XV.
Fantastic shapes of heavy leaf-shadows on blinding whiteness. Torrents
of blue and lilac and crimson foaming over the branches of unknown
trees. Azure distances, snow-peaks, silver reefs, and an unbroken glare
of dead-white sunshine merging into a moonlight hardly whiter. Was
there never any night, real, black, obliterating, in all these dazzling
latitudes in which two desperate women had sought refuge?
They had “travelled.” It had been very interesting; and Anne was
better. Certainly she was much better. They were on their way home
now, moving at a leisurely pace--what was there to return for?--from
one scene of gorgeous unreality to another. And all the while Anne
had never spoken--never really spoken! She had simply, a day or two
after Mrs. Clephane’s furtive trip to Baltimore, told her mother
that her engagement was broken: “by mutual agreement” were the stiff
old-fashioned words she used. As no one else, even among their nearest,
had been let into the secret of that fleeting bond, there was no one to
whom explanations were due; and the girl, her curt confidence to her
mother once made, had withdrawn instantly into the rigid reserve she
had maintained ever since. Just so, in former days, Kate Clephane had
seen old Mrs. Clephane meet calamity. After her favourite daughter’s
death the old woman had never spoken her name. And thus with Anne; her
soul seemed to freeze about its secret. Even the physical resemblance
to old Mrs. Clephane reappeared, and with it a certain asperity of
speech, a sharp intolerance of trifles, breaking every now and again
upon long intervals of smiling apathy.
During their travels the girl was more than ever attentive to her
mother; but her solicitude seemed the result of a lesson in manners
inculcated long ago (with the rest of her creed) by old Mrs. Clephane.
It was impossible for a creature so young and eager to pass unseeingly
through the scenes of their journey; but it was clear that each
momentary enthusiasm only deepened the inner pang. And from all
participation in that hidden conflict between youth and suffering the
mother continued to feel herself shut out.
Nevertheless, she began to imagine that time was working its usual
miracle. Anne’s face was certainly less drawn--Anne’s manner perhaps a
shade less guarded. Lately she had begun to sketch again ... she had
suggested one day their crossing from Rio to Marseilles, continuing
their wanderings in the Mediterranean ... had spoken of Egypt and Crete
for the winter....
Mrs. Clephane acquiesced, bought guide-books, read up furtively, and
tried to temper zeal with patience. It would not do to seem too eager;
she held her breath, waiting on her daughter’s moods, and praying for
the appearance of the “some one else” whose coming mothers invoke in
such contingencies. That very afternoon, sitting on the hotel balcony
above a sea of flowers, she had suffered herself to wonder if Anne, who
was off on a long riding excursion with a party of young people, might
not return with a different look, the clear happy look of the last
year’s Anne. The young English planter to whose _hacienda_ they had
gone had certainly interested her more than any one they had hitherto
met.
The mother, late that evening, was still alone on the balcony when,
from behind her, Anne’s shadow fell across the moonlight. The girl
dropped into a seat. No, she wasn’t tired--wasn’t hungry--they had
supped, on the way back, at a glorious place high up over Rio. Yes, the
day had been wonderful; the beauty incredible; and the moonlit descent
through the forest.... Anne lapsed into silence, her profile turned
from her mother. Perhaps--who could tell? Her silence seemed heavy with
promise. Suddenly she put out a hand to Kate.
“Mother, I want to make over all my money to you. It would have been
yours if things had been different. It _is_ yours, really; and I don’t
want it--I hate it!” Her hand was trembling.
Mrs. Clephane trembled too. “But, Anne--how absurd! What can it matter?
What difference can it make?”
“All the difference.” The girl lowered her voice. “It’s because I was
too rich that he wouldn’t marry me.” It broke from her in a sob. “I
can’t bear it--I can’t bear it!” She stretched her hand to the silver
splendours beneath them. “All this beauty and glory in the world--and
nothing in me but cold and darkness!”
Kate Clephane sat speechless. She remembered just such flashes of wild
revolt in her own youth, when sea and earth and sky seemed joined in
a vast conspiracy of beauty, and within her too all was darkness.
