The Awakening of Helena Richie Part 41

He sat down by the gloomy catafalque of a bed, and when Benjamin Wright began to say again, "M-m-my f--" he stopped him with a gesture.

"No, father; not at all. He would have gone away anyhow, whether you had given him the money or not. No; it was my fault," the poor man said, dropping back into his own misery. "I was hard on him. Even that last night, I spoke harshly to him. Sometimes I think that possibly I didn't entirely understand him."

He dropped his head in his hand, and stared blankly at the floor. He did not see the dim flash of humor in the old eyes.

CHAPTER XXVI

The day that Sam Wright was buried Helena had written to Lloyd Pryor.

She must see him at once, she said. He must let her know when he would come to Old Chester--or she would come to him, if he preferred. "It is most important," she ended, "_most_ important." She did not say why; she could not write of this dreadful thing that had happened.

Still less could she put down on paper that sense of guilt, so alarming in its newness and so bewildering in its complexity. She was afraid of it, she was even ashamed of it; she and Lloyd had never talked about--things like that. So she made no explanation. She only summoned him with a peremptoriness which had been absent from their relations for many years. His answer, expected and despaired of, came three weeks later.

It was early in October one rainy Friday afternoon. Helena and David were in the dining-room. She had helped him with his lessons,--for it was Dr. Lavendar's rule that Monday's lessons were to be learned on Friday; and now they had come in here because the old mahogany table was so large that David could have a fine clutter of gilt-edged saucers from his paint-box spread all around. He had a dauby tumbler of water beside him, and two or three _G.o.dey's Lady's Books_ awaiting his eager brush. He was very busy putting gamboge on the curls of a lady whose petticoats, by a discreet mixture of gamboge and Prussian blue, were a most beautiful green.

"Don't you think crimson-lake is pretty red for her lips?" Helena asked, resting her cheek on his thatch of yellow hair.

"No, ma'am," David said briefly; and rubbed on another brushful.

Helena put an eager arm about him and touched his ear with her lips; David sighed, and moved his head. "No; I wasn't going to," she rea.s.sured him humbly; it was a long time since she had dared to offer the "forty kisses." It was then that Sarah laid the mail down on the table; a newspaper and--Lloyd Pryor's letter.

Helena's start and gasp of astonishment were a physical pang. For a long time afterwards she could not bear the smell of David's water- colors; gamboge, Chinese white and Prussian blue made her feel almost faint. She took up the letter and turned it over and over, her pallor changing into a violent rush of color; then she fled up-stairs to her own room, tearing the letter open as she ran.

Her eyes blurred as she began to read it, and she had to stop to wipe away some film of agitation. But as she read, the lines cleared sharply before her. The beginning, after the "Dear Nelly," was commonplace enough. He was sorry not to have answered her letter sooner; he had been frightfully busy; Alice had not been well, and letter-writing, as she knew, was not his strong point. Besides, he had really expected to be in Old Chester before this, so that they could have talked things over. It was surprising how long Frederick had hung on, poor devil. In regard to the future, of course--here the page turned. Helena gasped, folding it back with trembling fingers: "Of course, conditions have changed very much since we first considered the matter. My daughter's age presents an embarra.s.sment which did not exist a dozen years ago. Now, if we carried out our first arrangement, some kind friend would put two and two together, and drop a hint, and Alice would ask questions. Nevertheless"--again she turned a page-- nevertheless, Lloyd Pryor was prepared to carry out his promise if she wished to hold him to it. She might think it over, he said, and drop him a line, and he was, as ever, hers, L. P.

Helena folded the letter, laying the edges straight with slow exactness.... He would carry out his promise if she held him to it.

She might drop him a line on the subject.... While her dazed mind repeated his words, she was alertly planning her packing: "Can Sarah fold my skirts properly?" she thought; but even as she asked herself the question, she was saying aloud, "Marry him? Never!" She slapped the letter across her knee. Ah, he knew that. He knew that her pride would come to his rescue! The tears stung in her eyes, but they did not fall.... Sarah must begin the next morning; but it would take a week to close everything up.... Well; if he had ceased to want her, she did not want him! What a letter she would write him; what indifference, what a.s.surances that she did not wish to hold him to that "first arrangement"; what anger, what reproach! Yes; she would "drop him that line"! Then it came over her that perhaps it would be more cutting not to write to him at all. She raised her rag of pride but almost instantly it fell shuddering to the dust--_Sam Wright_....

