Part 21 (1/2)
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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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, fas.h.i.+onably 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 s.h.i.+ning.
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, s.h.i.+vering 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.”