Mathilde had been wrong in telling Wayne that her mother had gone
upstairs in obedience to an impulse of kindness. She had gone to
quiet a small, gnawing anxiety that had been with her all the day,
a haunting, elusive, persistent impression that something was wrong
between her and her husband.
All the day, as she had gone about from one thing to another, her mind
had been diligently seeking in some event of the outside world an
explanation of a slight obscuration of his spirit; but her heart, more
egotistical, had stoutly insisted that the cause must lie in her. Did
he love her less? Was she losing her charm for him? Were five years the
limit of a human relation like theirs? Was she to watch the dying down
of his flame, and try to shelter and fan it back to life as she had
seen so many other women do?
Or was the trouble only that she had done something to wound his aloof
and sensitive spirit, seldom aloof to her? Their intimate life had
never been a calm one. Farron’s interests were concentrated, and his
temperament was jealous. A woman couldn’t, as Adelaide sometimes had
occasion to say to herself, keep men from making love to her; she did
not always want to. Farron could be relentless, and she was not without
a certain contemptuous obstinacy. Yet such conflicts as these she had
learned not to dread, but sometimes deliberately to precipitate, for
they ended always in a deeper sense of unity, and, on her part, in a
fresh sense of his supremacy.
If he had been like most of the men she knew, she would have assumed
that something had gone wrong in business. With her first husband she
had always been able to read in his face as he entered the house the
full history of his business day. Sometimes she had felt that there was
something insulting in the promptness of her inquiry, “Has anything
gone wrong, Joe?” But Severance had never appeared to feel the insult;
only as time went on, had grown more and more ready, as her interest
became more and more lackadaisical, to pour out the troubles and,
much more rarely, the joys of his day. One of the things she secretly
admired most about Farron was his independence of her in such matters.
No half-contemptuous question would elicit confidence from him, so that
she had come to think it a great honor if by any chance he did drop
her a hint as to the mood that his day’s work had occasioned. But for
the most part he was unaffected by such matters. Newspaper attacks and
business successes did not seem to reach the area where he suffered or
rejoiced. They were to be dealt with or ignored, but they could neither
shadow or elate him.
So that not only egotism, but experience, bade her look to her own
conduct for some explanation of the chilly little mist that had been
between them for twenty-four hours.
As soon as the drawing-room door closed behind her she ran up-stairs
like a girl. There was no light in his study, and she went on into
his bedroom. He was lying on the sofa; he had taken off his coat, and
his arms were clasped under his head; he was smoking a long cigar. To
find him idle was unusual. His was not a contemplative nature; a trade
journal or a detective novel were the customary solace of odd moments
like this.
He did not move as she entered, but he turned his eyes slowly and
seriously upon her. His eyes were black. He was a very dark man, with
a smooth, brown skin and thick, fine hair, which clung closely to his
broad, rather massive head. He was clean shaven, so that, as Adelaide
loved to remember a friend of his had once suggested, his business
competitors might take note of the stern lines of his mouth and chin.
She came in quickly, and shut the door behind her, and then dropping on
her knees beside him, she laid her head against his heart. He put out
his hand, touched her face, and said:
“Take off this veil.”
The taking off of Adelaide’s veil was not a process to be accomplished
ill-advisedly or lightly. Lucie, her maid, had put it on, with much
gathering together and looking into the glass over her mistress’s
shoulder, and it was held in place with shining pins and hair-pins. She
lifted her head, sank back upon her heels, and raised her arms to the
offending cobweb of black meshes, while her husband went on in a tone
not absolutely denuded of reproach:
“You’ve been in some time.”
“Yes,”--she stuck the first pin into the upholstery of the sofa,--“but
Pringle told me Mathilde had a visitor, and I thought it was my duty to
stop and be a little parental.”
“A young man?”
“Yes. I forget his name--just like all these young men nowadays, alert
and a little too much at his ease, but amusing in his way. He said,
among other things--”
But Farron, it appeared, was not exclusively interested in the words
of Mathilde’s visitor; for at this instant, perceiving that his wife
had disengaged herself from her veil, he sat up, caught her to him, and
pressed his lips to hers.
“O Adelaide!” he said, and it seemed to her he spoke with a sort of
agony.
She held him away from her.
