MARGARET
As he inserted his latch-key in the old-fashioned lock, Stephen
remembered that his mother had instructed him not to be late because
Margaret Blair was coming to spend the evening. "It takes you so long to
change that I believe you begin to dream as soon as you go to your
room," she had added; and while he made his way hurriedly and softly up
the stairs, he wondered how he could have so completely forgotten the
girl whom he had always thought of vaguely as the one who would some
day--some remote day probably--become his wife. He was not in love with
Margaret, and he believed, though one could never be sure, that she was
not in love with him--that her fancy, if a preference so modest could be
called by so capricious a name, was for the handsome young clergyman who
read Browning with her every Tuesday afternoon. But he was aware also
that she would marry him if he asked her; he knew that the hearts of
four formidable parents were set on the match; and in his past
experience his mother's heart had invariably triumphed over his less
intrepid resolves. When Janet had said that the war had "spoiled" this
carefully nurtured sentiment, she had described the failure with her
usual accuracy. If he had never gone to France, he would certainly have
married Margaret in his twenty-fourth year, and by this time they would
have begun to rear a promising family. For he was the offspring of
tradition; and the seeds of that strange flower, which some adventurous
ancestor had strewn in his soul, could not have broken through the
compact soil in which he had grown. If he had never felt the charm of
the unknown, he would have remained satisfied to accept convention for
romance; if he had never caught a glimpse of wider horizons, he would
have restricted his vision contentedly to the tranquil current of James
River. But the harm had been done, as Janet said, the exotic flower had
sprung up, and he had learned that the family formula for happiness
could not suffice for his needs. He craved something larger, something
wider, something deeper, than the world in which his fathers had lived.
In that first year after his return he had felt that antiquated
traditions were closing about him and shutting out the air, just as he
had felt at times that the fine old walls of the house were pressing
together over his head. At such moments the sense of suffocation, of
smothering for lack of space in which to breathe, had driven him like a
hunted creature out into the streets. It was not long before he
discovered that certain persons brought this feeling of oppression more
quickly than others, that the presence of Margaret or of his parents
stifled him, while Corinna made him feel as if a window had been
suddenly flung open. The doctors, of course, had talked in scientific
terms of diseased nerves and a specialist whom his mother had called in
on one occasion had tried first to probe into the secrets of his infancy
and afterward to analyse his symptoms away. But the war, among other
lessons, had taught him that one must not take either one's sensations
or scientific opinion too seriously, and he had contrived at last to
turn the whole thing into the kind of family joke that his father could
understand. Outwardly he took up his life as before; if the penalty of
depression was psychoanalysis, it was worth while to pretend at least to
be gay. Yet beneath the surface there was, he told himself, a profound
revulsion from everything that he had once enjoyed and loved--an apathy
of soul which made him a moving shadow in a universe of stark
unrealities. He knew that he was sinking deeper and deeper into this
morass of indifference; he realized, at times vividly, that his only
hope was in change, in a complete break with the past and a complete
plunge into the future. His reason told him this, and yet, though he
longed passionately to let himself go--to make the wild dash for
freedom--his disabled will, the nervous indecision from which he
suffered, prevented both his liberation and his recovery. There were
hours of grayness when he told himself that he had neither the fortitude
to endure the old nor the energy to embrace the new. In his nature, as
in his environment, two opposing spirits were struggling: the realistic
spirit which saw things as they were and the romantic spirit which saw
things as they ought to be. It was the immemorial battle, brought by
circumstances to a crisis, between the race and the individual, between
tradition and adventure, between philosophy and experience, between age
and youth.
Yes, it was "something different" that he craved. He had known Margaret
too long; there was no surprise for him in any gesture that she made, in
any word that she uttered. They had drunk too deeply of the same springs
to offer each other the attraction of mystery, the charm of the
unusual. He was familiar with every opinion she had inherited and
preserved, with every dress she had worn, with every book she had read.
