IV

The funeral took place the next morning, and on the return from the

cemetery Dick told his mother that he must go and look over things at

Darrow’s office. He had heard the day before from his friend’s aunt, a

helpless person to whom telegraphy was difficult and travel inconceivable,

and who, in eight pages of unpunctuated eloquence, made over to Dick what

she called the melancholy privilege of winding up her nephew’s affairs.

Mrs. Peyton looked anxiously at her son. “Is there no one who can do this

for you? He must have had a clerk or some one who knows about his work.”

Dick shook his head. “Not lately. He hasn’t had much to do this winter, and

these last months he had chucked everything to work alone over his plans.”

The word brought a faint colour to Mrs. Peyton’s cheek. It was the first

allusion that either of them had made to Darrow’s bequest.

“Oh, of course you must do all you can,” she murmured, turning alone into

the house.

The emotions of the morning had stirred her deeply, and she sat at home

during the day, letting her mind dwell, in a kind of retrospective piety,

on the thought of poor Darrow’s devotion. She had given him too little

time while he lived, had acquiesced too easily in his growing habits of

seclusion; and she felt it as a proof of insensibility that she had not

been more closely drawn to the one person who had loved Dick as she loved

him. The evidence of that love, as shown in Darrow’s letter, filled her

with a vain compunction. The very extravagance of his offer lent it a

deeper pathos. It was wonderful that, even in the urgency of affection, a

man of his almost morbid rectitude should have overlooked the restrictions

of professional honour, should have implied the possibility of his friend’s

overlooking them. It seemed to make his sacrifice the more complete that it

had, unconsciously, taken the form of a subtle temptation.

The last word arrested Mrs. Peyton’s thoughts. A temptation? To whom? Not,

surely, to one capable, as her son was capable, of rising to the height

of his friend’s devotion. The offer, to Dick, would mean simply, as it

meant to her, the last touching expression of an inarticulate fidelity:

the utterance of a love which at last had found its formula. Mrs. Peyton

dismissed as morbid any other view of the case. She was annoyed with

herself for supposing that Dick could be ever so remotely affected by the

possibility at which poor Darrow’s renunciation hinted. The nature of

the offer removed it from practical issues to the idealizing region of

sentiment.

Mrs. Peyton had been sitting alone with these thoughts for the greater part

of the afternoon, and dusk was falling when Dick entered the drawing-room.

In the dim light, with his pallour heightened by the sombre effect of

his mourning, he came upon her almost startlingly, with a revival of

some long-effaced impression which, for a moment, gave her the sense of

struggling among shadows. She did not, at first, know what had produced the

effect; then she saw that it was his likeness to his father.

“Well--is it over?” she asked, as he threw himself into a chair without

speaking.

“Yes: I’ve looked through everything.” He leaned back, crossing his hands

behind his head, and gazing past her with a look of utter lassitude.

She paused a moment, and then said tentatively: “to-morrow you will be able

to go back to your work.”

“Oh--my work,” he exclaimed, as if to brush aside an ill-timed pleasantry.

“Are you too tired?”

“No.” He rose and began to wander up and down the room. “I’m not

tired.--Give me some tea, will you?” He paused before her while she poured

the cup, and then, without taking it, turned away to light a cigarette.

“Surely there is still time?” she suggested, with her eyes on him.

“Time? To finish my plans? Oh, yes--there’s time. But they’re not worth

it.”

“Not worth it?” She started up, and then dropped back into her seat,

ashamed of having betrayed her anxiety. “They are worth as much as they

were last week,” she said with an attempt at cheerfulness.

“Not to me,” he returned. “I hadn’t seen Darrow’s then.”

There was a long silence. Mrs. Peyton sat with her eyes fixed on her

clasped hands, and her son paced the room restlessly.

“Are they so wonderful?” she asked at length.

“Yes.”

She paused again, and then said, lifting a tremulous glance to his face:

“That makes his offer all the more beautiful.”

Dick was lighting another cigarette, and his face was turned from her.

“Yes--I suppose so,” he said in a low tone.

“They were quite finished, he told me,” she continued, unconsciously

dropping her voice to the pitch of his.

“Yes.”

