Restless Earth/Chapter 21

Almost a month had passed since the earthquake when Patricia Weybourn walked slowly up the garden path to the Harley bungalow carrying the letters, some sodden with recent rain, which had lain in the box at the gate. The curtains of coloured net at the windows waved gently in the westerly breeze. Patricia eyed them absently.

Behind the waving curtains on the right lay Grace Harley, silent, listening to the lagging footsteps of the woman who had brought her home.

Grace Harley would never see again.

The surgeon had been definite about it. The falling beam, which had marred her soft beauty irreparably, had destroyed her sight utterly. She knew these things now, yet her lips smiled—while her soul wept in the darkness. She mourned Joan more than her sight.

​The sun shone upon her as she lay beneath the white counterpane. She felt its warmth through the bandages which covered the upper half of her face and upon her hands where they lay upon her breast. She lay very still and quiet.

She was looking at the familiar objects in her room with the eyes of memory; the bookshelves near the fireplace; the Brangwyn etching and the study of a tree-fern by Trevor Lloyd which hung upon the south wall; the dressing table with its three mirrors; the crystal bowl which stood upon the window-ledge—the bow!l which Jimmy detested and had threatened to smash; the set of furniture which Jimmy had made for Joan’s doll’s-house, and of which he had been so vain that he had decided to use it to ornament the mantel-piece; the sea-grass chair with the pink panel; the rugs; the photographs of Jimmy and Joan, and of all the family; everything—just as she had left it. She could have placed her hand upon any desired object were she allowed to rise.

Her suffering was not so vivid now as she lay in the darkness surrounded by familiar things. It had been horrible in Palmerston, where the slapping of the canvas screens on the verandah, the rumble of wheeled beds, the cries of the patients, the commands of the nurses, the faint street noises, the terrible clanking of a church bell, and the changing of the dressings had been one long nightmare—a black hell in which she had prayed in vain for light and a surcease from racking pain.

The pain had almost gone now; and here, at home, the days seemed much lighter. Here were friendliness and warmth. Her surroundings knew her and spoke to her. She knew every little sound; the click of the gate, the noise of the shaking of Mrs. Langham’s mats, the soft clatter of the starlings in the pipe near the hot-water cistern, the creaking of the bathroom door, the intermittent rattling of the breeze-blown hydrangeas against the corner of the house, the slapping of drying linen on the line; the countless ​little home noises which she had seldom noticed now spoke a potent language.

She could identify each neighbour’s car and every tradesman’s van. She could see the baker’s expression of concentration as he hurried up the path, while Ginger eyed him disdainfully from his perch on the verandah rail. She could see the tall pines in the distance and Mount Egmont beyond; she could see the group of pungas in the gully.

It was not so dark here, at home.

She heard Patricia enter the house by the back door; heard the light the gas beneath the kettle in preparation for morning tea; heard her straighten a corner of a rug as she crossed the breakfast room; heard her cross the hall and enter the room in which she lay.

Grace turned her head expectantly as Patricia set the letters down upon the table near the window.

“Were there any?” she asked.

“Lots,” answered Patricia.

“Any for me?”

“I don’t think so. Some of the addresses are hard to decipher, but I think they are all for Mr. Harley.”

“Of course. I am dead, to all intents and purposes.”

Paricia looked pityingly at the woman on the bed and was surprised to see that she smiled.

“Grace———”

“That wasn’t a complaint, Pat,” said Grace gently. “I’m happy to be home again—even as I am. Pat, dear———”

“Yes?”

“Do you think it will hurt me if you call him Jimmy?”

Patricia did not answer. She spread the wet letters upon the window-ledge to dry in the sun.

“It won’t,” Grace assured her. “In fact, I would rather you call him Jimmy. You used to call him ​that. You call him Jimmy in your thoughts—and you love him, Pat.”

“I don’t love him,” asserted Patricia in a low, level voice. “I once imagined I did. I like him immensely, of course; but women such as I never love anyone really, We can’t. There is something missing in us.”

She turned to smile at Grace ruefully.

“Heaven alone knows why we are born,” she continued. “It seems to me that we exist solely to make trouble for others.”

The thought made her glance in the direction of the Langham home across the gully. She frowned as she saw Mrs. Langham staking chrysanthemums and keeping a watchful eye on the Harley bungalow.

“Pat, dear, there is ne necessity to pretend with me,” replied Grace very, very gently. “I’m not blaming you for loving Jimmy; and I am not blaming Jimmy for loving you. Love is a gypsy, you know.”