As a whole she embodied his ideal of feminine perfection. She was
gentle, lovely and unselfish; she never asked unnecessary questions,
never exacted more of one's time than one cared to give, never
interfered with more important, if not more admirable, pursuits. That
was the rarest of combinations, he knew--the delightful mingling of
every virtue he held desirable in woman--and yet, rare and delightful as
he acknowledged it to be, he was obliged to confess that it awakened not
the faintest quiver of his pulses. Margaret aroused in him every
sentiment except the one of interest; and he had begun to realize that
at the moments when he admired her most, it was often impossible for him
to make conversation. It had never occurred to him to wonder if their
association had become emotionally unprofitable to her also, for in
accordance with the system under which he lived, he had assumed that
woman's part in love was as heroically passive as it had been in
religion. What he had asked himself again and again was why, since she
was so perfectly desirable in every way, he had never fallen in love
with her? Until this evening he had always told himself that it would
come right in the end, that he was in his own phrase simply "playing for
time." Margaret was handsomer, if less piquant, than Patty Vetch. She
possessed every quality he had found lacking in poor Patty; yet he
admitted ruefully that he felt the vague sense of disappointment which
follows when one is offered a dish of one's choice and finds that the
expected flavour is missing.
There was a peremptory knock at his door, and his mother looked in
reproachfully. "You must hurry, Stephen, or everything will be burned to
a cinder."
"I am sorry," he replied with compunction, "I didn't realize that I was
late."
Her expression was stern but kind. "If you could only learn to be
punctual, dear. Of course while we felt that you were not quite
yourself, we tried not to worry about it. But you have been home so long
now that you ought to be able to drop back into your old habits."
She was right, he knew; the exasperating thing about her was that she
was always right. It was reasonable, it was logical, that after two
years he should be able to drop back into his old habits of life; and
yet he realized, with the intensity of revolt, that these habits
represented for him the form of bondage from which he desired
passionately to escape. He could not oppose his mother, and the
knowledge that he could not oppose her increased his annoyance. As far
back as he could remember she had governed her household as a benevolent
despot; and the fact that she lived entirely for others appeared to him
to have endowed her with some unfair advantage. Her very unselfishness
had developed into an unscrupulous power to ruin their lives. How was it
possible to weigh one's personal preferences against an irresistible
force which was actuated simply and solely by the desire for one's good?
Who could withstand a virtue which had encased itself in the first
principle of religion--which gave all things and demanded nothing except
the sacrifice of one's immortal soul?
"I am ready now," he said; and then as they went downstairs together, he
added contritely: "After this I'll try to remember."
"I hope you will, my dear. It vexes your father." Even in his childhood
Stephen had understood that his father's "vexation" existed only as an
instrument of correction in the hands of his mother. Though he had
discovered by the time he was three years old that the image was nothing
more than a nursery bugaboo, there were occasions still when the figure
was solemnly dressed up and paraded before his eyes.
"So it's the Dad, bless him!" he exclaimed, for if he loved his mother
in spite of her virtues, he joined heartily in the family worship of the
head of the house. "Well, he has had a word with Margaret anyway, and he
ought to thank me for that."
"Dear Margaret," murmured Mrs. Culpeper, "she is looking so sweet
to-night."
That Margaret was looking very sweet indeed, Stephen acknowledged as
soon as he entered the room, where the firelight suffused the Persian
rugs (which had replaced the earlier Brussels carpet woven in a mammoth
floral design), the elaborately carved and twisted rosewood chairs and
sofas, upholstered in ruby-coloured brocade, the few fine old pieces of
Chippendale or Heppelwhite, the massive crystal chandelier, and the
precise copies of Italian paintings in gorgeous Florentine frames. Here
and there hung a family portrait, one of Amanda Culpeper, a famous
English beauty, with a long nose and a short upper lip, not unlike
Victoria's. This painting, which was supposed to be by Sir Joshua
Reynolds, was a source of unfailing consolation to Victoria, though
Stephen preferred the Sully painting of his grandmother, Judith
Randolph, who reminded him in some subtle way of Margaret Blair. In his
childhood he had believed this drawing-room to be the most beautiful
place on earth, and he never entered it now without a feeling of regret
for a shattered illusion.
