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Sisters

K >> Kathleen Norris >> Sisters




"But, Alix--you're thin!" Peter said, holding her at arm's length.
"And--and--" He gently touched the black she wore, and fixed
puzzled and troubled eyes upon her face. "Alix--" he asked,
apprehensively.

For answer she tried to smile at him, but her lips trembled and
her eyes brimmed. She had led the way into the old sitting room
now, and Peter recognized, with a thrill of real feeling, the
shabby rugs and books and pictures, and the square piano beside
which he had watched Cherry's fat, childish hand on the scales so
many times, and Alix scowling over her songs.

"You heard--about Dad?" Alix faltered now, turning to face him at
the mantel.

"Your father!" Peter said, shocked.

"But hadn't you heard, Peter?"

"My dear--my dearest child, I'm just off the steamer. I got in at
six o'clock. I'd been thinking of you all the time, and I suddenly
decided to cross the bay and come straight on to the valley,
before I even went to the club or got my mail! Tell me--your
father--"

She had knelt before the cold hearth, and he knelt beside her, and
they busied themselves with logs and kindling in the old way. A
blaze crept up about the logs and Alix accepted Peter's
handkerchief and wiped a streak of soot from her wrist, quite as
if she was a child again, as she settled herself in her chair.

Peter took the doctor's chair, keeping his concerned and
sympathetic eyes upon her.

"He was well one day," she said, simply, "and the next--the next,
he didn't come downstairs, and Hong waited and waited--and about
nine o'clock I went up--and he had fallen--he had fallen--"

She was in tears again and Peter put his hand out and covered hers
and held it. Their chairs were touching, and as he leaned forward,
their faces might almost have touched, too.

"He must have been going to call someone," said Alix, after a
while, "they said he never suffered at all. This was January, the
last day, and Cherry got here that same night. He knew us both
toward morning. And that--that was all. Cherry was here for two
weeks. Martin came and went--"

"Where is Cherry now?" Peter interrupted.

"Back at Red Creek." Alix wiped her eyes. "She hates it, but
Martin had a good position there. Poor Cherry, it made her ill."

"Anne came?"

"Anne and Justin, of course." Peter could not understand Alix's
expression. She fell silent, still holding his hand and looking at
the fire.

He had not seen her for nearly six months; he had been all around
the world; had found her gay, affectionate letters in London, in
Athens, in Yokohama. But for three months now he had been away
from the reach of mails, roughing it on a friend's hemp plantation
in Borneo, and if she had written, the letter was as yet
undelivered. He looked at her with a great rush of admiration and
affection. She was not only a pretty and a clever woman; but, in
her plain black, with this new aspect of gravity and dignity, and
with new notes of pathos and appeal in her exquisite voice, he
realized that she was an extremely charming woman.

More than that, she stood for home, for the dearly familiar and
beloved things for which he had been so surprisingly homesick. His
mountain cabin and the old house in San Francisco on Pacific
Avenue; she belonged to his memories of them both; she was the
only woman in the world that he knew well.

Before he said good-bye to her, he had asked her to marry him. He
well remembered her look of bright and interested surprise.

"D'you mean to tell me you have forgotten your lady love of the
hoop-skirts and ringlets?" she had demanded.

"She never wore ringlets and crinolines!" he had answered.

"Well, bustles and pleats, then?"

"No," Peter had told her, frankly. "I shall always love her, in a
way. But she is married; she never thinks of me. And I like you so
much, Alix; I like our music and cooking and tramps and reading--
together. Isn't that a pretty good basis for marriage?"

"No!" Alix had answered, decidedly. "Perhaps if I were madly in
love with you I should say yes, and trust to little fingers to
lead you gently, and so on--"

He remembered ending the conversation in one of his quick moods of
irritation against her. If she couldn't take anybody or anything
seriously--he had said.

Poor Alix--she was taking life seriously enough to-night, Peter
thought, as he watched her.

"Tell me about Cherry," he said.

"Cherry is well, but just a little thin, and heart-broken now, of
course. Martin never seems to stay at any one place very long, so
I keep hoping--"

"Doesn't make good!" Peter said, shaking his head.

"Doesn't seem to! It's partly Cherry, I think," Alix said
honestly. "She was too young, really. She never quite settles
down, or takes life in earnest. But he's got a contract now for
three years, and so she seems to be resigning herself, and she has
a maid, I believe."

"She must love him," Peter submitted. Alix looked surprised.

"Why not?" she smiled. "I suppose when you've had ups and downs
with a man, and been rich and poor, and sick and well, and have
lived in half-a-dozen different places, you rather take him for
granted!" she added.

