"I never see her from morning till night," Mrs. Payton said. "Rather
different from my day! When I was a young lady, girls stayed indoors
with their mothers."
Mrs. Payton's mother, stroking her white gloves down over her knuckly
fingers, shrugged her shoulders: "You didn't like 'those days' so very
much yourself, my dear. But of course Freddy is shocking. It isn't that
she has bad taste--she has no taste! All I hope is that she won't
publicly disgrace us. Bessie Childs says that her husband says this
business idea is perfect nonsense."
The two ladies were in the double parlor on the left of the wide hall of
No 15. It was a gloomy place, even when the ailanthus-trees had lost
their leaves; the French windows were so smothered in plush and lace
that the gleam of narrow mirrors between them could not lighten the
costly ugliness. In its day the room had been very costly. The carpet,
with its scrolls and garlands, the ebony cabinets, picked out in
gilt--big and foolish and empty--the oil-paintings in vast, tarnished
frames, must all have been very expensive. There was an ormolu clock on
the black marble mantelpiece holding Time stationary at 7.20 o'clock of
some forgotten morning or evening; the bronzes on either side of it--a
fisher-maid with her string of fish, and a hunter bearing an antelope
on his shoulders--were dulled by the smoky years. Opposite the
fireplace, against the chocolate-brown wall-paper, Andrew Payton, on a
teakwood pedestal, glimmered in white marble blindness. Beside him, the
key-board of a grand piano was yellowing in untouched silence. The room
was so dim that Mrs. Holmes, coming in out of the sunshine, stumbled
over a rug.
"You have such a clutter of things, Ellen," she complained, sharply.
"It's lighter up-stairs," Mrs. Payton defended herself.
"What did you say? Do speak more distinctly!"
"I said it was lighter up-stairs. Come up, and I'll show you a puzzle
I've just worked out. Dreadfully difficult!"
But Mrs. Holmes never went up-stairs in the Payton house; to be sure,
the door between the sitting-room and the room beyond it was always
locked, but--_you heard things_. So she said she couldn't climb the
stairs. "I'm getting old, I'm afraid," she said, archly.
"I suppose you are very rheumatic?" her daughter sympathized; "why don't
you try--"
"Not at all!" the older lady interrupted; "just a little stiff. Mrs.
Dale said her cousin thought you were my sister," she added,
maliciously.
As far as clothes went, the cousin might have supposed Mrs. Holmes was
Mrs. Payton's daughter--the skirt in the latest ugliness of style, the
high heels, the white veil over the elaborate hair, were all far more
youthful than the care-worn mother of Frederica (and Mortimore) would
have permitted herself.
"I've been so dreadfully busy," Mrs. Holmes declared; "I meant to come
in yesterday, but I had a thousand things to do! Bridge all afternoon at
Bessie Childs's. I played with young Mrs. Dale. She ought to get another
dressmaker."
"Did you know Mr. Dale's aunt was dying?" Mrs. Payton said.
Mrs. Holmes frowned. She was, as she often said, a very busy woman; she
kept house, made calls, had "fittings," shopped, and read the
newspapers. She did these things well and thoroughly, for, as her
granddaughter had once said, she "was no fool." She was shrewd, capable,
energetic, and entirely a woman of the world. Her daughter's social
seclusion and mental apathy amazed and irritated her. But intelligent
and busy as she was, she had leisure for one thing: _Fear_. She never
said of what. Nor would she, if she could help it, allow the name of her
Fear to be mentioned. "I always run away if people talk of unpleasant
things!" she used to say, sharply. The mere reference to Mr. Dale's aunt
made her pull her stole about her shoulders, and clutch for bags and
card-cases that were always sliding off a steep and slippery lap.
"Why, Mama, you mustn't go," Mrs. Payton remonstrated, "you've just--"
"I only stopped a minute to say that if you don't keep Freddy in order,
she will disgrace us all," Mrs. Holmes said, nervously; "but you keep
talking about unpleasant things! I am all heart, and I can't bear to
hear about other people's troubles."
Mrs. Payton understood; she gave her mother a pitiful look. ("I believe
she'd like to live to be a hundred!" she thought; "whereas, if it wasn't
for poor Mortimore I'd be glad to go; I'm so--tired. And Freddy wouldn't
miss me.") All the while she was talking in her kind voice, of living,
not dying; of her intention of starting in early this year on her
Christmas presents--"I get perfectly worn out with them each Christmas!"
Of her cook's impertinence--"servants are really impossible!" Of Flora's
low-spiritedness--"Miss Carter says she's simply wild to get married,
but I can't think so; Flora is so refined."
"Human nature isn't very refined," Mrs. Holmes said.
"Miss Carter says she wants to take music lessons."
"That's terribly refined," Mrs. Holmes said, satirically.
"It's absurd," her daughter declared, with annoyance; "music lessons!
