Mrs. Tracy had recovered. The keys of the Willows were safely back in her drawer, and she and Laura Lou began again going to the house on stated days. On those days Vance usually stayed at home to write in the stuffy little dining room; or, if the stuffiness was too oppressive, wandered off up the mountain, past the gates of Eaglewood, past the highest-lying farms, to the open ridges below Thundertop.
Mrs. Tracy’s day was Saturday. On her first return to the Willows she apparently discovered nothing unusual or out of order; if she had, Vance would certainly have heard of it. She had never thrown off the worry of having to entrust the keys to him, and had manifestly expected to find books dislodged and cigarette ends lying about, if nothing worse.
“I told Mother you’d be ever so careful,” Laura Lou reported afterward with a little smile of triumph; and Vance, pushing his manuscript aside, smiled back absently: “After the scare I had in that house —!”
He was not afraid of scares now. He knew that on the days when he went to the Willows he was still supposed by his wife and mother-inlaw to be “at the office.” And so, technically, he was. After all, he had simply transferred his papers from a precarious desk corner at the New Hour to the sanctuary of Miss Lorburn’s library. He no longer needed Mrs. Tracy’s keys (those damned keys!) for Halo Tarrant had her own, and was always there before him. He did not remember how that tacit arrangement had been established, nor at whose suggestion he and she, when the afternoon’s work was over, invariably restored every book to its place, locked up the manuscript in a cupboard below the bookshelves, and buried their cigarette ends in the border outside of the window. On the day when Mrs. Tarrant had first surprised him in the library Vance had confessed that his wife and mother-in-law did not know of his coming to the Willows to work, and had told her his reasons for keeping his visits secret. She had understood in a flash — when did she not? — and all their subsequent precautions had grown out of that brief avowal, without any comment or question that he could remember.
That was one of her rare qualities, to him perhaps the rarest: the way she took things for granted, didn’t forever come harping back on them. That, and her not asking questions — personal questions. In the world of Euphoria and the Tracys the women did nothing but ask questions. They never stopped asking questions. The only things that seemed to interest them unfailingly were the things a man might conceivably want to keep to himself. They had noses like shooting dogs for those particular things, whatever they were; a good part of the time a man spent away from his women had to be devoted to inventing prevarications as to how he spent it. If a fellow had only strolled down to the station to see the Chicago express come in, he would invent something else from the mere force of habit. . . . With Mrs. Tarrant it was different. She had a way of dashing straight at the essentials. And anyhow, she didn’t seem to care how Vance spent his time when he was away from her, an indifference as surprising to him in a woman friend as in wife or sweetheart. No one had ever cross-questioned him more searchingly than his own sisters; yet here was a woman with whom he was on terms of fraternal intimacy — who shared with him almost daily the long hushed midsummer afternoons, yet seemed interested only in the hours they lived together in fervid intellectual communion. The truth was that, both as Halo Spear and as Halo Tarrant, she had always appeared to Vance less as a simple human creature than as the mysterious custodian of the unknown, a being who held the keys of knowledge and could render it accessible and lovely to him. The first day she had found him at work on his new tale she had plunged into his enchanted world with him, and there they met again each afternoon. She had entered instantly into his idea of evoking the old house and its dwellers, and as he advanced in his task she was there at each turn, her hands full of treasure, like a disciple bringing refreshment to an artist too engrossed to leave his work. Only it was he who was the disciple, not she: he who, at each stage, had something new to learn of her. He had brought his fresh untouched imagination to the study of the old house and the lives led in it — a subject which to her had seemed too near to be interesting, but to him was remote and poetic as the Crusades or the wars of Alexander. And he saw that, as she supplied him with the quaint homely details of that past, she was fascinated by the way in which they were absorbed into his vision, woven into his design. “I don’t see how you can feel as those people must have felt. I suppose it’s because they’re already history to you. . . . Don’t forget that Alida” (Elinor Lorburn had become Alida Thorpe) “would always have had her handkerchief in her hand: with a wide lace edge, like the one I brought down from Eaglewood to show you yesterday. . . . It’s important, because it made them use their hands differently. . . . And their minds too, perhaps . . . like the old gentlemen I remember when I was a child, who always carried their hat and gloves into the drawing room when they called. And her wedding dress” (for their Alida was to have had the hope of marriage) “would, I think, have been like my great-great~grandmother’s: India mull, embroidered at Madras, and brought back on one of her grandfather’s merchantmen. For of course all their finery would have been stored away for generations in those old chests we found in the attic. Elinor really was an epitome of six or seven generations — the last chapter of a long slowly moving story.”
“Ah — slowly moving! That’s it! If I could get the pace the way you seem to give it to me when you tell me all those things . . .”
He leaned his elbows on the scattered pages and stared at her across the table. The long folds of the green velvet table cover drooped to the floor between them, and from her shadowy place above the mantel Miss Lorburn looked down meditatively on the young pair who were trying to call her back to life. Halo Tarrant, facing him, her dark hair parted on her temples, her thin face full of shadowy hollows, seemed in the shuttered summer light, almost as ghostly as Miss Lorburn. “I wonder — ” Vance broke out, laying down his pen to look at her. “Have you had to give up things too . . .?”
“Give up things . . .?”
“I mean: a vision of life.”
“Oh, THAT—!” She gave a faint laugh. “Who doesn’t? Luckily one can recapture it sometimes — in another form.” She pointed to the manuscript. “That’s exactly your theme, isn’t it?”
He nodded. The allusion sent him back to his work. He did not know why he had strayed from it to ask her that question — the first personal question he had ever put to her. But there were moments when the shape of her face, the curves of her hair and brows, reminded him so startlingly of the thwarted lady above the mantel that the comparison sent a pang through him. And then Mrs. Tarrant would burst into banter and laughter, would flame with youthful contradictions and enthusiasms, and he would wonder how he could have seen in her any resemblance to the sad spinster who had leaned on winter evenings on the green velvet table, reading Coleridge.
“Yes — but it was Coleridge; don’t forget that! It wasn’t The Saints’ Rest or The Book of Martyrs.” That had been one of Halo’s first admonitions. Vance was not to make a predestined old maid or a pious recluse out of his Alida. She must be a creature apt for love, but somehow caught in the cruel taboos and inhibitions of her day, and breaking through them too late to find compensation except under another guise: the guise of poetry, dreams, visions. . . . That was how they saw her.
His work had always been engrossing to Vance — something he was driven to by an irresistible force. But hitherto it had been laborious, thankless, full of pitfalls and perplexities, as much a weariness as a joy, and always undertaken tentatively, hazardously, with a dread lest the rich fields through which it beckoned should turn into a waterless desert. Now he felt at ease with his subject, assurance grew in him as he advanced. For beside him was that other consciousness which seemed an extension of his own, in which every inspiration, as it came, instantly rooted and flowered, and every mistake withered and dropped out of sight. He was tasting for the first time the creator’s supreme joy, the reflection of his creation in a responsive intelligence; and young as he was, and used to snatching what came to him as recklessly as a boy breaking the buds from a fruit tree, he was yet deeply aware of the peculiar quality of this experience.
“That about the handkerchief always in her hand — that’s the kind of thing that gives me the pace . . . .” He leaned back, rumpling his hair and looking straight ahead of him into his dream. He had been reading aloud the afternoon’s work, and Halo, as her way was, sat silent, letting the impression of the reading penetrate her.
“You see, from the first day I set foot in this house I got that sense............