Finish, Good Lady

by LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS

“Finish, Good Lady, the bright day is done And we are for the dark.”

OH, I know all about you, Miss Delaney!” Mrs. Codman declared in her high voice. “You were with old Mrs. Lord. And before that with my cousin, Angeline Trevor. You taught school once at Miss Higby’s! And you even once wrote a book. On the girlhood of Queen Victoria. You see, I have my dossier.” She shook a little memorandum pad in a tortoise-shell case.

I confess that I was surprised and flattered. The mention of my poor forgotten little book had the effect of completely unsettling me. If you were an old maid who had to touch up her hair to look young enough to get a job as an old lady’s companion, and if you had traveled by bus all the way from New York to Anchor Harbor, Maine, on the strength of a telegram from a complete stranger, you would know how gratifying such things could be. “Fancy your knowing all that!”

I exclaimed.

“Well, you see I don’t like to get just anyone for Mama,” she said quickly. “It’s shocking to me how my friends and contemporaries neglect their parents. They seem to think, don’t they, that if the poor old things have a drive in the park in the morning and a nap in the afternoon, they should be satisfied? but I am not like that. I live for my mother, Miss Delaney.”

I watched her carefully as she told me this. She was a tall, bony, handsome woman with a very powdered face and long brown hair drawn straight back over her head and exploding, at the back of her neck, in a huge cluster of tiny curls. I knew that she must be fifty-five, but she did not look it, any more than she looked any age. Her eyes moved back and forth without settling on me, and her hands, long and white like her face, fluttered vaguely at her sides. She seemed, with the exoticism of her Chinese robe and the elaborate affectation of her smile, to be trying to conceal her bigness and her strength. Yet her sentiments were commendable. There was no doubt of that.

“One should certainly look after one’s parents,” I said approvingly. “Too many people, as you say, forget.”

“Well, if we’re agreed on that, Miss Delaney,” she answered me brightly, “I think we must really be agreed on everything.”

When I left the vast living room, so desperately eighteenth century, crowded with porcelain figures of ladies curtsying and little gilt chairs, I went out on the terrace that overlooked the pine trees and the sparkling Maine ocean to breathe in the golden air. I was not at all sure that Mrs. Cod man and I would be agreed on everything, and my prosaic nature was already troubled by the sense of unreality with which the air was so charged, but beggars, after all, are in no position to be choosers. I had the job, and it was for the job that l had come.

I had been engaged for the rest of the season as a companion to Mrs. Lorne, Mrs. Codman’s octogenarian mother. The greal house of stone and shingle belonged, it appeared, to the old lady, and she and her daughter spent the summers of their widowhood in it together, waited on by eight maids in an atmosphere of stately and unrelieved femininity. The only representative of a third generation was Mrs. Codman’s married daughter, Nora Jones, a taciturn, diffident young woman who lived with her three small children in what had once been a gardener‘s cottage near the big house,

Mrs. Codman never seemed to take any particular interest in Nora; her preoccupation was entirely with Mrs. Lorne, whom she looked after with an assiduousness that considerably lessened my own duties. She look me out on the porch, on the morning after my arrival, to present me to her mother. Mrs. Lome was silting in a wicker chair, her shoulders hunched together, her head lowered and her gnarled, jeweled hands clasping a walking stick that was resting against her knees. Her face was long, oval, and rat her grim; her cheeks and eyelids drooped in a semblance of repose. She made me think of an old lizard basking in the sun; only the frivolity of the red and yellow flowers on her hat, so absurdly out of key with the rest of the picture, gave any evidence of her inner sense of union with Anchor Harbor.

“Mama, dearest, this is Miss Delaney,” Mrs. Codman began loudly, leaning down and putting an arm around her mother‘s shoulders. “You remember that I told you about Miss Delaney, don‘t you? She‘s come to read to you and be such a friend.”

Mrs. Lorne gave me a brief, inhospitable look. “I hope she‘s better than that Slater woman, anyway,” she said with the irresponsible rudeness that I had come to know so well in the old. “She was always reading me things I didn‘t want to hear. And mumbling, too. Do you remember how she mumbled, Alix? Like an old frog.”

Mrs. Codman smiled her mannered smile and put her head affectionately close to her mother‘s. “Oh, Miss Delaney won‘t mumble, darling,” she assured her. “She‘s a literary lady. She’s even published a book. A whole book.”

The old lady grunted. “As long as she doesn’t read it to me,” she retorted.

