Time Will Darken It (34 page)

“The house seems a little chilly,” Mrs. Danforth said when her husband came back from the Kings’. She was sitting in her accustomed chair and her hands were engaged in the creation of the same white six-pointed star.

“I’ll see what I can do about it,” he said.

The rumble of furnace grates being shaken went through the silent house. A shovel scraped in the coal bin. An iron door clanged shut, and there were heavy footsteps clumping up the basement stairs. Mrs. Danforth looked up as her husband came into the room. He went over to his chair, sat down, rubbed his eyes with his hand, sighed, and said nothing. After a time he said, “Well, I’ve been over the whole business with him. He listened to everything I had to say, but he’s still going ahead with his plans.”

“I thought he probably would,” Mrs. Danforth said.

“He feels responsible because he drew up the papers and because the arrangements were made in his house. If there’s anything in the world that boy doesn’t feel responsible for, I don’t know what it is. He has to borrow four thousand dollars. The bank won’t take the stock as collateral.”

“Is that so,” Mrs. Danforth said.

“I told him, ‘You’ll be lucky if you get out of this without having to go into bankruptcy.’ ”

“What did he say to that?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“Austin will never go bankrupt,” Mrs. Danforth said calmly.

“The others are willing to ride along without bringing suit, in the hopes of getting their money back some day. It’s Bud Ellis who’s making the trouble. He threatened to bring suit against Austin.”

“Why against Austin?”

“Because if they brought suit against Mr. Potter and won, the chances are they still couldn’t collect anything. So far as Austin is concerned, they haven’t got a leg to stand on. The case would be thrown out of court.”

“Austin must know that.”

“Certainly he knows it, and so does Bud Ellis. It isn’t right. ‘Let them stew in their own juice,’ I told him. ‘You’ve paid off your father’s debts. That’s enough.’ … He mustn’t make a pauper of himself for people who aren’t even related to him.”

“No,” Mrs. Danforth agreed.

“I told him all that and a lot more, but it was so much wasted breath.”

“Well, you’ve had your say,” Mrs. Danforth said, searching through the table drawer for a missing crochet hook. “Whatever happens now, it won’t be your fault.”

15

“How nice you look, Nora,” Alice Beach said.

To her surprise, Nora went back into her room and took off her ear-rings. The look of expectancy on her face, as she went down the hall and said good night to Mrs. Beach, could not be taken off. Martha King’s long-delayed invitation had included them all, but Mrs. Beach had eaten something that disagreed with her and was in bed, and one of the girls was obliged to stay home and take care of her. Which one should go, and which one should miss this pleasant change from their ordinary routine, had been decided long ago when Lucy took lessons from Geraldine Farrar’s singing teacher and Alice stayed below in the little reception hall, listening to the sound of her sister’s voice ascending and descending the scale that ended with a chord on the piano.

“Do you have your key?” Mrs. Beach asked, as Lucy got up from the chair beside the bed.

“In my purse,” Lucy said. “We’ll be home early.”

On her face also there was a look of expectancy, but what Lucy Beach expected from this evening was by no means clear. She could not have been hoping that the Kings, after knowing her for many years, would suddenly accept her as their intimate friend, ask her for dinner again and again, and feel somehow incomplete unless she was with them. Nevertheless,
the look was there, and it implied something of this kind of order.

“The cat came back,” Nora said, as Austin opened the door to them. Having waited so long for an invitation to dinner, she now produced this poor joke in self-defence, to show that the waiting was unimportant, was nothing. The gloved hand that was about to reach out and touch his coat-sleeve, she checked in time, but there was nothing she could do about her own rapturous happiness or the voice that cried
Oh why can’t he love me?

Nervously, knowing that the happiness could not last because he would not let it last, she looked around to see what changes had taken place in the house during the past three months.

“It’s nice to see you,” Austin said, as he put their coats away in the hall closet.

Though it was so important that Nora look at him, right then, before his expression changed, she could not. Once before he had seemed to want something of her, and then it turned out that he.… That was how it all began, the mistake above all other mistakes she must guard against making. But would he have said that he was glad to see her unless he meant to imply something more besides?

“Martha will be down in just a minute,” he said, and led them into the living-room.

“Mother and Alice were so sorry they couldn’t come,” Lucy said.

“I’m sorry, too,” Austin said, and then, as Lucy chose an uninviting chair, “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable by the fire?”

I know exactly how I feel when I’m with him, Nora said to herself, but I don’t know how to stop feeling it.

They sat stiffly, making conversation, until Martha King came down the stairs. She was wearing a silk shawl, but she showed quite plainly that she was carrying a child. Austin
talked to Lucy, and Nora was left with Martha King, whose one effort at making conversation with Nora that evening came to nothing. While Martha was talking to her, Nora’s glance wavered towards the other couple in the room, and then travelled to the sheet music on the piano. She wondered what it would be like sitting here alone with him in the evening, listening to his playing (so much more delicate than her mother’s thumping) and watching his sensitive hands moving over the keyboard. She realized suddenly that Martha had asked her a question and said, “Mama? Oh, she’s fine.”

“And your father?”

