begun only when Chris left her. During its first months she and
he had been in Spain and Italy, shut off by the safe Alps or the
neutral indifference; and the devouring need to keep Chris amused,
and herself amusing, had made her fall into the easy life of the
Italian watering-places, and the careless animation of Rome, without
any real sense of being in an altered world. Around them they found
only the like-minded; the cheerful, who refused to be “worried”, or
the argumentative and paradoxical, like Chris himself, who thought
it their duty as “artists” or “thinkers” to ignore the barbarian
commotion. It was only in 1915, when Chris’s own attitude was
mysteriously altered, and she found him muttering that after all a
fellow couldn’t stand aside when all his friends and the chaps of his
own age were getting killed--only then did the artificial defences
fall, and the reality stream in on her. Was his change of mind genuine?
He often said that his opinions hadn’t altered, but that there were
times when opinions didn’t count ... when a fellow just had to _act_.
It was her own secret thought (had been, perhaps, for longer than she
knew); but with Chris--could one ever tell? Whatever he was doing, he
was sure, after a given time, to want to be doing something else, and
to find plausible reasons for it: even the war might be serving merely
as a pretext for his unrest. Unless ... unless he used it as an excuse
for leaving her? Unless being with _her_ was what it offered an escape
from? If only she could have judged him more clearly, known him better!
But between herself and any clear understanding of him there had hung,
from the first, the obscuring mist of her passion, muffling his face,
touch, speech (so that now, at times, she could not even rebuild his
features or recall his voice), obscuring every fold and cranny of his
character, every trick of phrase, every doubling and dodging of his
restless mind and capricious fancy. Sometimes, in looking back, she
thought there was only one sign she had ever read clearly in him, and
that was the first sign of his growing tired of her. Disguise that as
she would, avert her eyes from it, argue it away, there the menace
always was again, faint but persistent, like the tiny intermittent pang
which first announces a mortal malady.
And of all this none of the people watching her from across the sea had
had a suspicion. The war had swallowed her up, her and all her little
concerns, as it had engulfed so many million others. It seemed written
that, till the end, she should have to be thankful for the war.
Her eyes travelled back to Fred Landers, whose sturdy bulk, planted
opposite her, seemed to have grown so far off and immaterial. Did he
really guess nothing of that rainbow world she had sent her memory back
to? And what would he think or say if she lifted the veil and let him
into it?
“He’ll hate me for it--but I must,” she murmured. She raised herself on
her elbow: “Fred--”
The door opened softly to admit Anne, with the Airedale at her heels.
They brought in a glow of winter air and the strange cold perfume of
the dusk.
“Uncle Fred? How jolly of you to have come! I was afraid I’d left
mother alone too long,” the girl said, bending to her mother’s cheek.
At the caress the blood flowed back into Kate’s heart. She looked up
and her eyes drank in her daughter’s image.
Anne hung above her for a moment, tall, black-cloaked, remote in the
faint light; then she dropped on her knees beside the couch.
“But you’re _tired_ ... you’re utterly done up and worn out!” she
exclaimed, slipping an arm protectingly behind her mother. There was a
note of reproach and indignation in her voice. “You must never be tired
or worried about things any more; I won’t have it; we won’t any of us
have it. Remember, I’m here to look after you now--and so is Uncle
Fred,” she added gaily.
“That’s what I tell her--nothing on earth to worry about _now_,” Mr.
Landers corroborated, getting up from his chair and making for the door
with muffled steps.
“Nothing, nothing--ever again! You’ll promise me that, mother, won’t
you?”
Kate Clephane let her hand droop against the strong young shoulder. She
felt herself sinking down into a very Bethesda-pool of forgetfulness
and peace. From its depths she raised herself just far enough to say:
“I promise.”
IV.
Anne, withdrawing from her mother’s embrace, had decreed, in a decisive
tone: “And now I’m going to ring for Aline to tuck you up in bed.
And presently your dinner will be brought; consommé and chicken and
champagne. Is that what you’ll like?”
“Exactly what I shall like. But why not share it with you downstairs?”
But the girl had been firm, in a sweet yet almost obstinate way. “No,
dearest--you’re really tired out. You don’t know it yet; but you will
presently. I want you just to lie here, and enjoy the fire and the
paper; and go to sleep as soon as you can.”
Where did her fresh flexible voice get its note of finality? It
was--yes, without doubt--an echo of old Mrs. Clephane’s way of saying:
“We’ll consider that _settled_, I think.”
Kate shivered a little; but it was only a passing chill. The use
the girl made of her authority was so different--as if the old Mrs.
Clephane in her spoke from a milder sphere--and it was so sweet to be
compelled, to have things decided for one, to be told what one wanted
and what was best for one. For years Kate Clephane had had to order
herself about: to tell herself to rest and not to worry, to eat when
she wasn’t hungry, to sleep when she felt staring wide-awake. She would
have preferred, on the whole, that evening, to slip into a tea-gown and
go down to a quiet dinner, alone with her daughter and perhaps Fred
Landers; she shrank from the hurricane that would start up in her head
as soon as she was alone; yet she liked better still to be “mothered”
in that fond blundering way the young have of mothering their elders.
And besides, Anne perhaps felt--not unwisely--that again, for the
moment, she and her mother had nothing more to say to each other; that
to close on that soft note was better, just then, than farther effort.
At any rate, Anne evidently did not expect to have her decision
questioned. It was that hint of finality in her solicitude that made
Kate, as she sank into the lavender-scented pillows, feel--perhaps
evoked by the familiar scent of cared-for linen--the closing-in on her
of all the old bounds.
The next morning banished the sensation. She felt only, now, the
novelty, the strangeness. Anne, entering in the wake of a perfect
breakfast-tray, announced that Uncle Hendrik and Aunt Enid Drover were
coming to dine, with their eldest son, Alan, with Lilla Gates (Lilla
Gates, Kate recalled, was their married daughter) and Uncle Fred
Landers. “No one else, dear, on account of this--” the girl touched
her mourning dress--“but you’ll like to begin quietly, I know--after
the fatigue of the crossing, I mean,” she added hastily, lest her
words should seem to imply that her mother might have other reasons
for shrinking from people. “No one else,” she continued, “but Joe and
Nollie. Joe Tresselton, you know, married Nollie Shriner--yes, one of
the Fourteenth Street Shriners, the one who was first married to Frank
Haverford. She was divorced two years ago, and married Joe immediately
afterward.” The words dropped from her as indifferently as if she had
said: “She came out two years ago, and married Joe at the end of her
first season.”
“Nollie Tresselton’s everything to me,” Anne began after a pause.
“You’ll see--she’s transformed Joe. Everybody in the family adores her.
She’s waked them all up. Even Aunt Enid, you know--. And when Lilla
came to grief--”
“Lilla? Lilla Gates?”
“Yes. Didn’t you know? It was really dreadful for Aunt Enid--especially
with her ideas. Lilla behaved really badly; even Nollie thinks she did.
But Nollie arranged it as well as she could.... Oh, but I’m boring you
with all this family gossip.” The girl paused, suddenly embarrassed;
then, glancing out of the window: “It’s a lovely morning, and not too
cold. What do you say to my running you up to Bronx Park and back
before lunch, just to give you a glimpse of what Nollie calls our
_New_ York? Or would you rather take another day to rest?”