For months she had been praying for this hour of recovered communion
with her daughter; yet now that it had come, now that the barriers
were down, she felt powerless to face what was beyond. If it had been
any other man! Paralysed by the fact that it was just that one, she
continued to sit silent, her hand on Anne’s sunken head.
“Why should you think it’s the money?” she whispered at last, to gain
time.
“I know it--I know it! He told Nollie once that nothing would induce
him to marry a girl with a fortune. He thought it an impossible
position for a poor man.”
“Did he tell _you_ so?”
“Not in so many words. But it was easy to guess. When he wrote to ...
to give me back my freedom, he said he’d been mad to think we might
marry ... that it was impossible ... there would always be an obstacle
between us....” The girl lifted her head, her agonized eyes on her
mother’s. “What obstacle could there be but my money?”
Kate Clephane had turned as cold as marble. At the word “obstacle”
she stood up, almost pushing the girl from her. In that searching
moonlight, what might not Anne read in her eyes?
“Come indoors, dear,” she said.
Anne followed her mechanically. In the high-ceilinged shadowy room Mrs.
Clephane sat down in a wooden rocking-chair and the girl stood before
her, tall and ghostly in her white linen riding-habit, the dark hair
damp on her forehead.
“Come and sit by me, Anne.”
“No. I want you to answer me first--to promise.”
“But, my dear, what you suggest is madness. How can I promise such a
thing? And why should it make any difference? Why should any man be
humiliated by the fact of marrying a girl with money?”
“Ah, but Chris is different! You don’t know him.”
The mother locked her hands about the chair-arms. She sat looking down
at the bare brick floor of the room, and at Anne’s two feet, slim and
imperious, planted just before her in an attitude of challenge, of
resistance. She did not dare to raise her eyes higher. “_I don’t know
him!_” she repeated to herself.
“Mother, answer me--you’ve got to answer me!” The girl’s low-pitched
voice had grown shrill; her swaying tall white presence seemed to
disengage some fiery fluid. Kate Clephane suddenly recalled the baby
Anne’s lightning-flashes of rage, and understood what reserves of
violence still underlay her daughter’s calm exterior.
“How can I answer? I know what you’re suffering--but I can’t pretend to
think that what you propose would make any difference.”
“You don’t think it was the money?”
Kate Clephane drew a deep breath, and clasped the chair-arms tighter.
“No.”
“What _was_ it, then?” Anne had once more sunk on her knees beside her
mother. “I can’t bear not to know. I can’t bear it an hour longer,” she
gasped out.
“It’s hard, dear ... I know how hard....” Kate put her arms about the
shuddering body.
“What shall I do, mother? I’ve written, and he doesn’t answer. I’ve
written three times. And yet I know--”
“You know?”
“He _did_ love me, mother.”
“Yes, dear.”
“And there wasn’t any one else; I know that too.”
“Yes.”
“No one else that he cared about ... or who had any claim.... I asked
him that before I promised to marry him.”
“Then, dear, there’s nothing more to say--or to do. You can only
conclude that he gave you back your freedom because he wanted his.”
“But it was all so quick! How can anybody love one day, and not the
next?”
Kate winced. “It does happen so--sometimes.”
“I don’t believe it--not of him and me! And there _was_ the money; I
know that. Mother, let me try; let me tell him that you’ve agreed to
take it all back; that I shall have only the allowance you choose to
make me.”
Mrs. Clephane again sat silent, with lowered head. She had not foreseen
this torture.
“Don’t you think, dear, as you’ve written three times and had no
answer, that you’d better wait? Better try to forget?”
The girl shook herself free and stood up with a tragic laugh. “You
don’t know me either, mother!”
That word was crueller than the other; the mother shrank from it as if
she had received a blow.
“I do know that, in such cases, there’s never any remedy but one. If
your courage fails you, there’s your pride.”
“My pride? What’s pride, if one cares? I’d do anything to get him
back. I only want you to do what I ask!”
Kate Clephane rose to her feet also. Her own pride seemed suddenly to
start up from its long lethargy, and she looked almost defiantly at her
defiant daughter.
“I can’t do what you ask.”
“You won’t?”
“I can’t.”
