The Awakening of Helena Richie Part 51

Samuel Wright nodded; he could not speak at first, and Simmons lifting his head, looked at him, fiercely; then he swallowed several times, and said, with ponderous dignity: "Certainly, father. Certainly." And Simmons fell back into the shadows.

"Of course," murmured Benjamin Wright, "if I g-get well, it needn't hold, you know."

After that he seemed to sleep a little, until, his eyes still closed, he said, "The boy slapped my face. So it's all right."

Samuel started up from his chair at the bedside, shocked and protesting.

"Gad-a-mercy!" said Benjamin Wright, fretfully, opening his eye and looking at him--"that makes us square! Don't you see?"

There was a long silence. Once Dr. Lavendar spoke to him, and once William King touched his wrist, but he seemed to sleep. Then abruptly, and quite clearly, he spoke:

"'Crito, I owe a c.o.c.k to Aesculapius'.... Lavendar?"

"Yes, Benjamin?"

"The debt is paid. Hey? I got the receipt."

"He is wandering," said Samuel. "Father, what do you want?"

But he did not speak again.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

Helena had asked Dr. Lavendar to keep David, out of abject fear of William King. The doctor had granted her until Sunday to give him up without explanations; if she had not done so then, he must, he said doggedly, "tell." In sending the child to the Rectory she had not given him up; she had only declared a truce. She had tied Dr. King's hands and gained a breathing-s.p.a.ce in which to decide what she must do; but she used to watch the hill road every morning, with scared eyes, lest he should stop on his way up to Benjamin Wright's to say that the truce was over. David came running joyously home two or three times, for more clothes, or to see the rabbits, or to hang about her neck and tell her of his journey. Upon one of these occasions, he mentioned casually that "Alice had gone travelling." Helena's heart stood still; then beat suffocatingly in her throat while she drew the story piecemeal from the child's lips.

"She said," David babbled, "that he didn't know you. An' she said--"

"And where was he--Mr. Pryor, all this time?" she demanded, breathlessly. She opened and shut her hands, and drew in her breath, wincing as if in physical pain; across all the days since that meeting of the Innocents, she felt his anger flaying her for the contretemps.

It brought home to her, with an aching sense of finality the completeness of the break between them. But it did more than that.

Even while she cringed with personal dismay, she was groping blindly towards a deeper and diviner despair: Those two young creatures were the cherubims at the east of the garden, bearing the sword that turned every way! By the unsparing light of that flashing blade the two sinners, standing outside, saw each other; but the one, at least, began to see something else: the glory of the garden upon which, thirteen years ago, she had turned her back! ...

Helena did not ask any more questions. David, lounging against her knee, chattered on, ending with a candid and uncomplimentary reference to Mr. Pryor; but she did not reprove him. When, having, as it were, displayed his sling and his bag of pebbles, he was ready to run joyously back to the other home, she kissed him silently and with a strange new consciousness of the everlasting difference between them.

But that did not lessen her pa.s.sionate determination that William King should never steal him from her! Yet how could she defeat her enemy?

A week pa.s.sed, and still undecided, she wrote to Dr. Lavendar asking further hospitality for David: "I want to have him with me always, but just now I am a little uncertain whether I can do so, because I am going to leave Old Chester. I will come and ask you about it in a few days."

She took the note out to the stable to George and bade him carry it to the Rectory; as she went back to the empty house, she had a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Smith's jewel-like eyes gleaming redly upon her from the gloom of the rabbit-hutch, and a desolate longing for David made her hurry indoors. But there the silence, unbroken by the child's voice, was unendurable; it seemed to turn the confusion of her thoughts into actual noise. So she went out again to pace up and down the little brick paths between the box borders of the garden. The morning was still and warm; the frost of a sharp night had melted into threads of mist that beaded the edges of blackened leaves and glittered on the brown stems of withered annuals. Once she stopped to pull up some weed that showed itself still green and arrogant, spilling its seeds from yellowing pods among the frosted flowers; and once she picked, and put into the bosom of her dress, a little belated monthly rose, warm and pink at the heart, but with blighted outer petals. She found it impossible to pursue any one line of thought to its logical outcome; her mind flew like a shuttlec.o.c.k between a dozen plans for William King's defeat. "Oh, I must decide on something!" she thought, desperately. But the futile morning pa.s.sed without decision. After dinner she went resolutely into the parlor, and sitting down on her little low chair, pressed her fingers over her eyes to shut out any possible distractions. "Now," she said, "I will make up my mind."

