The Dwelling Place of Light Part 29

At the Hampton station she took the trolley, alighting at the Common, following the narrow path made by pedestrians in the heavy snow to Fillmore Street. She climbed the dark stairs, opened the dining-room door, and paused on the threshold. Hannah and Edward sat there under the lamp, Hannah scanning through her spectacles the pages of a Sunday newspaper. On perceiving Janet she dropped it hastily in her lap.

"Well, I was concerned about you, in all this storm!" she exclaimed.

"Thank goodness you're home, anyway. You haven't seen Lise, have you?"

"Lise?" Janet repeated. "Hasn't she been home?"

"Your father and I have been alone all day long. Not that it is so uncommon for Lise to be gone. I wish it wasn't! But you! When you didn't come home for supper I was considerably worried."

Janet sat down between her mother and father and began to draw off her gloves.

"I'm going to marry Mr. Ditmar," she announced.

For a few moments the silence was broken only by the ticking of the old-fas.h.i.+oned clock.

"Mr. Ditmar!" said Hannah, at length. "You're going to marry Mr.

Ditmar!"

Edward was still inarticulate. His face twitched, his eyes watered as he stared at her.

"Not right away," said Janet.

"Well, I must say you take it rather cool," declared Hannah, almost resentfully. "You come in and tell us you're going to marry Mr. Ditmar just like you were talking about the weather."

Hannah's eyes filled with tears. There had been indeed an unconscious lack of consideration in Janet's abrupt announcement, which had fallen like a spark on the dry tinder of Hannah's hope. The result was a suffocating flame. Janet, whom love had quickened, had a swift perception of this. She rose quickly and took Hannah in her arms and kissed her. It was as though the relation between them were reversed, and the daughter had now become the mother and the comforter.

"I always knew something like this would happen!" said Edward. His words incited Hannah to protest.

"You didn't anything of the kind, Edward b.u.mpus," she exclaimed.

"Just to think of Janet livin' in that big house up in Warren Street!"

he went on, unheeding, jubilant. "You'll drop in and see the old people once in a while, Janet, you won't forget us?"

"I wish you wouldn't talk like that, father," said Janet.

"Well, he's a fine man, Claude Ditmar, I always said that. The way he stops and talks to me when he pa.s.ses the gate--"

"That doesn't make him a good man," Hannah declared, and added: "If he wasn't a good man, Janet wouldn't be marrying him."

"I don't know whether he's good or not," said Janet.

"That's so, too," observed Hannah, approvingly. "We can't any of us tell till we've tried 'em, and then it's too late to change. I'd like to see him, but I guess he wouldn't care to come down here to Fillmore Street."

The difference between Ditmar's social and economic standing and their own suggested appalling complications to her mind. "I suppose I won't get a sight of him till after you're married, and not much then."

"There's plenty of time to think about that, mother," answered Janet.

"I'd want to have everything decent and regular," Hannah insisted. "We may be poor, but we come of good stock, as your father says."

"It'll be all right--Mr. Ditmar will behave like a gentleman," Edward a.s.sured her.

"I thought I ought to tell you about it," Janet said, "but you mustn't mention it, yet, not even to Lise. Lise will talk. Mr. Ditmar's very busy now,--he hasn't made any plans."

"I wish Lise could get married!" exclaimed Hannah, irrelevantly. "She's been acting so queer lately, she's not been herself at all."

"Now there you go, borrowing trouble, mother," Edward exclaimed. He could not take his eyes from Janet, but continued to regard her with benevolence. "Lise'll get married some day. I don't suppose we can expect another Mr. Ditmar...."

"Well," said Hannah, presently, "there's no use sitting up all night."

She rose and kissed Janet again. "I just can't believe it," she declared, "but I guess it's so if you say it is."

"Of course it's so," said Edward.

"I so want you should be happy, Janet," said Hannah....

Was it so? Her mother and father, the dwarfed and ugly surroundings of Fillmore Street made it seem incredible once more. And--what would they say if they knew what had happened to her this day? When she had reached her room, Janet began to wonder why she had told her parents. Had it not been in order to relieve their anxiety--especially her mother's--on the score of her recent absences from home? Yes, that was it, and because the news would make them happy. And then the mere a.s.sertion to them that she was to marry Ditmar helped to make it more real to herself. But, now that reality was fading again, she was unable to bring it within the scope of her imagination, her mind refused to hold one remembered circ.u.mstance long enough to coordinate it with another: she realized that she was tired--too tired to think any more. But despite her exhaustion there remained within her, possessing her, as it were overshadowing her, unrelated to future or past, the presence of the man who had awakened her to an intensity of life hitherto unconceived. When her head touched the pillow she fell asleep....

