The Bent Twig Part 21

The pure coldness of the winter night struck sharply and gratefully on her senses after the warmth and indoor odors of the house. She sprang forward along the porch and down the steps, distending her nostrils and filling her lungs again and again. These long deep breaths seemed to her like the renewal of life.

As her foot grated on the gravel of the driveway she heard a stealthy sound back of her, at which her heart leaped up and stood still. The front door of the house had opened very quietly and shut again. She looked over her shoulder fearfully, preparing to race down the road, but seeing only Mrs. Fiske's tall, stooping figure, stopped and turned expectantly. The older woman came down the steps towards the fugitive, apparently unaware of the biting winter wind on her bared shoulders.

Quite at a loss, and suspiciously on her guard, Sylvia waited for her, searching the blurred pale face with impatient inquiry.

"I--I thought I'd walk with you a little ways," said the other, looking down at her guest.

"Oh no! _Don't_!" pleaded Sylvia in despair lest some one notice her hostess' absence. "You'll take a dreadful cold! With no wraps on--_do_ go back! I'm not a bit afraid!"

The other looked at her with a smoldering flush rising through the ashes of her gray face. "It wasn't that--I didn't suppose you'd be afraid--I--I just thought I'd like to go a ways with you,"

she repeated, bringing out the words confusedly and with obvious difficulty. "_I_ won't make you late," she added, as if guessing the girl's thoughts. She put a thin hand on Sylvia's arm and drew her rapidly along the driveway. For a moment they walked in silence. Then, "How soon will you reach home?" she asked.

"Oh, about a quarter to ten--the Interurban gets into La Chance at nine-fifteen, and it's about half an hour across town on the Washington Street trolley."

"In less than two hours!" cried Mrs. Fiske wildly. "In less than two hours!"

Seeing no cause for wonder in her statement, and not welcoming at all this unsought escort, Sylvia made no answer. There was another silence, and then, looking in the starlight at her companion, the girl saw with consternation that the quiet tears were running down her cheeks. She stopped short, "Oh ... _oh_!" she cried. She caught up the other's hand in a bewildered surprise. She had not the faintest idea what could cause her hostess' emotion. She was horribly afraid she would lose the trolley. Her face painted vividly her agitation and her impatience.

Mrs. Fiske drew back her hand and wiped her eyes with her palm. "Well, I must be going back," she said. She looked dimly at the girl's face, and suddenly threw her arms about Sylvia's neck, clinging to her. She murmured incoherent words, the only ones which Sylvia could make out being, "I can't--I can't--I _can't!_"

What it was she could not do, remained an impenetrable mystery to Sylvia, for at that moment she turned away quickly, and went back up the driveway, her face in her hands. Sylvia hesitated, penetrated, in spite of her absorption in her own affairs, by a vague pity, but hearing in the distance the clang of the trolley-car's bell, she herself turned and ran desperately down the driveway. She reached the public road just in time to stop the heavy car, and to swing herself lightly on, to all appearances merely a rather unusually well-set-up, fashionably dressed young lady, presenting to the heterogeneous indifference of the other pa.s.sengers in the car even a more ostentatiously abstracted air than is the accepted att.i.tude for young ladies traveling alone. One or two of her fellow voyagers wondered at the deep flush on her face, but forgot it the next moment. It was a stain which was not entirely to fade from Sylvia's face and body for many days to come.

CHAPTER XX

"BLOW, WIND; SWELL, BILLOW; AND SWIM, BARK!"

She reached home, as she had thought, before ten o'clock, her unexpected arrival occasioning the usual flurry of exclamation and question not to be suppressed even by the most self-contained family with a fixed desire to let its members alone, and a firm tradition of not interfering in their private affairs. Judith had come home before her father and now looked up from her game of checkers with wondering eyes. Sylvia explained that she was not sick, and that nothing had happened to break up or disturb the house-party. "I just _felt_ like coming home, that's all!" she said irritably, touched on the raw by the friendly loving eyes and voices about her. She was glad at least that her father was not at home. That was one less to look at her.

"Well, get along to bed with you!" said her mother, in answer to her impatient explanation. "And, you children--keep still! Don't bother her!"

Sylvia crept upstairs into the whiteness of her own slant-ceilinged room, and without lighting a lamp sat down on the bed. Her knees shook under her. She made no move to take off her furs or hat. She felt no emotion, only a leaden fatigue and lameness as though she had been beaten. Her mother, coming in five minutes later with a lighted lamp and a cup of hot chocolate, made no comment at finding her still sitting, fully dressed in the dark. She set the lamp down, and with swift deftness slipped out hatpins, unhooked furs, unb.u.t.toned and unlaced and loosened, until Sylvia woke from her lethargy and quickly completed the process, slipping on her nightgown and getting into bed.

