NEALE’S RETURN

July 22. Evening.

He stooped to kiss her and sank down beside her where she sat cowering in the dark. Although she could not see his face clearly Marise knew from his manner that he was very tired, from the way he sat down, taking off his cap, and his attitude as he leaned his head back against the pillar. She knew this without thinking about it, mechanically, with the automatic certainty of a long-since acquired knowledge of him. And when he spoke, although his voice was quiet and level, she felt a great fatigue in his accent.

But he spoke with his usual natural intonation, which he evidently tried to make cheerful. “I’m awfully glad you’re still up, dear. I was afraid you’d be too tired, with the funeral coming tomorrow. But I couldn’t get here any sooner. I’ve been clear over the mountain today. And I’ve done a pretty good stroke of business that I’m in a hurry to tell you about. You remember, don’t you, how the Powers lost the title to their big woodlot? I don’t know if you happen to remember all the details, how a lawyer named Lowder . . .”

“I remember,” said Marise, speaking for the first time, “all about it.”

“Well,” went on Neale, wearily but steadily, “up in Nova Scotia this time, talking with one of the old women in town, I ran across a local tradition that, in a town about ten miles inland, some of the families were descended from Tory Yankees who’d been exiled from New England, after the Revolution. I thought it was worth looking up, and one day I ran up there to see if I could find out anything about them. It was Sunday and I had to . . .”

Marise was beside herself, her heart racing wildly. She took hold of his arm and shook it with all her might. “Neale, quick! quick! Leave out all that. What did you do?”

She could see that he was surprised by her fierce impatience, and for an instant taken aback by the roughness of the interruption. He stared at her. How slow Neale was!

He began, “But, dear, why do you care so much about it? You can’t understand about what I did, if I don’t tell you this part, the beginning, how I . . .” Then, feeling her begin to tremble uncontrollably, he said hastily, “Why, of course, Marise, if you want to know the end first. The upshot of it all is that I’ve got it straightened out, about the Powers woodlot. I got track of those missing leaves from the Ashley Town Records. They really were carried away by that uncle of yours. I found them up in Canada. I had a certified copy and tracing made of them. It’s been a long complicated business, and the things only came in yesterday’s mail, after you’d been called over here. But I’d been in correspondence with Lowder, and when I had my proofs in hand, I telephoned him and made him come over yesterday afternoon. It was one of the biggest satisfactions I ever expect to have, when I shoved those papers under his nose and watched him curl up. Then I took him back today, myself, to his own office, not to let him out of my sight, till it was all settled. There was a great deal more to it . . . two or three hours of fight. I bluffed some, about action by the bar-association, disbarment, a possible indictment for perjury, and seemed to hit a weak spot. And finally I saw him with my own eyes burn up that fake warranty-deed. And that’s all there is to that. Just as soon as we can get this certified copy admitted and entered on our Town Records, ’Gene can have possession of his own wood-land. Isn’t that good news?”

He paused and added with a tired, tolerant, kindly accent, “Now Nelly will have fourteen pairs of new shoes, each laced higher up than the others, and I won’t be the one to grudge them to her.”

He waited for a comment and, when none came, went on doggedly making talk in that resolutely natural tone of his. “Now that you know the end, and that it all came out right, you ought to listen to some details, for they are queer. The missing pages weren’t in that first town I struck at all. Nothing there but a record of a family of Simmonses who had come from Ashley in 1778. They had . . .”

Marise heard nothing more of what he said, although his voice went on with words the meaning of which she could not grasp. It did not seem to her that she had really understood with the whole of her brain anything he had said, or that she had been able to take in the significance of it. She could think of nothing but a frightening sensation all over her body, as though the life were ebbing out of it. Every nerve and fiber in her seemed to have gone slack, beyond anything she had ever conceived. She could feel herself more and more unstrung and loosened like a violin string let down and down. The throbbing ache in her throat was gone. Everything was gone. She sat helpless and felt it slip away, till somewhere in the center of her body this ebbing of strength had run so far that it was a terrifying pain, like the approach of death. She was in a physical panic of alarm, but unable to make a sound, to turn her head.

It was when she heard a loud insistent ringing in her head, and saw the stars waver and grow dim that she knew she was fainting away.

Then she was lying on the sofa in Cousin Hetty’s sitting-room, Neale bending over her, holding a handkerchief which smelled of ammonia, and Agnes, very white, saying in an agitated voice, “It’s because she hasn’t eaten a thing all day. She wouldn’t touch her lunch or supper. It’s been turrible to see her.”

Marise’s head felt quite clear and lucid now; her consciousness as if washed clean by its temporary absence from life. She tried to sit up and smile at Neale and Agnes. She had never fainted away in all her life before. She felt very apologetic and weak. And she felt herself in a queer, literal way another person.

Neale sat down by her now and put his arm around her. His face was grave and solicitous, but not frightened, as Agnes was. It was like Neale not to lose his head. He said to Agnes, “Give me that cup of cocoa,” and when it came, he held it to Marise’s lips. “Take a good swallow of that,” he said quietly.

