Most of these circumstances Linda Hallet quietly recalled sitting with
her husband in the house that had been occupied by the Lowries'. A
letter from Pleydon had taken her into a past seven years gone by; while
ordinarily her memory was indistinct; ordinarily she was fully occupied
by the difficulties, or rather compromises, of the present. But, in the
tranquil open glow of a Franklin stove and the withdrawn intentness of
Arnaud reading, her mind had returned to the distressed period of her
wedding.
Elouise Lowrie--Amelia was dead--sunk in a stupor of extreme old age,
her bloodless hands folded in an irreproachable black surah silk lap,
sat beyond the stove; and Lowrie, Linda's elder child, five and a half,
together with his sister Vigné, had been long asleep above. Linda was
privately relieved by this: her children presented enormous obligations.
The boy, already at a model school, appalled her inadequate preparations
by his flashes of perceptive intelligence; while she was frankly abashed
at the delicate rosy perfection of her daughter.
The present letter was the third she had received from Dodge Pleydon,
whom she had not seen since her marriage. At first he had been enraged
at the wrong, he had every reason to feel, she had done him. Then his
anger had dissolved into a meager correspondence of outward and obvious
facts. There was so much that she had been unable to explain. He had
always been impatient, even contemptuous, of the emotion that made her
surrender to him unthinkable--Linda realized now that it had been the
strongest impulse of her life--and, of course, she had never accounted
for the practically unbalanced enmity of her mother.
The latter had deepened to an incredible degree, so much so that Mr.
Moses Feldt, though he had never taken an actual part in it--such
bitterness was entirely outside his generous sentimentality--had become
acutely uncomfortable in his own home, imploring Linda, with ready
tears, to be kinder to her mama. Judith, too, had grown cutting, jealous
of Linda's serenity of youth, as her appearance showed the effect of her
wasting emotions. Things quite extraordinary had happened: once
Linda's skin had been almost seriously affected by an irritation that
immediately followed the trace of her powder-puff; and at several times
she had had clumsily composed anonymous notes of a most distressing
nature.
She had wondered, calmly enough, which of the two bitter women were
responsible, and decided that it was her mother. At this the situation
at the Feldts', increasingly strained, had become an impossibility.
Arnaud Hallet, after his first visit, had soon returned. There was no
more mention of his money; but every time he saw her he asked her
again, in his special manner--a formality flavored by a slight diffident
humor--to marry him. Arnaud's proposals had alternated with Pleydon's
utterly different demand.
Linda remembered agonized evenings when, in a return of his brutal
manner of the unforgettable night in the Lowrie garden, he tried to
force a recognition of his passion. It had left her cold, exhausted,
the victim of a mingled disappointment at her failure to respond with
a hatred of all essential existence. At last, on a particularly trying
occasion, she had desperately agreed to marry him.
The aversion of her mother, becoming really dangerous, had finally
appalled her; and a headache weighed on her with a leaden pain. Dodge,
too, had been unusually considerate; he talked about the future--tied
up, he asserted, in her--of his work; and suddenly, at the signal of her
rare tears, Linda agreed to a wedding.
In the middle of the night she had wakened oppressed by a dread
resulting in an uncontrollable chill. She thought first that her mother
was bending a malignant face over her; and then realized that her
feeling was caused by her promise to Dodge Pleydon. It had grown worse
instead of vanishing, waves of nameless shrinking swept over her; and in
the morning, further harrowed by the actualities of being, she had sent
a telegram to Arnaud Hallet--to Arnaud's kindness and affection, his
detachment not unlike her own.
They were married immediately; and through the ceremony and the
succeeding days she had been almost entirely absorbed in a sensation of
escape. At the death of Amelia Lowrie, soon after, Arnaud had suggested
a temporary period in the house she remembered with pleasure; and,
making small alterations with the months and years, they had tacitly
agreed to remain.
Linda often wondered, walking about the lower floor, why it seemed so
familiar to her: she would stand in the dining-room, with its ceiling of
darkened beams, and gaze absent-minded through the long windows at the
close-cut walled greenery without. The formal drawing-room, at the right
of the street entrance, equally held her--a cool interior with slatted
wooden blinds, a white mantelpiece with delicately reeded supports and a
bas-relief of Minerva on the center panel, a polished brass scuttle for
cannel-coal and chairs with wide severely fretted backs upholstered in
old pale damask.
The house seemed familiar, but she could never grow accustomed to the
undeniable facts of her husband, the children and her completely changed
atmosphere. She admitted to herself that her principal feeling in
connection with Lowrie and Vigné was embarrassment. Here she always
condemned herself as an indifferent, perhaps unnatural, mother. She
couldn't help it. In the same sense she must be an unsatisfactory wife.
Linda was unable to shake off the conviction that it was like a play in
which she had no more than a spectator's part.
This was her old disability, the result of her habit of sitting, as
a child, apart from the concerns and stir of living. She made every
possible effort to overcome it, to surrender to her new conditions; but,
if nothing else, an instinctive shyness prevented. It went back further,
even, she thought, than her own experience, and she recalled all she had
heard and reconstructed of her father--a man shut in on himself who had,
one day, without a word walked out of the door and left his wife,
never to return. These realizations, however, did little to clarify her
vision; she was continually trying to adjust her being to circumstances
that persistently remained a little distant and blurred.
In appearance, anyhow, Linda told herself with a measure of reassurance,
she was practically unchanged. She still, with the support of Arnaud,
disregarding current fashion, wore her hair in a straight bang across
her brow and blue gaze. She was as slender as formerly, but more
gracefully round, in spite of the faint characteristic stiffness that
was the result of her mental hesitation. Her clothes, too, had hardly
varied--she wore, whenever possible, white lawns ruffled about the
throat and hem, with broad soft black sashes, while her more formal
dresses were sheaths of dull unornamented satin extravagant in the
perfection of their simplicity.