As he took Margaret's hand her expression of intelligent sympathy went
straight to his heart; and he told himself emphatically that after all
the familiar graces in women were the most lovable. She was a small
fragile girl, with a lovely oval face, nut-brown hair that grew in a
"widow's peak" on her forehead, and the prettiest dark blue eyes in the
world. Her figure drooped slightly in the shoulders, and was, as Mary
Byrd pointed out in her dashing way, "without the faintest pretence to
style." But if Margaret lacked "style," she possessed an unconscious
grace which seemed to Stephen far more attractive. It was delightful to
watch the flowing lines of her clothes, as if, he used to imagine in a
fanciful strain, she were poured out of some slender porcelain vase. Her
dress to-night, of delicate blue crêpe, began slightly below the throat
and reached almost to her ankles. It was a fashion which he had always
admired; but he realized that it gave Margaret, who was only twenty-two,
a quaint air of maturity.
"I am so sorry I am late," he said, "but I had to go back to the office
for a paper I'd forgotten." It was the truth as far as it went; and yet
because it was not the whole truth, because his delay was due, not to
his return for the paper, but to his meeting with Patty Vetch in the
Square, his conscience pricked him uncomfortably. When deceit was so
easy it ceased to be a temptation.
She looked at him with an expression of guileless sympathy. "After
working all day I should think you would be tired," she murmured. That
was the way she would always cover up his errors, large or small, he
knew, with a trusting sweetness which made him feel there was dishonour
in the merest tinge of dissimulation.
Mary Byrd was talking as usual in high fluting notes which drowned the
gentle ripple of Margaret's voice.
"I was just telling Margaret about the charity ball," she said, "and the
way the girls snubbed Patty Vetch in the dressing-room."
"And it was a very good account of young barbarians at play," commented
Mr. Culpeper, who was a romantic soul and still read his Byron.
"Patty Vetch? Why, isn't that the daughter of the Governor?" asked Mrs.
Culpeper, without a trace of her husband's sympathy for the victim of
the "snubbing." A moment later, in accordance with her mental attitude
of evasive idealism, she added briskly: "I try not to think of that man
as Governor of Virginia."
Of course the subject had come up. Wherever Stephen had been in the past
few weeks he had found that the conversation turned to the Governor; and
it struck him, while he followed the line of girls headed by his
mother's erect figure into the dining-room, that, for good or bad, the
influence of Gideon Vetch was as prevalent as an epidemic. All through
the long and elaborate meal, in which the viands that his ancestors had
preferred were served ceremoniously by slow-moving coloured servants, he
listened again to the familiar discussion and analysis of the demagogue,
as he still called him. How little, after all, did any one know of
Gideon Vetch? Since he had been in office what had they learned except
that he was approachable in human relations and unapproachable in
political ones?
"I wonder if Stephen noticed the girl at the ball?" said Mrs. Culpeper
suddenly, looking tenderly at her son across the lovely George II
candlesticks and the dish of expensive fruit, for she could never
reconcile with her ideas of economy the spending of a penny on
decorations so ephemeral as flowers.
"Oh, he couldn't have helped it," responded Mary Byrd. "Every one saw
her. She was dressed very conspicuously."
"Do you imply that you were not?" inquired her father, without facetious
intention.
Mary Byrd beamed indulgently in his direction. "Oh, you don't know what
it is to be conspicuous, dear," she answered. "What did you think of her
dress, Stephen?"
He met her question with a blush. Was he really so modest after the war
and France and everything?--Victoria wondered in silence.
"It was something red, wasn't it?" he rejoined vaguely.
"It was scarlet tulle." Mary Byrd, as her mother had once observed,
"hadn't an indefinite bone in her body." Then she imparted an additional
incident. "She got it badly torn. I saw her pinning it up in the
dressing-room."
"I should have been sorry for her," said Margaret simply; and he felt
that he had never in his life been so nearly in love with her.
"Is she pretty?" asked Mrs. Culpeper, appealing directly to Stephen as
a man and an authority. It was the question the strange woman had put to
him in the Square, and ironical mirth seized the young man as he
remembered.
