The Torch Bearer Part 2

"Ted has got a secret--secret--secret!

Like a little gir-rul--gir-rul--gir-rul!"

And hearing himself thus effeminized, Ted winced and wondered if he had not better have asked her after all.

Sheila came up to him with a troubled face. The feud between him and Charlotte always hurt and bewildered her. "You've made Charlotte feel bad," she chided reproachfully.

But with Charlotte's taunt still ringing in his ears, Ted was ruthless: "Fiddlesticks! If she feels bad about that, she's silly. And I can't tell secrets to silly girls."

Sheila was sorry for Charlotte, but she began to feel vaguely flattered on her own account: "What's the secret?"

"I know a place--just a little way back yonder--that's _fat_ with nuts!"

Sheila looked disappointed. It seemed, at this hour, rather a poor secret. But Ted, still with the air of honoring her above all others of her s.e.x, went on: "I'm going back and get some. And"--this impressively--"I'm going to let you come with me!"

Sheila brightened at the magnanimous offer, but a moment later grew uneasy: "Grandmother would be scared if I didn't come home with the others."

"How'd she find it out? Your house is farthest. She won't see the rest of 'em."

"But--but when I tell her--" said Sheila uneasily.

"You _needn't_ tell her! Don't you understand? She'll never know you _didn't_ come home with the others!"

Ted had a scrupulous personal honor, a pride, as it were, in his integrity. He told the truth about his own transgressions and paid the piper without complaint. But for others his truth was sometimes equivocal, his morality comfortably lax. And these lapses from grace on his part always filled Sheila with a shocked dismay.

"Oh," she protested, "I couldn't do that! Why, it would be _lying_!"

"Fiddlesticks! Where's the lie? You wouldn't _tell_ one!"

"It _would_ be a lie," persisted Sheila. "It would be a lie if I let her think what wasn't so."

"Fiddlesticks!" he p.r.o.nounced again. But he looked at her approvingly, nevertheless. Sheila was always "square," and he liked her the better for it. "Well, you go along with Charlotte, then," he added regretfully.

But he had tempted her more successfully than he knew, and her mind was busily working toward some compromise with her conscience. She cast an eye in the direction Charlotte had taken, and that glance decided her.

"Charlotte's out of sight," she said. "I--I believe I'll stay, Ted--_but I'll tell when I get home_!"

It was late afternoon when they did at last start homeward--with baskets as full as Ted had predicted. Going through the bright-hued woods, where the scarlet and burnished yellow of long-lived leaves still flaunted ribbons of flame and the dead and dun-colored broke crisply beneath their feet, they fell amicably silent, trudging briskly along with the impetus of health and hunger. Ted's silence was the content of a body drenched all day in sunshine and clean, cold air, and now deliciously placid; but Sheila's quiet was of a different quality.

For her the woods were full of mysteries and miracles; she was sure that little people, as quick and elusive as shadows, darted hither and thither at her very feet, and that enchantment was spread there like a fine-spun web. As she walked onward, brooding over things unseen and yet so surely true for her, there recurred to her a dream of the night before, and so vivid was her remembrance of it that she seemed to be dreaming a second time.

In the dream, oddly enough, she had been walking through these same woods. Here and there she had seen a bright leaf blowing; she had heard her own footsteps on the brittle leaves beneath; a slender shaft of sunlight--the last of the day--had stolen downward and touched her like a long finger. Then, suddenly, the golden finger had withdrawn and the dusk had fallen, not gradually, but in swift, downward billows of mist that flooded upon her and blinded her. She had closed her eyes against them for a moment, and when she opened them again, the mist had disappeared, leaving her in a s.p.a.ce of clear gray light. Through this light some one had come toward her, a shape at first vague and ethereal, as if it were a lingering spirit of the mist, but gathering substance and definite outline as it advanced until it became the figure of a woman with arms that reached toward her for embrace.

Involuntarily Sheila's own arms had reached forth in answer; she had taken a stumbling step forward; through the pale light there had glimmered on her, for an instant of revelation, the shadow's face.

_And she had wakened with the cry: "Mother!"_

A strange dream, especially for a little girl whose mother had died soon after her birth. But that dead mother had always been a dear familiar of Sheila's thoughts; her picture had been like a living companion. And though the sleeping vision of her had driven the child, startled to the very soul, to her grandmother's bed, now, as she trod the woods that had been the scene of the dream-miracle, she remembered it without fear.

