Time Will Darken It (41 page)

“Wait till I get there, Nora,” Alice Beach called out from her room, where she was getting dressed.

“We’re waiting,” Nora called back. “I haven’t told them a thing.”

Each evening when she came home from the office of Holby and King, she brought life and excitement not only into the Beaches’ gloomy house but also into the even gloomier sickroom. The atmosphere of illness had had to give way before it. The invalid’s eyes were bright with curiosity, and she had permitted Nora and Lucy, as a mark of special favour, to sit on her bed.

“Austin asked me if I’d come back this evening and help out. They’ve been searching all afternoon long for somebody’s will. Apparently Miss Ewing had her own system of filing and——”

“You are too, telling them,” Alice called out.

“No, I’m not,” Nora said. “Nobody can figure out what it is. The whole place is turned upside down, Mr. Holby is leaving for Chicago in the morning, and poor Cousin Austin——”

“Now,” Alice said coming into the room. From the colour in her cheeks, the eager expression on her face, she might have been expecting a gentleman caller.

“Miss Ewing’s mother used to sew for me,” Mrs. Beach said, forgetting that she had told Nora this vital fact several times already. “I had her for a week in the spring and a week in the fall. She was honest as the day is long, but slow—terribly slow.”

“Well,” Nora said, sitting back and with her arms crossed, looking from one interested face to another, “guess what.”

“Oh, don’t keep us in suspense any longer!” Alice cried.

“I won’t,” Nora said. “It was all in her imagination. The auditors have gone over the books with a fine-tooth comb, backwards and forwards, and every penny has been accounted for.”

“No!” Lucy exclaimed.

“Well, I’m glad, for her mother’s sake,” Mrs. Beach said.

“There isn’t a word of truth in Miss Ewing’s story,” Nora continued, “and I don’t know how many people she’s told it to. For instance, she hasn’t been near the doctor in two months.”

“It’s the strangest thing I ever heard of,” Alice said.

“Austin can’t convince her—he stopped in to see her this afternoon and I went with him. She still insists that she’s a thief and ought to be sent to the penitentiary. It’s very hard to know what to do with someone in that upset state. When you try to reason with them——”

“Was she in bed?” Lucy asked.

“No,” Nora said. “She was up and dressed. She has a cat, a big yellow tomcat and she didn’t want me to pick it up, but it came straight to me and sat in my lap as contented as you please, all the time we were there.”

“Austin shouldn’t have left everything in her hands,” Mrs. Beach said. “I’m surprised at him. I thought he was a better businessman than that.”

“But if you knew Miss Ewing——” Nora began.

“I had to watch her mother like a hawk,” Mrs. Beach said. “If I didn’t, every stitch had to be ripped out and done over
again. Part of the trouble was that she was going blind and didn’t know it. Miss Ewing must have wanted to steal the money. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be so on her mind.… When Lucy was six years old, she took a dollar bill from my pocket-book to buy lemonade,” Mrs. Beach went on, as if Lucy no longer had any feeling about this crisis in her moral life. “I knew all about it. The neighbour boy who had the lemonade stand stopped me as I was coming home and gave me the change, but I wanted her to tell me and so I waited …”

Lucy flushed, and when the painful story came to an end, Nora tactfully led the conversation around to Miss Ewing again.

“They’ve arranged for her care in a nursing home in Peoria until she’s better. The thing is to get her to go there.”

“Who’s footing the bill?” Mrs. Beach asked.

“Cousin Austin offered to. Mr. Holby refused to have any part of it. But something has to be done with her. She’s threatened to kill herself. Tonight as we left each other, Cousin Austin asked if I’d mind going to see her again tomorrow, alone. He thinks maybe she might listen to me where she wouldn’t listen to a man, and of course I told him I’d be glad to. I feel that anything I can do to help her, I ought to do, especially when they’ve all been so kind to me.”

9

The chairs in Dr. Seymour’s waiting room were straight-backed and hard, and time passed very slowly there. The dark varnished woodwork, the soiled lace doily on the centre table, the ancient
Saturday Evening Posts
, the brass lamp, and the leering, pink plaster billikin, all went with the atmosphere of antiseptic and worry, which remained intact,
in spite of the continual substitution of one worried person for another. The waiting room was full: Austin and Martha King, an old man with his left hand wrapped in a dirty bandage, a woman with a little girl, a red-cheeked man who was the picture of health but who could not have been what he appeared to be or he wouldn’t have been here. They sat, sometimes looking at each other, sometimes staring at the two pictures that hung on the wall. One of these pictures was of a doctor in a long frock coat walking down a moonlit road with his medicine bag in one hand and his umbrella in the other. The umbrella was held in such a way that the doctor cast ahead of him the shadow of the stork. In the other picture, the doctor was at the bedside of a sick child, whose anxious father and mother were standing in the shadows.