“You want me to go on suffering, then? You want to kill me?” The girl
was close to her, in a white glare of passion. “Ah, it’s true--why
should you care what happens to me? After all, we’re only strangers to
each other.”
Kate Clephane’s first thought was: “I mustn’t let her see how it
hurts--” not because of the fear of increasing her daughter’s
suffering, but to prevent her finding out how she could inflict more
pain. Anne, at that moment, looked as if the discovery would have been
exquisite to her.
The mother dared not speak; she feared her whole agony would break from
her with her first word. The two stood facing each other for a moment;
then Mrs. Clephane put her hand out blindly. But the girl turned from
it with a fierce “Don’t!” that seemed to thrust her mother still
farther from her, and swept out of the room without a look.
XVI.
Anne had decreed that they should return home; and they returned.
The day after the scene at Rio the girl had faltered out an apology,
and the mother had received it with a silent kiss. After that neither
had alluded to the subject of their midnight talk. Anne was as
solicitous as ever for her mother’s comfort and enjoyment, but the
daughter had vanished in the travelling companion. Sometimes, during
those last weary weeks of travel, Kate Clephane wondered if any closer
relation would ever be possible between them. But it was not often that
she dared to look ahead. She felt like a traveller crawling along a
narrow ledge above a precipice; a glance forward or down might plunge
her into the depths.
As they drew near New York she recalled her other return there, less
than a year before, and the reckless confidence with which she had
entered on her new life. She recalled her first meeting with her
daughter, her sense of an instant understanding on the part of each,
and the way her own past had fallen from her at the girl’s embrace.
Now Anne seemed remoter than ever, and it was the mother’s past which
had divided them. She shuddered at the fatuity with which she had
listened to Enid Drover and Fred Landers when they assured her that
she had won her daughter’s heart. “She’s taken a tremendous fancy to
you--” Was it possible that that absurd phrase had ever satisfied
her? But daughters, she said to herself, don’t take a fancy to their
mothers! Mothers and daughters are part of each other’s consciousness,
in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual
sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a
habit of thought to her children.
Well--this mother must put up with what she had, and make the most
of it. Yes; for Anne’s sake she must try to make the most of it,
to grope her own way and the girl’s through this ghastly labyrinth
without imperilling whatever affection Anne still felt for her. So a
conscientious chaperon might have reasoned--and what more had Kate
Clephane the right to call herself?
They reached New York early in October. None of the family were in
town; even Fred Landers, uninformed of the exact date of their return,
was off shooting with Horace Maclew in South Carolina. Anne had
wanted their arrival to pass unperceived; she told her mother that
they would remain in town for a day or two, and then decide where to
spend the rest of the autumn. On the steamer they languidly discussed
alternatives; but, from the girl’s inability to decide, the mother
guessed that she was waiting for something--probably a letter. “She’s
written to him after all; she expects to find the answer when we
arrive.”
They reached the house and went upstairs to their respective
apartments. Everything in Anne’s establishment was as discreetly
ordered as in a club; each lady found her correspondence in her
sitting-room, and Kate Clephane, while she glanced indifferently over
her own letters, sat with an anguished heart wondering what message
awaited Anne.
They met at dinner, and she fancied the girl looked paler and more
distant than usual. After dinner the two went to Kate’s sitting-room.
Aline had already laid out some of the presents they had brought
home: a Mexican turquoise ornament for Lilla, an exotic head-band of
kingfishers’ feathers for Nollie, an old Spanish chronicle for Fred
Landers. Mother and daughter turned them over with affected interest;
then talk languished, and Anne rose and said goodnight.
On the threshold she paused. “Mother, I was odious to you that night at
Rio.”
Kate started up with an impulsive gesture. “Oh, my darling, what does
that matter? It was all forgotten long ago.”
“I haven’t forgotten it. I’m more and more ashamed of what I said. But
I was dreadfully unhappy....”
“I know, dear, I know.”
The girl still stood by the door, clutching the knob in an unconscious
hand. “I wanted to tell you that now I’m cured--quite cured.” Her smile
was heart-breaking. “I didn’t follow your advice; I wrote to him. I
told him--I pretended--that you were going to accept my plan of giving
you back the money, and that I should have only a moderate allowance,
so that he needn’t feel any inequality ... any sense of obligation....”