"What if, after all, dreams sometimes came true?" The thought quickened her breath, but not her feet. In the night she had fled from a dream too poignant, but now she felt no impulse for flight. Rather, she delayed her steps, thrilling as she recognized about her the dream's landmarks.

For now there arose before Sheila's dazed eyes that rare and marvellous phenomenon of a dream reproduced, at least in its physical aspects, by reality. And in such an experience, given perhaps to one in a thousand, it is the reality that seems to tremble--threatened by some older and stronger truth--beneath one's feet. So it trembled now for Sheila as she saw again those features in the face of the woods that had impressed her sleep.

Here were the few rich leaves, fluttering lightly in the evening wind as they had fluttered in her dreaming vision of them! And now her heart fluttered with them, so much stranger than the dream itself was its incredible repet.i.tion.

There--just ahead--yes, surely! there was the same long finger of pale sunlight striking downward through the stripped trees! Presently she would pa.s.s beneath its touch, feeling it faintly warm upon her cheek--as she had felt it in her dream!

Afterwards would be the dusk. And then--_what if dreams came true_?

She was not afraid, but instinctively she drew nearer the boy beside her. "Ted," she breathed, in an awed whisper.

"Huh?" he asked, roused from his own silent well-being.

But she did not answer, and he strode cheerfully on without troubling himself to question her again. "What if dreams come true?" she was saying within herself, but she could not, after all, put the thought into words for Ted to scoff at.

And then, before she reached it, the finger of sunlight vanished and the dusk was upon her, not swiftly billowing, but slipping softly downward like a silken veil. She was not afraid, she told herself, but the dusk chilled her and she shivered.

After the dusk--if dreams came true!--would be-- And then her heart seemed to stop its beating. For dim in the distance, but coming toward her through the trees, there walked a shadow. And even while she watched, it gathered shape and substance unto itself; it ceased to be a floating fragment of mist and became a woman!

But now Sheila's heart began to beat again--riotously. Her hesitations, her unacknowledged fears, were succeeded by a sense of exquisite exultation. The miracle was at hand--and she rushed upon it.

"Ted!" It was not a whisper this time, but a cry, and the boy turned sharply. But Sheila had already started forward, calling wildly: "_Mother! Mother! Mother!_"

And though the woman was still but a distant figure, she heard that piercing call and answered it with one as clear and pa.s.sionate:

"_My little girl! I'm coming! I'm coming!_"

For an instant Ted stood motionless, struck to the earth by that simple horror of the unusual, the abnormal, which the very sane and unimaginative always feel. Then, with a single bound, he overtook Sheila and laid a detaining hand on her shoulder: "Sheila, _stop_!

It's Crazy Lisbeth! I know her voice!"

He was right. The advancing figure was not the beautiful mother-spirit of Sheila's dream, but a flesh and blood mother who, years before, had lost her husband and only child, and become crazed by her grief. Ever since then her heart had been wandering on a piteous quest for her dead, and her wits with it. And because she was very poor and quite harmless, suffering only the illusion that she would sooner or later find her husband and little daughter, the town was kind to her; set her to work when she would; fed her when she would not work; and left her free for her sad and futile search.

Sheila and Ted knew her well and no fear of her had ever touched them before, but now, as she came onward with her insanity strong upon her, both terror and repugnance seized on Ted.

"She thinks you're her child," he said angrily. "And no wonder! What made you do such a thing?"

Sheila turned to him with her explanation on her lips--the whole confession of her dream and her momentary belief that it had come true--but at sight of him looking at her so protectingly and yet so severely, her impetuous words faltered and grew cold.

"I--I was thinking of my mother," she stammered shyly.

The unexpected reply embarra.s.sed him. He wanted to scold her, but at this mention of her dead mother he could not. So he only dug his foot into the ground and gazed toward Lisbeth, who was now almost upon them, stumbling in her happy haste.

"We can't run away from her," said Sheila.

"She thinks you're her child!" he protested again, but less harshly.

"Yes," admitted Sheila gently, "like I thought she--" And then, at some sudden counsel of her heart, she exclaimed: "You stay here. I'll know what to do!"

It seemed to Ted an unbelievable thing that he saw happen before him then. For Sheila stepped quickly forward to meet the hurrying, pitiful creature who sought her; stepped forward and straight into the woman's arms. As he stared, a shudder of disgust shook Ted from head to foot.

"It's horrible!" he muttered to himself. "It's horrible for Sheila to let Crazy Lisbeth hug her!" But he could not go and draw Sheila away.

His repulsion would not permit him to approach the spectacle that excited it.