Not a word had been exchanged. Mrs. Marshall brought the cup of hot chocolate and Sylvia drank it as though she were a little girl again.

Her mother kissed her good-night, drew the blankets a little more snugly over her, opened two windows wide, took away the lamp, and shut the door.

Sylvia, warmed and fed by the chocolate, lay stretched at full length in the bed, breathing in the fresh air which rushed across her face from the windows, feeling herself in a white beat.i.tude of safety and peace. Especially did she feel grateful to her mother. "Isn't Mother _great_!" she said to herself. Everything that had pa.s.sed seemed like a confusing dream to her, so dreadful, so terrifying that she was amazed to feel herself, in spite of it, overcome with drowsiness. Now the roles were reversed. It was her brain that was active, racing and shuddering from one frightening mental picture to another, while her body, young, sound, healthful, fell deeper and deeper into torpor, dragging the quivering mind down to healing depths of oblivion. The cold, pure air blew so strongly in her face that she closed her eyes.

When she opened them again the sun was shining.

She started up nervously, still under the influence of a vivid dream--strange.... Then as she blinked and rubbed her eyes she saw her mother standing by the bed, with a pale, composed face.

"It's nine o'clock, Sylvia," she said, "and Mr. Fiske is downstairs, asking to see you. He tells me that you and he are engaged to be married."

Sylvia was instantly wide awake. "Oh no! Oh no!" she said pa.s.sionately. "No, we're not! I won't be! I won't see him!" She looked about her wildly, and added, "I'll write him that--just wait a minute." She sprang out of bed, caught up a pad of paper, and wrote hastily: "It was all a mistake--I don't care for you at all--not a bit! I hope I shall never have to speak to you again." "There," she said, thrusting it into her mother's hands. She stood for a moment, shivering in her thin nightgown in the icy draught, and then jumped back into bed again.

Her mother came back in a few moments, closed the windows, and opened the register. There was not in her silence or in a line of her quiet presence the faintest hint of curiosity about Sylvia's actions.

She had always maintained in theory, and now at this crisis with characteristic firmness of purpose acted upon her theory, that absolutely unforced confidence was the only kind worth having, and that moreover, unless some help was necessary, it might be as well for the younger generation early to acquire the strengthening capacity to keep its own intimate experiences to the privacy of its own soul, and learn to digest them and feed upon them without the dubiously peptonizing aid of blundering adult counsel. Sylvia watched her mother with wondering grat.i.tude. She wasn't going to ask! She was going to let Sylvia shut that ghastly recollection into the dark once for all. She wasn't going by a look or a gesture to force her helplessly responsive child to give, by words, weight and substance to a black, shapeless horror from which Sylvia with a vivid impulse of sanity averted her eyes.

She got out of bed and put her arms around her mother's neck. "Say, Mother, you are _great_!" she said in an unsteady voice. Mrs. Marshall patted her on the back.

"You'd better go and take your bath, and have your breakfast," she said calmly. "Judith and Lawrence have gone skating."

When Sylvia, tingling with the tonic shock of cold water and rough toweling, and rosy in her old blue sailor-suit, came downstairs, she found her mother frying pancakes for her in the kitchen blue with smoke from the hot fat. She was touched, almost shocked by this strange lapse from the tradition of self-help of the house, and said with rough self-accusation: "My goodness! The idea of _your_ waiting on _me_!" She s.n.a.t.c.hed away the handle of the frying-pan and turned the cakes deftly. Then, on a sudden impulse, she spoke to her mother, standing by the sink. "I came back because I found I didn't like Jerry Fiske as much as I thought I did. I found I didn't like him at all,"

she said, her eyes on the frying-pan.

At this announcement her mother's face showed pale, and for an instant tremulous through the smoke. She did not speak until Sylvia lifted the cakes from the pan and piled them on a plate. At this signal of departure into the dining-room she commented, "Well, I won't pretend that I'm not very glad."

Sylvia flushed a little and looked towards her silently. She had a partial, momentary vision of what the past two months must have been to her mother. The tears stood in her eyes. "Say, Mother dear," she said in a quavering voice that tried to be light, "why don't you eat some of these cakes to keep me company? It's 'most ten. You must have had breakfast three hours ago. It'd be fun! I can't begin to eat all these."

"Well, I don't care if I do," answered Mrs. Marshall. Sylvia laughed at the turn of her phrase and went into the dining-room. Mrs. Marshall followed in a moment with a cup of hot chocolate and b.u.t.tered toast.

