At night another came, a great white bloom in her hand and on her face the look of a votary. “My night-bloomin’ cereus. ’Twon’t last, but she always come over to see it, the night ’twas due to come out. I want she should have it.”
On the day when Anne sent Warren to play with the Beaman children the neighbors gathered solemnly in the parlor, presently to follow Miss Willy, who never had led before. Anne stood by the grave lined with evergreen boughs. There was greenery, too, over the mound of fresh earth.
“Who did that?” she asked, as they came away.
“Why, we all did. We always do that, for a neighbor.”
Those women, unimaginative, she had thought them, their lives but one long labor, too barren for sentiment; yet when the time for sentiment came they had done that tender service.
On the day after the funeral Warren went into the bedroom, stood looking at the bed. “Where’s auntie?” he asked. “When did she wake up?”
“She’s gone away, Wanny. Where she won’t have to go to sleep any more.”
The child stared at her. “Where’s that?”
“Ever so far away. Where the spring lives before it comes. Where the baby birds come from, and baby boys and girls, before they are born.” She had no sooner spoken the words than she was conscious of the fatuity of them. Why should she cheat the child with sentimentality? Why not try to tell him the truth? Why deck it out in inanities? But Warren’s eyes were alight and wide-opened.
“Where the fairies live?” he asked.
“Perhaps,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, well,” said Wanny, “she won’t like it much there. Not without me. I guess she’ll come back soon.”
But a day or two afterwards he came to his mother with quivering lip. “I want auntie. Why don’t she come back? Will you tell her to hurry?”
Anne turned her face away. “I want her, too, my lamb. But she can’t come.”
“Why can’t she come? Has she lost her crutch?”
“Yes. She’s lost it.”
“Why don’t you take it to her, then?”
“I can’t, Wanny. I can’t go where she is.”
“Well, where is she? That’s what I want to know.”
How much theology did one give a child? There had to be something. What could one say? She took him in her arms. “Auntie is with her Heavenly Father, my dear. He loves her, and needs her.”
“How do you know he does?”
Theology had its difficulties. “I do know. He’s my Heavenly Father, too. So I know. Just the way you know mother loves you.”
Wanny thought about that. “Have I got one, too?” he asked.
She kissed his curls. “Of course. We all have. Now run along and play. Maybe you’d like to help feed the chickens?”
But a few nights thereafter, while she was making him ready for bed, taking off his stockings and reveling in the fragrance of his hair against her face, he propounded another question.
“Mums,” he asked, “when am I going to my father?”
7
Under old Willy’s handkerchiefs in the top drawer of a bureau they found a folded sheet of paper. “I am in my right mind and senses. I give my body to the grave and my soul to the Lord. Everything else is to go to my friend, Anne Warren Denison.” There was Willy’s cramped signature, and the signature of witnesses.
“It was no more than right,” said Mrs. Wells, who was one of the witnesses, “seeing you come here to take care of her in her old age.”
Anne said nothing. The date stood out like a pointing finger. Willy had written it more than five years before she had come to Heathville, at a time when she thought of the old woman once a year, when the purchase of some gift for Christmas was one of those burdensome trivialities that she got through with as hurriedly as she could. The house was hers, the garden, the few hundreds in the savings bank, because old Willy had loved her, in her own mind built up about her a little tradition that later expressed itself in the kindly falsehood with which she quieted the curiosity of the neighbors. “Come to take care of her in her old age.” Perhaps Willy had dreamed of that during the years she had lived alone. Perhaps she had longed to have someone in her old age. It was a new thing to Anne to have that feeling of dull self-reproach, that consciousness of failure, unmixed with anger. Anger had obliterated any consciousness of failure towards Brice. Now old Willy’s bequest and the inescapable thoughts it brought with it held a mirror of self-analysis up to her. She could not look around it, nor walk away from it, but must stare and stare at the reflection of herself. And there was another thing that she had to think about. Warren’s questions, his reference to his father.
Willy was dead, Brice had gone out of her life, but the boy remained. Not four years in the world, already he was asking questions she could not answer. He would grow, would question further. Was she going to fail her son as she had failed those others? Oh yes, Willy had, indeed, had someone to take care of her in her old age; her longings and her poor little pride had been justified at the end. But Anne could take to herself no credit for that. Willy dead, she could admit her own failure. If things had fallen out differently, she would have said, when word came of the old woman’s death, “The poor old soul!” When word came of the bequest, she would have said, “How funny! What on earth shall I do with it?” It was only by chance, and because of her own need, not Willy’s, that she had stood by at the end.
So, now that the time had come when she was free to leave, she had to pause for a while, try to read her compass, to take her bearings, for there were strange seas ahead. She had been drifting. Where was she now? What was her position, what worth had this place she had thought she had won to, this security she thought her own toil had achieved for her spirit, this freedom from the bond of obligation? There was Brice. She had never believed that Brice was dead. Gradually she found herself thinking more and more about Brice, without anger, without bitterness.
If all life lead on to something, what was waiting for her? What was she going to meet? Above all, what was Warren going to meet, and how was she going to help him meet it? Could she escape that slow, onsweeping purpose pervading everything, that warp that ran through the whole fabric of life? To some natures life is a decomposing thing, to some a stimulus, to others a slow melting-pot, terrible in its persistency, yet all the while in its crucible melting away the baser elements that the purer may emerge. In some natures a gold of the spirit is the residuum, made a thing of itself only after the fires of life have had their way with it, worked it and fused and refined it. Anne’s physical freedom had come at last only to thrust her into the core of the crucible, but even yet she was not undergoing its intensest heat.
