Further Chronicles of Avonlea — Ch. X: The Son of His Mother, pt. 2
"Not a step will I stir till you promise.
Say you won't go to see that girl any more, and there's nothing I won't do for you.
But if you put her before me, I'll not go in--I never will go in."
With most women this would have been an empty threat; but it was not so with Thyra, and Chester knew it.
He knew she would keep her word.
And he feared more than that.
In this frenzy of hers what might she not do?
She came of a strange breed, as had been said disapprovingly when Luke Carewe married her.
There was a strain of insanity in the Lincolns.
A Lincoln woman had drowned herself once.
Chester thought of the river, and grew sick with fright.
For a moment even his passion for Damaris weakened before the older tie.
"Mother, calm yourself.
Oh, surely there's no need of all this!
Let us wait until to-morrow, and talk it over then.
I'll hear all you have to say.
Come in, dear."
Thyra loosened her arms from about him, and stepped back into a moon-lit space.
Looking at him tragically, she extended her arms and spoke slowly and solemnly.
"Chester, choose between us.
If you choose her, I shall go from you to-night, and you will never see me again!"
"Mother!"
"Choose!"
she reiterated, fiercely.
He felt her long ascendancy.
Its influence was not to be shaken off in a moment.
In all his life he had never disobeyed her.
Besides, with it all, he loved her more deeply and understandingly than most sons love their mothers.
He realized that, since she would have it so, his choice was already made--or, rather that he had no choice.
"Have your way," he said sullenly.
She ran to him and caught him to her heart.
In the reaction of her feeling she was half laughing, half crying.
All was well again--all would be well; she never doubted this, for she knew he would keep his ungracious promise sacredly.
"Oh, my son, my son," she murmured, "you'd have sent me to my death if you had chosen otherwise.
But now you are mine again!"
She did not heed that he was sullen--that he resented her unjustice with all her own intensity.
She did not heed his silence as they went into the house together.
Strangely enough, she slept well and soundly that night.
Not until many days had passed did she understand that, though Chester might keep his promise in the letter, it was beyond his power to keep it in the spirit.
She had taken him from Damaris Garland; but she had not won him back to herself.
He could never be wholly her son again.
There was a barrier between them which not all her passionate love could break down.
Chester was gravely kind to her, for it was not in his nature to remain sullen long, or visit his own unhappiness upon another's head; besides, he understood her exacting affection, even in its injustice, and it has been well-said that to understand is to forgive.
But he avoided her, and she knew it.
The flame of her anger burned bitterly towards Damaris.
"He thinks of her all the time," she moaned to herself.
"He'll come to hate me yet, I fear, because it's I who made him give her up.
But I'd rather even that than share him with another woman.
Oh, my son, my son!"
She knew that Damaris was suffering, too.
The girl's wan face told that when she met her.
But this pleased Thyra.
It eased the ache in her bitter heart to know that pain was gnawing at Damaris' also.
Chester was absent from home very often now.
He spent much of his spare time at the harbor, consorting with Joe Raymond and others of that ilk, who were but sorry associates for him, Avonlea people thought.
In late November he and Joe started for a trip down the coast in the latter's boat.
Thyra protested against it, but Chester laughed at her alarm.
Thyra saw him go with a heart sick from fear.
She hated the sea, and was afraid of it at any time; but, most of all, in this treacherous month, with its sudden, wild gales.
Chester had been fond of the sea from boyhood.
She had always tried to stifle this fondness and break off his associations with the harbor fishermen, who liked to lure the high-spirited boy out with them on fishing expeditions.
But her power over him was gone now.
After Chester's departure she was restless and miserable, wandering from window to window to scan the dour, unsmiling sky.
Carl White, dropping in to pay a call, was alarmed when he heard that Chester had gone with Joe, and had not tact enough to conceal his alarm from Thyra.
"'T isn't safe this time of year," he said.
"Folks expect no better from that reckless, harum-scarum Joe Raymond.
He'll drown himself some day, there's nothing surer.
This mad freak of starting off down the shore in November is just of a piece with his usual performances.
But you shouldn't have let Chester go, Thyra."
"I couldn't prevent him.
Say what I could, he would go.
He laughed when I spoke of danger.
Oh, he's changed from what he was!
I know who has wrought the change, and I hate her for it!"
Carl shrugged his fat shoulders.
He knew quite well that Thyra was at the bottom of the sudden coldness between Chester Carewe and Damaris Garland, about which Avonlea gossip was busying itself.
He pitied Thyra, too.
She had aged rapidly the past month.
"You're too hard on Chester, Thyra.
He's out of leading-strings now, or should be.
You must just let me take an old friend's privilege, and tell you that you're taking the wrong way with him.
