The Turmoil: A Novel

CHAPTER XXIX

As Bibbs came out of the New House, a Sunday trio was in course of passage upon the sidewalk: an ample young woman, placid of face; a black-clad, thin young man, whose expression was one of habitual anxiety, habitual wariness and habitual eagerness. He propelled a perambulator containing the third—and all three were newly cleaned, Sundayfied, and made fit to dine with the wife's relatives.

“How'd you like for me to be THAT young fella, mamma?” the husband whispered. “He's one of the sons, and there ain't but two left now.”

The wife stared curiously at Bibbs. “Well, I don't know,” she returned. “He looks to me like he had his own troubles.”

“I expect he has, like anybody else,” said the young husband, “but I guess we could stand a good deal if we had his money.”

“Well, maybe, if you keep on the way you been, baby'll be as well fixed as the Sheridans. You can't tell.” She glanced back at Bibbs, who had turned north. “He walks kind of slow and stooped over, like.”

“So much money in his pockets it makes him sag, I guess,” said the young husband, with bitter admiration.

Mary, happening to glance from a window, saw Bibbs coming, and she started, clasping her hands together in a sudden alarm. She met him at the door.

“Bibbs!” she cried. “What is the matter? I saw something was terribly wrong when I—You look—” She paused, and he came in, not lifting his eyes to hers. Always when he crossed that threshold he had come with his head up and his wistful gaze seeking hers. “Ah, poor boy!” she said, with a gesture of understanding and pity. “I know what it is!”

He followed her into the room where they always sat, and sank into a chair.

“You needn't tell me,” she said. “They've made you give up. Your father's won—you're going to do what he wants. You've given up.”

Still without looking at her, he inclined his head in affirmation.

She gave a little cry of compassion, and came and sat near him. “Bibbs,” she said. “I can be glad of one thing, though it's selfish. I can be glad you came straight to me. It's more to me than even if you'd come because you were happy.” She did not speak again for a little while; then she said: “Bibbs—dear—could you tell me about it? Do you want to?”

Still he did not look up, but in a voice, shaken and husky he asked her a question so grotesque that at first she thought she had misunderstood his words.

“Mary,” he said, “could you marry me?”

“What did you say, Bibbs?” she asked, quietly.

His tone and attitude did not change. “Will you marry me?”

Both of her hands leaped to her cheeks—she grew red and then white. She rose slowly and moved backward from him, staring at him, at first incredulously, then with an intense perplexity more and more luminous in her wide eyes; it was like a spoken question. The room filled with strangeness in the long silence—the two were so strange to each other. At last she said:

“What made you say that?”

He did not answer.

“Bibbs, look at me!” Her voice was loud and clear. “What made you say that? Look at me!”

He could not look at her, and he could not speak.

“What was it that made you?” she said. “I want you to tell me.”

She went closer to him, her eyes ever brighter and wider with that intensity of wonder. “You've given up—to your father,” she said, slowly, “and then you came to ask me—” She broke off. “Bibbs, do you want me to marry you?”

“Yes,” he said, just audibly.

“No!” she cried. “You do not. Then what made you ask me? What is it that's happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Wait,” she said. “Let me think. It's something that happened since our walk this morning—yes, since you left me at noon. Something happened that—” She stopped abruptly, with a tremulous murmur of amazement and dawning comprehension. She remembered that Sibyl had gone to the New House.

Bibbs swallowed painfully and contrived to say, “I do—I do want you to—marry me, if—if—you could.”

She looked at him, and slowly shook her head. “Bibbs, do you—” Her voice was as unsteady as his—little more than a whisper. “Do you think I'm—in love with you?”

“No,” he said.

Somewhere in the still air of the room there was a whispered word; it did not seem to come from Mary's parted lips, but he was aware of it. “Why?”

“I've had nothing but dreams,” Bibbs said, desolately, “but they weren't like that. Sibyl said no girl could care about me.” He smiled faintly, though still he did not look at Mary. “And when I first came home Edith told me Sibyl was so anxious to marry that she'd have married ME. She meant it to express Sibyl's extremity, you see. But I hardly needed either of them to tell me. I hadn't thought of myself as—well, not as particularly captivating!”

Oddly enough, Mary's pallor changed to an angry flush. “Those two!” she exclaimed, sharply; and then, with thoroughgoing contempt: “Lamhorn! That's like them!” She turned away, went to the bare little black mantel, and stood leaning upon it. Presently she asked: “WHEN did Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan say that 'no girl' could care about you?”

“To-day.”

Mary drew a deep breath. “I think I'm beginning to understand—a little.” She bit her lip; there was anger in good truth in her eyes and in her voice. “Answer me once more,” she said. “Bibbs, do you know now why I stopped wearing my furs?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so! Your sister-in-law told you, didn't she?”

“I—I heard her say—”

“I think I know what happened, now.” Mary's breath came fast and her voice shook, but she spoke rapidly. “You 'heard her say' more than that. You 'heard her say' that we were bitterly poor, and on that account I tried first to marry your brother—and then—” But now she faltered, and it was only after a convulsive effort that she was able to go on. “And then—that I tried to marry—you! You 'heard her say' that—and you believe that I don't care for you and that 'no girl' could care for you—but you think I am in such an 'extremity,' as Sibyl was—that you— And so, not wanting me, and believing that I could not want you—except for my 'extremity'—you took your father's offer and then came to ask me—to marry you! What had I shown you of myself that could make you—”

Suddenly she sank down, kneeling, with her face buried in her arms upon the lap of a chair, tears overwhelming her.

“Mary, Mary!” he cried, helplessly. “Oh NO—you—you don't understand.”

