XII The Poem Judith Read
I
From her vine-screened retreat in the summer house, Judith Ascott looked out on the fairest May Day she had ever known. It was the morning after ... and the promise she had made to Lary hung sinister and foreboding over her spirit. Everything around her was vibrant with coming summer. At home the buds would be opening timorously, while here the perennial climbers were in full leaf. An aureate splendour, seductive as Danae’s rain, rippled through the open structure of the pergola, transmuting the pebble walk to a pavement of costly gems; but within the widening of the arbour—that David had converted into an outdoor living-room—the frightened shadows sought refuge from the shafts that would presently destroy them. To the cool umbrageous corner nearest the house, where the light was faint, the woman had taken her world-weary body, yearning for the relaxation her bed had denied her.
It was all so insistent, this new life that had come to her, its music keyed to a pitch she had never realized, a tempo beyond the reach of her experience. The Trenches. Were there other families in the universe like this one? Before her coming to Springdale she had viewed the world through a thick forest of people, most of them intolerably tiresome. In the main they were contented ... such contentment as is to be derived from a favourable turn in the market or the balm of Bermuda to beguile a winter’s day. Happy lives, she had read, make uninteresting biographies. Her life had been far from happy, and her biography would be utterly stupid. Mrs. Trench was—she realized with a stab of astonishment—a desperately unhappy woman, and her life story was made up of a propitious marriage and six abnormally interesting children. And then ... Theo appeared at the other side of the garden wall, discerned the white-clad figure among the verdant shadows of the summer house, and scaled the low barrier with the nimbleness of a squirrel. In the folds of her skirt she held something, and a furtive air pervaded her small person.
II
“Dear Lady Judith, may I have the honour of a morning call?”
“Do come, you little ray of sunshine. Your Lady Judith’s sky is overcast, and she is in sore need of cheer.”
“Don’t you go bothering Mrs. Ascott this morning,” Theo’s mother cried sharply from the pantry window. “You ought to know enough not to wear out your welcome.”
“No danger,” Judith assured her. She did not perceive the look of sharp displeasure on the older woman’s face, but the voice affected her disagreeably, and she turned for relief to the anomalous reproduction of Lavinia, who was already nestling confidently at her side, on the oaken settle. The child spread upon her knee two sheets of paper, on which many lines had been written. A casual glance betrayed the agony of composition. Words had been discarded by the device of an impatient pen stroke. Others had been consigned to oblivion by means of carefully drawn lines. Phrases had been transposed and rhyming terminals changed.
“It’s a poem. I thought it would help to cheer you up. Mamma wouldn’t like it, and neither would Mrs. Stevens—because it doesn’t hop along on nice little iambic feet. It has to say ‘te-tum, te-tum, te-tum,’ or they think it isn’t poetry. Eileen writes some that are wilder than this one; but she never lets mamma see them. She wrote one on Love, last Sunday morning, when she ought to have been listening to the sermon, and ... what do you think! Left it in the hymn book! And Kitten Henderson found it, and sent it to Dan Vincel as her own composition.”
Mrs. Ascott took the copy, scanning the first page with crescent interest. She had not thought of Eileen as a poet. Yet such intense musical feeling.... The musician is seldom a poet of marked quality or distinction. The godlike gifts of rhythm, cadence, imagery, these may not flow with equal volume in double channels. Yet the verses, however crude, would shed another light on a nature too complex for ready analysis. There was no title, no clue to the impulse that promoted the writing. There was no need of such. A girl in Eileen’s rhapsodic mental state would not go far in search of inspiration.
“Birth, Hope, Ambition, Love,
These four the minor half of life compose:
The sylvan stream to broadening river flows,
And, golden-fair, replete with promise, glows
The radiant Sun above.
“The major half of life?
Love scars the soul, as ’twere a searing brand:
Ambition turns to ashes in our hand,
Nor, ’til the glass has spilled its latest sand,
Comes rest from urge and strife.
“O Birth! thou wanton wight
That dost with smiles enmask thy mocking eyes!
How dost thou cheat the unborn soul that flies
Full-eager from its formless Paradise
To realms of Death and Night!”
Theo sat breathless, a flush of expectation staining her dark skin, as the first page was laid aside and the second came to view. Before the remaining stanzas were finished, her heart was beating visibly through the thin morning dress, as her lips fashioned soundlessly the lines she had memorized at the second reading:
“O Love! more wanton e’en
Than Birth or Hope or bold Ambition, thine
To lift the quivering soul to heights divine,
To mad the brain with Amor’s poisoned wine,
To spread thy wonder-sheen
“O’er eyes that erst could see!
Thy promises, how fair, how full of bliss!
Are mortals born for rapture such as this?
Helas! the web was cunning-wove, I wis,
That e’en entangled me!”
“Theodora, are you sure that Eileen wrote these verses?”
“Eileen? Goodness, no! She scrawls all over the paper. You never saw her write a neat little hand like that.”
“Then who did write it?”
“Why ... Lary, of course. I thought you knew he was the poet—the real poet of the family. He wrote it last night. I saw his light burning at four o’clock this morning. I couldn’t sleep, either. Mine was ear-ache. His was another kind. He says you always have to agonize when you write anything worth while. And I think this poem is ... worth while ... don’t you?”
The solid ground of assurance was, somehow, slipping from beneath her feet. Lady Judith was not pleased. Her usually pale cheeks burned red, and there was an unfamiliar look in her eyes.
“Eileen told you to bring this to me?”
“Humph! You don’t think I’d show her Lary’s poem? He lets me see lots of things he writes, that mamma and the rest of them don’t know anything about—till they’re published. And if the stupid editors send them back—I never do tell. I wouldn’t ... for the world.”