“Vincent, what is it?” she asked.
“What is what?”
“Is anything wrong?”
“Between us?”
Oh, she knew that method of his, to lead her on to make definite
statements about impressions of which nothing definite could be
accurately said.
“No, I won’t be pinned down,” she said; “but I feel it, the way a
rheumatic feels it, when the wind goes into the east.”
He continued to look at her gravely; she thought he was going to speak
when a knock came at the door. It was Pringle announcing the visit of
Mr. Lanley.
Adelaide rose slowly to her feet, and, walking to her husband’s
dressing-table, repinned her hat, and caught up the little stray locks
which grew in deep, sharp points at the back of her head.
“You’ll come down, too?” she said.
Farron was looking about for his coat, and as he put it on he observed
dryly:
“The young man is seeing all the family.”
“Oh, he won’t mind,” she answered. “He probably hasn’t the slightest
wish to see Mathilde alone. They both struck me as sorry when I left
them; they were running down. You can’t imagine, Vin, how little
romance there is among all these young people.”
“They leave it to us,” he answered. This was exactly in his accustomed
manner, and as they went down-stairs together her heart felt lighter,
though the long, black, shiny pin stuck harmlessly into the upholstery
of the sofa was like a mile-stone, for afterward she remembered that
her questions had gone unanswered.
Wayne was still in the drawing-room, and Mathilde, who loved her
grandfather, was making a gentle fuss over him, a process which
consisted largely in saying: “O Grandfather! Oh, you didn’t! O
_Grandfather_!”
Mr. Lanley, though a small man and now over sixty, had a distinct
presence. He wore excellent gray clothes of the same shade as his hair,
and out of this neutrality of tint his bright, brown eyes sparkled
piercingly.
He had begun life with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley was
in itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his relations
had obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated from Columbia
College he began to doubt whether the profession of being an aristocrat
in a democracy was a man’s job. At no time in his life did he deny
the value of birth and breeding; but he came to regard them as a
responsibility solemn and often irritating to those who did not possess
them, though he was no longer content with the current views of his
family that they were a sufficient attainment in themselves.
He was graduated from college in 1873, and after a summer at the family
place on the Hudson, hot, fertile, and inaccessible, which his sister
Alberta was at that time occupying, he had arranged a trip round the
world. September of that year brought the great panic, and swept away
many larger and solider fortunes than the Lanleys’. Mr. Lanley decided
that he must go to work, though he abandoned his traditions no further
than to study law. His ancestors, like many of the aristocrats of the
early days, had allowed their opinions of fashion to influence too much
their selection of real estate. All through the late seventies, while
his brothers and sisters were clinging sentimentally to brownstone
fronts in Stuyvesant Square or red-brick facades in Great Jones Street,
Mr. Lanley himself, unaffected by recollections of Uncle Joel’s
death or grandma’s marriage, had been parting with his share in such
properties, and investing along the east side of the park.
By the time he was forty he was once more a fairly rich man. He
had left the practice of law to become the president of the Peter
Stuyvesant Trust Company, for which he had been counsel. After fifteen
years he had retired from this, too, and had become, what he insisted
nature had always intended him to be, a gentleman of leisure. He
retained a directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his
university, and was a thorny and inquiring member of many charitable
boards.
He prided himself on having emancipated himself from the ideas of
his own generation. It bored him to listen to his cousins lamenting
the vulgarities of modern life, the lack of elegance in present-day
English, or to hear them explain as they borrowed money from him the
sort of thing a gentleman could or could not do for a living. But on
the subject of what a lady might do he still held fixed and unalterable
notions; nor did he ever find it tiresome to hear his own daughter
expound the axioms of this subject with a finality he had taught her
in her youth. Having freed himself from fine-gentlemanism, he had
quite unconsciously fallen the more easily a prey to fine-ladyism; all
his conservatism had gone into that, as a man, forced to give up his
garden, might cherish one lovely potted plant.
At a time when private schools were beginning to flourish once more he
had been careful to educate Adelaide entirely at home with governesses.
