One Man in His Time Part 40

He made an explanatory gesture in the direction of his pocket. "I'll go down on the porch and smoke a cigar, and then if she hasn't had a relapse, I think it will be safe for me to go home. You can telephone if you need me. I am only a few blocks away." He went out with a brisk, elastic step, while his hand began to feel for the end of the cigar in his pocket.

"She's bad now," said the old woman. "It's the medicine, but she'll come to in a minute." She brought two wooden chairs with broken legs to the foot of the bed. "You'd better sit down. It may be a long waiting."

"I hope she'll know me," returned Patty. "She must have wanted to see me, or she wouldn't have sent." Her eyes left the stricken face and clung to the calla lily on the window-sill, as they had done that afternoon when she came here with Gershom. The single blossom on the lily had not faded; it was still as perfect as it had been then--only two days ago!--and not one of the closed buds had begun to open beside it.

"Oh, she wanted to see you," answered the old woman, in a croaking voice which seemed to Corinna to contain a sinister note. "As long as she was able to keep on her feet she used to go and sit in the Square just to watch you come out--"

"Do you mean that she cared for me like that?" asked the girl, in a hushed incredulous tone. "Was she really fond of me?"

The cripple turned her gla.s.sy eyes on the fresh young face. "Well, I don't know that she was fond," she responded bleakly, "but when you're as bad off as that, there ain't many things that you can think of."

A murmur fell from the lips of the dying woman, while she rolled her head slowly from side to side, as if she were seeking ease less from physical pain than from the thought in her mind. Her thick black hair, matted and damp where it had been brushed back from her forehead, spread like a veil over the pillow; and this sombre background lent a graven majesty to her features. At the moment her head appeared as expressionless as a mask; but in a few minutes, while they waited for returning consciousness, a change pa.s.sed slowly over the waxen face, and the full colourless lips began to move rapidly and to form broken and disconnected sentences. For a time they could not understand; then the words came in a long sobbing breath. "It has been too long. It has been too long."

"That goes on all the time," said the old woman. "I've been up with her for three nights, and she rambles almost every minute. But sick folks are like that," she concluded philosophically. She had not laid down her knitting for an instant; and standing now beside the bed, she jerked the gray yarn automatically through her twisted fingers. The clicking of the long wooden needles formed an accompaniment to the dry, hard sound of her words.

"Why doesn't some one hush that child?" asked Corinna impatiently.

Through the open window a breeze entered, bringing the thin restless wail of the baby.

"The mother tries, but she can't do anything. She thinks the milk went wrong and gave it colic."

The woman on the bed spoke suddenly in a clear voice. "Why doesn't he come?" she demanded. Raising her heavy lids she looked straight into Corinna's eyes, with a lucid and comprehending expression, as if she had just awakened from sleep.

Holding her knitting away from the bed with one hand, and bending over, until her deformed shape made a hill against the bedpost, the old woman screamed into the ear on the pillow, as if the hearer were either deaf or at a great distance. Though her manner was not heartless, it was as impa.s.sive as philosophy.

"He is coming," she shrieked.

"Is he bringing the child?"

"She is already here. Can't you see her there at the foot of the bed?"

The large black eyes, drained of any human expression, turned slowly toward the figure of Patty.

"But she is a little thing," said the woman doubtfully. "She is not three years old yet. What has he done with her? He told me that he would take care of her as if she belonged to him."

The old hunchback, bending her inscrutable face, screamed again into the ear on the pillow.

"That was near sixteen years ago, Maggie," she said. "Have you forgotten?"

The woman closed her eyes wearily. "Yes, I had forgotten," she answered.

"Time goes so."

But it appeared to Corinna, sitting there, with her eyes on the strip of sky which was visible through the window, that time would never go on. A pitiless fact was breaking into her understanding, shattering wall after wall of incredulity, of conviction that such a thing was too terrible to be true. She longed to get Patty away; but when she urged her in a whisper to go downstairs, the girl only shook her head, without moving her eyes from the haggard face on the pillow. The minutes dragged by like hours while they waited there, in hushed suspense, for they scarcely knew what. Outside in the backyard, the flowering ailantus tree shed a disagreeable odour; downstairs the feeble crying, which had stopped for a little while, was beginning again. While she remained motionless at the foot of the bed, wild and rebellious thoughts flocked through Corinna's mind. If she had only held back that message! If she had only kept Patty away until it was too late! She thought of the girl a few hours ago, flushed with happiness, dancing under the swinging garlands of flowers, to the sound of that thunderous music. Dancing there, with the restless pleasure of youth, while in another street, so far away that it might have been in a distant city, in a different world even, this woman, with the face of tragedy, lay dying with that fretful wail in her ears. A different world it might have been, and yet what divided her from this other woman except the blind decision of chance, the difference between beauty and ugliness, nothing more. In this dingy room, smelling of dust and drugs and the heavy odour of the ailantus tree, she felt a presence more profoundly real, more poignantly significant, than any material forms--the presence of those elemental forces which connect time with eternity. This little room, within its partial shadow, like the shadow of time itself, was touched with the solemnity of a cathedral. It seemed to Corinna, with her imaginative love of life, that a window into experience had opened sharply, a wall had crumbled. For the first time she understood that the innumerable and intricate divisions of human fate are woven into a single tremendous design.

