II
Mary Ann’s prophecy was fulfilled. Her mother stood beside her at the garden gate when Jane and Selina drove away, her glances up and down the sunny street evincing all a convalescent’s freshened interest in the outside world. The two faces were alike and yet unlike. The joy of living was in both; but a little uncertainty, a little appeal in the older woman’s told that with her it depended to some degree upon the steadier flow of animal spirits in the younger.
Jane and Selina turned for a last look at the portly figures and waving handkerchiefs.
“Who would think to look at them,” said Jane, “that Ma had only just returned from the jaws of death! It ought to be a warning to them. Some day she’ll go off in one of those attacks.”
“Ma’n’Mary Ann are as like as two peas,” said Selina. “They’re Maberlys. There never was a Maberly yet that knew how to look ahead. I declare, it gave me the shivers to see these two plunging right out of a sick-bed into colors and fashions the way they did. Ma’d ought to listen to us and sell her house and live round with her married children; at her age she’d ought to be some place where sickness and death are treated in a serious way.”
Upon this point Mrs. Colquhoun was firm. She could never go back to life on a farm again, she said; “living in town was living.” But she compromised by agreeing to devote the whole of the next summer to visiting her married children.
That was a long summer to Mary Ann. There was something wanting in all the small accustomed pleasures of her simple life, until the middle of August came, and the time set for her mother’s return was within counting distance. Then her spirits rose higher with every hour. As a toper would celebrate his happiness at the saloon, she went to Mr. Merrill’s dry-goods shop, and after a revel in that part of it where color most ran riot, she bought new chintz covering for the parlor furniture, a chrysanthemum pattern in various shades of fawn and glowing crimson.
The next step was to plan a reception to welcome her mother home and exhibit the new covering. Then a mighty idea struck her—this was the opportunity for the crimson velvet dress!
“I mayn’t never have as good an excuse for it again,” she said to the sewing-girl, “and it’s the one thing needed to make everything complete. Me in that crimson and Ma in the fawn silk she had made when the Reverend Mr. Ellis came will be a perfect match for the furniture.”
She patted the sofa back with affectionate pride.
“It does make you feel good to have anything new,” she said, sighing contentedly. “Anything, I don’t care if it’s only a kitchen stove-lifter. But this!—There are an awful lot of things in the world do make you feel good; aren’t there, Miss Adams? I mean common things, like putting on dry stockings when your feet are wet, or reading in bed, or sitting in a shady spot on a hot summer’s day, with a muslin dress on—yes, or even eating your tea, if you happen to be feeling hungry and have something particularly nice,” added this cheerful materialist.
The crimson velvet dress was being fitted for the last time when a letter was handed to Mary Ann. Her spectacles were downstairs, so she asked the sewing-girl to read it.
“‘My dear aunt,’” Miss Adams began, “‘Grandma took cold in church a week ago last Sunday and has been laid up——’”
There was a quick rustling of the velvet train. Mary Ann was vanishing into the clothes-closet. In a moment she reappeared with a small valise in her hand, and Miss Adams saw in her face what no one had ever seen there before—the shadow of a fear that hovered always on the outer edge of her happy existence and now stood close by her side. Mary Ann might be nine-tenths Maberly, but the other tenth was Colquhoun, after all.
“Put a dress into it, please,” she said, handing the valise to Miss Adams. “No, I won’t wait to take this off—I’ve a waterproof that will cover it all up. Pin the train up with safety pins—never mind if it does make pin-holes—I’ve just ten minutes to catch the train. A week ago Sunday! Oh, why didn’t they let me know before?”
When she alighted from the train at the flag station, she was clutching the waterproof close at the neck. She held it in the same unconscious grasp when she entered Jane’s big farm-house, by way of the kitchen. Selina was there, making a linseed poultice, and the odor was mingled with another which she knew afterwards to be the odor of black dye.
