Years of Grace

by Margaret Ayer Barnes

  'Of course,' said Jane. *I suppose he was Mrs. Lester's oldest friend. He was awfully fond of her.'

  'Well, every one was,' said Isabel. *But I'm not going to let Belle go into mourning.'

  'Black for the funeral,' urged Jane pacifically.

  *Of course,' said Isabel. 'That's only decent.' She turned toward the door. 'How is Gicily feeling to-day?'

  'Very well,' said Jane. 'She's in town at the concert.*

  'They go everywhere, don't they?' said Isabel. 'They don*t care how they look.'

  'I think that's fine,' said Jane.

  'But it's funny,' said Isabel. 'Last Friday night at the Casino I heard Cicily telUng Billy Winter that she had engaged a room at the Lying-in Hospital. I spoke to her about that. I didn't quite like it.'

  'They take it all as a matter of course,' said Jane.

  'I know,' said Isabel. 'But to a young bachelor '

  'I'm sure he didn't mind,' said Jane.

  'He didn't,' said Isabel. 'But I thought he should have.*

  'It's a difierent generation, old girl,' said Jane.

  n

  Last week it had been a bad cold. The morning after Mrs-Lester's fiineral it had turned into bronchitis. Yesterday it was a touch of pneumonia. To-day

  Jane stood in the doorway of Mr. Ward's Hbrary, holding a great sheaf of budding Ophelia roses, looking anxiously into Isabel's worried eyes.

  'I'm glad you came in, Jane,' said Isabel soberly.

  'Of course I came in,' said Jane. She walked quietly acroas

  the room to her father's desk and put her flowers down on the two days' accumulation of mail that waited for him, propped up against the brass humidor. Then she turned again to face Isabel.

  'I just can't realize it,' she said. *Day before yesterday I was talking to him, here in this room.'

  'I'm glad you came while Dr. Bancroft was here.' Isabel's voice was as worried as her eyes. 'He's upstairs with Mamma.'

  'How's Mamma taking it?' asked Jane.

  *Oh — she's fine,' said Isabel. 'She always is, you know, when there's anything really the matter. She didn't leave Papa's bedside all night. I don't think she got a wink of sleep. Minnie's been awful.'

  'Awful?' questioned Jane.

  'About the trained nurse. She just took one look at her and turned ugly. You know how Minnie is.*

  'She's very capable,' said Jane. 'And she adores us all.*

  'Yes,' said Isabel, 'but she likes to run the whole show herself. Mamma's been very silly about Minnie. She's let hei think she was indispensable.'

  'She pretty nearly is,' sighed Jane. 'She's not really acting up, is she?'

  'Oh, no,' said Isabel. 'She's just terribly gloomy. Goes around, you know, with a tremendous chip on her shoulder. She does what the nurse tells her to, but she does it grudgingly. She looks as if she'd like to say, "Don't blame ms if it rains!

  'Does it bother Mamma?' asked Jane.

  'Of course it does,' said Isabel. 'You know she always has J^Iinnie's attitude on her mind.'

  'It's ridiculous,* said Jane, 'at a time Hke this!*

  'Of course it is,' said Isabel. Both women turned at the sound of a step in the hall.

  'There's the doctor now,' said Jane, picking up her roses.

  Mrs. Ward entered the room, followed by Dr. Bancroft. She had on her grey silk dinner dress. Jane reaHzed that she could not have changed it since the night before. Her face looked terribly worn and weary and worried. She had taken off the black velvet ribbon she always wore about her throat in the evening. In the slight V-shaped decoll^tage of the grey silk dress the cords of her neck, freed from the restraining band, hung in slack, yellow furrows. There were great brown circles under her tired eyes. Dr. Bancroft, brisk and immaculate in his blue serge morning suit, looked extremely clean and clever and competent beside her.

  Jane!' said Mrs. Ward. 'I didn't know you'd come.' Her face quivered, a trifle emodonally, at the sight of the roses. She kissed her younger daughter.

  *How is he?' Jane's eyes sought the doctor's.

  'Fine!' said Dr. Bancroft briskly. 'In excellent shape, all things considered.'

  'Is the second lung affected?' asked Jane.

  'Just one tiny spot,' said Dr. Bancroft very cheerfully.