“He gave you this to read?”
“N-n-not exactly. He left the desk unlocked. Didn’t put the top quite all the way down, and one corner of the paper was sticking out. I had to see what it was, so that if it was something the others oughtn’t to see, I could put it under the blotter, out of sight.”
An expression of Dutton’s flashed through Mrs. Ascott’s mind: “Theo’s the spit of her mother. She’ll do the dirtiest tricks, and explain ’em on high moral grounds.” She caught and held the dark, troubled eyes.
“Theodora, do you know that you have done something almost unpardonable?”
“But, Lady Judith, when anybody feels the way Lary does, and you love him as much as I do—don’t you see, the sooner there’s an understanding, the better? It was that way with the Lady Judith in the story. And if it hadn’t been for the meddlesome fairy, that found the drawing of the two hearts, interlocked, the Prince wouldn’t have known, till it was too late.”
“Theo,” the woman interrupted sharply, “take these two sheets of paper back to your brother’s room, and lay them exactly as you found them, so that he won’t know they have been moved or seen.”
Fear puckered the thin little face, fear and chagrin. With sparrow-like motion she turned and darted in the direction of the wicket gate. Midway she stopped, arrested by the timbre of Mrs. Ascott’s voice—a sternness she had not deemed possible.
“Come back, Theodora, if you want me ever to care for you again.”
A moment the lithe body wavered, the mind irresolute. Then she set her head impishly on one side, looked at the angry, frightened woman with a scold-me-if-you-can expression, and slowly retraced her steps, dragging her toes in the gravel and swaying her straight hips from side to side. It was pure bravado. At the entrance to the summer house, her spirit broke. In another instant she was in Mrs. Ascott’s lap and great sobs were shaking her agitated bosom.
“There, precious, I didn’t mean to hurt you. But, can’t you realize, dearie? You must be made to realize, no matter how it hurts.”
“No, you are the one who must be made to realize. I knew it, all along.”
“Knew what, Theo?”
“That Lary’s crazy about you. He never cared for anybody—not even puppy-dog love, when he was a boy. He was glad when Sylvia married, so he wouldn’t have to take her girl friends home—when they hung around so late that they were afraid to go home by themselves. I’ve been waiting to tell you about him for ever so long. You couldn’t know how good he is—how good—and wonderful.” The smothered voice was full of adoration. “He has the dearest ways, when you are all alone with him. And he never misses the point of a joke. Mamma can say witty things; but she almost never sees the other fellow’s joke. And his hands are so gentle—not strong and rough, like Bob’s. If you only knew.... But Lary wouldn’t ever tell you the nice side of him.”
Hungry arms pressed her close.
“Ah!” the advocate stopped her pleading, to sigh with infinite relief. “You won’t be angry with me. But, Lady Judith, I had to do it ... if you hadn’t ever forgiven me. Lary is teaching me to stand things like a stoic. And when so much depends on it—” The eyes flamed with an idea. “You know, like walking along in the dark, and all at once somebody strikes a match to light a cigar, and you see that there is a hole in the road that you would have fallen into. If no one had struck a match, how would you know the hole was there?”
“And you can keep this secret—never let your brother suspect?”
“He’s the last person in the world that I’d tell. He’d be more angry than you were. And there’s another reason. I’m not quite sure that Lary knows what’s the matter with him. Of course he says—in the last stanza of the poem. He’s written love poetry before, when it was only a woman he imagined, and so he might not think it was serious. Mrs. Ferguson said that if her husband had suspected that he was falling in love with her, he would have taken the first train out of town. Afterward ... he was glad he didn’t know.”
“Theodora! Are you sixty years old, and have you settled the marriage problems of a dozen unpromising daughters and granddaughters? Where did you get such ideas?”
“I heard mamma and Mrs. Ferguson talking about it, before Sylvia was married. I never forget anything I hear; but it’s an awful long time before I get light on some things. When I read Lary’s poem, this morning—and came to that last line—and remembered how pale you looked when you came out in the yard before breakfast—why, all at once the ideas came tumbling together, and I knew that Lary mustn’t know he was in love till he was so far in, he wouldn’t want to ever get out.”
It was adorable, the way she took Mrs. Ascott’s attitude and response for granted. No woman, not even the enshrined Lady Judith, would fail to be honoured by Lary’s love.
III
“Theo-do-ra!” Drusilla’s broad cadence issued from the pantry window. Drusilla was the coffee-coloured maid of all work, who was serving temporarily as mouthpiece for Mrs. Trench. “Come home this minute, honey. You got to do an errand befoh lunch.”
Theodora reflected that there was time for twenty such errands. And her perplexity grew when, after a few minutes, she saw Eileen pass through the wicket gate to take Mrs. Ascott an embroidery pattern from an old number of the Self Culture magazine. She remembered distinctly that Mrs. Ascott had said she did not care particularly about it. That was a week ago. Why had mamma dragged it out now, and sent it over by Eileen?
With all her wizard penetration, the child had never glimpsed the deep windings of her mother’s mind. Mrs. Ascott could not be counted on to take a lively interest in two of the Trench children, and for the present Eileen was the focal point of her mother’s concern. More and more the conviction grew that this woman from the great outside world had been sent by Divine Providence to aid in bringing to swift climax what otherwise might have been a long drawn out affair.
Long engagements were dangerous. Sylvia had been engaged to Tom Henderson for two years. If she, Lavinia Larimore, had listened to Calvin, when he begged her to run away and be married, the night he proposed to her.... It was when she reached this stage in her silent soliloquy that she determined to have Drusilla call Theodora home, and send Eileen to Vine Cottage in her stead.