She sat up in her chair, trembling. Yes; she and David would start on Monday; she would meet Lloyd in Philadelphia on Tuesday, and be married that morning. Her trunks could follow her; she would not wait for the packing. George must do up the furniture in burlap; a railroad journey across the mountains would injure it very much, unless it was carefully packed.

She rose hurriedly, and taking her travelling-bag out of the wardrobe, began to put various small necessities into it. Suddenly she stopped short in her work, then went over to the mantel-piece, and leaning her arms upon it looked into the mirror that hung lengthwise above it. The face that gazed back at her from its powdery depths was thinner; it was paler: it was--not so young. She looked at it steadily, with frightened eyes; there were lines on the forehead; the skin was not so firm and fresh. She spared herself no details of the change, and as she acknowledged them, one by one, the slow, painful red spread to her temples. Oh, it was horrible, it was disgusting, this aging of the flesh! The face in the mirror looked back at her helplessly; it was no weapon with which to fight Lloyd Pryor's weariness! Yet she must fight it, somehow. It was intolerable to think that he did not want her; it was more intolerable to think that she could not match his mood by declaring that she did not want him. "But that's only because of Sam Wright," she a.s.sured herself, staring miserably at the white face in the gla.s.s; "if it wasn't for that--! But I must get more sleep; I mustn't let myself look so worn out."

In such cross-currents of feeling, one does not think consecutively.

Desires and motives jumbled together until Helena said to herself desperately, that she would not try to answer Lloyd's letter for a day or two. After all, as he had so clearly indicated, there was no hurry; she would think it over a little longer.

But as she thought, the next day and the next, the wound to her affection and her vanity grew more unbearable, and her feeling of responsibility waned. The sense of guilt had been awakened in her by her recognition of a broken Law; but as the sense of sin was as far from her consciousness as ever, she was able to argue that if no one knew she was guilty, no further harm could be done. So why kill what lingering love there might be in Lloyd's heart by insisting that he keep his promise? With that worn face of hers, how could she insist!

And suppose she did not? Suppose she gave up that hungry desire to be like other people, arranged to leave Old Chester--on that point she had no uncertainty--but did not make any demand upon him? It was perfectly possible that he would be shamed into keeping his promise.

She said to herself that, at any rate, she would wait a week until she had calmed down and could write with moderation and good humor.

Little by little the purpose of diplomacy strengthened, and with it a determination to keep his love--what there was of it--at the price of that "first arrangement." For, after all, the harm was done; Sam Wright was dead. She was his murderer, she reminded herself, sullenly, but nothing like that could ever happen again, so why should she not take what poor happiness she could get?

Of course this acceptance of the situation veered every day in gusts of misery and terror; but, on the whole, the desire for peace prevailed. Yet the week she had allowed herself in which to think it over, lengthened to ten days before she began to write her letter. She sat down at her desk late in the afternoon, but by tea-time she had done nothing more than tear up half a dozen beginnings. After supper David rattled the backgammon-board significantly.

"You are pretty slow, aren't you?" he asked, as she loitered about her desk, instead of settling down to the usual business of the evening.

"Don't you think, just to-night, you would rather read a story?" she pleaded.

"No, ma'am," said David, cheerfully.

So, sighing, she opened the board on her knees. David beat her to a degree that made him very condescending, and also extremely displeased by the interruption of a call from William King.

"n.o.body is sick," David said politely; "you needn't have come."

"Somebody is sick further up the hill," William excused himself, smiling.

"Is Mr. Wright worse?" Helena said quickly. She lifted the backgammon- board on to the table, and whispered a word of manners to David, who silently stubbed his copper-toed shoe into the carpet.

"No," the doctor said, "he's better, if anything. He managed to ask Simmons for a poached egg, which made the old fellow cry with joy; and he swore at me quite distinctly because I did not get in to see him this morning. I really couldn't manage it, so I went up after tea, and he was as mad as--as David," said William, slyly. And David, much confused, kicked vigorously.