Kate listened with lowered head. “Perhaps you were right to write to
him.”
“Yes, I was right,” Anne answered with a faint touch of self-derision.
“For now I know. It was not the money; he has told me so. I’ve had a
letter.”
“Ah--”
“I’m dismissed,” said the girl with an abrupt laugh.
“What do you mean, dear, when you say I was right?”
“I mean that there was another woman.” Anne came close to her, with the
same white vehement face as she had shown during their nocturnal talk
at Rio.
Kate’s heart stood still. “Another woman?”
“Yes. And you made me feel that you’d always suspected it.”
“No, dear ... really....”
“You _didn’t_?” She saw the terrible flame of hope rekindling in Anne’s
eyes.
“Not--not about any one in particular. But of course, with a man ... a
man like that....” (Should she go on, or should she stop?)
Anne was upon her with a cry. “_Mother, what kind of a man?_”
Fool that she was, not to have foreseen the consequences of
such a slip! She sat before her daughter like a criminal under
cross-examination, feeling that whatever word she chose would fatally
lead her deeper into the slough of avowal.
Anne repeated her question with insistence. “You knew him before I
did,” she added.
“Yes; but it’s so long ago.”
“But what makes you suspect him now?”
“Suspect? I suspect nothing!”
The girl stood looking at her fixedly under dark menacing brows. “I
do, then! I wouldn’t allow myself to before; but all the while I
knew there was another woman.” Between the sentences she drew short
panting breaths, as though with every word speech grew more difficult.
“Mother,” she broke out, “the day I went to Baltimore to see him the
maid who opened the door didn’t want to let me in because there’d been
a woman there two days before who’d made a scene. A scene--that’s what
she said! Isn’t it horrible?” She burst into tears.
Kate Clephane sat stupefied. She could not yet grasp the significance
of the words her daughter was pouring out, and repeated dully: “You
went to Baltimore?” How secret Anne must be, she thought, not only
to have concealed her visit at the time, but even to have refrained
from any allusion to it during their stormy talk at Rio! How secret,
since, even in moments of seeming self-abandonment, she could refrain
from revealing whatever she chose to keep to herself! More acutely than
ever, the mother had the sense of being at arm’s length from her child.
“Yes, I went to Baltimore,” said Anne, speaking now in a controlled
incisive voice. “I didn’t tell you at the time because you were not
well. It was just after you came back from Meridia, and had that
nervous break-down--you remember? I didn’t want to bother you about my
own affairs. But as soon as I got his letter saying the engagement was
off I jumped into the first train, and went straight to Baltimore to
see him.”
“And you did?” It slipped from Kate irresistibly.
“No. He was away; he’d left. But I didn’t believe it at the time; I
thought the maid-servant had had orders not to let me in....” She
paused. “Mother, it was too horrible; she took me for the woman who had
made the scene. She said I looked just like her.”
Kate gasped: “The negress said so?”
Her question seemed to drop into the silence like a shout; it was as if
she had let fall a platter of brass on a marble floor.
“The negress?” Anne echoed.
Kate Clephane sank down into the depths of her chair as if she had been
withered by a touch. She pressed her elbows against her side to try to
hide the trembling of her body.
“How did you know it was a negress, mother?”
Kate sat helpless, battling with confused possibilities of fear; and in
that moment Anne leapt on the truth.
“It was _you_, mother--_you_ were the other woman? You went to see him
the day you said you’d been to Meridia?” The girl stood before her now
like a blanched Fury.
“I _did_ go to Meridia!” Kate Clephane declared.
“You went to Baltimore too, then. You went to his house; you saw him.
You were the woman who made the scene.” Anne’s voice had mounted to a
cry; but suddenly she seemed to regain a sense of her surroundings. At
the very moment when Kate Clephane felt the flash of the blade over her
head it was arrested within a hair’s-breadth of her neck. Anne’s voice
sank to a whisper.
“Mother--you did that? It was really you--it was your doing? You’ve
always hated him, then? Hated him enough for that?”