A bluebottle fly buzzing up and down the window dropped on the sill, then began to buzz again. Through the Venetian blinds the sunshine fell in bars across the carpet; she opened her eyes and watched its silent movement,--so intangible, so irresistible; the nearest line touched her foot; her skirt; climbed to her listless hands; out in the hall the clock slowly struck three; her thoughts blurred and ran together; her very fears seemed to sink into s.p.a.ce and time and silence. The sunshine pa.s.sed over her lap, resting warm upon her bosom; up and up, until, suddenly, like a hot finger, it touched her face. That roused her; she got up, sighing, and rubbing her eyes as if she had been asleep. No decision! ...

Suppose she should go down into the orchard? Away from the house, she might be better able to put her mind on it. She knew a spot where, hidden from curious eyes, she could lie at full length in the gra.s.s, warm on a western slope. David might have found her, but no one else would think of looking for her there.... When she sank down on the ground and clasped her hands under her head, her eyes were level with the late-blossoming gra.s.s that stirred a little in an unfelt breath of air; two frosted stalks of goldenrod, nodded and swung back and nodded again, between her and the sky. With absent intentness, she watched an ant creeping carefully to the top of a head of timothy, then jolting off at some jar she could not feel. The sun poured full upon her face; there was not a cloud anywhere in the unfathomable blue stillness.

Thought seemed to drown in seas of light, and personality dwindled until her pain and fright did not seem to belong to her. She had to close her eyes to shut herself into her own dark consciousness:

How should she keep her child?

The simplicity of immediate flight she had, of course, long ago abandoned; it would only postpone the struggle with William King. That inflexible face of duty would hunt her down wherever she was, and take the child from her. No; there was but one thing to do: parry his threat of confessing to Dr. Lavendar that he had "made a mistake" in advising that David should be given to her, by a confession of her own, a confession which should admit the doctor's change of mind without mentioning its cause, and at the same time hold such promises for the future that the old minister would say that she might have David. Then she could turn upon her enemy with the triumphant declaration that she had forestalled him; that she had said exactly what he had threatened to say,--no more, no less. And yet the child was hers! But as she tried to plan how she should put it, the idea eluded her. She would tell Dr. Lavendar thus and so: but even as she marshalled her words, that scene in the waiting-room of the railroad station ached in her imagination. Alice's ignorance of her existence became an insult; what she was going to say to Dr. Lavendar turned into a denunciation of Lloyd Pryor; he was vile, and cruel, and contemptible! But these words stumbled, too. Back in her mind, common sense agreed to Lloyd's silence to his daughter; and, suddenly, to her amazement, she knew that she agreed, not only to the silence, but to his objection to marrying her. It would be an offence for her to live with Alice! Marriage, which would have quitted this new tormenting sense of responsibility and made her like other people, would not have lessened that offence. It came over her with still more acute surprise, that she had never felt this before. It was as if that fire of shame which had consumed her vanity the night she had confessed to William King, had brought illumination as well as burning. By its glare she saw that such a secret as she and Lloyd held between them would be intolerable in the presence of that young girl. Lloyd had felt it--here she tingled all over:--Lloyd was more sensitive than she! Ah, well; Alice was his own daughter, and he knew how almost fanatical she was about truth; so he was especially sensitive. But Dr.

King? He had felt it about David: "whether you married this man or not would make no difference about David." She thought about this for awhile in heavy perplexity.

Then with a start she came back again to what she must say to Dr.

Lavendar: "I will promise to bring David up just as he wishes; and I will tell him about my money; he doesn't know how rich I am; he will feel that he has no right to rob David of such a chance. And I will say that n.o.body could love him as I can." Love him! Had she not given up everything for him, sacrificed everything to keep him? For his sake she had not married! In this rush of self-approval she sat up, and looked blindly off over the orchard below her at the distant hills, blue and slumberous in the sunshine. Then she leaned her head in her hands and stared fixedly at a clump of clover, green still in the yellowing stubble.... She had chosen her child instead of a convention which, less than a month ago, she had so pa.s.sionately desired; a month ago it seemed to her that, once married, she could do no more harm, have no more shame. Yet she had given all this up for David! ...

Suddenly she spurred her mind back to that talk with Dr. Lavendar: she would promise--anything! And planning her promises, she sat there, gazing with intent, unseeing eyes at the clover, until the chilly twilight drove her into the house.

