Patricia (21 page)

And it wasn't as if Patricia was a babe in arms still. It took time to know people and find out all about them, meantime Patricia was almost twenty-four, yet apparently as carefree and happy as when a child. When her mother protested, she frankly owned that she did not want to be tied down. She declared she was not sure she would ever care for any man enough to want to live her life out with him. And when her mother asked aghast, “Mercy! Patricia, what else could you do? You couldn't get a divorce. You know your father would never stand for that!” Patricia only laughed and replied:

“Why, I hadn't thought about that, dearest. I'm sure there would be plenty of other things to do besides getting married. There always have been.”

“But,” said her mother, “there has always been Thorny!”

“Yes,” said Patricia with a sigh, “that's the trouble! There has always been Thorny. I never can stir without Thorny, and I'm getting fed up with it.”

Then she flitted away to a golf game with a perfectly new young naval officer whom she had just met.

Sometimes she wondered to herself whether after all she had a haunting fear of a possible truth underlying her mother's words that had prevented her so far from cutting Thorny entirely out of her life. It could be done, of course, if she really went at it in earnest. Why had she not done it? Would she miss him? Had Thorny become a habit? Or was it just that her apathy concerning him was because she dreaded the combat with her mother that would surely come if she sent Thorny away absolutely.

Well, and why couldn't she give up and marry Thorny? He seemed to care for her. It would satisfy her mother, and in a way she would be much freer than she was now, having to account for every breath she breathed. Or would she? Her memories of Thorny still haunted her. Had he really changed?

But they had nothing in common. And that vague longing of her soul that had never been wholly satisfied, could that find satisfaction as Thorny's companion? It wasn't thinkable. Must she just surrender and take life as it came, giving up all the sweet dreams of a home someday where God would be honored and life be an anteroom of heaven? It wasn't thinkable that Thorny would ever be one who would be willing to have family worship every day. She almost laughed at the idea. Wasn't that a pretty good guide? Or was she just what some of her friends called her, a sentimentalist?

But she didn't love Thorny. She never felt happy when he tried to embrace her. She remembered too vividly that time he kissed her so violently in the woods. She would never let him touch even so much as her hand. Always when he tried to be affectionate, she turned away, laughed pleasantly, suddenly asked him a question about something utterly irrelevant, and managed to get out of the room as soon as possible.

Thorny of late had been exceedingly restive under Patricia's continued indifference, and one day he broached the subject before her mother.

“I say, Mrs. Prentiss, what's the matter with your daughter that I can't get any answer out of her when I ask her to marry me? I'm about fed up on being put off. I think she ought to say yes or no, don't you?”

“Why, Patricia, how rude of you!” said Mrs. Prentiss.

“Mother, I've told him no a great many times!” protested the girl quickly with a light laugh. “The trouble is he won't take no for an answer.”

“Now, Patricia, I think you ought to be serious about this. It's time you sat down and really considered the matter. Thorny has been very patient, and it isn't fair for you to act this way. Everybody knows that probably in the end you will marry him, and you are getting yourself unnecessarily talked about. I don't like it. It is time to end all this and know just where we stand. Patricia, I am serious. I ask you to set a definite day when you will answer Thorny. A good young woman does not play around with the leniency of the man who wishes to marry her. She does not lead him on, and yet go with this one and that, and leave him to wait her pleasure. I am ashamed of you. It looks as if you were trying to make Thorny jealous.”

“Mother! I haven't been doing that!” protested Patricia stormily. “And I have never led Thorny on. He knows himself that I have told him no time and time again, and then I finally settled down to just consider him a good friend. But that doesn't suit either.”

Her mother eyed her in scorn.

“It does seem, my child, as if you were crazy. Acting this way to such a wonderful boy as Thorny. I'm afraid, my dear, you will bitterly regret this someday. And for your own sake I am going to ask you to set a definite time, a day, when Thorny may expect a real answer from you, and you will begin to plan your life and end this suspense.”

Patricia looked at her mother in despair, then her eyes went down for a minute thoughtfully. At last she looked up.

“All right!” she said huskily. “Call it one month from today.”

“Very well,” said her mother firmly. “Put that date down, Thorny, so we won't forget it,” said Mrs. Prentiss with satisfaction.

“All right, Mother Prentiss, I'll do that little thing. Although I don't really have to, you know. That's a date I don't forget. May the fifth. That's the day I came home to go to the picnic with Pat. Don't you remember? I had the dickens of a time getting off from school that day. I was supposed to be cheerleader in the biggest game of the season that year. And that was the day I first discovered what a little beauty our Pat had become. That was the day my devotion to you first began, Pat.”