"Do you think he will ever be able to talk?" she said.

William would not commit himself. "Perhaps; and perhaps not. I didn't get anything clear out of him to-night, except--a bad word."

"d.a.m.n?" David asked with interest.

William chuckled and then remembered to look proper. But David feeling that he was being laughed at, hid his face on Helena's shoulder, which made her lift him on to her knee. There, in the drowsy warmth of the little autumn fire, and the quiet flow of grown people's meaningless talk, he began to get sleepy; gradually his head slipped from her shoulder to her breast, and when she gathered his dangling legs into her lap, he fell sound asleep.

"It isn't his bedtime yet," she excused herself. She rested her cheek on the child's head and looked over at the doctor. She wore a dark crimson silk, the bosom filled with sheer white muslin that was caught together under her soft chin by a little pearl pin; her lace undersleeves were pushed back so that William could see the lovely lines of her white wrists. Her parted hair fell in soft, untidy waves down over her ears; she was staring absently across David's head into the fire.

"I wish," William said, "that you would go and call on old Mr. Wright some time. Take David with you. It would cheer him up." It seemed to William King, thinking of the forlorn old man in his big four-poster, that such a vision of maternity and peace would be pleasant to look upon. "He wouldn't use David's bad word to you, I am sure."

"Wouldn't he?" she said.

For once the doctor's mind was nimble, and he said in quick expostulation: "Come, come; you mustn't be morbid. You are thinking about poor Sam and blaming yourself. Why, Mrs. Richie, you are no more responsible for his folly than I am."

She shook her head. "That day at the funeral, I thought how they used to bring the murderer into the presence of the man he had killed."

William King was really displeased. "Now, look here, you must stop this sort of thing! It's not only foolish, but it's dangerous. We can none of us play with our consciences without danger; they cut both ways."

Mrs. Richie was silent. The doctor got up and planted himself on the hearth-rug, his back to the fire, and his hands under his coat tails.

"Let's have it out: How could you help it because that poor boy fell in love? You couldn't help being yourself--could you? And Sam couldn't help being sentimental. Your gentleness and goodness were like something he had never seen before. But you had to stop the sentimentality, of course; that was just your duty. And I know how wisely you did it--and kindly. But the boy was always a self-absorbed dreamer; the mental balance was too delicate; it dipped the wrong way; his mind went. To feel it was your fault is absolute nonsense. Now there! I've never been so out of patience with you before," he ended smiling; "but you deserve it."

"I don't deserve it," she said; "I wish I did."

"When I spoke about goodness," the doctor amended, "I didn't mean to reflect on his father and mother. Mrs. Wright is one of the best women in the world. I only meant--" William sat down and looked into the fire. "Well; just plain goodness isn't necessarily--attractive. A man--at least a boy like Sam, admires goodness, of course; but he does sort of hanker after prettiness;" William's eyes dwelt on her bent head, on the sheer muslin under David's cheek, on the soft incapable hands that always made him think of white apple-blossoms, clasped around the child's yielding body;--"Yes; something pretty, and pleasant, and sweet; that's what a man--I mean a boy, Sam was only a boy; really wants. And his mother, good as she is, is not,--well; I don't know how to express it."

Helena looked over at him with a faint smile. "I thought goodness was the finest thing in the world; I'm sure I used to be told so," she ended dully.

"Of course, _you_ would feel that," the doctor protested; "and it is, of course it is! Only, I can understand how a boy might feel. Down at the Wrights' there was just nothing but plain goodness, oh, very plain, Mrs. Richie. It was all bread-and-b.u.t.ter. Necessary; I'm the last person to say that bread-and-b.u.t.ter isn't necessary. But you do want cake, once in a while; I mean when you are young. Sam couldn't help liking cake," he ended smiling.

"Cakes and ale," Helena said.

But the connection was not clear to William. "At home, there was just plain, ugly goodness; then he met you. And he saw goodness, and other things!"

Helena's fingers opened and closed nervously. "I wish you wouldn't call me good," she said; "I'm not. Truly I'm not."

William laughed, looking at her with delighted eyes. "Oh, no; you are a terrible sinner!"