You're too jealous and exacting, Thyra."
"You don't know anything about it.
You have never had a son," said Thyra, cruelly enough, for she knew that Carl's sonlessness was a rankling thorn in his mind.
"You don't know what it is to pour out your love on one human being, and have it flung back in your face!"
Carl could not cope with Thyra's moods.
He had never understood her, even in his youth.
Now he went home, still shrugging his shoulders, and thinking that it was a good thing Thyra had not looked on him with favor in the old days.
Cynthia was much easier to get along with.
More than Thyra looked anxiously to sea and sky that night in Avonlea.
Damaris Garland listened to the smothered roar of the Atlantic in the murky northeast with a prescience of coming disaster.
Friendly longshoremen shook their heads and said that Ches and Joe would better have kept to good, dry land.
"It's sorry work joking with a November gale," said Abel Blair.
He was an old man and, in his life, had seen some sad things along the shore.
Thyra could not sleep that night.
When the gale came shrieking up the river, and struck the house, she got out of bed and dressed herself.
The wind screamed like a ravening beast at her window.
All night she wandered to and fro in the house, going from room to room, now wringing her hands with loud outcries, now praying below her breath with white lips, now listening in dumb misery to the fury of the storm.
The wind raged all the next day; but spent itself in the following night, and the second morning was calm and fair.
The eastern sky was a great arc of crystal, smitten through with auroral crimsonings.
Thyra, looking from her kitchen window, saw a group of men on the bridge.
They were talking to Carl White, with looks and gestures directed towards the Carewe house.
She went out and down to them.
None of these who saw her white, rigid face that day ever forgot the sight.
"You have news for me," she said.
They looked at each other, each man mutely imploring his neighbor to speak.
"You need not fear to tell me," said Thyra calmly.
"I know what you have come to say.
My son is drowned."
"We don't know THAT, Mrs. Carewe," said Abel Blair quickly.
"We haven't got the worst to tell you--there's hope yet.
But Joe Raymond's boat was found last night, stranded bottom up, on the Blue Point sand shore, forty miles down the coast."
"Don't look like that, Thyra," said Carl White pityingly.
"They may have escaped--they may have been picked up."
Thyra looked at him with dull eyes.
"You know they have not.
Not one of you has any hope.
I have no son.
The sea has taken him from me--my bonny baby!"
She turned and went back to her desolate home.
None dared to follow her.
Carl White went home and sent his wife over to her.
Cynthia found Thyra sitting in her accustomed chair.
Her hands lay, palms upward, on her lap.
Her eyes were dry and burning.
She met Cynthia's compassionate look with a fearful smile.
"Long ago, Cynthia White," she said slowly, "you were vexed with me one day, and you told me that God would punish me yet, because I made an idol of my son, and set it up in His place.
Do you remember?
Your word was a true one.
God saw that I loved Chester too much, and He meant to take him from me.
I thwarted one way when I made him give up Damaris.
But one can't fight against the Almighty.
It was decreed that I must lose him--if not in one way, then in another.
He has been taken from me utterly.
I shall not even have his grave to tend, Cynthia."
"As near to a mad woman as anything you ever saw, with her awful eyes," Cynthia told Carl, afterwards.
But she did not say so there.
Although she was a shallow, commonplace soul, she had her share of womanly sympathy, and her own life had not been free from suffering.
It taught her the right thing to do now.
She sat down by the stricken creature and put her arms about her, while she gathered the cold hands in her own warm clasp.
The tears filled her big, blue eyes and her voice trembled as she said: "Thyra, I'm sorry for you.
I--I--lost a child once--my little first-born.
And Chester was a dear, good lad."
For a moment Thyra strained her small, tense body away from Cynthia's embrace.
Then she shuddered and cried out.
The tears came, and she wept her agony out on the other woman's breast.
As the ill news spread, other Avonlea women kept dropping in all through the day to condole with Thyra.
Many of them came in real sympathy, but some out of mere curiosity to see how she took it.
Thyra knew this, but she did not resent it, as she would once have done.
She listened very quietly to all the halting efforts at consolation, and the little platitudes with which they strove to cover the nakedness of bereavement.
When darkness came Cynthia said she must go home, but would send one of her girls over for the night.
"You won't feel like staying alone," she said.
Thyra looked up steadily.
"No. But I want you to send for Damaris Garland."
"Damaris Garland!"
Cynthia repeated the name as if disbelieving her own ears.
There was never any knowing what whim Thyra might take, but Cynthia had not expected this.
"Yes.
Tell her I want her--tell her she must come.
She must hate me bitterly; but I am punished enough to satisfy even her hate.
