Rena's experiment

by Mary Jane Holmes

For a while he lay perfectly still, sometimes, with his eyes closed, but oftener with them fixed upon Rena to whom he said at last, “It makes me think of that night in the grove ever so many years ago when you picked the pine-needles from Tom’s neck and I wished you were picking them from mine. Do you remember it?”

“Hush! You are not to talk,” Rena replied, and he was quiet again until the eye came in at the window, and with a start, he exclaimed, “There it is! I don’t believe it found that braid.”

With a tact I could not understand, Rena managed to send the eye away again and to keep Rex so quiet that I dreaded the time when she must leave. I knew she ought to go and suggested it to her, but she stayed until the clock struck five, and then left the room so noiselessly that Rex, who was sleeping, did not awaken. In the lower hall she met Colin. He had thought the matter over very seriously and concluded that although it was a foolish joke, it was like a girl, and he had perhaps been too hard on Rena. With Irene he was still angry. She had acted the biggest lie, he thought, and then she was not real. She was bogus, and had tried to win Rex under false colors, and had let him treat her as if she was to be Rex’s wife. He was ashamed of all the things he had said to her on that subject and vexed that she had accepted them so sweetly as if they belonged to her. She was a fraud and did not seem as grand and beautiful as she had at first. Rena, however, was real. She was related to Nannie. She was the girl Sandy had seen and admired, and though he mentally called her a little hussy for trying such a doubtful experiment, he forgave her entirely when he heard she was with Rex “keeping that confounded eye away.” When he met her in the hall she simply bowed to him and was hurrying on when he put his hand on her shoulder saying: “Not so fast. I want to speak to you. I was a brute the other day to talk as I did, but I was mad for a minute, and now I don’t think the joke a nice one; but, by George! you did stand up square for Irene when I came down so heavily on her. I believe you’ve just as much head on you as she has, and it beats me how you manage Rex and that eye—her eye. He was fool enough to look in the well. Did you know it?”

Rena nodded and he went on: “He says he saw half her face and one eye, but Lord, he didn’t see anything; he couldn’t.”

“Yes, he did; or he might,” Rena answered, beginning to understand, and repeating Sam’s story and adding: “Tom tried the same thing on me, and I saw half his face; so it can be done. Of course Mr. Travers knew it was a joke. Irene must have told him.”

Colin shook his head doubtfully. Rex had said nothing about a joke, or an explanation from Irene, as he would have done had there been any, and something like a suspicion of the truth began to creep into his mind, making him still more indignant at Irene. But he said nothing except that “when men like Rex went into such rot and got crazy it was time the performance was stopped,” and he had ordered the well closed up and was glad the glass was broken, although he presumed there would be a howling among the young people who might try to open the well. Then he added, as she turned to leave him, “You are not to walk home; you are too tired. I shall order the carriage.”

Rena was very tired and she accepted Colin’s offer gladly and was driven home by Nixon. With Rena gone Rex’s paroxysms of delirium returned. The eye came back and sat upon the wall and the ceiling and the bureau and chairs, sometimes in one place, sometimes in another, while the braid of hair wound itself now around my head and then around that of Rex, who kept asking for Rena, and became so wild that the doctor said to me at last: “I think we must send for that young lady. She does more good than both of us.”

I was doubtful whether Rena would come again, but I wrote her a note telling her the state of things, and was delighted when about ten o’clock the next morning she walked into the house with Tom. He had taken the early train from Boston and stopped on his way from the station at Mrs. Parks’, where he heard from Rena all the particulars of Rex’s illness—of his looking in the well, of his hallucination with regard to the eye, and her confession to him.

“It was awful,” she said, “and at first my heart beat in my throat so I could scarcely talk, and I felt as if I was about to be electrocuted. But I am glad it is over, and he did not seem angry either, only hurt, at the trick put upon him. I am going with you this morning to see him.”

“But is it safe to go there so much? Aren’t you afraid of fever?” Tom asked.