“Oh, she won’t,” her daughter again assured her. “Now we‘ll just see. Right away. Miss Delaney, would you mind reading Mama a column from the Anchor Bulletin? I have it here. Suppose you read us the social column? That would be so nice.” And she handed the paper to me, folded open at the art icle in quest ion.

I put on my pince-nez, cleared my throat, and started off in a rather nervous voice; “The younger fry were all agog last night at the soup and salmon supper that Archie Kriendl gave on board his new motor launch, 1 peg-o’-My–-Heart.”

I read on down the column, giving as cheerful an emphasis as I could to each note of its sterile gaiety. I assumed, of course, that it was only a test piece that had been chosen at random from the paper. I was surprised, therefore, to find, each time I looked up at them, that Mrs. Lorne and her daughter were following the reading with a scrupulous attention. As I continued on down through the seemingly endless list of dinners and cocktail parties that went to make up a single day of Anchor Harbor’s gay round, I had an odd feeling that the old lady was coming to life. She nodded or shook her head; she murmured indistinguishable little side remarks, throaty with approval, and once or twice she even laughed aloud with a cackling enthusiasm. When I came, with some embarrassment, to a reference to herself as the “grand old lady” of the peninsula, she nodded vigorously several times and cried, “How very sweet! ”

“That was dear of them,” Mrs. Codman agreed. “And Miss Delaney reads quite charmingly, don‘t you think?”

“Oh, quite. Yes, quite.”

“I think that will do for now, don’t you, Mama?”

“ I do, my dear.”

I handed back the newspaper to Mrs. Codman and went once more to the terrace to see if the ocean was still there.

2

So, at any rate, my duties began. The days were routine and monotonous, but a person in my work has to be prepared for that. Every morning after breakfast I went upstairs to Mrs. Loren’s sitting room to read her the morning gossip column. When I had finished this I read any other social columns in any other newspapers or magazines that might have arrived. On Sundays I had to read her the “cottage directory” of the summer colony, which appeared once a week, revised to embrace new arrivals and departures. It took nearly an hour to read through it, but Mrs. Lorne could not bear to have a line skipped and sometimes wanted whole sections read to her over and over again. At noon we went to the swimming club, where Mrs. Lorne sat at an umbrella table on the lawn by the pool and drank a cocktail, while her daughter roved in quest of people to bring over to speak to her. After lunch she rested before her drive with Mrs. Codman along the ocean road. On these drives I always occupied the folding seat and spoke only when Mrs. Codman, whose manners, though artificial, were very good, asked me a question. In the evening the old lady and her daughter either went out for dinner or entertained at home, while I had my supper in quiet upstairs in my room.

I had hoped, at first, despite the difference in our ages, to establish a friendship with Nora Jones, Mrs. Codman‘s daughter, who did not seem to share her mother‘s or grandmother‘s tastes. She gave me, however, little encouragement. Physically Nora resembled her grandmother; she was a tall, thin, rather charmless creature, with bobbed hair and hostile eyes that peered over the portcullis of her embattled personality, ready to pour hot pitch on the first unwelcome intruder. She spent most of her time looking after the children and rarely went out at night even when I volunteered to act as a sitter. She seemed, indeed, to scorn those who dined out.

“Everything in Anchor Harbor is a prelude to the evening,” she explained to me once. “Life begins at eight. Your job is to be a sort of masseuse to Granny so she’ll be able to sit up at the dinner table and talk right, talk left.”

“Wouldn’t Mrs. Lome be happier,” I remonstrated, “if she spent some of her evenings quietly at home?”

Nora gave a little snort. “Do you want to kill her?” she demanded.

It was extraordinary to me that a lady as old and as outwardly grim as Airs. Lome could take such an intense interest in the social life of the community. I had imagined that a face so wrinkled and austere might be the sign of thoughts grave and philosophic, yet her mind, far from turning 1 o the gates of a heaven so imminently to be opened, seemed to dwell exclusively on the doors of her neighbors that opened nightly at eight. She had, of course, always, during a long life, dined and been dined, and it. was possible that what may have been an occupation incidental to larger things had become, in her later years, an end in itself, a sort of pattern in the continuance of which she found a refuge from senility. Or it may have been senility itself. 1 could not tell. Hut what was totally inexplicable to me was Mrs. Codman’s seemingly passionate desire to satisfy, at every turn, her mother’s peculiar tastes.