"Do you think her pretty, Stephen?" repeated Margaret, and waited, with
an expression of impartial interest, for his reply.
For an instant he hesitated. Did he think Patty Vetch pretty or not? "I
hardly know," he answered. "I suppose it depends upon whether you like
that kind of thing or not. Why don't you ask Peyton?" At the time he
couldn't have told himself whether he admired Patty or not. She
surprised him, she struck a new note, the note of the unexpected, but
whether he liked or disliked it, he could not tell. "There is something
unusual about her," he concluded hurriedly, feeling that he had not been
quite fair.
"Well, I think she's good looking enough," Peyton, the incurious young
man of "advanced" tastes, was replying. "She seems to have a kind of
fascination. I don't know what it is, but I dare say she inherited it
from her father. The Governor may be unsound in his views and uncertain
in his methods, but I've yet to see any one who could resist his smile."
"The Judge admires him," remarked Stephen, with the air of a man who
tosses a bomb into a legislative assembly.
"Oh, Stephen," protested Victoria on a high note of interrogation, "how
can he?"
"The Judge likes to keep up well with the times," observed Mr. Culpeper,
whose final argument against any innovation was the inquiry, "What do
you suppose General Lee would have thought of it?" Pausing an instant
while the family hung breathlessly on his words, he continued
heroically: "Now, it doesn't bother me to be called an old fogy."
"There's no use trying to hide the fact that the Judge isn't quite what
he used to be," said Mrs. Culpeper in an unusually tolerant tone. "He
has let his habit of joking grow on him until you never know whether he
is serious or simply poking fun at you."
"The next thing we hear," suggested Peyton, who was quite dreadful at
times, "will be that the old gentleman admires the daughter also."
"He doesn't like conspicuous women," rejoined Victoria. "He told me so
only the other day when Mrs. Bradford announced that she was going to
run for the legislature."
"That's the kind of conspicuousness we all object to," commented Peyton;
"Patty Vetch isn't that sort."
Janet was more merciful. "Well, you are obliged to be conspicuous to-day
if you want anybody to notice you," she said. "Look at Mary Byrd."
Mary Byrd tossed her bright head as gaily as if a compliment had been
intended. "Oh, you needn't think I like to dress this way," she
retorted, "or that I don't sometimes get tired of keeping up with
things. Why, there are hours and hours when I simply feel as if I should
drop."
"Well, as long as you look like that you needn't hope for a change,"
remarked Stephen admiringly. Then, turning his gaze away from her too
obvious brightness, he looked into the tranquil depths of Margaret's
blue eyes, and thought how much more restful the old-fashioned type of
woman must have been. Men didn't need to bestir themselves and sharpen
their wits with women like that; they were accepted, with their
inherent virtues or vices, as philosophically as one accepted the
seasons.
It was a dull supper, he thought, because his mind was distracted; but a
little later, when they had returned to the drawing-room, and the family
had drifted away in separate directions--Mary Byrd and Peyton to a
dance, his father to his library, and his mother and the three other
girls to a game of bridge in the next room, he received an amazing
revelation of Margaret's point of view. His sentiment for the girl had
always suffered, he was aware, from too many opportunities. He had
sometimes wished that an obstacle might arise, that the formidable
parents would try for once to tear them apart instead of thrust them
together, but, in spite of the changeless familiarity of their
association, he was presently to discover how little he had known of the
real Margaret beneath the flowing grace and the nut-brown hair and the
eyes like blue larkspur. Though the tribal customs had shaped her body
and formed her manners, a rare essence of personality escaped like a
perfume from the hereditary mould of the race.
As he looked at her now, sitting gracefully on the ruby brocade of one
of the rosewood chairs, with her lovely head framed by the band of
intricate carving, he was aware that the delicate subtleties and
shadings of her feminine charm made an entirely fresh appeal to his
perceptions, if not to his senses. He had never admired her appearance
more than he did at that instant; and yet his gaze was as dispassionate
as the one he bestowed on the Sully portrait of which she reminded him.
