Читать книгу At the Crossroads - Harriet T. Comstock - Страница 5

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Aunt Polly lifted the sock she was knitting and wiped her eyes.

“Mary-Clare just naturally makes you laugh and cry at once,” the old voice replied, “remembering her is real diverting. She came from plain, decent stock, but something was grafted onto her while she was young and it made a new kind of girl of Mary-Clare. So loving and loyal.” Again Aunt Polly wiped her eyes.

“And brave and grateful,” Heathcote took up his story, “and terrible far-seeing. I don’t hold with Polly that Mary-Clare became something new by grafting. Seems more like she was two girls, both keeping pace and watching out and one standing guard if the other took a time off. I never did feel sure ole Doc was quite fair with Mary-Clare. Without meaning to, he got a stranglehold on that girl. She’d have trotted off to hell for him, or with him. She’d have held her head high and laughed it off, too. I don’t suppose any one on God’s earth actually knows what the real Mary-Clare thinks about things on her own hook, but you bet she has ideas!”

Northrup was more interested than he had been in many a day. The story thrilled him. The girl of the yellow house loomed large upon his vision and he began to understand. He was not one to scoff at things beyond the pale of exact science; his craft was one that took much for granted that could not be reduced to fact. Standing at the door of the little yellow house he had become a victim of suggestion. That accounted for it. The mists were passing. He had not been such an ass, after all.

“So! that is your old doctor’s place down by the crossroads?” he said with a genuine sense of relief.

“It was. Ole Doc died seven years back.”

“What became of his son––you said he had a boy?” Northrup was gathering the threads in his hands. Nothing must escape him; it was all grist.

“Oh! Larry came off and on the scene. There are them as think ole Doc didn’t treat Larry fair and square. I don’t know, but anyway, just before ole Doc was struck with that 22 stroke that finished him, Larry came home and seemed to be forgiving enough, if there had been any wrong done. He had considerable education; ole Doc had given him that chance, but Larry drifted––allas was, and still is, a drifter. We all stand pat for the feller on account of his father and Mary-Clare. It was a blamed risky thing, though, Larry’s marrying Mary-Clare! I allas will hold to that!”

Once, when Northrup was a young boy, he had been shocked by electricity. The memory of his experience often recurred to him in moments of stress. He had been standing within a few yards of the tree that had been shattered, and he had fallen unconscious. When he came to, he was vividly aware of the slightest details of sight and sound surrounding him. His senses seemed to have been quickened during the lapse of time. He winced at the light; the flickering of leaves above him hurt; the song of birds beat against his brain with sweet clamour, and he vaguely wondered what had happened to him; where he had been?

In like manner Northrup, now, was aware of a painful keenness of his senses. Heathcote looked large and his voice vibrated in the quiet room; Aunt Polly seemed dwindling, physically, while something about her––the light playing on her knitting needles and spectacles, probably––radiated. The crackling logs were like claps of thunder. Northrup pulled himself to an upright position as one does who resists hypnotism.

“I’m afraid you’re tiring Brace, brother.”

Aunt Polly’s voice, low, even, and calm, got into the confusion as a soft breeze had, that day so long ago, and brought full consciousness in its wake.

“On the other hand,” Northrup gave a relieved laugh, “I am intensely interested. You see, she looks so young, that Mrs.––Mrs.–––”

“Rivers?” suggested Heathcote refilling his pipe. “Lord! I wonder if any one ever called Mary-Clare Mrs. Rivers before, Polly?” Heathcote paused, then went on:

“Yes; Mary-Clare holds her own and her boy-togs help the idea. Mary-Clare ain’t properly grown up, anyway. 23 Some parts of her are terrible strong and thrifty; parts as has caught the sunlight, so to speak, and been sheltered from blasts. The other parts of her ain’t what you might say shrivelled, but they’ve kept hid and they ain’t ever on exhibition.”

“How ridiculous you are, brother.” Aunt Polly was enjoying her brother’s flights, but felt called upon to keep him in order.

“Oh! it’s just a blamed amusing fancy of mine,” Heathcote chuckled, “to calculate ’bout Mary-Clare. You see, being a magistrate, I married Mary-Clare to Larry, and I’ve never been at ease about the thing, though I had to put it through. There lay ole Doc looking volumes and not being able to speak a word––nothing to do for him but keep him company and try to find out what he wanted. He kept on wanting something like all possessed. Larry and Mary-Clare hung over him asking, was it this or that? and his big, burning eyes sorter flickering, never steady. I recall old Peneluna Todd was there and she said the young uns were pestering the ole Doc. Then, it was ’long about midnight, Larry rose up from asking some question, and there was a new look on his face, a white, frozen kind of look. Mary-Clare kinder sprang at him. ‘What is it?’ she whispered, and I ain’t never forgot her face. At first Larry didn’t answer and he began shaking, like he had the chills.

