It was out and it was sealed now and certain.
He looked over her shoulder.
“Very well,” he said. “Good news, isn’t it, madam? Miss Beatrice will be very pleased.”
Did he mean what it sounded as if he meant? Was he, under that smugness and oiliness and respectability, actually as impertinent, as sly, as he sounded? Dared he—She checked herself. He did dare, of course. Knowing his own secret understanding with his master. Knowing her own lack of weapons and backing. There was never and had never been any definite excuse for complaint. His insolence was always veiled, oily, hidden. Nothing that would oblige Ivan to reprove him.
“I don’t know exactly when he will arrive,” she said. “I believe the doctor intends to bring him out in his own car. Is Miss Beatrice in her study?”
She was, sitting with the door closed, watching the garden with clouded, brooding eyes, her black eyebrows brought together over her long, pale face and looking, except for her eyes, exactly like Ivan.
She frowned and blinked when Marcia spoke to her, as if the words recalled her from some secret deeps of thought.
“Dr. Blakie—oh, yes,” she said. “I wanted to ask him if there is anything in particular in the way of diet and care for Ivan. I knew you wouldn’t think to ask him.”
“I did ask him,” said Marcia. “He said there was nothing—”
Beatrice’s mouth had Ivan’s trick of sudden secret indentations at its corners. It wasn’t a smile, but it was like one. She put two cold fingers under Marcia’s chin and said, “Our little butterfly troubling herself with household affairs!” and walked out of the room. The gesture and look were so like Ivan’s in their secret, dark amusement, in the suggestion of something poised and venomous under light words, that Marcia felt a sick wave of foretaste. She turned and followed Beatrice’s tall figure in its trimly fashionable gray knitted dress. Ancill and Delia, the young and somewhat subdued housemaid, were in the hall and had been talking, though as Marcia entered it Delia became ostentatiously busy with a duster and Ancill inspected his cap closely.
Dr. Blakie was on the verge of departure, and had already absently pulled on his gloves and was looking anxiously at his watch. He had devoted more than its quota of time to the Godden affair and was evidently hurried and was telling Beatrice rather crisply that, except for his ankle, Ivan was actually perfectly well.
“It doesn’t seem possible,” said Beatrice, “when he was on the very verge of death so short a time ago. If it hadn’t been for you, Graham—”
“No, no,” said Dr. Blakie hurriedly. “Ivan has the constitution of an ox, really. It was good luck that I happened to be here when you had news of the accident and could go straight to the hospital and operate. By the way, did you ever find out whom he collided with?”
“No, never. The car has been repaired; that will please Ivan. New fenders—various new parts, indeed.”
“Yes, to be sure.” He was abstracted; he looked again at his watch, glanced at Marcia and said, “Well, I must be on my way. I’ll bring Ivan out myself shortly after noon. Can’t say just when—depends upon how things go this morning. No special diet or special care—just keep him from walking too much.” He looked a little grim, as if he wanted to repeat what he had said to Marcia about that, but refrained under Beatrice’s brooding dark gaze.
Beatrice went with him to the outside door, closing the door of the library after her, as if to keep Marcia from hearing any words she might have wished to have with the doctor. But, if so, the words were very few, for presently Marcia heard the slow, quivering jar the heavy door gave when it closed. Beatrice did not rejoin her in the library, and Marcia stood quite still in the middle of the room.
The clouded green waters of the aquarium moved slightly now and then. The white head of Caesar looked blankly down at her. The half-glimpsed reflections along the bookshelves glimmered a little and seemed to move. She found herself staring fixedly at Ivan’s desk again—Ivan’s desk, so strangely, flatly empty since Ivan’s absence—and again seeing Ivan’s face behind it, watching her with those blank light eyes. As he had looked that day of March eighteenth—the day he had been injured in the accident and Dr. Graham Blakie had literally, almost miraculously, saved his life.
As he had looked when she had unexpectedly, dreadfully, defied him.
She could still see the three long red marks appearing against his livid face, and the horribly blank, bright look in his eyes. ...