* * * * *
The rush through the vivid air; the spectacle of the new sumptuous
city; of the long reaches above the Hudson with their showy
architecture and towering “Institutions”; of the smooth Boulevards
flowing out to cared-for prosperous suburbs; the vista of Fifth
Avenue, as they returned, stretching southward, interminably, between
monumental façades and resplendent shop-fronts--all this and the tone
of Anne’s talk, her unconscious allusions, revelations of herself and
her surroundings, acted like champagne on Kate Clephane’s brain, making
the world reel about her in a headlong dance that challenged her to
join it. The way they all took their mourning, for instance! She, Anne,
being her grandmother’s heiress (she explained) would of course not
wear colours till Easter, or go to the Opera (except to matinées) for
at least another month. Didn’t her mother think she was right? “Nollie
thinks it awfully archaic of me to mix up music and mourning; what
have they got to do with each other, as she says? But I know Aunt Enid
wouldn’t like it ... and she’s been so kind to me. Don’t you agree that
I’d better not?”
“But of course, dear; and I think your aunt’s right.”
Inwardly, Kate was recalling the inexorable laws which had governed
family affliction in the New York to which she had come as a bride:
three crape-walled years for a parent, two for sister or brother,
at least twelve solid months of black for grandparent or aunt, and
half a year (to the full) for cousins, even if you counted them by
dozens, as the Clephanes did. As for the weeds of widowhood, they
were supposed to be measured only by the extent of the survivor’s
affliction, and _that_ was expected to last as long, and proclaim
itself as unmistakably in crape and seclusion, as the most intolerant
censor in the family decreed--unless you were prepared to flout the
whole clan, and could bear to be severely reminded that your veil was a
quarter of a yard shorter than cousin Julia’s, though her bereavement
antedated yours by six months. Much as Kate Clephane had suffered under
the old dispensation, she felt a slight recoil from the indifference
that had succeeded it. She herself, just before sailing, had replaced
the coloured finery hastily bought on the Riviera by a few dresses of
unnoticeable black, which, without suggesting the hypocrisy of her
wearing mourning for old Mrs. Clephane, yet kept her appearance in
harmony with her daughter’s; and Anne’s question made her glad that she
had done so.
The new tolerance, she soon began to see, applied to everything; or, if
it didn’t, she had not yet discovered the new prohibitions, and during
all that first glittering day seemed to move through a millennium where
the lamb of pleasure lay down with the lion of propriety.... After
all, this New York into which she was being reinducted had never, in
any of its stages, been hers; and the fact, which had facilitated her
flight from it, leaving fewer broken ties and uprooted habits, would
now, she saw, in an equal measure simplify her return. Her absence,
during all those years, had counted, for the Clephanes, only in terms
of her husband’s humiliation; there had been no family of her own to
lament her fall, take up her defence, quarrel with the clan over the
rights and wrongs of the case, force people to take sides, and leave
a ramification of vague rancours to which her return would give new
life. The old aunts and indifferent cousins at Meridia--her remote
inland town--had bowed their heads before the scandal, thanking fortune
that the people they visited would probably never hear of it. And now
she came back free of everything and every one, and rather like a
politician resuming office than a prodigal returning to his own.
The sense of it was so rejuvenating that she was almost sure she was
looking her best (and with less help than usual from Aline) when she
went down to dinner to meet the clan. Enid Drover’s appearance gave a
momentary check to her illusion: Enid, after eighteen years, seemed
alarmingly the same--pursed-up lips, pure vocabulary and all. She had
even kept, to an astonishing degree, the physical air of her always
middle-aged youth, the smooth complexion, symmetrically-waved hair and
empty eyes that made her plump small-nosed face like a statue’s. Yet
the mere fact of her daughter Lilla profoundly altered her--the fact
that she could sit beaming maternally across the table at that impudent
stripped version of herself, with dyed hair, dyed lashes, drugged
eyes and unintelligible dialect. And her husband, Hendrik Drover--the
typical old New Yorker--that he too should accept this outlawed
daughter, laugh at her slang, and greet her belated entrance with the
remark: “Top-notch get-up tonight, Lil!”
“Oh, Lilla’s going on,” laughed Mrs. Joe Tresselton, slipping her thin
brown arm through her cousin’s heavy white one.
Lilla laughed indolently. “Ain’t _you_?”
“No--I mean to stay and bore Aunt Kate till the small hours, if she’ll
let me.”
_Aunt Kate!_ How sweet it sounded, in that endearing young voice!
No wonder Anne had spoken as she did of Nollie. Whatever Mrs. Joe
Tresselton’s past had been, it had left on her no traces like those
which had smirched and deadened Lilla. Kate smiled back at Nollie
and loved her. She was prepared to love Joe Tresselton too, if only
for having brought this live thing into the family. Personally, Joe
didn’t at first offer many points of contact: he was so hopelessly
like his cousin Alan Drover, and like all the young American officers
Kate had seen on leave on the Riviera, and all the young men who
showed off collars or fountain-pens or golf-clubs in the backs of
American magazines. But then Kate had been away so long that, as yet,
the few people she had seen were always on the point of being merged
into a collective American Face. She wondered if Anne would marry an
American Face, and hoped, before that, to learn to differentiate them;
meanwhile, she would begin by practising on Joe, who, seating himself
beside her with the collective smile, seemed about to remark: “See that
Arrow?”
Instead he said: “Anne’s great, isn’t she, Aunt Kate?” and thereby
acquired an immediate individuality for Anne’s mother.
Dinner was announced, and at the dining-room door Kate wavered,
startled by the discovery that it was still exactly the same
room--black and gold, with imitation tapestries and a staring white
bust niched in a red marble over-mantel--and feeling once more
uncertain as to what was expected of her. But already Anne was guiding
her to her old seat at the head of the table, and waiting for her to
assign their places to the others. The girl did it without a word; just
a glance and the least touch. If this were indeed a mannerless age,
how miraculously Anne’s manners had been preserved!
And now the dinner was progressing, John Clephane’s champagne bubbling
in their glasses (it seemed oddest of all to be drinking her husband’s
Veuve Clicquot), Lilla steadily smoking, both elbows on the table, and
Nollie Tresselton leading an exchange of chaff between the younger
cousins, with the object, as Kate Clephane guessed, of giving her, the
newcomer, time to take breath and get her bearings. It was wonderful,
sitting there, to recall the old “family dinners”, when Enid’s small
censorious smile (Enid, then in her twenties!) seemed as inaccessible
to pity as the forbidding line of old Mrs. Clephane’s lips; when even
Joe Tresselton’s mother (that lazy fat Alethea Tresselton) had taken
her cue from the others, and echoed their severities with a mouth
made for kissing and forgiving; and John Clephane, at the foot of the
table, proud of his house, proud of his wine, proud of his cook, still
half-proud of his wife, was visibly saying to himself, as he looked
about on his healthy handsome relatives: “After all, blood is thicker
than water.”
The contrast was the more curious because nothing, after all,
could really alter people like the Drovers. Enid was still gently
censorious, though with her range of criticism so deflected by the
huge exception to be made for her daughter that her fault-finding had
an odd remoteness: and Hendrik Drover, Kate guessed, would be as
easily shocked as of old by allusions to the “kind of thing they did in
Europe”, though what they did at home was so vividly present to him in
Lilla’s person, and in the fact of Joe Tresselton’s having married a
Fourteenth Street Shriner, and a divorced one at that.
It was all too bewildering for a poor exile to come to terms with--Mrs.
Clephane could only smile and listen, and be thankful that her own case
was so evidently included in the new range of their indulgence.