“‘You must tell me, Larry!’ Mary-Clare went up close and took Larry by the shoulders as if she was going to tear his secret from him. Then she went on to say how he had no right to keep anything from her––her, as would give her soul for the ole Doc. She meant it, too. Well, Larry sort of dragged it out of himself. Ole Doc wanted him and Mary-Clare to marry! That was what was wanted! There wasn’t much time to consider things, but Mary-Clare went close to the bed and knelt down and said slowly and real tender:

“‘You can hear me, can’t you, Daddy?’ The flicker in ole Doc’s eyes steadied. I reckon any call of Mary-Clare’s could halt him, short of the other side of Jordan. ‘Then, 24 dearie Dad, listen.’ Just like that she said it. I remember every word. ‘You want me to marry Larry––now? It would make you––happy?’ The steady look seemed to kinder freeze. I called it a listening look more than an understanding one. I’ll allas hold to that, but God knows there warn’t much time to calculate. Peneluna began acting up but Mary-Clare set her aside.

“‘All right, Daddy darling!’ she whispered, and with that she stood up and said to me, ‘You marry us at once! Come close so that he can see and know!’

“Things go here in the Forest that don’t go elsewhere; I married them two because I couldn’t help it––something drew me on. And then just when I got to the end, ole Doc rose up like he was lifted––he stared at what was passing; tried to say something, and sank back smiling––dead!”

Northrup wiped his forehead. There were drops of perspiration on it, and his breath came roughly through his throat; he seemed part of the dramatic scene.

“Satisfied, I say!” broke in Aunt Polly. “It was a big risk, but the dying see far, and the doctor had left all he had to Mary-Clare, which didn’t seem just right to his flesh-and-blood boy, and I guess he wanted to mend a bad matter the only way he could.”

“Maybe!” sighed Peter. “Maybe. But he took big chances even for a dying man. I couldn’t get rid of the notion that when he cottoned to what had been done, he sorter threw up his hands! But what happened to Mary-Clare just took my breath. ’Pon my soul, as I looked at her it was like I saw her going away after ole Doc and leaving, in her place, a new, different woman that really didn’t count so long as she looked after things while the real Mary-Clare went about her business. It was disturbing and I felt downright giddy.”

“You’re downright silly, Peter Heathcote”––Polly tossed her knitting aside and shifted the pillows of the couch––“making Mary-Clare out the way you do when she’s ordinary enough and doing her life tasks same as other folks.”

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“How has it worked out?” Northrup heard the words as if another spoke them.

“I guess, friend, that’s what no one actually knows.” Peter pulled on his pipe. “Larry is on and off. Maclin, over to the mines, seems to do the ordering of Larry’s coming and going. Darned funny business, I say. However, there you are. When Larry is home I guess the way Mary-Clare holds her head and laughs gets on his nerves. No man likes to feel that he can’t clutch hold of his wife, but it comes to that, say what you will, Mary-Clare keeps free of things in a mighty odd fashion; I mean the real part of her; the other part goes regular enough.

“She don’t slacken up on her plain duty. What the ole Doc left she shares right enough with Larry; she keeps the house like it should be kept, and she’s a good second to Polly here, where fodder is concerned. But something happened when Larry was last home that leaked out somehow. A girl called Jan-an let it slip. Not a quarrel exactly, but a thing that wasn’t rightfully settled. Larry was ordered off, sudden, by Maclin, but take it from me, when Larry comes back he’ll get his innings. Larry isn’t what you could call a sticker, but he gets there all the same. He ain’t going to let any woman go too far with him. That’s where Larry comes out strong––with women.”

“I don’t know as you ought to talk so free, brother.” Polly looked dubious.

“In the meantime,” Northrup said quietly, “the little wife lives alone in the yellow house, waiting?” He hadn’t heard Polly’s caution.

He was thinking of Mary-Clare’s look when she confronted him the day of his coming. Was she expecting her husband? Had she learned to love him? Was she that kind of woman? The kind that thrives on neglect and indifference?

“Not alone, as you might say,” Heathcote’s voice drawled. “There’s Noreen, her little girl, you know. Noreen seems at times to be about a thousand years older than her mother, but by actual count she’s going on six, ain’t that it, Polly?”

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Again Northrup felt as he had that day by the lightning-shattered tree.

“Her little girl?” he asked slowly, and Aunt Polly raised her eyes to his face. She looked troubled, vaguely uneasy.

