The Bent Twig

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

"Oh, coal-mines forever!" she said, smiling, her eyes brilliant with friendly mockery.

"Aye! Toujours perdrix!" he admitted. He continued to look steadily and seriously into her smiling, sparkling face, until, with a sudden pulse of premonition, she was stricken into a frightened gravity. And then, with no prelude, no approach, quite simply and directly, he spoke. "I wonder how much you care for me?" he said musingly, as he had said everything else that afternoon: and as she positively paled at the eeriness of this echo from her own thought, he went on, his voice vibrating in the deep organ note of a great moment, "You must know, of course, by this time that I care everything possible for you."

Compressed into an instant of acute feeling Sylvia felt the pangs which had racked her as a little girl when she had stood in the schoolyard with Camilla Fingál before her, and the terrifying hostile eyes about her. Her two selves rose up against each other fiercely, murderously, as they had then. The little girl sprang forward to help the woman who for an instant hesitated. The fever and the struggle vanished as instantly as they had come. Sylvia felt very still, very hushed. Page had told her that she always rose to crucial moments. She rose to this one. "I don't know," she said as quietly as he, with as utter a bravery of bare sincerity, "I don't know how much I care for you—but I think it is a great deal." She rose upon a solemn wing of courage to a greater height of honesty. Her eyes were on his, as clear as his. The mere beauty of her face had gone like a lifted veil. For a instant he saw her as Sylvia herself did not dream she could be. "It is very hard," said Sylvia Marshall, with clear eyes and trembling lips of honest humility, "for a girl with no money to know how much she cares for a very rich man."

She had never been able to imagine what she would say if the moment should come. She had certainly not intended to say this. But an unsuspected vein of granite in her rang an instant echo to his truth. She was bewildered to see his ardent gaze upon her deepen to reverence. He took her hand in his and kissed it. He tried to speak, but his voice broke.

She was immensely moved to see him so moved. She was also entirely at a loss. How strangely different things always were from forecasts of them! They had suddenly taken the long-expected stride away from their former relation, but she did not know where they had arrived. What was the new status between them? What did Austin think she meant? It came to her with a shock that the new status between them was, on the surface, exactly what it was in reality; that the avowed relation between them was, as far as it went, precisely in accord with the facts of the case. The utter strangeness of this in any human relationship filled her with astonishment, with awe, almost with uneasiness. It seemed unnatural not to have to pretend anything!

Apparently it did not seem unnatural to the man beside her. "You are a very wonderful woman," he now said, his voice still but partly under his control. "I had not thought that you could exist." He took her hand again and continued more steadily: "Will you let me, for a little while longer, go on living near you? Perhaps things may seem clearer to us both, later—"

Sylvia was swept by a wave of gratitude as for some act of magnanimity. "You are the wonderful one!" she cried. Not since the day Hélène had told her who he was, had she felt so whole, so sound, so clean, as now. The word came rushing on the heels of the thought: "You make one feel so clean!" she said, unaware that he could scarcely understand her, and then she smiled, passing with her free, natural grace from the memorable pause, and the concentration of a great moment forward into the even-stepping advance of life. "That first day—even then you made me feel clean—that soap! that cold, clean water—it is your aroma!"

Their walk along the silent water, over the great lawn, and up the steps was golden with the level rays of the sun setting back of them, at the end of the canal, between the distant, sentinel poplars. Their mood was as golden as the light. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they were silent. Truth walked between them.

Sylvia's mind, released from the tension of that great moment, began making its usual, sweeping, circling explorations of its own depths. Not all that it found was of an equal good report. Once she thought fleetingly: "This is only a very, very pretty way of saying that it is all really settled. With his great wealth, he is like a reigning monarch—let him be as delicate-minded as he pleases, when he indicates a wish—" More than once—many, many times—Felix Morrison's compelling dark eyes looked at her penetratingly, but she resolutely turned away her head from them, and from the impulse to answer their reproach even with an indignant, well-founded reproach of her own. Again and again she felt a sweet strangeness in her new position. The aroma of utter sincerity was like the scent of a wildflower growing in the sun, spicy, free. She wondered at a heart like his that could be at once ardent and subtle, that could desire so profoundly (the deep vibrations of that voice of yearning were in her ears still) and yet pause, and stand back, and wait, rather than force a hair's breadth of pretense. How he had liberated her! And once she found herself thinking, "I shall have sables myself, and diamonds, and a house as great as Molly's, and I shall learn how to entertain ambassadors, as she will never know." She was ashamed of this, she knew it to be shockingly out of key with the grand passage behind them. But she had thought it.

And, as these thoughts, and many more, passed through her mind, as she spoke with a quiet peace, or was silent, she was transfigured into a beauty almost startling, by the accident of the level golden beams of light back of her. Her aureole of bright hair glowed like a saint's halo. The curiously placed lights and unexpected shadows brought out new subtleties in the modeling of her face. Her lightened heart gleamed through her eyes, like a lighted lamp. After a time, the man fell into a complete silence, glancing at her frequently as though storing away a priceless memory….