After a time, an elderly woman being treated for the cataract on her right eye was led out by a woman who might have been her daughter. While she was inside, the elderly woman had been told something that she had not expected to be told; something good or something bad that it would take her a while to get used to. In the meantime, she had to be guided. Someone had to manage her purse for her, and show her the way to the door.

The man with the dirty bandage went inside, and Austin looked at Martha. She surprised him now by a patience that he (who was always so patient) did not have. He fidgeted, he was restless, he turned nervously and looked out of the window. His usual sense that everything would be all right, that he was not threatened by the disasters that overtook other people, had deserted him. These consultations had taken place before and they were always the same, always reassuring. He ought to have been at his office at this moment, but Martha couldn’t have managed the street-car, and he didn’t want her to come in one of Jim Mathein’s dirty old hacks, so he had harnessed Prince Edward and driven her down here himself.

The little girl was suffering from some skin disease. She looked at Martha and then away, looked again, and finally buried her head in her mother’s lap. The two women exchanged glances and smiled. Gradually the little girl overcame her shyness to the point where she could come and lean against Martha’s knee.

“How old are you?” Martha asked.

“Five,” the mother said. “She doesn’t talk.”

“Oh,” Martha said. She leaned forward so that the child could finger her beads. It was all that Austin could do to keep from interfering, but Martha had no concern apparently about the skin disease and whether it might be contagious.

For a while nothing happened in the waiting room—nothing more interesting or dramatic than the sun’s coming out from behind a cloud, outlining the window on the linoleum floor and transferring the lace curtains there also, as if they were the kind of decalcomania pictures that schoolboys apply to their hands and forearms with spit. Of the illness that for forty years had passed through the waiting room, there was no trace. People with tuberculosis, people walking around with typhoid fever germs inside them, women with a lump on their breast that turned out to be malignant, men with an enlarged prostate, children who failed to gain weight. People with heart trouble, with elephantiasis, dropsy, boils, carbuncles, broken arms, gangrenous infections, measles, mumps, a deficiency of red corpuscles, a dislocated spine, meningitis, facial paralysis, palsy. Women with wrinkled stockings who would shortly be led away to the asylum, women who could not nurse their children, babies born to linger a short while, like a bud on a sickly plant. The little boy whose legs are in braces, the little girl who has breasts at three and begins to menstruate at four but is otherwise normal. The man whose breath is choked by asthma, whose heartbeat is irregular and tired. The woman with swollen joints. The woman whose husband has infected her with
gonorrhœa. All saving their worry and fright for the inner office, all capable of being cured or incurable. The illness of the soul inextricably bound up with the illness of the body. The ones who ought to recover and won’t, the ones whose condition is hopeless and yet who live on. Like the pattern of the lace curtain on the linoleum, they came and went, leaving no trace.

The man who had gone into the inner office with a dirty bandage wrapped around his hand came out with a clean one. The office girl said, “The doctor will see you now, Mrs. King,” and Martha raising herself out of her chair, walked across the room with the curious, unnatural gait of a woman far gone in pregnancy.

Austin waited until the door closed behind her, and then his eyes dropped to the floor, searching for the outline of the window frame, which was so pale now that it was hardly visible, and soon went out altogether. He sat, crossing and uncrossing his legs. After a time he took out his watch and looked at it. The examination in the inner office was lasting longer than usual. He looked out of the window once more at the English cart and didn’t at once realize that the office girl had spoken to him.

“I beg your pardon?” he said, turning away from the window.

“Dr. Seymour would like to speak to you,” the office girl said.

10

“I don’t know what you must think of me,” Mary Caroline Link said. “I’ve been meaning to come ever since you got here, only there’s so much to do. This is my last year in high school. I’m graduating in June. And what with the glee club
and the triangular debate and outside reading—Did you ever have to read
The Heart of Midlothian
? It’s a terribly sad book—I don’t know where the days go. But it isn’t right not to have time for your friends.”

Her conversational manner suitable to a woman of forty, Mary Caroline sat on the sofa in the Beaches’ parlour. She had come on a Sunday afternoon with an offering of Boston brown bread.