WAS IRENE RIGHT?
IF she could have heard some of the talk that had taken place on the
porch in the moonlight, Mrs. Burnham would have better understood her
son's consideration. They had taken but very few turns on the porch when
Erskine said:--
"Mamma has gone upstairs. I think I must run up and see her a few
minutes, Irene. She does not seem to feel quite well to-night; although
in some respects I think I never saw her looking better; her eyes were
very bright, did you notice? Perhaps she is feverish. Did she speak of
having cold?"
"Not at all; I have no idea that she doesn't feel quite well."
"There was something peculiar about her. Didn't she really go out at all
to-day? That is certainly unusual; you have seen how particular she is
to keep her Friday programme. Irene, I am really afraid that she is
ill."
"She isn't ill at all, you fussy boy; I think you are absurd about your
mother. You fuss over her as though she were a spoiled child. That is
just the word for it."
"Very well," he said good-humouredly. "I must go and 'fuss over' her,
enough to know why she overturned her usual programme," and he moved
toward the door.
His wife held to his arm and tried to arrest his steps.
"Don't go in, Erskine; it is stuffy inside, and I haven't seen you since
morning. As for that programme which worries you so much, if you were
not dreadfully stupid to-night you would understand that it is I who
overturned it. I ran away with the carriage, I told you--almost as soon
as you went yourself. I was so charmed with the idea of seeing the
Langhams again that I forgot everything else."
Her husband turned then to look at her, his face expressing surprise.
"Did you take our carriage, dear? I supposed you ordered one from the
livery."
His wife pretended to pout.
"You are cross to-night, Erskine. I don't see why I should. I thought
'Our' meant mine as much as hers. Why shouldn't she order one if she
wanted it?"
He laughed, as though he was expected to understand that she was talking
nonsense, but he spoke with an undertone of decision.
"Oh if it comes to that, the carriage as well as the horses are
undoubtedly my mother's, but she and I have never drawn any hard and
fast lines about 'mine' and 'thine'; I have always found her too willing
to give up her convenience for mine. For that reason, perhaps, I have
been careful to plan systematically for her, and to anticipate and
overrule her personal sacrifices as much as possible, and I know that
you will delight to join me in it. I am afraid that she was much
inconvenienced to-day; still, that cannot be why she did not see any of
her friends. What reason did she give, dear, for not coming down?"
Irene pouted in earnest this time.
"Really, Erskine, you are strangely obtuse! I have explained at least
three times that mother spent the afternoon in her room, and that I gave
orders that she should not be disturbed. I thought I should be commended
for it instead of blamed."
"I haven't had a thought of blaming you, Irene, but I am a trifle
anxious about my mother, and what you say only increases the anxiety.
She has never been given to sleeping much in the daytime."
"Oh what nonsense! as though you knew what she did all day, while you
are in town! Of course she sleeps; old people always do."
"My mother isn't old, Irene."
[Illustration: "MY MOTHER ISN'T OLD, IRENE."--_Page 167._]
"Why not, I wonder? you ridiculous boy! When should people begin to be
called old, pray, if not at fifty? And she is more than that. She is
within a few years of Auntie's age, and you thought she was an old
woman, and were always preaching to me about how patient I must be with
her on that account."
Her husband gave her a troubled, half-startled look. His mother nearly
as old as the invalid aunt who had seemed to him old enough to be his
grandmother!
"Are you sure?" he asked helplessly.
His wife laughed satirically.
"Sure of what, my beloved dunce? That your mother is fifty-three? Of
course I am. It was only a few days ago that she showed me her
gold-lined silver cup, that has the imprint of her first teeth and is
dated for her first birthday."
Then her face sobered.
"And I'll tell you another way in which I know it, Erskine. She is
growing nervous and over-sensitive, as old people always do. I can see a
great difference in her, even in the short time that I have been here.
It is nothing to worry about, of course; simply something to be expected
as among the infirmities of age. You ought to have married me six or
eight years before you did; it would have been easier for her. She
simply cannot get used to your having a wife. 'My son' has 'lived and
breathed and had his being' so many years for her sake alone, that to
share him with another is a bitter experience. She doesn't love me one
bit, Erskine, and it is not my fault. If I were an angel from heaven, it
wouldn't make any difference, provided I had presumed to marry you. It
makes it hard for both of us; and for that very reason it would be much
better if you and I were in a little house of our own. She would get
used to it much easier if she did not have me continually before her
eyes."
If she could have seen distinctly the look of pain on her husband's
face, as she got off these sentences with composed voice, it might have
moved her to pity for him. When he spoke, his voice was almost sharp. "I
am sure you are mistaken, Irene; utterly mistaken. My mother wanted me
to marry; she has wanted it for years; at times she was actually
troubled because I did not, and spoke of it very seriously."
Irene laughed lightly as she gave his arm some half-reproving,
half-caressing pats.
"Blind as a bat, you are!" she said. "Despite all your supposed wisdom.
On general principles your mother wanted you to marry, of course,
because that is the proper thing for a man to do. But marriage in the
abstract and marriage in the concrete are two very different matters.
There! haven't I put that well? Those are lawyers' terms, aren't they?
They sound learned, anyway."
