The Wide House

by Taylor Caldwell

  It seemed to him that an hour or more passed as he stood there, washed over by the darkest waves of anguish on which no star shed any light at all. But it could have been only a few moments. When he could resume his walk down the corridor, he felt as weak and broken as though he had just risen from a sick-bed, and the huge pain that pervaded him was a low fire all through his tired body. He ached as if stricken by an endless sorrow.

  He reached the little window, and stopped involuntarily. He looked down at the blasted gardens two stories below. He saw the wet bricks of the winding walks, over which bent the cold and iron branches of empty trees. He saw the white walls beyond, the ruined flower-beds. He saw the paling pewter of the December sky, as silent as death itself. Not even a sparrow twittered over the brown grass, or swung on a limb. There was no wind at all, though this was a land of almost constant wind. Everything stood frigid and without movement and life.

  He stood with his hands grasping the window-frames, and said aloud, and very simply again: “I cannot endure it.” He said it over and over, with a dull and heavy vehemence which was yet without passion or meaning. He did not ask himself: What is it I cannot endure? Instinctively he knew that to know the answer would be too terrible, would make life impossible for him. He only listened to the sound of his voice, and its dogged rising and increasing swiftness, and the very sound of it, while expressing his enormous agony, also dulled it. It was an incantation. After a few moments of listening to his own words, his own cold and meaningless frenzy, he could straighten up and go on again, weaker than ever, but dizzy rather than frantic, as he had been before.

  Nevertheless, his face was wizened, dried into the planes and wrinkles of voiceless torment. He tapped on Laurie’s door, and at the sound of her clear young voice he opened the door, and peered within. He smiled. It was the smile of an old man.

  Laurie sat crouched on the hearth, reading by its red and uncertain light. Her little room was in gathering shadow. The firelight was like a pool on the thick shagginess of the hearthrug. The andirons and the fender glittered with bright brazen reflections. Laurie wore a black woolen frock over which was tied her ruffled pinafore of white muslin. Her long golden hair, which reached far below her waist, was held back from her face by a band of crimson ribbon. She looked up at her brother, smiling faintly; her small face was serene and full of dignity. She stood up, tossing back the lengths of her hair, and her smile grew brighter. She was a tall girl, nearly twelve now; there was an air of calm and gentle authority about her, and a maturity greater than her years.

  “Is it time for tea, Angus?” she asked.

  But he stood on the threshold and only gazed at her with a poignant acuteness which was the aftermath of his enormous despondency. She was warm and young and alive. She was the denial of his melancholy and his despair. She was the normal voice calling over the blackness which had almost drowned him; she was the voice awakening him from nightmare. He could feel the nightmare retreat to a greater distance from him, held at bay by her very existence. He shivered.

  He came into the room, feeling that he had just returned from an age-long journey. He rubbed his hands together. “It is cold,” he said. He stood on the hearth and bent to the fire eagerly, urgently. She watched him in silence, and now her face, daily growing more beautiful, more closed, more dignified and withdrawn, looked almost fluid in the firelight, and full of mature pain.

  Angus lifted the coal scuttle and threw more coals upon the crimson embers. Now the fire leapt and spluttered, throwing off radiant sparks; it roared up the chimney. Angus stared at it, with his urgency hot upon him. It was like a fever in him, like the febrile fire that races after a deathlike chill. He turned to his sister, and smiled upon her.

  “What were you reading, Laurie?” he asked, and his voice was tender and deep, as it always was when he spoke to her.

  She did not move, but there was a curious restlessness about her, which showed itself in the sudden flicker of her golden lashes and the half movement of her red young mouth. She said, almost coldly: “I was reading Bleak House. By Mr. Dickens.”

  And now Angus’ look matched her voice in coldness. “A novel, Laurie! On the Sabbath! Where are your Sunday-school books, and your Testaments?” But there was a lifelessness in his tone which he could not overcome.

  Laurie shrugged slightly. “I have studied my lesson, Angus. I’ve read the texts.”