Her eyes were very soft; there was a faint smile on her thin pink lips
which gave the look of coldness, of reticence to her face. With her head
bent and her hands folded in her lap, she sat there waiting
pensively--for what? It occurred to him suddenly with a shock that she
was deeper, far deeper than he had ever suspected.
"You are so different from the other girls, Margaret," he said at last,
oppressed by the old difficulty of making conversation. "You don't
belong to the same world with Mary Byrd and--" He was going to add
"Patty Vetch," but he checked himself before the name escaped him.
She seemed to melt rather than break from her attitude of waiting, so
gently did her movements sink into the shadowy glow of the firelight.
"No, I don't," she replied, with a touch of sadness. "I sometimes wish
that I did."
"You wish that you did!" Here was surprise at last. "But, why, in
Heaven's name, should you wish that when you are everything that they
ought to be?"
"As if that mattered!" There was a tone in her voice that was new to
him. "It's gone out of fashion to be superior. Nobody even cares any
longer about your being what you ought to be. I've been trained to be
the kind of girl that doesn't get on to-day, full of all sorts of
forgotten virtues and refinements. Nobody looks at me because everybody
is staring so hard at the girls who are improperly dressed. There is
only one place where I can be sure of having attention, and that is in
an Old Ladies' Home. Old ladies admire me."
For the second time that day he found himself startled by the
eccentricities of the feminine mind; but in Margaret's passive
resignation there was none of Patty's rebellion against the cruelty and
injustice of life. Generations of acquiescence were in the slender
figure before him; and he realized that the completeness of her
surrender to Fate must have softened her destiny. Both girls were
victims of the changing fashion in women, of an age that moved not in a
stream, but in a whirlpool.
"I admire you," he said in a caressing voice, "more than I admire any
one else in the world."
She had been gazing into the fire, and as she turned slowly in answer to
his words, it seemed to him that the blue of a summer sky shone on him
from beneath the tremulous shadow of her eyelashes.
"The trouble," she replied, with an appealing glance, "is that I don't
know how to be common. There isn't any hope of a girl's being popular if
she doesn't know how to be common. I would be if I could," she confessed
plaintively, "but I haven't the faintest idea how to begin."
"I hope you'll never learn," he insisted. In awakening his sympathy she
had awakened also a deep-rooted protective instinct. He felt that he
longed to guard and defend her, as a brother of course, and if this
newer and tenderer sentiment was the result of feminine calculation, he
was too chivalrous or too inexperienced to perceive it. What he
perceived was simply that this lovely girl, whom he had known from
infancy, had opened her heart and taken him into her confidence. To
admit that she was not a success in her small social world, proved her,
he felt, to be both frank and courageous.
"Of course they don't call their way common," she pursued, with what
seemed to him the most touching candour. "Their word for it is 'pep'."
She pronounced the vulgar syllable as if she abhorred it. "That is what
I haven't got, and that's why I have never been a real success in
anything except church work. Even in the Red Cross it was 'pep' that
counted most, and that was the reason they never sent me to Europe.
Mother tried to make me into the kind of girl that men admired when she
was young; but the type has gone out of fashion to-day just as much as
crinolines or a small waist. If I were clever I suppose I could make
myself over and begin to jump about and imitate the sort of animation I
never had; but I'm not really clever, for I've tried and I can't do it.
It only makes me feel silly to pretend to be what I am not."
Her confession struck him, while he listened to it, as the sweetest and
most womanly one he had ever heard.
"I cannot imagine your pretending," he answered, and felt that the
remark was as inane as if he had quoted it from a play. After a moment,
as she seemed to be waiting for something, he continued with greater
assurance, "I dare say they have a quality that the older generation
missed. It isn't just commonness. The modern spirit means, I suppose, a
breathless vitality. We are more intensely alive than our ancestors,
perhaps, more restless, more inclined to take risks."
The phrases he had used made him think suddenly of Gideon Vetch. Was
that the secret of the Governor's irresistible magnetism, of his
meteoric rise into power? He embodied the modern fetish--success; he
was, in the lively idiom of the younger set,--personified "pep." After
all, if the old order crumbled, was it not because of its own weakness?
