"I don't know, I don't know;" Cousin Lydia dropped the speculation into the pit of her own experience. "It looks like He wouldn't have made 'em to care about it then. But being as she saw it that way, they couldn't have done different. Not that Judd didn't see it in the light of his duty, too." There was evidently nothing in the annals of the Judds and the Lattimores which allowed a violation of the inward monitor.
"Well, I must say, he has turned it into grace, if ever a man has. Not to say but what you've helped him to it." It was in the manner of Almira's concession of not in the matter, that Cousin Judd had chosen Lydia chiefly for her capacity not to offer any distraction to his profounder passion, and nothing in Cousin Lydia's comment to deny it. From the room beyond we could hear the inarticulate, half-conscious notice of my mother's pain. Cousin Lydia moved to attend her.
"All those years," I whispered to Almira, "she has loved him and he has loved my mother!" I was pierced through with the pure sword of the spirit which had divided them. But Almira was more practical.
"She was better off," Almira insisted. "Lydia hadn't no knack with men folk ever. She knew Judd wouldn't have loved her, but so long as he loved your mother she was safe. They got a good deal out of it, her knowing and sympathizing. She could sympathize, you see, for she knew how it was herself, loving Judd that way. It was no more than right they should get what they could out of it. It was the only thing they had between them."
"All those years!" I said again. I felt myself immeasurably lifted out of the mists and mires of the Shamrocks into clear and aching atmospheres.
"I will say this for Lydia," extenuated the Skald, "that though she hadn't no gift to draw a man to her, she knew how to hold her hand off and let him go his own thought. It was religion kept your mother and Judd apart, and yet it was in religion they comforted one another. Lydia never put herself forward like she might, claiming it was her religion too. And she was one that appreciated church privileges."
But I wondered where my father came in. It had been, I knew, a passionate attachment.
"Like a new house," said Almira, "built up where the old one has been, but the cellars of it don't change. Real loving is never really got over." I felt the phrase sounding in some subterranean crypt of my own.
With this new light on it, it came out for me wonderfully in my mother's face, as I watched her through the anxious days, how much her life had been stayed in renunciations. I suppose my new appreciation must have shone out for her as well, for I could see rising out of her disorder, like a drowned person out of the sea, a bond of our common experience. We were two women, together at last, my mother and I, and could have speech with one another.
Something no doubt contributed to this new understanding by an affair of Forester's which, as I began to be acquainted with the incidents preceding it, I believed to be partly responsible for my mother's stroke. I have already sketched to you how Forester had grown up in the need of finding himself always at the centre of feminine interest without the opportunity of satisfying it normally by marriage, and how the too early stimulation of sentiment and affection had led to his being handed about from girl to girl in the attempt to gratify his need without transgressing any of the lines marked out by his profession as an eminently nice young man. It came naturally out of the mere circumstance of there being a limited number of girls at hand whom he might conceivably court without the intention of marrying, for him to fall into the society of others whom he might not court but who might nevertheless find it much to their advantage to marry him.