Part 73

Geordie had come up the steps now; a good-looking young fellow, and somehow touching, with his sulky mouth and his sulky blue eyes.

“Louisa!” said Mrs. Russell, in a threatening voice. “This is my son, George. Geordie, your Aunt Louisa!”

Poor Louisa said nothing at all, for fear of bursting into tears, but Geordie could be trusted to behave with decorum. He said something about this being an unexpected pleasure; said it punctiliously. But Mrs. Russell knew at once, by the tone of his voice, that he didn’t like this aunt. She saw him cast a quick glance at her lamentable untidiness.

“Are those your bags, out in the street?” he inquired. “Shan’t I get them?”

“Oh, no!” cried Louie. “Please don’t bother! I’ll get them!” And she made a sort of rush forward, which Mrs. Russell checked.

“Louie!” she said, sternly, and after Geordie had gone down the steps: “Louie! You must have more dignity!”

II

There was no dinner at half past six that evening, or at seven, either. When the clock struck the hour, there was Mrs. Russell sitting on the veranda, while her son paced up and down, hands in his pockets, and his face sulkier than ever. The sun was gone, now, and the clear sky was fading from lemon-yellow into gray; the honeysuckle was coming to life in the quiet dusk.

“How long is she going to stay?” he demanded.

Mrs. Russell didn’t like that tone.

“Naturally I didn’t ask her,” she answered, stiffly. “She’s had a great many--difficulties, and she’s come here, to me, for a rest.”

“D’you mean she’s going to live here?”

She was hurt and amazed at his manner, but it was not her way to show it.

“Your aunt hasn’t mentioned her plans for the future,” she replied.

He walked up and down in silence for a time, and to his mother there was something ominous in his steady footfall; it was, she thought, as if he were going away from her, miles and miles away. Suddenly he spoke again, from the other end of the veranda:

“Isn’t it hard enough for us to get on as it is?” he asked. “Without an extra--”

“George!” she cried, too hurt to stifle the cry. “Your own aunt!”

“Oh, let’s look at the thing from a practical point of view!” he suggested, impatiently. “You know what my salary is, mother, and you know how far it goes, or doesn’t go.”

“Please!” said Mrs. Russell, curtly. “Surely we needn’t discuss this now--before your aunt has been in the house an hour.”

“Just as you please!” said he. “But--” Again he walked down to the other end of the veranda. “All I mean is”--he went on, in a strained unsteady voice--“that I can’t do any more. I’ve--I’ve done my best, and I can’t do any more.”

Mrs. Russell sat like a statue in the gathering darkness. She had come face to face with sorrow and anxiety more than once in her life; she had had her full share of all that; but never, never before had anything wounded her like this. So she was a burden to her son.

All the little money left her by her husband she had used for the boy’s education and welfare, with all her love, her time, all her life thrown, unconsidered, into the bargain. And now she was a burden to him.

“I’ve lived too long,” she said as if to herself.

Geordie had stopped in his restless pacing to and fro.

“Mother!” he said. “You know I didn’t mean it. Mother! I’m sorry.”

“Very well, my boy!” she answered, in her composed way. “We’ll say no more about it.”

He came a few steps nearer, but halted; he hadn’t been bred to the habit of affection. A hundred thousand old impulses that had been stifled by cool common sense made a great barrier now, just there, a few steps away from his mother. He turned away again, and Mrs. Russell did not stir.

It was over; that was their sensible way of dealing with all such matters; not to take them out into the daylight and destroy them, but to shut them up, to weigh down the heart for many and many a day. They had ten minutes more alone there in the dusk together, ten long minutes, and neither of them spoke.

They were, of course, waiting for their luckless guest, and both silently condemning her unpardonable delay. But, if they could have seen her just then, down on the floor on her knees beside the neat little bed in the neat, strange little room, not weeping, but very still, as if a ruthless hand had struck into quietude all her flutterings.

