CHAPTER II
It was on a Saturday of late October that it happened—the adventure which, in after years, Sheila was to see as so significant.
Sheila and Ted had gone to the woods with a nutting-party—a party too merry to do much but frolic, and eat as they gathered. By afternoon their baskets were not nearly full, and Ted surveyed his own with chagrin. He liked to accomplish what he set out to do, not because he was particularly industrious, but because a sense of power within him, partly sheer physical vigor and partly a naturally dominant will, demanded deeds for its satisfaction. If he could stay an hour longer, if he could go a little deeper into the woods, he could fill his basket, he reflected; whereas now—and he looked with contempt and a genuine distress at his meagre store of hazel nuts.
In his discontent he had already lagged behind his companions. The other children had set their faces homeward; Sheila walked just ahead of him, her arm around the waist of Charlotte Davis, a girl of her own age whom she had taken, with solemn vows, for her dearest friend. He might call the two girls, he thought, and together they could soon have a fine harvest, but his inclination rejected Charlotte almost as quickly as the idea occurred to him. For Charlotte, with her pert little freckled nose and her shrewd blue eyes, was not a comrade to Ted's taste. She had never shown him a proper reverence, and he was at the stage when a boy desires feminine tribute even while he affects to scorn it.
Charlotte had never understood him. Or was it what he did not suspect—that she had always understood him too well? At any rate she had a disconcerting way of gazing at him, her head cocked impudently on one side, her eyes half speculative, half amused. And her sharp, teasing tongue was even more disconcerting than her naughty, quizzical stare. He could imagine, from past experience at her hands, what would happen now if he included her in his plan.
"What do you want of more nuts?" she would ask, with the inquiring innocence that he had learned to distrust. "Haven't you got all you can eat?"
"Yes, but—" he would begin to explain.
And she would interrupt him in the middle of his sentence with:
"Oh, I see! You just want to do more than anybody else, don't you? Theodore Kent always does more than anybody else! Don't he, Sheila?" And this with a great show of admiration. Yet even to Sheila, whose loyal mind conceived with difficulty of any disrespect to him, the mockery of the apparent admiration would be obvious.
Yes, that was what would happen if he invited Charlotte to stay, and he felt himself flush at the fancied conversation. But he would ask Sheila. She really admired him! She appreciated him! If she was sometimes queer, she was a nice little thing in spite of that.
"Sheila!" he called.
She paused and looked back at him.
"Come here a minute," he urged. "I want to tell you something." And when she would have drawn Charlotte with her, he added: "It's a secret."
At which transparent hint, Charlotte flung off Sheila's arm and marched on, singing maliciously:
"Ted has got a secret—secret—secret!
Like a little gir-rul—gir-rul—gir-rul!"
And hearing himself thus effeminized, Ted winced and wondered if he had not better have asked her after all.
Sheila came up to him with a troubled face. The feud between him and Charlotte always hurt and bewildered her. "You've made Charlotte feel bad," she chided reproachfully.
But with Charlotte's taunt still ringing in his ears, Ted was ruthless: "Fiddlesticks! If she feels bad about that, she's silly. And I can't tell secrets to silly girls."
Sheila was sorry for Charlotte, but she began to feel vaguely flattered on her own account: "What's the secret?"
"I know a place—just a little way back yonder—that's fat with nuts!"
Sheila looked disappointed. It seemed, at this hour, rather a poor secret. But Ted, still with the air of honoring her above all others of her sex, went on: "I'm going back and get some. And"—this impressively—"I'm going to let you come with me!"
Sheila brightened at the magnanimous offer, but a moment later grew uneasy: "Grandmother would be scared if I didn't come home with the others."
"How'd she find it out? Your house is farthest. She won't see the rest of 'em."
"But—but when I tell her—" said Sheila uneasily.
"You needn't tell her! Don't you understand? She'll never know you didn't come home with the others!"
