Conflict (Prouty)/Book 4/Chapter 9

by Olive Higgins Prouty

Chapter IX

I

Roger was standing up when she returned, his back to the burning logs, watching the doorway through which she must enter, his eyes still shining with that strange soft brilliance, his color still deep and glowing.

She crossed the room to him quickly.

'It was a call from Terry,' she said.

'From Terry?'

'There has been an accident.'

The brilliance of his eyes changed instantly to piercing sharpness. 'An accident to whom?'

'To Felix,' Cicely replied; then briefly, baldly, 'He was killed by a railroad train late yesterday afternoon,' she announced.

'Killed? Where? How?'

'Sit down and I'll tell you.'

'No thanks. I'll stand. Was Sheilah with him? Was Sheilah hurt?'

Cicely smiled and gave a tiny shrug. 'No. Sheilah wasn't hurt. Sheilah's all right, Roger. Sheilah herself spoke to me on the telephone.'

'Tell me what happened.'

'I will.'

'Well?'

How impatient he was!

'It was a very unnecessary death.'

'Yes? How?'

'They were playing on the railroad tracks—Felix and Phillip, and a school friend of Phillip's, placing pennies and bits of wire on the steel rail, it seems, for the train to run over and crush into queer shapes, and Felix, the boys report, had used his jackknife to twist a piece of wire, or cut it off, I don't know which, and evidently laid the knife down on the steel rail and forgot it, till it was too late.'

'You mean he tried to get it when it was too late?'

'Exactly. It was an old jackknife he had carried for years, and he was very fond of it, Sheilah says.'

'I understand. He was a queer chap. Always fond of all his tools.'

'He didn't notice the knife on the rails till the train was approaching. He pointed it out to the two boys, and called back to them as he ran that he was going to get it. And he almost did get it. They found the knife in his hand afterward. But he tripped and fell. The headlights on the approaching engine must have dazed him, Sheilah thinks. It was dark, late afternoon, mercifully so dark, the little boys saw none of the details. He was killed instantly, they say.' Cicely paused and leaning took a cigarette from the low table near by.

'A shocking death,' said Roger. 'Terrible for Sheilah. How is she taking it?'

'Perfectly calmly.'

'Shall you go to her?'

'Not immediately, I think.' Then, after another pause in which Cicely lit her cigarette, 'Shall you, Roger?' she inquired.

'Why, I don't know. I hadn't thought. It's all happened so suddenly—so unexpectedly. Do you think she'd want me to? Do you think I should? Not immediately, of course. But a little later. Do you think——' he stopped, the full realization of what had happened, and its significance to Sheilah and to him, and perhaps to Cicely, too—breaking over him in a flood. Sheilah in trouble. Sheilah free. But was he free now? He looked sharply at Cicely. How much had he said before she left the room? How much had she suspected?

'Look at me, Cicely.'

She obeyed, calmly, impersonally, through a veil of smoke.

'Do you think I ought to go to Sheilah?'

'There is no reason why you ought not as far as I know,' she replied evenly.

'Do you want me to go?' he persisted, to make sure that he was released, if indeed she had ever imagined him to be bound.

'Of course I do,' lightly she lied, 'if it will make you happy, and Sheilah happy, too. And,' she added with grim honesty in the same breath with her lie, 'T think it will.'

'Do you really?' eagerly, like a boy, Roger took her up. No, she hadn't suspected, nor expected, either. 'I want very much to make Sheilah happy,' he added.

'I know you do. I understand perfectly, Roger.'

'Oh, you're such a good friend of mine, Cicely,' he exclaimed.

Friend? Friend indeed!

Roger began pacing up and down the little room, plying Cicely with countless questions as to the details of Felix's death, to most of which she was forced to reply with forbearing patience. 'I don't know. I didn't ask. Sheilah didn't say.'

He left her half an hour later at her suggestion. He had planned to stay till the next afternoon, returning to Boston as was his custom, on Sunday evening.

'But this news has rather upset you, it seems to me,' Cicely had remarked as she watched him walking up and down the little book-lined cell, in which, as her guest, he was a prisoner till she set him free. 'Most men like to get out from underneath a roof when they're upset,—tramp, or something of the sort. Why don't you? Or, if you prefer, go back to Boston to-night, Roger, and come up another time.'

