XXIII Lavinia Sees the Abyss
I
Four days without incident ... and then Eileen fainted at the dressmaker’s. The afternoon was hot and she had stood for a long fitting. It was nothing unusual to the seamstress, but it was a thrilling experience for the girl who had never known oblivion other than that of normal sleep. She went home with a bump on her head, to tell how near she came to being impaled on Miss Denison’s shears. Saturday morning she fainted again. It was after a long telephone conversation with Kitten Henderson. Lavinia sent for Dr. Schubert. He was making a country call. In a panic of fear she summoned Mrs. Ascott. When they had chafed the girl’s hands and bathed her temples with brandy, consciousness returned slowly.
“I thought I was dying,” she murmured between stiffened lips. “My hands felt like clubs, and all at once my whole body seemed to be climbing into my head.”
A cry—the sudden baffled scream of a trapped animal—burst from Lavinia Trench, as she sprang to the side of the divan. “What have you done? Oh, my God, what have you done?”
“My dear Mrs. Trench,” Judith expostulated, “what has come over you!”
“You don’t know what it means. You haven’t been through it six times. I never fainted at any other time—and that scapegrace of a Hal Marksley off to college without a word. Oh, I’ll go mad!”
Relief came in a torrential flood of abuse, of self-pity. All the store that had been repressed since the early days of July poured its acrid waters over the girl. In vain Eileen sought to defend herself, to declare furiously that her mother’s accusation was untrue. In such moods, Lavinia was never careful to choose her words. When the tirade became insulting, beyond endurance, she sprang from the couch and fled to a room on the third floor where she could lock herself in and defy the family to drag her forth.
Judith went home, dumb with anguish. Would Eileen do violence to herself? Would David’s heart break? Would Lary.... She paused, panting, to frame the question: “Would Lary rise to the occasion?” On the answer hung all her hope. After an hour of thinking, such as she had never done before, she went again through the wicket gate. She would take the girl with her for the laboratory experiment—an unusually important one, that called for an extra pair of hands. Lavinia was nowhere in sight; but from the cellar came the sound of mop and broom. Absinthe might give surcease to the roué in the boulevard restaurant but for Lavinia Trench the safety-valve was hard manual labor.