The Brimming Cup
CHAPTER XX
A PRIMAEVAL HERITAGE
July 21. Evening.
Cousin Hetty lay coldly dead; and Marise felt herself blown upon
by an icy breath that froze her numb. The doctor had come and gone,
queerly, and bustlingly alive and full of talk and explanations;
Agnes had come back and, silently weeping, had walked endlessly and
aimlessly around the house, with a broom in her idle hand; one
after another of the neighbors had come and gone, queerly alive as
usual, they too, for all their hushed and awkward manners; Neale
had come, seeming to feel that cold breath as little as the
others.
And now Neale was gone, after everything had been decided, all
the incredibly multitudinous details that must be decided. The
funeral was set for the day after tomorrow, and until then,
everything in everybody's life was to stop stock-still, as a matter
of course. Because Agnes was in terror of being left alone for an
instant, Marise would not even leave the house until after the
funeral, and one of the thousand petty unescapable details she and
Neale had talked of in the hushed voice which the house imposed on
all in it, was the decision as to which dress and hat were to be
sent to her from the wardrobe at home.
She was to stay there with Agnes, she, who was all the family
old Cousin Hetty had left, for the last watch over what lay up
there on the bed in her bedroom. Neale would look out for the
children (there was no one else for the moment, Touclé was
gone, Eugenia quite useless), would telegraph the few old friends
who would care to know the news, would see Mr. Bayweather about the
funeral, would telephone the man in West Ashley who dug graves,
would do what was to be done outside; and she would do what was to
be done inside, as now, when she sat on the stairs waiting in case
the undertaker needed something.
She was glad that the undertaker was only quiet, white-bearded
old Mr. Hadley, who for so many, many years had given his silent
services to the dead of Ashley that he had come to seem not quite a
living figure himself, hushed and stilled by his association with
everlasting stillness. Marise, cold and numbed with that icy breath
upon her, knew now why the old undertaker was always silent and
absent. A strange life he must have had. She had never thought of
it till she had seen him come into that house, where she and Agnes
waited for him, uncertain, abashed, not knowing what to do. Into
how many such houses he must have gone, with that same quiet look
of unsurprised acceptance of what everybody knew was coming
sometime and nobody ever expected to come at all. How extraordinary
that it had never occurred to her that Cousin Hetty, old as she
was, would some day die. You never really believed that anybody in
your own life was ever going to die, or change; any more than you
really believed that you yourself were ever going to grow old, or
change; or that the children were ever really going to grow up.
That threadbare old phrase about the death of old people, "it
always comes as a shock," that was true of all the inevitable
things that happened in life which you saw happen to everyone else,
and never believed would happen to you.
This was the last tie with the past gone, the last person
disappeared for whom she was still the little girl she felt herself
now, the little girl who had lost her way and wanted someone to put
her back in the path. She had a moment of very simple, sweet
sorrow, sitting there alone in the hall, warm tears streaming down
her cheeks and falling on her hands. Cousin Hetty gone, dear old
Cousin Hetty, with her bright living eyes, and her love for all
that was young. How much she owed her . . . those troubled years of
her youth when Cousin Hetty and the old house were unfailing
shelter. What shelter had she now?
The pendulum of her mind swung back . . . of course this was
silly traditional repeating of superstitious old words. There was
no shelter; there could be none in this life. No one could show her
the path, because there was no path; and anyone who
pretended to show it was only a charlatan who traded on moments of
weakness like this.
Mr. Hadley opened the door quietly and asked in that
seldom-heard voice of his for a couple of soft, clean towels. Where
did Cousin Hetty keep her towels? In the chest of drawers at the
end of the hall. An odor of cloves came up spicily into the air as
Marise opened the drawer. How like Cousin Hetty to have that
instead of the faded, sentimental lavender. She had perhaps put
those towels away there last night, with her busy, shaking old
hands, so still now. All dead, the quaintness, the vitality, the
zest in life, the new love for little Elly, all dead now, as though
it had never been, availing nothing. There was nothing that did not
die.
