The Bent Twig Part 37

"Do you live with her?" asked Sylvia.

"My was.h.i.+ng is said to be done in New York," he said seriously. "I believe that settles the question of residence for a man."

"Oh, how quaint!" said Sylvia, laughing. Then with her trained instinct for contriving a creditable exit before being driven to an enforced one by flagging of masculine interest, she rose and looked at her watch.

"Oh, don't go!" he implored her. "It's so beautiful here--we never were so--who knows when we'll ever again be in so ..."

Sylvia divined with one of her cymbal-claps that he had meant, perhaps, that very afternoon to--She felt a dissonant clas.h.i.+ng of triumph and misgiving. She thought she decided quite coolly, quite dryly, that pursuit always lent l.u.s.ter to the object pursued; but in reality she did not at all recognize the instinct which bade her say, turning her watch around on her wrist: "It's quite late. I don't think I'd better stay longer. Aunt Victoria likes dinner promptly." She turned to go.

He took his small defeat with his usual imperturbable good nature, in which Sylvia not infrequently thought she detected a flavor of the unconscious self-a.s.surance of the very rich and much-courted man.

He scrambled to his feet now promptly, and fell into step with her quick-treading advance. "You're right, of course. There's no need to be grasping. There's tomorrow--and the day after--and the day after that--and if it rains we can wear rubbers and carry umbrellas."

"Oh, I don't carry an umbrella for a walk in the rain," she told him.

"It's one of our queer Marshall ways. We only own one umbrella for the whole family at home, and that's to lend. I wear a rubber coat and put on a sou'wester and _let_ it rain."

"You would!" he said in an unconscious imitation of Arnold's accent.

She laughed up at him. "Shall I confess why I do? Because my hair is naturally curly."

"Confession has to be prompter than that to save souls," he answered.

"I knew it was, five weeks ago, when you splashed the water up on it so recklessly there by the brook."

She was astonished by this revelation of depths behind that well-remembered clear gaze of admiration, and dismayed by such unnatural accuracy of observation.

"How cynical of you to make such a mental comment!"

He apologized. "It was automatic--unconscious. I've had a good deal of opportunity to observe young ladies." And then, as though aware that the ice was thin over an unpleasant subject, he s.h.i.+fted the talk.

"Upon my word, I wonder how Molly and Morrison _will_ manage?"

"Oh, Molly's wonderful. She'd manage anything," said Sylvia with conviction.

"Morrison is rather wonderful himself," advanced Page. "And that's a magnanimous concession for me to make when I'm now so deep in his bad books. Do you know, by the way," he asked, looking with a quick interrogation at the girl, "_why_ I'm so out of favor with him?"

Sylvia's eyes opened wide. She gazed at him, startled, fascinated.

Could "it" be coming so suddenly, in this casual, abrupt manner? "No, I don't know," she managed to say; and braced herself.

"I don't blame him in the least. It was very vexing. I went back on him--so to speak; dissolved an aesthetic partners.h.i.+p, in which he furnished the brains, and my coal-mines the sinews of art. _I_ was one of his devotees, you know. For some years after I got out of college I collected under his guidance, as my mother does, as so many people do.

I even specialized. I don't like to boast, but I dare affirm that no man knows more than I about sixteenth century mezza-majolica. It is a branch of human knowledge which you must admit is singularly appropriate for a dweller in the twentieth century. And of great value to the world. My collection was one of Morrison's triumphs."

Sylvia felt foolish and discomfited. With an effort she showed a proper interest in his remarks. "Was?" she asked. "What happened to it?"

"I went back on it. In one of the first of those fits of moral indigestion. One day, I'd been reading a report in one of the newspapers on the status of the coal-miner, and the connection between my bright-colored pots and platters, and my father's lucky guess, became a little too dramatic for my taste. I gave the collection to the Metropolitan, and I've never bought a piece since. Morrison was immensely put out. He'd been to great trouble to find some fine Fontana specimens for me. And then not to have me look at them--He was right too. It was a silly, pettish thing to do. I didn't know any better then. I don't know any better now."

It began to dawn on Sylvia that, under his air of whimsical self-mockery he was talking to her seriously. She tried to adjust herself to this, to be sympathetic, earnest; though she was still smarting with the sense of having appeared to herself as undignified and ridiculous.