“He’s all right. They’re all fine and sent their love to you and Cousin Austin,” Nora said, and felt as if she had awakened abruptly in the midst of a dream. Though the dream remained in her memory, as sharp and clear as a winter day, she couldn’t get back into it. “I notice that Cousin Austin comes home much later than he used to last summer. I’m afraid we interfered with his work.”

“He’s been very busy with the fall term of court,” Martha said.

“Oh,” Nora said, and nodded, and then after a pause she said, “I’d like very much to hear him speak in court. Would it embarrass him, having someone there that he knows?”

Martha picked at the fringe of her shawl and Nora thought for a moment that she had not understood. “If you think it would embarrass him, I won’t say anything to him about it,” she said.

“He won’t let me go and hear him,” Martha said, “but that’s probably just an idea that he’s got fixed in his mind. You’ll have to ask him and see what he says. He might enjoy having you there.”

“You can come if you like,” Austin said, turning away from Lucy. “The case I’m trying now is not very interesting, the way a criminal trial would be.”

“I wouldn’t care about that,” Nora said, her face suffused with pleasure. “All I want is to see a case tried.”

“Dinner is served,” Rachel said.

After they were seated, Nora turned to Austin, prepared to be anything that he wanted her to be, because she loved him so much and because he was so wonderful and she was so happy just being with him. All she needed was some positive indication from him of the role he wanted her to play in his life, and until that came she felt shy with him (it was strange how someone could take up so much of your thoughts and still be as remote as a star) and painfully aware of the fact that she wanted him to love her (knowing that he couldn’t) and that it didn’t matter, so long as she was here and could love him.

Austin’s efforts at commonplace table conversation were not taken up by Nora and he had to fall back on the food. Martha tried to talk to Lucy but there were distractions. Rachel had forgotten to warm the plates, and she passed the mint sauce after they had finished eating their lamb.

Lucy Beach, dining out for the first time in years without her mother and sister, failed to notice the frequent silences. Her hand kept reaching for the cut-glass tumbler. She drank a great deal of water, and smoothed and folded the napkin lying across her lap. When, after an interruption, Martha King took up the conversation at some place other than the place where Lucy had left off, she was neither discouraged nor hurt. Her European table manners returned to her; she ate without transferring her fork from her left hand to her right. She complimented Martha on the lamb, the canned peas, the mashed potatoes. She smiled vivaciously (when there was really nothing to smile at) as if she were a beautiful worldly woman with a black velvet ribbon encircling her throat, her long white gloves drawn back and bunched at her wrists, offering herself first to the distinguished grey-haired man on her right, and then to the gallant and witty young man on her left.

When they had finished the main course and were ready for dessert, Martha rang the little china serving bell beside her place, and nothing happened. As if it were customary for
people to ring and have no one answer, they sat and waited. Eventually, Rachel put her head in at the pantry door and said, “The frogleg man.”

“At this time of night!” Austin exclaimed. He felt in his change pocket and drew out fifty cents for Rachel. Then turning to Nora, he explained, “Mr. Barrett. We never know when he’s coming, and if we don’t take them, he won’t come back any more. They’re bullfrogs, and I suspect that he catches them with a flashlight, which is against the law, but …” The frogleg man carried them safely through the rest of the meal, on his eccentric back. When they left the table and returned to the living-room, they discovered the fireplace had been smoking in their absence. Austin opened the windows and while they shivered with the cold and broke into coughing, Nora started telling about a strange odour that had developed in the plantation house at Howard’s Landing. “It wasn’t like any smell I’ve ever smelled before. It was dry and dusty, and a little like the smell of vinegar, and nobody could make out where it was coming from, until one day——” Austin left the room and Nora waited until he had come back with a big log in his hands before she went on and finished her story.

The log made the fire burn properly. The smoke went up the chimney instead of out into the room, and in time they were able to close the windows. The Kings and their two guests sat in a circle around the fire, and Austin, finding an appreciative audience, talked shop. Martha sat quietly braiding the fringes of her shawl. Austin’s stories about the involved litigations, lawsuit after lawsuit, of the picturesque Jouette family, she had heard before. From time to time she pressed a yawn back into her throat and, exerting all the will-power at her command, kept from glancing at the clock in the castle of St. Angelo. Lucy Beach contributed nothing to the conversation but her animated interest. Looking at her, one would have thought that a great many things were now being made clear to her that had not been clear before.
Actually, she was planning in her mind what she would say to Alice when she got home.
Austin got started talking about the law
, she would say,
and he talked very well. I wish you could have heard him.…

Lucy sat and listened as long as Austin included her in the conversation. When he forgot to do this, she turned to Martha King and began to talk about a problem that had arisen in connection with the kindergarten.

“We have an arrangement with Rachel’s son, Eugene, to come and start the fire in the stove so the rooms will be warm when the children get there. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the chairs had been rearranged and the alphabet plates were on a different shelf of the cupboard from where I’d put them the day before. I didn’t know whether to speak to Eugene or not. He’s a very nice boy, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But soon after that, a piece of green paper was missing, and some of the crayons were broken. Something had to be done, so I went downtown an hour earlier one morning, and guess who the culprit was?”