Ted had a scrupulous personal honor, a pride, as it were, in his integrity. He told the truth about his own transgressions and paid the piper without complaint. But for others his truth was sometimes equivocal, his morality comfortably lax. And these lapses from grace on his part always filled Sheila with a shocked dismay.
"Oh," she protested, "I couldn't do that! Why, it would be lying!"
"Fiddlesticks! Where's the lie? You wouldn't tell one!"
"It would be a lie," persisted Sheila. "It would be a lie if I let her think what wasn't so."
"Fiddlesticks!" he pronounced again. But he looked at her approvingly, nevertheless. Sheila was always "square," and he liked her the better for it. "Well, you go along with Charlotte, then," he added regretfully.
But he had tempted her more successfully than he knew, and her mind was busily working toward some compromise with her conscience. She cast an eye in the direction Charlotte had taken, and that glance decided her. "Charlotte's out of sight," she said. "I—I believe I'll stay, Ted—but I'll tell when I get home!"
It was late afternoon when they did at last start homeward—with baskets as full as Ted had predicted. Going through the bright-hued woods, where the scarlet and burnished yellow of long-lived leaves still flaunted ribbons of flame and the dead and dun-colored broke crisply beneath their feet, they fell amicably silent, trudging briskly along with the impetus of health and hunger. Ted's silence was the content of a body drenched all day in sunshine and clean, cold air, and now deliciously placid; but Sheila's quiet was of a different quality. For her the woods were full of mysteries and miracles; she was sure that little people, as quick and elusive as shadows, darted hither and thither at her very feet, and that enchantment was spread there like a fine-spun web. As she walked onward, brooding over things unseen and yet so surely true for her, there recurred to her a dream of the night before, and so vivid was her remembrance of it that she seemed to be dreaming a second time.
In the dream, oddly enough, she had been walking through these same woods. Here and there she had seen a bright leaf blowing; she had heard her own footsteps on the brittle leaves beneath; a slender shaft of sunlight—the last of the day—had stolen downward and touched her like a long finger. Then, suddenly, the golden finger had withdrawn and the dusk had fallen, not gradually, but in swift, downward billows of mist that flooded upon her and blinded her. She had closed her eyes against them for a moment, and when she opened them again, the mist had disappeared, leaving her in a space of clear gray light. Through this light some one had come toward her, a shape at first vague and ethereal, as if it were a lingering spirit of the mist, but gathering substance and definite outline as it advanced until it became the figure of a woman with arms that reached toward her for embrace. Involuntarily Sheila's own arms had reached forth in answer; she had taken a stumbling step forward; through the pale light there had glimmered on her, for an instant of revelation, the shadow's face.
And she had wakened with the cry: "Mother!"
A strange dream, especially for a little girl whose mother had died soon after her birth. But that dead mother had always been a dear familiar of Sheila's thoughts; her picture had been like a living companion. And though the sleeping vision of her had driven the child, startled to the very soul, to her grandmother's bed, now, as she trod the woods that had been the scene of the dream-miracle, she remembered it without fear.
"What if, after all, dreams sometimes came true?" The thought quickened her breath, but not her feet. In the night she had fled from a dream too poignant, but now she felt no impulse for flight. Rather, she delayed her steps, thrilling as she recognized about her the dream's landmarks.
For now there arose before Sheila's dazed eyes that rare and marvellous phenomenon of a dream reproduced, at least in its physical aspects, by reality. And in such an experience, given perhaps to one in a thousand, it is the reality that seems to tremble—threatened by some older and stronger truth—beneath one's feet. So it trembled now for Sheila as she saw again those features in the face of the woods that had impressed her sleep.
Here were the few rich leaves, fluttering lightly in the evening wind as they had fluttered in her dreaming vision of them! And now her heart fluttered with them, so much stranger than the dream itself was its incredible repetition.
There—just ahead—yes, surely! there was the same long finger of pale sunlight striking downward through the stripped trees! Presently she would pass beneath its touch, feeling it faintly warm upon her cheek—as she had felt it in her dream!
Afterwards would be the dusk. And then—what if dreams came true?
