Part 16 (1/2)
”Wait!” she said, following him across the threshold. ”How did that happen? I thought you were going to wait while those men filled the--the--” She paused, but moved nearer him insistently.
”I did wait. Miss Vertrees was there,” he said, reluctantly. ”She had walked away for a while and didn't notice that the carriages were leaving. When she came back the coupe waiting for me was the only one left.”
Sibyl regarded him with dilating eyes. She spoke with a slow breathlessness. ”And she drove home from Jim's funeral--with you!”
Without warning she burst into laughter, clapped her hand ineffectually over her mouth, and ran back uproariously into the house, hurling the door shut behind her.
CHAPTER XIII
Bibbs went home pondering. He did not understand why Sibyl had laughed.
The laughter itself had been spontaneous and beyond suspicion, but it seemed to him that she had only affected the effort to suppress it and that she wished it to be significant. Significant of what? And why had she wished to impress upon him the fact of her overwhelming amus.e.m.e.nt?
He found no answer, but she had succeeded in disturbing him, and he wished that he had not encountered her.
At home, uncles, aunts, and cousins from out of town were wandering about the house, several mournfully admiring the ”Bay of Naples,” and others occupied with the Moor and the plumbing, while they waited for trains. Edith and her mother had retired to some upper fastness, but Bibbs interviewed Jackson and had the various groups of relatives summoned to the dining-room for food. One great-uncle, old Gideon Sheridan from Boonville, could not be found, and Bibbs went in search of him. He ransacked the house, discovering the missing antique at last by accident. Pa.s.sing his father's closed door on tiptoe, Bibbs heard a murmurous sound, and paused to listen. The sound proved to be a quavering and rickety voice, monotonously bleating:
”The Lo-ord givuth and the Lo-ord takuth away! We got to remember that; we got to remember that! I'm a-gittin' along, James; I'm a-gittin'
along, and I've seen a-many of 'em go--two daughters and a son the Lord give me, and He has taken all away. For the Lo-ord givuth and the Lo-ord takuth away! Remember the words of Bildad the Shuhite, James. Bildad the Shuhite says, 'He shall have neither son nor nephew among his people, nor any remaining in his dwellings.' Bildad the Shuhite--”
Bibbs opened the door softly. His father was lying upon the bed, in his underclothes, face downward, and Uncle Gideon sat near by, swinging backward and forward in a rocking-chair, stroking his long white beard and gazing at the ceiling as he talked. Bibbs beckoned him urgently, but Uncle Gideon paid no attention.
”Bildad the Shuhite spake and his says, 'If thy children have sinned against Him and He have cast them away--'”
There was a m.u.f.fled explosion beneath the floor, and the windows rattled. The figure lying face downward on the bed did not move, but Uncle Gideon leaped from his chair. ”My G.o.d!” he cried. ”What's that?”
There came a second explosion, and Uncle Gideon ran out into the hall.
Bibbs went to the head of the great staircase, and, looking down, discovered the source of the disturbance. Gideon's grandson, a boy of fourteen, had brought his camera to the funeral and was taking ”flash-lights” of the Moor. Uncle Gideon, rea.s.sured by Bibbs's explanation, would have returned to finish his quotation from Bildad the Shuhite, but Bibbs detained him, and after a little argument persuaded him to descend to the dining-room whither Bibbs followed, after closing the door of his father's room.
He kept his eye on Gideon after dinner, diplomatically preventing several attempts on the part of that comforter to reascend the stairs; and it was a relief to Bibbs when George announced that an automobile was waiting to convey the ancient man and his grandson to their train.
They were the last to leave, and when they had gone Bibbs went sighing to his own room.
He stretched himself wearily upon the bed, but presently rose, went to the window, and looked for a long time at the darkened house where Mary Vertrees lived. Then he opened his trunk, took therefrom a small note-book half filled with fragmentary scribblings, and began to write:
Laughter after a funeral. In this reaction people will laugh at anything and at nothing. The band plays a dirge on the way to the cemetery, but when it turns back, and the mourning carriages are out of hearing, it strikes up, ”Darktown is Out To-night.” That is natural--but there are women whose laughter is like the whirring of whips. Why is it that certain kinds of laughter seem to spoil something hidden away from the laughers? If they do not know of it, and have never seen it, how can their laughter hurt it? Yet it does. Beauty is not out of place among grave-stones. It is not out of place anywhere. But a woman who has been betrothed to a man would not look beautiful at his funeral. A woman might look beautiful, though, at the funeral of a man whom she had known and liked. And in that case, too, she would probably not want to talk if she drove home from the cemetery with his brother: nor would she want the brother to talk. Silence is usually either stupid or timid. But for a man who stammers if he tries to talk fast, and drawls so slowly, when he doesn't stammer, that n.o.body has time to listen to him, silence is advisable. Nevertheless, too much silence is open to suspicion. It may be reticence, or it may be a vacuum.
It may be dignity, or it may be false teeth.
Sometimes an imperceptible odor will become perceptible in a small inclosure, such as a closed carriage. The ghost of gasoline rising from a lady's glove might be sweeter to the man riding beside her than all the scents of Arcady in spring. It depends on the lady-- but there ARE! Three miles may be three hundred miles, or it may be three feet. When it is three feet you have not time to say a great deal before you reach the end of it. Still, it may be that one should begin to speak.
No one could help wis.h.i.+ng to stay in a world that holds some of the people that are in this world. There are some so wonderful you do not understand how the dead COULD die. How could they let themselves? A falling building does not care who falls with it.
It does not choose who shall be upon its roof and who shall not.
Silence CAN be golden? Yes. But perhaps if a woman of the world should find herself by accident sitting beside a man for the length of time it must necessarily take two slow old horses to jog three miles, she might expect that man to say something of some sort!
Even if she thought him a feeble hypochondriac, even if she had heard from others that he was a disappointment to his own people, even if she had seen for herself that he was a useless and irritating enc.u.mbrance everywhere, she might expect him at least to speak--she might expect him to open his mouth and try to make sounds, if he only barked. If he did not even try, but sat every step of the way as dumb as a frozen fish, she might THINK him a frozen fish. And she might be right. She might be right if she thought him about as pleasant a companion as--as Bildad the Shuhite!
Bibbs closed his note-book, replacing it in his trunk. Then, after a period of melancholy contemplation, he undressed, put on a dressing-gown and slippers, and went softly out into the hall--to his father's door.
Upon the floor was a tray which Bibbs had sent George, earlier in the evening, to place upon a table in Sheridan's room--but the food was untouched. Bibbs stood listening outside the door for several minutes.
There came no sound from within, and he went back to his own room and to bed.
In the morning he woke to a state of being hitherto unknown in his experience. Sometimes in the process of waking there is a little pause--sleep has gone, but coherent thought has not begun. It is a curious half-void, a glimpse of aphasia; and although the person experiencing it may not know for that instant his own name or age or s.e.x, he may be acutely conscious of depression or elation. It is the moment, as we say, before we ”remember”; and for the first time in Bibbs's life it came to him bringing a vague happiness. He woke to a sense of new riches; he had the feeling of a boy waking to a birthday.