"Oh, you think it works that way?" Peter asked, with a keen look.

"Well, don't you think so? Aren't lots of marriages like that?"

"You false alarm. You quitter!" he answered.

Alix laughed, a trifle guiltily. Also she flushed, with a great
wave of splendid young colour that made her face look seventeen
again. "Your father left you--something, Alix?" Peter asked
presently, with some hesitation.

"That," she answered frankly, "is where Anne comes in!"

"Anne?"

"Anne and Justin came straight over," Alix went on, "and they were
really lovely. And they asked me to come to them for a visit--but
I couldn't very well; they live with his mother, you know, Amanda
Price Little, who writes the letters to the Chronicle about
educating children and all that. Doctor Younger and George Sewall
were here every day; you and George were named as executors. I was
so mixed up in policies and deeds and overdue taxes and interest
and bonds--"

"Poor old Alix, if I had only been here to help you!" the man
said. And for a moment they looked a little consciously at each
other.

"Well, anyway," the girl resumed hastily, "when it came to reading
the will, Anne and Justin sprung a mine under us! It seems that
ten years ago, when the Strickland Patent Fire Extinguisher was
put upon the market, my adorable father didn't have much money--he
never did have, somehow. So Anne's father, my Uncle Vincent, went
into it with him to the extent of about three thousand dollars--"

"Three thousand!" Peter, who had been leaning forward, earnestly
attentive, echoed in relief.

"That was all. Dad had about three hundred. They had to have a
laboratory and some expensive retorts and things, it seems. Dad
did all the work, and put in his three hundred, and Uncle Vincent
put in three thousand--and the funny thing is," Alix broke off to
say, musingly, "Uncle Vincent was perfectly splendid about it; I
myself remember him saying, 'Don't worry, Lee. I'm speculating on
my own responsibility, not yours.'"

"Well?" Peter prompted, as she hesitated.

"Well. They had a written agreement then, giving Uncle Vincent a
third interest in the patent, should it be sold or put on the
market--"

"Ha!" Peter ejaculated, struck.

"Which, of course, was only a little while before Uncle Vincent
died," Alix went on, with a grave nod. "The agreement lay in Dad's
desk all these years--fancy how easily he might have burned it
many's the time! But he didn't. George Sewall says that Anne is
right."

"But wasn't Anne third heiress anyway, under his will? I know I've
heard--"

"Certainly she was. But a third interest now, in a diminished
estate that began at something less than one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars, is quite different from a third of it ten years
ago, plus compound interest," Alix said, bringing her clear brows
together with a quizzical smile. "They've broken the will."

Peter, in the silence, whistled expressively.

"Gee--rusalem!" he exclaimed. "What does it come to?"

At this Alix looked very sober, gazed down at the fire, and shook
her head.

"All he had!" she answered, briefly.

Peter was silent, looking at her in stupefaction.

"Almost, that is," Alix amended more cheerfully. "As it was--we
should have had more than thirty thousand apiece. As it is, Anne
gets it all, or if not quite all, nearly all."

"Gets!" he echoed, hotly. "How do you mean?"

"It seems to be perfectly just," the girl answered, rather
lifelessly. But immediately she laughed. "Don't look so awful,
Peter. In the first place, Cherry and I still have the house. In
the second place, I am singing at St. Raphael's for five hundred a
year, and singing other places now and then."

"Alix, aren't you corking!" he said, with his pleasantest smile.

"Am I?" she asked, smiling. But immediately the smile melted, and
her lips shook. "Anyway, I'm glad you're home again, Peter!" she
added.

"Home again," he answered, half-angrily. "I should hope I am--and
high time, too! Has this--this money been turned over to Anne?"

"Not yet. Nobody gets anything until the estate is cleared--a year
or more from now."

"And do you tell me that she will have the effrontery to take it?"

"Rather! She said to me, 'Isn't it wonderful that Justin saw it at
once, and I never would have seen it!' She was quite sweet and
merry over it--"

"Great Lord! Does she know that it's practically all your father
had?"

Alix hesitated.

"Well, you see there had been mismanagement, Peter. Dad
speculated, and lost some. And we were a pretty heavy expense for
a good many years. I hated to expose the whole thing, and George--
he's been splendid--said that they probably had a perfectly valid
claim, anyway. There are some things to be thankful for," Alix
added, dashing the sudden tears from her eyes, "and one is that
Dad never knew it!"

"I can't tell you how surprised I am at Anne," Peter said.