She was not afraid, but instinctively she drew nearer the boy beside her. "Ted," she breathed, in an awed whisper.
"Huh?" he asked, roused from his own silent well-being.
But she did not answer, and he strode cheerfully on without troubling himself to question her again. "What if dreams come true?" she was saying within herself, but she could not, after all, put the thought into words for Ted to scoff at.
And then, before she reached it, the finger of sunlight vanished and the dusk was upon her, not swiftly billowing, but slipping softly downward like a silken veil. She was not afraid, she told herself, but the dusk chilled her and she shivered.
After the dusk—if dreams came true!—would be— And then her heart seemed to stop its beating. For dim in the distance, but coming toward her through the trees, there walked a shadow. And even while she watched, it gathered shape and substance unto itself; it ceased to be a floating fragment of mist and became a woman!
But now Sheila's heart began to beat again—riotously. Her hesitations, her unacknowledged fears, were succeeded by a sense of exquisite exultation. The miracle was at hand—and she rushed upon it.
"Ted!" It was not a whisper this time, but a cry, and the boy turned sharply. But Sheila had already started forward, calling wildly: "Mother! Mother! Mother!"
And though the woman was still but a distant figure, she heard that piercing call and answered it with one as clear and passionate:
"My little girl! I'm coming! I'm coming!"
For an instant Ted stood motionless, struck to the earth by that simple horror of the unusual, the abnormal, which the very sane and unimaginative always feel. Then, with a single bound, he overtook Sheila and laid a detaining hand on her shoulder: "Sheila, stop! It's Crazy Lisbeth! I know her voice!"
He was right. The advancing figure was not the beautiful mother-spirit of Sheila's dream, but a flesh and blood mother who, years before, had lost her husband and only child, and become crazed by her grief. Ever since then her heart had been wandering on a piteous quest for her dead, and her wits with it. And because she was very poor and quite harmless, suffering only the illusion that she would sooner or later find her husband and little daughter, the town was kind to her; set her to work when she would; fed her when she would not work; and left her free for her sad and futile search.
Sheila and Ted knew her well and no fear of her had ever touched them before, but now, as she came onward with her insanity strong upon her, both terror and repugnance seized on Ted.
"She thinks you're her child," he said angrily. "And no wonder! What made you do such a thing?"
Sheila turned to him with her explanation on her lips—the whole confession of her dream and her momentary belief that it had come true—but at sight of him looking at her so protectingly and yet so severely, her impetuous words faltered and grew cold.
"I—I was thinking of my mother," she stammered shyly.
The unexpected reply embarrassed him. He wanted to scold her, but at this mention of her dead mother he could not. So he only dug his foot into the ground and gazed toward Lisbeth, who was now almost upon them, stumbling in her happy haste.
"We can't run away from her," said Sheila.
"She thinks you're her child!" he protested again, but less harshly.
"Yes," admitted Sheila gently, "like I thought she—" And then, at some sudden counsel of her heart, she exclaimed: "You stay here. I'll know what to do!"
It seemed to Ted an unbelievable thing that he saw happen before him then. For Sheila stepped quickly forward to meet the hurrying, pitiful creature who sought her; stepped forward and straight into the woman's arms. As he stared, a shudder of disgust shook Ted from head to foot. "It's horrible!" he muttered to himself. "It's horrible for Sheila to let Crazy Lisbeth hug her!" But he could not go and draw Sheila away. His repulsion would not permit him to approach the spectacle that excited it.
And meanwhile the little girl was murmuring, still in the fold of Lisbeth's arm, words that he could not understand, but that drifted to him with the soft sounds of pleadings and promises.
"Sheila!" he called peremptorily.
She did not reply, but talked on to Lisbeth, interrupted now and then by the latter, but evidently not discouraged in her purpose of persuasion.
"Sheila!" Ted called again, and this time uneasily.
And now she answered, over her shoulder, and with a motion that held him back: "We're going home!"