When the bells and the undulating scream of the siren awoke her, she lay awhile groping in the darkness. Where was she? Who was she? The discovery of the fact that the nail of the middle finger on her right hand was broken, gave her a clew. She had broken that nail in reaching out to save something--a vase of roses--that was it!--a vase of roses on a table with a white cloth. Ditmar had tipped it over. The sudden flaring up of this trivial incident served to re-establish her ident.i.ty, to light a fuse along which her mind began to run like fire, illuminating redly all the events of the day before. It was sweet to lie thus, to possess, as her very own, these precious, pa.s.sionate memories of life lived at last to fulness, to feel that she had irrevocably given herself and taken--all. A longing to see Ditmar again invaded her: he would take an early train, he would be at the office by nine. How could she wait until then?

With a movement that had become habitual, subconscious, she reached out her hand to arouse her sister. The coldness of the sheets on the right side of the bed sent a s.h.i.+ver through her--a s.h.i.+ver of fear.

"Lise!" she called. But there was no answer from the darkness. And Janet, trembling, her heart beating wildly, sprang from the bed, searched for the matches, and lit the gas. There was no sign of Lise; her clothes, which she had the habit of flinging across the chairs, were nowhere to be seen. Janet's eyes fell on the bureau, marked the absence of several knick-knacks, including a comb and brush, and with a sudden sickness of apprehension she darted to the wardrobe and flung open the doors. In the bottom were a few odd garments, above was the hat with the purple feather, now shabby and discarded, on the hooks a skirt and jacket Lise wore to work at the Bagatelle in bad weather. That was all.... Janet sank down in the rocking-chair, her hands clasped together, overwhelmed by the sudden apprehension of the tragedy that had lurked, all unsuspected, in the darkness: a tragedy, not of Lise alone, but in which she herself was somehow involved. Just why this was so, she could not for the moment declare. The room was cold, she was clad only in a nightdress, but surges of heat ran through her body. What should she do? She must think. But thought was impossible. She got up and closed the window and began to dress with feverish rapidity, pausing now and again to stand motionless. In one such moment there entered her mind an incident that oddly had made little impression at the time of its occurrence because she, Janet, had been blinded by the prospect of her own happiness--that happiness which, a few minutes ago, had seemed so real and vital a thing! And it was the memory of this incident that suddenly threw a glaring, evil light on all of Lise's conduct during the past months--her accidental dropping of the vanity case and the gold coin! Now she knew for a certainty what had happened to her sister.

Having dressed herself, she entered the kitchen, which was warm, filled with the smell of frying meat. Streaks of grease smoke floated fantastically beneath the low ceiling, and Hannah, with the frying-pan in one hand and a fork in the other, was bending over the stove. Wisps of her scant, whitening hair escaped from the ridiculous, tightly drawn knot at the back of her head; in the light of the flickering gas-jet she looked so old and worn that a sudden pity smote Janet and made her dumb--pity for her mother, pity for herself, pity for Lise; pity that lent a staggering insight into life itself. Hannah had once been young, desirable, perhaps, swayed by those forces which had swayed her. Janet wondered why she had never guessed this before, and why she had guessed it now. But it was Hannah who, looking up and catching sight of Janet's face, was quick to divine the presage in it and gave voice to the foreboding that had weighed on her for many weeks.

"Where's Lise?"

And Janet could not answer. She shook her head. Hannah dropped the fork, the handle of the frying pan and crossed the room swiftly, seizing Janet by the shoulders.

"Is she gone? I knew it, I felt it all along. I thought she'd done something she was afraid to tell about--I tried to ask her, but I couldn't--I couldn't! And now she's gone. Oh, my G.o.d, I'll never forgive myself!"

The unaccustomed sight of her mother's grief was terrible. For an instant only she clung to Janet, then becoming mute, she sat down in the kitchen chair and stared with dry, unseeing eyes at the wall. Her face twitched. Janet could not bear to look at it, to see the torture in her mother's eyes. She, Janet, seemed suddenly to have grown old herself, to have lived through ages of misery and tragedy.... She was aware of a pungent odour, went to the stove, picked up the fork, and turned the steak. Now and then she glanced at Hannah. Grief seemed to have frozen her. Then, from the dining-room she heard footsteps, and Edward stood in the doorway.

"Well, what's the matter with breakfast?" he asked. From where he stood he could not see Hannah's face, but gradually his eyes were drawn to her figure. His intuition was not quick, and some moments pa.s.sed before the rigidity of the pose impressed itself upon him.

"Is mother sick?" he asked falteringly.

Janet went to him. But it was Hannah who spoke.

"Lise has gone," she said.

"Lise--gone," Edward repeated. "Gone where?"

"She's run away--she's disgraced us," Hannah replied, in a monotonous, dulled voice.

Edward did not seem to understand, and presently Janet felt impelled to break the silence.

"She didn't come home last night, father."

"Didn't come home? Mebbe she spent the night with a friend," he said.