THAT afternoon Lucy was walking alone in the grounds. She had been sewing ever since dinner and now at four o’clock she had come out for a breath of fresh air. Jenny Morris was with her. The child was in one of her enquiring moods and had asked numerous questions, about where the sap went in winter and what became of the old holly leaves when the new ones came out in the spring. Lucy was glad when a little negro peeping around the corner of the house had enticed Jenny off to play.
Lucy unlatched the gate of the little rose garden and stepped in. She went up and down the walks, stopping now and then before some rosebush or flowering shrub, but she could not have told what flower it was she was eyeing so intently. She was thinking of the night when she had ridden home from Music Hall with George Rowan. She could remember the distinct feeling of aversion that she had had when George laid his hand on her saddle and she knew that in a second he would be leaning over to kiss her. But she could not understand why she had felt as she did. She knew that if George were here today she would act very differently. And yet, she told herself, feeling as she felt that night she could not have acted differently. And she would start over the same cycle, beginning with the time they had ridden down the hill and going on to the moment when George had let his voice ring out wildly in the night as if to say it was all finished.
She left the garden and walked toward the house. The east portico as always at this season of the year was hung thick with vines. The white columns could barely be discerned under them. Growing close to it, so close that its branches brushed the portico steps, was an enormous hemlock tree. Lucy had played with her dolls in the little cave made by the sweeping branches and this tree, this whole section of the grounds, had always had a special charm for her. A few months ago when she had been away at school she had thought that if she could see the hemlock tree and the white columns under their greenery, she would be perfectly happy. Soon after arriving home she had darted away from the others and had come around to this side of the house merely for the pleasure of traversing the shady path. She stopped now and looked up at the portico. It was just as usual, the vines as green, the shade of the hemlock boughs as thick and yet the whole scene was in some mysterious way altered.
At that moment Cally, tired from bending over the cutting table, came to the ballroom window and looked out. She habitually dressed plainly but today she looked even less glamorous than usual, in a dress of gray poplin with her hair pushed back from her strong, plain face. Lucy, seeing her aunt looking down on her, smiled and made a gesture signifying she would be upstairs in a minute, then looked away. There had come to her one of those moments of discernment in which the whole tenor, the inner meaning of another person’s life seems revealed. Lucy had been familiar with her aunt’s history ever since she could remember. She had heard older people sighing over Cally’s “ruined life” but she had never until this moment conceived what it would be like to have one’s life “ruined.” Up to now whatever spiritual necessity she had known was that of being true to herself. “That’s not like me,” she would think sometimes when she had been unkind to Jenny Morris or had thwarted one of the older girls in some petty way. But now she saw in a flash that life was not so simple as she had thought it. Aunt Cally, everybody agreed, had done all she could to make her marriage a success. She had stayed with Charles Hobart as long as she could but he was dissolute as well as weak, forever after other women, dangerous when drinking. She had had no choice finally but to leave him. And yet, Lucy thought, it must have been very bitter to her to have to come home to her father’s house, a divorced woman with a child, to live on year after year the futile life that a woman with no household of her own must live. Lucy loved her aunt but she had always thought of her as curiously set apart by her misfortunes. She had never even conceived of such things happening to herself, but in a flash she realized what a precarious business life—and particularly love—is and how impalpable the forces which make for success or disaster. And it now seemed to her as improbable that she could be happy in this life as it had once seemed certain.
She stood still on the path, staring at the white portico and green vines until they were completely obscured by the tears that had sprung to her eyes. Finally she turned around and walked up and down the path. Blinded by tears she did not see a negro boy who approached until he was at her side. She looked up and shaking the tears angrily from her face, said in a cold, strained voice: “Well, Antony, what is it?”
The boy replied that he had come from camp and had a letter for one of the young ladies.
“They’re upstairs in the ballroom,” Lucy said in the same cold tone.
She watched the boy mount the steps and cross the porch. The idea that had just come to her affected her so powerfully that she could feel her vitals turning over within her and for a moment had to stand perfectly still. Finally she closed her mouth, looked around her with the furtive expression a person has when he fears some alien eye has seen him making a spectacle of himself and started up the steps. She was as violently happy now as she had been miserable a moment ago. She was convinced that the note the boy brought was for her, from George, and it seemed to her that she could hardly wait to get it in her hands.
In the sewing room everything was as she had left it a half-hour before. Cally was out of the room for a few minutes and the negro women had taken advantage of her absence to lay down their shears and stretch themselves. Barbara Clayton and Octavia had put their sewing down too and had gone over to stand beside a window. They looked at Lucy curiously a moment when she came in, then continued their conversation.