Rather different from the time I went to housekeeping--then, servants
worked! I gave Flora a lovely embroidered collar the other day; and yet,
the next thing I knew, Anne told me she was crying her eyes out down in
the coal-cellar. I went right down to the cellar, and said, 'You _must_
tell me what's the matter.' But all I could get out of her was that she
was tired of living. Miss Carter says Anne says that Flora's young man
has married somebody else, and she--"
"Don't mumble! It's almost impossible to hear you," her mother broke in;
"as for servants, there are no such things nowadays. They have men
callers, a thing my mother never tolerated! And they don't dream of
being in at ten. My seventh cook in five months comes to-morrow."
"Don't you think you are rather strict--I mean about hours, and beaux,
and all that sort of thing? My three all have beaux--only poor Flora's
don't seem very faithful. Mama, don't you think you ought to see an
aurist? You really are a little--"
"Not at all! I hear perfectly;--except when people mumble. And I shall
never change; my way of keeping house is the right way, so why should I
change?"
"I couldn't keep my girls a week if I were as strict as you," Mrs.
Payton ventured.
"It wouldn't be much loss, my dear!" the older woman said; she ran a
white-gloved finger along the top of the piano beside her, and held it
up, with a dry laugh. "You could eat off the floor in my house; but you
never were much of a housekeeper. However, I didn't come to talk about
servants; I came to tell you that I am going to call on those cousins of
Mr. Weston's, and explain that at any rate _I_ don't approve of my
granddaughter's going into business!"
"I'm sure I don't, either!" poor Mrs. Payton protested. "I am dreadfully
distr--"
"Why don't you tell her it isn't _done_? Why do you allow it?" Mrs.
Holmes demanded.
Mrs. Payton raised protesting hands: "'Allow' Freddy?"
"If you'd stop her allowance, you'd stop her nonsense. That is what I
would do if a daughter of mine cut such didos!"
"I can't--she's of age. You can't control girls nowadays," Mrs. Payton
sighed.
"She ought to be married," said Mrs. Holmes, clutching at the back of a
gilt chair as she got on to her shaking old legs; "though I can't
imagine any nice man wanting to marry a girl who talks as she does.
Maria Spencer told me she heard that Fred said that men ought not to be
allowed to marry unless they had a health certificate."
Mrs. Payton gasped with horror. "Mama! are you _sure_? I can't believe--
What _are_ we coming to?"
"It mortified me to death," said Mrs. Holmes. ("Oh, do pick up that
card-case for me!) I wish Arthur Weston would marry her, but I suppose
he never got over that Morrison girl's behavior? No; the real trouble
is, you insist on living in this out-of-the-way place! Oh, yes, I know;
poor Mortimore. Still, the men won't come after her here, because it
looks as if she had no money--that, and her queerness. Really, you ought
to try to get her settled. You ought to move over to the Hill; but you
love that poor, brainless creature up-stairs more than you do Fred!"
Mrs. Payton stiffened. "I love both my children just the same; and I
can't discuss Mortimore, Mama, with anybody. As for being brainless,
Doctor Davis always said, 'The intellect is _there_; but it is veiled.'"
The tears brimmed over. "You don't understand a mother's feelings,
Mama."
Mrs. Holmes shrugged her shoulders and brushed a powdered cheek against
her daughter's worn face. "Good-by. Of course, you never take any
advice--I'm used to that! If I wasn't the warmest-hearted creature in
the world I should be very cross with you. I suppose you are terribly
lonely without Freddy?"
"Oh, terribly," said Mrs. Payton.
When Mrs. Holmes had gone, teetering uncertainly down the front steps to
her carriage, Freddy's mother, pausing a moment in the hall to make sure
that Mr. Andrew Payton's silk hat had been dusted, went heavily
up-stairs and sat down in her big cushioned chair. She wished that she
had something to do. Of course, there was that new puzzle--but sometimes
the thought of a puzzle gave her a qualm of repulsion, the sort of
repulsion one feels at the sight of the drug that soothes and disgusts
at the same moment. The household mending was a more wholesome anodyne;
but there was very little of that; she had gone all through Freddy's
stockings the day before, and found only one thin place. To-day there
seemed nothing to do but sit in her soft chair and think of Freddy's
shocking talk and how unkind Mrs. Holmes was about Mortimore. She knew,
in the bottom of her heart, that her son's presence was painful to
everybody except herself; she knew that Freddy didn't like to have
people call, for fear they might see him, and that her reluctance dated
back to her childhood. "But suppose she doesn't like it, what has that
got to do with it?" Morty's mother thought, angrily; "it's a question of
duty. Mama doesn't seem to remember that Freddy ought to do her duty!"
