Sylvia did not believe her ears. She looked up wildly as Judith rose from the ground, and advanced upon her sister with a stern, white face. Before she had finished speaking, she had said more than Sylvia had ever heard her say about a matter personal to her; but even so, her iron words were few. "Sylvia, I want to tell you about it, of course. I've got to. But I won't say a word, unless you can keep quiet, and not make a fuss. I couldn't stand that. I've got all I can stand as it is."
She stood by an apple-tree and now broke from it a small, leafy branch, which she held as she spoke. There was something shocking in the contrast between the steady rigor of her voice and the fury of her fingers as they tore and stripped and shredded the leaves. "Arnold is an incurable alcoholic," she said; "Dr. Rivedal has pronounced him hopeless. Dr. Charton and Dr. Pansard (they're the best specialists in that line) have had him under observation and they say the same thing. He's had three dreadful attacks lately. We … none of their treatment does any good. It's been going on too long—from the time he was first sent away to school, at fourteen, alone! There was an inherited tendency, anyhow. Nobody took it seriously, that and—and the other things boys with too much money do. Apparently everybody thought it was just the way boys are—if anybody thought anything about it, except that it was a bother. He never had anybody, you know—never, never anybody who …" her voice rose, threatened to break. She stopped, swallowed hard, and began again: "The trouble is he has no constitution left—nothing for a doctor to work with. It's not Arnold's fault. If he had come out to us, that time in Chicago when he wanted to—we—he could—with Mother to—" Her steady voice gave way abruptly. She cast the ravaged, leafless branch violently to the ground and stood looking down at it. There was not a fleck of color in her beautiful, stony face.
Sylvia concentrated all her will-power on an effort to speak as Judith would have her, quietly, without heroics; but when she broke her silence she found that she had no control of her voice. She tried to say, "But, Judith dear, if Arnold is like that—doesn't he need you more than ever? You are a nurse. How can you abandon him now!" But she could produce only a few, broken, inarticulate words in a choking voice before she was obliged to stop short, lest she burst out in the flood of horror which Judith had forbidden.
Broken and inarticulate as they were, Judith knew what was the meaning of those words. The corners of her mouth twitched uncontrollably. She bit her marble lower lip repeatedly before she could bring out the few short phrases which fell like clods on a coffin. "If I—if we—Arnold and I are in love with each other." She stopped, drew a painful breath, and said again: "Arnold and I are in love with each other. Do you know what that means? He is the only man I could not take care of—Arnold! If I should try, we would soon be married, or lovers. If we were married or lovers, we would soon have—" She had overestimated her strength. Even she was not strong enough to go on.
She sat down on the ground, put her long arms around her knees, and buried her face in them. She was not weeping. She sat as still as though carved in stone.
Sylvia herself was beyond tears. She sat looking down at the moist earth on the trowel she held, drying visibly in the hot sun, turning to dust, and falling away in a crumbling, impalpable powder. It was like seeing a picture of her heart. She thought of Arnold with an indignant, passionate pity—how could Judith—? But she was so close to Judith's suffering that she felt the dreadful rigidity of her body. The flat, dead tones of the man in the Pantheon were in her ears. It seemed to her that Life was an adventure perilous and awful beyond imagination. There was no force to cope with it, save absolute integrity. Everything else was a vain and foolish delusion, a two-edged sword which wounded the wielding hand.
She did not move closer to Judith, she did not put out her hand. Judith would not like that. She sat quite motionless, looking into black abysses of pain, of responsibilities not met, feeling press upon her the terrifying closeness of all human beings to all other human beings—there in the sun of June a cold sweat stood on her forehead….
But then she drew a long breath. Why, there was Austin! The anguished contraction of her heart relaxed. The warm blood flowed again through her veins. There was Austin!
She was rewarded for her effort to bring herself to Judith's ways,
when presently her sister moved and reached out blindly for her hand.
At this she opened her arms and took Judith in. No word was spoken.
Their mother was there with them.
Sylvia looked out over the proud, dark head, now heavy on her bosom, and felt herself years older. She did not try to speak. She had nothing to say. There was nothing she could do, except to hold Judith and love her.