The Torch Bearer Part 3

And meanwhile the little girl was murmuring, still in the fold of Lisbeth's arm, words that he could not understand, but that drifted to him with the soft sounds of pleadings and promises.

"Sheila!" he called peremptorily.

She did not reply, but talked on to Lisbeth, interrupted now and then by the latter, but evidently not discouraged in her purpose of persuasion.

"Sheila!" Ted called again, and this time uneasily.

And now she answered, over her shoulder, and with a motion that held him back: "We're going home!"

At that he understood what she was bent upon. She had been coaxing Lisbeth to go home. But why should she concern herself about one who was used to roam the whole countryside at any hour of the day or night, walking unmolested in the desolate safety of her affliction? Why, above all, should Sheila go home _with_ her?

For that, apparently, was what Sheila meant to do. She had already started onward with her self-appointed charge, and though the woods had grown more shadowy, Ted could see the two figures plainly, walking close together and linked by the woman's arm. That arm about Sheila's shoulder--Crazy Lisbeth's arm!--set him shuddering again as violently as the first embrace had done. It was an affront to every fiber of his thoroughly normal being. But still he could not go nearer to remove it; by the law of his own nature he had to stay outside the circle of Lisbeth's madness and Sheila's folly. And his sense of responsibility had, perforce, to appease itself with his following them at a discreet range--a distant and sulking protector.

It seemed to him, as he strode on behind them with irate steps, that they would never get out of the woods. Little woodland sounds, a snapping bough, a breaking leaf, a scurrying squirrel, sounds that he would not ordinarily have noticed, now startled him into fright. The gradual failing of the light oppressed him almost to panic; and when the early twilight settled somberly over the woods, such weird, moving shadows rose up all around him that he would fain have taken to his heels had he not feared what lay before him more.

Crazy Lisbeth scrubbing his mother's kitchen floor was only a harmless "innocent," the pensioner of his condescending pity; but Crazy Lisbeth in the woods at nightfall--Ah, then she became a different and a dreadful creature, one to shake the heart and alarm the nerves of the bravest.

Sheila appeared to think otherwise and to find Lisbeth docile enough, for despite Ted's conviction that the homeward way was interminable, these two went steadily onward and at a fair pace. And after no long interval their attendant knight had the satisfaction of following them from the covert of the woods into the open s.p.a.ces of the town.

Here Ted's alarms left him, abruptly and completely. He could have laughed aloud at the bogies he had escaped. His self-respect came swaggering back, and with it the determination to a.s.sert a belated mastery of Sheila. She was not a block ahead, and now he hailed her.

But as she had done in the woods, she merely called to him over her shoulder: "We're going home!"

Crazy Lisbeth lived on the other side of the town, in a mean little cottage that more fortunate householders had deserted. It was a long walk there and the hour was already late, seven at the least. A vision of Mrs. Caldwell watching for Sheila flashed across Ted's mind and strengthened his resistance against this further perversity.

"You must go with me right away!" he exclaimed, hastening after Sheila.

"Your grandmother'll be scared to death!"

"Oh," cried Sheila, stopping now, but with her hand still resolutely gripping Lisbeth's, "Oh, I know it, Ted! But I can't help it!" And though her tone was sharp with distress, she turned obstinately on.

There was nothing for him but to follow her to the end of her adventure. Ted knew it from experience. Sheila in one of her moods, obsessed by some "queer notion," was immovable, though sweetly reasonable at all other times. So with a bad grace he went on in her wake, beset now, not by fear, but by keen resentment of the whole absurd situation.

Thus they came at last, the ill-a.s.sorted trio, to Lisbeth's cottage, sitting lonely and unlit by lamp or fire upon a bare hillside. Sheila and Lisbeth paused, and Ted stopped, too, still a few yards from them, but expectant of some further freak and ready to spring forward with a rebuke that would end the mad episode on the spot. But just then the moon swung slowly out from some prisoning cloud, flooding the hillside with light, and as Ted saw Lisbeth's face, he forgot his intention of remonstrance and could but stand and gaze.

