“Yes.”
“True to you as you are to him?”
“Yes.”
For a moment longer she looked at me closely, then with a sigh of relief leaned back. “I believe you, Jane, I always said it wasn’t true. I couldn’t believe my girl wouldn’t tell me.”
I buried my head in her knees. I felt sick and guilty, and as I knelt there I saw that long ago I had thrown over my Aunt Patience for your mother, though I loved Patience Forbes better than any one in the world.
Presently she said humorously with her slow American twang—“Well, I guess I’ll have to get used to your looks, Jane, and not be silly, but I reckon it would be easier if your voice weren’t so French. You’ve got a queer sort of accent. I don’t know what all your aunts and uncles will say when they see you. I expect if you explain it’s just the effect of the world you’ve come from they’ll think it’s a pretty queer world.”
But I had no intention of explaining myself to my relatives. Aunt Patty had the right to bring me to book, but no one else had. It seemed to me that night, lying awake in my cool, puritan bed, rather funny to think of the people of St. Mary’s Plains holding me to account. What had I done, after all, to come in for a scolding? I had told my aunt I was unchanged. In a sense it was true. If I had not been the same I should not have wanted to come.
I could hear Celestine fussing about in the next room. Celestine was going to be a thorn in the side of the Grey House. She was out of place. There she was surrounded by my clothes. My clothes looked horribly gawdy littered all over that room. Presently her light was extinguished. I lay in the dark between the sheets that smelled of lavender, my eyes open in the kind familiar darkness, and told myself that it was true, that I was unchanged, the same—the very same person that had lain in that bed in that same homely safe obscurity years before—and for a time, the sounds and the unseen but palpable presences round me, seemed to agree, to reassure me.
I heard the tram rumbling by up the Avenue, I could see in my mind’s eye, the arc light above the street shining on the high branches of the elm trees, the comfortable houses set back in their grass plots, shrouded in shadow, lighted windows showing here and there, and beyond them to the West, I knew was the river, filled with the dark hulls of ships, lumber schooners from the great lakes, pleasure boats, tugs, their red lights riding high above the black water. From the side of my bed my mind could move surely out through the night among known objects, along familiar and friendly streets, past houses and shops and churches, all acquainted with me as I was with them. And I felt the furniture of the room was kindly, sedate and prim, taking me for granted, assuming that all was well, that I belonged there—but did I? Was it true? The years seemed to have been rolled up, as if the intervening time were a parchment scroll, put away in a corner, but there was something else, something different that could not be put away. It was in me. It existed in my blood, in my body. It was restless and it gnawed me. No—no—it was not true. I was not the same. No miracle could undo what had been done to me. No relief could obliterate from my mind what I had learned. I was old—I was tired and corrupt—something irrevocable had happened to me—something final and fatal, that no longing and no prayers could ever exorcise.
St. Mary’s Plains had “got a move on” during my absence, so my relatives told me. I saw as much. It had entered upon one of those sensational periods of industrial success that come to American towns so unexpectedly. Some one had invented a stove, some one else a motor car. Former modest citizens were making millions and building factories. Down town was encroaching on the pleasant shady districts of up town. The lots on either side of the Grey House had been bought by a syndicate who proposed to put there a hotel and an apartment building. The Grey House would be sandwiched in between them. It would become a little dark building at the bottom of a well, but Patience Forbes had refused to sell, though the price offered her would have left her more than comfortably off for the rest of her life. I asked leave to buy the Grey House from her for greater security, but she refused. “I’m safe enough, Jane, because I don’t want money. No man alive can make me sell if I don’t want to. You’ve no call to worry about me.”