“Yep!” Peter rose stiffly. He wanted to go to bed. “Noreen’s the saving from the litter. How many was there, Polly?”

Polly got upon her feet, the trouble-look growing in her eyes.

“Noreen had a twin as was dead,” she said tenderly. “Then the last one lived two hours––that’s all, brother.” She walked to the window. “The storm is setting this way,” she went on. “Just listen to that lake acting up as if it was the ocean.”

The riotous swish of the water sounded distant but insistent in the warm, quiet room, and faintly, at rare intervals, the bell, rung by unseen forces, struck dully. It had given up the struggle.

Northrup, presently, had a strong inclination to say to his host that he had changed his mind and must leave on the morrow. That course seemed the only safe and wise one.

“But why?” Something new and uncontrolled demanded an answer. Why, indeed? Why should anything he had heard cause him to change his plans? This hectic story of a young woman had set his imagination afire, but it must not make a fool of him. What really was taking place became presently overpoweringly convincing.

“I am going to write!”

That was it! The story had struck his dull brain into action and he had been caught in time, before running away. He had gained the thing he had been pursuing, and he might have let it escape! The woman of the yellow house became a mere bearer of a rare gift––his restored power! He was safe; everything was safe. The world had righted itself at last. It wasn’t the woman with the dun-coloured ending to her story that mattered; it was the story.

“I think I’ll turn in,” he said, stifling a yawn, “Good-night.”

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“Don’t hurry about breakfast,” Aunt Polly said gently. “Breakfast is only a starter, I always hold. It’s like kindlings to start the big logs. Sleep well, and God bless you!”

She smiled up at her guest as if he were an old friend––come back!

Up in his room Northrup had difficulty in keeping himself from work. He dared not begin; if he did he would write all night. He must be sure. In the meantime, he wrote to his mother:

By the above heading you’ll see how far I’ve got on my way, searching for my lost health. I’m really in great shape. Manly was right: I had to let go! I’m struggling now between two courses. Apparently I was in a blue funk; all I needed was to find it out. Well, I’ve found it out. Shall I come home and prove it by doing the sensible thing, or shall I go on and make it doubly sure? If anything important turns up I would telegraph, but in case I do go on I want to do the job thoroughly and for a time lose myself. I will wait your word, Mother.

Northrup was not seeking to deceive any one. He might strike out for new places in a week, or he might, if the mood held, write in King’s Forest. It all depended upon the mood. What really mattered was an unfettered state.

The vagrant in him, that had been starved and denied, rose supreme. Now that he was sure that he was going to write, had a big theme, there was excuse for his desire to be free. He would return to his chink in the wall, as Manly explained, better fitted for it and with a wider vision. He had a theory that a writer was, more or less, like a person with a contagious disease: he should be exiled until all danger to the peace and happiness of others was past. If only the evenly balanced folks would see that and not act as if they were being insulted!

While he undressed, Northrup was sketching his plot mentally. In the morning it would be fixed; it would be more like copying than creating when a pen was resorted to.

“I’ll take that girl in the yellow house and do no end of things with her. Dual personality! Lord, and in this stagnant 28 pool! All right. Dual personality. Now she must get a jog about her husband and wake up! Two men and one woman. Triangle, of course. Nothing new under God’s heaven. It’s the handling of the ragged old things. I can make rather a big story out of the ingredients at hand.”

Northrup felt that he was going to sleep; going to rise to the restored desire for work. No wonder he laughed and whistled––softly; he had overtaken himself!

Three days later a telegram came from Mrs. Northrup.

“Go on,” it said simply. Mrs. Northrup knew when it was wisest to let go. But this was not true of Kathryn Morris, the other woman most closely attached to Northrup’s life. Kathryn never let go. When she lost interest in any one, or anything, she flung it, or him, from her with no doubtful attitude of mind. Kathryn meant to marry Northrup some day and he fully expected to marry her, though neither of them could ever recall just when, or how, this understanding had been arrived at.

It was, to all appearances, a most fitting outcome to close family interests and friendships. It had just naturally happened up to the point when both would desire to bring it to a culmination. The next step, naturally, must be taken by Kathryn for, when Northrup had ventured to suggest, during his convalescence, a definite date for their wedding, Kathryn had, with great show of tenderness, pushed the matter aside.

The fact was, marriage to Kathryn was not a terminal, but a way station where one was obliged to change for another stretch on a pleasant and unhampered journey, and she had no intention of marrying a possible invalid or, perhaps, a dying man.