But the young people--what did they think? That would be the
interesting thing to know. They had all, she gathered, far more
interests and ideas than had scantily furnished her own youth, but all
so broken up, scattered, and perpetually interrupted by the strenuous
labour of their endless forms of sport, that they reminded her of a
band of young entomologists, equipped with the newest thing in nets,
but in far too great a hurry ever to catch anything. Yet perhaps it
seemed so only to the slower motions of middle-age.
Kate’s glance wandered from Lilla Gates, the most obvious and least
interesting of the group, to Nollie Shriner (one of the “awful”
Fourteenth Street Shriners); Nollie Shriner first, then Nollie
Haverford, wife of a strait-laced Albany Haverford, and now Nollie
Tresselton, though she still looked, with her brown squirrel-face and
slim little body, like a girl in the schoolroom. Yes, even Nollie
seemed to be in a great hurry; one felt her perpetually ordering
and sorting and marshalling things in her mind, and the fact, Kate
presently perceived, now and then gave an odd worn look of fixity to
her uncannily youthful face. Kate wondered when there was ever time to
enjoy anything, with that perpetual alarm-clock in one’s breast.
Her glance travelled on to her own daughter. Anne seemed eager too,
but not at such a pace, or about such a multiplicity of unrelated
things. Perhaps, though, it was only the fact of being taller,
statelier--old-fashioned words still fitted Anne--which gave her that
air of boyish aloofness. But no; it was the mystery of her eyes--those
eyes which, as Kate had told her, she had chosen for herself from some
forgotten ancestral treasury into which none of the others had dipped.
Between olive and brown, but flecked with golden lights, a little too
deep-set, the lower lid flowing up smooth and flat from the cheek, and
the black lashes as evenly set as the microscopic plumes in a Peruvian
feather-ornament; and above them, too prominent, even threatening, yet
melting at times to curves of maiden wonder, the obstinate brows of old
Mrs. Clephane. What did those eyes portend?
Kate Clephane glanced away, frightened at the riddle, and absorbed
herself in the preoccupying fact that the only way to tell the Drovers
from the Tresseltons was to remember that the Drovers’ noses were even
smaller than the Tresseltons’ (but _would_ that help, if one met one of
either tribe alone?). She was roused by hearing Enid Drover question
plaintively, as the ladies regained the drawing-room: “But after all,
why _shouldn’t_ Anne go too?”
The women formed an interrogative group around Mrs. Clephane, who found
herself suddenly being scrutinized as if for a verdict. She cast a
puzzled glance at Anne, and her daughter slipped an arm through hers
but addressed Mrs. Drover.
“Go to Madge Glenver’s cabaret-party with Lilla? But there’s no
real reason at all why I shouldn’t--except that my preference, like
Nollie’s, happens to be for staying at home this evening.”
Mrs. Drover heaved a faint sigh of relief, but her daughter, shrugging
impatient shoulders out of her too-willing shoulder-straps, grumbled:
“Then why doesn’t Aunt Kate come too? You’ll talk her to death if you
all stay here all the evening.”
Nollie Tresselton smiled. “So much for what Lilla thinks of the charm
of our conversation!”
Lilla shrugged again. “Not _your_ conversation particularly. I hate
talking. I only like noises that don’t mean anything.”
“Does that rule out talking--_quite_?”
“Well, I hate cleverness, then; you and Anne are always being clever.
You’ll tire Aunt Kate a lot more than Madge’s party would.” She
stood there, large and fair, the features of her small inexpressive
face so like her mother’s, the lines of her relaxed inviting body so
different from Mrs. Drover’s righteous curves. Her painted eyes rested
curiously on Mrs. Clephane. “You don’t suppose she spent her time in
Europe sitting at home like this, do you?” she asked the company with
simplicity.
There was a stricken pause. Kate filled it by saying with a laugh:
“You’ll think I might as well have, when I tell you I’ve never in my
life been to a cabaret-party.”
Lilla’s stare deepened; she seemed hardly able to take the statement
in. “What _did_ you do with your evenings, then?” she questioned, after
an apparently hopeless search for alternatives.
Mrs. Drover had grown pink and pursed-up; even Nollie Tresselton’s
quick smile seemed congealed. But Kate felt herself carrying it off on
wings. “Very often I just sat at home alone, and thought of you all
here, and of our first evening together--this very evening.”
She saw Anne colour a little, and felt the quick pressure of her arm.
That they should have found each other again, she and Anne!
The butler threw open the drawing-room door with solemnity. “A
gentleman has called in his motor for Mrs. Gates; he sends word that
he’s in a hurry, madam, please.”
“Oh,” said Lilla, leaping upon her fan and vanity bag. She was out of
the room before the butler had rounded off his sentence.
Mrs. Drover, her complacency restored, sank down on a plump Clephane
sofa that corresponded in richness and ponderosity with her own person.
“Lilla’s such a baby!” she sighed; then, with a freer breath, addressed
herself to sympathetic enquiries as to Mrs. Clephane’s voyage. It was
evident that, as far as the family were concerned, Anne’s mother had
been born again, seven days earlier, on the gang-plank of the liner
that had brought her home. On these terms they were all delighted to
have her back; and Mrs. Drover declared herself particularly thankful
that the voyage had been so smooth.
V.
Smoothness, Kate Clephane could see, was going to mark the first stage
of her re-embarkation on the waters of life. The truth came to her,
after that first evening, with the surprised discovery that the family
had refrained from touching on her past not so much from prudery,
or discretion even, as because such retrogressions were jolting
uncomfortable affairs, and the line of least resistance flowed forward,
not back. She had been right in guessing that her questions as to what
people thought of her past were embarrassing to Landers, but wrong in
the interpretation of his embarrassment. Like every one else about her,
he was caught up in the irresistible flow of existence, which somehow
reminded her less of a mighty river tending seaward than of a moving
stairway revolving on itself. “Only they all think it’s a river....”
she mused.
But such thoughts barely lit on her tired mind and were gone. In the
first days, after she had grasped (without seeking its explanation) the
fact that she need no longer be on her guard, that henceforth there
would be nothing to conjure away, or explain, or disguise, her chief
feeling was one of illimitable relief. The rapture with which she
let herself sink into the sensation showed her for the first time how
tired she was, and for how long she had been tired. It was almost as
if this sense of relaxation were totally new to her, so far back did
her memory have to travel to recover a time when she had not waked to
apprehension, and fallen asleep rehearsing fresh precautions for the
morrow. In the first years of her marriage there had been the continual
vain effort to adapt herself to her husband’s point of view, to her
mother-in-law’s standards, to all the unintelligible ritual with which
they barricaded themselves against the alarming business of living.
After that had come the bitterness of her first disenchantment, and
the insatiable longing to be back on the nursery floor with Anne;
then, through all the ensuing years, the many austere and lonely
years, and the few consumed with her last passion, the ever-recurring
need of one form of vigilance or another, the effort to keep hold of
something that might at any moment slip from her, whether it were
her painfully-regained “respectability” or the lover for whom she
had forgone it. Yes; as she looked back, she saw herself always with
taut muscles and the grimace of ease; always pretending that she felt
herself free, and secretly knowing that the prison of her marriage had
been liberty compared with what she had exchanged it for.
That was as far as her thoughts travelled in the first days. She
abandoned herself with the others to the flood of material ease, the
torrent of facilities on which they were all embarked. She had been
scornful of luxury when it had symbolized the lack of everything
else; now that it was an adjunct of her recovered peace she began
to enjoy it with the rest, and to feel that the daily perfection
of her breakfast-tray, the punctual renewal of the flowers in her
sitting-room, the inexhaustible hot water in her bath, the swift
gliding of Anne’s motor, and the attentions of her household of
servants, were essential elements of this new life.