“I do, though!” she sobbed. “I do!”

He came and stood beside her. “You kill me!” he said. “I can't make it plain. From the first of your loveliness to me, I was all self. It was always you that gave and I that took. I was the dependent—I did nothing but lean on you. We always talked of me, not of you. It was all about my idiotic distresses and troubles. I thought of you as a kind of wonderful being that had no mortal or human suffering except by sympathy. You seemed to lean down—out of a rosy cloud—to be kind to me. I never dreamed I could do anything for YOU! I never dreamed you could need anything to be done for you by anybody. And to-day I heard that—that you—”

“You heard that I needed to marry—some one—anybody—with money,” she sobbed. “And you thought we were so—so desperate—you believed that I had—”

“No!” he said, quickly. “I didn't believe you'd done one kind thing for me—for that. No, no, no! I knew you'd NEVER thought of me except generously—to give. I said I couldn't make it plain!” he cried, despairingly.

“Wait!” She lifted her head and extended her hands to him unconsciously, like a child. “Help me up, Bibbs.” Then, when she was once more upon her feet, she wiped her eyes and smiled upon him ruefully and faintly, but reassuringly, as if to tell him, in that way, that she knew he had not meant to hurt her. And that smile of hers, so lamentable, but so faithfully friendly, misted his own eyes, for his shamefacedness lowered them no more.

“Let me tell you what you want to tell me,” she said. “You can't, because you can't put it into words—they are too humiliating for me and you're too gentle to say them. Tell me, though, isn't it true? You didn't believe that I'd tried to make you fall in love with me—”

“Never! Never for an instant!”

“You didn't believe I'd tried to make you want to marry me—”

“No, no, no!”

“I believe it, Bibbs. You thought that I was fond of you; you knew I cared for you—but you didn't think I might be—in love with you. But you thought that I might marry you without being in love with you because you did believe I had tried to marry your brother, and—”

“Mary, I only knew—for the first time—that you—that you were—”

“Were desperately poor,” she said. “You can't even say that! Bibbs, it was true: I did try to make Jim want to marry me. I did!” And she sank down into the chair, weeping bitterly again. Bibbs was agonized.

“Mary,” he groaned, “I didn't know you COULD cry!”

“Listen,” she said. “Listen till I get through—I want you to understand. We were poor, and we weren't fitted to be. We never had been, and we didn't know what to do. We'd been almost rich; there was plenty, but my father wanted to take advantage of the growth of the town; he wanted to be richer, but instead—well, just about the time your father finished building next door we found we hadn't anything. People say that, sometimes, meaning that they haven't anything in comparison with other people of their own kind, but we really hadn't anything—we hadn't anything at all, Bibbs! And we couldn't DO anything. You might wonder why I didn't 'try to be a stenographer'—and I wonder myself why, when a family loses its money, people always say the daughters 'ought to go and be stenographers.' It's curious!—as if a wave of the hand made you into a stenographer. No, I'd been raised to be either married comfortably or a well-to-do old maid, if I chose not to marry. The poverty came on slowly, Bibbs, but at last it was all there—and I didn't know how to be a stenographer. I didn't know how to be anything except a well-to-do old maid or somebody's wife—and I couldn't be a well-to-do old maid. Then, Bibbs, I did what I'd been raised to know how to do. I went out to be fascinating and be married. I did it openly, at least, and with a kind of decent honesty. I told your brother I had meant to fascinate him and that I was not in love with him, but I let him think that perhaps I meant to marry him. I think I did mean to marry him. I had never cared for anybody, and I thought it might be there really WASN'T anything more than a kind of excited fondness. I can't be sure, but I think that though I did mean to marry him I never should have done it, because that sort of a marriage is—it's sacrilege—something would have stopped me. Something did stop me; it was your sister-in-law, Sibyl. She meant no harm—but she was horrible, and she put what I was doing into such horrible words—and they were the truth—oh! I SAW myself! She was proposing a miserable compact with me—and I couldn't breathe the air of the same room with her, though I'd so cheapened myself she had a right to assume that I WOULD. But I couldn't! I left her, and I wrote to your brother—just a quick scrawl. I told him just what I'd done; I asked his pardon, and I said I would not marry him. I posted the letter, but he never got it. That was the afternoon he was killed. That's all, Bibbs. Now you know what I did—and you know—ME!” She pressed her clenched hands tightly against her eyes, leaning far forward, her head bowed before him.

Bibbs had forgotten himself long ago; his heart broke for her. “Couldn't you—Isn't there—Won't you—” he stammered. “Mary, I'm going with father. Isn't there some way you could use the money without—without—”

She gave a choked little laugh.

“You gave me something to live for,” he said. “You kept me alive, I think—and I've hurt you like this!”

“Not you—oh no!”

“You could forgive me, Mary?”

“Oh, a thousand times!” Her right hand went out in a faltering gesture, and just touched his own for an instant. “But there's nothing to forgive.”

“And you can't—you can't—”

“Can't what, Bibbs?”

“You couldn't—”

“Marry you?” she said for him.

“Yes.”

“No, no, no!” She sprang up, facing him, and, without knowing what she did, she set her hands upon his breast, pushing him back from her a little. “I can't, I can't! Don't you SEE?”

“Mary—”

“No, no! And you must go now, Bibbs; I can't bear any more—please—”

“MARY—”

“Never, never, never!” she cried, in a passion of tears. “You mustn't come any more. I can't see you, dear! Never, never, never!”

Somehow, in helpless, stumbling obedience to her beseeching gesture, he got himself to the door and out of the house.