At that he understood what she was bent upon. She had been coaxing Lisbeth to go home. But why should she concern herself about one who was used to roam the whole countryside at any hour of the day or night, walking unmolested in the desolate safety of her affliction? Why, above all, should Sheila go home with her?
For that, apparently, was what Sheila meant to do. She had already started onward with her self-appointed charge, and though the woods had grown more shadowy, Ted could see the two figures plainly, walking close together and linked by the woman's arm. That arm about Sheila's shoulder—Crazy Lisbeth's arm!—set him shuddering again as violently as the first embrace had done. It was an affront to every fiber of his thoroughly normal being. But still he could not go nearer to remove it; by the law of his own nature he had to stay outside the circle of Lisbeth's madness and Sheila's folly. And his sense of responsibility had, perforce, to appease itself with his following them at a discreet range—a distant and sulking protector.
It seemed to him, as he strode on behind them with irate steps, that they would never get out of the woods. Little woodland sounds, a snapping bough, a breaking leaf, a scurrying squirrel, sounds that he would not ordinarily have noticed, now startled him into fright. The gradual failing of the light oppressed him almost to panic; and when the early twilight settled somberly over the woods, such weird, moving shadows rose up all around him that he would fain have taken to his heels had he not feared what lay before him more.
Crazy Lisbeth scrubbing his mother's kitchen floor was only a harmless "innocent," the pensioner of his condescending pity; but Crazy Lisbeth in the woods at nightfall—Ah, then she became a different and a dreadful creature, one to shake the heart and alarm the nerves of the bravest.
Sheila appeared to think otherwise and to find Lisbeth docile enough, for despite Ted's conviction that the homeward way was interminable, these two went steadily onward and at a fair pace. And after no long interval their attendant knight had the satisfaction of following them from the covert of the woods into the open spaces of the town.
Here Ted's alarms left him, abruptly and completely. He could have laughed aloud at the bogies he had escaped. His self-respect came swaggering back, and with it the determination to assert a belated mastery of Sheila. She was not a block ahead, and now he hailed her.
But as she had done in the woods, she merely called to him over her shoulder: "We're going home!"
Crazy Lisbeth lived on the other side of the town, in a mean little cottage that more fortunate householders had deserted. It was a long walk there and the hour was already late, seven at the least. A vision of Mrs. Caldwell watching for Sheila flashed across Ted's mind and strengthened his resistance against this further perversity.
"You must go with me right away!" he exclaimed, hastening after Sheila. "Your grandmother'll be scared to death!"
"Oh," cried Sheila, stopping now, but with her hand still resolutely gripping Lisbeth's, "Oh, I know it, Ted! But I can't help it!" And though her tone was sharp with distress, she turned obstinately on.
There was nothing for him but to follow her to the end of her adventure. Ted knew it from experience. Sheila in one of her moods, obsessed by some "queer notion," was immovable, though sweetly reasonable at all other times. So with a bad grace he went on in her wake, beset now, not by fear, but by keen resentment of the whole absurd situation.
Thus they came at last, the ill-assorted trio, to Lisbeth's cottage, sitting lonely and unlit by lamp or fire upon a bare hillside. Sheila and Lisbeth paused, and Ted stopped, too, still a few yards from them, but expectant of some further freak and ready to spring forward with a rebuke that would end the mad episode on the spot. But just then the moon swung slowly out from some prisoning cloud, flooding the hillside with light, and as Ted saw Lisbeth's face, he forgot his intention of remonstrance and could but stand and gaze.
For a moment he thought that the woman before him could not be Crazy Lisbeth at all, and then he thought that the moonlight tricked him. But of one thing he was sure; be the cause what it might, he saw a Lisbeth magically and beautifully changed. Foolish and pathetic and middle-aged she had been only yesterday, but to-night love and joy had had their way with her for a little while and had transformed her almost into youth and comeliness again. Unconscious of Ted's watchful and hostile presence, as she had been from the first, she turned to Sheila with a simple and moving tenderness:
"Come," she said, opening her gate.
But Sheila stood motionless, her face soft with a pity that could no longer protect.