Sylvia pulled her down and kissed her. "You'd prescribe hot chocolate for anything from getting religion to a broken leg!" she said, laughing. Her voice shook and her laugh ended in a half-sob.

"No--oh no!" returned her mother quaintly. "Sometimes hot milk is better. Here, where is my share of those cakes?" She helped herself, went around the table, and sat down. "Cousin Parnelia was here this morning," she went on. "Poor old idiot, she was certain that planchette would tell who it was that stole our chickens. I told her to go ahead--but planchette wouldn't write. Cousin Parnelia laid it to the blighting atmosphere of skepticism of this house."

Sylvia laughed again. Alone in the quiet house with her mother, refreshed by sleep, aroused by her bath, safe, sheltered, secure, she tried desperately not to think of the events of the day before. But in spite of herself they came back to her in jagged flashes--above all, the handsome blond face darkened by pa.s.sion. She shivered repeatedly, her voice was quite beyond her control, and once or twice her hands trembled so that she laid down her knife and fork. She was silent and talkative by turns--a phenomenon of which Mrs. Marshall took no outward notice, although when the meal was finished she sent her daughter out into the piercing December air with the command to walk six miles before coming in. Sylvia recoiled at the prospect of solitude. "Oh, I'd rather go and skate with Judy and Larry!" she cried.

"Well, if you skate hard enough," her mother conceded.

The day after her return Sylvia had a long letter from Jermain Fiske, a letter half apologetic, half aggrieved, pa.s.sionately incredulous of the seriousness of the break between them, and wholly unreconciled to it. The upshot of his missive was that he was sorry if he had done anything to offend her, but might he be everlastingly confounded if he thought she had the slightest ground for complaint! Everything had been going on so swimmingly--his father had taken the greatest notion to her--had said (the very evening she'd cut and run that queer way) that if he married that rippingly pretty Marshall girl he could have the house and estate at Mercerton and enough to run it on, and could practise as much or as little law as he pleased and go at once into politics--and now she had gone and acted so--what in the world was the matter with her--weren't they engaged to be married--couldn't an engaged man kiss his girl--had he ever been anything but too polite for words to her before she had promised to marry him--and what _about_ that promise anyhow? His father had picked out the prettiest little mare in the stables to give her when the engagement should be announced--the Colonel was as much at a loss as he to make her out--if the trouble was that she didn't want to live in Mercerton, he was sure the Colonel would fix it up for them to go direct to Washington, where with his father's connection she could imagine what an opening they'd have! And above all he was crazy about her--he really was! He'd never had any idea what it was to be in love before--he hadn't slept a wink the night she'd gone away--just tossed on his bed and thought of her and longed to have her in his arms again--Sylvia suddenly tore the letter in two and cast it into the fire, breathing hard. In answer she wrote, "It makes me sick to think of you!"

She could not endure the idea of "talking over" the experience with any one, and struggled to keep it out of her mind, but her resolution to keep silence was broken by Mrs. Draper, who was informed, presumably by Jermain himself, of the circ.u.mstances, and encountering Sylvia in the street waited for no invitation to confidence by the girl, but pounced upon her with laughing reproach and insidiously friendly ridicule. Sylvia, helpless before the graceful a.s.surance of her friend, heard that she was a silly little unawakened schoolgirl who was throwing away a brilliantly happy and successful life for the queerest and funniest of ignorant notions. "What did you suppose, you baby? You wouldn't have him marry you unless he was in love with you, would you? Why do you suppose a man _wants_ to marry a woman? Did you suppose that men in love carry their sweethearts around wrapped in cotton-wool? You're a woman now, you ought to welcome life--rich, full-blooded life--not take this chilly, suspicious att.i.tude toward it! Why, Sylvia, I thought you were a big, splendid, vital, fearless modern girl--and here you are acting like a little, thin-blooded New England old maid. How can you blame Jerry? He was engaged to you. What do you think marriage _is_? Oh, Sylvia, just think what your life would be in Washington with your beauty and charm!"

This dexterously aimed attack penetrated Sylvia's armor at a dozen joints. She winced visibly, and hung her head, considering profoundly.

She found that she had nothing to oppose to the other's arguments.

Mrs. Draper walked beside her in a silence as dexterous as her exhortation, her hand affectionately thrust through Sylvia's arm.

