No difference of standard in the Collingham household was so obvious as
that between Dauphin, the Irish setter, and Max, the police dog. The
situation was specially hard on Dauphin. To have owned Collingham Lodge
and its occupants during all his conscious life, and then one day to
find himself obliged to share this dominion with a stranger had given
him in his declining years a pessimistic point of view. It had made him
proud, cold, withdrawn, like a crusty old aristocrat forced in among
base company. To the best of his ability he ignored the police dog,
though it was difficult not to be aware of the presence of a being too
exuberant to appreciate disdain.
For Dauphin, the most beastly experience of the day began about four
each afternoon, at the minute when the dog-clock told him that his
master might be expected home. That was the hour at which from time
immemorial he had taken possession of the great front portico where the
distant burr of the motor-car first reached him. When the burr became a
throb he knew it was passing the oak that marked the Collingham
boundary; and, since it had arrived on his own ground, he could run down
the driveway to meet it. This had been his exclusive right. To be joined
daily now by a frisky, irrepressible pup made him feel like an old man
tied to an insupportable young wife from whom his own death will be the
sole deliverance. Life to Dauphin had thus become a mingling of
impatience and anguish, poorly masked beneath an air of dignity.
And as far as he could judge, his master's wife, of whom he had no great
opinion, had begun to share these emotions. Anguish and impatience had
become of late the chief elements in the aura she threw out, and by
which dogs take their sense of men. It was not that her words or
expressions betrayed her. It was only that when she came within his
sphere of perception he was aware that she felt the kind of passion the
police dog roused in himself.
He was aware of it on this May afternoon, more than six months after she
had first learned of Bob's infatuation for the Follett girl, when she
came out on the portico to listen for the expected car. She would come
out, listen, and go in. Each time she came out, each time she listened,
each time she retired, he felt the sweeping to and fro of an imperious
will worried or frustrated, though he sat on his haunches and gave no
sign. He couldn't give a sign, because Max would misunderstand it. There
he was, down on the lawn before the portico, grinning, prancing, joking,
calling names--names quite audible in dog intercourse, though a human
being couldn't catch them--and the least little movement Dauphin made
would be taken as concession. The old setter was sorry. He would have
liked showing his master's wife--he didn't consider her his
mistress--that he understood her distress; but he was nailed to the
doorstep by _force majeure_.
And the woman envied him. He was perfectly aware of that. She assumed
that dogs had no social problems. All he had to do, she thought, was to
sit and blink at the magnolias, hawthorns, and lilacs pursuing one
another into bloom. All he had to think of was the up hill and down dale
of the view before him, a haze of blue and green and rose melting to the
mauve of hills.
As a matter of fact, this was something like what was passing through
her mind. A masterful woman, she was nevertheless reaching that point of
self-pity where she envied the untroubled dogs. While she carried the
cares of so many others, no one else carried hers. All through the
winter she had had Edith and Bob on her mind, and now she had Bradley.
On leaving for the bank that morning, he had been so terribly upset that
she couldn't rest till knowing how he had got through his day. She was
the more worried because of being entirely alone and thus thrown in on
herself.
Edith had gone to stay with people in the Berkshires. Of that her mother
was glad. She meant for the present to keep her there. With her queer
ideas, she would only make her brother the more difficult to deal with,
though she had not been difficult herself. Nearly seven months had
passed, and yet her affair with Ayling was exactly where it had been in
the previous October. That was the advantage of a girl; you could always
tell where she stood. Edith was tenacious, but not defiant. Though
capable of engaging herself to this young man, she would hardly marry
him in face of her father's opposition.
Bob, on the other hand, was not only head-strong, but unreasonable. He
would marry the Follett girl if she would marry him, whatever might be
the consequences. She, his mother, had it "out" with him, and he had
said so. It was a terrible thing to have their whole domestic happiness
hang on the whim of a creature like the Follett girl; but apparently it
did.
She had not spoken to Bob till Hubert Wray had surrendered all he had to
tell. He had done this through a process of "pumping" of which he
himself had hardly been aware. Having ascertained that his New England
connections were unexceptional, Junia had been attentive to him through
the winter, making him feel that Collingham Lodge was a second home.
What he didn't tell to her he told to Edith, and what Edith knew the
mother had no great difficulty in finding out. Thus when, on the
previous Saturday, Bob was about to leave for a party on Long Island,
they had had the plain talk which could no longer be deferred.
