Kay's Story pt 12 - The Haunting Words

George’s letter, being apart from her family, missing David, anticipating Sylvia—it all weighed down on her heart with crushing force, heightened by this humiliating ordeal with Ferdinand.  Remembering his amused and patronizing tone, and those smouldering eyes, she huffed across the small room in a blaze, pounding her back down onto her narrow bed.  Gazing up at the ceiling, she blew wisps of hair away from her eyes.  If any of her cabin mates returned to the room just now they would’ve though she was trying to bore holes in the ceiling with her burning glare. 

            Pride stung, Elianna didn’t feel like praying at that moment.  Instead she rolled over to the edge of the bed to reach for the leather bound journal that was in her suitcase under the bed.  She would take her mind off of her woes by distracting herself with Sylvia’s. 

January 15, 1910

     This winter is abominable.  I. HATE. THIS. PLACE.

            Elianna smirked.  Quite childish she’s becoming, she thought.

January 21, 1910

     Snow.  More snow.  My mind seems to be losing sanity and every last shred of patience.  Sometimes I am so angry that I can only laugh.  Laugh!  Me—Sylvia Rose MacDonald—laughing like a deranged woman!  Who am I?  I scarcely know anymore. 

     I hate God.  I shudder to think of someone reading such an admission from my pen, but it is true.  I’m certain he could have avoided the mess that is my present circumstance.  But he has not.  David is a blustering fool for loving this god as he does.  There is so much more to life.  There must be.  I have tasted enough of the stiff restraints of moralism.  Elianna is one of those fools, devoting all her time to helping the riffraff girls like Beth Knox find enough firewood.  She makes me sick—the joy she finds in stupid small things, the way she’s perfect.  I don’t know why David didn’t marry her years ago.  They’re just peachy for each other.  A match made in heaven for sure.

     I make myself sick.  My lies, my façade that I accomplish with effortless spontaneity, my dark moods these days.  I have never felt so wicked, so full of dark shadows.  Not a few times thus far have I looked out the pane at the snow blanketing the world, and I have longed to die, even if it meant taking my own life.    

Elianna paused.  A lone tear spilled down her left cheek, and she savored the sensation.  Something was rising out of pity in her heart.  Was it love?  Whatever it was, she felt the impulse to pray for this broken and confused woman.  Even more bewildering was her memory of that season.  Sylvia had truly appeared in public as though nothing of this sort had ever affected her.  Her cunning in showmanship was not exaggerated.

            Elianna recalled well what came next.  Sylvia received word that her grandmother had died.  The complication that arose, however, was that her mother had contracted a strange fever, and she was wholly unfit to travel.  Sylvia’s mother had always been fragile, and this worried her to no end.  Her father said that it may be months before she would be healthy enough to journey back.  It was best for Sylvia and her brother to remain in America. 

            The tone of the journal became even more bitter.  Sylvia moaned and groaned through several more entries until she fell ill. David came often to keep her company at her bedside.  Sometimes he convinced her to let him read to her.  He found the two volumes Lady Ashmore had given her for Christmas and read both of them to her from cover to cover.  She was too weak and sometimes too disoriented to protest.  As she recalled, the warm tones of his voice soothed her and calmed her anxious heart, distracting her mind from the dreariness of her life.  The words washed over her “like a sea of oil”, mostly incomprehensible in her delirium and exhaustion.  But she did remember hearing the word God and the name Jesus Christ so often that it began to fill her “like the great swell of a tide.” 

            The sickness racked her body severely.  What had begun as a hard case of influenza had turned into pneumonia.  On one of her lucid days she wrote,

     The mirror despises me, and I cannot blame it.  Why David persists in coming to endure my wasted appearance is past my comprehension.  The doctor says I am improving now.  The worst of it is over.  Although I have heard or understood little from the books David read to me, I cannot stop the repeating of a certain phrase: “Thy mercy, O Lord, endureth forever; forsake not the work of thine own hands.”  I do not even know in which book it may be found.  But it haunts me in a way that does not frighten me.  At night I have awakened to my own voice nearly shouting the words.  When I open my eyes in the morning I am immediately aware of them crowding my mind.  When fevers have overtaken me I found that I could only repeat them as I writhed in bed, almost as a prayer from my own heart, unbidden, and yet entirely comforting.  Look at how I am writing!  I scarcely recognize it as my own; the ancient language of those books must be moulding it.  I am still too weak to write much more than this.  My brother will be coming soon to visit my room.