"Well, we all were!" Alix confessed. "But it's just Anne's odd
little self-centred way," she added. "It was here, and she wanted
it. She belongs heart and soul to the Little family now, and she
is quite triumphant over being of so much help to Justin. They're
to build a house in Berkeley. Anne has it all worked out!" Alix
said, with amused distaste. "Well--I let Hong go, and as soon as I
can rent this house, I'm going to New York."

"Why New York, my dear girl?"

"Because I believe I can make a living there, singing and teaching
and generally struggling with life!" she answered, cheerfully.
"Cherry gets most of the money--they are always somewhat in debt,
and I imagine that the reason she is able to have a nice apartment
and a maid now is because she knows it is coming--and I get the
house, and enough money to keep me going--say, a year, in New
York."

"Do you want to go, Alix?" he said, affectionately.

"Yes, I think I do," she answered. But her eyes watered. "I do--in
a way," she added. "That is, I love my singing, and the thought of
making a success is delightful to me. But of course it means that
I give up everything else. I can't have home life, and--and the
valley--for years, four or five anyway, I'll have to give all that
up. And I'm twenty-seven, Peter. And I'd always rather hoped that
my music was going to be a domestic variety--"She stopped,
smiling, but he saw the pain in her eyes. "George Sewall most
kindly asked me to mother his small son--" she resumed, casually.
"But although he is the dearest--"

"Sewall did!" Peter exclaimed, rather struck. "Great Scott! his
father is one of the richest men in San Francisco."

"I know it," Alix agreed. "And he is one of the nicest men," she
added. "But of course he'll never really love any one but Ursula.
And I felt--oh, I felt too tired and alone and depressed to enter
upon congratulations and clothes and family dinners with the
Sewalls," she ended, a little drearily. "I wanted--I wanted things
in the old way--as they were--" she said, her voice thickening.

"I know--I know!" Peter said, sympathetically. And for a while
there was silence in the little house, while the rain fell
steadily upon the dark forest without, and soaked branches swished
about eaves and windows. "Can you put me up to-night?" he asked,
suddenly. He liked her frank pleasure.

"Rather! I think Cherry's room was made up fresh last Monday," she
told him. "And to-morrow," she added, with a brightening face,
"we'll walk up to your house, and see what six months of Kow's
uninterrupted sway have done to it!"

"That's just what we'll do!" he agreed, enthusiastically. "And
we'll have some music--"

She had risen, as if for good-nights, and was now beside the old
square piano, where she had placed the lamp.

"I haven't touched it--since--" she said, sadly, sitting on the
stool, and with her eyes still smiling on him, putting back the
hinged cover. And a moment later her hands, with the assurance and
ease of the adept, drifted into one of the songs of the old days.

"Do you remember the day we put the rose tree back, Peter?" she
asked. "When Martin was almost a stranger? And do you remember the
day Cherry and I fell into the Three Wells and you and Dad had to
disappear while we dried our clothing on branches of trees? And do
you remember the day we made biscuits, over by the ocean?"

"I remember all the days," he answered, deeply stirred.

"We didn't see all this, then," Alix mused, still playing softly.
"Anne claiming everything for her husband, you and I here talking
of Dad's death, and Cherry married--" She sighed.

"She's not happy?" he questioned quickly.

Alix shrugged, pursing her lips doubtfully.

"She's not unhappy," she told him, with a troubled smile. "It's
just one of those marriages that don't ever get anywhere, and
don't ever stop," she added. "Martin has faults, he's
unreasonable, and he makes enemies. But those aren't the faults
for which a woman can leave her husband. Oh, Peter," she added,
laying a smooth warm hand on his, and looking straight into his
eyes with her honest eyes, "don't go away again! Stay here in the
valley for a week or two, and help me get everything worked out
and thought out--I've been so much alone!"

"Dear old Alix!" he said, sitting down on the bench beside her and
putting his arm about her. She dropped her head on his shoulder,
and so they sat, very still, for a long minute. Alix's hand went
to her own shoulder, and her fingers tightened on his, and she
breathed deep, contented breaths, like a child.

"Somebody ought to wire Mrs. Grundy, collect," she said, after
awhile.

"We will defy Mrs. Grundy, my dear," Peter said, kissing the top
of a soft brown braid, "by trotting off hand in hand tomorrow and
getting ourselves married. Why, Alix, he gave us his consent years
ago--don't you remember?"

"He DID wish it!" she said, and burst into tears.

