“Oh, incomparable brown eyes and the lispen tongue. Just enough limp to make her, you might say, appealen. ‘Oh, wait for me, Minnie,’ and her walk said, ‘I’ll wait.’ Conway knew Minnie. All the town in a whisper. Simplest thing on earth. Not worth one damn ‘hush.’ Easy to know and lived next door.”
“The story they tell, it’s not true,” she said softly. “It’s not true.”
Some part of her knowledge of which she had not been taking account seemed to be speaking to her suddenly out of a confused dark, speaking, rejecting, foretelling. Indignation and pain clouded her thinking, and her protective sense surrounded all that was left of Conway so that she spoke angrily, arisen now to become a flame of anger. “It’s not true. Minnie Harter lied. What is there to do?... In the face of the town what can I do?”
Her business with the three students occupied very much of her time, for she helped them generously with their practice. She knew that the report Minnie Harter had made was not true. It might have been true in the nature of the earth, but it was not in this case true. On the second day after her talk with Horace she knew again within herself that the report was untrue. She was busy all day mending undergarments for Anthony. Cotton cloth drawn together with sewing thread, scrutinized minutely, told her a final thing about the form of yarn which was in reality floating undevised lint brought into a line by spinning, bound together in a knitted chain of net. The lint floated from the design in a continual wasting, perpetual dissolution, and her own mind strove to bind its own threads, to regather its lint and impose some well-knit conclusions into the chaos. On the third day she knew again that the story was untrue. Minnie Harter had, she divined, claimed Conway as it were out of the grave to give herself a posthumous romance, a right lover. With this story she would arise in dignity in the town. The infant had been still-born and after a little all but the richly tragic parts of the drama would be forgotten.
Passing in her room, Theodosia observed that she had removed Conway’s picture from her shelf although she scarcely remembered the act. It had been put into a box of photographs, taken up without passion and slipped inside the cover of the box at some casual moment between coming and going. She laughed once a swift, cruel laughter that bent downward the corners of her mouth at the spectacle of two women quarreling over a dead man, herself one. She discovered that she had no quarrel beyond that induced by friendly loyalty. A suspicion grew in the arising confusion of her thought that her own posthumous passion for Conway had been identified with her lost hope of the fiddle, with her tenderness and self-love that had been shielding her limitation from inner examination and despair. The story remained untrue, but Conway grew remote for her, increasing in remoteness as three days wore away. The shock of the argument opened new vistas down into the dark of her inner thought. She remembered him tenderly, as dead, as wronged in his grave. She thought of him less often.
FOUR
She ran out of the house at dusk, her fiddle in her hand, fiddle and bow clutched in her fingers. She went rapidly down the street, thinking that she would walk toward the pool, toward the fields, toward some point far beyond the town. She would hurl fiddle-playing into the tops of tall trees and hurl it again into the darkening sky. The ripples of the water would be black and the plowed fields would be black where the dusk had sunk into the autumn furrows.
Before the livery stable she saw Stiggins, who stood listlessly, his hands in his pockets, swaying unevenly from one foot to the other. The wind that would have blown the dark water of the pool was shifting the straws and trash of the stable about before Stig’s feet, making a shallow drift in the dirt and refuse.
“Come on with me, Stig,” she said. “Come and go with me where I go.”