The Brimming Cup Part 32

The old woman turned and waited till the younger had overtaken her. They were under the dense shade of an old maple, beside the road, as they stood looking at each other.

As she had followed, Marise regretted her impulse, and had wondered what in the world she could find to say, but now that she saw again the expression in the other's face, she cried out longingly, "Toucle, where do you go that makes you look peaceful?"

The old woman glanced at her, a faint surprise appearing in her deeply lined face. Then she looked at her, without surprise, seriously as though to see what she might read in the younger woman's eyes. She stood for a long moment, thinking. Finally she sat down on the gra.s.s under the maple-tree, and motioned Marise to sit beside her. She meditated for a long time, and then said, hesitatingly, "I don't know as a white person could understand. White people ... n.o.body ever asked me before."

She sat silent, her broad, dusty feet in their elastic-sided, worn, run-over shoes straight before her, the thick, h.o.r.n.y eyelids dropped over her eyes, her scarred old face carved into innumerable deep lines.

Marise wondered if she had forgotten that anyone else was there. She turned her own eyes away, finally, and looking at the mountains saw that black thunderclouds were rolling up over the Eagle Rocks. Then the old woman said, her eyes still dropped, "I tell you how my uncle told me, seventy-five years ago. He said people are like fish in an underground brook, in a black cave. He said there is a place, away far off from where they live, where there is a crack in the rock. If they went 'way off they could get a glimpse of what daylight is. And about once in so often they need to swim there and look out at the daylight. If they don't, they lose their eyesight from always being in the dark. He said that a lot of Indians don't care whether they lose their eyesight or not, so long's they can go on eating and swimming around. But good Indians do. He said that as far as he could make out, none of the white people care. He said maybe they've lost their eyes altogether."

Without a move of her sagging, unlovely old body, she turned her deep black eyes on the flushed, quivering, beautiful woman beside her.

"That's where I go," she answered. "I go 'way off to be by myself, and get a glimpse of what daylight is."

She got up to her feet, s.h.i.+fted her reticule from one hand to the other, and without a backward look trudged slowly down the dusty road, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure.

Marise saw her turn into a wood-road that led up towards the mountain, and disappear. Her own heart was burning as she looked. n.o.body would help her in her need. Toucle went away to find peace, and left her in the black cave. Neale stood... .

A child's shriek of pain and loud wailing calls for "Mother! Mother!

_Mother!_" sent her back running breathlessly to the house. Mark had fallen out of the swing and the sharp corner of the board had struck him, he said, "in the eye! in the eye!" He was shrieking and holding both hands frantically over his left eye. This time it might be serious, might have injured the eye-ball. Those swing-boards were deadly. Marise s.n.a.t.c.hed up the screaming child and carried him into the kitchen, terrible perspectives of blindness hag-riding her imagination; saying to herself with one breath, "It's probably nothing," and in the next seeing Mark groping his way about the world with a cane, all his life long.

She opened the first-aid box on the kitchen-shelf, pulled out a roll of bandage and a length of gauze, sat down with Mark in her lap near the faucet, and wet the gauze in cold water. Then she tried in vain to induce him to take down his hands so that she could see where the blow had struck.

But the terrified, hysterical child was incapable of hearing what she said, incapable of doing anything but scream louder and louder when she tried to pull down those desperately tight little hands held with frantic tenseness over the hurt eye. Marise could feel all his little body, quivering and taut. His shrieks were like those of someone undergoing the most violent torture.

She herself responded nervously and automatically to his condition, felt herself begin to tighten up, and knew that she was equally ready to shake him furiously, or to burst into anguished tears of sympathy for his pain.

Wait now ... wait ... what was the thing to do for Mark? What would untie those knots of fright and shock? For Paul it would have been talk of the bicycle he was to have for his birthday; for Elly a fairy-story or a piece of candy! For Mark ...