It came over Mrs. Payton, with a thrill of pride, that she herself had
always done her duty. Here, alone, with everything silent on the other
side of the bolted door, she could allow herself to think how well she
had done it! To Mortimore, first and foremost--she paused there, with a
pang of annoyance at her mother's words: "I do _not_ love him best!" she
declared. She did her duty to Freddy, just as much as to Morty. When
Fred had scarlet fever no mother could have been more devoted. She
hadn't taken her clothes off for four days and nights! Her supreme
dutifulness, however, a dutifulness of which she had always been acutely
conscious, was in enduring Andrew's behavior. "Some women wouldn't have
stood it," she thought, proudly. But what a good wife she had been! She
had let him have his own way in everything. When he was cross, she had
been silent. When he was drunk, she had wept--silently, of course. When
he had done other things, of which anonymous letters had informed her,
she had still been silent;--but she had been too angry to weep. She
shivered involuntarily to think what would have happened if she had not
been silent--if she had dared to remonstrate with him! For Andrew
Payton's temper had been as celebrated as the brains which had once
filled the now empty hat. "Some wives would have left him," she told
herself; "but I always did my duty! Nobody ever supposed that
I--_knew_." When Andrew died, and her friends were secretly rejoicing
over her release, how careful she had been to wear the very deepest
crape! "I didn't go out of the house, even to church, for three weeks,
and I didn't use a plain white handkerchief for two years," she
thought--then flushed, for, side by side with her satisfaction at her
exemplary conduct was a rankling memory--a memory which made her
constantly tell herself, and everybody else, that she "loved both her
children just the same." The remorse--for it amounted to that--began a
few weeks after Mr. Payton's death, when Freddy, listening to her
mother's pride in the black-bordered handkerchief, had flung out: "If
you told the truth, you'd use a flag for a handkerchief, and you'd go to
church to return thanks!"
There had been a dreadful scene between the mother and daughter that
day.
"As for 'mourning' him," Andrew Payton's daughter said, "you don't. It's
a lie to smother yourself in that horrid, sticky veil. You are mighty
glad to get rid of him! You were as afraid as death of him, and you
didn't love him at all. All this talk about 'mourning' is rot."
Mrs. Payton cowered as if her daughter had struck her: "Oh, how can you
be so wicked!"
"Is it wicked to tell the truth?"
Mrs. Payton clasped and unclasped her hands: "I did my duty! But do you
suppose I've been _happy_?" Her breath caught in a sob. "I've lived in
hell all these years, just to make a home for you! I did my duty."
"I should have thought 'duty' would have made you leave him," Frederica
said; "hell isn't a very good home for a child." She was triumphantly
aware that she had said something smart; her mother's wincing face
admitted it. "I suppose you were afraid to make a break while he was
alive," she said, "but why not tell the truth now?"
Already the consciousness of self-betrayal had swept over Andy Payton's
wife; her face flamed with anger. "You had no business to make me say a
thing like that! You only tell the truth to hurt my feelings. _You are
just like Andrew!_" She looked straight at her daughter, her eyes fierce
with candor. "I love Mortimore best," she said, in a whisper.
For a single instant they stared at each other like two strangers. The
mother was the first to come to herself. "I--I didn't mean that, Freddy.
I love you both alike. But it was wicked to speak so of your father."
"I was a beast to hurt your feelings!" Frederica said; "and I don't in
the least mind your loving Mortimore best. But what I said about Father
is true; his being my father doesn't alter the fact that he was horrid.
Mother, you _know_ he was horrid! Don't let's pretend, at any rate to
each other."
Her face twitched with eagerness to be understood; she tried to put her
arm around her mother; but Mrs. Payton turned a rigid cheek to her lips;
and instantly Fred lapsed back into contempt of unreality. The fact was,
the deed was done. Each had told the other the truth. Mother and
daughter had both seen the flash of the blade of fact as it cut pretense
between them. Never again would Mrs. Payton's vanity over duty done dare
to raise its head in her daughter's presence: Freddy knew that, so far
as her married life went, duty had been cowardly acquiescence. Never
again would Frederica be able to fling at her mother her superior
morality: Mrs. Payton knew she was cruel, knew she was "just like her
father."... Like Andy Payton! She ground her teeth with disgust, but
she could not deny it. She was so truthful that she saw the Truth; saw
her father's intelligence in her own clear mind; his ability in hers;
his meanness in her ruthless smartness in proving a point. She hated him
for these things--but she hated herself more.
Mrs. Payton told Arthur Weston of this revealing scene; but her
confession confined itself to her remorse for having said she loved one
child more than the other. "Of course I love them just _exactly_ the
same, but Freddy was wicked to speak disrespectfully of her father."
Then Frederica poured her contrition into his pitying ears.
"I was a beast, but I was not a liar."
"It isn't necessary to be a beast, to be truthful," he reminded her.
"I made her cry," she said. "Father used to do that. Do--do you think
I'm like him?"
"Like your father? Good Lord, no!" he said, in horrified haste; then
apologized. "I--I mean, Mr. Payton was a very able man, I had great
respect for his brains; but he was--severe."
"'Severe'? Well, I'm 'severe,' I suppose? No; the trouble with me is,
I'm hideously truthful--_and I like to be_."