This reflection caused Lucy’s pulse to quicken. She shook her head. Compressing her lips and shutting her eyes, she said, under her breath but fervently, “Oh, God, forgive my vanity and help me hold myself together!” It would be disgraceful of her if she allowed an incidental thing to overshadow the purpose of her journey. If circumstances should permit, it would be justifiable to her to see him, of course. It was a matter of serious consequence that she and Edward try to get re-acquainted with each other, to see—she pinched the end of her finger with the other hand—to see whether this was not just a sentimental notion that would evaporate before the realities.
Yet the yellow telegram she had received aboard the train at Savannah, and now was stored in her pocketbook, remained close to her consciousness. It had given her a feeling of security that she had not had in a long time. It had said merely that he and her niece, Jessica, would be at the train to meet her. Lucy pulled her watch by its black cord out of her belt. She was already four hours late! Her hand shook as she restored the small gold timepiece. She felt disgusted with herself at this evidence of her suspense. But had she not been more than twenty-four hours on the road? She had a right to feel shaky. She could not be far from exhaustion. And beneath her tension, she was so weary!
She looked toward the window and saw reflected in the streaked, tarnished pane, her pale face. But leaning to look in the strip of mirror between the windows, she discovered a touch of pink at her cheekbone and felt a flutter of gratitude to the Almighty for giving her more than she deserved. It must be the excitement. Abruptly, she straightened up, sighing severely.
But at that moment the train came to a final stop and the conductor announced, “All out for Charleston!” With the short veil on her black hat pulled down and her pocketbook clutched between her gloved hands, she moved in the loose queue along the aisle, through the vestibule and onto the steps. She first glimpsed them, a man in a white suit and a woman in a light colored dress gazing up at the doorway, without identifying them. Then recognition came.
Just beyond the footstool, she swept her small niece up in her arms, murmuring “Oh, Jessica, Jessica, Jessica!” And they clung to each other desperately for a tense moment. Then she released her to ask, “How is she, Jessica?” There were tears in their eyes.
Jessica, her face flushed, embarrassed as always by any demonstration of feeling, said with lowered gaze, “I think she is really better, Aunt Lucy!”
Lucy considered herself undemonstrative. And it was a natural, deeply-felt greeting, yet she could not have denied that, all the while, somewhere in the obscurity of her mind, she was conscious of Edward. Somehow, she was aware of his standing there, a little way behind them, his panama hat in his hand, in polite reticence, yet his liquid brown eyes on them in a graceful sympathy. And this awareness was charged with suspense and a fluttering apprehension for the approaching moment.
Then, there he was, coming toward her, saying, “Lucy! Lucy!” And before she realized it he had kissed her gently on the cheek, then stepped back still holding both her hands.
She scarcely knew what she had expected, but she had been too astonished at this to present a cheek for him. And she was too caught up in the moment to observe Jessica’s reaction. As she began to right herself, with Jessica on one side and Edward on the other, hurrying her along the cinder platform and through the waiting room and across the cobblestones to a hack, beside which stood a bowing colored driver—as she began to right herself, she felt the grace and youth of the old city descending upon her and offered up another prayer.
Edward lifted her and Jessica into the back seat and climbed into the front. While they waited for the driver to pick up her suitcase, Edward informed her that the next train to Summerville would not leave for another hour and forty-five minutes, and asked if she and Jessica would not come over to his flat on Rutledge Avenue to rest and have some tea? He was leaning solicitously over the back of his seat, and his deep, almost casual voice held the proper note of concern for her distress.
Lucy smiled wryly. “Do, Edward!” she exclaimed, out of shock. “And that would be across town!” She wet her lips to add lamely, “I can’t let you be so extravagant!”
Shaking his head, he assured her that it would take no more than ten or twelve minutes. She must be very tired. There was only the extravagance of his pleasure in taking her. . . .And he promised, “I’ll put you on the next train that goes to Summerville, without fail.”
