And then, having fairly seen him, she did turn the hood. Alston dropped
into the chair by the bedside and looked at her. She was a plain woman,
it is true, but of heroic lines. Her iron-grey hair was brushed smoothly
back into its two braids, and her nightgown, with its tiny edge, was of
the most pronouncedly sensible cut, of high neck and long sleeves. Yet
there was nothing uncouth about her in her elderly ease of dress and
manner. She was a wholesome woman, and the heart of her son turned
pathetically to her.
"Mary gone to bed?" he asked.
"Yes," said Mrs. Choate. "She was tired. She's been rehearsing a dance
with those French girls and their class."
Alston lay back in his chair, regarding her with hot, tired eyes. He
wanted to know what she thought of a great many things: chiefly whether
a woman who had married Jeff Blake need be afraid of him. But there was
a well-defined code between his mother and himself. He was not willing
to trap her into honest answers where he couldn't put honest questions.
"Mother," said he, and didn't know why he began or indeed that he was
going to say just that at all, "do you ever wish you could run away?"
She gave the corner of the book a pat with one beautiful hand.
"I do run away," she said. "I was a good many miles from here when you
came in. And I shall be again when you are gone. Among the rogues, such
as we don't see."
"What is it?"
"Mysteries of Paris."
"That's our vice, isn't it," said Alston, "yours and mine, novel
reading?"
"You're marked with it," said she.
There was something in the quiet tone that arrested him and made him
look at her more sharply. The tone seemed to say she had not only read
novels for a long time, but she had had to read them from a grave
design. "It does very well for me," she said, "but it easily mightn't
for you. Alston, why don't you run away?"
Alston stared at her.
"Would you like to go abroad?" he asked her then, "with Mary? Would you
like me to take you?"
"Oh, no," said Mrs. Choate. "Mary wouldn't want to. She's bewitched with
those French girls. And I don't want to. I couldn't go the only way I'd
like."
"You could go any way you chose," said Alston, touched. He knew there
was a war chest, and it irked him to think his mother wouldn't have it
tapped for her.
"Oh, no," said she. "I should need to be slim and light, and put on
short petticoats and ride horses and get away from tigers. I don't want
to shoot them, but I'd rather like to get away from them."
"Mother," said Alston, "what's come over you? Is it this book?"
She laughed, in an easy good-humour.
"Books don't come over me," said she. "I believe it's that old Madame
Beattie."
"What's Madame Beattie done that any--" he paused; Esther's wrongs at
Madame Beattie's hands were too red before him--"that any lady would be
willing to do?"
"I really don't know, Alston," said his mother frankly. "It's only that
when I think of that old party going out every night--"
"Not every night."
"Well, when she likes, and getting up on a platform and telling goodness
knows what to the descendants of the oldest civilisations, and their
bringing her home on their shoulders--"
"No, no, mother, they don't do that."
"I tell you what it makes me feel, Alston: it makes me feel _fat_."
"Madame Beattie weighs twenty pounds more than you do, and she's not so
tall by three inches."
"And then I realise that when women say they want to vote, it isn't
because they're all piously set on saving the country. It's because
they've peeped over the fence and got an idea of the game, and they're
crazy to be in it."
"But, mother, there's no game, except a dirty one of graft and politics.
There's nothing in it."
"No," said Mrs. Choate. "There isn't in most games. But people play
them."
"You don't think Amabel is in it for the game?"
"Oh, no! Amabel's a saint. It wouldn't take more than a basket of wood
and a bunch of matches to make her a martyr."
"But, mother," said Alston, "you belong to the antis."
"Do I?" asked his mother. "Yes, I believe I do."
"Do you mean to say you're not sincere?"
"Why, yes, of course I'm sincere. So are they. Only, doesn't it occur to
you they're having just as much fun organising and stirring the pot as
if it was the other pot they were stirring? Besides they attitudinise
while they stir, and say they're womanly. And they like that, too."
"Do you think they're in it for the game?"
"No, no, Alston, not consciously. Nobody's in it for the game except
your Weedon Moores. Any more than a nice girl puts on a ribbon to trap
her lover. Only nature's behind the girl, and nature's behind the game.
She's behind all games. But as to the antis--" said Mrs. Choate
impatiently, "they've gone on putting down cards since the rules were
changed."
Alston rose and stood looking down at her. She glanced up brightly, met
his eyes and laughed.
"All is," said she, in a current phrase even cultured Addington had
caught from its "help" from the rural radius outside, "I just happened
to feel like telling you if you want to run away, you go. And if I
weighed a hundred and ten and were forty-five, I'd go with you.
Actually, I should advise you, if you're going to stay here, to stir
the pot a little now it's begun to boil so hard."
"Get into politics?" he asked, remembering Jeff.
"Maybe."
She smiled at him, pleasantly, not as a mother smiles, but an implacable
mistress of destiny. In spite of her large tolerance, there were moments
when she did speak. So she had looked when he said, as a boy, that he
shouldn't go to gymnasium, and she had told him he would. And he went.
Again, when he was in college and had fallen in with a set of
ultra-moderns and swamped himself in decoration and the beguilements of
a spurious art, he had seen that look; then she had told him the
classics were not to be neglected. Now here was the look again. Alston
began to have an uncomfortable sense that he might have to run for
office in spite of every predilection he ventured to cherish. He could
have thrown himself on the floor and bellowed to be let alone.
"But keep your head, dear," she was saying. "Keep your head. Don't let
any man--or woman either--lose it for you. That's the game, Alston,
really."
It was such a warm impetuous tone it brought them almost too suddenly
and too close together. Alston meant to kiss her, as he did almost every
night, but he awkwardly could not. He went out of the room in a shy
haste, and when he dropped off to sleep he was thinking, not of Esther,
but of his mother. Even so he did not suspect that his mother knew he
had come from Esther and how fast his blood was running.