"And besides that," he went on, looking away, down the dusty highroad they were then crossing on their way back to the house--"besides that, I went back on a great scheme of Morrison's for a National Academy of Aesthetic Instruction, which I was to finance and he to organize. He had gone into all the details. He had shown wonderful capacity. It's really very magnanimous of him not to bear me more of a grudge. He thought that giving it up was one of my half-baked ideas. And it was.

As far as anything I've accomplished since, I might as well have been furthering the appreciation of Etruscan vases in the Middle West. But then, I don't think he'll miss it now. If he still has a fancy for it, he can do it with Molly's money. She has plenty. But I don't believe he will. It has occurred to me lately (it's an idea that's been growing on me about everybody) that Morrison, like most of us, has been miscast. He doesn't really care a continental about the aesthetic salvation of the country. It's only the contagion of the American craze for connecting everything with social betterment, tagging everything with that label, that ever made him think he did. He's far too thoroughgoing an aesthete himself. What he was brought into the world for, was to appreciate, as n.o.body else can, all sorts of esoterically fine things. Now that he'll be able to gratify that taste, he'll find his occupation in it. Why shouldn't he? It'd be a hideously leveled world if everybody was, trying to be a reformer.

Besides, who'd be left to reform? I love to contemplate a genuine, whole-souled appreciator like Morrison, without any qualms about the way society is put together. And I envy him! I envy him as blackly as your pines envied the sumac. He's got out of the wrong role into the right one. I wish to the Lord I could!"

They were close to the house now, in the avenue of poplars, yellow as gold above them in the quick-falling autumn twilight. Sylvia spoke with a quick, spirited sincerity, her momentary pique forgotten, her feeling rus.h.i.+ng out generously to meet the man's simple openness. "Oh, that's the problem for all of us! To know what role to play! If you think it hard for you who have only to choose--how about the rest of us who must--?" She broke off. "What's that? What's that?"

She had almost stumbled over a man's body, lying p.r.o.ne, half in the driveway, half on the close-clipped gra.s.s on the side; a well-dressed man, tall, thin, his limbs sprawled about broken-jointedly. He lay on his back, his face glimmering white in the clear, dim dusk. Sylvia recognized him with a cry. "Oh, it's Arnold! He's been struck by a car! He's dead!"

She sprang forward, and stopped short, at gaze, frozen.

The man sat up, propping himself on his hands and looked at her, a wavering smile on his lips. He began to speak, a thick, unmodulated voice, as though his throat were stiff. "Comingtomeetyou," he articulated very rapidly and quite unintelligibly, "an 'countered hill in driveway ... no hill _in_ driveway, and climbed and climbed"--he lost himself in repet.i.tion and brought up short to begin again, "--labor so 'cessive had to rest--"

Sylvia turned a paper-white face on her companion. "What's the matter with him?" she tried to say, but Page only saw her lips move. He made no answer. That she would know in an instant what was the matter flickered from her eyes, from her trembling white lips; that she did know, even as she spoke, was apparent from the scorn and indignation which like sheet-lightning leaped out on him. "Arnold! For _shame_!

Arnold! Think of Judith!"

At the name he frowned vaguely as though it suggested something extremely distressing to him, though he evidently did not recognize it. "Judish? Judish?" he repeated, drawing his brows together and making a grimace of great pain. "What's Judish?"

And then, quite suddenly the pain and distress were wiped from his face by sodden vacuity. He had hitched himself to one of the poplars, and now leaned against this, his head bent on his shoulder at the sickening angle of a man hanged, his eyes gla.s.sy, his mouth open, a trickle of saliva flowing from one corner. He breathed hard and loudly. There was nothing there but a lump of uncomely flesh.

Sylvia shrank back from the sight with such disgust that she felt her flesh creep. She turned a hard, angry face on Page. "Oh, the beast!

The beast!" she cried, under her breath. She felt defiled. She hated Arnold. She hated life.

Page said quietly: "You'll excuse my not going with you to the house?

I'll have my car and chauffeur here in a moment." He stepped away quickly and Sylvia turned to flee into the house.

But something halted her flying feet. She hesitated, stopped, and pressed her hands together hard. He could not be left alone there in the driveway. A car might run over him in the dusk. She turned back.

She stood there, alone with the horror under the tree. She turned her back on it, but she could see nothing but the abject, strengthless body, the dreadful ignominy of the face. They filled the world.

