He looked as if he had not slept for a week; his fat eyelids drooped over his glassy eyes, and his cheeks and throat hung flaccid. He started as the apothecary's cat stole smoothly up and rubbed itself against his leg;and it was to him that the man said, "You want to take a table-spoonful of that, as long as you're awake.
I guess it won't take a great many to fetch you.""All right," said Lapham, and paid and went out.
"I don't know but I SHALL want some of it," he said, with a joyless laugh.
Irene came closer up to him and took his arm. He laid his heavy paw on her gloved fingers. After a while she said, "I want you should let me go up to Lapham to-morrow.""To Lapham? Why, to-morrow's Sunday, Irene! You can't go to-morrow.""Well, Monday, then. I can live through one day here.""Well," said the father passively. He made no pretence of asking her why she wished to go, nor any attempt to dissuade her.
"Give me that bottle," she said, when he opened the door at home for her, and she ran up to her own room.
The next morning Irene came to breakfast with her mother;the Colonel and Penelope did not appear, and Mrs. Lapham looked sleep-broken and careworn.
The girl glanced at her. "Don't you fret about me, mamma," she said. "I shall get along." She seemed herself as steady and strong as rock.
"I don't like to see you keeping up so, Irene,"replied her mother. "It'll be all the worse for you when you do break. Better give way a little at the start""I shan't break, and I've given way all I'm going to.
I'm going to Lapham to-morrow,--I want you should go with me, mamma,--and I guess I can keep up one day here.
All about it is, I don't want you should say anything, or LOOK anything. And, whatever I do, I don't want you should try to stop me. And, the first thing, I'm going to take her breakfast up to her. Don't!" she cried, intercepting the protest on her mother's lips. "I shall not let it hurt Pen, if I can help it. She's never done a thing nor thought a thing to wrong me. I had to fly out at her last night; but that's all over now, and I know just what I've got to bear."She had her way unmolested. She carried Penelope's breakfast to her, and omitted no care or attention that could make the sacrifice complete, with an heroic pretence that she was performing no unusual service.
They did not speak, beyond her saying, in a clear dry note, "Here's your breakfast, Pen," and her sister's answering, hoarsely and tremulously, "Oh, thank you, Irene." And, though two or three times they turned their faces toward each other while Irene remained in the room, mechanically putting its confusion to rights, their eyes did not meet.
Then Irene descended upon the other rooms, which she set in order, and some of which she fiercely swept and dusted.
She made the beds; and she sent the two servants away to church as soon as they had eaten their breakfast, telling them that she would wash their dishes.
Throughout the morning her father and mother heard her about the work of getting dinner, with certain silences which represented the moments when she stopped and stood stock-still, and then, readjusting her burden, forced herself forward under it again.
They sat alone in the family room, out of which their two girls seemed to have died. Lapham could not read his Sunday papers, and she had no heart to go to church, as she would have done earlier in life when in trouble.
Just then she was obscurely feeling that the church was somehow to blame for that counsel of Mr. Sewell's on which they had acted.
"I should like to know," she said, having brought the matter up, "whether he would have thought it was such a light matter if it had been his own children.
Do you suppose he'd have been so ready to act on his own advice if it HAD been?""He told us the right thing to do, Persis,--the only thing.
We couldn't let it go on," urged her husband gently.
"Well, it makes me despise Pen! Irene's showing twice the character that she is, this very minute."The mother said this so that the father might defend her daughter to her. He did not fail. "Irene's got the easiest part, the way I look at it. And you'll see that Pen'll know how to behave when the time comes.""What do you want she should do?"
"I haven't got so far as that yet. What are we going to do about Irene?""What do you want Pen should do," repeated Mrs. Lapham, "when it comes to it?""Well, I don't want she should take him, for ONE thing,"said Lapham.
This seemed to satisfy Mrs. Lapham as to her husband, and she said in defence of Corey, "Why, I don't see what HE'S done. It's all been our doing.""Never mind that now. What about Irene?""She says she's going to Lapham to-morrow. She feels that she's got to get away somewhere. It's natural she should.""Yes, and I presume it will be about the best thing FOR her.
Shall you go with her?"
"Yes."
"Well." He comfortlessly took up a newspaper again, and she rose with a sigh, and went to her room to pack some things for the morrow's journey.
After dinner, when Irene had cleared away the last trace of it in kitchen and dining-room with unsparing punctilio, she came downstairs, dressed to go out, and bade her father come to walk with her again. It was a repetition of the aimlessness of the last night's wanderings.
They came back, and she got tea for them, and after that they heard her stirring about in her own room, as if she were busy about many things; but they did not dare to look in upon her, even after all the noises had ceased, and they knew she had gone to bed.
"Yes; it's a thing she's got to fight out by herself,"said Mrs Lapham.
"I guess she'll get along," said Lapham. "But I don't want you should misjudge Pen either. She's all right too.
She ain't to blame."
"Yes, I know. But I can't work round to it all at once.
I shan't misjudge her, but you can't expect me to get over it right away.""Mamma," said Irene, when she was hurrying their departure the next morning, "what did she tell him when he asked her?""Tell him?" echoed the mother; and after a while she added, "She didn't tell him anything.""Did she say anything, about me?"