It was not until Sat.u.r.day that she dared to go to the Rectory. It was early in the afternoon, just as the Collect Cla.s.s was gathering in the dining-room. She had forgotten it, she told Mary, as she closed her umbrella on the door-step. "Can I wait in the study?" she asked, uncertainly;--there was time to go back! The task of telling part of the truth to this mild old man, whose eye was like a sword, suddenly daunted her. She would wait a few days.--she began to open her umbrella, her fingers blundering with haste,--but retreat was cut off: Dr. Lavendar, on his way to the dining-room, with Danny at his heels, saw her; she could not escape!

"Why, Mrs. Richie!" he said, smiling at her over his spectacles. "Hi, David, who do you suppose is here? Mrs. Richie!"

David came running out of the dining-room; "Did you bring my slag?" he demanded.

And she had to confess that she had not thought of it; "You didn't tell me you wanted it, dear," she defended herself, nervously.

"Oh, well," said David, "I'm coming home to-morrow, and I'll get it."

"Would you like to come home?" she could not help saying.

"I'd just as lieves," said David.

"Run back," Dr. Lavendar commanded, "and tell the children I'm coming in a minute. Tell Theophilus Bell not to play Indian under the table.

Now, Mrs. Richie, what shall we do? Do you mind coming in and hearing them say their Collect? Or would you rather wait in the study? We shall be through in three-quarters of an hour. David shall bring you some jumbles and apples. I suppose you are going to carry him off?"

Dr. Lavendar said, ruefully.

"Oh," she faltered in a sudden panic, "I will come some other time,"

but somehow or other, before she knew it, she was in the dining-room; very likely it was because she would not loosen the clasp of David's little warm careless hand, and so her reluctant feet followed him in his hurry to admonish Theophilus. When she entered, instant silence fell upon the children. Lydia Wright, stumbling through the catechism to Ellen Dale [Ill.u.s.tration: "Dr. Lavendar," said Helena, "in regard to David."] who held the prayer-book and prompted, let her voice trail off and her mouth remain open at the sight of a visitor; Theophilus Bell rubbed his sleeve over some chalk-marks on the blackboard;--"I am drawing a woman with an umbrella," he had announced, condescendingly; "I saw her coming up the path,"--but when he saw her sitting down by Dr. Lavendar, Theophilus skulked to his seat, and read his Collect ever with unheeding attention.

Then the business of the afternoon began, and Helena sat and listened to it. It was a scene which had repeated itself for two generations in Old Chester; the fathers and mothers of these little people had sat on these same narrow benches without backs, and looked at the blackboard where Dr. Lavendar wrote out the divisions of the Collect, and then looked at the sideboard, where stood a dish of apples and another of jumbles. They, too, had said their catechism, announcing, in singsong chorus that they heartily thanked their Heavenly Father that He had called them to this state of salvation; and Dr. Lavendar had asked one or another of them, as he now asked their children, "What meanest thou by this word Sacrament?" "What is the inward and spiritual grace?"

That afternoon, when he swooped down on David, Helen squeezed her hands together with anxiety; did he know what was the inward and spiritual grace? Could he say it? She held her breath until he had sailed triumphantly through:

_"A death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness,"_ and so on. When he had finished, she looked proudly at Dr. Lavendar, who, to her astonishment, did not bestow a single word of praise!

"And yet," said Helena to herself, "he said it better than any of them, and he is the youngest!--David said it very well, didn't he?"

she ventured, in a whisper.

Dr. Lavendar made no answer, but opened a book; on which there was a cheerful shuffling as the children jostled each other in their efforts to kneel down in the s.p.a.ce between the benches; when all was still, Dr. Lavendar repeated the Collect. Helena dropped her face in her hands, and listened:

_"Grant, we beseech Thee, merciful Lord, to Thy faithful people pardon and peace, that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve Thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord."_

_"Amen!"_ said the children, joyfully; and, scrambling to their feet, looked politely at the sideboard. David, who played host on these occasions, made haste to poke the apples at Mrs. Richie, who could not help whispering to him to pull his collar straight; and she even pushed his hair back a little from his forehead. The sense of possession came over her like a wave, and with it a pang of terror that made her lips dry; at that moment she knew the taste of fear in her mouth. When Dr. Lavendar spoke to her, she was unable to reply.

"Well, now, Mrs. Richie," he said, "I expect these little people can eat their apples without us; can't you, chickabiddies?"

"Yes, sir!" said the children, in eager chorus, eying the apples.

"You and I will go into the study for a while," said Dr. Lavendar.

She followed him speechlessly...the time had come.