They turned to face me fully. “But we thought you were against us in
the matter!”
My calm was now uncivil. “With every acquaintance taking a hand, they
are, of course, heading for the rocks.”
“Dear me! Dear me!” grieved Mr. Tillinghast. “I should really dislike
to think it. They’re so well matched in the way of looks. I admire
Eva’s looks more than I can tell you.” He failed to observe that Miss
Augusta now strung his well meant words on a handy rosary to be used
during his inevitable penance. He swept into what was almost lyricism.
“She has such a broad and gracious brow, and her eyebrows take a flying
line. Her hair seems to fly upwards, too, although it really never
blows about. Did you ever notice that about her, Augusta--that she is
never frowsy? There’s something about her,” he said in his nice elderly
voice, “that is wing-like, aspiring. She’s--she’s aloof, untouchable,
and reaching up. She seems to be looking at a facet of the star to
which she’s hitched her wagon; and the star is eternally within and
beyond her reach, poor girl!”
“Well!” The monosyllable might have been propelled from Miss Augusta by
her inner and boiling emotions.
Mr. Tillinghast gave her every indication of having jumped the fence.
Gazing into space made lovely by his faint regret, he said: “Her
mouth--such a small mouth!--is fastidious.”
Miss Augusta said: “But not generous.”
Mr. Tillinghast asked her: “Have you ever noticed that she has the
nicest little straight nose?”
“It will be pinched when she is older,” remarked Miss Augusta.
I hurried to the window embrasure and stood looking down into the
uninteresting street; I hoped they would take my shaking form for the
sign of some tender emotion. That they did was proven by their guilty
haste in urging me back to the tea table. “Poor Tilly isn’t what he
was,” Miss Augusta reassured me in a whisper, as she plied me with a
fresh buttered muffin. “Do eat this, Mrs. Avery. You’re such a scrap of
a person, I always think you must be dieting.”
“If you mean, that he’s in love with her,” I suggested maliciously, “he
is eating too many muffins for that state of mind.”
For Mr. Tappan Tillinghast had absent-mindedly reached out a heavily
veined hand and appropriated the muffin intended for me. His eyes
retained his visions; he dreamily munched the muffin. Sure of Miss
Augusta’s sympathetic understanding because he had always been able
to count on it, he thought aloud. “It must have been such a strange
contrast, that between Lavinia and Eva, the day they met. Both such
pale women.”
“Indeed!” sniffed Miss Augusta. “And how, pray, did you come to know
about it?”
“A little bird told me,” said he with another of this group’s
platitudes. He put a roguish head on one side.
“Meaning Gertrude? She had little to do, not to tell her own aunt!”
“No,” he said. “Oh, no indeed: Lavinia told me.”
Then, she judged, he had at last got the straight of it. How straight
the tale must have been, coming from Mrs. Van Suydam--how she must have
hit out from the shoulder, defeated as she was by Eva who took no part
in it--how bitterly, in short, she must have told her story to this old
friend, was a thing that he would never tell me except fragmentarily.
“Lavinia went up there to fetch Nicholas home,” he went into it. He
implied that she had thus flung down her gauntlet to fate. Her head
scarcely reached her son’s shoulder; but she had dominated him always,
and she would dominate him now. She had felt from the start that
something dreadful was to happen. There was an underlying meaning to
this. It was her duty to find the meaning, if her son were close to it,
and she felt in her bones that he was. She felt that it might be the
meaning of life itself. One could not manage life, which had a way of
sneaking up behind and clubbing one through the medium of the child.
She had reported to Mr. Tillinghast that she had said to her son:
“Please don’t keep me waiting.” And instantly she knew that she had
lost. Stiff and straight, she faced him in silence. She waved off his
offer to escort her to her carriage.
“Nicholas was very quiet, too, she told me,” continued Mr. Tillinghast.
“She looked back from the head of the stairs. She knew that already she
was forgotten. She said that at this moment she tasted bitterness.” It
was from force of habit only that her lips said “Humph! Indeed!”
I drank tea that was strong from the bottom of the pot. When I thought
it safe to glance at Mr. Tillinghast, I said to him: “Thank you for
telling me.”
“What can you mean, dear Mrs. Avery?” demanded Miss Augusta curiously.
“Oh--” I said flippantly, giving it to them for what it was
worth--“there are always two sides, aren’t there?”
[Illustration]