She had come downstairs, quite airy, quite gay, in a fresh blouse and a not too dingy skirt, and, standing unnoticed in the doorway, she had heard her nephew’s words. She had rushed up the stairs again, silent as a moth, except for the tinkle of countless small hairpins dropping from her riotous hair, and had sunk down on the floor like this, to taste failure again.

The clear chiming of the clock roused her. She got up, a little bewildered for a moment.

“I’ll go away!” she thought, at first. But, after all, her failure had taught her something. She put more pins into her hair, a little more powder on her nose; she tried a smile or two before the mirror, and down the stairs she went, airy as before.

“The only really terrible thing,” she said to herself, “is to fail because you haven’t tried.”

And so she did try. She sat at the table with her unsmiling and calm sister, her unsmiling and sulky nephew, and she smiled for three; she talked, and in the end she made them smile, not because she was especially witty, but because her sweet, light spirit gave a glimmer to all her words. She was ridiculous, but she was charming; she made of that sober family dinner a high festival. And when they had finished:

“Oh, let’s have coffee in the garden, Bella!” she said.

“No!” said Mrs. Russell, startled. “We don’t have coffee, Louie. I think it keeps one awake.”

“But who doesn’t want to be awake on a night like this? Let’s be awake! Let’s have a little table on the lawn, and candles--candlelight under the trees is so wonderful, Bella!”

“Mary won’t like it!” whispered Mrs. Russell. “It means extra work for her.”

“I’ll do it! All alone!”

Mrs. Russell might have protested more, if she had not observed her son pushing the books and papers off the top of a small table in the next room. If he wanted it so, or if he were trying to atone, very well; she would agree to this absurd proposal.

So the table was placed in the back garden, and there Mrs. Russell and her son sat, to wait for Louie and the coffee. They sat there under the great dark beeches that rustled solemnly in the night wind and set the candles to flickering.

Candlelight wonderful under the trees? It was horrible; it was the most sorrowful, gloomy, bitter thing. Was that the leaves stirring, or a sigh from the boy? Mrs. Russell wanted to look at him, but dared not, for fear that their eyes should meet, and with what lay between them, they must not look into each other’s eyes. A burden to him--a burden too heavy for his young shoulders--

Louie came across the grass with the tray, and this time Geordie’s sigh was quite audible as he arose to take it from her.

“There!” she cried. “Isn’t this nice?”

Her gay voice sounded very pitiful in the dark. Mrs. Russell resolved to make an effort to help the poor creature.

“Yes,” she said. “It is--very nice.” But no other words came.

There could be no silence where Louie was, though; even if no one spoke, there was a swarm of dainty little sounds, the clink of a porcelain cup on its saucer, the musical ring of a silver spoon on the brass tray; the sugar tongs against the crystal bowl.

“There!” Louie cried again. “Don’t you smoke, Geordie?”

“Thanks!” said he, gloomily, and taking a cigarette from his case, he leaned forward to light it at the candle.

“Mercy!” exclaimed Mrs. Russell. The two others looked inquiringly at her, but she said hastily that it was nothing. For she certainly did not intend to explain what had startled her.

It was the sight of Geordie’s face as he had leaned over the candle. His blue eyes had seemed to dance and gleam, the flickering light had given him a look as if smiling in impish glee--altogether, he had looked so much, so very much, as Louie had looked years ago.

He had drawn back into the shadows, tilting his chair against the trunk of a tree, and, feeling herself deserted, Mrs. Russell tried to talk to her sister. Useless! Geordie was there, and could hear if he wished.

She understood what Louie was thinking about--what things she had in her queer, pitiful life to think about, what compensations she had found for missing wifehood and motherhood?

