And Eva? What had she really thought under her long patience? Though her bearing may not have been natural, it was, the old man admitted, heroic. The code of perfect behaviour supported her as firmly as if it had been a cross. Never by word or gesture, never by so much as a look, had she betrayed herself. All that had happened ten years before, and this was the first allusion, so far as the General knew, she had ever made to the old scandal.
Now, while he watched her, a thin, faint rose drifted into her cheeks, as if they were stained by the sunset. She had raised herself on her arm, and the blue silk fell away from the curve of her elbow. Though she was looking beyond him to the broken clouds in the west, he could see that her eyes were dark with pain above that still smile on her lips. Then the last edge of the sun vanished in a red rim below the horizon, and at the same instant her smile wavered and died.
"I have always wanted to tell you that he was not to blame that night," she said very slowly. "He was there trying to help her. It was about a will. Some relative had defrauded her. I want you to know this. I want you to believe this." She stopped, choked a moment, and asked in a breathless whisper, "You do believe what I tell you?"
"Yes, I believe you."
"I felt that I wanted you to know," she continued, after a long pause in which he heard the spasmodic rise and fall of her breath. "One can never tell what may happen. If I should die before George, I want you to know how—how splendid he has been. I want you to be his friend always."
"Of course I am his friend, and, most of all, I am your friend. Nothing can change that."
"No, nothing can change that." She had fallen back on the pillows, and lay looking out at the shadowy branches of elms against the vivid light of the afterglow. "You are like George in some ways," she added presently, "and in others so different."
"I suppose human nature is much the same in all of us, my dear."
"It isn't just human nature. There's something more. John Welch has human nature, too, but there's nothing of you in him, and there's nothing of George."
"Well, that doesn't keep him from being a fine lad. As I've told you before, I sometimes wish my little girl could take a fancy to him. It would not be a brilliant marriage, but he would make a good husband, if character counts."
Eva sighed vaguely, listening to the soft April wind in the trees. "Yes, he's a fine boy. I'm very fond of John; but he isn't the kind a young girl falls in love with. Somehow, he is too—too honest—and perhaps too unselfish. It takes more than character to awaken love—especially first love." Suddenly, without a sound, her tears brimmed over, and failing to find the handkerchief under her pillow, she wiped her eyes on the lace of her sleeve.
"Don't cry. Don't cry," pleaded the old man. "There is nothing in the world for you to cry about, Eva."
"I know there isn't. Nothing in the world," she responded, while her tears flowed all the faster. "It's just nerves. Doctor Bridges and John tell me so. It is just nerves." When he drew out his silk handkerchief and put it on the coverlet, she caught it up and hid her face for an instant.
Turning away from her, he looked over the small neglected garden to the scattered spires of Queenborough. Everywhere it is the same, he thought. Everywhere people are loving, suffering, hating, hoping, going into hospitals, coming out of hospitals, laughing, weeping, trying fruitlessly to make life what it is not. All the striving for an impossible happiness, for an ecstasy that endures. All the long waiting, the vain prayers, the hope that is agony! And who knows what the end of it is? Who knows that the end ever comes? But what we see and touch cannot be the whole of it. There must be a plan, there must be a meaning, he insisted, still faithful to a creed he had forsaken.
All life isn't lived in a hospital. For the young there is joy somewhere, and for the old there is the end of expectancy and a green bench in the sunshine.
Presently, while he still gazed out of the window, he felt her hand close on his, and turning quickly, he saw that not only her lips but her eyes were smiling up at him. A moment before she had seemed to lose courage, and his heart had sunk down in despair; but now, with the change in her look, he felt that he was able to face life again.
"I ought to know all about first love," she said brightly, "because I fell in love with George when I was eight years old."
Heartened by her tone, he replied as cheerfully as he could, "Well, I'm glad they don't all begin so soon, my dear." Almost, but not quite, he had touched the inside curve of her elbow. Then, with his eyes on the wine-purple veins and swollen joints of his hand, he drew back and grasped the crook of his walking-stick. No, the hands of youth and age could not clasp without flinching. Yet Jenny Blair, God bless her, thought of forty-two as the downward turn. Well, no matter. If one had to be eighty-three, it was better to be eighty-three alone with the past.
"Oh, that was long before he thought of me." She was laughing with her old archness, and he told himself that the music of chimes was in the sound of her voice. "It began when he plunged into that burning shanty down near Penitentiary Bottom and brought out Memoria. George was only a small boy then, but I fell in love with him, and I never got over it. Acts like that always made a tremendous appeal to me, even when I was a child. Somehow, I saw him after that always rushing into flame and smoke and rushing out again with a bundle in his arms. You remember Memoria, who does our washing? Of course the firemen could have saved her as well; but George wouldn't wait for the fire engine. That was exactly like him, wasn't it? He can never bear to wait when an impulse seizes him."
"Yes, yes, I know, but you oughtn't to have been there. You were too small."
"That's what Mother said; but Mammy was Memoria's grandmother. We were playing out in the street, and when Mammy heard the fire-bells, she ran down as fast as she could and all the children followed her. I wouldn't have missed it for anything in the world. It was the first time I ever saw Memoria. She couldn't have been more than three years old, and she was exactly the colour of brown sugar."
"I remember, but aren't you talking too much?" He flinched and shifted his heavy body, which had once been hard as nails he told himself, but was now soft and flabby.
"Are you in pain?" she asked, laying her hand on his arm.
"A twinge in my joint. All my age seems to have got down at last to my legs. I was telling Jenny Blair on the way up here that I'd be as sound as I ever was if I had a new pair of legs."
She was silent so long that he began to wonder if she had forgotten him or had fallen asleep from fatigue. Nothing, he decided, while he waited, but the false excitement of drugs could have broken down her reserve so completely. When, at last, she spoke again, it was in the low wandering tone in which one muses aloud. "No, I wouldn't have missed it for anything. Mammy lost her head when she heard of the fire. You couldn't blame her. Memoria was her grandchild. All the children on the block ran down as fast as they could. The alarm was ringing over the city, and presently the fire engine came dashing down the hill, with all the splendid white horses. There was a crowd of negroes praying and shouting in front of the house, and Memoria's mother was shrieking that she had forgotten her baby. She had saved her spring hat, her best set of plates, her sewing-machine, and even a bushel of black-eyed peas; but she had forgotten that Memoria was asleep in a trundle bed. Afterwards, she said she thought Memoria was with the other children out in the yard; but I believe she had simply forgotten her in the excitement."