“Then they will be entered, I suppose?”

“Of course--why not?” he answered almost sharply.

“Shall you have time to attend to all that and to finish yours too?”

“Oh, I suppose so. I’ve told you it isn’t a question of time. I see now

that mine are not worth bothering with.”

She rose and approached him, laying her hands on his shoulders. “You are

tired and unstrung; how can you judge? Why not let me look at both designs

to-morrow?”

Under her gaze he flushed abruptly and drew back with a half-impatient

gesture.

“Oh, I’m afraid that wouldn’t help me; you’d be sure to think mine best,”

he said with a laugh.

“But if I could give you good reasons?” she pressed him.

He took her hand, as if ashamed of his impatience. “Dear mother, if you had

any reasons their mere existence would prove that they were bad.”

His mother did not return his smile. “You won’t let me see the two designs

then?” she said with a faint tinge of insistence.

“Oh, of course--if you want to--if you only won’t talk about it now! Can’t

you see that I’m pretty nearly dead-beat?” he burst out uncontrollably; and

as she stood silent, he added with a weary fall in his voice, “I think I’ll

go upstairs and see if I can’t get a nap before dinner.”

* * * * *

Though they had separated upon the assurance that she should see the two

designs if she wished it, Mrs. Peyton knew they would not be shown to her.

Dick, indeed, would not again deny her request; but had he not reckoned on

the improbability of her renewing it? All night she lay confronted by that

question. The situation shaped itself before her with that hallucinating

distinctness which belongs to the midnight vision. She knew now why Dick

had suddenly reminded her of his father: had she not once before seen the

same thought moving behind the same eyes? She was sure it had occurred to

Dick to use Darrow’s drawings. As she lay awake in the darkness she could

hear him, long after midnight, pacing the floor overhead: she held her

breath, listening to the recurring beat of his foot, which seemed that of

an imprisoned spirit revolving wearily in the cage of the same thought. She

felt in every fibre that a crisis in her son’s life had been reached, that

the act now before him would have a determining effect on his whole future.

The circumstances of her past had raised to clairvoyance her natural

insight into human motive, had made of her a moral barometer responding to

the faintest fluctuations of atmosphere, and years of anxious meditation

had familiarized her with the form which her son’s temptations were likely

to take. The peculiar misery of her situation was that she could not,

except indirectly, put this intuition, this foresight, at his service.

It was a part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real

counsellor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not

become a part of the moral tissues. Love such as hers had a great office,

the office of preparation and direction; but it must know how to hold its

hand and keep its counsel, how to attend upon its object as an invisible

influence rather than as an active interference.

All this Kate Peyton had told herself again and again, during those hours

of anxious calculation in which she had tried to cast Dick’s horoscope; but

not in her moments of most fantastic foreboding had she figured so cruel a

test of her courage. If her prayers for him had taken precise shape, she

might have asked that he should be spared the spectacular, the dramatic

appeal to his will-power: that his temptations should slip by him in a dull

disguise. She had secured him against all ordinary forms of baseness; the

vulnerable point lay higher, in that region of idealizing egotism which is

the seat of life in such natures.

Years of solitary foresight gave her mind a singular alertness in dealing

with such possibilities. She saw at once that the peril of the situation

lay in the minimum of risk it involved. Darrow had employed no assistant in

working out his plans for the competition, and his secluded life made it

almost certain that he had not shown them to any one, and that she and Dick

alone knew them to have been completed. Moreover, it was a part of Dick’s

duty to examine the contents of his friend’s office, and in doing this

nothing would be easier than to possess himself of the drawings and make

use of any part of them that might serve his purpose. He had Darrow’s

authority for doing so; and though the act involved a slight breach of

professional probity, might not his friend’s wishes be invoked as a secret

justification? Mrs. Peyton found herself almost hating poor Darrow for

having been the unconscious instrument of her son’s temptation. But what

right had she, after all, to suspect Dick of considering, even for a

moment, the act of which she was so ready to accuse him? His unwillingness

to let her see the drawings might have been the accidental result of

lassitude and discouragement. He was tired and troubled, and she had chosen

the wrong moment to make the request. His want of readiness might even be

due to the wish to conceal from her how far his friend had surpassed him.