“Because she’s not unhappy,” thought Mrs. Russell. “She hasn’t anything at all, as far as I can see, and yet she’s not unhappy. Perhaps I’m as much a failure as she is. I meant to help him--to make him happy. But he’s miserable. I’ve done the best I can; I can’t do any more. It’s as if his heart was breaking. Why? He has a good salary. I’ve only taken just enough to keep his home as he likes it. He has plenty for his clothes and whatever else he wants. I thought--I made him--happy.”

Not one minute more could she endure this soft, dark silence; she wanted to get into the house, in the lamplight, safely shut into her home, away from the vast summer night.

“What time is it, Geordie?” she asked, so suddenly that he started.

“Nine,” he replied.

“But what watch is that?”

“A new one.”

“Then where’s the one they gave you at the office, Geordie? Such a handsome one, Louie! A present to him on his twenty-fourth birthday. Engraved. Geordie, I hope you haven’t left it about, anywhere. It’s not a thing to be careless with.”

“No; it’s safe,” he said, briefly.

“Where? In your room?”

“It’s perfectly safe!” he answered, with such a note of exasperation in his voice that Louie pitied him.

“I’m sure--” she began happily, but her sister interrupted.

“Well, I’m not. You don’t know what a boy that age is capable of. And it’s a handsome watch. Geordie, I wish--There! Now you’ve broken this new one! Oh, my dear--”

For, as he arose, his foot had caught in the chair; he stumbled, and dropped the watch with a thud. It was Louie who recovered it; Louie who hastily gathered together the small oblong papers that fluttered out of his breast pocket. One had fallen at Mrs. Russell’s feet; she stooped.

“What--” she began; but Louie fairly snatched it out of her fingers.

“Here, Geordie!” she said, gayly.

Mrs. Russell did not know what these tickets were, but Louie did. Louie knew well.

III

Indeed, all the three inmates of the house were heavy at heart that night, each with some especial knowledge not shared by the others. The night grew sultry, too, and when the morning came, it was the first day of real summer, hot and still. It was a day to make any one jaded who had not slept well.

Geordie was down first, and walking up and down the veranda; smoking, too, his aunt noticed.

“You shouldn’t, before breakfast!” she admonished him, cheerfully. “And you can’t smell the flowers, either, if you do.”

He smiled, a forced, strained sort of smile, but civil enough, considering how unwelcome the sight of her was. He stopped walking up and down, too, and, after a moment, said, in a perfunctory voice:

“It’s going to be a hot day.”

“Geordie!” said she. “Let me talk to you!”

As much as his mother, did he hate and dread that note of fervor, of intimacy. He moved his shoulders restlessly, and smiled again.

“About time for breakfast,” he murmured evasively.

“No, it’s not. Geordie, you won’t mind if I stay here with you and your mother for a little while, will you?”

He turned scarlet.

“No. Of course not,” he replied. “Very glad.”

“I want to stay--ever so much. But only if it can be my way. Because I’m a frightfully obstinate creature, Geordie; absolutely unmanageable. And I can’t bear not to be independent. I’m going to find myself a job--”

“No!” he interrupted, with a frown. “Please don’t.”

She seated herself on the rail of the veranda, a most undignified attitude for one of her years, and yet, as always, there was a debonair grace about her; something unconquerably girlish.

“I will get a job, Geordie!” she announced. “That’s settled. No matter where I live, I’ll do that. But I want so much to stay here, if you’ll let me stay on my own terms. Let me pay my board and feel like a nice, independent business woman!”

“No!” he said, again. “I--it can’t be that way.”

“But why, Geordie?” she asked, smiling a little.

And he couldn’t endure her smile; he couldn’t endure her proposal; it was the final straw for his already mutinous and unhappy spirit. If she had any faint idea of what he already suffered from this talk about being “an independent business woman”; if she had imagined what a sore subject that was.

“No!” he said. “If you want to stay here and make mother a visit, you’re more than welcome. But--I don’t approve of women going out to work.”

“What!” she cried. “Oh, but my dear boy!”

