XXIII Lavinia Sees the Abyss
I
Four days without incident ... and then Eileen fainted at the dressmaker’s. The afternoon was hot and she had stood for a long fitting. It was nothing unusual to the seamstress, but it was a thrilling experience for the girl who had never known oblivion other than that of normal sleep. She went home with a bump on her head, to tell how near she came to being impaled on Miss Denison’s shears. Saturday morning she fainted again. It was after a long telephone conversation with Kitten Henderson. Lavinia sent for Dr. Schubert. He was making a country call. In a panic of fear she summoned Mrs. Ascott. When they had chafed the girl’s hands and bathed her temples with brandy, consciousness returned slowly.
“I thought I was dying,” she murmured between stiffened lips. “My hands felt like clubs, and all at once my whole body seemed to be climbing into my head.”
A cry—the sudden baffled scream of a trapped animal—burst from Lavinia Trench, as she sprang to the side of the divan. “What have you done? Oh, my God, what have you done?”
“My dear Mrs. Trench,” Judith expostulated, “what has come over you!”
“You don’t know what it means. You haven’t been through it six times. I never fainted at any other time—and that scapegrace of a Hal Marksley off to college without a word. Oh, I’ll go mad!”
Relief came in a torrential flood of abuse, of self-pity. All the store that had been repressed since the early days of July poured its acrid waters over the girl. In vain Eileen sought to defend herself, to declare furiously that her mother’s accusation was untrue. In such moods, Lavinia was never careful to choose her words. When the tirade became insulting, beyond endurance, she sprang from the couch and fled to a room on the third floor where she could lock herself in and defy the family to drag her forth.
Judith went home, dumb with anguish. Would Eileen do violence to herself? Would David’s heart break? Would Lary.... She paused, panting, to frame the question: “Would Lary rise to the occasion?” On the answer hung all her hope. After an hour of thinking, such as she had never done before, she went again through the wicket gate. She would take the girl with her for the laboratory experiment—an unusually important one, that called for an extra pair of hands. Lavinia was nowhere in sight; but from the cellar came the sound of mop and broom. Absinthe might give surcease to the roué in the boulevard restaurant but for Lavinia Trench the safety-valve was hard manual labor.
II
The experiment, that morning, narrowly missed success. At the moment when three pairs of eyes were watching with anxious interest, the fumes from a heated retort were wafted into Eileen’s face, and she collapsed in Dr. Schubert’s arms. Judith turned off the flame beneath the mass of glowing coal and hurried to the consultation room where the girl lay, white and deathlike.
“Unfasten her corsets, quick! Her pulse is almost gone.” The physician’s command held an unwonted blend of terror. Eileen Trench was the core of his soul. He could not be impersonal, where she was concerned. At an opportune moment Sydney arrived, to lend a hand.
It was decided that the girl must lie quiet for an hour. And of course Mrs. Ascott would stop for luncheon. Luncheon! Could one eat food, with the world in shambles? She went to the divan, choking with distress. The amber eyes were half closed and great tears welled over the lids.
“It’s beastly to be such a nuisance to those we love....” The blue lips scarcely moved to articulate the poignantly empty words. Then the long lashes drooped in utter weariness, and Eileen slept.
Judith Ascott left the office. She wanted to get away from herself, away from every familiar thing. Unconsciously she turned her back on the cross-street that would have led to the campus and thence to her home. How many miles she walked, she could not guess. She was hazily conscious of smiling meadows and orchards, panting beneath their load of ruddy fruit. Winding hill roads, ankle-deep in dust, and brooks that laughed at obstructing pebbles; pastures where cattle grazed, and acres of coreopsis, resplendent with their wealth of fleeting gold, she viewed with eyes that saw not.
When at last her strength waned and hunger overcame her, she perceived that she was approaching a town. She would go to the station and inquire for a train to Springdale. A little way to her left, graders were at work with shovels that scarred the helpless earth. Great piles of stone and other piles of yellow brick and moulded terra cotta crowned the rising ground. In the midst of all this orderly confusion she perceived a sign-board, insolent with new paint:
DAVID TRENCH
BUILDING CONTRACTOR
She stared in astonishment. Then, by some magic of the mind the solid earth beneath her feet shifted. She was no longer facing south. This was Springdale, and she was approaching her home from the west. The work on Henry Marksley’s mansion had already begun. She shuddered as she thought of David.
From the high point in the parked boulevard, near which the sign-board stood, she could see the distant tower clock, its face gilded by the late afternoon sun. And over there on the newly paved extension of Sherman Avenue the foolish little trolley car was bobbing serenely along. She could catch it on the return trip if she hurried.