  “But you haven’t meditated upon them,” he said, and it seemed to him that his words were thick and heavy in his throat.

  She shrugged again. “Enough. I can’t ‘meditate’ on them all day.”

  “It’s little enough to give—God—one day out of seven,” he rebuked her.

  But she was silent. Finally, he glanced about the room and looked at her bedside table. There lay the lessons and the Bible. He said in the dull and abstracted voice of complete listlessness: “Would you like me to hear your lesson, Laurie?”

  “No, thank you.” If there was irony in the quickness of her response, he felt rather than heard it. He regarded her with distressed dourness. She smoothed back her hair calmly with the palms of her lovely large hands, so white and perfect. But she continued to return his regard impassively.

  “Where did you get that novel, Laurie?” he asked, not understanding the pain in his heart.

  The faintest of smiles passed over her lips, a smile of cool irony and disinterest. “Cousin Stuart gave it to me for Christmas. It is one of four of Mr. Dickens’ books which he gave me. They’re very interesting, Angus. You should read them.”

  “I have no time for nonsense,” he said, with proud severity. “Nor should you, Laurie. The world is a grave and serious place, and there is no room in it for frivolity.”

  The girl was about to reply tartly; the first forewarning of her words was already quick and unusually vivid in her large dark-blue eyes. But she held them back even when they had risen to her lips. Instead, a gentle look, tender, even maternal, replaced the first hard sparkle between her lashes. She came to her brother and took his dry cold hand. “Never mind, Angus. I promise you I’ve got my lessons. Is that enough?”

  He made a movement as if to withdraw his hand; he tried to let her see his displeasure. But he could do neither, for her expression was so gentle and loving, and her young hand so warm. Against his will he smiled at her. With his free hand he stroked her smooth and shining hair. He said, irrelevantly: “It is so pretty, your hair, Laurie.”

  That reminded him. He added: “By the way, Mama wants you to go to her and brush her hair for her. Her head aches.” Instantly, and intangibly, her features hardened, became aloof and impregnable again. But she said indifferently: “I had forgotten. I’ll go to her at once.”

  She smoothed down her pinafore, straightened the ruffles at her neck, and went out of the room quickly, walking with a steady effortless gliding motion which was one day to entrance thousands of people. Angus watched her go. When the door closed behind her it seemed to him that the room was suddenly invaded by a deathly coldness and emptiness, which not even the renewed fire could dissipate.

  He looked about the little room, which quivered with silent crimson. The corners were lost in shadow. The dark ceiling moved in the firelight. The furniture was plain, but good and somber mahogany. The narrow little canopied bed was white and nebulous. The draperies at the tall thin windows stirred in a rising wind. All about were scattered Laurie’s school-books, and other books. Angus frowned sadly. He looked down at the hearth where the maligned novel lay, open and face down. He picked it up, and distastefully, holding it as far from him as possible, he scanned a page or two.

  He read: “She is like the morning. With that golden hair, those blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheeks, she is like the summer morning. The birds here will mistake her for it.”

  Angus lifted his gloomy gray eyes from the book and stared at the door through which his sister had gone. There was the strangest rising in his heart, like a voluptuous pain, almost a pain of joy and overw
helming tenderness. He forgot that this was the Sabbath, and this the reprehensible book of Mr. Dickens. “She is like the morning”! The lovely words were a dazzle of light before his dimmed eyes. Little golden Laurie, his darling. The book shook in his hands. Who cared for Laurie, but himself? Who loved her, but him? She was his treasure, his responsibility; she was all he had.

  He sat down on the stool near the fire, feeling a weight behind his eyelids like tears. His sorrow was on him again, formless and huge. He knew Laurie loved him. But she was changing in these days. She had always been scant of words, but she had always smiled. Until lately, until hardly a few weeks ago. What had happened to his Laurie? There was a coldness and hardness about her now, hardly ever broken, a chill surface, impervious and silent. Her mother called her “a self-satisfied and selfish minx, with no heart in her.” Angus recalled those words. “With no heart in her.” But no, he almost cried aloud, there is a heart in Laurie, but it is dying, it is being killed!