Was not the fact of its decay the sign of some secret disintegration,
of rottenness at the core? And if the new spirit could destroy, perhaps
it could build as well. There might be more in it, he was beginning to
discern, than mere lack of control, than vulgar hysteria and
undisciplined violence. The quality expressed by that dreadful word was
the sparkle on the edge of the tempest, the lightning flash that
revealed the presence of electricity in the air. After all, the god of
the future was riding the whirlwind.
"I wonder if we can be wrong, you and I?" he went on presently,
forgetting the intensely personal nature of Margaret's disclosures,
while he followed the abstract trend of his reflections. "Isn't it
conceivable that we are standing, not for what is necessarily better,
but simply for what is old? Isn't the conservative merely the creature
of habit? I suppose the older generation always looks disapprovingly at
the younger, and, in spite of our youth, we really belong to the past
generation. We see things through the eyes of our parents. We are
mentally middle-aged--for middle age is a state of mind, after all. You
and I were broken in by tradition--at least I know I was, and even the
war couldn't free me. It only made me restless and dissatisfied. It
destroyed my belief in the past without giving me faith in the future.
It left me eager to go somewhere; but it failed to offer me any
direction. It put me to sea without a compass."
Clasping his hands behind his head, he leaned back against the carving
of his chair, and fixed his gaze on the portrait of the English
ancestress over the mantelpiece. The firelight flickered over his firm,
clear-cut features, over the sleek dark hair, which was brushed
straight back from his forehead, and over his sombre smoke-coloured
eyes in which a dusky glow came and went. Margaret, watching him with
her pensive smile, thought that she had never seen him look so
"interesting."
"We used to talk in those first days about the 'spiritual effect' of the
war," he resumed dreamily, speaking more to himself than to his
companion. "As if organized violence could have a steadying
effect--could have any results that are not the offspring of violence.
It is hard for me to talk about it. I've never even tried before to put
it into words; but we are both suffering from the same cause, I think. I
know it has played the very deuce with my life. It has made me
discontented with what I have; but it hasn't shown me anything else that
was worth striving for. I seem to have lost the power of wanting because
I've discovered that nothing is worth having after you get it. Every
apple has turned into Dead Sea fruit."
He had never before spoken so freely, and when he had finished he felt
awkward and half resentful. Margaret's extraordinary frankness had
started him, he supposed, on a similar strain; but he wished that he had
kept back all that sentimental nonsense about what his mother called
disapprovingly, his "frame of mind." Any frame of mind except the
permanently settled appeared unsafe to Mrs. Culpeper; and her son felt
at the moment that her opinion was justified. Somehow the whole thing
seemed to have resulted from his meeting with Gideon Vetch. It was Vetch
who had "unsettled" him, who had taken the wind out of the stiff sails
of his prejudices. Had the war awakened in him, he wondered, the need of
crude emotional stimulants, the dangerous allurement of the unfamiliar,
the exotic? Would it ever pass, and would life become again normal and
placid without losing its zest and its interest? For it was the zest of
life, he realized, that he had encountered in Gideon Vetch.
"But you are a man," Margaret was saying plaintively. "Everything is
easier for a man. You can go out and do things."
"So can women now. You can even go into politics."
She made a pretty gesture of aversion. "Oh, I've been too well brought
up! There isn't any hope for a girl who is well brought up except the
church, and even there she can't do anything but sit and listen to
sermons. Mother's consolation," she added with a soft little laugh, "is
that I should have been a belle and beauty in the days when Madison was
President."
Then putting the subject aside as if she had finished with it for ever,
she began talking to him about the books she was reading. Of all the
girls he knew she was the only one who ever opened a book except one
that had been forbidden.
An hour later, when Margaret went home with her father, Stephen turned
back, after putting her into the car, with a warmer emotion in his heart
than he had ever felt for her before. She was not only lovely and
gentle; she had revealed unexpected qualities of mind which might
develop later into an attraction that he had never dreamed she could
possess. Never, he felt, had the outlook appeared so desirable. He was
in that particular dreaminess of mood when one is easily borne off on
waves of sentiment or imagination; and it is possible that, if his
mother had been able to refrain from improving perfection, he might
have found himself sufficiently in love with Margaret for all practical
purposes. But Mrs. Culpeper, who had no need of dissimulation since she
had always got things by showing that she wanted them entirely for the
good of others, was incapable of leaving her son to work out his own
future. When he entered the house again he found her awaiting him at the
foot of the staircase.
