Time Will Darken It (27 page)

After dinner, Martha King took her coffee cup and went into the living-room. Austin followed her and built a fire. The living-room fireplace smoked a little until the flue was warm, and as he stood holding the evening paper across the upper part of the opening, he said, “Did you call Nora or go over to see her today?”

“I meant to,” Martha said, “but before I got around to it, she came over here.” She was silent for such a long time that he finally looked at her over his shoulder.

“I’m worried about her,” Martha said.

“Why?”

“Well, she’s up here among strangers, and she’s young and impulsive, and with nobody to keep any kind of check on her——”

“The Beaches aren’t strangers,” Austin objected.

“They aren’t like her own family. They don’t have any control over her. I wouldn’t want anything to happen, for Aunt Ione’s sake. I feel that she trusts us to look after Nora as much as we can, even though Nora isn’t staying with us.”

The flue was now drawing properly and the newspaper no longer needed, but Austin continued to stand facing the brick fireplace, keeping the paper from being sucked up the chimney.

“I have a feeling that Nora is in trouble and that she needs——”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Oh, Austin, you make me so impatient sometimes. You know perfectly well that Nora is in love with you and that that’s why she didn’t go home when they did.”

“Did she say so?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how do you——”

“I saw it on her face when she walked in. She wanted to know if I thought she’d done right in staying, and we talked about that and about her family. And then we talked about you.”

Austin crumpled the newspaper into a ball and threw it into the fire.

“I offered to introduce her to some young people,” Martha said, as he sat down, “but it turned out that she likes being with older people. She finds them more stimulating. Besides, she doesn’t think of us—of you and me—as being old.”

“We’re not as young as we once were. That’s no reason to smile at her.”

“Very well,” Martha said. “I won’t smile at her. You have a way, Austin—you’ve never done it with me but I’ve seen it happen with other people——”

The creaking of the front stairs made her turn her head for a second. The Kings’ house, being old, was subject to unexplained noises, most of which came from the cellar and the pantry, and from the front stairs when there was no one on them. This creaking of the stairs, so like the sound of someone trying not to make a sound, often caused Abbey King’s heart to stop beating for several seconds. The footsteps did not, like those in ghost stories, continue down the stairs and stop just outside the library door. There was only one, and then a long agonized waiting for the next step, which never came.

“You have a way,” Martha went on, “of being very kind and gentle sometimes, and of seeming to offer more than you really do. If you act that way with Nora——”

“What am I supposed to do? Tell her that she’s got no business to be in love with me?”

Martha shook her head. “I didn’t say that. But if you tell her—or even allow her to guess that you know, it’ll be all over
with her. She’s got as much as she can manage now to keep from telling you or me or anybody that she thinks will listen sympathetically. The only thing that makes it possible for her to pretend that she isn’t in love with you is that she doesn’t know how you might take it. You might laugh at her or think she was just being very young and she can’t bear that. She has that much pride still. As long as she doesn’t know how you feel, she’ll go on trying to pull the wool over my eyes and waiting for a sign from you. At least I think she will. If she breaks down and starts to confide in you, you can refuse to listen.”

Austin sighed.

“If you can’t stop her any other way, you can always turn your back and walk off. I may be wrong but I don’t think Nora has ever been in love before. And for that reason——”

“I don’t see how she can be interested in a man of my age,” Austin said. “But whatever feeling she has for me now, she’ll get over, as I told her.”

“Do you mean to say she came right out and told you she was in love with you?”

“More or less.”

“When?”

“The day before they left,” Austin said, and then recounted briefly what had happened between Nora and him in his office. When he had finished, he sat staring at the cortège of nymphs that followed the car of Apollo, over the mantelpiece, and thinking how strange it was that Martha showed no signs of being jealous. So many times before when her jealousy had no grounds whatever, she had been very difficult and unreasonable. Apparently, even though she made scenes and accused him of things he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing, she didn’t really believe or mean what she said. Otherwise, how could she sit, considering the design of the coffee cup so calmly and dispassionately.

“She seemed very upset because she had to go back to
Mississippi with them, and so I told her that she could write to me—which there won’t be any occasion for her to do now. And also that I’d do anything I could to help her.”

Martha King picked up her coffee cup, and started for the dining-room. As she reached the doorway she turned and asked, “You’re not in love with her, are you?”

He saw that she was looking at him, waiting for his answer with no fear and no anger because she felt it necessary to ask such a question, but in a way that was more serious for both of them, if his answer were yes, than either fear or anger.

“No,” he said soberly, “I’m not in love with her.”