There was something in her good-humored protest that made him hot with resentment. She wasn’t laughing at him--and yet, she might as well have been; she couldn’t have pointed out more plainly the absurdity of his words and his attitude. Just by some little inflection of the voice, she made him the youngest twenty-five that ever lived--a boy, a child, a silly, pompous, impertinent young ass.

“I won’t have it!” he said.

She saw her mistake then--she was always quick to recognize her failures--but it was too late to remedy it.

“I’m sorry you feel like that, George,” she said, gravely. “Because, you see, I couldn’t stay here unless it could be that way.”

“Suit yourself!” he answered, briefly.

But he regretted the words as soon as they were spoken.

“I only meant--” he began, but when he turned he found her gone, vanished in her own quick, quiet way. He hurried into the house to find her, and looked for her everywhere, but in vain.

And it seemed to him that he could not go off to the city with this new burden upon his conscience. It was bad enough that he should have hurt his mother the evening before; bad enough to endure the other harassments that had tried him so sorely, for so long, without this new misery. He thought of his aunt’s sprightliness; her gay and touching friendliness toward him; he remembered how grave her face had become.

“She might have known I didn’t mean that,” he thought, dismayed. “I don’t like her, and she’ll be a bore and a nuisance; but I didn’t mean to offend her.”

And all the time he was perfectly aware that she wasn’t “offended,” any more than a clover blossom is offended if you tread it underfoot. It was he who had been offended at the idea of his mother’s sister going out to work every day from under his roof--of any woman doing so, in whom he was interested. Come to think of it, he was glad he had said he “wouldn’t have it”; he meant that. He had told Nell also that he wouldn’t have it.

“Still,” he admitted, “I might have been a little more--well, more cordial to her. Because I can see that she’s another one of those people.”

For lately the poor fellow had been learning something about that other sort of people--people not sensible and restrained, but full of fancies and notions and feelings; people who needed careful handling, unless you were willing to see that look of pain and disappointment in their eyes.

Mrs. Russell thought that her son looked pale and jaded that morning, and noticed, with a heavy heart, how little he ate.

“I suppose he’s working too hard,” she said to herself. “Wearing himself out, and wasting all his youth--to take care of me. I suppose what he wants is--”

But she couldn’t quite imagine what he might want.

“Perhaps he’d rather go off and live in the city with one of his friends, like Dick Judson,” she thought. “I wonder if I couldn’t--” So there she sat, calm and composed as ever, making the most absurd plans for living on her own private income of thirty dollars a month.

“Perhaps Louie and I together might manage something,” she thought. “Louie knows more than I do about things of that sort. I’ll speak to her.”

Geordie went off, and still Mrs. Russell sat at the breakfast table, waiting for her sister, and silently condemning this sloth that kept her so late abed.

As a matter of fact, Louie was half a mile away from the house, picking daisies in a wide, sunny field. Seen from the road, you might have thought that tall and slender creature with fair hair shining in the sun was a care-free young girl; she moved so lightly, and now and then she sang a snatch of song.

But all this was mere bravado, her own especial method of preparing herself for a painful ordeal. She had something to do that morning which she dreaded, and instead of taking an extra cup of coffee, or anything of that sort, the silly creature forgot all about breakfast and wandered off into a daisy field. No wonder she was such a failure!

She had peculiar compensations, though. The fierce hot sun, and the rank, sweet smell of the humble little field flowers and weeds, even the troublesome insects that crawled out from the daisies onto her hands, and the little winged nuisances that flew in her face, amused and solaced her, and did her, or so she fancied, more good than ten breakfasts.

And after a time she felt strong and tranquil enough to face her day. From a pocket in her skirt she drew out a bit of paper--one of those dropped by her nephew the evening before, and she looked at it carefully.

It was a pawn ticket, marked:

Gold Watch. $50.00

IV

Now it happened that Miss Cigale, although she had said she hadn’t a penny in the world, really did have sixty-five dollars. Considered as the savings of a lifetime, it might pretty well be called nothing, and in her careless way she had so thought of it; but now she saw it in a quite different light.