She closed her own eyes with a long shiver of revulsion and of fear. During all those weeks at the hospital he had said, nothing of what had happened that day. But now that he was well, now that he was to be at home, it would come.
The room pressed too closely upon her—Ivan’s room, which was so soon to take up its familiar life.
Beatrice had retired to her own study again—there was no sound in the house, or, if there was a sound, it was muffled by other sounds and far away, so that even the high, remarkably acoustic spaces overhead could not pick up and amplify it hollowly as they did any sound at night.
Marcia turned rather blindly to the french doors, opened one and went out.
The gray sky hung low over tiny bright leaves just budding. The lilacs had been caught by the frost; only a few of them were turning a pale purple, touched still with brown. Her feet slipped a little on the wet flagstones and over moist grass as she turned toward the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden. It was cold, too, but anything was better just then than the house. Besides, the vines over the summerhouse, still brown though they were, were yet a kind of screen—a screen from the prying, watching eyes of the household.
The household of which she was not, and never had been since the day she became Ivan Godden’s wife, the mistress.
The lily pool was gray and full and choked a little with last summer’s rushes. Already, owing to the many rains of the spring, the grass needed cutting, and the hedges and trees gave promise of being too lush and green, although just now there was a faintly yellow tone about them. Across the garden wall the Copley house looked very bright in its red bricks and neat white trim.
She had liked seeing it there. In the very cheer of its neat red bricks—contrasting with the heavy gray stones of the Godden house, only half masked in strong, old ivy—it gave a kind of promise of friendliness. Besides, occasionally across the wall she could see Robert Copley and his mother, walking in the garden or throwing sticks for Bunty to catch. And always at night the windows were bright, even though, lately, Rob had been gone so much.
The thought of Bunty recalled her again to the day of March eighteenth.
The false peace of the past few weeks was gone.
Ivan was returning.
There was a bench in the damp summerhouse. Marcia Godden sat down there and put her face in her hands.
CHAPTER II
IT HAD BEEN THREE years since Marcia married Ivan Godden and came to live at the Godden house.
The three years made so deep and dangerous a chasm that it was almost impassable. She remembered only in a kind of unreal series of pictures a faraway girl, Marcia Trench—with her fine blond hair and wide gray eyes and a pink flame in her cheeks. School days under the wing of Aunt Marcia Trench, kind and slightly irresponsible like her son, Galway. Her own parents growing more and more vague in her memory as she grew older. Their first dance—hers and Gally’s; herself in white chiffon ruffles, with eyes like stars and Gally very bony and gangling in his first tails and blushingly in love with the girl next door. Skating and tobogganing, with Gally breaking unheard-of bones at every possible opportunity, and smashing up uncounted cheap roadsters. He was an adept at it; Aunt Marcia would sigh good-naturedly and pay the bills. Dear old Gally; he hadn’t changed, though everything else in Marcia’s world had done so; he was still rattlebrained and not too bright; still harum-scarum and noisy; still acquiring unexpected fiancées through his irrepressible habit of casual love-making and being surprised and slightly wounded because some girl had taken him
seriously. Not that he was any great catch. With the candor of a sister, Marcia was obliged to admit that, though she loved him dearly. And he was still an adept at smashing up roadsters, and they were still cheap roadsters, though they were no longer decorated with alarming signs. For 1930 had come and foundations had developed a way of sliding out from under one, and 1931 had been no better. And one day Aunt Marcia, as simply and placidly as she had done everything else, died. There was another hiatus there in Marcia’s memory. Then all at once she was living at the Godden house, married to Ivan Godden, who was going to take care of her and make her happy.
It was a small yet widespread circle she moved into, its wideness possible only in a great city, though Baryton, properly speaking, was not a part of Chicago, was not, even, in Cook County, and every day heavily laden commuters’ trains swept in and out from town. But Baryton was not at all a social unit. Rather it was a dwelling place for people whose interests and connections were almost wholly centered in and about Chicago. Occasionally, as with the Copleys, you knew your neighbors.