Ah, that blessed word--_hated_! When the other had trembled in the very
air! The mother, bowed there, her shrunken body drawn in on itself,
felt a faint expanding of the heart.
“No, dear; no; not hate,” she stammered.
“But it _was_ you?” She suddenly understood that, all the while, Anne
had not really believed it. But the moment for pretense was past.
“I did go to see him; yes.”
“To persuade him to break our engagement?”
“Anne--”
“Answer me, please.”
“To ask him--to try to make him see....”
The girl interrupted her with a laugh. “You made him break our
engagement--you did it. And all this time--all these dreadful
months--you let me think it was because he was tired of me!” She sprang
to her mother and caught her by the wrists. Her hot fingers seemed to
burn into Kate’s shivering flesh.
“Look at me, please, mother; no, straight in the eyes. I want to try to
find out which of us you hated most; which of us you most wanted to see
suffer.”
The mother disengaged herself and stood up. “As for suffering--if you
look at me, you’ll see I’ve had my share.”
The girl seemed not to hear. “But why--why--why?” she wailed.
A reaction of self-defence came over Kate Clephane. Anne’s white-heat
of ire seemed to turn her cold, and her self-possession returned.
“What is it you want me to tell you? I did go to see Major Fenno--yes.
I wanted to speak to him privately; to ask him to reconsider his
decision. I didn’t believe he could make you happy. He came round to
my way of thinking. That’s all. Any mother would have done as much. I
had the right--”
“The right?” Anne shrilled. “What right? You gave up all your rights
over me when you left my father for another man!”
Mrs. Clephane rose with uncertain steps, and moved toward the door
of her bedroom. On the threshold she paused and turned toward her
daughter. Strength had come back to her with the thought that after all
the only thing that mattered was to prevent this marriage. And that she
might still do.
“The right of a friend, then, Anne. Won’t you even allow me that?
You’ve treated me as a friend since you asked me to come back. You’ve
trusted me, or seemed to. Trust me now. I did what I did because I knew
you ought not to marry Major Fenno. I’ve known him for a great many
years. I knew he couldn’t make you happy--make any woman happy. Some
men are not meant to marry; he’s one of them. I know enough of his
history to know that. And you see he recognized that I was right--”
Anne was still staring at her with the same fixed implacable brows.
Then her face broke up into the furrows of young anguish, and she
became again a helpless grief-tossed girl, battling blindly with her
first sorrow. She flung up her arms, buried her head in them, and sank
down by the sofa. Kate watched her for a moment, hesitating; then she
stole up and laid an arm about the bowed neck. But Anne shook her off
and sprang up.
“No--no--no!” she cried. They stood facing each other, as on that other
cruel night.
“You don’t know me; you don’t understand me. What right have you to
interfere with my happiness? Won’t you please say nothing more now?
It was my own fault to imagine that we could ever live together like
mother and daughter. A relation like that can’t be improvised in a
day.” She flung a tragic look at her mother. “If you’ve suffered, I
suppose it was my fault for asking you to make the experiment. Excuse
me if I’ve said anything to hurt you. But you must leave me to manage
my life in my own way.” She turned toward the door.
“Goodnight--my child,” Kate whispered.
XVII.
Two days later Fred Landers returned.
Mrs. Clephane had sent a note begging him to call her up as soon as he
arrived. When his call came she asked if she might dine with him that
night, and he replied that she ought to have come without asking. Anne,
he supposed, would honour him too?
No, she answered; Anne, the day before, had gone down to the Drovers’
on Long Island. She would probably be away for a few days. And would
Fred please ask no one else to dine? He assured her that such an idea
would never have occurred to him.
He received her in the comfortable shabby drawing-room which he had
never changed since his mother and an old-maid sister had vanished from
it years before. He indulged his own tastes in the library upstairs,
leaving this chintzy room, with its many armchairs, the Steinway piano
and the family Chippendale, much as Kate had known it when old Mrs.