Lucy would never have considered such a visit beforehand, but confronted with Edward’s warm invitation and getting no help from Jessica it did not now seem so callous toward her gravely ill sister, only ten miles away.
And at that point Jessica added, “Yes, Aunt Lucy, we couldn’t get there a minute sooner if we sat in the station. And I know you are worn out and need the rest.” She made a droll purse of her lips and smiled sweetly. “I think I would like a cup of tea, too!”
It was already sunset when Lucy finally reached her sister’s sick room, in the rambling, porch-surrounded house in Summerville. The hour, the veranda, and an overspreading oak tree, she knew, all contributed their shadows to the scene. Yet Lucy looked shocked by her elder sister’s appearance. This unfamiliar pallid visage against the pillow would have seemed the death mask of an old woman, but for the occasional twitching of a corner of her mouth. The iron-gray hair, the closed, deep-set eyes, in the gaunt face, seemed otherwise lifeless.
She was alone with her for Jessica had gone on to the kitchen to see about supper. Sister Prudence was ten years older than Lucy and temperamentally different, and they had never been close. But they had always borne each other a genuine respect and a peculiar sisterly affection. This, in a way, came of the family anxiety over Prudence’s mysterious powers.
The now mask-like face, less than two years ago—there, with her in Riverton, at the time of Mr. Hightower’s death—had been so alive, so lined with living, with its concern and care, to be sure, but irrevocably committed to life.
That was it, that was it, perhaps! Lucy thought of the afternoon at about this hour, soon after the funeral. Prudence and she were sitting on the side porch behind the trumpet vine, she vaguely talking.
Prudence interrupted her abruptly, asking, “Lucy, who is that coming in the yard?”
They were facing the side lawn that had a gate to the street. And Lucy stared in astonishment, saying, “Why, Prudence, I don’t see anybody!”
“Coming up the path? A little girl in white?” she went on.
Lucy’s heart had lunged, in alarm at this, for she was familiar with her sister’s visions. And at that very moment six-year-old Lucinda was in bed with a fever.
Prudence had grasped Lucy’s forearm, saying, “Don’t! Don’t be disturbed, Lucy!. . .It isn’t here, it’s back home!” Then she had shaken her head, adding, “I’m so sorry I mentioned it, but I just didn’t realize. . . So sorry!”
The child of an intimate friend and neighbor here, in Summerville, had died at the hour of the appearance, to be sure, but the thing was that Prudence had not known it was a phantom! She was always embarrassed by her apparitions. It was that she could not distinguish between objective actuality and her visions, so enthralled by life was she. It was her unselfconscious commitment missing from her face, Lucy decided, that she found so shocking now.
She had a sudden guilty sense of having come too late upon the scene. She thought of their almost frivolous talk over their tea at Edward’s flat with a twinge of conscience. . . .Conscience, before the sister of her bosom. . .and a vision of their father, in the family library, coming up off his knees after morning prayers, raising his voice in song, “A charge to keep I have, a God to glorify—” Lucy sighed.
On the bed, her sister stirred, turning her face toward her. Her lips moved, she mumbled, opening her eyes—She had called Lucy’s name!
“Oh, Prudy! Prudy!” Lucy cried and dropped to her knees by the head of the bed.
Supper that evening was a subdued meal, but not w
ithout pleasure for her. Her nephews were at table. Debonair Jack, now grave, was home for the summer from college and Julian, the courtly, who for two years now had been practicing medicine in Charleston, was down to attend his mother, and incidentally, to greet her, Lucy, having been unable to meet the train. She was very fond of both of them. And Julian gave them the encouraging report that his mother was showing unexpected improvement for this stage of recovery.
Lucy, recognized as the most capable nurse in the family, took over at the bedside. She quit the sick room at 11:30 that evening, because of her travel weariness. But the next morning, she was again at her sister’s side, where she remained throughout most of the week’s daylight hours.