Every night the two of them, one in black velvet with a pearl choker, and the younger in billowing taffeta and gauze veils, got into the old black town car that was drawn up under (be stone portecochere and sped off to their evening meal. When they stayed at home it was only to repay their obligations, and I used to watch from my window as the dark limousines rolled down the driveway to discharge their elderly cargo. The front hall on these occasions, filled with canes and wheel chairs, reminded me of the vestibule of the cathedral at Lourdes, which I had seen when traveling with Mrs. Trevor. Indeed, it was a curious world.

I felt this particularly one morning at the club when I was sitting, as usual, with Airs. Lome at an umbrella table as she sipped her noon Alartini. This was always a difficult time. The old lady regarded it as a social hour, a receiving time, but, unfortunately, many people who were perfectly willing to dine at her house, where the food and wine were good and llie company, from their point of view, congenial, eschewed her table at the club, where pleasanter groups were to be found on almost any part of the broad lawn by the pool.

On the morning I have mentioned, Mrs. Codman must have been unable to find a single recruit, for she had come back to the table alone and had sat down between me and her mother and was leaning forward, her elbows on the table, making conversation as smoothly and deliberately as if she had been acting as hostess at one of her larger and more difficult dinners. The “social hour,” apparently, was sacred, even with just the family present, and I could not help a certain grudging admiration for so granite a will power. Nora was sitting on the grass by our table watching her children as they splashed in the pool.

Airs. Lome and Airs. Codman were discussing a camp further inland that they were thinking of buying to get away, from time to time, from the gaiety of the summer colony. The old lady seemed particularly enthusiastic. “There’ll be one big cabin,” she was saying excitedly, “and a lot of little ones. I think there’ll even be one for Aliss Delaney, won’t there, Alix?”

“Of course there will, Alania, dear. We couldn’t go without Aliss Delaney.”

“And we’ll be able to give picnics,” Airs. Lome continued. “And have a canoe full of men with fiddles!”

“It’ll be such a wonderful place for Mama to rest,” Mrs. Codman said, looking tit me with her same smile and her wide inscrutable eyes, as if it were to be taken for granted that I, too, cared.

Nora turned unexpectedly from her children.

“And when the life in the woods gets too hectic,” she said sharply, “I suppose there’ll be camps beyond the camps? Why not? It’s a way of spending money, isn’t it?”

Airs. Codman looked calmly back at her daughter without answering. There was just the slightest lift of her eyebrows to indicate that she was in any way ruffled. The! she spied a possible candidate for the table, an old gentleman in tight, yellowing flannels who was hurrying across the flagstones, his eyes carefully averted from our group, and she was up and over the grass in pursuit.

“Spending money?” the old lady exclaimed. “Who’s talking about spending money?” She sounded agitated. “It’s my money, isn’t it? I can afford it, can’t I?”

Nora was again watching her children in the pool. “You’re the judge, Gran,” she said quietly. “If you are the judge.”

Airs. Lome looked down at her granddaughter vindictively. “If you wish to talk with me, Nora, I think you might have the ordinary politeness to get off the grass and sit at my table,” she snapped. “Your generation is turning into a bunch of nursemaids. And bad nursemaids, too,” she added.

I was dismayed at such petulance, even in a woman of her years. I turned to poor Nora, to reassure her with a wink or a smile of sympathy, only to be surprised in turn at the expression on her face. She was staring at the old lady with eyes that fairly glittered. “If I’m turning into a nurse, Gran,” she said in a clear, ominous tone, “perhaps you can tell me whose fault it is:”

“You have a husband, haven’t you?” Mrs. Lome demanded fretfully. “Can’t he support you? lias he failed?”

Nora’s lips moved into the semblance of a smile, “Yes,” she said coolly. “lie’s failed. Docs that satisfy you, Gran?” There was a sudden tenseness in her tone. “Am I sufficiently humbled now? Am I enough of a beggar for you?”

Mrs. Lome did not answer. She reached for her half-empty glass, but her hand trembled so that she knocked it over, and its contents spilled over the table and onto her dress. In the midst of the confusion Mrs. Codman reappeared. Without a word she dropped to her knees on the grass and started to dab at her mother’s dress with her handkerchief.

“She wants me to die, that daughter of yours, Alix,” Mrs. Lome babbled in her high, querulous voice. “She wants to cut me up into little pieces and feed me to those ravenous brats of hers!”

