The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/Maud-Evelyn/Chapter 6
VI
I can see Lavinia, for instance, in her ugly new mourning immediately after her mother's death. There had been long anxieties connected with this event, and she was already faded, already almost old. But Marmaduke, on her bereavement, had been to her, and she came straightway to me.
'Do you know what he thinks now?' she soon began. 'He thinks he knew her.'
'Knew the child?' It came to me as if I had half expected it.
'He speaks of her now as if she hadn't been a child.' My visitor gave me the strangest fixed smile. 'It appears that she wasn't so young—it appears she had grown up.'
I stared. 'How can it "appear"? They know, at least! There were the facts.'
'Yes,' said Lavinia, 'but they seem to have come to take a different view of them. He talked to me a long time, and all about her. He told me things.'
'What kind of things? Not trumpery stuff, I hope, about "communicating"—about his seeing or hearing her?'
'Oh no, he doesn't go in for that; he leaves it to the old couple, who, I believe, cling to their mediums, keep up their sittings and their rappings, and find in it all a comfort, an amusement, that he doesn't grudge them and that he regards as harmless. I mean anecdotes—memories of his own. I mean things she said to him and that they did together—places they went to. His mind is full of them.'
I turned it over. 'Do you think he's decidedly mad?'
She shook her head with her bleached patience. 'Oh no, it's too beautiful!'
'Then are you taking it up? I mean the preposterous theory———'
'It is a theory,' she broke in, 'but it isn't necessarily preposterous. Any theory has to suppose something,' she sagely pursued, 'and it depends at any rate on what it's a theory of. It's wonderful to see this one work.'
'Wonderful always to see the growth of a legend!' I laughed. 'This is a rare chance to watch one in formation. They're all three in good faith building it up. Isn't that what you made out from him?'
Her tired face fairly lighted. 'Yes—you understand it; and you put it better than I. It's the gradual effect of brooding over the past; the past, that way, grows and grows. They make it and make it. They've persuaded each other—the parents—of so many things that they've at last also persuaded him. It has been contagious.'
'It's you who put it well,' I returned. 'It's the oddest thing I ever heard of, but it is, in its way, a reality. Only we mustn't speak of it to others.'
She quite accepted that precaution. 'No—to nobody. He doesn't. He keeps it only for me.'
'Conferring on you thus,' I again laughed, 'such a precious privilege!'
She was silent a moment, looking away from me. 'Well, he has kept his vow.'
'You mean of not marrying? Are you very sure?' I asked. 'Didn't he perhaps———?' But I faltered at the boldness of my joke.
The next moment I saw I needn't. 'He was in love with her,' Lavinia brought out.
I broke now into a peal which, however provoked, struck even my own ear at the moment as rude almost to profanity. 'He literally tells you outright that he's making believe?'
She met me effectively enough. 'I don't think he knows he is. He's just completely in the current.'
'The current of the old people's twaddle?'
Again my companion hesitated; but she knew what she thought. 'Well, whatever we call it, I like it. It isn't so common, as the world goes, for any one—let alone for two or three—to feel and to care for the dead as much as that. It's self-deception, no doubt, but it comes from something that—well,' she faltered again, 'is beautiful when one does hear of it. They make her out older, so as to imagine they had her longer; and they make out that certain things really happened to her, so that she shall have had more life. They've invented a whole experience for her, and Marmaduke has become a part of it. There's one thing, above all, they want her to have had.' My young friend's face, as she analysed the mystery, fairly grew bright with her vision. It came to me with a faint dawn of awe that the attitude of the Dedricks was contagious. 'And she did have it!' Lavinia declared.
I positively admired her, and if I could yet perfectly be rational without being ridiculous, it was really, more than anything else, to draw from her the whole image. 'She had the bliss of knowing Marmaduke? Let us agree to it, then, since she's not here to contradict us. But what I don't get over is the scant material for him!' It may easily be conceived how little, for the moment, I could get over it. It was the last time my impatience was to be too much for me, but I remember how it broke out. 'A man who might have had you!'
For an instant I feared I had upset her—thought I saw in her face the tremor of a wild wail. But poor Lavinia was magnificent. 'It wasn't that he might have had "me"—that's nothing: it was, at the most, that I might have had him. Well, isn't that just what has happened? He's mine from the moment no one else has him. I give up the past, but don't you see what it does for the rest of life? I'm surer than ever that he won't marry.'
'Of course, he won't—to quarrel, with those people!'
For a minute she answered nothing; then, 'Well, for whatever reason!' she simply said. Now, however, I had gouged out of her a couple of still tears, and I pushed away the whole obscure comedy.