“He’s always come between us—always. Even the last night before I went west he was down after us, calling you away. I’d give up my work—it isn’t that—but you’re the only person in the world that matters to me, and I must be first to you or I won’t be anything. I won’t take just what you can spare me from Victor. If you love me, you’ll come.”
“He needs me.”
“I need you.”
“Not as much as he does—no one needs me as much as he does.”
“It’s Victor or me, Maggie.”
The baby lay in the big wash-basket under the wistaria vine wailing until she came to comfort him, the child ran to her from imagined terrors, the boy lifted his wet face and swollen eyes to her as she came out of the room where Mamma was dying. They held out their hands to her as the Child had held out his hands on the day of scillas and snow.
“It’s Victor, Edward.”
Carefully, as if she were made of thinnest glass, she moved about the room. Nothing of Edward must be left, now that Edward himself was gone. The dent he had made in the sofa cushion, the hearthrug corner that his foot turned up. Carefully, so as not to break her fragile glass fingers, she tidied them. Then she sat in the window-seat, her eyes on the falling snow, her hands lying lightly in her lap.
She was empty, empty as the shell of a locust that still clings to a tree trunk; legs, eyes, body all there, but the bright soaring wings that were in it, the life that was in it, torn out and away.
And suddenly she ran after him, tore after him, tumbling down the stairs, leaving the hall door wide for the wind and the snow to enter, stepping on her skirt, stumbling, running through the snow in her thin slippers. He had gone to the Allens’—she would go to him, they would be together again, forever and ever. “Edward, Edward, I’m coming—oh, Edward, I want you!”
Edward her lover and friend to whom she had given the bread of tears.
“Victor,” sighed the wind among the pine branches. “Victor,” sighed the sifting snow.
Victor frightened. Victor homesick. Victor needing her.
Across the fields she saw Victor trudging home through the dusk, his shoulders up, his head down against the snowy wind. Passionate, enfolding tenderness flooded her, and pain beyond any pain she had ever known. It was as if her heart had been broken open so that her brother could enter in completely. But Edward was there, too, would be there forever. No matter if she never saw him again, no matter what happened. Could anything make her stop loving him? Can storms put out the stars?
She went back to the house, and in to the new life that still looked so much like the old. The horsehair sofa, the parlor fire smoking a little, Dicky and Downy piping in their cages, the smell of carnations and of frying chicken, the clock on the stairs, that sounded like water falling drop by drop—
She must go and take off Edward’s place from the tea-table—she must go—as soon as she stopped shaking—
The door burst open, and Victor came stamping in, all red cheeks and snow.
“Hello, Maggie! Where’s Edward?”
“He’s gone.”
“He’s coming back to tea, isn’t he?”
“No.”
“Did you tell him we were going to have charlotte russe?”
And suddenly she cried in a high quivering voice:
“Victor Campion, I’ve told you one million times to scrape off your feet and not come tracking snow into the house!”
Victor looked up with mild reproach from where he sat struggling with his rubber boots.
“Well, don’t take my head off, Maggie, it isn’t my fault Edward couldn’t stay.”
XVII
The ladies were stealing a good many glances at the clock beneath the Arab and his prancing steed on Mrs. Leaf’s mantelpiece. Four o’clock—certainly time for coffee and cake if their suppers weren’t to be spoiled. The flannel for the orphans’ nightgowns puckered more and more slowly over their needles.
And then, instead of going comfortably in and sitting around the dining-room table for their cake and coffee as they always did, always, at every meeting of the Guild, Carpus the houseman in his white jacket, with his black forehead all puckered with perplexity, brought in a tray and put it on a small spidery table by Mrs. Leaf—and there wasn’t anything on it but tea and bread and butter! Tea! And bread and butter! Mrs. Talbot nearly cried, she was so disappointed, and Mrs. Pennock gave Mrs. Holly such a look! It was hardly worth the trouble of balancing the cups and plates. And poor Miss Perry, who had counted on saving her supper, gazed round at the blue velvet ottomans and chairs with their fat fringes, the grand gas chandelier like a floating bouquet of white glass tulips with twisty stems, and the bright-colored peasants dancing on large china vases, and couldn’t understand it at all. Mrs. Leaf generally gave “such an elegant entertainment.”
Mrs. Leaf knew what they were feeling, and was bright pink with self-consciousness. But her guest from New York, Mrs. Hawthorn, had afternoon tea, with bread and butter, so the Leafs were having it—and the ladies of the Guild were having it.
Mrs. Hawthorn’s opulent curves, covered with tight black silk, filled an S shaped rocking-chair, white frothed from beneath her long black train, bracelets encircled her plump white wrists and a chatelaine watch clung to the steeps of her bosom. She was being charming to everyone, as a rose sheds its fragrance for all, as a queen bows to the crowd. Mrs. Almond thought she certainly washed her hair with soda to make it golden, and told Hessie Farley so; and