Marise was amazed to find that the hot sweet smell of the cocoa aroused in her a keen sensation of hunger. She drank eagerly, and taking in her hand the piece of bread and butter which Neale offered to her, she began to eat it with a child’s appetite. She was not ashamed or self-conscious in showing this before Neale. One never needed to live up to any pose before Neale. His mere presence in the room brought you back, she thought, to a sense of reality. Sometimes if you had been particularly up in the air, it made you feel a little flat as she certainly did now. But how profoundly alive it made you feel, Neale’s sense of things as they were.

The food was delicious. She ate and drank unabashedly, finding it an exquisite sensation to feel her body once more normal, her usual home, and not a scaring, almost hostile entity, apart from her. When she finished, she leaned against Neale’s shoulder with a long breath. For an instant, she had no emotion but relieved, homely, bodily comfort.

“Well, for Heaven’s sake!” said Neale, looking down at her.

“I know it,” she said. “I’m an awful fool.”

“No, you’re not,” he contradicted. “That’s what makes me so provoked with you now, going without eating since morning.”

Agnes put in, “It’s the suddenness of it that was such a shock. It takes me just so, too, comes over me as I start to put a mouthful of food into my mouth. I can’t get it down. And you don’t know how lost I feel not to have Miss Hetty here to tell me what to eat. I feel so gone!”

“You must go to bed this minute,” said Neale. “I’ll go right back to the children.”

He remembered suddenly. “By George, I haven’t had anything to eat since noon, myself.” He gave Marise an apologetic glance. “I guess I haven’t any stones to throw at your foolishness.”

Agnes ran to get him another cup of cocoa and some more bread and butter. Marise leaned back on the sofa and watched him eat.

She was aware of a physical release from tension that was like a new birth. She looked at her husband as she had not looked at him for years. And yet she knew every line and hollow of that rugged face. What she seemed not to have seen before, was what had grown up little by little, the expression of his face, the expression which gave his presence its significance, the expression which he had not inherited like his features, but which his life had wrought out there.

Before her very eyes there seemed still present the strange, alien look of the dead face upstairs, from which the expression had gone, and with it everything. That vision hung, a cold and solemn warning in her mind, and through it she looked at the living face before her and saw it as she had never done before.

In the clean, new, sweet lucidity of her just-returned consciousness she saw what she was not to forget, something like a steady, visible light, which was Neale’s life. That was Neale himself. And as she looked at him silently, she thought it no wonder that she had been literally almost frightened to death by the mere possibility that it had not existed. She had been right in thinking that there was something there which would outlast the mere stars.

He looked up, found her eyes on him, and smiled at her. She found the gentleness of his eyes so touching that she felt the tears mounting to her own. . . . But she winked them back. There had been enough foolishness from her, for one day.

Neale leaned back in his chair now, looked around for his; cap, took it up, and looked back at her, quietly, still smiling a little. Marise thought, “Neale is as natural in his life as a very great actor is in his art. Whatever he does, even to the most trifling gesture, is done with so great a simplicity that it makes people like me feel fussy and paltry.”

There was a moment’s silence, Neale frankly very tired, looking rather haggard and grim, giving himself a moment’s respite in his chair before standing up to go; Marise passive, drawing long quiet breaths, her hands folded on her knees; Agnes, her back to the other two, hanging about the sideboard, opening and shutting the drawers, and shifting their contents aimlessly from one to the other.

Then Agnes turned, and showed a shamed, nervous old face. “I don’t know what’s got into me, Miss Marise, that I ain’t no good to myself nor anybody else. I’m afraid to go back into the kitchen alone.” She explained to Neale, “I never was in the house with a dead body before, Mr. Crittenden, and I act like a baby about it, scared to let Mrs. Crittenden out of my sight. If I’m alone for a minute, seems ’sthough . . .” She glanced over her shoulder fearfully and ended lamely, “Seems ’sthough I don’t know what might happen.”

“I won’t leave you alone, Agnes, till it is all over,” said Marise, and this time she kept contempt not only out of her voice, but out of her heart. She was truly only very sorry for the old woman with her foolish fears.

Agnes blinked and pressed her lips together, the water in her eyes. “I’m awful glad to hear you say that!” she said fervently.

Marise closed her eyes for a moment. It had suddenly come to her that this promise to Agnes meant that she could not see Neale alone till after the funeral, tomorrow, when she went back into life again. And she found that she immensely wanted to see him alone this very hour, now! And Agnes would be there . . . !

She opened her eyes and saw Neale standing up, his cap in his hand, looking at her, rough and brown and tall and tired and strong; so familiar, every line and pose and color of him; as familiar and unexciting, as much a part of her, as her own hand.

As their eyes met in the profound look of intimate interpenetration which can pass only between a man and a woman who have been part of each other, she felt herself putting to him clearly, piercingly, the question which till then she had not known how to form, “Neale, what do you want me to do?”

She must have said it aloud, and said it with an accent which carried its prodigious import, for she saw him turn very white, saw his eyes deepen, his chest lift in a great heave. He came towards her, evidently not able to speak for a moment. Then he took her hands . . . the memory of a thousand other times was in his touch . . .

He looked at her as though he could never turn his eyes away. The corners of his mouth twitched and drew down.

He said, in a deep, trembling, solemn voice, “Marise, my darling, I want you always to do what is best for you to do.”

He drew a deep, deep breath as though it had taken all his strength to say that; and went on, “What is deepest and most living in you . . . that is what must go on living.”

He released one hand and held it out towards her as though he were taking an oath.