Judith laid the sheet in its place and returned the volume to the bookcase. Yes, David was right. But what a weird obsession! Lavinia, out of the pregnant depths of her misery, had fashioned a lover to her liking, a phantom lover, to be communed with in secret. Had she gone to Detroit, not to visit Sylvia, but to seek some fantastic realization of her yearning for the perfect romance? Why had she come home, shattered and undone. A real man ... the man she met in the Pullman when she was returning from Bromfield—the man who had fallen in love with her?
She paused beside the table where, an hour ago, she had laid the Bromfield paper. She looked at it with vacant eyes, striving to clarify her turbid thoughts. Gradually, out of the emptiness, words came up to her, the words that David had read, at the head of the “personal” column.
“Our distinguished citizen, Mr. Calvin Stone, has just returned from a ten days’ business trip to Chicago.”
The room with its delicate furnishings faded, as when the lights are suddenly turned off. Judith stared, her heart leaping in unrhythmic cadence, her eyes following the monstrous panorama that unrolled before her. Long ago she had gone to a little cinema theatre with Lary and the girls, where black dots had danced on a white screen. Black dots were dancing now, on the white screen of her memory.
A dozen disjointed fragments of conversation; an old story her grandmother had told her, of a secret wedding in Rochester; Lavinia’s greedy interest in the story, in all that pertained to Calvin and Lettie Stone; her determination to revisit Bromfield the summer following Mrs. Stone’s death; the miracle of her regeneration when she returned home; the yellow pallor on her face when she put the question: “Do people ever really get over things?” The dots had woven themselves into a succession of preliminary shapes, and all at once the picture was complete. Lavinia’s secret lay bare before her daughter-in-law’s gaze.
IV
Outside on the street there was commotion. Judith was aroused from her torpor of pain by Lavinia Trench’s voice, strident and hysterical:
“Carry him into the west room. You can’t take him upstairs on that stretcher. What has happened to him? Why didn’t you telephone me? David, are you alive?”
David had fallen from the roof of the Marksley house. No one knew what had caused the accident. He was standing on a wide ledge, that ought to have been secure. One of the workmen saw him stagger, reel backward and come crashing down. It was fortunate that he did not strike the stone pavement. That would have been fatal. He was apparently only stunned by the fall.
Judith followed the curious crowd into the house and bent above the stricken man, while his wife ran panting up the stairs to prepare his bed. He opened his eyes and his lips fashioned inarticulate words.