She handed in the towels and sat down again on the stairs
leaning her head against the wall. What time could it be? Was it
still daylight? . . . No, there was a lamp lighted down there. What
could she have been doing all day, she and Agnes and the doctor and
Mr. Hadley? She wondered if the children were all right, and if
Neale would remember, when he washed Mark's face, that there was a
bruise on his temple where the swing-board had struck him. Was that
only yesterday morning! Was it possible that it was only last night
that she had lain awake in the darkness, trying to think, trying to
know what she was feeling, burning with excitement, as one by one
those boldly forward-thrusting movements came back to her from the
time when he had cried out so angrily, "They can't love her.
They're not capable of it!" to the time when they had exchanged
that long reckless gaze over Elly's head! And now there was the
triumphant glory of security which had been in his kiss . . . why,
that was this morning, only a few hours ago! Even through her cold
numbed lassitude she shrank again before the flare-up of that
excitement, and burned in it. She tried to put this behind her at
once, to wait, like all the rest, till this truce should be over,
and she should once more be back in that mêlée of
agitation the thought of which turned her sick with confusion. She
was not strong enough for life, if this was what it brought, these
fierce, clawing passions that did not wait for your bidding to go
or come, but left you as though you were dead and then pounced on
you like tigers. She had not iron in her either to live ruthlessly,
or to stamp out that upward leap of flame which meant the renewal
of priceless youth and passion. Between these alternatives, she
could make no decision, she could not, it would tear her in
pieces to do it.
The pendulum swung back again, and all this went out, leaving
her mortally tired. Agnes came to the foot of the stairs, a little,
withered, stricken old figure, her apron at her eyes. From behind
it she murmured humbly, between swallowing hard, that she had made
some tea and there was bread and butter ready, and should she boil
an egg?
A good and healing pity came into Marise's heart. Poor old
Agnes, it was the end of the world for her, of course. And how
touching, how tragic, how unjust, the fate of dependents, to turn
from one source of commands to another. She ran downstairs on
tip-toe and put her arm around the old woman's shoulder. "I haven't
said anything yet, Agnes," she told her, "because this has come on
us so suddenly. But of course Mr. Crittenden and I will always look
out for you. Cousin Hetty . . . you were her best friend."
The old woman laid her head down on the other's shoulder and
wept aloud. "I miss her so. I miss her so," she said over and
over.
"The thing to do for her," thought Marise, as she patted the
thin heaving shoulders, "is to give her something to work at."
Aloud she said, "Agnes, we must get the front room downstairs
ready. Mr. Hadley wants to have Cousin Hetty brought down there.
Before we eat we might as well get the larger pieces of furniture
moved out."
Agnes stood up, docilely submitting herself to the command,
stopped crying, and went with Marise into the dim old room, in
which nothing had been changed since the day, twenty years ago,
when the furniture had been put back in place after Cousin Hetty's
old mother had lain there, for the last time.
The two women began to work, and almost at once Agnes was
herself again, stepping about briskly, restored by the familiarity
of being once more under the direction of another. They pulled out
the long haircloth sofa, moved the spindle-legged old chairs into
the dining-room, and carried out one by one the drawers from the
high-boy in the corner. From one of these drawers a yellowed paper
fell out. Marise picked it up and glanced at it. It was a letter
dated 1851, the blank page of which had been used for a game of
Consequences. The foolish incoherencies lay there in the faded ink
just as they had been read out, bringing with them the laughter of
those people, so long dead now, who had written them down in that
pointed, old-fashioned handwriting. Marise stood looking at it
while Agnes swept the other room. Cousin Hetty had been ten years
old in 1851, just as old as Paul was now. Her mother had probably
left something she wanted to do, to sit down and laugh with her
little daughter over this trivial game. A ghostly echo of that
long-silent laughter fell faintly and coldly on her ear. So soon
gone. Was it worth while to do it at all? Such an effort, such a
fatigue lay before those children one tried to keep laughing, and
then . . .
Someone came in behind her, without knocking or ringing. People
had been coming and going unannounced in that house all the day as
though death had made it their own home. Agnes came to the door,
Marise looked up and saw Nelly Powers standing in the door-way, the
second time she had been there. "I come over again," she said, "to
bring you some hot biscuit and honey. I knew you wouldn't feel to
do much cooking." She added, "I put the biscuits in the oven as I
come through, so they'd keep warm."