"I hope you had a pleasant evening, Stephen."
"Yes, Mother, very pleasant."
"Margaret is a dear girl, and so well brought up. Her mother has a great
deal for which to be thankful."
"A great deal, I am sure." A sharp sense of irritation had dispelled the
dreamy sentiment with which he had parted from Margaret. To his mother,
he knew, the evening appeared only as one more carefully planned and
carelessly neglected opportunity; and the knowledge of this exasperated
him in a measure that was absurdly disproportionate to the cause.
"She is so refreshing after the things you hear about other girls,"
pursued Mrs. Culpeper. "Poor Mrs. St. John was obliged to go to a rest
cure, they say, because of the worry she has had over Geraldine; and the
other girls are almost as troublesome, I suppose. That is why I am so
thankful that you should have taken a fancy to Margaret. She is just the
kind of girl I should like to have for a daughter-in-law."
"You'll have a long time to wait, Mother. I don't want to marry anybody
until I need a nurse in my old age."
He spoke jestingly, but his mother, with her usual tenacity, held fast
to the subject. Under the flickering gas light in the hall (they were
still suspicious of the effect of electricity on Mr. Culpeper's eyes)
her face looked grimly determined, as if an indomitable purpose had
moulded every feature and traced every line in some thin plastic
substance.
"I have set my heart on this, Stephen."
At this he laughed aloud with an indecorous mirth. In spite of her
instincts and traditions how lacking in feminine finesse, how utterly
without subtlety of method she was! She had stood always for the
unconquerable will in the fragile body, and she had used to the utmost
her two strong weapons of obstinacy and weakness. He did not know
whether the dread of being nagged or the fear of hurting her had
influenced him most; and when he looked back he could recall only a
series of ineffectual efforts at evasion or denial. It is true that he
had once adored her--that he still loved her--but it was a love, like
his father's, which was forbearing but never free, which was always
furtive and a little ashamed of its own weakness. Ever since he could
remember she had triumphed over their inclinations, their convictions,
and even their appetites, for they had eaten only what she thought good
for them. She had invariably gained her point; and she had gained it
with few words, without temper or agitation, by sheer force of
character. If she had been a moral principle she could not have moved
more relentlessly.
"Mrs. Blair and I used to talk it over when you and Margaret were
children," she continued, in the inflexible tone with which she was
accustomed to carry her point. "Even then you were fond of her."
He looked at her with a gleam of the tolerant amusement he had caught
from his father's expression. "Can you imagine anything more certain to
turn a man against a marriage than the thought that it was arranged for
him in his infancy?" he objected.
"Not if he knew that his mother had set her heart on it?" She looked
hurt but resolute.
"Don't set your heart on it, Mother. Let me dree my own weird."
"My dear boy, it is for your own good. I am sure that you know I am not
thinking of myself. I may say with truth that I never think of myself."
It was true. She never thought of herself; but he had sometimes wondered
what worse things could have happened if she had occasionally done so.
"I know that, Mother," he answered simply.
"I have but one wish in life and that is to see my children happy," she
said, with an air of injured dignity which made him feel curiously
guilty.
It was the old infallible method, he knew. She would never yield her
point; she would never relax her pressure; she would never admit defeat
until he married another woman.
"I want nobody else in your place, Mother. Goodnight, and try to set
your heart on something else."
As he undressed a little later he was thinking of Margaret--of her low
white brow under the "widow's peak," of her soft blue eyes, of her
goodness and gentleness, and of the thrill in her voice when she had
made that touching confession. Margaret's voice was the last thing he
thought of before falling asleep; but hours afterward, when the dawn was
beginning to break, he dreamed of Patty Vetch in her red cape and of
that hidden country of the endless roads and the far horizons.