CHAPTER XXIX
WANT me to hook you, or anything?" five minutes later the voice of Aunt Emma asked from outside the bathroom door, where Reba stood looking down at the first dress her hands had fallen upon in the closet—a sprigged muslin, white and crisp from recent laundering. How well she remembered it! How calm and steady her heart-beats had been when she used to wear this dress, on warm Sunday afternoons four or five summers ago! How clean, how chaste she had been then!
"Yes, please," she replied; and slipping the dress over her head, and her arms into the long tight sleeves, she called, "Come in."
She stood passive and silent, while the older woman pulled and tugged at her back.
"My goodness!" Aunt Emma exclaimed at last. "There ain't a bit of use trying to get this together back here. You don't seem to belong to this dress any more, Reba. I had no idea you'd broadened out so."
Reba glanced at her reflection in the oval-tipped, black-walnut mirror over the marble washstand.
"You're right, I guess. I don't belong to this dress any more. Let me get back into the dirty one where I do belong," she said dispassionately.
Everything Reba said that evening was spoken in the same unemotional voice. "Just as if she'd turned into wood, or pulp, or something," Emma said to Syringa, in discussing it later.
Seated downstairs at the dining-room table, with all three of the sisters hovering about her (her mother had been wheeled into the dining-room when Reba was upstairs) and Syringa appearing now and then from the kitchen, Reba was as composed and tranquil as if it were the usual thing to drop in on her family like this, without bag or baggage, unexpected, and unannounced.
David slunk into the room before Reba had been seated at the table long, on the pretext of asking her for her trunk-check.
"I haven't any check," she replied, coolly. "I haven't brought anything with me. But I've written back to have my things sent, so they'll be here in a day or two."
"Do you mean to tell us you've gone and actually given up your place down there with the Red Cross people?" her dazed father asked for himself.
"I mean to tell you that I'm going to give it up. I shall send in my resignation within a week."
"But what are you planning to do around here?" after a pause he inquired wonderingly.
"I don't know—just stay here, I suppose."
It was Aunt Augusta's sharp eyes that first spied the wide gold band on Reba's finger. At least it was Aunt Augusta who first spoke of it. Reba had not removed her wedding-ring. There was to be no more deceit about her marriage. In the back seat of the little church, in the dark of her bowed head and closed eyes, while the choir had been singing, Reba had decided that to acknowledge Nathan would be the very least she could do in way of expiation.
"Isn't that something new?" Aunt Augusta inquired, pointing with a long finger at Reba's left hand reaching for the sugar-bowl.
"No, not very. I've had it over three years. It's my wedding-ring."
"Your what, did you say?"
"My wedding-ring. I guess I never mentioned to you that I was married."
Aunt Emma and Cousin Syringa sat down abruptly at that.
"Where's your husband, then?" demanded the still-erect Augusta.
Reba took a sip of tea before she answered. It was pretty hot. She poured a little milk into it.
"I don't know exactly."
Queer how detached her steady voice was from herself. Queer she could see and hear so clearly, manage so deftly knife and fork and spoon. It was like being two people—one moving, speaking, answering questions, the other looking on helpless, bleeding and dumb.
"Married? And don't know where your husband is?" pursued Aunt Augusta, incredulously.
Reba nodded.
Aunt Augusta came a step or two nearer.
"Has he left you?" she asked. "Wan't he good to you? You might as well tell us about him. We won't blame you, Reba. Did he treat you wrong some way?" Aunt Augusta's voice was almost gentle.
"Oh, no," Reba told her. "He didn't treat me wrong any way. You see, his business," she explained, "is on a boat that sails between places in the Pacific. That's why I don't know exactly where he is."
"Oh, that's it; that's it," murmured Aunt Augusta; but she was still mystified. So were the others.
"Was it a secret marriage?" the sharp, high voice of the invalid suddenly broke in.
Reba nodded. "Yes, and I meant to keep it secret till he came back, and we settled down somewhere."
"What made you change your mind, then?" Reba's mother asked. "Sudden, like this?"
For the first time Reba hesitated.
"Yes, what made you change your mind?" repeated the now-aroused David.
