimentalize over and be self-sacrificing about."

"Well, of course, he couldn't quite abandon the poor girl; and she really _is_ fond of him."

"And perfectly safe to philander with. Well, now that he has no one depending on him I suppose he will marry her!"

"That's what is worrying me," protested Effie; "you see it all depends on whether I go on depending on him." She broke down over that. Mother hadn't wanted Forester to marry Lily Jastrow, and everybody by the mouth of Almira Jewett, had thought it was Effie's duty to keep him from it if she could.

"And I could, by just staying on. It's mother's money in the business, your's and mine as much as his, and this house ... it's partly ours ...

if we stay in it."

"Well if you _want_ to...."

Effie came over and sobbed on my shoulder, "Oh, I don't," she said. "I suppose it is horrid and selfish. I'm fond of Forrie, but I want to do things in the world ... like you have ... and I want to marry and have babies. Oh, oh!" She was quite overwhelmed with the turpitude of it.

"You shall, you shall," I determined for her.

"Oh, Olivia, I have _wanted_ you so. I knew you'd understand. It was all right so long as mother lived; I could do anything for her, but now I want--I want to be _me_!" I understood very well what that want was. But first off I had to explain to Effie why I couldn't take her with me. It was wonderful how she entered into my feeling about my work, and my lack of success in Chicago.

"_Of course_, you ought to go to New York. You'll be a great tragic actress, Olive, I know _that_. You could go, too, if you could get your share out of the business. You could have mine and yours!" She glowed over it. But the fact was we couldn't get the money out of the business.

As it stood we couldn't have sold the shop for what mother had put into it, and, besides, we should have had to deal first with Forester's conviction that he was taking care of our shares for us. I needn't have worried about Effie; she was too pretty and competent not to have arranged for herself. The princ.i.p.al and his wife drove over from Montecito to say that they would be glad to have her come back and finish the course interrupted within a few months of graduation by my mother's illness. And for her board and tuition she was to act as the princ.i.p.al's secretary. Within a year she wrote that she was engaged to their son.

In the meantime I undertook to stop the capacious maw of Forrie's need of being important; and the only way I saw to do it, involved my surrender of any hope I had of finding my own release in what my mother had left us of my father's hard won savings. I shouldn't have had any compunction, so fierce was my own need of success, about forcing my brother's hand, but I meant definitely not to leave any gap in his life for Effie to be drawn back into. Before we had come to this point, the second afternoon after the funeral in fact, circ.u.mstances had begun to work for me. Effie and I, looking out of the window, saw Mrs. Jastrow coming along by the front fence with all her gentility spread, as it were, by the feeling she had of her call on us being a diplomatic function.

"She's coming to see how we take it," Effie averred.