Finally, Sylvia's ponderings continuing so long that they were approaching the Marshall house, in sight of which she had no mind to appear, she gave Sylvia's arm a little pat, and stood still. She said cheerfully, in a tone which seemed to minimize the whole affair into the smallest of pa.s.sing incidents: "Now, you queer darling, don't stand so in your own light! A word would bring Jerry back to you now--but I won't say it will always. I don't suppose you've ever considered, in your young selfishness, how cruelly you have hurt his feelings! He was awfully sore when I saw him. And Eleanor Hubert is right on the spot with Mamma Hubert in the background to push."

Sylvia broke her silence to say in a low tone, blushing scarlet, "He was--_horrid_!"

Mrs. Draper dropped her light tone and said earnestly: "Dear little ignorant Sylvia--you don't recognize life when you see it. That's the way men are--all men--and there's no use thinking it horrid unless you're going into a convent. It's not so bad either,--once you get the hang of managing it--it's a hold on them. It's a force, like any other force of nature that you can either rebel against, or turn to your account and make serviceable, if you'll only accept it and not try to quarrel with water for running downhill. As long as she herself isn't carried away by it, it's a weapon in the hand of a clever woman. Only the stupid women get hurt by it--the silly ones who can't keep their heads. And after all, my dear, it _is_ a force of nature--and you're too intelligent not to know that there's no use fighting against that.

It's just idiotic and puritanic to revolt from it--and doesn't do any good besides!" She looked keenly into Sylvia's downcast, troubled face, and judged it a propitious moment for leaving her. "_Good_-bye, darling," she said, with a final pat on the shoulder.

Sylvia walked slowly into the house, her heart like lead. Her food had no savor to her. She did not know what she was eating, nor what her mother, the only one at home for lunch, was saying to her. As a matter of fact Mrs. Marshall said very little, even less than was her custom.

Her face had the look of terrible, patient endurance it had worn during the time when Lawrence had had pneumonia, and his life had hung in the balance for two days; but she went quietly about her usual household tasks.

After the meal was over, Sylvia continued to sit alone at the table, staring palely down at the tablecloth, her mind full of Mrs. Draper's illuminating comments on life, which had gone through her entire system like a dexterously administered drug. And yet that ingenious lady would have been surprised to know how entirely her attack had failed in the one point which seemed to her important, the possibility of a reconciliation between Sylvia and Jermain. The girl was deeply under the impression made by the philosophy of the older woman; she did not for the moment dream of denying its truth; but she stood granite in a perfectly illogical denial of its implications in her own case. She did not consciously revolt against the suggestion that she renew her relations to Jerry Fiske, because with a united action of all her faculties she refused utterly to consider it for an instant.

She would no more have been persuaded to see Jerry again, by a consideration of the material advantages to be gained, than she could have been persuaded to throw herself down from the housetop. That much was settled, not by any coherent effort of her brain, but by a co-ordination of every instinct in her, by the action of her whole being, by what her life had made her.

But that certainty brought her small comfort in the blackness of the hour. What hideous world was this in which she had walked unawares until now! Mrs. Draper's jaunty, bright acceptance of it affected her to moral nausea. All the well-chosen words of her sophisticated friend were imbedded in the tissue of her brain like grains of sand in an eyeball. She could not see for very pain. And yet her inward vision was lurid with the beginning of understanding of the meaning of those words, lighted up as they were by her experience of the day before, now swollen in her distraught mind to the proportions of a nightmare: "It's a weapon in the hand of a clever woman--it's not so bad once you get the hang of managing it--it's a hold on men--" Sylvia turned whiter and whiter at the glimpse she had had of what was meant by Mrs. Draper's lightly evasive "it"; a comprehension of which all her "advanced" reading and study had left her mind as blankly ignorant as a little child's. Now it was vain to try to shut her thoughts away from Jermain. She lived over and over the scene with him, she endured with desperate pa.s.sivity the recollection of his burning lips on her bosom, his fingers pressing into her side. Why not, if every man was like that as soon as he dared? Why not, if that was all that men wanted of women? Why not, if that was the sole ghastly reality which underlay the pretty-smooth surface of life?

And beyond this bleak prospect, which filled her with dreary horror, there rose glimpsed vistas which sent the shamed blood up to her face in a flood--if every man was like that, why, so were the men she had known and loved and trusted; old Reinhardt, who seemed so simple, what had been his thoughts when he used years ago to take her on his knee--what were his thoughts now when he bent over her to correct her mistakes on the piano?

The expression of Colonel Fiske's eyes, as he had complimented her, brought her to her feet with a shudder--but Colonel Fiske was an old, old man--as old as Professor Kennedy--

Why, perhaps Professor Kennedy--perhaps--she flung out her arms--perhaps her father--