The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster (pdf to ebook reader txt) 📕

them. And in this she was seconded very amiably, by Frederica. But Portia had put down a categorical veto on all these attempts. She hadn't the inclination nor the energy, she said, and her mother needed all the time she could spare away from her business. Once, when Rose pressed the matter, she gave a more genuine reason. Rose's new friends, she said, would regard her introduction to them solely as a bid for business. She didn't want them coming around to her place to buy their wedding presents "in order to help out that poor old maid sister of Rose Aldrich's." She was getting business enough in legitimate ways.

Sometimes she told herself that if Rose had really wanted her, she'd have pressed the matter harder--wouldn't have given up unless she was clutching with real relief at an excuse that let her out of an embarrassment. But at other times she accused herself of having acted in a petty snobbish spirit in declining the chance not only for pleasant new friendships, especially Frederica's, but for a closer association with her sister. Well, the thing was done now, and the question certainly never would rise again.

The reason why it couldn't arise again was what Portia came to tell Rose this morning. She hoped she'd be able to tell it gently--provide Rose with just the facts she'd have to know, and get away without letting any other facts escape, so that afterward she'd have the consolation of being able to say to herself, "That was finely done." All her life, she told herself, she had been doing fine things grudgingly, mutilating them in the doing. If she weren't very careful, that would happen this morning. If she could have known the truth and made her resolution, and confided it to Rose during the first hours of her mother's illness, when the fight for life had drawn them together, it would not have been hard. But with the beginning of convalescence, when Rose, with an easy visit and a few facile caresses, could outweigh in one hour, all of Portia's unremitting tireless service during the other twenty-three, and carry off as a prize the whole of her mother's gratitude and affection, the old envy and irritation had come back threefold.

Rose greeted her with a "Hello, Angel! Why didn't you come right up? Isn't it disgraceful to be lying around in bed like this in the middle of the morning?"

"I don't know," said Portia. "Might as well stay in bed, if you've nothing to do when you get up." She meant it to sound good-humored, but was afraid it didn't. "Anyhow," she added after a straight look into Rose's face, "you look, this morning, as if bed was just where you ought to be. What's the matter with you, child?"

"Nothing," said Rose, "--nothing that you'd call anything at any rate."

Portia smiled ironically. "I'm still the same old dragon, then," she said. And then, with a gesture of impatience, turned away. She hadn't meant to begin like that. Why couldn't she keep her tongue in control!

"I only meant," said Rose very simply, "that you'd say it was nothing, if it was the matter with you. I've seen you, so many times, get up looking perfectly sick and, without any breakfast but a cup of black coffee, put on your old mackintosh and rubbers and start off for the shop, saying you were all right and not to bother, that I knew that was what you'd say now, if you felt the way I do."

"I'm sorry," said Portia. "I might have known that was what you meant. I wonder if you ever want to say ugly things and don't, or if it's just that it never occurs to you to try to hurt anybody. I didn't mean to say that either. I've had a rather worrying sort of week."

"What is it?" said Rose. "Tell me about it. Can I help?"

"No," said Portia. "I've thought it over and it isn't your job." She got up and went to the window where Rose couldn't see her face, and stood looking out. "It's about mother," she concluded.

Rose sat up with a jerk. "About mother!" she echoed. "Has she been ill again this week? And you haven't let me know! It's a shame I haven't been around, but I've been busy"--her smile reflected some of the irony of Portia's--"and rather miserable. Of course I was going this afternoon."

"Yes," said Portia, "I fancied you'd come this afternoon. That's why I wanted to see you alone first."

"Alone!" Rose leaned sharply forward. "Oh, don't stand there where I can't see you! Tell me what it is."

"I'm going to," said Portia. "You see, I wasn't satisfied with old Murray. That soothing bedside manner of his, and his way of encouraging you as if you were a child going to have a tooth pulled, drove me nearly wild. I thought it was possible, either that he didn't understand mother's case, or else that he wouldn't tell me what he suspected. So a week ago to-day, I got her to go with me to a specialist. He made a very thorough examination, and the next day I went around to see him." Her voice got a little harder and cooler. "Mother'll never be well, Rose. She's got an incurable disease. There's a long name for it that I can't remember. What it means is that her heart is getting flabby--degenerating, he called it. He says we can't do anything except to retard the progress of the disease. It may go fast, or it may go slowly. That attack she had was just a symptom, he said. She'll have others. And by and by, of course, a fatal one."