She knew his sensitiveness on this point, and reproached herself for not

having foreseen it. But her own arguments failed to convince her. Deep

beneath her love for her boy and her faith in him there lurked a nameless

doubt. She could hardly now, in looking back, define the impulse upon which

she had married Denis Peyton: she knew only that the deeps of her nature

had been loosened, and that she had been borne forward on their current

to the very fate from which her heart recoiled. But if in one sense her

marriage remained a problem, there was another in which her motherhood

seemed to solve it. She had never lost the sense of having snatched her

child from some dim peril which still lurked and hovered; and he became

more closely hers with every effort of her vigilant love. For the act

of rescue had not been accomplished once and for all in the moment

of immolation: it had not been by a sudden stroke of heroism, but by

ever-renewed and indefatigable effort, that she had built up for him the

miraculous shelter of her love. And now that it stood there, a hallowed

refuge against failure, she could not even set a light in the pane, but

must let him grope his way to it unaided.

V

Mrs. Peyton’s midnight musings summed themselves up in the conclusion that

the next few hours would end her uncertainty. She felt the day to be

decisive. If Dick offered to show her the drawings, her fears would be

proved groundless; if he avoided the subject, they were justified.

She dressed early in order not to miss him at breakfast; but as she entered

the dining-room the parlour-maid told her that Mr. Peyton had overslept

himself, and had rung to have his breakfast sent upstairs. Was it a pretext

to avoid her? She was vexed at her own readiness to see a portent in the

simplest incident; but while she blushed at her doubts she let them govern

her. She left the dining-room door open, determined not to miss him if

he came downstairs while she was at breakfast; then she went back to the

drawing-room and sat down at her writing-table, trying to busy herself with

some accounts while she listened for his step. Here too she had left the

door open; but presently even this slight departure from her daily usage

seemed a deviation from the passive attitude she had adopted, and she rose

and shut the door. She knew that she could still hear his step on the

stairs--he had his father’s quick swinging gait--but as she sat listening,

and vainly trying to write, the closed door seemed to symbolize a refusal

to share in his trial, a hardening of herself against his need of her. What

if he should come down intending to speak, and should be turned from his

purpose? Slighter obstacles have deflected the course of events in those

indeterminate moments when the soul floats between two tides. She sprang

up quickly, and as her hand touched the latch she heard his step on the

stairs.

When he entered the drawing-room she had regained the writing-table and

could lift a composed face to his. He came in hurriedly, yet with a kind of

reluctance beneath his haste: again it was his father’s step. She smiled,

but looked away from him as he approached her; she seemed to be re-living

her own past as one re-lives things in the distortion of fever.

“Are you off already?” she asked, glancing at the hat in his hand.

“Yes; I’m late as it is. I overslept myself.” He paused and looked vaguely

about the room. “Don’t expect me till late--don’t wait dinner for me.”

She stirred impulsively. “Dick, you’re overworking--you’ll make yourself

ill.”

“Nonsense. I’m as fit as ever this morning. Don’t be imagining things.”

He dropped his habitual kiss on her forehead, and turned to go. On the

threshold he paused, and she felt that something in him sought her and then

drew back. “Good-bye,” he called to her as the door closed on him.

She sat down and tried to survey the situation divested of her midnight

fears. He had not referred to her wish to see the drawings: but what did

the omission signify? Might he not have forgotten her request? Was she

not forcing the most trivial details to fit in with her apprehensions?

Unfortunately for her own reassurance, she knew that her familiarity with

Dick’s processes was based on such minute observation, and that, to such

intimacy as theirs, no indications were trivial. She was as certain as if

he had spoken, that when he had left the house that morning he was weighing

the possibility of using Darrow’s drawings, of supplementing his own

incomplete design from the fulness of his friend’s invention. And with a

bitter pang she divined that he was sorry he had shown her Darrow’s letter.

