Sharp pain of fear released the explosion that, momentarily, had been dammed up by the sheer fury of her thoughts:
“You old fool, you!” she raged. “So you’ve been sitting here all these years while I’ve been looking after you, scheming against me and mine. A trick, that’s what it is. Think you’re clever, eh, using your gift to—”
It was the way the old man was shrinking that brought brief, vivid awareness to the woman of the danger of such an outburst after so many years of smiling friendliness. She heard the old man say:
“I don’t understand, Mrs Carmody. What’s the matter?”
“Did you say it?” She couldn’t have stopped the words to save her soul.
“Did I say what?”
“About Phyllis and that Couzens boy—”
“Oh, them!” He seemed to forget that she was there above him. A benign smile crept into his face. He said at last quietly: “It seems like hardly yesterday that they were married—”
For a second time he became aware of the dark, forbidding expression of the woman who towered above him.
“Anything wrong?” he gasped. “Has something happened to Phyllis and her husband?”
With a horrible effort the woman caught hold of herself. Her eyes blazed at him with a slate-blue intensity.
“I don’t want you to talk about them, do you understand? Not a word. I don’t want to hear a word about them.”
The old man stirred, his face creasing into a myriad extra lines of bewilderment. “Why, certainly, Mrs Carmody, if you wish, but my own great-granddaughter—”
He subsided weakly as the woman whipped on Pearl: “If you mention one word of this to Phyllis, I’ll . . . you know what I’ll do to you.”
“Oh, sure, ma,” Pearl said. “You can trust me, ma.”
The woman turned away, shaking. For years there had been a dim plan in the back of her mind, to cover just such a possibility as Phyllis wanting to marry someone else.
She twisted her face with distaste and half fear, and brought the ugly thing out of the dark brain corridor where she had kept it hidden.
Her fingers kept trembling as she worked. Once she saw herself in the mirror over the sink – and started back in dismay at the distorted countenance that reflected there.
That steadied her. But the fear stayed, sick surge after sick surge of it. A woman, forty-five, without income, in the depths of the depression. There was Federal relief, of course, but they wouldn’t give that to her till the money was gone. There was old-age pension – twenty-five years away.
She drew a deep breath. Actually, those were meaningless things, utter defeats. Actually, there was only her desperate plan – and that required the fullest co-operation from Bill.
She studied Bill when he came in from the field at lunch. There had been a quietness in him this last year or so that had puzzled her. As if, at twenty, he had suddenly grown up.
He looked like a man; he was strongly built, of medium height with lines of dark passion in his rather heavy face.
That was good, that passion; undoubtedly, he had inherited some of her own troubled ambition – and there was the fact that he had been caught stealing just before they left the city, and released with a warning.
She hadn’t blamed him then, felt only his bitter fury against a world that lashed out so cruelly against boys ruthlessly deprived by fate of spending money.
That was all over, of course. For two years he had been a steady, quiet worker, pulling his full share with the other hired men. Nevertheless—
To get Phyllis, that earlier, harder training would surely rise up once more – and win for all of them.
Slyly, she watched as, out of the corner of his eyes, he took one of his long, measured glances at Phyllis, where she sat across the table slantwise from him. For more than a year now, the woman had observed him look at Phyllis like that – and besides she had asked him, and—
Surely, a young man of twenty would fight to get the girl he loved.
Fight unscrupulously. The only thing was—
How did a mother tell her son the particular grim plan that was in her mind? Did she . . . she just tell him?
After lunch, while Phyllis and Pearl were washing the dishes, the woman softly followed Bill up to his room. And, actually, it was easier than she had thought.
He lay for a while, after she had finished, staring at the ceiling; his heavy face was quiet almost placid. Finally:
“So the idea is that this evening you take Pearl in to Kempster to a movie; the old man, of course, will sleep like a log. But after Phyllis goes to bed at her usual time, I go into her room – and then she’ll have to marry me.”
It was so baldly put that the woman shrank, as if a mirror had been held up to her; and the image was an incredibly evil, ravaged thing. The cool voice went on:
“If I do this it means we’ll be able to stay on the farm, is that right?”
She nodded, because no words would come. Then, not daring to stay a moment longer, she turned and left the room.
Slowly, the black mood of that interview passed. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon when she came out into the veranda; and the old man looked up from his chair, and said:
“Terrible thing,” he said, “your sister hanged. They told me at the hotel. Hanged. Terrible, terrible; you’ve been right to have nothing to do with her.”
He seemed to forget her, simply sat there staring into space.
The whole thing was utterly unreal, and, after a moment, quite unthinkably fantastic. The woman stared at him with a sudden, calm, grim understanding of the faint smile that was creeping back into his face, a serene smile.
So that was his plan, she thought coolly. The mischievous old scoundrel intended that Phyllis should not marry Bill. Therefore, knowing his own reputation for prophecy, he had cleverly told her that Phyllis and Charlie Couzens—
That was his purpose. And now he was trying to scare her into doing nothing about it. Hanging indeed. She smiled, her thick face taut with inward anger.
He was clever – but not clever enough.
In the theater she had a curious sense of chattering voices and flickering lights. Too much meaningless talk, too much light.
Her eyes hurt and, afterward, when they came out onto the pale dimness of Kempster’s main street, the difference – the greater darkness – was soothing.
She must have said, “Pearl, let’s go in and have a banana split.”
She must have said that or agreed to it because after a while they were sitting at a little table; and the ice cream was cold as it went into her mouth; and there was a taste of banana.
Her mind held only a variation of one tense thought: If she and Bill could put this over, the world was won. Nothing thereafter could ever damage them to the same dreadful degree as this could.
“Aw, gee, ma, I’m sleepy. It’s half past eleven.”
The woman came to reality with a start. She looked at her watch; and it was true. “Goodness gracious!” she exclaimed with artifical amazement. “I didn’t realize—”
The moon was shining, and the horse anxious to get home. Coming down the great hill, she could see no light anywhere in the house. The buildings loomed silent in the moonlit darkness, like great semiformless shapes against the transparent background of the land.
She left Pearl to unhitch the animal and, trembling, went into the house. There was a lamp in the kitchen turned very low. She turned it into brightness, but the light didn’t seem to help her feet on the stairs. She kept stumbling, but she reached the top, reached Bill’s door. Ever so softly, she knocked.
No answer.
She opened the door. The pale, yellow light of the lamp poured onto the empty bed – and it was only the