“SHE COULD NOT HELP SEEING THAT SELINA FOUND SOME STRANGE PLEASURE IN ALL THESE INCIDENTS OF A LAST ILLNESS”
In her mother’s bedroom the same acid odor was in the air, and Jane was sitting at the window with a piece of black sewing in her hands. Jane’s husband and John Maberly were standing at the foot of the bed, silent and melancholy, looking as awkward as men always do in a sick-room; Jane’s stern gloom was tinged with a 383 condescending pity for beings so out of place. Mary Ann saw them all at the first glance. Then she forgot everything; she was snuggling down against the bed, making the little, tender, glad, sorry sounds a mother makes when she has been separated from her baby.
When she lifted her head the men were leaving the room, John’s face working. Selina was there with the poultice. She took it from her. One look into her mother’s face had been enough. From that moment she seemed to be holding her back by sheer force of will from the edge over which she was slipping.
There was no merry gossip and laughter now, 384 there were no love stories, no monologues with pauses for smiles. Mary Ann felt that a careless word or look would be enough to loosen that frail hold on life. When the doctor came, he found his patient in charge of a stout woman in a fresh linen dress, whose self-command was so perfect that he did not waste many words in softening the opinion for which she followed him to the door.
“Your mother’s age is against her,” he said. “The bronchitis in itself is not alarming, but her heart is weak, and I fear you must not expect her recovery.”
He knew at once that she refused to accept his verdict, though she only said, “I’d like to telegraph for our doctor at home, if you don’t mind.”
When Dr. Corbett came, he confirmed the opinion.
“The bronchitis is no worse than usual,” he added, “the treatment has been the same; but she seems to have lost her grip.”
“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t catch a hold of it again,” said poor Mary Ann, choking down her agony with the thought that she must return immediately to her mother’s room.
“I don’t quite understand it,” the doctor said, with a questioning look. “The nursing—that’s been good? Dr. Black tells me so.”
“Yes, Jane and Selina are both good nurses, better’n what I am, if it wasn’t that Ma’s used to me.”
“And there’s no obstacle to her recovery that you know of?” Mary Ann shook her head. “Well, Miss Mary Ann, we must just conclude that it’s the natural wearing out of a good machine. And we’ll do what we can.”
When Mary Ann went back to her mother’s room, she found her a little roused from the stupor in which she had been lying. The visit of her own doctor, the accustomed tendance, had touched some spring that set old wheels running. With the clairvoyance love so often gives to the sick-nurse, Mary Ann knew that she had something to say to her.
She sat by the bed and waited. A fluttering whisper came at last.
“Did you see Jane’s hands?”
Mary Ann’s mind, seeking desperately for a clue, flashed from the stains on her sister’s hands, which she had vaguely set down to black currant jelly, to the acid smell in the kitchen—to the black sewing—to the forgotten shock of a year ago.
“They asked me where I’d like to lie—beside Pa or in the cemetery in town.”
“It’s their forehandedness, Ma. I never did know such a forehanded pair. Talk about meeting trouble half way—Selina’n’Jane don’t wait for it to start out at all.”
“Selina read out of the paper that bronchitis was nearly always fatal after seventy.”
“Well, now, what will those papers say next? Do you know what I read out of our own Advertiser the other day? That every woman over thirty has had at least one offer of marriage. Now, that’s a lie, for I never had an offer in my life. I’m kind of glad I didn’t, Ma, for I suppose I’d have took it; and you and me do have an awfully good time together, don’t we?”
But her mother was not listening now; it had been a flash merely of the old self. Mary Ann looked around the room until she found Jane’s lap-board with a pile of black sewing on it. She gathered up the carefully pressed pieces and poked them roughly in between a large clothes cupboard and the wall.
“There!” she said to herself, “it will be a while before they find that, and when they do they can call it Mary Ann’s flighty way of redding up a room.”
She heard her sisters whispering in the hall and went out to them. Selina was tying her bonnet-strings.
“I’m going home to do a lot of cooking,” she said in an important undertone. “John’s wrote to Ma’s relatives in Iowa, and some of them’s sure to come.”
Mary Ann looked into the wrinkled face; the past weeks had added new lines of genuine grief to it, yet she could not help seeing that Selina found some strange pleasure in all these incidents of a last illness. The words she had meant to say seemed futile. She was turning to go into her mother’s room again when an idea came to her.
“Don’t go yet,” she said. “I want to show you two something.”