At last she was at rest. Even the nature of her sleep was changed.
Waking one morning--not with a jerk, but slowly, voluntarily, as it
were--out of a soundless, dreamless night, a miraculous draught of
sleep, she understood that for years even her rest had been unrestful.
She recalled the uncertainty and apprehension always woven through her
dreams, the sudden nocturnal wakings to a blinding, inextinguishable
sense of her fate, her future, her past; and the shallow turbid
half-consciousness of her morning sleep, which would leave her, when
she finally woke from it, emptied of all power of action, all hope and
joy. Then every sound that broke the night-hush had been irritating,
had pierced her rest like an insect’s nagging hum; now the noises
that accompanied her falling asleep and awakening seemed to issue
harmoniously out of the silence, and the late and early roar of Fifth
Avenue to rock her like the great reiterations of the sea.
“This is peace ... this _must_ be peace,” she repeated to herself, like
a botanist arrested by an unknown flower, and at once guessing it to be
the rare exquisite thing he has spent half his life in seeking.
Of course she would not have felt any of these things if Anne had not
been the Anne she was. It was from Anne’s presence, her smile, her
voice, the mystery of her eyes even, that the healing flowed. If Kate
Clephane had an apprehension left, it was her awe--almost--of that
completeness of Anne’s. Was it possible, humanly possible, that one
could cast away one’s best treasure, and come back after nearly twenty
years to find it there, not only as rare as one had remembered it, but
ripened, enriched, as only beautiful things are enriched and ripened
by time? It was as if one had set out some delicate plant under one’s
window, so that it might be an object of constant vigilance, and then
gone away, leaving it unwatched, unpruned, unwatered--how could one
hope to find more than a dead stick in the dust when one returned? But
Anne was real; she was not a mirage or a mockery; as the days passed,
and her mother’s life and hers became adjusted to each other, Kate felt
as if they were two parts of some delicate instrument which fitted
together as perfectly as if they had never been disjoined--as if Anne
were that other half of her life, the half she had dreamed of and
never lived. To see Anne living it would be almost the same as if it
were her own; would be better, almost; since she would be there, with
her experience, and tenderness, to hold out a guiding hand, to help
shape the perfection she had sought and missed.
These thoughts came back to her with particular force on the evening
of Anne’s reappearance at the Opera. During the weeks since old Mrs.
Clephane’s death the Clephane box had stood severely empty; even when
the Opera House was hired for some charity entertainment, Anne sent a
cheque but refused to give the box. It was awfully “archaic”, as Nollie
Tresselton said; but somehow it suited Anne, was as much in her “style”
as the close braids folded about her temples. “After all, it’s not
so easy to be statuesque, and I like Anne’s memorial manner,” Nollie
concluded.
Tonight the period of formal mourning for old Mrs. Clephane was over,
and Anne was to go to the Opera with her mother. She had asked the Joe
Tresseltons and her guardian to join them first at a little dinner,
and Kate Clephane had gone up to dress rather earlier than usual. It
was her first public appearance, also, and--as on each occasion of
her new life when she came on some unexpected survival of her youth,
a face, a voice, a point of view, a room in which the furniture had
not been changed--she was astonished, and curiously agitated, at
setting out from the very same house for the very same Opera box. The
only difference would be in the mode of progression; she remembered
the Parisian landau and sixteen-hand chestnuts with glittering plated
harness that had waited at the door in her early married days. Then
she had a vision of her own toilet, of the elaborate business it used
to be: Aline’s predecessor, with cunning fingers, dividing and coiling
the generous ripples of her hair, and building nests of curls about
the temples and in the nape; then the dash up in her dressing-gown to
Anne’s nursery for a last kiss, and the hurrying back to get into her
splendid brocade, to fasten the diamond coronet, the ruby “sunburst”,
the triple pearls. John Clephane was fond of jewels, and particularly
proud of his wife’s, first because he had chosen them, and secondly
because he had given them to her. She sometimes thought he really
admired her only when she had them all on, and she often reflected
ironically on Esther’s wifely guile in donning her regal finery before
she ventured to importune Ahasuerus. It certainly increased Kate
Clephane’s importance in her husband’s eyes to know that, when she
entered her box, no pearls could hold their own against hers except
Mrs. Beaufort’s and old Mrs. Goldmere’s.
It was years since Kate Clephane had thought of those jewels. She
smiled at the memory, and at the contrast between the unobtrusive dress
Aline had just prepared for her, and all those earlier splendours. The
jewels, she supposed, were Anne’s now; since modern young girls dressed
as richly as their elders, Anne had no doubt had them reset for her own
use. Mrs. Clephane closed her eyes with a smile of pleasure, picturing
Anne (as she had not yet seen her) with bare arms and shoulders, and
the orient of the pearls merging in that of her young skin. It was
lucky that Anne was tall enough to look her best in jewels. Thence
the mother’s fancy wandered to the effect Anne must produce on other
imaginations; on those, particularly, of young men. Was she already, as
they used to say, “interested”? Among the young men Mrs. Clephane had
seen, either calling at the house, or in the course of informal dinners
at the Tresseltons’, the Drovers’, and other cousins or “in-laws”, she
had remarked none who seemed to fix her daughter’s attention. But there
had been, as yet, few opportunities: the mitigated mourning for old
Mrs. Clephane did at least seclude them from general society, and when
a girl as aloof as Anne was attracted, the law of contrasts might draw
her to some one unfamiliar and undulled by propinquity.
“Or an older man, perhaps?” Kate considered. She thought of Anne’s
half-daughterly, half-feminine ways with her former guardian, and
then shrugged away the possibility that her old stolid Fred could
exercise a sentimental charm. Yet the young men of Anne’s generation,
those her mother had hitherto met, seemed curiously undifferentiated
and immature, as if they had been kept too long in some pure and
enlightened school, eternally preparing for a life into which their
parents and professors could never decide to let them plunge.... It
struck Mrs. Clephane that Chris, when she first met him, must have been
about the age of these beautiful inarticulate athletes ... and Heaven
knew how many lives he had already run through! As he said himself, he
felt every morning when he woke as if he had come into a new fortune,
and had somehow got to “blow it all in” before night.
Kate Clephane sat up and brushed her hand over her eyes. It was
the first time Chris had been present to her, in that insistent
immediate way, since her return to New York. She had thought of him,
of course--how could she cast even a glance over her own past without
seeing him there, woven into its very texture? But he seemed to have
receded to the plane of that past: from his torturing actual presence
her new life had delivered her.... She pressed both hands against her
eyes, as if to crush and disperse the image stealthily forming; then
she rose and went into her bedroom, where, a moment before, she had
heard Aline laying out her dress.
The maid had finished and gone; the bedroom was empty. The change
of scene, the mere passage from one room to another, the sight of
the evening dress and opera-cloak on the bed, and of Beatrice Cenci
looking down on them through her perpetual sniffle, sufficed to recall
Kate to the present. She turned to the dressing-table, and noticed
a box which had been placed before her mirror. It was of ebony and
citron-wood, embossed with agates and cornelians, and heavily clasped
with chiselled silver; and from the summit of the lid a silver Cupid
bent his shaft at her.
Kate broke into a faint laugh. How well she remembered that box!