He smiled in an absent-minded way at her folly. His thoughts were
elsewhere. Something in the turn of her sentence had carried him
suddenly back to a moon-lighted evening in which he had walked and
talked with Alice Warder, and he could seem to hear her voice again as
she said:--
"I know your mother loves me, Erskine, almost as she would a daughter;
and I also know that she loves me a great deal better because her son is
like a brother to me instead of being--something else." He remembered
how he had puzzled over it all, and studied his mother's face, and half
decided that Alice was right. Was Irene right, also? Was his mother
grieved that he had married at all? Was it possible that she could have
stooped to so small a feeling as jealousy!
His wife laid her head caressingly against his arm and said softly:--
"Don't worry about it, Erskine. We can't either of us help it now; and
we must just make the best of it and do as well as we can."
For the first time in his life, as those low tremulously spoken words
sounded in his ears, a feeling very like resentment toward his mother
swelled in Erskine Burnham's heart, and a torrent of tenderness rushed
over him toward the wife who had no one in all the world but himself.
This was what she had often told him.
All things considered it is perhaps not strange that he did not visit
his mother's room that evening.
It is true that when they went upstairs he paused before her door and
listened, and told himself that she was asleep and he would not disturb
her. But there had been nights before, many of them, in which he had
waited at her door and listened, and murmured: "Mommie," and received a
prompt invitation to enter. On this evening, though the hour was not
late, he was not insistent. He made no attempt to knock or to speak. It
was his concession to that new thought about her being an old woman. Or
was it a slight concession, unawares, to that new feeling of resentment?
His mother, knowing nothing of what had been talked over in the
moonlight, held her breath and waited. Of course Erskine would come to
say good night. She forgot that she had wished he would not come! When
his footsteps moved toward his own room, she waited a minute, then
stepped into the hall.
"Erskine!" she said; but she said it very softly and he did not hear
her. She could hear his voice. He was talking with his wife. The mother
slipped softly back to her own room and locked her door. It was not
late, and she and her son were only across a hall from each other; yet,
for the first time in her life under like conditions, if she slept at
all it must be without his good-night kiss. There is no true mother but
will appreciate the situation. There are, it is true, mothers who are
not accustomed to good-night kisses from their grown sons, and so would
not miss them, but they are accustomed to a certain atmosphere, and they
can understand what it would be like to be suddenly removed from it.
Mrs. Burnham went to her bed as usual, after a while, like the sensible
woman that she was. That she did not go to sleep was not her fault, for
she made earnest effort to do so. She told herself repeatedly and with a
calmness which was itself unnatural, that nothing terrible had happened,
and that she was above making herself miserable over trifles. Was her
daughter-in-law's indifference to her only a trifle? She made a distinct
pause over that word "indifference" and selected it with care; of course
it was nothing more; and--yes, it was a trifle. How could one who knew
her so little and had so little in common with her life be expected to
be other than indifferent? Erskine had expected more, very much more,
but Erskine was--was different from other people.
Then, suddenly, all her heart went out in a great swell of tenderness
for Erskine. She did not stop to reason about it, she did not wait to
ask herself why Erskine, who had everything, should be the subject of
her shielding care; she simply took him metaphorically once more into
her mother-arms and vowed to shield him from even a hint of solicitude
on her account. She would rise above it all; she would treat Irene
exactly as though she were at all times the loving and considerate
daughter that Erskine believed she was; she would let him be blind to
her faults, she would even help him to increased blindness. That was her
work for him now; she would accept it and be diligent in it. The thought
helped to quiet her, but it did not bring her sleep. She was broad
staring awake. She told herself that sleep seemed an impossibility; she
wondered curiously how she had ever slept.
A low murmur of talk came to her from the room across the hall. They
were not sleeping, either. Could she have heard some of the talk in that
room across the hall it would have made things plainer to her than they
were.
"There is one thing, dear," Erskine Burnham was saying to his wife,
"which we must look upon as settled. We can have no home apart from my
mother's. You can plan for summer cottages if you will, and where you
will, for a stay of a few weeks, but the real home must always be here.
I have taken care of my mother, practically all my life; and now if she
is, as you say, growing old, it is not the time to make any change."
"Not even though the change would be a benefit to her?" His wife
intended her words to represent a playful sarcasm, but Erskine's face
had clouded and he had answered quickly:
"No; not even under such an extraordinary supposition as that. Young as
I was when my father died, he said that to me about my mother which has
always made her seem to me as a trust; and I must be true to my trust in
any case."
After a moment's constrained silence between them his face had cleared
and he had laughed cheerfully.
"But we need not be so solemn over it, Irene. I know my mother, and I
have no fears as to her wishes. Nothing that anybody could say would
make me believe that she could be happier away from me than with me. I
would almost not believe it if she said so herself. Quite, indeed. I
should feel that she had over-persuaded herself in some spirit of
sacrifice. There is material in my mother for martyrdom, Irene. It shall
be your and my study to prevent her from indulging in it."
His wife made no attempt to reply. She was in some respects a wise woman
and she understood that there was a time when silence was golden. When
she spoke again, it was to ask if he did not think curtains lined with
rose color would be an improvement on those now separating their
dressing room from the main apartment.