They had had it after lunch, seated on a bench overlooking the tennis
court. They had come out ostensibly to talk over the sacrifice of the
pink-and-white hawthorn in the shade of which they sat in favor of
extending the court so that Bob and Edith could both have parties
simultaneously. While the new court would be an improvement, they would
regret the celestial flowering of the hawthorn whenever, as at present,
it was May.
"Not that it would make so very much difference to your father and me,"
Junia began, in a quavering tone, "if things we're afraid of were to
happen."
So the subject was opened up. Bob could only ask, "What things?" and his
mother could only tell him.
"It's quite true, old lady," he confessed. "You might as well know it
first as last."
Junia had not brought up her children without having learned that, while
Edith could be controlled, Bob could only be managed. With Edith, she
could say, "I forbid," with Bob, it had to be, "I suffer."
"Of course, dear," she said now, "I'm your mother, and whatever you do I
shall try to accept. It will be hard, naturally--it's hard already--but
you can count on me."
He took her hand and squeezed it.
"Thanks, old lady."
"Of course I can't answer for your father. You know for yourself how
stern and unyielding he is."
"Oh, I'm not so sure about that. It's always seemed to me that he'd give
in to a lot of things, if you'd only let him."
This perspicacity being dangerous, she glided to another aspect of her
theme.
"What I don't understand is why, if you've been in love with her for
seven or eight months, and you mean to marry her, you haven't done it
already."
He took two or three puffs at his cigarette before tossing off:
"I'd do it like a shot, if she would."
"And she won't?"
"Not yet."
"And you think she will?"
"I'm sure she will."
"What makes you so certain?"
"Nothing. I just know."
Having had her fears verified, Junia had no object in pushing the
inquiry further. Her duty in life was to take events as they touched her
family and mold them for the best. When she called it "the best" she
meant it as the best. She was not a worldly woman with mere fashionable
ends in view. Eager for the good of her children, she was conscientious
in pursuit of the things she truly believed to be worthiest.
All through Sunday she took counsel with herself, going to communion at
the restful little Marillo church, and putting new intensity into her
devotion. She had guests at lunch and went out to dinner, and, though
equal to all the social demands, her mind did not relinquish the purpose
she had in view. Could she have accomplished it without her husband's
aid, she would probably not have taken him into her confidence. It being
her special task to deal with the children, the less he knew of their
mistakes and escapades the simpler it was for them all.
It may be an illuminating digression here to say that there had been a
time, some fifteen years earlier, when Junia had had an experience as
difficult as the one she was facing now. Nothing but a trained
subconsciousness had carried her through that, and she looked for the
same mainstay of the self to come to her aid again. One of the lessons
she had learned at that time was the value of quietude, of reserve in
"giving herself away." She was not one to whom this restraint came
natural; but for the very reason that it was acquired, it had the
intenser force.
It was at a time when they had lived in the Marillo house only a little
while, and the Bradley of that day was not the portly, domesticated
bigwig of the present. He was a tempestuous sea of passions right at the
dangerous flood-tide, the middle forties. The first ardor of married
life was at an end for both of them; but while, for her, existence was
running more and more into one quiet purposeful stream, for him it was
raging off in new directions.
Whatever Junia suspected she was too wise to know it as a certainty.
Knowing, she argued, would probably weaken her and do nothing to
strengthen him. Already she was more intensely a mother than she was a
wife, living in the amazing careers she was planning for her children.
Edith would marry an English peer, while Bob would take a brilliant
place in his own country. Their victories would be her victories, till,
in some far-distant, beatified old age, she would be translated to the
stars.
And then one afternoon, when the flagged pavement had only recently been
laid and they were drinking tea on it, Bradley had said, right out of a
clear sky:
"Junia I don't know whether you've suspected it or not, but for some
time past I've had a mistress."
That was the instant when she first learned the value of a schooled
subconsciousness. It seemed to her that she had been slain; and yet,
with a nerve little less than miraculous, she went on with her tasks
among the tea things.
"If you've done it so far without telling me, Bradley," she said, at
last, with only the slightest tremor in her tone, "why shouldn't you let
me remain ignorant?"
"Does that mean that you don't care if I go on?"
"I think you can answer that as well as I. What I don't care for is to
be drawn into an affair from which your own good taste--merely to put it
on that ground--should be anxious to leave me out."
He looked at her savagely.
"Don't you resent it any more than that?"
"Is that why you're giving me the information--to see how much I resent
it?"
"Partly."
"Then I'm afraid you will have your labor for your pains. You'll never
see more than you're seeing at this instant."
That stand was a master stroke. It gave her the advantage of being
enigmatic. It enabled her to take blows without seeming to have felt
them, and to deliver them without betraying the quarter from which the
next would come.