She did not have to lift the lid to see its padded trays and tufted
sky-blue satin lining! It was old Mrs. Clephane’s jewel-box, and
on Kate’s marriage the dowager had solemnly handed it over to her
daughter-in-law with all that it contained.
“I wonder where Anne found it?” Kate conjectured, amused by the
sight of one more odd survival in that museum of the past which John
Clephane’s house had become. A little key hung on one of the handles,
and she put it in the lock, and saw all her jewels lying before her. On
a slip of paper Anne had written: “Darling, these belong to you. Please
wear some of them tonight....”
* * * * *
As she entered the opera box Kate Clephane felt as if the great
central chandelier were raying all its shafts upon her, as if she were
somehow caught up into and bound on the wheel of its devouring blaze.
But only for a moment--after that it seemed perfectly natural to be
sitting there with her daughter and Nollie Tresselton, backed by the
usual cluster of white waistcoats. After all, in this new existence it
was Anne who mattered, not Anne’s mother; instantly, after the first
plunge, Mrs. Clephane felt herself merged in the blessed anonymity of
motherhood. She had never before understood how exposed and defenceless
her poor unsupported personality had been through all the lonely years.
Her eyes rested on Anne with a new tenderness; the glance crossed
Nollie Tresselton’s, and the two triumphed in their shared admiration.
“Oh, there’s no one like Anne,” their four eyes told each other.
Anne looked round and intercepted the exchange. Her eyes smiled too,
and turned with a childish pleasure to the pearls hanging down over her
mother’s black dress.
“Isn’t she beautiful, Nollie?”
Young Mrs. Tresselton laughed. “You two were made for each other,” she
said.
Mrs. Clephane closed her lids for an instant; she wanted to drop a
curtain between herself and the stir and brightness, and to keep in
her eyes the look of Anne’s as they fell on the pearls. The episode of
the jewels had moved the mother strangely. It had brought Anne closer
than a hundred confidences or endearments. As Kate sat there in the
dark, she saw, detached against the blackness of her closed lids,
a child stumbling with unsteady steps across a windy beach, a funny
flushed child with sand in her hair and in the creases of her fat legs,
who clutched to her breast something she was bringing to her mother.
“It’s for mummy,” she said solemnly, opening her pink palms on a dead
star-fish. Kate saw again the child’s rapturous look, and felt the
throb of catching her up, star-fish and all, and devouring with kisses
the rosy body and tousled head.
In themselves the jewels were nothing. If Anne had handed her a bit of
coal--or another dead star-fish--with that look and that intention,
the gift would have seemed as priceless. Probably it would have been
impossible to convey to Anne how indifferent her mother had grown to
the Clephane jewels. In her other life--that confused intermediate life
which now seemed so much more remote than the day when the little girl
had given her the star-fish--jewels, she supposed, might have pleased
her, as pretty clothes had, or flowers, or anything that flattered the
eye. Yet she could never remember having regretted John Clephane’s
jewels; and now they would have filled her with disgust, with
abhorrence almost, had they not, in the interval, become Anne’s....
It was the girl who gave them their beauty, made them exquisite to
the mother’s sight and touch, as though they had been a part of her
daughter’s loveliness, the expression of something she could not speak.
Mrs. Clephane suddenly exclaimed to herself: “I am rewarded!” It was
a queer, almost blasphemous, fancy--but it came to her so. She was
rewarded for having given up her daughter; if she had not, could she
ever have known such a moment as this? She had been too careless
and impetuous in her own youth to be worthy to form and guide this
rare creature; and while she seemed to be rushing blindly to her
destruction, Providence had saved the best part of her in saving Anne.
All these scrupulous self-controlled people--Enid and Hendrik Drover,
Fred Landers, even the arch enemy, old Mrs. Clephane--had taken up the
task she had flung aside, and carried it out as she could never have
done. And she had somehow run the mad course allotted to her, and come
out of it sane and sound, to find them all waiting there to give her
back her daughter. It was incredible, but there it was. She bowed her
head in self-abasement.
The box door was opening and shutting softly, on the stage voices and
instruments soared and fell. She did not know how long she sat there
in a kind of brooding rapture. But presently she was roused by hearing
a different voice at her elbow. She half opened her eyes, and saw a
newcomer sitting by Anne. It was one of the young men who came to the
house; his fresh blunt face was as inexpressive as a football; he might
have been made by a manufacturer of sporting-goods.
“--in the box over there; but he’s gone now; bolted. Said he was too
shy to come over and speak to you. Give you my word, he’s got it bad;
we couldn’t get him off the subject.”
“_Shy?_” Anne murmured ironically.
“That’s what he said. Said he’s never had the microbe before. Anyhow,
he’s bolted off home. Says he don’t know when he’ll come back to New
York.”
Kate Clephane, watching her daughter through narrowed lids, perceived a
subtle change in her face. Anne did not blush--that close-textured skin
of hers seldom revealed the motions of her blood. Her delicate profile
remained shut, immovable; she merely lowered her lids as if to keep in
a vision. It was Kate’s own gesture, and the mother recognized it with
a start. She had been right, then; there was some one--some one whom
Anne had to close her eyes to see! But who was he? Why had he been too
shy to come to the box? Where did he come from, and whither had he fled?
Kate glanced at Nollie Tresselton, wondering if she had overheard;
but Nollie, in the far corner of the box, leaned forward, deep in the
music. Joe Tresselton had vanished, Landers slumbered in the rear. With
a little tremor of satisfaction, Kate saw that she had her daughter’s
secret to herself: if there was no one to enlighten her about it at
least there was no one to share it with her, and she was glad. For the
first time she felt a little nearer to Anne than all the others.
“It’s odd,” she thought, “I always knew it would be some one from a
distance.” But there are no real distances nowadays, and she reflected
with an inward smile that the fugitive would doubtless soon reappear,
and her curiosity be satisfied.
That evening, when Anne followed her into her bedroom, Mrs. Clephane
opened the wardrobe in which she had placed the jewel-box. “Here, my
dear; you shall choose one thing for me to wear. But I want you to take
back all the rest.”
The girl’s face clouded. “You won’t keep them, then? But they’re all
yours!”
“Even if they were, I shouldn’t want them any longer. But they’re not,
they’re only a trust--” she paused, half smiling--“a trust till your
wedding.”
She had tried to say the word lightly, but it echoed on through the
silence like a peal of silver bells.
“Oh, my wedding! But I shall never marry,” said Anne, laughing
joyously, and catching her mother in her arms. It was the first time
she had made so impulsive a movement; Kate Clephane, trembling a
little, held her close.
It brought the girl nearer, made her less aloof, to hear that familiar
old denial. “Some day before long,” the mother thought, “she’ll tell me
who he is.”
VI.
Kate Clephane lay awake all night thinking of the man who had been too
shy to come into the box.
Her sense of security, of permanence, was gone. She understood now
that it had been based on the idea that her life would henceforth go
on just as it had for the two months since her return; that she and
Anne would always remain side by side. The idea was absurd, of course;
if she followed it up, her mind recoiled from it. To keep Anne for the
rest of her life unchanged, and undesirous of change--the aspiration
was inconceivable. She wanted for her daughter the common human round,
no more, but certainly no less. Only she did not want her to marry
yet--not till they two had grown to know each other better, till Kate
had had time to establish herself in her new life.
So she put it to herself; but she knew that what she felt was just an
abject fear of change, more change--of being uprooted again, cast once
more upon her own resources.