While they waited there in silence the hours dragged on like years. At last the woman appeared to sleep, and when she opened her eyes again, her gaze had become clear and lucid.

"Have you sent for them?" she asked.

"Yes, I sent for them," answered the old woman, lowering her voice to a natural pitch. "The girl is here."

"Patty? Where is she?"

Drawing her hand from Corinna's clasp, Patty moved slowly to the head of the bed, and standing there beside the deformed old woman, she looked down on the upturned face.

"I came as I promised. Can I help you?" she asked; and her voice was so quiet, so repressed, that Corinna looked at her anxiously. How much had the girl understood? And, if she understood, what difference would it make in her life--and in Stephen's life?

"I couldn't tell you the other day because of Julius," said the woman, in a strangled tone. "I couldn't say things before Julius." Then, glancing toward the door, she asked breathlessly, "Didn't Gideon Vetch come with you?"

"Father?" responded Patty, wonderingly. "Do you want Father to come?"

A smile crossed the woman's face, and she made a movement as if she wanted to raise her head. "Do you call him Father?" she returned in a pleased voice.

At the question, Corinna sprang up and made an impulsive step forward.

"Oh, don't!" she cried out pleadingly. "Don't tell her!"

"But he is my father," Patty's tone was stern and accusing. "He is my father."

The smile was still on the woman's face; but while Corinna watched it, she realized that it was unlike any smile she had ever seen before in her life--a smile of satisfaction that was at the same time one of relinquishment.

"They thought I was married to him," she said slowly. "Julius thought, or pretended to think, that he could harm him by making me swear that I was married to him. They gave me drugs. I would have done anything for drugs--and I did that! But the old woman there knows better. She's got a paper. I made her keep it--about Patty--"

"Don't!" cried Corinna again in a sharper tone. "Oh, can't you see that you must not tell her!"

For the first time the woman turned her eyes away from the girl. "It is because of Gideon Vetch," she answered slowly. "I may get well again, and then I'll be sorry."

"But he would rather you wouldn't." Corinna's voice was full of pain.

"You know--you must know, if you know him at all, that he would rather you spared her--"

"Know him?" repeated the woman, and she laughed with a dry, rattling sound. "I don't know him. I never saw him but once in my life."

"You never saw him but once." The words came so slowly from Patty's lips that she seemed to choke over them. "But you said that you knew my mother?"

Again the woman made that dry, rattling sound in her chest. "Your mother never saw him but once," she answered grimly. "She never saw him but once, and that was for a quarter of an hour on the night they were taking her to prison. I would never have told but for Julius," she added. "I would never have told if they hadn't tried to make out that I knew him, and that he was really your father. It would ruin him, they said, and that was what they wanted. But when they bring it out, with the paper they got me to sign, I want you to know that it is a lie--that I did it because I'd have died if I hadn't got hold of the drugs--"

"But he is my father," repeated Patty quite steadily--so steadily that her voice was without colour or feeling.

The only reply that came was a gasping sound, which grew louder and louder, with the woman's struggle for breath, until it seemed to fill the room and the night outside and even the desolate sky. As she lay back, with the arm of the old cripple under her head and her streaming hair, the spasm pa.s.sed like a stain over her face, changing its waxen pallor to the colour of ashes, while a dull purplish shadow encircled her mouth. For a few minutes, so violent was the struggle for air, it appeared to Corinna that nothing except death could ever quiet that agonized gasping; but while she waited for the end, the sound became gradually fainter, and the woman spoke quite plainly, though with an effort that racked not only her strangled chest, but her entire body.

Each syllable came so slowly, and now and then so faintly, that there were moments when it seemed that the breath in that tormented body would not last until the words had been spoken.

"You were going on three years old when he first saw you. They were taking me away to prison--that's over now, and it don't matter--but I hadn't any chance--" The panting began again; but by force of will, the woman controlled it after a minute, and went on, as if she were measuring her breath inch by inch, almost as if it were a material substance which she was holding in reserve for the end. "Your father died the first year I married him, and things went from bad to worse--there's no use going over that, no use--They were taking me to prison from the circus, and I had you in my arms, when Gideon Vetch came by and saw me--" Again there was a pause and a desperate battle for air; and again, after it was over, she went on in that strangled whisper, while her eyes, like the eyes of a drowning animal, clung neither to Patty nor Corinna, but to the austere face of the old hunchback. "'What am I to do with the child?' I asked, and he stepped right out of the circus crowd, and answered 'Give me the child. I like children'--" An inarticulate moan followed, and then she repeated clearly and slowly.

"Just like that--nothing more--'Give me the child. I like children.'

That was the first time I ever saw him. He had come to see some of the people in the circus, and I've never seen him since then except in the Square. The trial went against me, but that's all over. Oh, I'm tired now. It hurts me. I can't talk--"

She broke into terrible coughing; and the old woman, dropping her knitting for the first time since they had entered the room, seized a towel from a chair by the bed. "Talking was too much for her," she said.

"I thought she'd pull through. She was so much better--but talking was too much."

"She is so ill that she doesn't know what she is saying," murmured Corinna in the girl's ear. "She is out of her mind."

"No, she isn't out of her mind," replied Patty quietly. "She isn't out of her mind." In her ball gown of green and silver, like the colours of sunlit foam, with a wreath of artificial leaves in her hair, her loveliness was unearthly. "It is every bit true. I know it," she reiterated.