Every summer he took her abroad, and showed her, and talked with
her about, books, pictures, and buildings; he inoculated her with
such fundamentals as that a lady never wears imitation lace on her
underclothes, and the past of the verb to “eat” is pronounced to rhyme
with “bet.” She spoke French and German fluently, and could read
Italian. He considered her a perfectly educated woman. She knew nothing
of business, political economy, politics, or science. He himself had
never been deeply interested in American politics, though very familiar
with the lives of English statesmen. He was a great reader of memoirs
and of the novels of Disraeli and Trollope. Of late he had taken to
motoring.
He kissed his daughter and nodded--a real New York nod--to his
son-in-law.
“I’ve come to tell you, Adelaide,” he began.
“Such a thing!” murmured Mathilde, shaking her golden head above the
cup of tea she was making for him, making in just the way he liked; for
she was a little person who remembered people’s tastes.
“I thought you’d rather hear it than read it in the papers.”
“Goodness, Papa, you talk as if you had been getting married!”
“No.” Mr. Lanley hesitated, and looked up at her brightly. “No; but I
think I did have a proposal the other day.”
“From Mrs. Baxter?” asked Adelaide. This was almost war. Mrs. Baxter
was a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long and regular
visits to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some alarm, though
time had now given them a certain institutional safety.
Her father was not flurried by the reference.
“No,” he said; “though she writes me, I’m glad to say, that she is
coming soon.”
“You don’t tell me!” said Adelaide. The cream of the winter season was
usually the time Mrs. Baxter selected for her visit.
Her father did not notice her.
“If Mrs. Baxter should ever propose to me,” he went on thoughtfully, “I
shouldn’t refuse. I don’t think I should have the--”
“The chance?” said his daughter.
“I was going to say the fortitude. But this,” he went on, “was an
elderly cousin, who expressed a wish to come and be my housekeeper.
Perhaps matrimony was not intended. Mathilde, my dear, how does one
tell nowadays whether one is being proposed to or not?”
In this poignant and unexpected crisis Mathilde turned slowly and
painfully crimson. How _did_ one tell? It was a question which at the
moment was anything but clear to her.
“I should always assume it in doubtful cases, sir,” said Wayne, very
distinctly. He and Mathilde did not even glance at each other.
“It wasn’t your proposal that you came to announce to us, though, was
it, Papa?” said Adelaide.
“No,” answered Mr. Lanley. “The fact is, I’ve been arrested.”
“Again?”
“Yes; most unjustly, most unjustly.” His brows contracted, and then
relaxed at a happy memory. “It’s the long, low build of the car. It
looks so powerful that the police won’t give you a chance. It was
nosing through the park--”
“At about thirty miles an hour,” said Farron.
“Well, not a bit over thirty-five. A lovely morning, no one in sight,
I may have let her out a little. All of a sudden one of these mounted
fellows jumped out from the bushes along the bridle-path. They’re a
fine-looking lot, Vincent.”
Farron asked who the judge was, and, Mr. Lanley named him--named him
slightly wrong, and Farron corrected him.
“I’ll get you off,” he said.
Adelaide looked up at her husband admiringly. This was the aspect of
him that she loved best. It seemed to her like magic what Vincent could
do. Her father, she thought, took it very calmly. What would have
happened to him if she had not brought Farron into the family to rescue
and protect? The visiting boy, she noticed, was properly impressed. She
saw him give Farron quite a dog-like look as he took his departure.
To Mathilde he only bowed. No arrangements had been made for a future
meeting. Mathilde tried to convey to him in a prolonged look that if he
would wait only five minutes all would be well, that her grandfather
never paid long visits; but the door closed behind him. She became
immediately overwhelmed by the fear, which had an element of desire in
it, too, that her family would fall to discussing him, would question
her as to how long she had known him, and why she liked him, and what
they talked about, and whether she had been expecting a visit, sitting
there in her best dress. Then slowly she took in the fact that they
were going to talk about nothing but Mr. Lanley’s arrest. She marveled
at the obtuseness of older people--to have stood at the red-hot center
of youth and love and not even to know it! She drew her shoulders
together, feeling very lonely and strong. As they talked, she allowed
her eyes to rest first on one speaker and then on the other, as if she
were following each word of the discussion. As a matter of fact she was
rehearsing with an inner voice the tone of Wayne’s voice when he had
said that he loved her.