She turned her face to the sun and sighed.

“Of course, I’m jealous, Pat. I am just a woman. I am not strong enough, or shallow enough, not to have regrets for a love that is dead. And I find it hard to smile in this hour of unexpected victory. That’s what you call it in your heart, isn’t it? Unexpected victory. You know that you could have held him but for this. Now, I hold him faster than ever. Now, his sense of duty, his sense of fairness, his remorse, will keep him at my side. He will be eager to atone. He will subject his desires, his whole life, to my wishes—and he will never be convinced that I don’t want him to do that. I don’t, Pat. I don’t!”

The frail white hands clutched the counterpane. Her body shook with the vehemence of her final words.

Patricia hurried to her side and took the trembling hands in hers.

“Hush, dear!” she begged. “You must not speak like this. You don’t know what you are saying. Mr. ​Harley and I have quarrelled, irrevocably. He—he struck me. Any decent man would have done so under the circumstances.”

“Pat———”

“I’m not altogether respectable, you know. Many people will tell you that. All New Plymouth will testify to the fact, I imagine. Mr. Harley was bound to find it out, sooner or later. He found out rather sooner than I had expected—that’s all.”

She spoke with intense bitterness, and Grace turned her head as though to look at her.

“You tell me this to comfort me, Pat.”

“I tell you this because it is the truth,” corrected Patricia flatly. “Your husband hates me. He hates me for destroying his contentment; for smashing his home; for killing his wife and child———”

Grace Harley shook her head slowly. Her scarred lips smiled faintly.

“He could never hate you, Pat. If he struck you, it was when he bitterly accused himself. He should have struck himself. He will know that now. He is a just man, Pat, and he must know that you were not to blame. My dear, none of us is to blame. We were driven by something stronger than convention to act as we did—all of us. Oh, I don’t want Jimmy to sacrifice himself for me, Pat. I don’t!”

Patricia seated herself upon the bed.

“Grace,” she said softly and earnestly, “there are two kinds of love—the constant, which burns with a steady flame, a comforting thing like a fire on a hearth, and the inconstant, which flames and destroys and leaves no ashes. Some people have one, some the other. Most people are subject to both. Your husband is subject to both. You have the constant—I know only the inconstant. I’m always falling in love, and out of it. I don’t wish to, but I just don’t seem able to help it. Men find me attractive, and I—well, I suppose I like playing with them. It is in my blood. But, as God’s my judge, Grace, I did not wish to attract your husband. I tried to avoid him. ​But—it just happened, my dear. Moon-madness, that’s all it was. Moon-madness.”

She sat silent for a moment, the pressure of Grace’s thin fingers around her own seeming an accusation rather than a gesture of sympathy. She rose to her feet with a cry of distress.

“Oh, what have I done?” she cried, clenching her hands together. “What have I done?”

Often she had cried thus in the seclusion of her room, but now Grace’s magnanimity and helplessness wrung the words from her afresh.

Grace reached out and grasped Patricia’s skirt.

“Won’t you take Jimmy, my dear, if I ask you to?” she pleaded. “If I ask you to save him from himself? From—from slavery?”

“No!” answered Patricia almost fiercely, as she wrenched herself free and fled the room.

Grace Harley turned her face to the sun again and lay still. Her heart was singing, and the dark years ahead seemed less terrifying.

****

Patricia came back presently with the morning tea-tray. She set it down upon a chair beside the bed, propped Grace into a sitting position with extra pillows, and placed a cup in her hands.

She had recovered her composure, and was now the cheerful and attentive person which she had become during these latter weeks.

“Try a meringue,” she invited, placing a plate of the dainties in Grace’s lap. “I won’t guarantee them, but they’re the best I could do. I’m afraid I’ll never be a cook.”

“You have made wonderful strides, I think, Pat,” declared Grace, fumbling for the plate. “I think you must be a good all-rounder.”

Patricia laughed softly and scornfully. She said nothing. She took her own cup to the window, where she turned over the wet correspondence between sips.

​One of the letters slipped from her fingers and fell upon the floor with a slap. It was heavy and limp with water.

She stooped to recover it, and paused as she saw that the envelope had burst at the seams. She bent lower and read the printed words at the top of the disclosed sheet:

She lifted the sodden missive silently, glancing cautiously at the bed to see if her action were observed. Her immediate recollection of Grace’s blindness shamed her, and she flushed uncomfortably.