Right there and then Bradley had been monstrous enough to suggest that,
since she liked Collingham Lodge, she should remain there and let him go
away. He would make generous provision for her and the children, and in
return expect his divorce.
But she had taken her stand--the enigmatic. She didn't argue; she didn't
plead; she didn't reproach him; she didn't treat him to the scene
through which weaker women would have put him.
"Bradley, I shall expect you to remain with me," were the only words she
used.
And he had remained. Less than two years later, it was she who fixed the
sum the other woman was to be paid in order to get rid of her. She was
sufficiently in sympathy with her sex to insist on the terms being
liberal. "I think she should have fifty thousand dollars," she declared,
and fifty thousand dollars the woman received.
So that, if Bradley had lost the first passion of his love for her, he
had gained vastly in respect. Hot-tempered, high-handed, impetuous,
imperious, as he knew her to be, he saw her curb and compress these
qualities till they became a prodigious motor force. If she had not
mastered herself, she had mastered the expression of herself till she
was an instrument at her own command.
It was as an instrument at her own command that, on the Wednesday
morning, before he went to town, she gave her husband as much
information as she thought he ought to possess about his son.
"Would you mind sitting down for a minute, Bradley? I've something
important to say."
He had come up to her room, as she took her breakfast in bed, after he
had had his own downstairs. Wearing a lace dressing jacket and a boudoir
cap, she was propped up with pillows, a wicker tray with legs on the
coverlet before her. In the canopied Louis Quinze bed of old
rich-grained walnut, raised six inches above the floor, she suggested an
eighteenth-century French princess, Madame Sophie or Madame Victoire,
receiving a courtier at her _levée_.
Luxurious with a note of chastity was the rest of the chintzy room. The
pictures on the walls were sacred ones, copies of old Italian masters. A
_prie-dieu_ in a corner supported a bible and a prayer-book in tooled
bindings with a coat of arms. The white-paneled wardrobe room seen
through a door ajar was as austere as a well-kept sacristy. Perfumed air
came in through the open windows, and thrushes were fluting in the
trees.
Reminding her that Tims, the chauffeur, would soon be at the door to
take him to the bank, Collingham sank into the armchair nearest to the
bed. His thoughts were on the amount in the proposed issue of Paraguayan
bonds the house would be able to carry.
"It's about Bob," she began, in a tone little more than casual. "Did you
know he was in a scrape?"
He started, firing off his brief questions rapidly:
"Who? Bob? What kind of scrape? With a girl?"
"Exactly. With a girl who may give us a good deal of trouble unless the
thing is stopped."
If Collingham's heart sank it was not wholly because of the scrape with
the girl, but because he was afraid of chickens coming home to roost.
Though he had never broached the subject with the boy, he had often
wondered as to how he met sexual temptation; and now he was to learn.
"Is it anything very wrong?"
"Only in intention." She sipped her coffee before letting him have the
full force of it. "He wants to marry her."
He felt some slight relief.
"Oh, then it's not--"
"No; not as far as he's concerned. As to her--well I presume that she's
the usual type."
"Did he tell you himself?"
"He told me himself."
"His job at the bank pays him only two thousand dollars a year. Did he
say what else he expected to marry on?"
"We didn't discuss that; but I suppose it would be what he expects you
to give him."
"And if I don't give him anything?"
"That's what I wanted to know. If you didn't--"
"He'd call it off?"
"No; perhaps not. But she would."
"Have you any special reason for thinking so?"
"None but my knowledge of--of that kind of woman in general." She went
on as quietly as if the incident of fifteen years previously had never
occurred. "Men are so guileless about women who have--who have love to
sell. They're such simpletons. They so easily think these women like
them for themselves when all the while they're only gauging the measure
of the pocketbook."
Collingham endeavored not to hang his head, but it seemed to go down in
spite of him as the placid voice sketched his program for the day.
Junia had heard her husband say that Mr. Huntley, his second in command,
was to go to South America in connection with the issue of Paraguayan
bonds. Why shouldn't Bob be sent with him? It would add to his
experience and make him feel important. After he had left Asuncion,
reasons could be found for keeping him at Lima, Rio, or Buenos Aires
till the whole thing blew over. Having accepted the suggestion
gratefully, Collingham came to the question he had up to now repressed.
"Who's the girl? I suppose you know."
"She's been posing for Hubert Wray. Bob met her at the studio. Her name
is--"
Grasping the arms of the chair, he strained forward.