Then suddenly she decided that she would be much happier alone in
her own room. She rose, patted her grandfather on the shoulder, and
prepared to escape. He, not wishing to be interrupted at the moment,
patted her hand in return.
“Hello!” he exclaimed. “Hands are cold, my dear.”
She caught Farron’s cool, black eyes, and surprised herself by
answering:
“Yes; but, then, they always are.” This was quite untrue, but every one
was perfectly satisfied with it.
As she left the room Mr. Lanley was saying:
“Yes, I don’t want to go to Blackwell’s Island. Lovely spot, of course.
My grandfather used to tell me he remembered it when the Blackwell
family still lived there. But I shouldn’t care to wear stripes--except
for the pleasure of telling Alberta about it. It would give her a
year’s occupation, her suffering over my disgrace, wouldn’t it,
Adelaide?”
“She’d scold me,” said Adelaide, looking beautifully martyred. Then
turning to her husband, she asked. “Will it be very difficult, Vincent,
getting papa off?” She wanted it to be difficult, she wanted him to
give her material out of which she could form a picture of him as a
savior; but he only shook his head and said:
“That young man is in love with Mathilde.”
“O Vin! Those children?”
Mr. Lanley pricked up his ears like a terrier.
“In love?” he exclaimed. “And who is he? Not one of the East Sussex
Waynes, I hope. Vulgar people. They always were; began life as
auctioneers in my father’s time. Is he one of those, Adelaide?”
“I have no idea who he is, if any one,” said Adelaide. “I never saw or
heard of him before this afternoon.”
“And may I ask,” said her father, “if you intend to let your daughter
become engaged to a young man of whom you know nothing whatsoever?”
Adelaide looked extremely languid, one of her methods of showing
annoyance.
“Really, Papa,” she said, “the fact that he has come once to pay
an afternoon visit to Mathilde does not, it seems to me, make an
engagement inevitable. My child is not absolutely repellent, you know,
and a good many young men come to the house.” Then suddenly remembering
that her oracle had already spoken on this subject, she asked more
humbly, “What was it made you say he was in love, Vin?”
“Just an impression,” said Farron.
Mr. Lanley had been thinking it over.
“It was not the custom in my day,” he began, and then remembering that
this was one of his sister Alberta’s favorite openings, he changed the
form of his sentence. “I never allowed you to see stray young men--”
His daughter interrupted him.
“But I always saw them, Papa. I used to let them come early in the
afternoon before you came in.”
In his heart Mr. Lanley doubted that this had been a regular custom,
but he knew it would be unwise to argue the point; so he started fresh.
“When a young man is attentive to a girl like Mathilde--”
“But he isn’t,” said Adelaide. “At least not what I should have called
attentive when I was a girl.”
“Your experience was not long, my dear. You were married at Mathilde’s
age.”
“You may be sure of one thing, Papa, that I don’t desire an early
marriage for my daughter.”
“Very likely,” returned her father, getting up, and buttoning the last
button of his coat; “but you may have noticed that we can’t always get
just what we most desire for our children.”
When he had gone, Vincent looked at his wife and smiled, but smiled
without approval. She twisted her shoulders.
“Oh, I suppose so,” she said; “but I do so hate to be scolded about the
way I bring up Mathilde.”
“Or about anything else, my dear.”
“I don’t hate to be scolded by you,” she returned. “In fact, I
sometimes get a sort of servile enjoyment from it. Besides,” she went
on, “as a matter of fact, I bring Mathilde up particularly well, quite
unlike these wild young women I see everywhere else. She tells me
everything, and I have perfectly the power of making her hate any one I
disapprove of. But you’ll try and find out something about this young
man, won’t you, Vin?”
“We’ll have a full report on him to-morrow. Do you know what his first
name is?”
“At the moment I don’t recall his last. Oh, yes--Wayne. I’ll ask
Mathilde when we go up-stairs.”
From her own bedroom door she called up.
“Mathilde, what is the name of your young friend?”
There was a little pause before Mathilde answered that she was sorry,
but she didn’t know.
Mrs. Farron turned to her husband and made a little gesture to indicate
that this ignorance on the girl’s part did not bear out his theory;
but she saw that he did not admit it, that he clung still to his
impression. “And Vincent’s impressions--” she said to herself as she
went in to dress.