“There, there, dear,” Mrs. Codman murmured soothingly; “she’s simply young and selfish. We’re going home now. Come, Mama.” She helped the old lady up. As they were going oil-, however, she turned to Nora and hissed at her in a fierce voice too low for the old lady to catch: “1 can 1 leave Mama alone lor a second, but this happens. Will you never give up?”

J stared after them in amazement. 1 do not suppose that 1 had ever witnessed a scene so peculiarly distressing to my own ordered sense of how things should be. I turned doubtfully back to Nora. “You mustn’t mind what the old lady says, 1 said soothingly. “She doesn’t mean a word of it. She loves you in her heart, Mrs. Jones,” I continued. “She often talks to me about you.”

Nora placed her calm, suspicious eyes upon me and smiled. “Oh, Miss Delaney,” she reproved me. “Your immortal soul!”

3

THOUGHT about this scene a good deal during ihe next few days. It had a lingering effect in my mind that seemed too strong even for its ugliness. It was not so much, I decided, the lack of feeling between Nora and her grandmother that disturbed me. I had lived long enough with the old to accept as a regrettable but obvious fact that their descendants, particularly those of a more remote degree, often regard their continued existence with an impatience concealed only by caution. What bothered me, therefore, much more, was Mrs. Codman’s unhesitating adoption of her mother’s point of view as opposed to her daughter’s. Nora might not have been an ingratiating young woman, but there was a certain integrity in her plainness of manner and speech that appealed to me. In air atmosphere of abounding luxury she appeared to have no part. She dressed simply and acted, as her grandmother had so harshly put it, like a nursemaid.

All during the long sermon in the little church on the following Sunday, as I sat behind the old lady and Mrs. Codman, I reflected on the latter’s preoccupation with the older generation. Was it. good? Or hopelessly bad? Was it natural? Or was it so abnormal as to be responsible for all of the strange atmosphere in Mrs. Lome s house; was it like Lear’s abdication, as I used to teach the girls at Miss 11 igby’s, an act that outraged nature and produced the inevitable tragedy of the play? It seemed significant that the minister had taken for his text that morning the fifth commandment.

A few nights later, when there was a conference of Episcopal ministers in Anchor Harbor, Airs. Codman actually found herself in need of an extra woman for one of her dinners, and I was obliged to attend. I sat in silence during the meal while my elderly dinner companions talked to the more engaging ladies on their other sides and I speculated on the waste, in a single Anchor Harbor summer, that went into this liturgical round of meals. Afterwards I was alone, away from the other ladies, when Nora came and sal beside me.

“How are you enjoying yourself, Aliss Delaney?” she asked in her faintly sarcastic tone. “Does it grow on you? They tell me it can.

I shook my head firmly, and she smiled.

“I guess you’re safe,” she said. “For a little while.”

I was bursting to protest at the whole scheme ol life, and this seemed to be my invitation. ’AN ill you tell me something, Mrs. Jones?” I asked, somewhat abashed at my own nerve. “Why do you stay here? \ou can t like it, can you?

She looked at me with a detached, amused air.

I felt that she was sizing me up. Not so much to see if I was worthy of her revelation as to anticipate my reaction to it. “It’s very simple,” she said. “I have no money.”

I gaped. “Not any?”

“Not a red cent,” she said casually. “Grans got it all. She’s sitting on the pile. Like an old dragon.”

I was shocked. “You shouldn’t speak so disrespectfully about your grandmother, I reproached her, Irving vainly’ to re-establish some of the thirtyyear difference between us. “When she passes on, she’ll leave you your proper share of her estate.

For the first time in our acquaintance I heard Nora laugh. “Fenella, you’re priceless!” she exclaimed, using my Christian name with a bold indifference that was doubly impertinent. “I’d like to keep you in a jar.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded indignantly.

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” she continued in the same mocking lone. “This turkey that you’ve been eating. This moderately good champagne that you’re drinking. The Servants around us. You, yourself, my friend. That’s my share.”

I stared at her. “ You mean,” 1 said, lowering my voice, “that your grandmother is living . . . beyond her means?”

“Beyond her means!” she exclaimed. “Beyond her ends!”

Most of my employers in the past had believed that it was wicked to spend principal. 1 suppose 1 must have unconsciously adopted their attitude, for I was appalled.

“But why?” I exclaimed. “Why does she do it?”