"Not--not Follett's girl?"
"Yes; that _is_ the name. You dismissed her father from the bank last
year." Her eyes followed him as he stumbled to his feet. "But what
difference does it make whether it's she or some one else?"
He couldn't tell her. The fear of the vague nemesis he called "chickens
coming home to roost" was too obscure. Listening in a daze to the rest
of his instructions, he seized them chiefly because they would ease the
line he was to take with Bob.
He was to give him no hint that he, the father, had heard anything of
the Follett girl. The South American mission could stand on its own
merits as extremely flattering. Whatever reluctance Bob might feel, he
would see the opportunity as too important to forego. All Junia begged
of her husband was to know nothing of Bob's love affairs. If Bob himself
brought the subject up, it would be enough to remain firm on the
question of money. Of the rest, Junia was willing to take charge, as she
would explain to him when he came home in the afternoon.
These instructions Collingham did his best to carry out. At lunch, in
the house's private room at the Bowling Green Club, he approached Mr.
Huntley on the subject of being responsible for Bob on the errand to
Asuncion, and Mr. Huntley expressed himself as delighted. On returning
to the bank, Collingham asked Miss Ruddick to bring the young man to the
private office.
"Hello, Bob! How are things going?"
"So, so, dad," Bob admitted, guardedly.
"Sit down. I want to talk to you."
Bob sat down gingerly, warily, scenting something in the wind, much like
Max or Dauphin from a person's atmosphere. Whatever his mother had been
told on Saturday, his father might have learned by Wednesday. Bob would
have been sure of this were it not that his mother often had curious
reserves.
For Collingham there was nothing to do but to plunge on the subject of
South America, and he plunged. But, in his dread of the roosting
chicken, he plunged nervously, with a tendency to redden, to stammer,
and otherwise to betray himself. Before he had finished Bob was saying
inwardly: "Mother's put him wise to Jennie and I'm to be packed off.
Well, we'll see."
"It's thumping good of you and Mr. Huntley, dad," he said, aloud; "and I
suppose it would do if I gave you my answer in a day or two."
"That's the girl," the father thought; but he obeyed Junia's injunction
as to not being explicit when it came to words.
"You see, it's this way, Bob: It's not exactly an invitation that I'm
giving you; it's--it's a decision of the bank of which you're an
employee. We take it for granted that you'll go if we want to send you."
"And I take it for granted that you won't send me if I don't want to
go."
Not to force the issue, Collingham left the matter there, preferring to
consult Junia as to what he should do next. To this end, he drove home
earlier than usual.
It added to Dauphin's irritation that Max should hear the motor first.
With ears cocked like a donkey's, how could he help it? There was
nothing in the world that Dauphin despised as he despised the police
dog's ears. They were forever pointed, alert, inquisitive, ignoble. But
there it was! Max was bounding down the driveway, covering yards at a
spring, before the setter could drag himself from his haunches. It was
Max, too, who, when the motor passed the oak, gave the first yelp of
delight.
But it was Dauphin who, as his master descended from the car, entered
into his depression. It was he, too, who perceived the conflict of auras
when wife and husband met. Waves of unreasoned dread on the one side
encountered a force of clear-eyed determination on the other as the
weltering sea comes up against the steadfast rocks.
They began talking as they turned to enter the house, continuing the
conversation within the great hall, where only the strip of red carpet
running its length and up the fine stairway, two or three bits of old
carved English oak, and the brass touches on the wrought-iron baluster,
relieved the admirable nudity.
"Now come in here," she said, briskly, having heard all that had passed
between him and Bob.
He followed her into the library, where she led the way to the desk.
"Read that."
He ran his eye over the lines written in her legible, decorative hand.
_Collingham Lodge,_
_Marillo Park._
_Dear Miss Follett_:
My husband and I would be greatly obliged if you could give us a
half hour of your time to talk over matters which may prove as
important to you as to us. If you could make it convenient to
come here to-morrow, Thursday, afternoon, you would find a very
good train at three-twenty-five, and one by which to return at
five-forty-seven. I inclose a time-table, and you would be met
at Marillo Station.
Yours sincerely,
_Junia Collingham_.
He looked at her wonderingly.
"What's the big idea?"
"A very big idea. Don't you see? We can cut the ground right from under
his feet without his ever thinking we had anything to do with it. You
personally needn't be supposed to know that this nonsense has ever been
in the air. It's too late for me, of course, because he and I have
already talked of it. But for you--"
He tapped the paper in his hand.
"But this move I don't understand."
"Well, sit down and I'll tell you."