  'Can I see him?' asked Jane. 'Can I take him these roses?'

  'Certainly,' said Dr. Bancroft. 'But don't try to talk to him.'

  'He's very drowsy,' said Mrs. Ward.

  'He's tired,' said Dr. Bancroft. 'His system's been putting up a big fight all night. His vitality is amazing for a man of his age.' He smiled pleasantiy at Mrs. Ward. 'Now, don't worry. What he needs is rest. Miss Coulter will order the oxygen. You'd better lie down yourself, this morning, Mrs. Ward. You look all in.' He turned from the doorway and met Minnie on the threshold. She glanced at him inimically. Minnie looked all in, too. But very gloomy.

  'Get a nap, yourself, Minnie,' smiled Dr. Bancroft. *Therc*i nothing you can do.'

  'I'll not nap,' said Minnie briefly.

  'I'll drop in again after luncheon,' said the doctor casually. *And, by the way, Mrs. Ward — I'm sending up a second nurse for the night work.'

  *A second — nurse?' faltered Mrs. Ward.

  Jane and Isabel looked into each other's eyes.

  'Just to spare you,' said Dr. Bancroft. 'You must save your strength.' He smiled pleasantly at Jane and Isabel. 'CJood-morning.' He brushed by Minnie's outraged figure and was gone.

  Jane stood a moment in silence, fingering her roses. Her father had pneumonia — double pneumonia. And all because of the folly of going to Mrs. Lester's funeral. Standing beside an open grave for twenty minutes, bareheaded in the February breeze, ankle-deep in the February slush of a Grace-land lot. Paying the last tribute, of course, to the fi-iendsliip of a lifetime. But twenty minutes — by the grave of an old, old lady whose life was over—and now—double pneumonia.

  'Well — I guess I'll go up,' said Jane. How long had they aU been staring in silence at the door that had closed behind the doctor?

  'I'll take you, Mrs. Carver,' said Minnie officiously.

  Jane looked steadUy into her eager, resentful face. Dear old Minnie, who had been with them all for more than thirty years! Jane slipped her arm around the plump waist above the white apron strings.

  'Thank you, Minnie,' she said.

  As she left the room, she saw her mother sink into her father's leather armchair. She walked slowly down the hall and up the stairs with Minnie. She had a queer dazed feeling

  that this — this couldn't be happening. Not to her father. Not to the Wards. Nothing — nothing — really serious had ever happened to them. Jimmy's death, of course. But that had only happened to her. It had not torn the fabric of family life — it had not uprooted the associations of her earhest childhood. Cicily's marriage — worrying, perplexing, of coiirse, but not — not terrifying, Hke this sort of worry.

  The house seemed quieter than usual. Hushed. Expectant. Jane suddenly remembered the sinister silence of the upper corridor of Flora's house that April morning twenty-two years ago, when she had walked out under the budding elm trees for her first encounter with death. The battered door — the smell of gas — the feeUng of little living Folly beneath her feet — the incredulity — the finality — the horror. And Stephen — hushed young Stephen — standing so gravely between the green-and-gold portieres in Flora's hall. The terrible viidness of youthful impressions! But why did it all come back to her now? Now — when she was trying to fight off this senseless sense of impending tragedy — of terror.

  Jane tapped lightly on her father's door. It was opened by Miss Coulter, in crisp, starched linen. Her smile, as she took the roses, was just as brisk, just as cheerful as Dr. Bancroft's had been. Jane entered her father's room. He was lying, under meticulously folded sheets, in the big double black walnut bedstead that he had shared with Jane's mother since Jane's earhest memory. His eyes were closed and he was resting easily. His breath came curiously, however, in long, slow gasps. His br
east, beneath the meticulously folded sheets, rose and fell, laboriously, with the effort of his breathing.

  Nevertheless, at the sight of him, Jane felt a sudden flood of reassurance. He did not look very ill. His face, beneath his neatly combed white hair, was smoothly relaxed in sleep.

  It looked unnatural only because Miss Coulter had removed his gold-framed spectacles.

  The nurse came softly to the bedside, the roses in a glass vase in her hand. She placed them on the bed table.

  'I'll tell him that you brought them, Mrs. Carver,' she murmured. 'I think you hadn't better stay just now.'