“You don’t think she knows about it, do you?” she came back at me. “Why, she’d die at the very idea! No, it’s my mother. Darling Mummie. She ladles it out for her, right and left. We romp through the remaining securities. It’s quite a romp, too, Fenella.” She looked about the vast room. “You’ll have to concede that.”

I shuddered and looked around at Mrs. Codman. She was talking with great animation to the lady on her right; her eyes were moving back and forth and her white, bare shoulders up and down. Mrs. Borne, at the opposite end of the room, was leaning way forwards toward her neighbor and shaking her old while head. I could hear the uncomprehending cackle of her laugh.

“You mean your mother’s spending all of Mrs. Lome’s money?” I demanded. “But what will she do when it’s used up?”

Nora raised her eyebrows. “What will il matter? She’ll have done her duty. She won’t, you see, have let Gran down.”

“Let her down? ”

“It’s Mummies mania,” Nora explained, “that people owe that to their parents. She wants Gran to live splendidly. To the end.”

J clenched my lists. “You must go to your grandmother!” I exclaimed. “You must tell her t he whole thing! ”

Nora smiled. “You don’t see it, Miss Delaney,”she said. “ You don’t see our situation at all. Gran would never believe me. You ought to have seen by now what I count for in this house.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat under her steady, compelling stare. She surrounded me with doors that seemed to bang in my face. Yet she gave me, at the same time, a feeling that something was expected of me.

“It can’t be any fun for you,” I said weakly.

“Fun? With children to educate?”

I clasped my hands together. “I’ll speak to her!" I cried.

“To whom?”

“ To your mot her.”

“To Mother!” she exclaimed.

“To Mrs. Lome then.”

She looked at me, I thought, with the same savage contempt that she had showm to her grandmother at the pool. It was as if all the contempt that she felt for Anchor Harbor had suddenly been focused on a single person. And that person, for no greater apparent reason than proximity, had to be me.

“Do you think she’d believe you?” she demanded with an acid bitterness. “Her paid companion? A person w ho’s employed to please her? Who even dyes her hair to look young for her?”

Instinctively I clasped my hands to my head. “It’s not dyed!” I cried. Never had I been so humiliated. “It may be touched up a bit, here and there. I admit il. And you shouldn’t speak that way to your elders, Nora Jones! You have no business to!”

But Nora only shrugged her shoulders and got up to move away. For a moment 1 sat there alone, staring in indignation at her stiff back as she crossed the room. Then, quite suddenly, I relaxed.

I even managed a little giggle at the audacity of her candor and at my self for thinking that I fooled people with my silly hair. She was so pathetic, this unbending, proud creature, with her neglected children. One had no business to look for sympathy in her tormented soul. One could only try to help.

II may have been absurd for a grizzled old companion like myself, hardened by years of intimate association with the senile, to presume to be of assistance to anyone as young and aristocratic as Nora, but who else was there? It seemed a shame for no one to strike a blow, however inadequate, in her defense. Perhaps I was an old fool, a frustrated mother, anything you will, but few had been the households in which a young matron had been willing, at her mother’s dinner party, to turn her attention to me, in front of all the more important friends, and call me impudently by my Christian name.

4

As might have been expected, I watched Mrs. Codman and Mrs. Lome, in the ensuing days, with a more observant ey e. 1 took a housekeeper’s note of the daily prolusion of flowers in the dark front ball, the shining while-walled tires on the ancient town cars, the ever twirling sprinklers on the closely eropped lawn that surrounded the house.

I saw all and counted all, but what could a creature like myself accomplish? There was no wray, directly or indirectly, in which 1 could limit the flow of the household extravagance. Once I suggested to Mrs. Codman, when she had summoned me to her room to discuss the plan of the day, that her mother was going out too much. She swung around immediately from the big triple mirror on her dressing table.

“The doctors say it keeps her young,” she retorted. “They say it’s the best thing in the world for her. I suppose you know more than the doctors, Miss Delaney.”

“It’s no way for a lady her age to be living,” I saiil with a courage that I hadn’t known before.

She got up and walked rapidly back and forth, kicking at the skirt of her dressing gown as she turned. ”1 have not employed you, my dear Miss Delaney,” she said sharply, “for your social advice.” ruder the powder was the countenance of a little girl, unjustly accused and passionately defensive.

After this altercation I was more than ever in a quandary. I was sure that 1 had to do with a woman who was, at least temporarily, in a highly neurotic state; it was obvious that normal arguments would carry little weight with her. There seemed to be nothing to do but appeal to the old lady herself, and this seemed a precarious solution.