"I seem to be doing things in a slightly irregular manner," she
said to him the next day, when they had gotten breakfast together,
and were basking in the sunlight of the upper deck of the
ferryboat, on their way to the city. "I spend the night BEFORE my
marriage alone--alone in a small country house hidden in the
woods--with my betrothed, and propose to buy my trousseau
immediately after the ceremony!"

"I feel like saying to you what the dear old French archbishop
said to the small child," Peter smiled, marvelling a little
nonetheless at her untouched serenity. "He was speaking to all the
children in some institution, and came to this little one: 'ET TU
ETES NEGRE? AH, BIEN--BIEN, CONTINUEZ--CONTINUEZ!' It's what makes
you yourself, Alix, doing everything just a little differently."

"Marrying you, far from seeming a radical or momentous thing to
do," she assured him, "seems to me like getting back into key--
getting out of this bad dream of loneliness and change--securing
something that I thought was lost!"

Her voice fell to a dreamy note, and she watched the gulls,
wheeling in the sunshine, with thoughtful, smiling eyes. The man
glanced at her once or twice, in the silence that followed, with
something like hesitation, or compunction, in his look.

"Look here, Alix--let's talk. I want to ask you something. Or,
rather, I want to tell you something--or, rather--"

"CONTINUEZ--CONTINUEZ!" she said, laughing, as he hesitated.

"There's never been anything--anything to tell you--or your
father, if he was here," Peter said, flushed and a trifle awkward,
"I'm not that kind of a man. I was a crippled kid, as you know,
all for books and music and walks and older people. But there HAS
been that one thing--that one woman--"

Flushed, too, she was looking at him with bright, intelligent
eyes.

"But I thought she never even knew--"

"No, she never did!"

Alix looked back at the gulls.

"Oh, well, then--" she said, indifferently.

"Alix, would you like to know about her?" Peter said bravely. "Her
name--and everything?"

"Oh, no, please, I'd much rather not!" she intercepted him
hastily, and after a pause she added, "Our marriage isn't the
usual marriage, in that way. I mean I'm not jealous, and I'm not
going to cry my eyes out because there was another woman--is
another woman, who meant more to you, or might have! I'm going
into it with my eyes wide open, Peter. I know you love me, and I
love you, and we both like the same things, and that's enough."

Three weeks later he remembered the moment, and asked her again.
They were in the valley house now, and a bitter storm was whirling
over the mountain. Peter's little cabin rocked to the gale, but
they were warm and comfortable beside the fire; the room was lamp-
lighted, scented by Alix's sweet single violets, white and purple,
spilling themselves from a glass bowl, and by Peter's pipe, and by
the good scent of green bay burning. The Joyces had had a happy
day, had climbed the hills under a lowering sky, had come home to
dry clothes and to cooking, for Kow was away, and had finally
shared an epicurean meal beside the fire.

Peter was wrapped in deep content; the companionship of this
normal, pretty woman, her quick words and quick laugh, her music,
her glancing, bright interest in anything and everything, was the
richest experience of his life. She had said that she would change
nothing in his home, but her clever white fingers had changed
everything. There was order now, there was charming fussing and
dusting, there were flowers in bowls, and books set straight, and
there was just the different little angle to piano and desk and
chairs and tables that made the cabin a home at last. She wanted
bricks for a path; he had laughed at her fervent, "Do give me a
whole carload of bricks for Christmas, Peter!" She wanted bulbs to
pot. He had lazily suggested that they open the town house while
carpenters and painters remade the cabin, but she had protested
hotly, "Oh, do let's keep it just as it always was!"

Smiling, he gave her her way. She amused him day after day. He
watched her, marvelling at the miracle that was woman. He heard
her in the kitchen, interrogating the Chinese: "You show me
picture your little boy!" He heard her inveigling Antone, the old
Italian labourer, into confidences.

Tonight he watched her in great satisfaction; he liked to have her
here in his home, one of the pretty Stricklands, Peter Joyce's
wife. Nobody else was here, nobody else belonged here, they were
masters of their own lives. She quite captivated him by her
simplicity and frankness; she washed her masses of brown hair and
shook it loose in the sunshine, and she came in wet more than
once, and changed her shoes before the fire--just as she had years
ago, when she was a madcap little girl running wild through the
woods.

They had been talking of Cherry, as they often did. Alix's
favourite topic was her little sister; she had almost a maternal
pride and fondness where Cherry was concerned. Today she had been
house-cleaning, and had brought some treasures downstairs. She had
showed Peter Cherry's old exercise books: "Look, Peter, how she
put faces in the naughts and turned the sevens into little sail-
boats! And see the straggling letters--'Charity Strickland!' I've
always hated to destroy them. She was such a lazy, cunning little
scholar!"

