I
Throughout the months of May and June the battle had raged--Lavinia
Trench’s battle, not with her family but with herself. She knew, as
all those in her little world knew, that a visit to Bromfield was not
the difficult thing she had made it. Times without number David had
implored her to go with him especially when there was serious illness
or death in one or the other of their families. And now that she had
achieved her purpose, knowing all the while, somewhere in the depths of
her, hope of conquest on a certain perfectly definite object, and had
bent her tremendous energy in that direction--knowing all the while,
somewhere in the depths of her, that the enemy lay entrenched in quite
another quarter.
In those former struggles, in which she had invariably bent David to
her will, she had rewarded him with a period of forced sweetness which
he was glad to take in lieu of the comradeship he had long since ceased
to hope for. It had been this way when they made the perilous move from
Olive Hill, where he was doing remarkably well, working at a daily
wage, to Springdale, where he must hazard all he had saved ... to give
his wife the social advantage she could not find in a dirty mining
town. But Lavinia had no instinct for society, derived no immediate
satisfaction from such triumphs as had come to her. It appeared to
David’s simple and always lucid mind that she created situations for
the sheer purpose of annihilating them. In every crisis in their lives,
he had owned in retrospect that Lavinia was right. Had he understood
the situation, a frank discussion would have won him. It was her method
of approach that seemed to him unnecessarily cruel.
She had, from childhood, viewed David Trench as an amiable yokel, to
be blindfolded and led about by the hand. And now one sentence in his
talk, that morning in the shop, rankled: “Who is it that you want to
see in Bromfield?” She had been telling herself over and over again
that there was no one in particular she wanted to see. Her essentially
prudish mind shrank from the naked truth that stalked before her, in
the dark hours of the night, with David peacefully sleeping at her
side. But negation was not conquest. In vain she declared to her own
soul that Calvin Stone was nothing to her. She could meet him without
a tremor. She tried to picture him, old and scarred by life--shrinking
from her gaze, because of the stain on his fair name. She saw him,
instead, a debonair youth of three-and-twenty, the sort of fellow who
would kiss a girl ... and argue about it afterward.
There had been periods, weeks and even months, when the foothills of
her immediate environment had obscured that treeless mountain peak in
her life--the irreparable injury she had suffered. But something always
happened to bring her perfidious lover once more within her ken. Never
so poignantly as when Mrs. Ascott unwittingly revealed the reason
for Calvin’s hasty marriage. She had fancied such an explanation ...
had been sure that the certainty of it would be anodyne for her deep
hurt. Instead it had served only to tear open the old wound, to set it
festering with the toxin of that other unstudied remark: “He afterward
tried to get out of it.” Had not Calvin’s father foreshadowed this very
contingency? Lettie’s husband might sicken of his bargain--might come
back to his first love, to plead for her forgiveness and the boon of
her restored favour.
She would keep this idea uppermost in her mind, when she went to
Bromfield. It not only served to soothe her vanity, but it would be
a whip with which to lash the man who had wronged her. No, she would
not give him the satisfaction of thinking she regretted her own hasty
marriage. She would make him believe she had been infinitely the gainer
when she married David Trench. The idea was so preposterous that, given
a less subjective sense of humour, she might have laughed at it. But
David had been that kind of stalking horse before.