'You're sure you wouldn't mind?'

How he grasped at it!

'Of course not.'

'And you'll ask me another time?'

'Certainly,' she laughed. 'Go up and pack your things. I'll have a taxi called for you, and you can catch the nine-thirty express, if you hurry.'

Thus it is a thoroughbred accepts defeat.

II

At the same moment that Cicely closed the door of her room that night with fierce determination to shut out from her consciousness the thought of Roger now definitely denied her, Sheilah, behind another closed door, miles away, also fought the thought of him. All the long tense hours since Phillip had come running home with his shocking announcement, underneath her armour of composure, again and again the thought of Roger pricked Sheilah. When would he hear? What would he do when he did hear? Would he break their long silence? Or had her freedom come too late? Oh, uninvited, unwanted, and unworthy thoughts at such a time! Why did they persist? She wanted to think only of Felix, and to think of him with loyalty, with grief, with pity. Poor Felix—poor, kind, bungling, ineffectual Felix. Dead—gone. And so unnecessarily. So ignominiously. Swept into the unknown by a mistake—a blunder. It had not crossed Sheilah's mind that there was any motive in his death. Her lifelong unawareness of his last gift to her was Felix's reward. Behind still another closed door, that night, lay Felix—silent, inarticulate, as he had been all his life, but crowned with success at last.

Sheilah had not called up Cicely to tell her of Felix's death until the end of the second day. Laetitia and Roddie, hastily summoned home from college and school, had already gone upstairs to their rooms. After Sheilah had said good-bye to Cicely in her composed voice (she had been like that all day—numb, calm, controlled without effort), she went into the kitchen. It was dark save for two checkered squares of moonlight on the floor. Softly she closed the door, and crossing the room, sat down at the kitchen table, burying her head in her arms, folded on the red cloth. Cicely had said, 'I will tell Roger. He is here with me now.' With her now? It was all right, of course. All right. As it should be. As she had chosen. But oh—oh—she was so tired—suddenly so very tired. If she could only cry!

Sheilah was still sitting at the kitchen table in the moonlight, when she heard dimly, through the closed door, the telephone, one short ring and two long ones. Her number—and a moment after, the clock on the mantel wheezingly struck the hour. Ten o'clock. Who would be calling her so late? She rose wearily, and went out into the hall.

III

Roger did not catch the nine-thirty express from Wallbridge after all. It rumbled into the station and out again, while he was shut up in a telephone-booth, trying to establish communication with Terry, Vermont. The telephone-booth was cheap and battered, lined with pressed tin, and smelling of stale tobacco. He felt the same old distaste that he used to, in receiving Sheilah's voice in such unlovely surroundings, but he was in too much of a hurry to seek a more fitting place. He also felt the same old eagerness and excitement, as he impatiently waited for his call to be completed, increased to-night, by uncertainty. Would she wish him to call her? Her loyalty to Felix would be burning just now with abnormal intensity, he felt sure. Would she under stand he respected that loyalty, and wanted only to share with her the burden of the shock of sudden death? Or had renouncement dulled her old understanding, and time cured her of her old need of him?

Anxiously he waited for her voice to find its way over the miles and miles of cable, stretched between him and her, and when finally it did, it was so rich and vibrant, it was as if she herself had come the long difficult way through the dark to him.

'Yes, this is she. This is Mrs. Nawn,' he heard her announce, calmly.

He closed his eyes tightly, pressing the receiver close to his ear.

'Sheilah.'

There was a short pause, and then, 'Oh, is it you?'

'Yes. It is I. I've just heard. I'm in a telephone-booth. The first one I could reach. I had to call you.'

'Oh, Roger——' and suddenly the voice that had travelled so far stumbled, like a tired child at the end of a long race, falling into arms held out to it.

There was another pause, in which the arms seemed to gather the child closer. There were, in fact, many pauses.

'When may I come?' finally said Roger.

'Do you still want to?'

'There's nothing in the world I want to do so much!'

'Later, then. In the spring, please.'

'All right, later. In the spring,' he replied. 'I understand. And until then, until the spring, every day and every hour, I will——' he didn't finish, but the quivering cable somehow conveyed his meaning to Sheilah.

'I know. I know,' she said.

 

The end