Part 58 (1/2)

”It was more strange than I dare tell you, mother dear,” Lois added to the letter of details which she wrote at odd minutes during the day, ”that that poor old man should have broken down just at our door. There was a kind of fatality in it, as if he had come to throw himself at our feet. The son would have gone on if his father had been able to drag himself another yard; but he wasn't. It was all we could do to get him up the portico steps and into the nearest seat.

”I wonder if you remember him--old Mr. Fay? If so, you wouldn't know him now. I can only compare him to a tree that's been attacked at the roots and shrivels and dries in a season. He seems to have pa.s.sed from sixty to ninety in the course of a few months, as if the very principle of life had failed him. It would be pitiful if it wasn't worse. I mean that we're afraid it may be worse, though that is a matter which as yet I mustn't write about.

”The son puzzles me--or rather he would if there were not something in him like all the other Fays, desperate and yet attractive, appealing and yet hostile. He looks like his sister, which means that he's handsome, with those extraordinary eyes of the shade of the paler kinds of jade, and a ”finish” to the features quite unusual in a man. The prison shows in his pallor, in his cropped hair, and in something furtive in the glance which, Thor says, will probably pa.s.s as he gets used again to freedom. I remember that Dr. Hilary once said of him that he's the stuff out of which they make revolutionaries and anarchists. In that case I should think he might be a valuable addition to the cause, for, as with Rosie, there's a quality in him that wins you at the very moment when you're most repelled. He makes you sorry for him. We're sorry for them all. Even now, with poor Claude lying there, we've no other feeling than that. We've had enough of retaliations and revenges. Nothing could prove their uselessness more thoroughly than what happened here last night. If we could let everything rest where it is, leaving the crime to be its own punishment, G.o.d knows we would do it gladly.”

Later in the day she continued: ”I wish you could have seen the meeting between Thor and that poor fellow who has just come out of jail. Thor was superb--so gentle and kind and tender, and all with an air that tragic sorrow has made n.o.ble. There are things I cannot tell you about him--that Thor must tell to his father if they're ever told at all--but this I can say even now, that if any good is to come out of all this it will be through Thor more than any one. He doesn't see his way as yet, but he'll find it. He'll find it by the same impulse that made him march up to Matt Fay, putting his hand on his shoulder and looking him in the eyes with a simple, man-to-man sympathy which no one could resist. The very fact that Thor feels so deeply that he's been to blame--very, very much to blame--gives intensity now to his kindness. As for Matt Fay, he colored and stammered and shuffled, and though he tried to maintain his bravado, it was without much success. He was still more embarra.s.sed when, after the old man had finished his coffee and was able to move again, Thor ordered Sims to bring round the car and drive the two of them home. We said nothing to them about Claude. I couldn't have borne its being mentioned to them here--or to have been obliged to watch the effect. It would be like having to look on at a vivisection. There are things I don't want to see or to know. All that is really imperative is that, whatever the outcome, they should consider us their friends.”

The letter was not finished till she was alone that night. She wrote carefully at first, choosing just the right words. ”Thor is sleeping at the other house, and may continue to do so for some time. He seems to want to be there--as you can understand. Not only does he make it more bearable for Uncle Sim and Cousin Amy, but he gets a kind of a.s.suagement to his grief in being near Claude. You needn't be surprised, therefore, if he remains a little longer--perhaps longer than you might expect.”

Up to this point she had been cautious, but for a minute something less controlled escaped her. ”Oh, mother darling, I want to be a good wife to Thor, as you've been a good wife to papa. He needs me, and yet in his inmost heart he's bearing this great trial alone. Don't misunderstand me. I haven't broken down. Perhaps if I could have broken down a little it would have brought me nearer to him. But I'm not near to him. There's the truth. I'm infinitely far away from him. In a sense I'm infinitely below him; for though I've been right in certain matters in which he has been wrong, I feel strangely his inferior. He has things on his conscience for which I know he finds it hard to see the way of repentance--and I have nothing on mine--nothing, that is, but a vague discomfort and a sense of not being wholly right--and yet I feel that he's--how shall I put it?--that he's the nearer to G.o.d of us two. He needs me, and I ought to help him; but it's like helping some one who's on a tower while I stay on the ground. Oh, mother darling, why can't I be to him what you've been to papa? What is it that men get from women which _saves_ them? Thor needs saving just as much as other men, though you mightn't suppose so. I know you think him perfect, and I used to think the same; but he's not. He has faults--grave ones. I even know that he's weak where I'm strong, and that the thing he needs is the thing I can supply--only I don't supply it. Mother dear, you've given it to papa or he wouldn't be recovering as he is. Why can't I give it, too?

