“I didn’t ask you to take the volume,” Judith said pointedly.
“No, but you made me believe there was something in it—something that was an improvement on the Bible....”
Her daughter-in-law took up the offender and carried it to the library. When she returned, there was a precipitate relapse into a chair. Lavinia had improved the interval to look for the Sentinel. It was not in the room. A bitter tirade poured from her purple lips. There was no use in people trying to shirk responsibility. David had always done it. So had Larimore. They continually placed her in untenable situations and then left her to bear the consequences alone. She had had to rear the family single-handed, to take all the responsibility for their moral and financial welfare. If it had not been for her, they might have been criminals or tramps. David had never concerned himself for her ... or them.
“Mother, I can’t listen to such outrageous injustice. I have never seen a more considerate husband than father is to you. Even Lary, with all his tenderness, and his perfect comradeship, has his eyes on himself most of the time. Father never thinks of himself. His whole heart is given to you and his children.”
“Yes, and he hangs over me until he drives me to distraction. I’ll tell him where I have been—if he doesn’t stop following me about—as if I hadn’t a right to go where I please.”
III
Lavinia’s usual solvent, a flood of tears, failed her. Dry-eyed she left the room, forgetting to ask for the paper, which had been the real object of her call. Judith returned to the library and took down the volume of Browning. In some unfathomable way it was responsible for the distressing situation. As she turned the pages, pencil marks caught her eye. A line, a word or two, in some instances an entire stanza had been underscored. They were, without exception, love passages. Well over towards the back, a sheet of note paper came to view, covered with Lavinia’s tight, precise writing. If Browning would change the subject, just when you thought you had grasped his meaning ... at least, you could fling your net over the elusive concept and carry it away—isolate it from the confusing wealth of context.
But no! This was more than random copying. Widely separated passages had been woven together into a kind of confession of faith ... like lemon jelly in a mould. Judith, as she read, forgot that she was looking into another woman’s soul, forgot Lavinia, in the fascination of following the curious windings of Lavinia’s mind.
“Come back with me to the first of all. Let us lean and love it over again. Let us now forget and now recall, and gather what we let fall. Each life’s incomplete, you see. I follow where I am led, knowing so well the leader’s hand. Oh, woman, wooed, not wed! When we loved each other, lived and loved the same, till an evening came when a shaft from the devil’s bow pierced to our ingle-glow, and the friends were friend and foe. Never fear but there’s provision of the devils to quench knowledge, lest we walk the earth in rapture—making those who catch God’s secret just so much more prize their capture. The true end, sole and single, we stop here for is this love-way with some other soul to mingle. How is it under our control to love or not to love? Heart, shall we live or die? The rest ... settle by and by.”