Tell her to come to me for Chester's sake."
Cynthia did as she was bid, she sent her daughter, Jeanette, for Damaris.
Then she waited.
No matter what duties were calling for her at home she must see the interview between Thyra and Damaris.
Her curiosity would be the last thing to fail Cynthia White.
She had done very well all day; but it would be asking too much of her to expect that she would consider the meeting of these two women sacred from her eyes.
She half believed that Damaris would refuse to come.
But Damaris came.
Jeanette brought her in amid the fiery glow of a November sunset.
Thyra stood up, and for a moment they looked at each other.
The insolence of Damaris' beauty was gone.
Her eyes were dull and heavy with weeping, her lips were pale, and her face had lost its laughter and dimples.
Only her hair, escaping from the shawl she had cast around it, gushed forth in warm splendor in the sunset light, and framed her wan face like the aureole of a Madonna.
Thyra looked upon her with a shock of remorse.
This was not the radiant creature she had met on the bridge that summer afternoon.
This--this--was HER work.
She held out her arms.
"Oh, Damaris, forgive me.
We both loved him--that must be a bond between us for life."
Damaris came forward and threw her arms about the older woman, lifting her face.
As their lips met even Cynthia White realized that she had no business there.
She vented the irritation of her embarrassment on the innocent Jeanette.
"Come away," she whispered crossly.
"Can't you see we're not wanted here?"
She drew Jeanette out, leaving Thyra rocking Damaris in her arms, and crooning over her like a mother over her child.
When December had grown old Damaris was still with Thyra.
It was understood that she was to remain there for the winter, at least.
Thyra could not bear her to be out of her sight.
They talked constantly about Chester; Thyra confessed all her anger and hatred.
Damaris had forgiven her; but Thyra could never forgive herself.
She was greatly changed, and had grown very gentle and tender.
She even sent for August Vorst and begged him to pardon her for the way she had spoken to him.
Winter came late that year, and the season was a very open one.
There was no snow on the ground and, a month after Joe Raymond's boat had been cast up on the Blue Point sand shore, Thyra, wandering about in her garden, found some pansies blooming under their tangled leaves.
She was picking them for Damaris when she heard a buggy rumble over the bridge and drive up the White lane, hidden from her sight by the alders and firs.
A few minutes later Carl and Cynthia came hastily across their yard under the huge balm-of-gileads.
Carl's face was flushed, and his big body quivered with excitement.
Cynthia ran behind him, with tears rolling down her face.
Thyra felt herself growing sick with fear.
Had anything happened to Damaris?
A glimpse of the girl, sewing by an upper window of the house, reassured her.
"Oh, Thyra, Thyra!"
gasped Cynthia.
"Can you stand some good news, Thyra?"
asked Carl, in a trembling voice.
"Very, very good news!"
Thyra looked wildly from one to the other.
"There's but one thing you would dare to call good news to me," she cried.
"Is it about--about--" "Chester!
Yes, it's about Chester!
Thyra, he is alive--he's safe--he and Joe, both of them, thank God!
Cynthia, catch her!"
"No, I am not going to faint," said Thyra, steadying herself by Cynthia's shoulder.
"My son alive!
How did you hear?
How did it happen?
Where has he been?"
"I heard it down at the harbor, Thyra.
Mike McCready's vessel, the _Nora Lee_, was just in from the Magdalens.
Ches and Joe got capsized the night of the storm, but they hung on to their boat somehow, and at daybreak they were picked up by the _Nora Lee_, bound for Quebec.
But she was damaged by the storm and blown clear out of her course.
Had to put into the Magdalens for repairs, and has been there ever since.
The cable to the islands was out of order, and no vessels call there this time of year for mails.
If it hadn't been an extra open season the _Nora Lee_ wouldn't have got away, but would have had to stay there till spring.
You never saw such rejoicing as there was this morning at the harbor, when the _Nora Lee_ came in, flying flags at the mast head."
"And Chester--where is he?"
demanded Thyra.
Carl and Cynthia looked at each other.
"Well, Thyra," said the latter, "the fact is, he's over there in our yard this blessed minute.
Carl brought him home from the harbor, but I wouldn't let him come over until we had prepared you for it.
He's waiting for you there."
Thyra made a quick step in the direction of the gate.
Then she turned, with a little of the glow dying out of her face.
"No, there's one has a better right to go to him first.
I can atone to him--thank God, I can atone to him!"
She went into the house and called Damaris.
As the girl came down the stairs Thyra held out her hands with a wonderful light of joy and renunciation on her face.
"Damaris," she said, "Chester has come back to us--the sea has given him back to us.
He is over at Carl White's house.
Go to him, my daughter, and bring him to me!"