She went into her bedroom and returned in a few minutes with the crimson dress over her arm.
“I was getting it fitted when the news of Ma’s sickness came, and I just put a waterproof over it. The seams have got a little ravelled. I thought maybe you two would help me top-sew them.”
“Mary Ann——!”
“You’re so much cleverer than me with the needle. I was having it made for—for—” Mary Ann could not trust her voice to tell what she had been having it made for—“for an occasion. It won’t be needed now as soon as I expected, but you know, Selina’n’Jane, you always say yourselves there’s nothing like taking time by the forelock.”
“Mary Ann——”
“A few hours would finish it up if we all got at it. Oh, there’s Ma coughing. I must run and get the pail of water and hot brick to steam up the room.”
She threw the dress into her sister’s hands and was gone. They stood looking at each other across it.
“Poor Mary Ann!”
“She talked about an occasion. I don’t know more’n one kind of occasion people get dresses like this for. Can she mean——?”
“At her age? Nonsense!”
“Dr. Corbett appears to think a pile of her. He’s a widower——”
“Now you speak of it, Selina, he does look at her in an admiring sort of way. If there was anything of that kind in prospect—and of course she’d lay off black sooner——”
The sun came out and streamed through the high window upon the dress in their hands. It was like a drink of wine to look at it.
“There’s no denying it’s a handsome thing,” Jane said. “It does seem a pity to have the edges ravel. We might finish it, anyway, and sew it up in a bag with camphor.”
Through the gray languor that overlay Mrs. Colquhoun’s consciousness, glints of crimson began to find their way. Now the spot of color was disappearing under Mary Ann’s white apron; now it was in Jane’s stained hands; now it was passing from Jane to Selina.
Then she heard Dr. Corbett say, as he handed Mary Ann a small parcel, “It’s the first sewing-silk I ever bought, Miss Mary Ann, and I don’t know whether it’s a good match, but it’s crimson, anyhow, Merrill gave me his word for that”; and when Mary Ann made a warning gesture towards the bed, the faint stirring of interest almost amounted to curiosity.
“What did he mean?” she asked, after the doctor had gone. Mary Ann bent down to catch the husky whisper. “The silk—what is it for?”
“You’re a little stronger to-day, aren’t you, Ma? I’ve a secret I meant to keep till you were well; but there! Wait till I get back and I’ll tell you.”
Mrs. Colquhoun let her eyelids close and forgot all about it. When she opened them again, Mary Ann stood before her arrayed in the velvet dress. The radiant vision seemed part of the train of visions that had been passing before her closed eyes; but this stayed, and the smiling creases of the cheeks were substantial and firm.
Then Mary Ann fell on her knees beside the bed and made a crimson frame of her arms for the nightcapped head on the pillow.
“I’m not a bit of good at keeping a secret, Ma. Jane and Selina and me have just finished it, but you weren’t to know anything about it till you got home. It was to be a surprise. And there’s new covering on the parlor furniture, a handsome flower pattern, all fawn and crimson, like our dresses, and we’re going to have a home-coming party. I don’t want to be impatient, but I wish you’d hurry up and get well.”
Mrs. Colquhoun was gazing into her daughter’s eyes.
“Do you really think I’m going to get well, Mary Ann?” she asked, and the wistfulness of old desire revived was in the feeble voice.
“Of course you’re going to get well, dearie. Why shouldn’t you?”
“It seemed kind of settled I wasn’t—and it’s so upsetting to stay when you’re expected to go. I didn’t care much.”
She put up her hand weakly and stroked the velvet.
“But now—if you think so—perhaps——”
At his next visit Dr. Corbett said, “Your mother’s caught her grip again, Miss Mary Ann,” and Dr. Black added heartily, “And if you’ll only tell us how you did it, Miss Mary Ann, you’ll be putting dollars in our pockets.”
But the cunning of love, with all its turnings and twistings, is only half-conscious—the rest is instinct.
“I don’t know that there’s anything to tell, doctor,” Mary Ann said slowly, wiping away a tear. “Only you might just keep a watch out and see that none of your patients are being hurried out of the world by the preparations for their own mourning. That’s what was happening to Ma.”