He's there in that house, and I'm here in this. His heart is aching for grief, and mine because I don't know how to comfort him--and all because the glimmer of light that leads me on isn't strong enough. It's better than nothing; I don't deny that. I can grope my way by it when I might expect to be utterly bewildered--but, oh, mother dear, it's not love.”

But having read this page in the morning, she suppressed and destroyed it. After the night's rest she was more sure of herself. Since she had any clue at all she felt it wise to possess her soul in patience and see to what issue it would lead her. For the pa.s.sages she withdrew she subst.i.tuted, therefore, such an account of Rosie as would put her mother in touch with that portion of Claude's life.

”It's hard to know how the little thing feels just now,” she went on, when the main facts had been given, ”because she's so stunned by dread.

It's the same dread that oppresses us all, but which is so much more terrible for them. For poor little Rosie the things that have happened are secondary now to what may happen still. _That_ almost blots Claude out of her mind. Luckily she has a great deal of pluck--of what in our old-fas.h.i.+oned New England phrase was called grit. That she'll win in the end, and come out at last to a kind of happiness, I haven't the least doubt, especially as she has that fine fellow, Jim Breen, to turn to.

You remember him, don't you? It's touching to see his tenderness to Rosie, now that she has such a need of him. It's the more touching because she doesn't give him anything but the most indirect encouragement. He knows perfectly well that whatever he gets from her now will be only her second best, but he's grateful even for that.

”She came to me yesterday morning of her own accord, before I could get word to her. William Sweetapple had heard the news and told her as he pa.s.sed the house where they have just gone to live in Susan Street.

Rosie had been early to the door to take in the milk, and Sweetapple was going by. She flew here at once. I had expected her to be crushed--but she wasn't. As I've just said, she seemed to be looking forward rather than looking back. She was looking forward to what I've hinted at and dare not say, and setting her face as a flint. That is how I can best describe her--and yet it was as a flint with a wonderful s.h.i.+ne on it, as if something had come to her in the way of inner illumination that used not to be in her at all. Jim Breen is fond of saying that this is not the Rosie of a year or two ago, and it isn't. It's not even the Rosie of the episode with Claude. Her face is now like a lighted lamp as compared with the time when it was blank. I'm not enough in her confidence to know exactly what has wrought the change, so that I can only guess. It seems to me the same thing that has given the mother a new view of life, only that Rosie has probably come to it by another way. They're strangely alike, those two--each so tense, so strong, so demanding, each broken on the wheel, and each with that something firm and fine in the grain to which the wheel can do no more than impart a higher _patina_ of polis.h.i.+ng. They seem to me to bring down into our rather sugary life some of the old, narrow, splendidly austere New England qualities that have almost pa.s.sed away and to make them bloom--bloom, that is, as the portulacca blooms, in a parched soil where any other plant would bake, and yet with an almost painfully vivid brilliancy. Doesn't George Meredith say in one of his books--is it _The Egoist_?--that the light of the soul should burn upward? Well, that's what it seems to do in them--to burn upward with a persistent glow, in spite of conditions that might reasonably put it out.”

”The old man is a mystery to me,” she wrote later, ”chiefly because it is so impossible to connect him with any of the things we fear. He seemed so small and shrunken and harmless as he sat on the portico yesterday morning, drinking his coffee and munching a slice of toast, that he appealed to me only as something to be taken care of. That sinister element which I've seen in him of late had gone altogether, leaving nothing but his old, faded, dreamy mildness, contented and appeased. That is the really uncanny thing, that he seems _satisfied_.

He showed no fear of us at all, nor the slightest nervousness, not even when Thor came. Thor was startled to see him there at first, but I managed to whisper a word or two in French, so that he went straight up to Fay and shook hands. I was glad of that. It put us in the right att.i.tude--that of not trying to find a victim or looking for revenge.”

Before adding her next paragraph she weighed its subject-matter pensively. It was not necessary to her letter; it was nothing her mother was obliged to know. She decided to say it, however, from an instinct resembling that of self-preservation. If her mother were ever to hear anything....