  What was killing the sweetness, and the heart, in Laurie? What was making her as smooth and featureless as a stone? Laurie’s heart, that heart of a child! He could not endure it He was wild with his pain.

  She rarely sang now. The pianoforte down in the lofty parlor hardly ever filled the house with its sweet notes, accompanying Laurie as she sang. He could hear the echoes of her full and beautiful voice, that voice which was too strong, too dear, too majestic, to be the voice of a young girl. It had suffered some training at her young ladies’ school, but the prim and hampering methods of her teachers had not changed its fullness and life and roundness. It had broken away from them like a full flood over a feeble barrier of little stones, a golden flood that could not be restrained. How it had filled the house when she sang; it was the voice of an angel, tranquil but triumphant, sounding effortlessly like a trumpet in all the rooms. She could sing the most inane ballad, and it was a celestial rhapsody. She could trill a few exercises, and they were the movement of a symphony. Every room would seem to listen, breathless, as the strong rapture invaded it. Even the servants would listen, halting in their work and freezing into statue-like attitudes.

  How long had it been since Laurie had sung? Angus, in his desperate intentness, could not remember. But it had been a long time. With the freezing and dying of Laurie’s heart, her voice was dying also. It had become silent, like bounding waters frozen by quick and gathering ice.

  “Oh, Laurie, Laurie!” he cried, and Mr. Dickens’ maligned book slipped from his knees with a crash.

  He stood up, quite wildly. He looked about him. He walked up and down the narrow little room. What had happened to Laurie? Why had he been so blind and so deaf? How had he been insensible to her silence, to the freezing of her face, to her stillness? It had been a long time since he and she had walked together, of a Sunday afternoon. How had it happened? He could not remember. He could not tell. He only knew that in his own black blindness of voiceless despair he had wandered away from his sister, had forgotten her. Her voice had been powerless to follow him. Or perhaps she had just remained behind, of her own will.

  And then he remembered that last Sunday when they had walked together near the river. The memory came back on a rush of light, poignant and clear. It had been a cold spring Sunday in the latter part of May. The day was very bright, polished and chill, typical of the northland, and though the wind was like a wall of invisible ice, strongly pressing against cheek and breast, the memory of the seven months of bitter winter, black and bound, made this day seem festive and brilliant and gay. It was a release from months of endless snow and blizzards, and gales that rushed through the dark air like thousands of cutting scimitars. The banks of the river were wet and brown, smiling with half-liquid mud; the trees were only half-leafed; the grass, while greening slowly, was still short and uncertain. But the sky was pure and immense, filled with radiant light, and the rushing river waters were almost indigo in their intensity of color. So clear and pellucid was this north air that one could see the farm-houses and the little white cottages on the Canadian shore, and the faint greenness of the trees. Here and there a rotting cake of ice drifted swiftly with the current, tilting, catching on its surface blinding reflections of the sun. There was a wideness and a promise in the air, a murmur of brief but fervent life, and though the wind turned Laurie’s cheeks to crimson, and though she must clutch her big beaver bonnet with her gloved hand or hold down her whirling skirts, she laughed with pleasure that the winter had gone. She stood beside Angus, and though he was tall, and nearly eight years older than she, the top of her head reached to his eyes.

  A cloud of white gulls circled against the sky, catching sunlight on their wings. Their melancholy calling echoed in the clear silence, mingling with the voice of the constant strong wind. They blew down on the water, a swirl of giant snowflakes, and then rose again with small fish in their beaks. Wide flat rocks, bleached by the winter, shone in the sunlight, their edges lapped by restless green waves. Angus and Laurie picked their way carefully over these stones, and stood near the water, their bright eyes looking at the Canadian shore, the gulls, the river. Behind them were thick woods, full of the cries of busy birds. They could hear the many churchbells of the late Sabbath morning. It was very peaceful, very brilliant, and very cold.