Peter, smiling at the old books, had remembered her, a small,
square Cherry, with a film of gold falling over a blazing cheek,
and mutinous blue eyes. Ah--the wonderful eyes were wonderful even
then--

The date gave him a moment's shock. Only eight--only seven years
ago she had been a schoolgirl! Cherry was not yet twenty-three--

"I wish she had married a little differently," Alix said,
thoughtfully. "Cherry isn't exacting. But she does like pretty
gowns and pretty rooms, and to do things as other girls do!"

"You should have married the mining engineer," he told her. "Red
Creek would have had no terrors for you!

"I should have loved it!" she agreed, carelessly.

A curious expression flashed into her face. She was smiling; but
immediately the smile faded, and she looked back at the fire with
puzzled eyes.

"If I loved a man, Peter, the place and the house and the money
wouldn't matter much!" she answered after awhile, in a slightly
strained voice.

"Perhaps," he suggested, still thinking of Cherry, "that's the
trouble!"

She gave him a quick, almost frightened look.

"The--the trouble?" she stammered. And with a little ashamed laugh
she added, "What trouble?"

For a long time he looked at her in silence, at first puzzled,
gradually fitting meaning and interpretation to his words and her
own. Presently their eyes met, and with her little gruff boyish
laugh she came over to the low seat at his knee.

"You see that there is something just a little wrong, then?" she
asked.

"Between you and me, Alix?" he questioned in return, his fine hand
tight upon hers, and his affectionate, brotherly look searching
her face.

"Well, don't you, Peter?" she countered.

"I hadn't noticed anything, my dear, except that you are making a
lonely, solitary man a very happy one," he answered, with his
grave smile.

"But that--" she contended, with scarlet cheeks, but bravely "--
that isn't marriage!"

"What ought marriage be?" he smiled, half humouring her, half
concerned.

For answer she looked keenly, almost wistfully, into his face. He
had noticed this look more than once of late.

"I don't know," she said softly, after awhile, with a little
discouraged shrug of her shoulders. "I always thought that when a
man and a woman liked each other--oh, thoroughly--liked the same
things, had everything in common, that that was enough. And--for
the woman I was a month ago, it would have been enough, Peter!"
she added in a puzzled tone.

"You've changed then, Mrs. Joyce?"

"That's it," she agreed. "I'm not the same woman. I couldn't, as a
girl, estimate what life was going to be as a wife."

"Perhaps no girl can," he suggested, interested now.

"Well, that's just what I'm thinking, Peter!" she smiled, a little
ruefully. And again she gave him the look that was new, that was
not all timid nor wistful nor appealing, yet somehow partook of
all three. "You see, you feel that nothing can change you," she
elucidated further, "and you are perfectly sure of yourself, from
your old standpoint. And then the--well, the mental and spiritual
and physical miracle of marriage DOES change you, and it is as if
you had entered into a contract for a totally strange woman!"

She was so intent, so bright and earnest, as she turned a fire-
flushed face to his, that he felt an odd moisture pricking his
eyes.

"Alix," he said, affectionately, "where do I fail you?"

For a moment she was silent, her bright eyes fixed on his.
Gradually the serious look on her face lightened, and her
customary smile twitched at the corners of her mouth.

"I married you under a misapprehension," she said. "I thought you
had about three hundred dollars a year! It appears that you have
more than that every month--every week, for all I know--"

"You knew my mother had that old Pacific Avenue place!" he
answered with concern. "I never for one second deceived--"

"Oh, you idiot!" Alix laughed. "I don't mind being rich at all, I
like it. I don't want to live in the city, or join women's clubs,
and all that, but I like having my own check-book--truly, I do! As
for all the silver and portraits and rugs and things, why, we may
like them some day."

He was not listening to her; there was a sorry look in his eyes.

"You know, Alix," he said, suddenly, "you've made life a different
thing to me. I never had any woman near me before, and to hear
your voice about the house, and your piano, and your laugh--why,
it's wonderful to me. I've been alone here so many years, not
knowing really how much of life I missed, and you've brought it
all to me. Why, even to have Mrs. Florence at the post office ask
me for 'Mrs. Joyce,' gives me a warm, happy sort of feeling! I--"
he stroked the smooth hand under his own; there was real emotion
in his voice, "I'd do a good deal to show you how grateful I am,
old girl," he finished. "I wish you could tell me where I fail,
and I'd move heaven and earth to please you!"

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