And then quickly--everything came quickly to Sylvia--there stood before her the little boy who had come to see them in La Chance so long ago, the little honest-eyed boy who had so loved her mother and Judith, who had loved Pauline the maid and suffered with her pain; and then the bigger boy who out of his weakness had begged for a share of her mother's strength and been refused; and then the man, still honest-eyed, who, aimless, wavering, had cried out to her in misery upon the emptiness of his life; and who later had wept those pure tears of joy that he had found love. She had a moment of insight, of vision, of terrible understanding. She did not know what was taking place within her, something racking--spasmodic throes of sudden growth, the emergence for the first time in all her life of the capacity for pity ...

When, only a moment or two later, Page's car came swiftly down the driveway, and he sprang out, he found Sylvia sitting by the drunkard, the quiet tears streaming down her face. She had wiped his mouth with her handkerchief, she held his limp hand in hers, his foolish staring face was hidden on her shoulder....

The two men lifted him bodily, an ign.o.ble, sagging weight, into the car. She stood beside him and, without a word, stooped and gently disposed his slackly hanging arms beside him.

Dark had quite fallen by this time. They were all silent, shadowy forms. She felt that Page was at her side. He leaned to her. Her hand was taken and kissed.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

MUCH ADO ...

The rest of October was a period never clear in Sylvia's head.

Everything that happened was confusing and almost everything was painful; and a great deal happened. She had thought at the time that nothing would ever blur in her mind the shock of finding Aunt Victoria opposed to what seemed to her the first obvious necessity: writing to Judith about Arnold. She had been trying for a long time now with desperate sincerity to take the world as she found it, to see people as they were with no fanatic intolerance, to realize her own inexperience of life, to be broad, to take in without too much of a wrench another point of view; but to Aunt Victoria's idea, held quite simply and naturally by that lady, that Judith be kept in ignorance of Arnold's habits until after marriage, Sylvia's mind closed as automatically, as hermetically as an oyster-sh.e.l.l snaps shut. She could not discuss it, she could not even attend with hearing ears to Mrs. Marshall-Smith's very reasonable presentation of her case; the long tradition as to the justifiability of such ignorance on a bride's part; the impossibility that any woman should ever know all of any man's character before marriage; the strong presumption that marriage with a woman he adored would cure habits contracted only through the inevitable aimlessness of too much wealth; the fact that, once married, a woman like Judith would accept, and for the most part deal competently with, facts which would frighten her in her raw girlish state of ignorance and crudeness. Sylvia did not even hear these arguments and many more like them, dignified with the sanction of generations of women trying their best to deal with life. She had never thought of the question before. It was the sort of thing from which she had always averted her moral eyes with extreme distaste; but now that it was forced on her, her reaction to it was instantaneous.

From the depths of her there rose up fresh in its original vigor, never having been dulled by a single enforced compliance with a convention running counter to a principle, the most irresistible instinct against concealment. She did not argue; she could not. She could only say with a breathless certainty against which there was no holding out: "Judith must know! Judith must know!"

Mrs. Marshall-Smith, alarmed by the prospect of a pa.s.sage-at-arms, decreed quietly that they should both sleep on the question and take it up the next morning. Sylvia had not slept. She had lain in her bed, wide-eyed; a series of pictures pa.s.sing before her eyes with the unnatural vividness of hallucinations. These pictures were not only of Arnold, of Arnold again, of Arnold and Judith. There were all sorts of odd bits of memories--a conversation overheard years before, between her father and Lawrence, when Lawrence was a little, little boy. He had asked--it was like Lawrence's eerie ways--apropos of nothing at all, "What sort of a man was Aunt Victoria's husband?"

His father had said, "A rich man, very rich." This prompt appearance of readiness to answer had silenced the child for a moment: and then (Sylvia could see his thin little hands patting down the sand-cake he was making) he had persisted, "What kind of a rich man?" His father had said, "Well, he was bald--quite bald--Lawrence, come run a race with me to the woodshed." Sylvia now, ten years later, wondered why her father had evaded. What kind of a man _had_ Arnold's father been?

But chiefly she braced herself for the struggle with Aunt Victoria in the morning. It came to her in fleeting glimpses that Aunt Victoria would be only human if she resented with some heat this entire disregard of her wishes; that the discussion might very well end in a quarrel, and that a quarrel would mean the end of Lydford with all that Lydford meant now and potentially. But this perception was swept out of sight, like everything else, in the singleness of her conviction: "Judith must know! Judith must know!"