Still she didn't look around from the window. She knew Rose was crying. She had heard the gasp and choke that followed her first announcement of the news, and since then, irregularly, a muffled sound of sobbing. She wanted to go over and comfort the young stricken thing there on the bed, but she couldn't. She could feel nothing but a dull irresistible anger that Rose should have the easy relief of tears, which had been denied her. Because Portia couldn't cry.

"He said," she went on, "that the first thing to do was to get her away from here. He said that in this climate, living as she has been doing, she'd hardly last six months. But he said that in a bland climate like Southern California, in a bungalow without any stairs in it, if she's carefully watched all the time to prevent excitement or over-exertion, she might live a good many years.

"So that's what we're going to do. I've written the Fletchers to look out a place for us--some quiet little place that won't cost too much, and I've sold out my business. I thought I'd get that done before I talked to you about it. I'll give the house here to the agent to sell or rent, and as soon as we hear from the Fletchers, we'll begin to pack. Within a week, I hope."

Rose said a queer thing then. She cried out incredulously, "And you and mother are going away to California to live! And leave me here all alone!"

"All alone with the whole of your own life," thought Portia, but didn't say it.

"I can't realize it at all," Rose went on after a little silence. "It doesn't seem--possible. Do you believe the specialist is right? They're always making mistakes, aren't they--condemning people like that, when the trouble isn't what they say? Can't we go to some one else and make sure?"

"What's the use?" said Portia. "Suppose we did find a man who said it probably wasn't so serious as that, and that she could probably live all right here? We shouldn't know that he was right--wouldn't dare trust to that. Besides, if I drag mother around to any more of them, she'll know."

Rose looked up sharply. "Doesn't she know?"

"No," said Portia in that hard even voice of hers. "I lied to her of course. I told her the doctor said her condition was very serious, and that the only way to keep from being a hopeless invalid would be to do what he said--go out to California--take an absolute rest for two or three years--no lectures, no writing, no going about.

"You know mother well enough to know what she'd do if she knew the truth about it. She'd say, 'If I can never be well, what's the use of prolonging my life a year, or two, or five; not really living, just crawling around half alive and soaking up somebody else's life at the same time?' She'd say she didn't believe it was so bad as that anyway, but that whether it was or not, she'd go straight along and live as she's always done, and when she died, she'd be dead. Don't you know how it's always pleased her when old people could die--'in harness,' as she says?"

Her voice softened a little as she concluded and the tenseness of her attitude, there at the window, relaxed. The ordeal, or the worst of it, was over; what she had meant to say was said, and what she had meant not to say, if hinted at once or twice, had not caught Rose's ear. She turned for the first time to look at her. Rose was drooping forlornly forward, one arm clasped around her knees, and she was trying to dry her tears on the sleeve of her nightgown. The childlike pathos of the attitude caught Portia like the surge of a wave. She crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. She'd have come still closer and taken the girl in her arms but for the fear of starting her crying again.

"Yes," Rose said. "That's mother. And I guess she's right about it. It must be horrible to be half alive;--to know you're no use and never will be. Only I don't believe it will be that way with her. I believe you told her the truth without knowing it. It's just a feeling, but I'm sure of it. She'll get strong and well again out there. You'll think so, too, when you get rested up a little.--You're so frightfully tired, poor dear. It makes me sick to think what a week you've had. And that you've gone through it all alone;--without ever giving Rodney and me a chance to help. I don't see why you did that, Portia."

"Oh, I saw it was my job," Portia said, in that cool dry way of hers. "It couldn't work out any other way. It had to be done and there was no one else to do it. So what was the use of making a fuss? It was easier, really, without, and--I didn't want any extra difficulties."

"But all the work there must have been!" Rose protested. "Selling your shop, and all. How did you ever manage to do it?"

"That was luck, of course," Portia admitted. "Do you know that Craig woman? You may have met her. She's rather on the fringe of your set, I believe. She's got a good deal of money and nothing to do, and I think she's got a fool notion that it'll be _chic_ to go 'into trade.' She came and offered to buy me out a month ago, and of course I wouldn't listen. But just by luck she called me up again the very day I went to talk to the specialist. I asked for twenty-four hours to think it over, and by that time I'd made up my mind. I got a very good price from