She had indeed needed to be told: the surprise was complete and
overwhelming. She sat silent under it, her hands trembling in his, till the
blood mounted to his face and she felt his confident grasp relax.
“You didn’t guess it, then?” he exclaimed, starting up and moving away from
her.
“No; I didn’t guess it,” she confessed in a dead-level voice.
He stood above her, half challenging, half defensive. “And you haven’t a
word to say to me? Mother!” he adjured her.
She rose too, putting her arms about him with a kiss. “Dick! Dear Dick!”
she murmured.
“She imagines you don’t like her; she says she’s always felt it. And yet
she owns you’ve been delightful, that you’ve tried to make friends with
her. And I thought you knew how much it would mean to me, just now, to have
this uncertainty over, and that you’d actually been trying to help me, to
put in a good word for me. I thought it was you who had made her decide.”
“I?”
“By your talk with her the other day. She told me of your talk with her.”
His mother’s hands slipped from his shoulders and she sank back into her
seat. She felt the cruelty of her silence, but only an inarticulate murmur
found a way to her lips. Before speaking she must clear a space in the
suffocating rush of her sensations. For the moment she could only repeat
inwardly that Clemence Verney had yielded before the final test, and that
she herself was somehow responsible for this fresh entanglement of fate.
For she saw in a flash how the coils of circumstance had tightened; and as
her mind cleared it was filled with the perception that this, precisely,
was what the girl intended, that this was why she had conferred the crown
before the victory. By pledging herself to Dick she had secured his pledge
in return: had put him on his honour in a cynical inversion of the term.
Kate saw the succession of events spread out before her like a map, and the
astuteness of the girl’s policy frightened her. Miss Verney had conducted
the campaign like a strategist. She had frankly owned that her interest in
Dick’s future depended on his capacity for success, and in order to key him
up to his first achievement she had given him a foretaste of its results.
So much was almost immediately clear to Mrs. Peyton; but in a moment her
inferences had carried her a point farther. For it was now plain to her
that Miss Verney had not risked so much without first trying to gain her
point at less cost: that if she had had to give herself as a prize, it was
because no other bribe had been sufficient. This then, as the mother saw
with a throb of hope, meant that Dick, who since Darrow’s death had held
to his purpose unwaveringly, had been deflected from it by the first hint
of Clemence Verney’s connivance. Kate had not miscalculated: things had
happened as she had foreseen. In the light of the girl’s approval his act
had taken an odious look. He had recoiled from it, and it was to revive his
flagging courage that she had had to promise herself, to take him in the
meshes of her surrender.
Kate, looking up, saw above her the young perplexity of her boy’s face, the
suspended happiness waiting to brim over. With a fresh touch of misery she
said to herself that this was his hour, his one irrecoverable moment, and
that she was darkening it by her silence. Her memory went back to the same
hour in her own life: she could feel its heat in her pulses still. What
right had she to stand in Dick’s light? Who was she to decide between his
code and hers? She put out her hand and drew him down to her.
“She’ll be the making of me, you know, mother,” he said, as they leaned
together. “She’ll put new life in me--she’ll help me get my second wind.
Her talk is like a fresh breeze blowing away the fog in my head. I never
knew any one who saw so straight to the heart of things, who had such a
grip on values. She goes straight up to life and catches hold of it, and
you simply can’t make her let go.”
He got up and walked the length of the room; then he came back and stood
smiling above his mother.
“You know you and I are rather complicated people,” he said. “We’re always
walking around things to get new views of them--we’re always rearranging
the furniture. And somehow she simplifies life so tremendously.” He dropped
down beside her with a deprecating laugh. “Not that I mean, dear, that it
hasn’t been good for me to argue things out with myself, as you’ve taught
me to--only the man who stops to talk is apt to get shoved aside nowadays,
and I don’t believe Milton’s archangels would have had much success in
active business.”
He had begun in a strain of easy confidence, but as he went on she detected
an effort to hold the note, she felt that his words were being poured out
in a vain attempt to fill the silence which was deepening between them. She
longed, in her turn, to pour something into that menacing void, to bridge
it with a reconciling word or look; but her soul hung back, and she had to
take refuge in a vague murmur of tenderness.
“My boy! My boy!” she repeated; and he sat beside her without speaking,
their hand-clasp alone spanning the distance which had widened between
their thoughts.
* * * * *
The engagement, as Kate subsequently learned, was not to be made known till
later. Miss Verney had even stipulated that for the present there should
be no recognition of it in her own family or in Dick’s. She did not wish
to interfere with his final work for the competition, and had made him
promise, as he laughingly owned, that he would not see her again till the
drawings were sent in. His mother noticed that he made no other allusion to
his work; but when he bade her good-night he added that he might not see
her the next morning, as he had to go to the office early. She took this as
a hint that he wished to be left alone, and kept her room the next day till
the closing door told her that he was out of the house.
She herself had waked early, and it seemed to her that the day was already
old when she came downstairs. Never had the house appeared so empty. Even
in Dick’s longest absences something of his presence had always hung about
the rooms: a fine dust of memories and associations, which wanted only the
evocation of her thought to float into a palpable semblance of him. But now
he seemed to have taken himself quite away, to have broken every fibre by
which their lives had hung together. Where the sense of him had been there
was only a deeper emptiness: she felt as if a strange man had gone out of
her house.
She wandered from room to room, aimlessly, trying to adjust herself to
their solitude. She had known such loneliness before, in the years when
most women’s hearts are fullest; but that was long ago, and the solitude
had after all been less complete, because of the sense that it might
still be filled. Her son had come: her life had brimmed over; but now the
tide ebbed again, and she was left gazing over a bare stretch of wasted
years. Wasted! There was the mortal pang, the stroke from which there was
no healing. Her faith and hope had been marsh-lights luring her to the
wilderness, her love a vain edifice reared on shifting ground.
In her round of the rooms she came at last to Dick’s study upstairs. It was
full of his boyhood: she could trace the history of his past in its quaint
relics and survivals, in the school-books lingering on his crowded shelves,
the school-photographs and college-trophies hung among his later treasures.
All his successes and failures, his exaltations and inconsistencies, were
recorded in the warm huddled heterogeneous room. Everywhere she saw the
touch of her own hand, the vestiges of her own steps. It was she alone
who held the clue to the labyrinth, who could thread a way through the
confusions and contradictions of his past; and her soul rejected the
thought that his future could ever escape from her. She dropped down into
his shabby college armchair and hid her face in the papers on his desk.