  All sense of reassurance fell away from Jane at her hushed accents. Of course, he was terribly ill. He was seventy-three years old and he had double pneumonia. She would not kiss him — she would not touch him — she would not disturb him. He must have every chance. Jane turned from the bedside and joined Minnie on the threshold. With an air of crisp and kindly competence, Miss Coulter noiselessly closed the bedroom door.

  When Jane reentered the library, her mother was crying in her father's armchair. Isabel, standing on the hearthrug, was looking at her a litde helplessly. She turned to stare at Jane's sober face. Jane realized, with a sudden sense of shock, that she had not seen her mother cry since her own wedding day.

  'Mamma — don't,' she said brokenly, as she sank down on

  the arm of her father's chair. 'I think he looks very well '

  Mrs. Ward only shook her grey head and went on silently crying. Isabel still stared helplessly from the hearthrug. A curious little flame of macabre excitement was flickering about the ashes of pity and grief and terror that choked Jane's heart. Her father had double pneumonia. Her father might be going to die. Something really serious had happened to the Wards.

  m Jane sat in a rocking-chair, drawn closely to her father's bedside. Beyond the bed, on a litde walnut sofa, her mother

  and Isabel were sitting. At the farther end of the room, in two chairs by the fireside, Robin and Stephen were sharing their quiet vigil.

  They were waiting in silence. They had been waiting in silence, just like that, for more than three hours. Dr. Bancroft and Miss Coulter had been in and out. They were talking to each other, now, in the dressing-room beyond the fireplace. Jane could hear their whispering voices very faintly in the silence of the sick-room. A silence otherwise unbroken, save for the occasional staccato whirr of a passing motor on the boulevard in firont of the house, and by the slow rhythmic cadence of Mr. Ward's loud, laboured breathing. It was four o'clock in the morning and the motors passed very infrequently. The breathing went steadily on, however, with a dreadful, mechanical regularity. It assaulted the ear. It filled the quiet room like the roar of a bombardment. One shell fell. Then silence. Then another shell. Then silence. Then another shell.

  The night-hght was placed so that the bed lay in shadow, but Jane could see her father's figure very distinctly. His chest rose and fell, mechanically, in his rhythmic struggle for breath. The oxygen tank had been abandoned. It still stood on the floor beneath the bed table. Mr. Ward's face was wliite and pinched and drawn and completely weary — weary with the supreme exhaustion of approaching death. It showed no sign of consciousness. The eyes were closed and the mouth was slightly open. His hands lay relaxed on the meticulously ordered sheets.

  Jane sat looking at those hands. Old hands, fi-agile and blue-veined, with a black seal ring upon one littie finger. They were still her father's hands. The approach of death had not cdtered them as it had the drawn and weary face. The spark of life was in them. They were living hands. The

  face was terrifying. The face was relaxed, defenceless and beaten. It was no longer her father's living face. It had lost the spark.

  But the breathing continued. The breathing continued in slow, even, raucous gasps. The gasps were terrifying, but not as terrifying as the intervals between them. The intervals seemed endless. Shaken by the dreadful deHberation of that laboured breathing, Jane wondered, terrified, in every interval, if the gasp would come again.

  It did, however. It came with the impersonal regularity of a clock tick. Presently the clock would stop. Her father was dying. He would not live through the night. Three days ago he had sat in his leather armchair, in the library dowTi-stairs, lightly reassuring Jane on the state of his bronchitis. To-morrow he would be dead. The roses that Jane had brought to his bedside were still in the vase on the table. The buds had barely reached their prime. Only that morning her father had commented on their ephemeral, creamy bloom. Those roses would outlive him. Life would go on.

  Life would go on for Jane without his sustaining presence. Without his tacit sympathy, his love, his watchfulness, his warning, worried glance. He had worried and warned and watched and loved and sympathized over Jane for forty-one years, and now he was dying. He was dying just at the time when Jane felt she could have rewarded his love and sympathy as never before. There was no longer any necessity for worrying and warning and watching over her personal drama. She had grown up. Soon she would grow old. She saw life, now, eye to eye with her father. She, too, had become a spectator. Her children had taken the stage.