”Thor saw Rosie, too. He was coming down-stairs from taking a bath just as she was in the hall going away. It was the first time he'd seen her since before we were married. He was so lovely to her!--I wish I could tell you! You know he used to be interested in her in the days when her mother was his only patient. It was through him, if you remember, that Rosie and I came to be friends in the first place. He asked me to go and see her, to be nice to her. He feels very strongly that we people of the old, simple American stock should have held together in a way we haven't done, and that we shouldn't have allowed money to dig the abyss between us which I'm afraid is there now. I know that you personally are not interested in ideals of this kind, and yet Thor wouldn't be the Thor you love unless he had them. So he was lovely with Rosie, holding her hand, and looking down at her with those kind eyes of his, and begging her, whatever happened--_whatever happened_, mind you!--to throw everything on him in the way they would do if he was brother to them all. People talk about the brotherhood of man; but there will never be any such thing as the brotherhood of man till more men, and more women, too, get the spirit that's in him.”

Claude had been a week or more in his grave when the letters began to arrive from Mrs. Willoughby.

”As to our sailing,” she wrote from London, ”everything depends on Ena.

My cablegrams will have told you that she's better, but not exactly _how_. She's better mentally, and very sweet. _I_ think it surprising.

Now that the first shock is past, she's calmer, too, and doesn't say so often that she expected it. Why she should have expected it I couldn't make out till last night, when Archie told me that there'd been something between Claude and a girl named Fay. I remember those Fays; queer people they always were, and rather uppish. _She_ was a big, handsome girl when I was a little one. Eliza Grimes was her name, and as long ago as that she couldn't keep her place. I remember how she came for a while to Aunt Rachel's school, though not for long. Aunt Rachel couldn't draw too exclusive a line at first, but she did drop her in the end. I should never have thought that Claude would take up with a girl like that--Claude, of all people. You can't run counter to cla.s.s distinctions without making trouble, I always say--and you see how it acts. You and Thor are far too republican, or too democratic, or whatever it is, but I never thought that of poor Claude.

”Not that Archie attributes this dreadful thing to the connection with the Fays. He won't hear of any such suggestion. Ena seemed to look on it at first as a retribution, but Archie insists that there never was anything to retribute. There may be two opinions about that, though, mind you, I'm not saying so. To the best of my ability I'm letting bygones be bygones, as I think I've shown. But Ena certainly thought so at first, and it's my belief she does still. She's told me herself that when they were motoring through Devon and Cornwall they never reached their destination for the night without her being afraid of a cablegram awaiting their arrival. She was sure something terrible was going to happen, and knew it before they left home. I asked her in that case why in the name of goodness they should have come, but she couldn't answer me. Or, rather, she did answer me--just the kind of answer you'd expect from her. It was to get some new things, and she's got them. Lovely, some of them are, especially the dinner-gowns from Mariette's--but with their money--_and where it comes from_--it's easy to dress. Retribution indeed! It must be retribution enough for the poor thing just to look at them. She's already had a woman from Jay's to talk over her mourning.

Seems heartless, doesn't it? but then, of course, she must have it.

Jay's woman had to take her measurements from the gray traveling-suit, for the doctor won't let her get up for another week, not even to be fitted. That will show you how far we are from sailing, and poor Archie has changed the bookings twice.

”As for him, I can't tell, for the life of me, how he feels about being kept here--he's so frightfully the gentleman. I've always said that he wore good manners not as his natural face, but as a mask, and I feel it now more than ever. It's a mask that hides even his tears, though I'm sure, poor man, they flow fast enough beneath it. All the same, I suspect that he finds it something of a relief to be held up here--for a while, at any rate. He wishes he was home, and yet for some reason he's afraid to get there. Terrible as everything is, I know he feels that it will be more terrible still when he's on the spot.”

It was in a subsequent letter that Mrs. Willoughby wrote: ”I had to scrawl so hurriedly yesterday to catch the first mail that I couldn't begin at the beginning, or get to the point, or anything. I'll try now, though, as for the beginning, it's like going back to the dark ages, it all seems so long ago.

”Your first cablegram giving us the news arrived at Les Dalles in the middle of the afternoon, and such a scramble as we had to get over to Havre in time for the night boat! I can't tell you how we felt, for it was one of those shocks so awful that you don't feel anything. At least I didn't feel anything, though I can't say the same of your father. He, poor lamb, has felt it terribly, so sensitive as he is, and so easily upset. Well, we managed to get to Havre in time, and had a fair crossing. We reached London about ten in the morning, and of course had no notion of where Archie and Ena were. So we drove to their bankers, and, as luck would have it, found they were in London on their way between Cornwall and the north.

”Once we'd learned that, we came straight to this hotel, and sent up our cards. After that we waited. Waited! I should say so. Your father got crosser and crosser, threatening to go away without breaking the news at all. We knew they thought we'd come to make trouble about old scores, and were discussing whether or not to see us. When word came at last that we were to be shown up your father was in such a state that I had to leave him in the public parlor and go and face it alone.