  Angus had found some violets in the wet woods, where the spring light had been white and misty. These were now fastened to the collar of Laurie’s billowing brown beaver cloak. The sweet color was hardly less vivid than her eyes; her mouth was warm and living scarlet.

  And then she had begun to sing, very softly, meditatively, as if she were alone and singing only to herself. Her voice seemed part of this bright and rushing desolation of wind and river and stone and blazing cold sky. Angus had listened reverently. How her strong voice rose, bell-like, powerful, yet pure and leisurely as flowing gold, so that all the air seemed filled with it! It was their father’s song, so long forgotten by him, “O Morning Star!” And Angus listened, his heart swelling enormously one moment, the next squeezed by a sudden and overwhelming anguish.

  He wanted to cry out to her that she must not sing that song, which was an agony to him, an amorphous despair. It was the song of a man whose memory he was convinced was a power of evil for him, turning his thoughts to the most joyful and pagan of things, seducing him from what he knew was his duty. But he could not speak. He could only listen.

  He did not know when she stopped her singing. Only slowly he became conscious that she was silent, that now the voices of the wind and the river and the gulls had returned with overpowering intensity, as if awakened by the rapture of that song. Angus was very cold; his whole body was petrified with chill. He shivered.

  He looked at Laurie, his lips numb, his eyes smarting. And she was looking up at him, so gravely, so intently, that he was startled. Her blue eyes shone in the cataract of light that fell from the sky; her mouth was serious, even a little hard, and very sad.

  “Dada’s song,” he stammered. He could not look away from her, from that strange watchfulness of her eyes, and the hard sadness of her young mouth. She seemed to accuse him, not with anger, or disdain, but with sorrow and sternness.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “Dada’s song. You remember it, Angus?”

  But he could not speak. He could only loosen his hand from hers, and half turn away. Now he saw nothing of the sunlight but its desolation, nothing of the river but its threat of bitter green death.

  “Angus,” said Laurie, “you never go to the kirk with me any more.”

  He looked at the icy waters almost at his feet. He saw their emerald reflections, their bubbling foam. And then he said quietly: “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, in his lifeless and neutral voice. “There seems nothing for me there, any more. Besides, Mama needs me on Sunday.”

  Laurie said nothing. When he glanced at her furtively he saw that she was smiling with a new grimness, and that her eyes glinted through her lashes.

  Sh
e said: “There never was anything there, for anybody, in the kirk. God can’t be as bitter and as harsh as the minister says. When I am old enough, and my own mistress, I shall not go, either.”

  “Oh Laurie, that is a fair wicked thing to say!” he exclaimed, dully. “You are only a little girl, yet. You cannot judge.”

  She regarded him shrewdly. “You have judged, haven’t you, Angus?”

  But he did not answer that. He looked at the river.

  “But you haven’t forgotten your Presbyterianism, though, have you?” Her voice was soft, and a little derisive.

  “Laurie! You mustn’t talk like that! What can you know? You are so young. Why Laurie, you are only a child.”

  She shrugged, indifferently. “Grand-da’s mama was only two years older than I when she was married,” she remarked idly. “I am not so young.”

  She pulled her blowing cloak about her tightly, and stared grimly at the river. “Angus, when I was little you talked to me about being a doctor. I haven’t heard you mention it lately. Why not?”

  He became rigid in an iron silence, then he said, very coldly: “That was all nonsense, Laurie. I am in the shops now. Mama convinced me it was ridiculous, and that she needed me there, to protect her investment.”

  He was startled when he heard her laugh. It was a soft laugh, yet it was derisive, and not pleasant to hear. “Everything is ridiculous when Mama doesn’t want it,” she said. “She doesn’t want Robbie to be a lawyer. But Robbie will be a lawyer. She wants Bertie to go into the shops, with you. But Bertie will not have the shops. You wanted to be a doctor. But you have gone into the shops.”