David put the letter away in the safe, with his few priceless
possessions. He wanted to see his children--the two whose likeness to
him had been a cause for half humorous apology or bitter reproach. He
walked home from the office, lost in a flood of incoherent longing.
If only Lavinia had never been kind! There was to be a concert in the
college chapel on Thanksgiving evening. Perhaps Eileen could play in
public. His soul revolted at such philandering with the truth; but he
had taught himself to make peace with the powers that were stronger
than his will or his ability. He quickened his step. He would offer the
suggestion to Vine.
“It’s just the thing. I’ll go right over and tell Mrs. Henderson
about it! The women of Springdale will remember the date--if anything
should ever leak out. Eileen is built like the Trenches. I remember,
your sister Edith was at church the Sunday before little Buddie was
born--and when he came, it was a complete surprise. Nobody suspected
anything.”
David covered his face with his hands. His wife’s bald physical view
of Eileen’s soul-tragedy filled him with loathing. At long intervals,
in the years that were gone, she had forced him to look within the
steel-girt casket of her being, and always he had turned away
horrified eyes--to restore as best he might the priceless jewels of
his imagining. Could he censure his daughter because she had believed
in Hal Marksley, to her hurt? How had he judged the one he loved, the
woman he had given Eileen for a mother?
He put the thought aside as wickedly disloyal. Vine was the mother of
his children. She had taken him, a simple-hearted boy with no ambition
beyond the making of beautiful furniture, and she had made of him a
successful business man. He could no longer make beautiful things.
His fingers had lost their sure touch. But he had given his children
the cultural advantages his own boyhood had lacked, and he had laid
by enough to care for his family, if he should be taken. He had not
been happy. He knew, all at once, that he had not been happy. He had
never thought of it before. Still, what right had mortals to demand
happiness? Had Vine been sympathetic, he might never have risen above
the rank of a carpenter. His children would have toiled with their
hands, to measure the stolid level of Bromfield or Olive Hill. It was
Vine, with her far-seeing eyes and her two-edged tongue, who had made
Lary’s achievement possible, who had given Sylvia the satisfaction of
a marriage to her liking. It was patent that Sylvia, at least, was
satisfied with her lot.
His eyes turned inward, he began to take stock of his children. Bob and
Isabel were in heaven. The acts of God were not to be challenged. Lary
had periods of morbid brooding, when life looked worse than worthless.
It would be different, now that he had a wife to love him ... a wife
who saw in him a demigod. Such devotion had stimulated him to greater
endeavour than he had deemed worth while. It might not have worked
that way with Lary’s father ... if he had had a wife to soothe and
admire him. He might have been too happy to exert himself. He could not
be sure.
The very qualities which had won Judith were fostered by Vine’s
determination to send Larimore to Cornell. Just why Cornell, David had
no means of knowing. Lary had not gone to Bromfield for any of his
vacations. So the proximity of the old home town had nothing to do with
it. With all his cultural charm, he might not have won Mrs. Ascott, had
there been no strong incentive to action. He was inclined to drift, to
shun the crass grip of reality. His happiness had been thrust upon him,
because of Eileen’s drastic need.
Theodora was too young to be estimated with any degree of finality.
As she was, so had Vine Larimore appeared to him when, as a boy, he
had looked upon her with yearning eyes. In the after years Vine had
been the prototype of Sylvia. She might have bargained better with her
beauty--as Sylvia had bargained. What had prompted Vine to the breaking
of that other engagement? She had told him, times without number, that
he had won her--against her better judgment--by his persistent devotion
... had taken her by storm, and had thereby driven his rival to a hasty
and ill-starred marriage. How could he have taken any woman by storm?
He felt a little foolish pride in the thought that for one rash moment
he had been bold.
He once heard his wife counselling Sylvia, when she was on the point
of marrying for pique, an elderly widower in the college faculty. She
could afford to swallow Tom Henderson’s neglect, Vine had said, if
thereby she might some day step into Mrs. Dr. Henderson’s shoes. But
Sylvia was in no need of advice. She would always make the best of her
situation--glamour it over with a value calculated to inspire envy in
the minds of her friends. It would have been the same, had she occupied
a three-room cottage in Olive Hill, with miners’ wives for her social
equals. She was developing into a snob. David had not known the meaning
of the word until he felt it in Sylvia, that summer.
He turned for relief to Theodora, the one who was still plastic. His
mind had climbed awkwardly over Eileen. He must do his work, and a
father could not contemplate that catastrophe and live. Theo understood
him, as none of the others did. She had rejoiced with him in the seven
weeks of his belated honeymoon, and she sorrowed with him in the
bitterness of the aftermath.