Their quick, glancing scrutiny made Lucy conscious of the tears on her face but she was too proud to wipe them off publicly. Sitting down in a low chair she drew her sewing toward her and with unsteady hands tried to thread a needle. The negro women, yawning, bent over their work again. At the window the girls continued their conversation. Lucy managed to get the thread through the eye of the needle and bending forward in a stiff, unnatural posture took the careful stitches she had been trained as a child to take. But her hand, indeed her whole body, shook so that in a minute she had to put the work down.
“What did the boy bring?” she asked finally in a harsh, unnatural voice.
Barbara laughed. “A note from Bob.”
She came over to the table and began rolling up some scraps for the rag bag. As she bent over the black ribbon that she usually wore thrust down into the bosom of her dress swung outward. Lucy could see the little gold locket suspended at the end of the ribbon. Bob Summerfield’s picture was in it, of course. Everybody knew that she and Bob had been engaged since last summer.
Octavia had come over to the table and was helping Barbara roll up the scraps. “I wonder how that boy knew he’d find you here. We forgot to ask. . . .” She broke off, laughing constrainedly as she saw the expression on Lucy’s face.
Lucy hardly heard what the girls were saying. She had suddenly realized what was wrong with the room. Love. Love was not there. She was upstairs, reading a letter. . . .
Head bent forward she took two more trembling stitches, then got up and quit the room. Out in the hall she paused a second, then walked resolutely up the stairs and into the company wing where the young girls all slept these days. Love’s door was closed. There was no sound from inside. Lucy knocked and then without waiting for an answer went in.
Love was lying face down on the bed. She sat up when Lucy came in, smiling tremulously. “Oh, Lucy,” she cried, and before Lucy could avoid her she had thrown her arms around her cousin’s neck.
Lucy sat rigid, staring at a vase of flowers on a table. After a little she unloosed Love’s arms from around her neck and made her sit down.
“Was your letter from George?” she asked in a low voice.
Love was too absorbed in her own emotions to notice that anything was wrong with her cousin. Gazing at her hands clasped in her lap or sometimes raising her head to look dreamily out of the window she recounted the circumstances of her engagement to George: “Thursday night . . . you know just before he and Rives went off on that hunt. He said he wouldn’t go unless I promised him and so I did. . . . And then he didn’t want to go but I made him . . . I didn’t want everybody to know then. . . . I don’t know why. . . .”
Lucy, listening, calculated swiftly. Wednesday, no, Thursday had been the night after the dance at Music Hall. He had waited two days after she refused him before paying court to another girl And she, fool, had been convinced that he was still in love with her all that time. Her cheeks burned. She clenched her hands hidden in the folds of her dress.
Love was looking down at her letter. “He wrote this just before they left Hopkinsville. He doesn’t know where they go from there. He. . . .” She seemed to be trying to extract the less intimate portions of the letter for her companion’s benefit.
Lucy got up. “I told Aunt Cally I’d be back in a minute,” she said and walked out of the room, closing the door quietly behind her.
In the hall outside she leaned against the wall, her forehead pressed against the cold plaster, her hands unclenching at her sides. In a few minutes she recovered herself and walked on. From the ballroom she could hear the sound of the girls’ voices. She had turned her steps toward that room but when she was almost there she stopped and went swiftly down the stairs and out into the back yard. Her grandmother was there, superintending the activities of three or four negro women who were turning over peaches that had been laid out on long plank tables to dry. Lucy took her place among these women and for an hour she worked turning over the peaches and spreading out those that were still being brought up in sacks. At six o’clock Mrs. Allard, who had been back to the house several times during the afternoon, came out and called to her that it was almost time for supper. Lucy, who was sitting in a low chair peeling peaches, looked up. When Mrs. Allard saw the strained, blank face upturned to hers she thought Lucy was ill and started forward, but Lucy had got up and was walking toward the house and now as she saw her grandmother coming toward her she called out something about the peaches. Mrs. Allard thought that the expression she had seen on the girl’s face must have been some trick of the light falling through the peach tree boughs. Lucy, meanwhile, went upstairs and made herself ready for supper. After supper she sat on the gallery with the others until Mr. Allard, yawning, said it was time to go to bed. Lucy took up her candle and mounted the stairs with the others. Alone in her own room she set the candle down and began mechanically moving about in the process of getting ready for the night. After a little she stopped and sat down at the foot of the bed. She remained there a long time, staring before her in the dim light. Suddenly her mouth worked piteously, childishly and she pitched forward on the bed and lay there for a long time.