I did not know whether or not she would understand the issues involved or what she would be able to do about them if she did. But then, what could I lose? My job. I thought of Nora stalking the streets looking for a job. Of her little son shining shoes. I think I must have become slightly irrational in my preoccupation. And then one day at the swimming club I heard something that steeled me to my desperate alternative. Mrs. Codman told me, at the umbrella table during the “social hour,” that she had decided definitely to buy the camp for her mother. A camp in the woods, twenty miles inland, by a lake. Three large cabins. A hundred acres.

Nora came upon me later, sitting there alone. “You look worried, Fenella,” she said, with her usual smile. “As if you’d seen a ghost.”

“They’re actually going to buy that camp!” I cried.

“Of course. Gran wants to be an eagle scout.”

“Mrs. Jones! ’This can’t go on!”

“Can’t it, Fenella?” She raised her eyebrows. “Can’t it really?”

I rebelled at her suavity, at the sunlit air. I gazed up over the umbrella tables and the shingle roof of the clubhouse at the unreal silhouettes of the distant mountains, cut like backdrops in a children’s theater against the blue sky. Life, after all, was not like the Shakespeare tragedies that I had taught at Miss Higby’s. ’There were things that could be done, and if no one else would do them, well, then, it was up to the companion.

The next morning, when I went upstairs for my reading hour with Mrs. Lome, I did not bring the newspaper. 1 arrived a few minutes early in the sitting room that connected her bedroom with her daughter’s, and the old lady’s door was still closed. I stood there for a moment, breathing hard, until I had got up the courage to go to the boule desk with the spindly, curved legs where Mrs. Codman wrote her letters, and pull open, one after the other, the little drawers into which I had seen her, during her daily “business” hour, sticking the residue of her scantily examined mail.

My inner predictions, alas, were more than justified. The drawers were stuffed to the very brim with papers that had been carelessly folded or crumpled and jammed in there, obviously over a long period of time. As my nervous fingers poked about, the contents fairly exploded over the monogrammed elegance of the blotter folder into my lap and onto the floor: bills, bills without limit or classification, stuffed away out of sight and out of mind, letters from law firms and telegrams, warning and agitated, from family friends and advisers. It seemed to me, as I glanced rapidly through this angry mass of paper protest, as though all the outraged feelings of the commercial world, whose rules of prudence and economy Mrs. Codman was so grossly violating, had finally erupted from their long confinement to overwhelm us. I may have been tense with excitement, but I was no longer afraid when I heard Mrs. Lome’s door open, nor did I move from my place at the desk.

“What arc you doing at my daughter’s desk?”

I heard ihe old lady ask sharply. “You know you have no business there.” I turned around as she came closer, and saw the sudden amazement on her features. “Why, you’ve been messing it up!” She gave an incredulous gasp. “ You must have taken leave of your senses!”

I summoned all my courage for the test. “I know I’ve done a terrible thing, Mrs. Lome,” I said as calmly as I could; “and I’m quite aware that you will probably wish to discharge me on the spot. But will you please, for your own sake as well as your family’s, look at the papers on this desk? I’m not saying anything about what’s in them. I’m only asking you to look at them. Before you buy your new camp!”

She leaned on her cane with both hands and looked at me narrowly. Her stupefaction seemed almost to have turned into curiosity. “Are you implying,” she demanded, “that I can’t afford it?”

“I’m only implying, Mrs. Lome,” I said, quailing, despite everything, at the sense which she gave me of my own impertinence, “that you should make a check.”

There was a silence. Then she seemed to recover her old imperiousness. “It seems to me that for a companion, Miss Delaney,” she said in a biting tone, “you’re singularly nosy.”

I nodded dumbly.

“And now,” she continued in the same tone, “will you be good enough to leave this room? If you’re quite through at Mrs. Codman’s desk?

I turned instinctively to repair some of the mess that I had left there.

“No, leave that!” she said sharply.

I turned again to face her; I pulled myself up defiantly for my final exit, but as I did sol realized suddenly what it was I was seeing in her eyes. It I was fear; indeed it was panic. I was so taken aback that for a long moment I felt the full intensity of her communicated anxiety. Because she knew. Of course, she knew! It was as if she were imploring me desperately to deny what I had seen, as if she believed, in some odd, senile fashion, that as long as nobody, even her daughter, knew that she knew, it did not have to be true, but if I knew, a stranger, a bleak, alien wind through the air of Anchor Harbor, then her blue sky and her blue sea would roll up and crumple like the papers on the desk and on the floor. I hovered there, appalled. I was as afraid now as she.