So while Northrup struggled out of his long and serious illness, Kathryn played her little game under cover. Some women, rather dull and stupid ones, can do this admirably if they are young enough and lovely enough to carry it through, and Kathryn was both. She had also that peculiar asset of looking divinely intuitive and sweet during her silences, and it would have taken a keen reader of human 29 nature to decide whether Kathryn Morris’s silences brooded over a rare storeroom of treasure or over a haunted and empty chamber.

Without any one being aware of the reasons for his reappearance, a certain Alexander Arnold materialized while Northrup had been at his worst. Sandy Arnold had figured rather vehemently in the year following Kathryn’s “coming out,” but had faded away when Northrup began to show signs of becoming famous.

Arnold was a man who made money and lost it in a breath-taking fashion, but gradually he was steadying himself and was more often up than down––he was decidedly up at the time of Northrup’s darkest hour; he was still refusing to disappear when Northrup emerged from the shadows and showed signs of persisting. This was disconcerting. Kathryn faced a situation, and situations were never thrilling to her: she lacked the sporting spirit; she always played safe or endeavoured to. Sandy was still in evidence when Northrup disappeared from the scene.

Mrs. Northrup read Brace’s letter to Kathryn, and something in the girl rose in alarm. This ignoring of her, for whatever reason, was most disturbing. Brace should have taken her, if not his mother, into his confidence. Instead he had “cut and run”––that was the way Kathryn thought of it. Aloud she said, with that ravishing look of hers:

“How very Brace-like! Getting material and colour I suppose he calls it. I wish”––this with a tender, yearning smile––“I wish, for your sake and mine, dear, that his genius ran in another direction, stocks or banking––anything with an office. It is so worrying, this trick of his of hunting plots.”

“I only hope that he can write again,” Mrs. Northrup returned, patting the letter on her knee. Once she had wanted to write, but she had had her son instead. In her day women did not have professions and sons. They chose. Well, she had chosen, and paid the price. Her husband had cost her much; her son was her recompense. He was her interpreter, also.

“Where do you think he’ll go?” Kathryn asked.

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“He’ll tell us when he comes home.” There was something cryptic about Helen Northrup when she was seeking to help her son. Kathryn once more bridled. She was direct herself, very direct, but her advances were made under a barrage fire.

Her next step was to go to Doctor Manly. She chose his office hour, waited her turn, and then pleaded wakefulness and headache as her excuse for the call.

Manly hated wakefulness and headaches. You couldn’t put them under the X-ray; you couldn’t operate on them; you had to deal with them by faith. Kathryn was not lacking in imagination and she gave a fairly accurate description of long, black hours and consequent pain––“here.” She touched the base of her brain. She vaguely recalled that the nerve centres were in that locality.

Manly was impressed and while he was off on that scent, somehow Northrup got into the conversation.

“I cannot help worrying about Brace, more for his mother’s sake than his.” Kathryn looked very sweet and womanly, “He has been so ill and the letter his mother has just received is disturbing.”

Here Kathryn quoted it and Manly grinned.

“That’s all right,” he said, shaking a bottle of pills. “It does a human creature no end of good to run away at times. I often wonder why more of us don’t do it and come back keener and better.”

“Some of us have duties.” Kathryn looked noble and self-sacrificing.

“Some of us would perform them a darned sight better if we took the half holiday now and then that the soul, or whatever you call it, craves. Now Northrup ought to look to his job––it is a job in his case. You wouldn’t expect a travelling salesman to hang around his shop all the time, would you?”

Kathryn had never had any experience with travelling salesmen––she wasn’t clear as to their mission in life. So she said doubtfully:

“I suppose not.”

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“Certainly not! An office man is one thing; a professional man, another; and these wandering Johnnies, like Northrup, still another breed. He’s been starving his scent––that’s what I told him. Too much woman in his––and I don’t mean to hurt you, Kathryn, but you ought to get it into your system that marrying a man like Northrup is like marrying a doctor or minister; you’ve got to have a lot of faith or you’re going to break your man.”

Kathryn’s eyes contracted, then she laughed.

“How charming you are, Doctor Manly, when you’re making talk. Are those pills bitter?” Kathryn reached out for them. “Not that I mind, but I hate to be taken by surprise.”

“They’re as bitter as––well, they’re quinine. You need toning up.”

“You think I need a change?” The tone was pensive.

“Change?” Manly had a sense of humour. “Well, yes, I do. Go to bed early. Cut out rich food; you’ll be fat at forty if you don’t, Miss Kathryn. Take up some good physical work, not exercises. Really, it would be a great thing for you if you discharged one of your maids.”

“Which one, Doctor Manly?”

“The one who is on her feet most.”

And so, while Northrup settled down in King’s Forest, and his mother fancied him travelling far, Kathryn set her pretty lips close and jotted down the address of Helen Northrup’s letter in a small red book.

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