No! She could not picture herself living alone in a little house in
New York, dependent on Drovers and Tresseltons, and on the good Fred
Landers, for her moral sustenance. To be with Anne, to play the part
of Anne’s mother--the one part, she now saw, that fate had meant her
for--that was what she wanted with all her starved and world-worn
soul. To be the background, the atmosphere, of her daughter’s life;
to depend on Anne, to feel that Anne depended on her; it was the one
perfect companionship she had ever known, the only close tie unmarred
by dissimulation and distrust. The mere restfulness of it had made her
contracted soul expand as if it were sinking into a deep warm bath.
Now the sense of restfulness was gone. From the moment when she had
seen Anne’s lids drop on that secret vision, the mother had known that
her days of quietude were over. Anne’s choice might be perfect; she,
Kate Clephane, might live out the rest of her days in peace between
Anne and Anne’s husband. But the mere possibility of a husband made
everything incalculable again.
The morning brought better counsel. There was Anne herself, in her
riding-habit, aglow from an early canter, and bringing in her mother’s
breakfast, without a trace of mystery in her clear eyes. There was the
day’s pleasant routine, easy and insidious, the planning and adjusting
of engagements, notes to be answered, invitations to be sent out; the
habitual took Mrs. Clephane into its soothing hold. “After all,” she
reflected, “young men don’t run away nowadays from falling in love.”
Probably the whole thing had been some cryptic chaff of the youth with
the football face; Nollie, indirectly, might enlighten her.
Indirectly; for it was clear to Kate that whatever she learned about
her daughter must be learned through observing her, and not through
questioning others. The mother could not picture herself as having
any rights over the girl, as being, under that roof, anything more
than a privileged guest. Anne’s very insistence on treating her as
the mistress of the house only emphasized her sense of not being so
by right: it was the verbal courtesy of the Spaniard who puts all his
possessions at the disposal of a casual visitor.
Not that there was anything in Anne’s manner to suggest this; but that
to Kate it seemed inherent in the situation. It was absurd to assume
that her mere return to John Clephane’s house could invest her, in
any one else’s eyes, and much less in her own, with the authority she
had lost in leaving it; she would never have dreamed of behaving as
if she thought so. Her task, she knew, was gradually, patiently, to
win back, of all she had forfeited, the one thing she really valued:
her daughter’s love and confidence. The love, in a measure, was hers
already; could the confidence fail to follow?
Meanwhile, at any rate, she could be no more than the fondest of
lookers-on, the discreetest of listeners; and for the moment she
neither saw nor heard anything to explain that secret tremor of Anne’s
eyelids.
At the Joe Tresseltons’, a few nights later, she had hoped for
a glimpse, a hint. Nollie had invited mother and daughter (with
affectionate insistence on the mother’s presence) to a little evening
party at which some one who was not Russian was to sing--for Nollie
was original in everything. The Joe Tresseltons had managed to lend a
freshly picturesque air to a dull old Tresselton house near Washington
Square, of which the stable had become a studio, and other apartments
suffered like transformations, without too much loss of character. It
was typical of Nollie that she could give an appearance of stability to
her modern furnishings, just as her modern manner kept its repose.
The party was easy and amusing, but even Lilla Gates (whom Nollie
always included) took her tone from the mistress of the house, and,
dressed with a kind of savage soberness, sat there in her heavy
lustreless beauty, bored but triumphant. It was evident that, though at
Nollie’s she was not in her element, she would not for the world have
been left out.
Kate Clephane, while the music immobilized the groups scattered about
the great shadowy room, found herself scanning them with a fresh
intensity of attention. She no longer thought of herself as an object
of curiosity to any of these careless self-engrossed young people; she
had learned that a woman of her age, however conspicuous her past, and
whatever her present claims to notice, is fated to pass unremarked in a
society where youth so undisputedly rules. The discovery had come with
a slight shock; then she blessed the anonymity which made observation
so much easier.
Only--what was there to observe? Again the sameness of the American
Face encompassed her with its innocent uniformity. How many of them it
seemed to take to make up a single individuality! Most of them were
like the miles and miles between two railway stations. She saw again,
with gathering wonder, that one may be young and handsome and healthy
and eager, and yet unable, out of such rich elements, to evolve a
personality.
Her thoughts wandered back to the shabby faces peopling her former
life. She knew every seam of their shabbiness, but now for the first
time she seemed to see that they had been worn down by emotions and
passions, however selfish, however sordid, and not merely by ice-water
and dyspepsia.
“Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia,” she reflected,
“they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.”
Landers came up as the thought flashed through her mind, and apparently
caught its reflection in her smile.
“You look at me as if you’d never seen me before; is it because my
tie’s crooked?” he asked, sitting down beside her.
“No; your tie is absolutely straight. So is everything else about you.
That’s the reason I was looking at you in that way. I can’t get used to
it!”
He reddened a little, as if unaccustomed to such insistent scrutiny.
“Used to what?”
“The universal straightness. You’re all so young and--and so regular! I
feel as if I were in a gallery of marble masterpieces.”
“As that can hardly apply to our features, I suppose it’s intended to
describe our morals,” he said with a faint grimace.
“I don’t know--I wish I did! What I’m trying to do, of course,” she
added abruptly and unguardedly, “is to guess how I should feel about
all these young men--if I were Anne.”
She was vexed with herself that the words should have slipped out, and
yet not altogether sorry. After all, one could always trust Landers to
hold his tongue--and almost always to understand. His smile showed that
he understood now.
“Of course you’re trying; we all are. But, as far as I know, Sister
Anne hasn’t yet seen any one from her tower.”
A breath of relief expanded the mother’s heart.
“Ah, well, you’d be sure to know--especially as, when she does, it
ought to be some one visible a long way off!”
“It ought to be, yes. The more so as she seems to be in no hurry.” He
looked away. “But don’t build too much on that,” he added. “I learned
long ago, in such matters, to expect only the unexpected.”
Kate Clephane glanced at him quickly; his ingenuous countenance wore an
unaccustomed shadow. She remembered that, in old days, John Clephane
had always jokingly declared--in a tone proclaiming the matter to be
one mentionable only as a joke--that Fred Landers was in love with her;
and she said to herself that the lesson her old friend referred to was
perhaps the one she had unwittingly given him when she went away with
another man.
It was on the tip of her tongue to exclaim: “Oh, but I didn’t know
anything then--I wasn’t anybody! My real life, my only life, began
years later--” but she checked herself with a start. Why, in the very
act of thinking of her daughter, had she suddenly strayed away into
thinking of Chris? It was the first time it had happened to her to
confront the two images, and she felt as if she had committed a sort of
profanation.
She took refuge in another thought that Landers’s last words had
suggested--the thought that if she herself had matured late, why so
might Anne. The idea was faintly reassuring.
“No; I won’t build on any theory,” she said, answering him. “But one
can’t help hoping she’ll wait till some one turns up good enough for
what she’s going to be.”
“Oh, these mothers!” he laughed, his face smoothing out into its usual
guileless lines.
