Years of Grace

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 with 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. Everyone 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—

Jane was roused from revery by Isabel’s sudden movement, by her mother’s sharp, stifled exclamation. She stared at her father’s face. The mouth had dropped slightly more open. The chest was motionless. The slow raucous gasps were silenced. The bombardment had ceased.

“Dr. Bancroft! Dr. Bancroft!” cried Isabel shrilly. The doctor appeared instantly in the dressing-room door. He moved quickly to the bedside. Miss Coulter followed him. He took her father’s hand and felt the wrist for a moment in silence. He looked at Mrs. Ward. Robin and Stephen had crossed the room. They stood staring down at Mr. Ward from the foot of the bed. Her mother was crying. Isabel’s arm was around her. They, too, were staring down at Mr. Ward.

Her father was dead, thought Jane dully. Her father had died, as she sat at his bedside thinking abstract thoughts of life⁠—of her own personal problems. How could she have thought such thoughts at such a moment? Lost in the complications presented by her own drama, she had not seen the curtain fall on the last act of her father’s life. She had not sensed the final approach of death. She had been totally unaware of that last, fearfully awaited gasp.

Her mother had risen. Isabel’s arm was still around her. Stephen’s hand was on Jane’s shoulder. She rose slowly from her chair, staring down at the white, pinched face that lay upon the pillow⁠—the face that was not her father’s.

“Come, dear,” said Stephen tenderly. At the sound of his voice Jane felt her eyes fill suddenly with tears. Her father was dead. Stephen’s hand was on her elbow. His touch grew firm and insistent.

“Come, dear,” he said again. He led her to the door. Robin and Isabel were already there. Her mother was weeping in their arms.

“Come, dear,” Robin was saying. Her father was dead, and they were all running away from him. In response to some strange, instinctive recoil, life was retreating from death. They were leaving him to Dr. Bancroft and Miss Coulter.

“I⁠—I want to stay!” cried Jane a little wildly.

“No, dear,” said Stephen protectively, “come.” Somehow, Jane found herself in the darkened hall. Her mother was at her elbow.

“Come, Mamma, dear,” Isabel was saying.

“He’s⁠—dead,” said Mrs. Ward dully.

“Come, dear,” said Isabel insistently, through her tears.

“I’ve⁠—no one⁠—now,” said Mrs. Ward slowly.

Jane suddenly realized that Minnie had joined them. Her face was distorted with weeping.

“You’ve got me,” said Minnie. Competently she drew Mrs. Ward from Isabel’s restraining arm. “You come and lie down in the guestroom,” she said. Mrs. Ward permitted herself to be led away. Jane, in the darkened corridor, looked blankly, tearlessly, at Stephen, Isabel, and Robin. Her father was dead.

IV

Jane sat in the sunny corner of Cicily’s room in the Lying-in Hospital, holding the week-old twins in her arms. How ridiculous, how adorable of them to be twins, she was thinking, as she gazed down at their absurdly red, absurdly wrinkled, absurdly tiny faces. Little John Ward and little Jane Ward Bridges! John and Jane⁠—Cicily’s son and daughter!

Jane had wondered, a trifle anxiously, if she would experience a pang at the sight of a grandchild⁠—if grandmother-hood had birth pangs of its own. But no⁠—she had produced her grand-twins, vicariously to be sure, without any spiritual travail. She loved being a grandmother. She loved little Jane, and especially little John Ward Bridges, little John Ward, who had come into the world to take up life and his name, just six weeks after his great-grandfather had left it. Life had gone on.

Jane wished, terribly, that her father might have lived to see this great-grandson. He so nearly had. Things happened so quickly as you grew older. Jane felt she had barely recovered from those three dreadful days when her father’s life was hanging in the balance, from the shock of his death, from the pity and sorrow of the readjustment of her mother’s life, when the hour arrived, at two o’clock one March morning, when, stealing out of bed and leaving a note for Stephen on her pincushion, she had rushed with Cicily in the motor from the Lakewood house to the Lying-in Hospital, where she had sat in a waiting-room, a beautifully furnished, green-walled waiting-room that looked exactly like the bleak parlour of an exceptionally good hotel, for six, eight, ten hours, waiting for Cicily’s twins to come into the world.

Cicily had been born in the house on Pine Street. Jenny and Steve in the blue bedroom at Lakewood. Jane did not entirely hold with hospitals as a stage set for birth. In spite of surgeon’s plaster labels stuck on newborn shoulder blades, in spite of scientific footprints taken in birth-rooms, Jane