"Come," urged Lisbeth, "come, darling precious! This is home!"
But Sheila did not stir. "I—I can't," she answered gently.
"You can't? You can't? Oh, it's been a dream!—a dream!—a dream! You're not real—you're never real! I see you—and see you—and see you! But when I reach you, you're not real—not real! I believed it was different this time—but it's always the same! You're not real!"
And with that despairing cry, the Lisbeth whom Ted knew so well stood there before him again, old and foolish and piteous, whimpering softly and plucking at her ragged dress.
Sheila put her hand on the bent shoulder—bent to its long burden. "I am real," said the child in a clear, steadfast voice that somehow, penetrated Lisbeth's sad whimsies, "I am real!—and I'll come back!"
"You'll come back?" And Lisbeth ceased her whimpering and laid pleading hold on her. "You'll come back? I don't believe you're real now—I can't believe it any more! But I don't mind that if you'll come back anyway. You will? You promise?"
"I promise," answered Sheila. "If you are good—if you go straight into the house—I'll come back."
Lisbeth looked at her for an instant with an odd shrewdness in her poor foolish face. Then she nodded, evidently satisfied with what she saw. "I'll be good," she agreed. "I'll go in. Oh, my pretty darling! My dearest precious! Lisbeth will be good!" And after a quick clasping of Sheila, she went obediently into the mean little house and, without even a backward glance, closed the door behind her.
Sheila stepped toward Ted. "I'll go home now," she said wearily. Then she added, as if she were stretching out a wistful hand to his sympathy: "Oh, Ted, she thought—until the last—that I was her little girl!"
"Yes," he said, all his resentment returning, "and you let her! You let her, Sheila! How could you do such a thing?"
"But it comforted her. It comforted her to think so, Ted."
"She wasn't comforted when she thought you weren't real!"
"Yes, she was—even then. She was when I promised to come back."
"You can't keep your promise."
"Why can't I?"
"Your grandmother won't let you. You know that as well as I do. 'Tisn't your place to comfort Crazy Lisbeth, and Mrs. Caldwell will tell you so. Her troubles aren't any of your business."
"They are!" cried Sheila, with an anger now that matched his own, "they are—because I understand how she feels! I haven't any mother—and Lisbeth hasn't any child. Don't you see that it's just the same for both of us? And her little girl may be comforting my mother up in heaven right now!"
"And she may not!" he retorted,
"I believe it!" she proclaimed, carried away by the imaginary scene she had evoked.
"Well," said Ted, with his most exasperating tone of superior intelligence, "I don't!"
She glanced up at him as he trudged beside her, his face firm with his substantial beliefs, his feet sturdily treading a very solid earth. And though she was only a little girl, unlearned in the finger-posts of character, Sheila felt what she could not name nor analyze. She remembered that she had almost told him her dream, and she shivered at the thought.
"No," she remarked ruefully, "you don't believe anything that you can't see, do you, Ted?"
"I don't believe lies!" he replied crisply, "not even when I tell 'em myself."
"Lies?" she repeated in astonishment.
He stopped and faced her. "Look here! You said you couldn't let your grandmother think you came home with the rest of 'em when you didn't because that would be lying."
"Yes," agreed Sheila with conviction.
"But you let Lisbeth think what wasn't so!"
The words flashed their accusation at her with unmistakable clarity. "Yes," she assented once more, slowly, "I did." And then, with pained surprise, "Why, that was a lie, wasn't it?"
"And now," finished Ted ruthlessly, "you're making up lies about heaven for yourself! What's the matter with you, Sheila?"
They had reached Mrs. Caldwell's gate, and for a moment they stood staring at each other, the question hanging in the air between them. Then there came to Sheila a swift, inward vision of the contradictions of her own temperament, a vision untempered by the merciful knowledge that, in the final analysis, all human nature is very much alike.
"Oh," she cried, "what is the matter with me?"
And with a sob, she fled up the path to the house, leaving Ted frightened, ashamed, and more bewildered than ever.