Patricia looked at him wide eyed. That day! The day her real torments from him had begun! Not the day she went to that dear home on the hillside! The day the lilies of the valley were in bloom and John Worth had walked home with her in the twilight! Oh, not that day! Not that!

“Wait!” she said suddenly. “Suppose you make it May fifteenth. That will be better.”

“No!” said Thorny stubbornly. “I prefer the fifth, and you gave your word, you know.”

“Yes, Patricia,” said her mother, “we can't have any backing out nor hedging. That is just what you have been doing for a long time, and I won't have that going on any longer. We'll call it the fifth of May, and we'll give a party. We'll give a party to all your friends, and you shall announce your decision to them. Now, that's decided. We won't talk any more about it. The whole thing is settled and I'm going to send out invitations.”

“Oh!” said Patricia in a stricken voice. “Am I to have no voice in who shall be invited?”

“Well, of course if there's anybody else besides the ones we want you can have them, I suppose,” said her mother, “but I don't imagine there'll be any trouble about that. There is, of course, just our regular group of friends.”

Patricia looked at her mother with stormy eyes and then huskily agreed. But she walked out of the room and upstairs. She stayed by herself while Thorny and her mother conversed, Thorny emerging with a possessive look of triumph on his face, Mrs. Prentiss with the brightness of worry in her eyes.

All the rest of that day she stayed by herself and faced her future, trying to look ahead and see just what was the right thing to do. At last she prayed a sad little prayer, asking the Lord to show her just what was wrong with herself that she didn't want to decide a matter like this. Asking Him not to let her do anything that would make her unhappiness and wrong in the future. Asking Him to take out of her heart the things that made her unhappy and restless, to show her a right way clearly ahead.

When she crept to her bed at last and tried to see if any answer had been given her, it was all just as mixed-up as ever. There was her mother and Thorny on the one hand, and her own uncertainty on the other. Personally she would have been just as content to go on and live from day to day without considering marriage at all. But that didn't seem to be what was considered the right thing for her to do, and she wanted above all things to do right. There seemed to be no question of her own pleasure in the matter, and shouldn't people be happy, be really in love when they married?

“There!” she said at last, unhappily, one day about a week before the party. “I'll just go ahead to the time, and the Lord will show me what to do then, I'm sure He will. If He doesn't I'll be sure He wants me to marry Thorny. But somehow it isn't at all what I thought marrying would be. I thought it was supposed to make people happy, and this only seems to me like a kind of slavery.”

During the days that followed she tried several times to think of an engagement with Thorny calmly, as inevitable, a foregone conclusion, but something in her continually rebelled.

She tried to tell herself, as her mother had often told her, that all girls felt that way about the man they were going to marry until they were married, and that he was probably her reasonable mate, her “fate,” as she put it to herself. But the future as Mrs. Thornton Bellingham looked dark indeed to her, and she shrank from it inexpressibly.

Day after day went by, and still she had not finally faced the question with herself, had not even told herself whether her answer was to be yes or no. She doubted sometimes, if even when she stood upon her feet to announce her decision, she would be any clearer in her mind about it than she was now in her present distraught state.

And day by day as the night of the dinner approached, she found herself wildly hoping that some Power, greater than her own, would intervene and save her, or that somehow there would be given some light upon her way.

But now the day was almost upon her, and she was breathless over the thought of it.

She felt as if she were blindly walking into a trap. She was vexed with herself that she had promised her mother and the young man to settle the question on the evening of the party. If only she could go on being free and not be heckled and nagged to make a decision. If only she could be a little girl again and somehow begin life over, like a bit of knitting that could be unraveled to be knit up right once more without a mistake. There seemed to have been some stitch dropped in her life, some loop of life's thread left out that made all her young span look wrong. Something that might have changed it all to joyous living.

She blamed herself for being weak and unable to stand against her mother's bitter sarcasm, her hints that she was growing older every day and that she wasn't treating Thorny in an honorable way. There was something about her mother's persistence that wore her down to utter discouragement and made her feel that anything, even marriage with Thorny, might be better than being continually blamed and nagged and managed.