Grace, sensing a subtle change in Patricia’s attitude, spoke with timid apprehension.

“What is the matter?”

Patricia started. It was almost as if Grace had seen her slipping the letter into the pocket of her apron.

“Nothing,” she answered hurriedly. “Nothing, dear.”

“I thought you looked at me rather strangely, Pat.”

“Nonsense, Grace,” replied Patricia, forcing a laugh. “You mustn’t imagine things. Another cup of tea?”

“I haven’t finished this one yet.”

They chatted upon the fairness of the day, the possibility of growing asters in the plot near the breakfast-room window, the Easter holidays—a number of subjects which did not include those nearest to their thoughts—and Patricia remained uncomfortably aware of the letter in her pocket and an intention to deceive the blind woman.

“I wonder where Jimmy is?” asked Grace at last, no longer able to hold back her secret thought. “Do you think he will have received your letter?”

Patricia moved to the bed.

“He will come, my dear,” she answered consolingly. “You must not worry so much———”

​“I can’t help it. To think of him wandering in that horrible place—unwilling to come back now that he thinks there is no one here———”

“Sh! I won’t have you thinking this way, Grace. Do you wish me to slap you?”

Grace smiled wistfully.

“You are sure he will want me back—after running away———”

“Another cup of tea,” ordered Patricia sharply, taking Grace’s cup. “And please stop talking nonsense!”

She handed the blind woman another cup of tea.

“By-the-way,” she said in casual tones, “I suppose you wrote to him occasionally after you left?”

“Why—no,” answered Grace, in some surprise. “To tell you the truth, I—I didn’t think he would wish to hear from me. I thought he would like to make his decisions without—without———”

“I understand, dear,” interrupted Patricia, leaning over to touch Grace’s shoulder, her eyes shining strangely. “Now, try another meringue. I’ll go and put a little more water in the pot.”

“Don’t bother on my account,” begged Grace, as Patricia moved away.

“This is on my account,” declared Patricia as she left the room.

In the small kitchenette Patricia opened the sodden letter with care, spread it upon the small table and read it through without shame. It was the late Catherine Whipple’s first and last shot in her campaign to unite husband and wife; and it proved to Patricia that she still could feel, that her fight was not yet won—or lost.

It was a feeble shot. Nevertheless, it might have wrought infinite damage—or have repaired a breach—had it reached the man for whom it was intended.

Patricia read it through twice. Its cowardice seemed not to occur to her. She saw in it only a possible truth, and black bitterness enveloped her thoughts.

Here was the true explanation of Grace’s presence in Hastings at the moment of the shake, when Joan had been killed in Napier. The body found with Joan’s had been one of the strangers mentioned here. Grace had been away on an “excursion” with a man.

Her excuse that she went to purchase a middy suit for Joan was simply—an excuse. An excuse to meet the man—possibly a Hastings man.

Patricia laughed aloud—a cautious, hard laugh.

Grace had consoled herself very quickly. More than possibly she had found a lover before her husband had turned from her. That would account for her readiness to run away at the first sign of unfaithfulness in Jimmy.

Of course! They had been blind not to see it!

Grace, for all her meek, quiet little ways, had found a lover. It was the old story of still waters running deep.

And to think of all the sympathy, the bitter heart-aches, the agony of weeks, which had been wasted upon her! How she must have laughed in secret!

She had run off with her lover, knowing that her husband would be ready to provide her with all the money she would need—to live in comfort with her man.

​It was laughable!

And now, blinded and disfigured, she still played a part. She didn’t want Jimmy to sacrifice himself! Oh, no! Such a thing was unthinkable! Yet there she was, lying in the bedroom, waiting for him. Confident that he would come, that he would care for her all the days of her life—now that she was ashamed for her lover to look upon her. Doubtless the lover had deserted her—unless he too had been killed in Roach’s.

It was all very pathetic, no doubt; but it was not going to work out quite like that.

“Excursions with a man!”

Patricia uttered the words mockingly as she placed the letter to dry upon the rack above the stove.

Grace had cheated, cheated very skilfully. Very well, Patricia would cheat a little. Just how she intended to cheat she did not know at the moment. The idea would come presently. All she was certain of was that this was a fifty-fifty affair of love, and that she intended to collect her due proportion by fair means or foul. She would fight Grace and her blindness.

“Clever little cheat!” she murmured admiringly, as she set about her preparations for lunch.