It was impossible to remain face to face with such conjectures, and though

she had given up all her engagements during the few days since Darrow’s

death, she now took refuge in the thought of a concert which was to take

place at a friend’s house that morning. The music-room, when she entered,

was thronged with acquaintances, and she found transient relief in that

dispersal of attention which makes society an anesthetic for some forms

of wretchedness. Contact with the pressure of busy indifferent life often

gives remoteness to questions which have clung as close as the flesh to the

bone; and if Mrs. Peyton did not find such complete release, she at least

interposed between herself and her anxiety the obligation to dissemble it.

But the relief was only momentary, and when the first bars of the overture

turned from her the smiles of recognition among which she had tried to lose

herself, she felt a deeper sense of isolation. The music, which at another

time would have swept her away on some rich current of emotion, now seemed

to island her in her own thoughts, to create an artificial solitude in

which she found herself more immitigably face to face with her fears. The

silence, the _recueillement_, about her gave resonance to the inner

voices, lucidity to the inner vision, till she seemed enclosed in a

luminous empty horizon against which every possibility took the sharp edge

of accomplished fact. With relentless precision the course of events was

unrolled before her: she saw Dick yielding to his opportunity, snatching

victory from dishonour, winning love, happiness and success in the act by

which he lost himself. It was all so simple, so easy, so inevitable, that

she felt the futility of struggling or hoping against it. He would win the

competition, would marry Miss Verney, would press on to achievement through

the opening which the first success had made for him.

As Mrs. Peyton reached this point in her forecast, she found her outward

gaze arrested by the face of the young lady who so dominated her inner

vision. Miss Verney, a few rows distant, sat intent upon the music, in that

attitude of poised motion which was her nearest approach to repose. Her

slender brown profile with its breezy hair, her quick eye, and the lips

which seemed to listen as well as speak, all betokened to Mrs. Peyton a

nature through which the obvious energies blew free, a bare open stretch

of consciousness without shelter for tenderer growths. She shivered to

think of Dick’s frail scruples exposed to those rustling airs. And then,

suddenly, a new thought struck her. What if she might turn this force to

her own use, make it serve, unconsciously to Dick, as the means of his

deliverance? Hitherto she had assumed that her son’s worst danger lay in

the chance of his confiding his difficulty to Clemence Verney; and she

had, in her own past, a precedent which made her think such a confidence

not unlikely. If he did carry his scruples to the girl, she argued, the

latter’s imperviousness, her frank inability to understand them, would have

the effect of dispelling them like mist; and he was acute enough to know

this and profit by it. So she had hitherto reasoned; but now the girl’s

presence seemed to clarify her perceptions, and she told herself that

something in Dick’s nature, something which she herself had put there,

would resist this short cut to safety, would make him take the more

tortuous way to his goal rather than gain it through the privacies of the

heart he loved. For she had lifted him thus far above his father, that it

would be a disenchantment to him to find that Clemence Verney did not share

his scruples. On this much, his mother now exultingly felt, she could count

in her passive struggle for supremacy. No, he would never, never tell

Clemence Verney--and his one hope, his sure salvation, therefore lay in

some one else’s telling her.

The excitement of this discovery had nearly, in mid-concert, swept Mrs.

Peyton from her seat to the girl’s side. Fearing to miss the latter in

the throng at the entrance, she slipped out during the last number and,

lingering in the farther drawing-room, let the dispersing audience drift

her in Miss Verney’s direction. The girl shone sympathetically on her

approach, and in a moment they had detached themselves from the crowd and

taken refuge in the perfumed emptiness of the conservatory.

The girl, whose sensations were always easily set in motion, had at first a

good deal to say of the music, for which she claimed, on her hearer’s part,

an active show of approval or dissent; but this dismissed, she turned a

melting face on Mrs. Peyton and said with one of her rapid modulations of

tone: “I was so sorry about poor Mr. Darrow.”

Mrs. Peyton uttered an assenting sigh. “It was a great grief to us--a great

loss to my son.”

“Yes--I know. I can imagine what you must have felt. And then it was so

unlucky that it should have happened just now.”

Mrs. Peyton shot a reconnoitring glance at her profile. “His dying, you

mean, on the eve of success?”

Miss Verney turned a frank smile upon her. “One ought to feel that, of

course--but I’m afraid I am very selfish where my friends are concerned,

and I was thinking of Mr. Peyton’s having to give up his work at such a

critical moment.” She spoke without a note of deprecation: there was a

pagan freshness in her opportunism.

