A swelling white rage choked the boy's voice. "Does--does mother know
that you went to--such places?"
Paul turned sharply. "Of course not. There are some things women are
supposed to know nothing about."
That was the end of the discussion.
Pelham gradually decreased the frequency of his visits; but he still
managed precious afternoons with her in his car, and occasional
evenings, which left him irritatingly disturbed. He wanted to see more
of her, and knew that he should see less; he was eager even to hear her
name mentioned at home, but embarrassed if it was.
"Listen, Nell," he interposed to his sister, when he was helping to draw
up the list of guests for a summer fete the girls planned. "You used to
be pretty fond of Mrs. Meade."
"Not much! You can't have your Dorothy here."
Pelham was exasperated with the whole lot--always excepting his mother.
His long confidences with her had begun when he was a child, and still
were a pleasure and a panacea. One of these talks gave aid to his
bewilderment about Dorothy, although she was not mentioned. It had
started inconsequentially with a discussion of little Ned's conduct, and
dipped into many topics. In the course of it, he promised to sound both
the brothers on their attitude toward girls, and the annoying problem of
sex.
"You can do much more with the boys than I, Pelham. They'll listen to an
older brother, where they wouldn't listen to their mother."
Lovingly he patted the smooth flush of her cheek, delighting in the shy
wildrose beauty of her face. His fingers crept from this to the straight
chestnut folds of her hair, longing to stroke its unbound cascades, and
let them curtain his face, as she had done when he was a little boy in
bed; as she still sometimes did.
Then he answered her. "I listened to you, mother. It was your words and
your wishes that have kept me straight."
"And, please God, they will always keep my own dear son the finest,
cleanest, purest man in the world."
Pelham was wholly under the spell of Mary's idealistic phrases, her
sugary circumlocutions and romantic evasions of annoying facts. She had
found it impossible to meet Paul's brutal logic with her ill-trained
feminine inconsecutiveness; the course she took was an acceptance
couched in some inoffensive generality or platitude, with a
sentimentalized deity as authority for her stand. Paul pierced through
the unmeaning glamor; but the children did not. When things went
smashing, contrary to her plans and wishes, somehow God willed it ... a
convenient, kindly-disposed arranger, unless Paul's vigorous planning
took precedence. Her thirty-nine connubial articles could be summed up
in one: Paul could not be wrong, in the children's eyes; her wifely duty
bound her to wholesale support, even of his errors or occasional
unfairnesses. "He is your father, remember," blanketed everything. "God
only knows how much I love you," was her unfruitful solace to them. And
she did love them, and gave of her best for them, except where fealty to
Paul, who came immovably first, intervened.
This prayer of hers for the son's purity continued to ward off the
imperative temptations that nearness to Dorothy, or thoughts of Butler's
Avenue, spread around him. It fell on his ears now with all of the old
power.
He sat, rubbing her hand against his cheek, staring off to the distant
vagueness that was Shadow Mountain. The dun clouds along the horizon had
obscured its outline; the sky to the south was a sickly copper. Above it
pulsed and banded a tumult of smoke gray clouds; the eastern horizon was
a slate blue, rapidly darkening. A far rumble of muttered thunder was
followed by the vivid glare of sheet lightning, which brought into sharp
relief the serrated crest of the distant hills.
Suddenly out of the dull sky came a quick spatter of big drops. She
slipped from her son's embrace, and went in to see to windows and doors.
He moved a lazy flanneled leg further from the edge of the porch, where
the splashing drops bounced inward.
There was a short lull. He rose, as a white tongue of fire forked its
way toward the near summit of Shadow Mountain, followed immediately by a
deafening pattering rattle of thunder.
Hurrying in from the front porch, his mother met him, a strained look in
her eyes. "There's a storm coming, Pell. Your father's on the way home.
I hope it doesn't catch him."
Pelham moved idly into the library. Out of the side window he could see
the approaching wall of misty rain, blotting out the familiar outlines
of trees, the negro cottage beyond the spring depression, the spring
buildings, the outhouses. How quiet, how unerring and irresistible its
course!
The marching fusillade of drops touched the side of the barn, and
darkened it ominously: from a soft gray it shaded swiftly to a
rain-drenched black. Now it menaced the house itself; now the impartial
advance of the shrapnel, in slanting crystal lines, brought the house
beneath its unrelenting fire.
Pelham switched on the light, and pulled out an unread volume of
Stevenson. His fingers loafed over the leaves, as he listened to the
persistent drive of the storm.