Reba's hands slipped down into her lap. Her eyes fixed themselves on the glass knob of a door across the room. She stared at it in silence, but it was not the knob she saw. Oh, how it hurt! Just to think of his eyes—how it hurt! She winced slightly.
"It isn't as if I were young," she said outloud, in that strange dull voice of hers. "I'm too old to get over it—to wake up healed from it some day," mystifyingly to those who listened Reba went on. "I shall never feel the same toward life again. All the beauty has gone out of it now."
The invalid leaned forward in her chair.
"What are you talking about, Reba Jerome?" she called out shrilly.
Reba glanced at her mother unsurprised. What indeed was she talking about? And here, too? She gazed about at the staring faces, then shrugged and actually smiled. Never mind! She didn't care.
"I presume I was just thinking outloud," she said. Then turning to Aunt Augusta, she asked simply, as if she were a little child again, "Can't I go to bed now? I'm so tired!"
"Answer me, Reba," insisted the invalid irritably. "You answer me. What made you change your mind?"
"You keep still, Eunice," interrupted Augusta's voice peremptorily. "You leave Reba alone. She don't have to tell us all her affairs. Can't you see she's all tuckered out? I should think you'd have more sense. Of course you can go to bed, Reba. Syringa," she ordered, "you go up and get out that nightgown of mine with the acorn design hamburg yoke, in my bottom drawer, and put clean sheets onto Reba's bed, and take your things into the spare-chamber. That'll be your room hereafter."
"Oh, Augusta!" feebly Syringa expostulated. The spare-chamber! Why, Augusta prized her spare-chamber more than the grand piano, or her sealskin coat. To her the possession of a spare-chamber was proof of gentility. She'd as soon go without a dining-room, she had once said. "Let me move into the 'girl's room," Syringa urged. "I'll be comfortable enough there. There's that register down into the kitchen, you know, right over the kitchen stove."
"You keep still," briefly Augusta silenced Syringa. "I know what I'm about. 'Tisn't your comfort I'm thinking of. Reba's to have her own room, and she is to have it without feeling she's putting an old woman like you, with rheumatism every damp day, into that 'girl's room,' that ain't fit really for even a servant. You go right along and do as I say and no more talk about it."
Thus was the fatted calf killed for Reba, though she herself was hardly aware of it. She sat with her hands still in her lap and her gaze still fastened upon the door-knob. Some one had to touch her to call her back to the present place and moment. "You wanted to go to bed, didn't you?" Syringa asked her.
"Oh, yes; so I did," she replied.
Sweet as the return of the prodigal was to Augusta Morgan, it was in no spirit of triumph or proud victory that the old despot crossed the hall to Reba's room that night, after the crack at the bottom of the girl's door had been dark for over an hour.
"I just thought I'd look in," she explained, "and see if you were asleep yet."
There was a light burning in the hall, and Reba from her bed could see Aunt Augusta standing tall and specter-like in the familiar gray wrapper. "No, I'm not asleep.
Augusta came in.
"I was afraid you wasn't." She had a glass in her hand. "You drink this; it's bromide. Your mother has it to quiet her once in a while."
Reba drank docilely, and lay back again on her pillow.
An hour later, "You asleep yet?" inquired the same gray-clad figure, appearing for the second time on Reba's threshold.
"Not yet."
Aunt Augusta again approached Reba's bed and this time laid her hand upon her forehead. "Why, you're hot!"
A little moan escaped from Reba. Aunt Augusta leaned nearer.
"Tell me if you can. Where do you feel bad?" she asked.
"Here," Reba replied in a whisper, and she placed her hand upon her chest. "It was better for a while this afternoon," she went on; "I hardly felt it. But now it's worse. You wouldn't think it could hurt me, physically, would you?" she asked. "But it does."
Aunt Augusta bent over the bed and shook Reba by the shoulder.
"Reba, look here, look at me," she said in a firm steady voice. "Do you know who I am? Do you know where you are?"
"Of course—of course—you're Aunt Augusta. I'm in my own bed at home. I could see the roses there on the foot-board if there were more light. Oh! I'm in my right mind. Don't be afraid about that. I've come home to stay. You've got your way with me at last. The only funny thing is, I don't seem to care if you have. I don't seem to care about anything around here."