Marcia remembered her first meeting with the Copleys; it was after she and Ivan Godden had returned from a prolonged Southern trip and Beatrice had had family friends in to tea one Sunday to meet the new Mrs. Godden. They had all known each other except Marcia, and she had felt stiff and, a bride of three months, oddly unsure of herself. In the flood of introductions somehow she had missed Robert and his mother. For presently she found herself in a corner listening rather wearily to the hum of voices and soft little clatter of cups, and when Robert turned up beside her she had not known who he was. And he obviously had not known who she was, for he’d said abruptly, “What are you doing here? Have you had tea? Let me get you some.” He’d got tea and heaped a plate with the kind of sandwiches he liked. “I expect to help eat ’em,” he said, surveying the heap. “I only hope Beatrice hasn’t poisoned ’em. Now, then, tell me all about yourself.”
She hadn’t, because just then Verity Copley appeared and asked Robert to bring her some tea, also. “Beatrice’s food is so good,” she said. “Have you been presenting yourself to the bride, Robert? … It’s my son, that tall thing,” she said to Marcia. “I am Verity Copley.”
“Oh, I say,” Robert had said queerly. “You can’t be the girl Godden married.” His eyes had looked suddenly very dark and sober, and Verity had said quickly, though in a friendly and pleasant way:
“Our gardens adjoin, you know, Mrs. Godden. You must look at my roses one day. Do get me tea, Robert, darling, I’m starving.”
He had got the tea. And had stood by in silence, while Verity chatted and drank her tea. He said only one more thing, and that was as Verity was turning to greet Ivan, who, belatedly, observed his bride’s isolation. And that was queer, too, because it was urgent, as if for some reason he really wanted to know. He’d said, “How long have you been married?”
Marcia told him and he repeated it. “Three months,” he said.
They had gone shortly after that.
She’d seen them again, of course; they were neighbors and friends. In the intervening three years she had got to know them rather well—as well, that is, as she knew anyone. During the past winter, however, she had seen little of them; Verity had been engrossed in painting, Robert had stayed in town most of the time; Marcia herself, much as she liked Verity, had been conscious of an increasing barrier between them, unspoken and unrecognized but there nevertheless. But she couldn’t tell Verity much of her life; Verity could not ask; something formless and impassable had grown between them which forbade any save the most impersonal talk. They had come, that day of March eighteenth, as near it as possible and then had quickly, seeing the danger, sheered away. (Odd, thought Marcia in parenthesis, neither Ivan nor Beatrice had yet spoken of the dog, though they must have known.) She liked to think the Copleys were there; she liked to see the cheerful lights of their windows. But she saw less and less of them. As she saw less and less of Gally—of, in fact, all their friends. ...
The bare wooden bench was cold and damp; there was no wind, but an all-pervading chill. She shivered under her yellow sweater and wished she had stopped to get a coat. But Beatrice would have seen her going upstairs for the coat—would have asked her what she was doing, where she was going, why.
The yellow sweater reminded her again of Ivan and the day of March eighteenth, and again she could see—as she had seen so often since that strange tumultuous day which ended at St. Thomas’s Hospital, waiting to be told whether he was to live or die—the long, sharp, red streaks across his pale cheek.
She lifted her head and looked drearily across the lily pool and the stretch of garden.
Beyond the wall a robin was digging in the Copley garden and paused to sing its rain song—three low tentative notes. It would soon rain. And she must go back into the house; make—or pretend to help make—arrangements for Ivan’s home-coming. Beatrice, of course, would have already taken the thing into her own hands.
Somebody banged the garden door of the Copley house and came down the steps singing “I Believe in Miracles” at the top of his voice. It was Rob, bareheaded and sweater-clad. He came across the garden as if he did not see the shivering girl in yellow in the summerhouse. But he had seen her, for he stopped abruptly at the wall, stopped singing and said, “Hello, Marcia.”
“Hello, Rob.”