And yet—well, there was still a brief period in which to think this thing out. She had hoped that somehow she could get a saner view before the time was actually upon her. Perhaps by talking to someone, even that pilot she had just met. He seemed a sensible person, with a clear brain. Perhaps she could put a hypothetical case to him and get him talking about generalities that would help her. That had been her hope when she impulsively invited him and decided to seat him beside herself. At least he was someone to hold off Thorny for a little while at the last minute until she could be sure, could think just what to say when she was called upon for her decision.

To that end she had seated Thorny far down the table by her mother's side. It was her own dinner. She had arranged all such details herself. But she felt as if the walls of a vast stone prison were slowly closing around her heart to crush her. As each day rushed on she felt more and more desperate.

Twice she had tried to talk to her father about it, but it always seemed as if some evil power were trying to prevent her.

The first time she broached the subject she got only as far as one sentence:

“Dad, do you think that people ever should marry when they are not sure they love each other?”

She asked it anxiously one evening when they were sitting on the porch alone for a few moments to watch the sunset.

He looked at her keenly, yearningly; but before he could answer a servant came up respectfully.

“Mr. Prentiss, you're wanted on the telephone.”

And then before he was through telephoning, suddenly there were callers, just neighbors, who stayed and stayed, and there was no more opportunity to speak to him alone that night. Nor for two whole days following. There wasn't a time when she could see her father alone without exciting her mother's curiosity.

At last another brief time came, and she plunged into her trouble once more.

“Dad, is it ever right to marry unless you are sure you love the man?”

Again he looked up sharply.

“No,
never
!” he said almost fiercely. And then, still watching her keenly, “Do you mean that slick Thorny Bellingham?” he asked suddenly.

All at once there was a footstep in the hall and Mrs. Prentiss came to the door, pausing to look suspiciously at the two.

“What are you to having a secret conclave about?” she asked sharply. “Why do you always have to hide in corners to do your talking?”

Before either could answer, the doorbell interrupted and a telegram for Mr. Prentiss broke in upon their plans for the evening.

“I must leave for New York on the next train!” he announced, annoyed. “Something important in the business world has gone wrong, and I have to see a certain man tonight before he sails for a foreign land. I hope I'll be back in the morning, but I can't tell how things will turn out. It may take longer than I think, perhaps several days.”

There was no time to talk further. He was gone in a rush, and Patricia, almost sick with worry, wept alone that night and prayed. Oh, if her father would only come back in the morning! Why hadn't she talked to him about it before?

But day after day came telegrams instead, that he was detained still longer.

And then finally he didn't come until a few minutes before that awful dinner the very night of the party. It was grotesque! It was unbelievable, that he should be kept away so long! And she had prayed so much that God would help her, guide her, send her some definite word, and nothing had happened! Oh, she still believed in prayer, of course, but it must be some wrong attitude of her own somehow. But, oh, why didn't God send her some help?

There wasn't a minute to talk to her father after he came. She didn't have even an instant alone with him. She had meant to tell him all about her perplexity and the foolish promise she had made to Thorny and her mother. But now it was too late. She had only time for a hasty kiss as her guests were arriving and a hurried whisper:

“I'm having a party tonight, Dad, and you're the guest of honor. Hurry up and get ready!”

It was just then the telephone rang and she was called for. Her father was upstairs hastily dressing in evening garb, while she was receiving the apologies of the recreant pilot. And she was in such a tumult. If she only could have talked with her father for just five minutes and got his calm view of things, she might have been strong to face the evening. But there wasn't an instant.

And then she suddenly took in what her pilot was saying, that he could not possibly get there, and her heart almost failed her. Here was even this brief respite from Thorny torn away from her!

Her brows were drawn with annoyance, her eyes were full of trouble. She hadn't realized how much it was meaning to her to get away from Thorny for that last hour before she had to give her final word. It seemed as though there had been no time to think for the last two weeks. Her mother had been cheerfully going ahead preparing for this night, getting every last detail just as she wanted it, and there had been too much tumult in her heart for her to reason things out in the calm right way they should be reasoned. Even yet, though she had done her best to think of an engagement with Thorny, marriage with Thorny, as a foregone conclusion, she had not frankly told herself whether she would say yes or no when the moment came. Perhaps she was hoping that they would not press her at the last minute to keep her word, though she ought to have known them both better than that. Her mother's cheerful determined mouth, Thorny's possessive eyes, told her there was no hope from that quarter. And on the other hand if she should dare to assert her independence and say no, what catastrophe she would bring down upon the house. It would be too unpleasant to stay there after that. She shivered at the thought.