The music was over. The groups flowed past them toward the little
tables in another picturesque room, and Lilla Gates swept by in
a cluster of guffawing youths. She seemed to have attracted all
the kindred spirits in the room, and her sluggish stare was shot
with provocation. Ah, there was another mystery! No one explained
Lilla--every one seemed to take her for granted. Not that it really
mattered; Kate had seen enough of Anne to feel sure she would never be
in danger of falling under Lilla’s influence. The perils in wait for
her would wear a subtler form. But, as a matter of curiosity, and a
possible light on the new America, Kate would have liked to know why
her husband’s niece--surprising offshoot of the prudent Clephanes and
stolid Drovers--had been singled out, in this new easy-going society,
to be at once reproved and countenanced. Lilla in herself was too
uninteresting to stimulate curiosity; but as a symptom she might prove
enlightening. Only, here again, Kate had the sense that she, of all the
world, was least in a position to ask questions. What if people should
turn around and ask them about _her_? Since she had been living under
her old roof, and at her daughter’s side, the mere suggestion made her
tremble. It was curious--and she herself was aware of it--how quickly,
unconsciously almost, she had slipped at last into the very attitude
the Clephanes had so long tried to force upon her: the attitude of
caution and conservatism.
Her glance, in following Lilla, caught Fred Landers’s, and he smiled
again, but with a slight constraint. Instantly she thought: “He’d like
to tell me her whole story, but he doesn’t dare, because very likely it
began like my own. And it will always go on being like that: whatever
I’m afraid to ask they’ll be equally afraid to tell.” Well, that was
what people called “starting with a clean slate”, she supposed; would
no one ever again scribble anything unguardedly on hers? She felt
indescribably alone.
On the way home the mere feeling of Anne’s arm against hers drew her
out of her solitariness. After all, she had only to wait. The new life
was but a few weeks old; and already Anne’s nearness seemed to fill it.
If only she could keep Anne near enough!
“Did you like it, mother? How do we all strike you, I wonder?” the girl
asked suddenly.
“As kinder than anything I ever dreamed.”
She thought she felt Anne’s surprised glance in the darkness. “Oh,
_that_! But why not? It’s you who must try to be kind to us. I feel
as if we must be so hard to tell apart. In Europe there are more
contrasts, I suppose. I saw Uncle Fred helping you to sort us out this
evening.”
“You mean you caught me staring? I daresay I do. I want so much not to
miss anything ... anything that’s a part of your life....” Her voice
shook with the avowal.
She was answered by a closer pressure. “You wonderful mother! I don’t
believe you ever will.” She was conscious in Anne, mysteriously, of a
tension answering her own. “Isn’t it splendid to be two to talk things
over?” the girl said joyously.
“_What things?_” Kate Clephane thought; but dared not speak. Her hand
on Anne’s, she sat silent, feeling her child’s heart tremble nearer.
VII.
Every one noticed how beautifully it worked; the way, as Fred Landers
said, she and Anne had hit it off from their first look at each other
on the deck of the steamer.
Enid Drover was almost emotional about it, one evening when she and
Kate sat alone in the Clephane drawing-room. It was after one of Anne’s
“young” dinners, and the other guests, with Anne herself, had been
whirled off to some form of midnight entertainment.
“It’s wonderful, my dear, how you’ve done it. Poor mother didn’t always
find Anne easy, you know. But she’s taken a tremendous fancy to you.”
Kate felt herself redden with pride. “I suppose it’s the novelty,
partly,” Mrs. Drover continued, with her heavy-stepping simplicity.
“Perhaps that’s an advantage, in a way.” But she pulled up, apparently
feeling that, in some obscure manner, she might be offending where she
sought to please. “Anne admires your looks so much, you know; and your
slightness.” A sigh came from her adipose depths. “I do believe it
gives one more hold over one’s girls to have kept one’s figure. One can
at least go on wearing the kind of clothes they like.”
Kate felt an inward glow of satisfaction. The irony of the situation
hardly touched her: the fact that the youth and elasticity she had
clung to so desperately should prove one of the chief assets of her new
venture. It was beginning to seem natural that everything should lead
up to Anne.
“This business of setting up a studio, now; Anne’s so pleased that you
approve. She had a struggle with her grandmother about it; but poor
mother wouldn’t give in. She was too horrified. She thought paint so
messy--and then how could she have got up all those stairs?”
“Ah, well”--it was so easy to be generous!--“that sort of thing did
seem horrifying to Mrs. Clephane’s generation. After all, it was not
so long before her day that Dr. Johnson said portrait-painting was
indelicate in a female.”
Mrs. Drover gave her sister-in-law a puzzled look. Her mind seldom
retained more than one word in any sentence, and her answer was based
on the reaction that particular word provoked. “_Female_--” she
murmured--“is that word being used again? I never thought it very nice
to apply it to women, did you? I suppose I’m old-fashioned. Nothing
shocks the young people nowadays--not even the Bible.”
Nothing could have given Kate Clephane greater confidence in her own
success than this little talk with Enid Drover. She had been feeling
her way so patiently, so stealthily almost, among the out-works
and defences of her daughter’s character; and here she was actually
instated in the citadel.
Anne’s “studio-warming” strengthened the conviction. Mrs. Clephane had
not been allowed to see the studio; Anne and Nollie and Joe Tresselton,
for a breathless week, had locked themselves in with nails and hammers
and pots of paint, sealing their ears against all questioning. Then
one afternoon the doors were opened, and Kate, coming out of the
winter twilight, found herself in a great half-lit room with a single
wide window overlooking the reaches of the Sound all jewelled and
netted with lights, the fairy span of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the
dark roof-forest of the intervening city. It all seemed strangely
significant and mysterious in that disguising dusk--full of shadows,
distances, invitations. Kate leaned in the window, surprised at this
brush of the wings of poetry.
In the room, Anne had had the good taste to let the sense of space
prolong itself. It looked more like a great library waiting for its
books than a modern studio; as though the girl had measured the
distance between that mighty nocturne and her own timid attempts, and
wanted the implements of her art to pass unnoticed.
They were sitting--Mrs. Clephane, the Joe Tresseltons and one or two
others--about the tea-cups set out at one end of a long oak table, when
the door opened and Lilla Gates appeared, tawny and staring, in white
furs and big pendulous earrings. She brought with her a mingled smell
of cigarettes and Houbigant, and as she stood there, circling the room
with her sulky contemptuous gaze, Kate felt a movement of annoyance.
“Why must one forever go on being sorry for Lilla?” she wondered,
wincing a little as Anne’s lips touched her cousin’s mauve cheek.
“It was nice of you to come, Lilla.”
“Well--I chucked something bang-up for you,” said Lilla coolly. It was
evidently her pride to be perpetually invited, perpetually swamped in
a multiplicity of boring engagements. She looked about her again, and
then dropped into an armchair. “Mercy--you _have_ cleared the decks!”
she remarked. “Ain’t there going to be any more furniture than this?”
“Oh, the furniture’s all outside--and the pictures too,” Anne said,
pointing to the great window.
“What--Brooklyn Bridge? Lord!--Oh, but I see: you’ve kept the place
clear for dancing. Good girl, Anne! Can I bring in some of my little
boys sometimes? Is that a pianola?” she added, with a pounce toward
the grand piano in a shadowy corner. “I like this kindergarten,” she
pronounced.
Nollie Tresselton laughed. “If you come, Anne won’t let you dance.
You’ll all have to sit for her--for hours and hours.”
“Well, we’ll sit between the dances then. Ain’t I going to have a
latch-key, Anne?”
She stood leaning against the piano, sipping the cock-tail some one
had handed her, her head thrown back, and the light from a shaded
lamp striking up at her columnar throat and the green glitter of her
earrings, which suggested to Kate Clephane the poisonous antennæ
of some giant insect. Anne stood close to her, slender, erect, her
small head clasped in close braids, her hands hanging at her sides,
dead-white against the straight dark folds of her dress. There was
something distinctly unpleasant to Kate Clephane in the proximity of
the two, and she rose and moved toward the piano.