“Get out!” she cried in a sudden fit of temper. “I told you to get out, you meddling fool!”

I heard her voice still after me as I hurried down the corridor to my own room. Inside I fell on my knees by the bed with my head in my hands, too panic-stricken to think. I have no idea how long a time had passed, a half hour or an hour, when I heard a knock at my door and went to open it. It was Nora with an odd little smile on her face. “Have you heard about Gran?” she asked. I shook my head quickly. “She’s had another of her strokes. She was sitting at Mummic’s desk, of all places, and she’d made the most terrible mess of all her papers, I can’t imagine why. She can’t see enough to read.”

I leaned against the door and gave a little groan. Nora was still smiling. “Didn’t I tell you,” she said, shaking her head in mock reproach, “that you could do nothing?”

“Oh, Mrs. Jones,” I murmured in a sick voice.

“Don’t take it to heart, Fenella,” she said casually. “The old girl’s always having strokes. Maybe one of these days it’ll be the real McCoy. While it’s still worth while. If you know what I mean.”

I stared at her in horror. “You devil!” I cried.

For the second time that summer I heard Nora laugh. “My dear Miss Delaney,” she protested, “your emotions, I’m afraid, are beyond me. If there’s a devil in this house, are you so very sure it’s me?”

5

IT turned out that Mrs. Lorne’s stroke was a bad one indeed, but she lingered in a state of semiconsciousness. There was no further need for my services, and despite Mrs. Codman’s kind protests I insisted upon getting out of the way. I left the house and its atmosphere of hush and trained nurses early one morning, without saying good-bye to anyone. I could not, however, return to New York. I took a room in the village and called every morning at the house for news. I never ventured beyond the huge, dark antlered front hall where Mary, the waitress, gave me the daily bulletin. It was always the same: Mrs. Lome was still unconscious, and the doctors said the end might come any time. I do not know how I lived through those days and nights and the seething tumult of my thoughts.

One afternoon when Mary opened the wide white door I saw Mrs. Codman behind her, in the middle of the hall. Before Mary could speak I heard Mrs. Codman call to me. “Oh, it’s you, Miss Delaney! Do come in.”

I faltered on the doorstep and murmured an inquiry about her mother. “No, it’s all right, come in.” And she came over and took me by the arm. “I wanted to talk to you, Miss Delaney. Mama passed on this morning.” She led me through the hall and the darkened living room to the den, talking all the while in the same high, seemingly inappropriate tone. “It’s all over, you see, at last. She went very quietly at the end, just as we all would have wished. She never recovered consciousness.”

We sat down on the sofa, and I fumbled in my old bag for a handkerchief. My head was spinning, and there were tears in my eyes. Mrs. Codman, however, was very calm, very calm and dry-eyed. “I know how fond Mama was of you,” she continued, “and I want to thank you for your helpfulness this summer. You must come one day and select a piece of china as a keepsake.” Enruflled, poised, deliberate, she seemed even further from reality than before.

“ I was no help,” I said in a shaky voice, rubbing my nose with the handkerchief. “You did everything for your mother, Mrs. Codman. You were a wonderful daughter.”

“I?” She shook her head gently. “I wasn’t wonderful at all. I loved my mother, Miss Delaney. It’s as simple as that.” She ran her hands over the folds of her long afternoon dress, smoothing it down on the cushions. “Very few people lose their mothers when they’re my age, you know. But that, you see, is the love that God gave me to feel. And I must confess that God has His wavs of working out His purpose. We had been living, I must confess to you, extravagantly. Very soon I should have had to tell poor Mama. We should have had to sell things. It would have been quite terrible for her. Now, on the contrary, everything is as it should be. In some ways, Miss Delaney, you might say it was beautiful.”

She looked up in surprise as I stilled a sob, and pressed my handkerchief desperately against my lips. She interpreted this, of course, as the expression of my grief for her mother, as indeed in a way it was, and she leaned over to hiy a sympathetic hand upon mine. I could say nothing, and I sat. there stupidly while she tried to console me. She might as well, poor woman, have spared her pains, for 1 knew now how little beauty there was to be for me, in the haunted years that gaped ahead, in having been, however briefly, the unwitting agent of her God.