For a moment he thought that the woman before him could not be Crazy Lisbeth at all, and then he thought that the moonlight tricked him.

But of one thing he was sure; be the cause what it might, he saw a Lisbeth magically and beautifully changed. Foolish and pathetic and middle-aged she had been only yesterday, but to-night love and joy had had their way with her for a little while and had transformed her almost into youth and comeliness again. Unconscious of Ted's watchful and hostile presence, as she had been from the first, she turned to Sheila with a simple and moving tenderness:

"Come," she said, opening her gate.

But Sheila stood motionless, her face soft with a pity that could no longer protect.

"Come," urged Lisbeth, "come, darling precious! This is home!"

But Sheila did not stir. "I--I can't," she answered gently.

"You can't? _You can't_? Oh, it's been a dream!--a dream!--a dream!

You're not real--you're never real! I see you--and see you--and see you! _But when I reach you, you're not real--not real_! I believed it was different this time--but it's always the same! _You're not real_!"

And with that despairing cry, the Lisbeth whom Ted knew so well stood there before him again, old and foolish and piteous, whimpering softly and plucking at her ragged dress.

Sheila put her hand on the bent shoulder--bent to its long burden. "I _am_ real," said the child in a clear, steadfast voice that somehow, penetrated Lisbeth's sad whimsies, "I _am_ real!--and I'll come back!"

"You'll come back?" And Lisbeth ceased her whimpering and laid pleading hold on her. "You'll come back? I don't believe you're real now--I _can't_ believe it any more! But I don't mind that if you'll come back anyway. You will? You promise?"

"I promise," answered Sheila. "If you are good--if you go straight into the house--I'll come back."

Lisbeth looked at her for an instant with an odd shrewdness in her poor foolish face. Then she nodded, evidently satisfied with what she saw.

"I'll be good," she agreed. "I'll go in. Oh, my pretty darling! My dearest precious! Lisbeth will be good!" And after a quick clasping of Sheila, she went obediently into the mean little house and, without even a backward glance, closed the door behind her.

Sheila stepped toward Ted. "I'll go home now," she said wearily. Then she added, as if she were stretching out a wistful hand to his sympathy: "Oh, Ted, she thought--until the last--that I was her little girl!"

"Yes," he said, all his resentment returning, "and you let her! You _let_ her, Sheila! How could you do such a thing?"

"But it comforted her. It comforted her to think so, Ted."

"She wasn't comforted when she thought you weren't real!"

"Yes, she was--even then. She was when I promised to come back."

"You can't keep your promise."

"Why can't I?"

"Your grandmother won't let you. You know that as well as I do.

'Tisn't your place to comfort Crazy Lisbeth, and Mrs. Caldwell will tell you so. Her troubles aren't any of your business."

"They are!" cried Sheila, with an anger now that matched his own, "they are--because I understand how she feels! I haven't any mother--and Lisbeth hasn't any child. Don't you see that it's just the same for both of us? And _her_ little girl may be comforting _my_ mother up in heaven right now!"

"And she may _not_!" he retorted,

"I believe it!" she proclaimed, carried away by the imaginary scene she had evoked.

"Well," said Ted, with his most exasperating tone of superior intelligence, "_I_ don't!"

She glanced up at him as he trudged beside her, his face firm with his substantial beliefs, his feet st.u.r.dily treading a very solid earth.

And though she was only a little girl, unlearned in the finger-posts of character, Sheila felt what she could not name nor a.n.a.lyze. She remembered that she had almost told him her dream, and she shivered at the thought.

"No," she remarked ruefully, "you don't believe anything that you can't _see_, do you, Ted?"

"I don't believe lies!" he replied crisply, "not even when I tell 'em myself."

"_Lies_?" she repeated in astonishment.

He stopped and faced her. "Look here! You said you couldn't let your grandmother think you came home with the rest of 'em when you didn't because that would be lying."

"Yes," agreed Sheila with conviction.

"But you let Lisbeth think what wasn't so!"