She had kept that ticket when she had picked up the others, for her idea was to get back the watch for her nephew and make him happy. And to make him, perhaps, a little fond of her. She had thought it possible last night; had thought that if she brought him his watch, and told him that she was going to take a position, he would see she wouldn’t be simply an extra person to feed, but a friend and a helper; that he would like her, and they would all three live together in that dear little house, in that sweet, dear garden, in the jolliest way. She didn’t expect any of that now, though.

“No,” she said to herself. “I irritate and annoy him. I can see that. I’m afraid he belongs to the ants, and he can’t endure grasshoppers. Oh, I’m sorry! He’s such a dear boy!”

She didn’t cry, for her tears were far more apt to be brought by joy than by pain; but she was certainly unhappy, all by herself there in the daisy field. To tell the truth, Miss Cigale was very tired, and had of late been haunted by specters. Wan failure she knew and didn’t mind, but when loneliness and uselessness came out hand in hand, she trembled.

“I’ll get the watch,” she decided. “I’ll do that, anyhow. But I shan’t come back. He doesn’t want me here, and--he’s a dear boy, but I don’t think I want to come.”

It was characteristic of her that she didn’t tell her sister she would not return. If she had to do anything unpleasant, well, then, she did it, as gallantly as she could; but if unpleasant things could be avoided, right gladly would she sheer off. So she only said that she had to “run into town,” and hugged and kissed her rather unresponsive sister, and off she went, leaving behind her those heavy bags which contained all the clothes and books and ridiculous, sentimental rubbish she had in the world.

“I can send for them,” she thought, “when I decide where I’m going.” And she troubled her head no more about them. What did trouble her was a memory. It was a memory of a girl--a tall, slender, fair-haired girl, a music student in New York, living on an allowance from home. And living all too carelessly on it, so that one day she found herself penniless, and very hungry, and with four days to wait before the allowance could arrive. And this girl--in the persistent memory--had taken a little gold locket and a silver watch to the pawnbroker. She had thought it rather a joke, until she had got there.

“It’s silly to feel like that,” she said to herself this morning. “Very silly. There’s nothing dishonorable or disgraceful in--in being temporarily short of money. The most important business men have to get loans. Heads of trusts and--every one. People go to their banks to get loans, and they’re not ashamed of it. Well, this is exactly the same thing. I simply walk in, repay the loan, take the watch, and go. Exactly like paying a note at the bank.”

Was it, though? Exactly like a bank--this queer, dark little shop, with barred windows--and the man behind the counter was exactly like the cashier her father used to bring home to dinner. She handed the ticket across the counter, with the money; but the man pushed the money back to her.

“Wait a moment!” said he, with a curious glance at her.

Then he disappeared, and Miss Cigale stood there, trying desperately hard not to feel like a criminal, an outlaw, a highly suspicious character. If she had been a man she would certainly have whistled; but, as it was, she stared about her with the most casual, offhand air.

Oh, but it was pitiful! To think that there were people so hard pressed that they must bring here a cotton quilt, or a dingy umbrella, or, worst of all, a child’s pair of rubber boots. Hanging on a line from the ceiling were guitars and banjos and mandolins and ukeleles--music sold into bondage.

“Is this your own ticket, madam?” asked a voice, and, turning, she saw a severe little elderly man looking at her through his spectacles. The question dismayed her. He appeared so very much displeased; perhaps it was a wrong sort of ticket, which Geordie shouldn’t have had.

“Yes. Oh, yes!” she answered, with a very poor attempt at sprightliness. “It’s mine.”

“You didn’t buy it--or find it?” he asked.

“Oh, no!” Miss Cigale replied, quite certain now that there was something wrong. “It’s my own!”

The elderly man looked at her steadily for a moment.