  Once she had worried him awfully. She had not heeded his warning. She had been swept by the intoxication of her love for Jimmy into indifference, into resentment even, toward

  that warning and that worry. She had given him a very bad time. Jane regretted that now. But she could not regret her love for Jimmy. With all his tenderness, with all his understanding, her father had not tried to understand that love. He had merely deplored it. 'Safety first' was always the parental slogan. Parents invariably deplored everything that threatened their children's security. Whatever their own experience had been, they desired for the younger generation only the most conventional, the most convenient, kind of happiness.

  Her father's experience. Jane looked at the worn, white face that lay upon the pillow. It told no tales. The spirit was withdrawn firom that face into some remote and impenetrable fastness, where it awaited in soUtude the last adventure of Ufe. It was obhvious of love, obHvious of care, obhvious of companionship. Stricken suddenly with a sense of the loneliness of death, Jane leaned forward to take her father's incredibly inert, intolerably touching hand. The fingers were cold. They returned no answering pressure. Jane softly withdrew her hand. She could not reach him.

  But was death, as a matter of fact, any more lonely than life? What had Jane ever known about her father's actual earthly experience? Parents knew httle enough of the emotional fives of their children, but children knew nothing of the emotional fives of their parents. The emotional life of a parent was a fantastic thought. In aU the forty-one years that they had shared together, Jane had never achieved, she had never even sought to achieve, one single reveafing glimpse of the secret stage on which the passionate personal drama of her father's fife had been enacted.

  What was that drama? Why had he loved her mother? Had he always loved her? Had there been no other girl before, no other woman after, he had met and married her?

  What had her parents really been, when they shared the romance of their early youth? Jane knew how they had looked. She had always known that because of the pictures in the red plush family album downstairs in the rosewood cabinet in the yellow drawing-room. Glossy, matter-of-fact photographs of the early seventies. Her mother at nineteen, in her wedding dress, with its formal pleats and exaggerated bustle of thick white satin and its little frill of sheer white lace that stood up stiffly at the back of her slender neck and framed her young, round face and the preposterous waterfall of her blonde curly hair. Her graceful young figure was elegantly pesed on a photographer's rustic bridge in the fashionable, back-breaking curve of the 'Grecian bend.' A charming, artificial figure. A pretty, grave little face. And her father framed in the oval of the opposite page. Her father in the middle twenties. A handsome young man with big dark eyes and a sensitive mouth and the faintest suspicion of a sidebum on his lean young cheeks. A serious young man, with hair just a litdc too l
ong and a collar just a little too big, and black satin coat lapels that were cut a trifle queerly. How had those two young people made out with marriage? Jane could not really believe they were her parents. She had no sense of the continuity of their personahty. They had died young — those tw'o young people. They had not grown up into Mr. and Mrs. John Ward of Pine Street, who had always seemed to Jane, since her earliest memory, so staid, so settled, so more than middle-aged.

  'All lives,' her father had said to her before Cicily's marriage, 'are difficult at times.' What had been his difficulties? Jane did not know. The difficulties of Victorian marriages had been mercifully concealed by Victorian reticence fi-om the eyes and ears of Victorian children. But what, for that matter, did Cicily, Jenny, and Steve know of herself and Stephen?

  Jane's eyes wandered from the white face on the pillow to her mother's dim figure sunk on the walnut sofa beyond the bed. Mrs. Ward was looking at her husband. Her eyes were dull ^xith grief, her face expressionless with fatigue. What did her mother know, Jane wondered, that she and Isabel did not, of the passionate personal drama of her father's life? What did wives know of husbands, or husbands know of wives? Stephen had absolutely no conception of the thoughts that passed daily through her mind. No knowledge whatever of that vast accumulation of confused impressions and vague convictions and wistful desires that made up the world of revery in which she really lived. Stephen had his world of revery, too, of course. Every one had. In the first disarming experience of love you tried to share that world. You flung open the door. You offered the key. But somehow, in spite of love, with time and incident the door swung slowly shut again. You never noticed it until you found yourself locked securely in, with the key in your own pocket. You really wondered how it had come to be there. You could not remember just when or why you had stopped saying — everything. But at the end of twenty years of marriage it was astounding to consider the number of things, that somehow, you had never said —