High above the tumult of Mark's shrieks and her own spasmodic reactions to them, she sent her intelligence circling quietly ... and in an instant ... oh yes, that was the thing. "Listen, Mark," she said in his ear, stopping her effort to take down his hands, "Mother's learned a new song, a _new_ one, awfully funny. And ever so long too, the way you like them." She put her arms about him and began, hearing herself with difficulty through his cries.

"On yonder hill there stands a damsel, Who she is, I do not know."

("How preposterous we must sound, if Eugenia is listening," she thought to herself, as she sang, "out-yelling each other this way!")

"I'll go and court her for her beauty.

She must answer 'yes' or 'no.'"

As usual Mark fell helpless before the combination of music and a story.

His cries diminished in volume. She said in his ear, "And then the Lady sings," and she tuned her voice to a young-ladyish, high sweetness and sang,

"My father was a Spanish Captain, Went to sea a month ago,"

Mark made a great effort and choked down his cries to heaving sobs as he tried to listen,

"First he kissed me, then he left me; Bade me always answer 'no.'"

She told the little boy, now looking up at her out of the one eye not covered by his hands, "Then the gentleman says to her," she made her voice loud and hearty and bluff,

"Oh, Madam, in your face is beauty, On your lips red roses grow.

Will you take me for your lover?

Madam, answer 'yes' or 'no.'"

She explained in an aside to Mark, "But her father had told her she must always answer just the one thing, 'no,' so she had to say," she turned up in the mincing, ladylike key again, and sang,

"Oh no, John, no, John, no."

Mark drew a long quivering breath through parted lips and sat silent, his one eye fixed on his mother, who now sang in the loud, l.u.s.ty voice,

"Oh, Madam, since you are so cruel, And that you do scorn me so, If I may not be your lover, Madam, will you let me go?"

And in the high, prim voice, she answered herself,

"Oh no, John, no, John, _no!_"

A faint smile hovered near Mark's flushed face. He leaned towards his mother as she sang, and took down his hands so that he could see her better. Marise noted instantly, with a silent exclamation of relief that the red angry mark was quite outside the eye-socket, harmless on the bone at one side. Much ado about nothing as usual with the children. Why _did_ she get so frightened each time? Another one of Mark's hairbreadth escapes.

She reached for the cold wet compress and went on, singing loudly and boldly, with a facetious wag of her head, (how tired she was of all this manoeuvering!),

"Then I will stay with you forever If you will not be unkind."

She applied the cold compress on the hurt spot and put out her hand for the bandage-roll, singing with an ostentatiously humorous accent and thinking with exasperation how all this was delaying her in the thousand things to do in the house,

"Madam, I have vowed to love you; Would you have me change my mind?"

She wound the bandage around and around the little boy's head, so that it held the compress in place, singing in the high, sweet voice,

"Oh no, John, no, John, NO."

She went on with a heavy, mock solemnity, in the loud voice,

"Oh, hark, I hear the church-bells ringing; Will you come and be my wife?"

She pinned the bandage in place at the back of Mark's head,

"Or, dear Madam, have you settled To live single all your life?"

She gathered the child up to her, his head on her shoulder, his face turned to her, his bare, dusty, wiry little legs wriggling and soiling her white skirt; and sang, rollickingly,

"Oh no, John, no, John, NO!"

"There, that's all," she said in her natural voice, looking down at Mark. She said to herself rebelliously, "I've expended enough personality and energy on this performance to play a Beethoven sonata at a concert," and found she was quoting something Vincent Marsh had said about her life, the day before.

There was a moment while the joke slowly penetrated to Mark's six-year-old brain. And then he laughed out, delightedly, "Oh, Mother, that's a beaut! Sing it again. Sing it again! Now I know what's coming, I'll like it such a lots betterer."

Marise cried out in indignant protest, "Mark! When I've sat here for ten minutes singing to you, and all the work to do, and the sun getting like red-hot fire every minute."

"What must you got to do?" asked Mark, challengingly.

"Well, the very first thing is to get dinner ready and in the fireless cooker, so we can turn out the oil-stove and cool off this terrible kitchen."