Mrs. Peyton was silent, and the girl continued after a pause: “I suppose

now it will be almost impossible for him to finish his drawings in time.

It’s a pity he hadn’t worked out the whole scheme a little sooner. Then the

details would have come of themselves.”

Mrs. Peyton felt a contempt strangely mingled with exultation. If only the

girl would talk in that way to Dick!

“He has hardly had time to think of himself lately,” she said, trying to

keep the coldness out of her voice.

“No, of course not,” Miss Verney assented; “but isn’t that all the more

reason for his friends to think of him? It was very dear of him to give up

everything to nurse Mr. Darrow--but, after all, if a man is going to get on

in his career there are times when he must think first of himself.”

Mrs. Peyton paused, trying to choose her words with deliberation. It was

quite clear now that Dick had not spoken, and she felt the responsibility

that devolved upon her.

“Getting on in a career--is that always the first thing to be considered?”

she asked, letting her eyes rest musingly on the girl’s.

The glance did not disconcert Miss Verney, who returned it with one of

equal comprehensiveness. “Yes,” she said quickly, and with a slight blush.

“With a temperament like Mr. Peyton’s I believe it is. Some people can pick

themselves up after any number of bad falls: I am not sure that he could. I

think discouragement would weaken instead of strengthening him.”

Both women had forgotten external conditions in the quick reach for each

other’s meanings. Mrs. Peyton flushed, her maternal pride in revolt; but

the answer was checked on her lips by the sense of the girl’s unexpected

insight. Here was some one who knew Dick as well as she did--should she say

a partisan or an accomplice? A dim jealousy stirred beneath Mrs. Peyton’s

other emotions: she was undergoing the agony which the mother feels at the

first intrusion on her privilege of judging her child; and her voice had a

flutter of resentment.

“You must have a poor opinion of his character,” she said.

Miss Verney did not remove her eyes, but her blush deepened beautifully. “I

have, at any rate,” she Said, “a high one of his talent. I don’t suppose

many men have an equal amount of moral and intellectual energy.”

“And you would cultivate the one at the expense of the other?”

“In certain cases--and up to a certain point.” She shook out the long fur

of her muff, one of those silvery flexible furs which clothe a woman with a

delicate sumptuousness. Everything about her, at the moment, seemed rich

and cold--everything, as Mrs. Peyton quickly noted, but the blush lingering

under her dark skin; and so complete was the girl’s self-command that the

blush seemed to be there only because it had been forgotten.

“I dare say you think me strange,” she continued. “Most people do, because

I speak the truth. It’s the easiest way of concealing one’s feelings. I

can, for instance, talk quite openly about Mr. Peyton under shelter of your

inference that I shouldn’t do so if I were what is called ‘interested’ in

him. And as I _am_ interested in him, my method has its advantages!”

She ended with one of the fluttering laughs which seemed to flit from point

to point of her expressive person.

Mrs. Peyton leaned toward her. “I believe you are interested,” she said

quietly; “and since I suppose you allow others the privilege you claim for

yourself, I am going to confess that I followed you here in the hope of

finding out the nature of your interest.”

Miss Verney shot a glance at her, and drew away in a soft subsidence of

undulating furs.

“Is this an embassy?” she asked smiling.

“No: not in any sense.”

The girl leaned back with an air of relief. “I’m glad; I should have

disliked--” She looked again at Mrs. Peyton. “You want to know what I mean

to do?”

“Yes.”

“Then I can only answer that I mean to wait and see what he does.”

“You mean that everything is contingent on his success?”

“_I_ am--if I’m everything,” she admitted gaily.

The mother’s heart was beating in her throat, and her words seemed to force

themselves out through the throbs.

“I--I don’t quite see why you attach such importance to this special

success.”