On the second day, late in the afternoon, Edward came by for a cup of tea. He had said, in the hour at his flat, with his good sense of propriety, “I know, Lucy, that you have only one concern now. But I will be visiting in Summerville and when you are adjusted to the situation there, I do hope you will let me see you?”
Jessica insisted on having them served on the porch, while she, Jessica, took over in the sick room. They didn’t try to talk much, yet their tete a tete was not heavy for their silence. In the gathering twilight they watched, on a large bush by the steps, the milk-white four-o’clocks open, like eyes—like the eyes of an awakening but sympathetic Argus.
By Thursday, Julian was sure that the paralysis was going to be limited to one side of his mother’s face and she had recovered some use of one leg and one hand. That afternoon Edward took Lucy for a buggy ride, as far as the tea farm, and urged her to stay on for another week, which she, of course, had no intention of doing! (She learned, after these twenty years and now irrelevant, that he suffered a concussion of the brain, from the blow he got on the night of the earthquake from which he did not recover for more than a month!) On the same day, Lucy received her first letters from Riverton—from Mrs. Dalton, who was staying with her children, and from her elder daughter, Elinor.
She had been procrastinating but decided the next morning that she must arrange for her return, not later than Sunday. Before she could bring the matter up that afternoon at tea, however, Edward and Jessica and finally Jack were all urging, even demanding that she stay another week. Thus far, there had been no sentiment between Edward and herself. He had been simply her life-long friend, deeply sympathetic with her in distress. They had talked about her sister’s illness, about their own youth together, about his past academic career, and the married life behind her. He had not broached the subject of their future and there was a formal restraint in their manner. She was not, and she sensed that he was not, yet ready to bring their affair to final issue.
Now that her sister had improved so much and while she was in the neighborhood, it would be unforgiveable of her, he urged, not to take the time to see her old Charleston friends. But there was a great deal more plainly on his face, as he said these things. And he had, when she accompanied him to the steps on his leaving, said, almost desperately, his urbanity vanishing and his face flushing even into the thinning hair above his forehead, “We’ve got to give ourselves a chance, Lucy! A chance!”
When Lucy went to the beach on Sullivan’s Island, on Thursday afternoon, she wore a bathing dress! She had scarcely had one on since she had been married. Lizzie, Lizzie Murchison Worley, her girlhood friend, whom she was visiting, had dared her to wear it. Though Lizzie was always strangely persuasive with her, this alone, of course, would not have accounted for her doing it. The fact that Lizzie, with her generous proportions, did not hesitate to don such scanty attire, herself, had its effect. But what was more important was that when Lucy tried on the suit—a black one trimmed in gold braid with ample bloomers that Lizzie had outgrown—she saw in the mirror that she still had a figure—a figure, not too bad even beside Eunice’s (that of Lizzie’s oldest daughter, whose bathing slippers she was wearing, too), Yet even this could not have accounted for her doing such a thing.
As Lucy stood against the sand dunes, in the afternoon sun before the in-coming tide, still wearing a beach robe—the Worleys (Lizzie, Wentworth, and their four children) already at their beach games, and Edward in the surf—she had a sudden stage fright. What, in the name of conscience and high heaven! had come over her? Edward and Lizzie had carried her in such a whirl! Lizzie began it yesterday with a luncheon, two of her Morrow cousins and three of their old Meminger classmates at her house in Charleston. Then she and Edward had toured the town: the old museum (where he showed her some of the handiwork of her Morrow silversmith ancestors), visits to the old Circular Congregational Church, where a Methodist preacher-uncle of hers had filled the pulpit in supererogation and out of a scarcity of preachers just after the Civil War, and to old Trinity and Bethel Methodist churches, to the old Morrow house on Wentworth and into the side garden, of course! Then they watched the Citadel cadets parading on the green, and strolled on the Battery, and on to a fine seafood restaurant, and finally to a piano concert at the old Academy of Music. A Cook’s tour, but with its peculiar necromancy—its way through the Looking Glass! And now, the beach party.