He looked at her. His brown hair was wet and shining, his direct blue eyes very keen below straight dark eyebrows. He held a pipe in his mouth, and his collar wasn’t fastened and his brown sweater was worn. He took the pipe out of his mouth, still watching her, and leaned against the wall.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” said Marcia.
He looked at her again for a long moment.
“Nonsense,” he said and vaulted over the wall, crossed the short, damp stretch of grass, circled the lily pool, and stood in the door of the summerhouse looking down at her.
“Now, then, what’s wrong?”
His eyes, as always under emotion, had turned quite black. He wanted to say, “What has happened to you, what disaster has fallen upon you, why are you so white and hunted and afraid?”
He couldn’t, of course, say it. So he stood there looking down at her through a still, gray world which held only himself and the girl in yellow, sitting so small and huddled and cold before him.
There was the gray, waiting lily pool, with green fringes of sedum and feathery wild phlox clustering in the crevices of the rocks edging the pool. There was the strip of wet lawn, queerly bright in the gray, clear light preceding rain. There was silence, and nothing else in the world.
Marcia said again helplessly, “Nothing’s wrong.” And looked away from him.
His mouth and eyes tightened a little. He glanced up toward the narrow, observant windows of the gray Godden house and said, “Ivan?”
The real meaning of the question was one Marcia couldn’t recognize. She said stiffly, “Oh, he’s very well. Dr. Blakie was just here.”
And he was coming home; she tried to tell him that, but the words and the pleasant, calm voice it demanded would not come, for her throat simply and completely closed. She stared at the lily pool, and a drop of rain fell in the middle of it, making small overlapping circles. She shivered a little, and Rob saw it.
“You are cold,” he said abruptly. “You ought to have a wrap. It’s raining—or about to. How long have you been sitting here?”
“I don’t know.” More drops were falling on the lily pool, breaking up its gray brooding. How long had it been and how much nearer was Ivan’s return?
He eyed her frowningly.
“Come,” he said suddenly. “Verity’s home and hasn’t seen you for ages. Where have you been keeping yourself? At the hospital, I suppose. I’ve not seen you since—since the night Ivan was hurt.” He said that with rather elaborate ease, and took her hands and pulled her to her feet and was propelling her toward the wall. There was a small iron gate at the front and between
the two front lawns, but the direct and shorter way was over the wall.
“Oh, no—I can’t. Not now.”
“Why not?”
“Ivan—”
He stopped suddenly, turning her so she faced him.
“Do you mean Ivan doesn’t want you to come to our house?”
“No—no!” She paused and took a breath and said in a light, too bright way: “Of course not. Why, he—insisted on my going to your mother’s dinner party tonight, although Beatrice and I felt it would take both of us from the hospital too early. He wouldn’t hear of our refusing it.” It was too light and too bright and altogether too facile. But she rushed on, nervously and too conscious of that observant gaze: “It will be so nice to see Verity and to have a little gaiety. Beatrice and I shall much enjoy it—we’ve been staying rather close to the hospital, you know, since Ivan’s—” Her voice just simply stopped.
Rob said quietly, “Come, Marcia. Over the wall you go.” His hands on her were gentle and certain. She was standing on the Copley side of the wall, and he was smiling beside her. “You weigh more than one would think,” he said. “You look so awfully slim and fragile.”
She glanced quickly toward the Godden house. Gray stone and thick old ivy which, in summer, too completely veiled the windows. All those narrow windows and gables looking down at her. The french doors to the library were not entirely visible through the masses of evergreens. Was Beatrice watching her? Was Ancill in there dusting the library—arranging his master’s favorite chair? Somebody suddenly opened an upstairs window, and in the quiet they could hear the rasp of it, and both looked that way. The screens weren’t yet on, and the thick lace curtains moved a little in the draft. It was a window of Ivan’s bedroom; Delia, then, was airing and freshening the room. The room adjoining Marcia’s.
Her heart throbbed and struggled until it actually did hurt. She knew somehow that Rob was looking at that window, too, and that his face was white and queer. He said abruptly and rather jerkily, “Hurry up. It’s raining—I’ll light a fire.”
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