“Because he does,” the girl returned instantly. “Because to him it is the

final answer to his self-questioning--the questioning whether he is ever to

amount to anything or not. He says if he has anything in him it ought to

come out now. All the conditions are favourable--it is the chance he has

always prayed for. You see,” she continued, almost confidentially, but

without the least loss of composure--“you see he has told me a great deal

about himself and his various experiments--his phrases of indecision and

disgust. There are lots of tentative talents in the world, and the sooner

they are crushed out by circumstances the better. But it seems as though

he really had it in him to do something distinguished--as though the

uncertainty lay in his character and not in his talent. That is what

interests, what attracts me. One can’t teach a man to have genius, but if

he has it one may show him how to use it. That is what I should be good

for, you see--to keep him up to his opportunities.”

Mrs. Peyton had listened with an intensity of attention that left her reply

unprepared. There was something startling and yet half attractive in the

girl’s avowal of principles which are oftener lived by than professed.

“And you think,” she began at length, “that in this case he has fallen

below his opportunity?”

“No one can tell, of course; but his discouragement, his _abattement_,

is a bad sign. I don’t think he has any hope of succeeding.”

The mother again wavered a moment. “Since you are so frank,” she then said,

“will you let me be equally so, and ask how lately you have seen him?”

The girl smiled at the circumlocution. “Yesterday afternoon,” she said

simply.

“And you thought him--”

“Horribly down on his luck. He said himself that his brain was empty.”

Again Mrs. Peyton felt the throb in her throat, and a slow blush rose to

her cheek. “Was that all he said?”

“About himself--was there anything else?” said the girl quickly.

“He didn’t tell you of--of an opportunity to make up for the time he has

lost?”

“An opportunity? I don’t understand.”

“He didn’t speak to you, then, of Mr. Darrow’s letter?”

“He said nothing of any letter.”

“There _was_ one, which was found after poor Darrow’s death. In it he

gave Dick leave to use his design for the competition. Dick says the design

is wonderful--it would give him just what he needs.”

Miss Verney sat listening raptly, with a rush of colour that suffused her

like light.

“But when was this? Where was the letter found? He never said a word of

it!” she exclaimed.

“The letter was found on the day of Darrow’s death.”

“But I don’t understand! Why has he never told me? Why should he seem so

hopeless?” She turned an ignorant appealing face on Mrs. Peyton. It was

prodigious, but it was true--she felt nothing, saw nothing, but the crude

fact of the opportunity.

Mrs. Peyton’s voice trembled with the completeness of her triumph. “I

suppose his reason for not speaking is that he has scruples.”

“Scruples?”

“He feels that to use the design would be dishonest.”

Miss Verney’s eyes fixed themselves on her in a commiserating stare.

“Dishonest? When the poor man wished it himself? When it was his last

request? When the letter is there to prove it? Why, the design belongs to

your son! No one else had any right to it.”

“But Dick’s right does not extend to passing it off as his own--at least

that is his feeling, I believe. If he won the competition he would be

winning it on false pretenses.”

“Why should you call them false pretenses? His design might have been

better than Darrow’s if he had had time to carry it out. It seems to me

that Mr. Darrow must have felt this--must have felt that he owed his friend

some compensation for the time he took from him. I can imagine nothing more

natural than his wishing to make this return for your son’s sacrifice.”

She positively glowed with the force of her conviction, and Mrs. Peyton,

for a strange instant, felt her own resistance wavering. She herself had

never considered the question in that light--the light of Darrow’s viewing

his gift as a justifiable compensation. But the glimpse she caught of it

drove her shuddering behind her retrenchments.

“That argument,” she said coldly, “would naturally be more convincing to

Darrow than to my son.”

Miss Verney glanced up, struck by the change in Mrs. Peyton’s voice.

“Ah, then you agree with him? You think it _would_ be dishonest?”

Mrs. Peyton saw that she had slipped into self-betrayal. “My son and I have

not spoken of the matter,” she said evasively. She caught the flash of

relief in Miss Verney’s face.

“You haven’t spoken? Then how do you know how he feels about it?”

“I only judge from--well, perhaps from his not speaking.”

The girl drew a deep breath. “I see,” she murmured. “That is the very

reason that prevents his speaking.”

“The reason?”

“Your knowing what he thinks--and his knowing that you know.”

Mrs. Peyton was startled at her subtlety. “I assure you,” she said, rising,

“that I have done nothing to influence him.”

The girl gazed at her musingly. “No,” she said with a faint smile, “nothing

except to read his thoughts.”