“Are you all right, dear?” she called, thrusting her head around the breakfast-room door. “I’m just going to start on the vegetables.”

“Don’t worry about me,” replied Grace. “I’ll be quite happy.”

“You had better get some sleep before the doctor comes.”

“I’ll do my best—although I prefer to lie here and just think.”

“Don’t eat all the meringues. You’ll suffer from indigestion if you do.”

“Very well, dear.”

Patricia sneered as she turned to her task of peeling potatoes.

​She prepared the lunch, moving about the kitchenette with fierce resolution, snatching up the necessary culinary implements as though she were snatching lethal weapons with which to defend herself against physical attack. She made an unusual clatter in the sink, so that Grace smiled as she pictured her friend’s incompetence.

She would not be cheated of love, she told the bubbling cabbage. She would not! Not for forty Graces—even though all were blind!

At noon she summoned enough resolution to go into the sick-room and collect the morning tea things. She smoothed her apron nervously, patted her hair into place, and practised a suitable expression of sympathy before the cheap mirror in the door of one of the cupboards, and set out on her simple errand with a fluttering heart. It was not an easy thing to fight a sick woman.

She halted abruptly on the threshold of Grace’s room.

Grace, half-asleep, was speaking quietly to herself. Patricia thought that she prayed.

The words were spoken very softly and for some moments Patricia did not catch their drift; then she made out a certain rhythm, and the sadness in the low voice forced itself into her unwilling consciousness. Presently she caught two lines of the poem which Grace repeated—the final lines upon which Grace raised her voice a little.

Silence followed, an intense silence in which Patricia fancied she heard a sob.

She stood very still, her hand raised against the door-face. Sun-light, flooding through the opened front door, enveloped her ard warmed her. She turned her head slowly and gazed at the varied tints of the sunlit trees, the red of the roofs, the blue of the sky, the gleam of the sea, the glory of ​colour of the world in which we live—and which the sightless cannot see.

She gazed until her eyes filled with tears of pity, and a lump arose in her throat; then she turned and made her way back to the kitchenette on her tip-toes.

The letter of the Sincere Friend lay dry and curled upon the rack. She took it down and read it through again.

Now, there seemed to be something wrong about it. It seemed to breathe spite, instead of warning. Could it possibly be that the writer had reason to hate James Harley, or was this the work of some interfering busy-body such as had often made trouble for herself, Patricia? An unspeakable person such as Mrs Langham, for instance?

As though the mere thought of the lady across the gully inspired her, Patricia tore the letter across again and again, fiercely.

“‘What does it all matter, Watson?’” she quoted; and this time she was perfectly sober, and knew what she did.

****

“Lunch!” she announced cheerfully, as she entered the sick-room with a laden tray. “If you don’t put-on weight it won’t be through any fault of mine. Come and get it.”

They were quite jolly over the meal, which, to tell the truth, was not a shining example of the culinary art. Patricia apologised for not salting the cabbage, and Grace laughed at the idea of mustard with mutton.

“Don’t you resent my presence, Grace?” asked Patricia earnestly, when they had finished.

“Not now, dear,” answered Grace, with a sad smile.

For a brief moment anger flamed in Patricia’s heart at what sounded like a confident announcement of victory; then it died as suddenly as pity filled her heart.

​“You are so good,” explained Grace; “and you help me to forget—Joan.”

Patricia rose briskly.

“Well, this wont do,” she declared. “I must do the washing-up. Then I’ll go into town and send another wire.”

“To Jimmy?” asked Grace eagerly.

“Yes. It seems evident that the others have not found him. Third time never like the rest, they say. Buzzy thinks he must be in Napier still———”

“Has Buzzy written?”

“Yes. She hopes you are getting along nicely, and all that———”

“What does she say about Jimmy?”

“Just that somebody she knows caught a glimpse of him last week———”

“Oh———”

“Hush, dear. We will have him home again very shortly—even if I have to go and fetch him myself.”

“They would never let you into the area, Pat.”

“I’d like to meet the man who would refuse to let me in, after I had smiled sweetly upon him,” replied Patricia. “Now, a little more sleep for you, young lady———”

Later, Patricia sent a telegram to James Harley in Napier. She signed it “Patricia.” She had a curious belief that the name would find him and bring him home.

“I’m the kind of woman who carries wish-bones, and who spits on her shoes for luck when she sees a white horse,” she decided at last. “In other words, a sentimental, superstitious fool!”

****