3

When Nora had finished drying the supper dishes for Lucy, she went upstairs to the room that she shared with Mr. Beach, and, standing in front of the dresser, she brushed and braided her hair. From the room at the end of the hall, she heard an old voice complaining.

In a way that was hardly noticeable to anyone but herself, Mrs. Beach was failing. She had difficulty remembering names. Her handwriting began to take on certain of the shaky characteristics of the handwriting on old envelopes in the attic. Her glasses had to be changed. She had to stop and rest on the stairs. All her life she had been busy pointing out the difference between black and white. Now, as a result of these new symptoms, she had to attend to the various shades of grey. This necessary task was instructive; it forced her to reconsider her marriage and rearrange her girlhood; but she was not grateful for it, any more than the woman who has occupied the prize room of a summer boarding-house until a declining income forces her to move into cramped quarters at
the head of the back stairs is grateful for the opportunity to acquaint herself with the kitchen odours and the angry voice of the cook. The complaining was bewildered, as if Mrs. Beach had not yet discovered the proper authorities to complain to, and realized that there was no point in laying her grievance before Alice.

Nora daubed cologne on her neck and throat, and after one last quick look at herself in the mirror, she opened a dresser drawer, took out a soft bundle wrapped in a hand-towel, turned out the light, and went down the hall to the head of the stairs.

Nora settled herself on the plush sofa in the parlour, where Lucy was waiting for her, and unpinned the towel, which contained a ball of grey wool and a pair of knitting needles. With Lucy’s help, Nora was learning to cast on. Listening for the sound of footsteps on the front porch, Nora sometimes lost the thread of Lucy’s conversation, but then she picked it up again, and nodding said, “I know just what you mean.” A mistake in her knitting was more serious. She had to unravel back to the point where her mind had wandered. There was no reason to think that Austin would come tonight, any more than any other night, and if he didn’t come, she still had every reason to be happy that she was here. In Mississippi, she could wait a hundred years, for all the good it would do her.

“You’re doing your hair a new way,” Nora observed.

“I changed the parting,” Lucy said.

“It’s very becoming the way you have it now. I’ve tried dozens of ways of doing my hair and this is the only way that doesn’t make me look like somebody in a sideshow. Mama has such beautiful hair—or at least it was beautiful before it turned grey. But I don’t know why we sit here talking about hair when there are so many more interesting things to talk about. What would you like to have, Lucy, if you could have anything in the world you asked for?”

“If I could have anything in the world? Why I’d like to——”

“Once you’ve declared your wish, you have to stand by it. You can’t change your mind and have something else instead. So before you——” Nora turned her head to listen.

If the Dresden shepherd with his crook and saffron knee-breeches and violets painted on his waistcoat, and the shepherdess with her petrified ribbons, tiny waist, and sweet expression are sometimes separated by the whole width of the mantelpiece, it may be that the shepherdess is an ardent, trusting, young girl, inexperienced in the ways of the world, the shepherd a married man, years older than she, with a china wife and child to think about and scruples that have survived the firing and glazing. Or perhaps the hand that put them there was more interested in ideas of order and balance than in images of philandering.

At quarter to nine Lucy yawned and said, “I rather expected Austin King to drop in.” She got up from her chair, picked up the souvenir book of the Columbian Exposition, which Nora had left out on the parlour table, and put it away on the bottom shelf of the glassed-in bookcase where it belonged. “Don’t feel you have to go to bed when we do, Nora. We’ve got into the habit of retiring with the chickens.”

“If you don’t mind,” Nora said, “I think I will wait up a little longer. I’m not a bit sleepy.”

Once or twice she got up and went into the dining-room, where she could see the lights in the Kings’ house, and at one point she wandered out into the hall and stood looking at the door chime which needed only a human hand to make it reverberate through the quiet house. At ten o’clock the lights went out downstairs in the house next door and the upstairs lights went on, shortly afterward.

When Nora went upstairs, no one said (as they would have if she had been at home):
Is that you, Nora?
From the room at the end of the hall came the sound of Mrs. Beach’s breathing,
as regular and mournful as a buoy bell. Nora tiptoed past the two open doors that offered absolute silence and turned the light on in her room.

When she was ready for bed, she turned the light off and raised the shade so that, lying in bed, she could still see the thin slice of light upstairs in the house next door. After a time the window was raised a few inches, but the light stayed on. Turning and tossing, lying now on her right side, now on her heart, Nora invited and prevented sleep. The light went out, the clock in the downstairs hall struck twelve, and then one, and finally two. After Nora had given up all hope of ever dropping off, she realized that she had been somewhere, that something had happened to her, that she had been dreaming.

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