She looked up to see Edward running up the beach toward her and she stiffened against his approach. As he kept on coming, growing larger, she noticed fleetingly that his legs were thinner than she remembered. Then his sun-tanned dripping face came giant-like upon her, as he shouted: “A regular spring tide running, Lucy! A high rider! Come on! Man the boards!”
She gasped and her eyes were suddenly wide and an indigo blue, a girl’s eyes. She threw the beach robe off her shoulders, letting it fall from the bathing dress. And, she stepped through the looking glass again. “Man the boards!” she cried and ran down the strand behind him. . . .
After supper at the Worley’s cottage that evening, she agreed to go with Edward down to the beach again to see the moon rise over the water. It was first dark when they arrived. The moon was not as yet in evidence, and the dim strand was deserted. The breeze was still balmy and smelled of salt-spines and seaweed and distance. Edward took Lucy’s hand and began to sing in a low baritone, “Just a song at twilight, when the lights are low.” Lucy joined in. . . .
But as she sang, she was distracted by vague misgivings. In the gray darkness, she began to feel middle-aged again, in reaction from her brief burst of youth of the afternoon, when she had forgotten herself in the surf. And Edward was middle-aged, too!
They were now walking along the water’s edge. And the dim slate surface of the sea had for her the look of the illustrations in her grandmother’s volume of Pilgrim’s Progress. Maybe, in a way, Edward wasn’t middle-aged? He was still holding onto an expectation of youth’s culminating experience, maybe!. . . And was she up to it? It was a grand and glowing thing for a woman to know that a man has loved her, has been devoted to her for twenty years! A man that she had loved—does love, Lucy corrected herself, frowning in the dark.
Edward said, “I don’t hear you singing!”
She squeezed his hand. “All right. Something a little gayer in the dark, please!” And, after a moment, she added, “What about, ‘Row, Row, Row’?” His hand was soft and strong. Suddenly, there was the wavering light of a distant boat, invisible in the darkness, to give point to their singing. She joined in with a will.
As they sang, seeing a hint of the moon’s approach in faint light beyond the round horizon, she felt suspense and a glowing came on inside her. But haven’t I had love? (She was aware somehow of Marcellus’ compact, white, blue-veined hand.) Haven’t I loved already? she asked, staring urgently at the skyline’s prophesy. Could there be something else? Her faith was weak.
They walked along in silence a little way, resting from the exertions of their last song, both held by the dim, moving, immensity of the sea. He said, “Lucy, your fingers are cold!”
And after a pause, she summoned the bravado to reply, “A cold hand’s said to be a good sign, isn’t it?”
For answer, he laughed and broke into song again, a very old sentimental one of
their childhood and she joined in with him. The edge of the moon was now above the water! They were far down a bare strand, far from the beach cottages. But this didn’t seem important, as, singing, they moved toward the moon.
Suddenly, it was all before them—a shining mirror of the sea, as round and immaculate as love itself. It caught the song in their throats, burnishing the ocean with a stairway of silver from the horizon directly, it seemed, to the sand spit on which they stood.
She said, in a discordant voice, “This is too much!”
He put a hand over her mouth gently. And an arm around her waist. “It’s time to forget everything else, Lucy!”
And, incredibly, as they stood there, staring into each other’s faces, in that light, she began to forget. . .forget. Yet before all mind left her, she stiffened against her floating on and said hoarsely, “But we can’t take this along with us, Edward!”
He shook her by the shoulders. “But we have, Lucy, we have!” he said, adding fiercely, “for thirty years we have!”
This emptied her mind of any further resistance to his faith.
The next morning, in Charleston, in the somber railroad waiting room, Lucy got her feet on the ground again. “I couldn’t remember this last night,” she said to Edward, beside her, smiling a little wryly as she sat erect, at the end of the dark rows of seats. “I—well, Edward, I don’t want to lay the blame on you. But I had a desperate sense of needing to remember when I couldn’t!”
This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4) Page 19