"Oh, thank you, Nelly, that's very kind and thoughtful," said
Marise. As she spoke and looked at the splendid, enigmatic woman
standing there, the richness of her vitality vibrating about her,
she saw again the nightmare vision of 'Gene and heard the terrible
breathing that had resounded in the Eagle Rock woods. She was
overwhelmed, as so often before in her life, by an amazement at the
astounding difference between the aspect of things and what they
really were. She had never entirely outgrown the wildness of
surprise which this always brought to her. She and Nelly, looking
at each other so calmly, and speaking of hot biscuits!
She listened as though it were an ironically incongruous speech
in a play to Agnes' conscientious country attempt to make
conversation with the caller, "Hot today, ain't it? Yesterday's
storm didn't seem to do much good." And to Nelly's answer on the
same note, "Yes, but it's good for the corn to have it hot. 'Gene's
been out cultivating his, all day long."
"Ah, not all day! Not all day!" Marise kept the thought to
herself. She had a vision of the man goaded beyond endurance,
leaving his horses plodding in the row, while he fled blindly, to
escape the unescapable.
An old resentment, centuries and ages older than she was, a
primaeval heritage from the past, flamed up unexpectedly in her
heart. There was a man, she thought, who had kept the
capacity really to love his wife; passionately to suffer; whose
cold intelligence had not chilled down to . . ."
"Well, I guess I must be going now," said Nelly in the speech of
the valley. She went away through the side-door, opening and
shutting it with meticulous care, so that it would not make a
sound. . . . As though a sound could reach Cousin Hetty now!
"I don't like her biscuits," said Agnes. "She always puts too
much sody in." She added, in what was evidently the expression of
an old dislike, "And don't she look a fool, a great hulking critter
like her, wearing such shoes, teeterin' along on them heels."
"Oh well," said Marise, vaguely, "it's her idea of how to look
pretty."
"They must cost an awful sight too," Agnes went on, scoldingly,
"laced halfway up her leg that way. And the Powerses as poor as
Job's turkey. The money she puts into them shoes'd do 'em enough
sight more good if 'twas saved up and put into a manure spreader, I
call it."
She had taken the biscuits out of the oven and was holding them
suspiciously to her nose, when someone came in at the front door
and walked down the hall with the hushed, self-conscious,
lugubrious tip-toe step of the day. It was Mr. Bayweather, his
round old face rather pale. "I'm shocked, unutterably shocked by
this news," he said, and indeed he looked badly shaken and scared.
It came to Marise that Cousin Hetty had been of about his age. He
shook her hand and looked about for a chair. "I came to see about
which hymns you would like sung," he said. "Do you know if Miss
Hetty had any favorites?" He broke off to say, "Mrs. Bayweather
wished me to be sure to excuse her to you for not coming with me
tonight to see if there was anything she could do. But she was
stopped by old Mrs. Warner, just as we were leaving the house.
Frank, it seems, went off early this morning to survey some lines
in the woods somewhere on the mountain, and was to be back to
lunch. He didn't come then and hasn't showed up at all yet. Mrs.
Warner wanted my wife to telephone up to North Ashley to see if he
had perhaps gone there to spend the night with his aunt. The line
was busy of course, and Mrs. Bayweather was still trying to get
them on the wire when I had to come away. If she had no special
favorites, I think that 'Lead, Kindly Light, Amid th' Encircling
Gloom' is always suitable, don't you?"
Something seemed to explode inside Marise's mind, and like a
resultant black cloud of smoke a huge and ominous possibility
loomed up, so darkly, so unexpectedly, that she had no breath to
answer the clergyman's question. Those lines Frank Warner had gone
to survey ran through the Eagle Rock woods!
"Or would you think an Easter one, like 'The Strife Is O'er, the
Battle Won,' more appropriate?" suggested Mr. Bayweather to her
silence.
Agnes started. "Who's that come bursting into the kitchen?" she
cried, turning towards the door.
It seemed to Marise, afterwards, that she had known at that
moment who had come and what the tidings were.
Agnes started towards the door to open it. But it was flung open
abruptly from the outside. Touclé stood there, her hat gone
from her head, her rusty black clothes torn and disarranged.
Marise knew what she was about to announce.
She cried out to them, "Frank Warner has fallen off the Eagle
Rocks. I found him there, at the bottom, half an hour ago,
dead."
The savage old flame, centuries and ages older than she, flared
for an instant high and smoky in Marise's heart. "There is a
man who knows how to fight for his wife and keep her!" she thought
fiercely.