It was too early to begin work in the garden. The fields were drying slowly that year, the season pausing, farmers waiting with impatient acceptance of the inevitable. Many hours during the winter she had passed with Kent before his fireside or in Miss Willy’s parlor or tramping over the rutted roads. He had played to her and loaned her books. On a day when the sun was as warm as in June she and Warren started for Kent’s house, the boy running here and there to peep into the buckets hanging to roadside maple trees.
“Sap’s running good,” Deacon Bassett told her as they passed his place. “Cold nights and hot suns—that’s what brings the sap up.”
She had never encountered Mrs. Kent. Her presence pervaded the house, Kent spoke of her frequently, but Anne had dreaded to see her, hoped that she never would—that woman who played with a doll, who was afraid of the woods and had to be watched lest she run away. In her mind she had visualized something repulsive. Insanity, she supposed, was a thing of wild impulses, a thing of terror. Pitiful, yes, but dreadful, better kept behind bars or in one of those places where “they” had good care. But on that day she was sitting in a deep chair before a fire of embers, and Kent was playing. The children, Warren and Jenny, were in a window-seat busy about their own affairs. The door opened. Anne could see, without moving, the slim form that stood there, hesitant. There was nothing startling, nothing repulsive, about that woman. Forty, perhaps, she was obviously fragile, and could never have been beautiful; but there remained about her a delicacy, a grace, a gentle desire to please that must once have meant charm. She was smiling.
Kent looked over his shoulder, his fingers still touching the keys. “Come in, Paula,” he said, quietly.
Mrs. Kent came in, step by step, still looking at Anne, until she was standing in front of her, hands loosely clasped. She waited until the music had stopped.
“Pretty lady,” she said, under her breath.
Kent came towards them. “It’s Mrs. Denison, Paula. Aren’t you glad to see her?”
She held out her hand, and Anne, standing, took it. Paula still looked at her searchingly. “I don’t know her. But she’s pretty. I’m glad she came to see us. Are we going to have tea, Rufus? Are there any cakes?”
Kent went out of the room, and his wife took Anne’s hand, led her to a sofa, sat down by her. She was still smiling, still friendly, like a child in her gentleness. Anne could find nothing to say. Before Kent returned Wanny slipped from the window-seat, came and stood in front of the pair, his small legs apart, hands clasped behind his back, a posture copied from his firm friend Dorilliam.
Paula’s lips parted. She withdrew her hand from Anne’s. “Oh! It’s a child!”
“My son Warren,” said Anne. Her maternal instinct at work, she added, “Wanny, say ‘How do you do, Mrs. Kent.’”
But Mrs. Kent had slipped to her knees before the boy. She was touching him, first his bright hair, then his cheek, then his hand. To his mother’s amazement the youngster submitted. Then, quite suddenly, he laughed.
“I like you,” said he. “You’re so funny.”
Paula sat back on the floor, laughed too. “And I like you, boy.” She looked up at Anne, leaned closer, whispered. “I have a baby, too. She doesn’t grow. It worries me. And she never talks. She’s asleep now, or I couldn’t have come down. I’ll show her to you, some day. But her hair—I like the color of your boy’s hair—like fire-light. What is your name, boy?”
Wanny told her. Again she fingered the ruddy softness of his hair, and he laughed aloud. She said, “I like it. I think I will change the color of my baby’s hair to that. Rufus will do it for me.”
“Will do what, Paula?” Kent asked. He came into the room, the Japanese boy following with a tea-tray whose richness reminded Anne of old days. When she had told him, he said, quite naturally, as though it were the most usual thing in the world to change hair:
“Yes, of course, I will. I will send to the city today for some hair the color of Wanny’s. In four days from now your baby shall have red hair like his, Paula.”
And Paula, jumping up, clapped her hands. But then she spied the cakes on the tea-tray, grabbed two of them, ate.
“Rufus,” Anne asked, a week or so later when they were walking along through the muddy road, “Rufus, why do you keep her there? Why do you have her live with you?” For one could ask any question, directly, of Kent.
He frowned, looked puzzled. “I don’t know that I can make it plain to you, Anne, or to myself. But there’s this: one does not discard responsibility, or care, or what not, by putting it out of sight. One sees a thing through, anyway. Life jolly well sees to it that we do that.”
Afterwards, thinking it over, Anne wondered. Was that true? Did one never escape? Was escape cut off? A thing out of sight—did that follow one, haunt, overtake? Or was it always inevitably present? There was her marriage. Brice. She had believed they had escaped each other, and misunderstandings, and the enormous, minute daily rubs. Yet here was she, here was Warren, with his developing intelligence and his questions and demands and rights, and there, somewhere, was Brice. Did he, too, have his demands, his rights? Were they still her concern, again to become her problem? Was the whole thing still there, for them both? Was there still that bond, still, still to be reckoned with whether she would or not? “One sees it through, anyway. Life sees to it that we do that.” Life—what was it? The wheel of the squirrel-cage old Willy had once spoken about, the wheel that one spins and spins, believing one’s self the force that drives the world; the cage that one cannot leave, but must return to and return to, because all outside the cage is wilderness?
For days she weighed that question; then came the great crisis of her life, out of the blue, suddenly, without warning, as crises come. It came, that flame of Fate which was to burn away slowly, with agony, the dross of her spirit.