As she sat down before it, letting her hands drift into the opening
bars of a half-remembered melody, she saw Lilla, in her vague lounging
way, draw nearer to Anne, who held out a hand for the empty cock-tail
glass. The gesture brought them so close that Lilla, slightly drooping
her head, could let fall, hardly above her breath, but audibly to Kate:
“He’s back again. He bothered the life out of me to bring him here
today.”
Again Kate saw that quick drop of her daughter’s lids; this time it was
accompanied by a just-perceptible tremor of the hand that received the
glass.
“Nonsense, Lilla!”
“Well, what on earth am I to do about it? I can’t get the police to run
him in, can I?”
Anne laughed--the faintest half-pleased laugh of impatience and
dismissal. “You may have to,” she said.
Nollie Tresselton, in the interval, had glided up and slipped an arm
through Lilla’s.
“Come along, my dear. There’s to be no dancing here today.” Her little
brown face had the worn sharp look it often took on when she was
mothering Lilla. But Lilla’s feet were firmly planted. “I don’t budge
till I get another cock-tail.”
One of the young men hastened to supply her, and Anne turned to her
other guests. A few minutes later the Tresseltons and Lilla went away,
and one by one the remaining visitors followed, leaving mother and
daughter alone in the recovered serenity of the empty room.
But there was no serenity in Kate. That half-whispered exchange between
Lilla Gates and Anne had stirred all her old apprehensions and awakened
new ones. The idea that her daughter was one of Lilla’s confidants was
inexpressibly disturbing. Yet the more she considered, the less she
knew how to convey her anxiety to her daughter.
“If I only knew how intimate they really are--what she really thinks of
Lilla!”
For the first time she understood on what unknown foundations her
fellowship with Anne was built. Were they solid? Would they hold? Was
Anne’s feeling for her more than a sudden girlish enthusiasm for an
agreeable older woman, the kind of sympathy based on things one can
enumerate, and may change one’s mind about, rather than the blind
warmth of habit?
She stood musing while Anne moved about the studio, putting away the
music, straightening a picture here and there.
“And this is where you’re going to work--”
Anne nodded joyously.
“Lilla apparently expects you to turn it into a dance-hall for her
benefit.”
“Poor Lilla! She can’t see a new room without wanting to fox-trot in
it. Life, for her, wherever she is, consists in going somewhere else in
order to do exactly the same thing.”
Kate was relieved: there was no mistaking the half-disdainful pity of
the tone.
“Well--don’t give her that latch-key!” she laughed, gathering up her
furs.
Anne echoed the laugh. “There are to be only two latch-keys--yours and
mine,” she said; and mother and daughter went gaily down the steep
stairs.
* * * * *
The days, after that, moved on with the undefinable reassurance
of habit. Kate Clephane was beginning to feel herself part of an
old-established routine. She had tried to organize her life in such
a way that it should fit into Anne’s without awkward overlapping.
Anne, nowadays, after her early canter, went daily to the studio and
painted till lunch; sometimes, as the days lengthened, she went back
for another two hours’ work in the afternoon. When the going was too
bad for her morning ride she usually walked to the studio, and Kate
sometimes walked with her, or went through the Park to meet her on her
return. When she painted in the afternoon, Kate would occasionally
drop in for tea, and they would return home together on foot in the
dusk. But Mrs. Clephane was scrupulously careful not to intrude on her
daughter’s working-hours; she held back, not with any tiresome display
of discretion, but with the air of caring for her own independence too
much not to respect Anne’s.
Sometimes, now that she had settled down into this new way of life, she
was secretly aware of feeling a little lonely; there were hours when
the sense of being only a visitor in the house where her life ought
to have been lived gave her the same drifting uprooted feeling which
had been the curse of her other existence. It was not Anne’s fault;
nor that, in this new life, every moment was not interesting and even
purposeful, since each might give her the chance of serving Anne,
pleasing Anne, in some way or another getting closer to Anne. But this
very feeling took a morbid intensity from the fact of having no common
memories, no shared associations, to feed on. Kate was frightened,
sometimes, by its likeness to that other isolated and devouring
emotion which her love for Chris had been. Everything might have been
different, she thought, if she had had more to do, or more friends of
her own to occupy her. But Anne’s establishment, which had been her
grandmother’s, still travelled smoothly enough on its own momentum,
and though the girl insisted that her mother was now the head of the
house, the headship involved little more than ordering dinner, and
talking over linen and carpets and curtains with old Mrs. Clephane’s
house-keeper.
Then, as to friends--was it because she was too much engrossed in her
daughter to make any? Or because her life had been too incommunicably
different from that of her bustling middle-aged contemporaries,
absorbed by local and domestic questions she had no part in? Or had
she been too suddenly changed from a self-centred woman, insatiable
for personal excitements, into that new being, a mother, her centre of
gravity in a life not hers?
She did not know; she felt only that she no longer had time for
anything but motherhood, and must be content to bridge over, as best
she could, the unoccupied intervals. And, after all, the intervals were
not many. Her daughter never appeared without instantly filling up
every crevice of the present, and overflowing into the past and the
future, so that, even in the mother’s rare lapses into despondency,
life without Anne, like life before Anne, had become unthinkable.
She was revolving this for the thousandth time as she turned into
the Park one afternoon to meet Anne on the latter’s way homeward.
The days were already much longer; the difference in the light, and
that premature languor of the air which comes, in America, before the
sleeping earth seems to expect it, made Mrs. Clephane feel that the
year had turned, that a new season was opening in her new life. She
walked on with the vague sense of confidence in the future which the
first touch of spring gives. The worst of the way was past--how easily,
how smoothly to the feet! Where misunderstanding and failure had
been so probable, she was increasingly sure of having understood and
succeeded. And already she and Anne were making delightful plans for
the spring....
Ahead of her, in a transverse alley, she was disagreeably surprised by
the sight of Lilla Gates. There was no mistaking that tall lounging
figure, though it was moving slowly away from her. Lilla at that hour
in the Park? It seemed curious and improbable. Yet Lilla it was; and
Mrs. Clephane’s conclusion was drawn immediately. “Who is she waiting
for?”
Whoever it was had not come; the perspective beyond Lilla was empty.
After a moment she hastened her step, and vanished behind a clump
of evergreens at the crossing of the paths. Kate did not linger to
watch for her reappearance. The incident was too trifling to fix
the attention; after all, what had one ever expected of Lilla but
that she might be found loitering in unlikely places, in quest of
objectionable people? There was nothing new in that--nor did Kate even
regret not having a glimpse of the objectionable person. In her growing
reassurance about Anne, Lilla’s affairs had lost whatever slight
interest they once offered.
She walked on--but her mood was altered. The sight of Lilla lingering
in that deserted path had called up old associations. She remembered
meetings of the same kind--but was it her own young figure she saw
fading down those far-off perspectives? Well--if it were, let it go!
She owned no kinship with that unhappy ghost. Serene, middle-aged,
respected and respectable, she walked on again out of that vanishing
past into the warm tangible present. And at any moment now she might
meet Anne.
She had turned down a wide walk leading to one of the Fifth Avenue
entrances of the Park. One could see a long way ahead; there were
people coming and going. Two women passed, with some noisy children
racing before them, a milliner’s boy, whistling, his boxes slung over
his shoulder, a paralytic pushing himself along in a wheeled chair;
then, coming toward her from the direction of Fifth Avenue, a man who
half-stopped, recognized her, and raised his hat.