Landers had given her a bridal dinner. The memory of that dinner,
and of Mrs. Landers, large, silvery, demonstrative, flashed through
Mrs. Clephane’s mind. She saw herself in an elaborately looped gown,
proudly followed by her husband, and enclosed in her hostess’s rustling
embrace, while her present host, crimson with emotion and admiration,
hung shyly behind his mother; and the memory gave her a pang of
self-pity.
In the middle of the room she paused and looked about her. “It feels
like home,” she said, without knowing what she was saying.
A flush almost as agitated as the one she remembered mounted to
Landers’s forehead. She saw his confusion and pleasure, and was
remotely touched by them.
“You see, I’m homeless,” she explained with a faint smile.
“Homeless?”
“Oh, I can’t remember when I was ever anything else. I’ve been a
wanderer for so many years.”
“But not any more,” he smiled.
The double mahogany doors were thrown open. Landers, with his
stiff little bow, offered her an arm, and they passed into a dusky
flock-papered dining-room which seemed to borrow most of its lighting
from the sturdy silver and monumental cut-glass of the dinner-table.
A bunch of violets, compact and massive, lay by her plate. Everything
about Fred Landers was old-fashioned, solid and authentic. She sank
into her chair with a sense of its being a place of momentary refuge.
She did not mean to speak till after dinner--then she would tell him
everything she thought. “How delicious they are!” she murmured,
smelling the violets.
In the library, after dinner, Landers settled her in his deepest
armchair, moved the lamp away, pressed a glass of old Chartreuse on
her, and said: “And now, what’s wrong?”
The suddenness and the perspicacity of the question took her by
surprise. She had imagined he would leave the preliminaries to her, or
at any rate beat about the subject in a clumsy effort to get at it.
But she perceived that, awkward and almost timorous as he remained
in smaller ways, the mere habit of life had given him a certain
self-assurance at important moments. It was she who now felt a tremor
of reluctance. How could she tell him--what could she tell him?
“Well, you know, I really _am_ homeless,” she began. “Or at least, in
remaining where I am I’m forfeiting my last shred of self-respect. Anne
has told me that her experiment has been a mistake.”
“What experiment?”
“Having me back.”
“Is that what she calls it--an experiment?”
Mrs. Clephane nodded.
Fred Landers stood leaning against the mantelpiece, an unlit cigar in
his hand. His face expressed perplexity and perturbation. “I don’t
understand. What has happened? She seemed to adore you.”
“Yes; as a visitor; a chaperon; a travelling companion.”
“Well--that’s not so bad to begin with.”
“No; but it has nothing on earth to do with the real relation between a
mother and daughter.”
“Oh, _that_--”
It was her turn to flush. “You agree with Anne, then, that I’ve
forfeited all right to claim it?”
He seemed embarrassed. “What do you mean by claiming it?”
She hesitated a moment; then she began. It was not the story she had
meant to tell; she had hardly opened her lips before she understood
that it would be as impossible to tell that to Fred Landers as to Anne.
For an instant, as he welcomed her to the familiar house, so full of
friendly memories, she had had the illusion of nearness to him, the
sense of a brotherly reassuring presence. But as she began to speak of
Chris every one else in her new life except her daughter became remote
and indistinct to her. She supposed it could not be otherwise. She
had chosen to cast her lot elsewhere, and now, coming back after so
many years, she found the sense of intimacy and confidence irreparably
destroyed. What did she really know of the present Fred Landers, or
he of her? All she found herself able to say was that when she had
heard that Anne meant to marry Chris Fenno she had thought it her
duty to try to prevent the marriage; and that the girl had guessed
her interference and could not forgive her. She elaborated on this,
lingering over the relatively insignificant details of her successive
talks with her daughter in the attempt to delay the moment when Landers
should begin to question her.
She saw that he was deeply disturbed, but perhaps not altogether sorry.
He had never liked Chris, she knew, and the news of the engagement was
clearly a shock to him. He said he had seen and heard nothing of Fenno
since Anne and her mother had left. Landers, who could not recall that
either Horace Maclew or Lilla had ever mentioned him, had concluded
that the young man was no longer a member of their household, and
probably not even in Baltimore. If he were, Lilla would have been sure
to keep her hold on him; he was too useful a diner and dancer to be
lost sight of--and much more in Lilla’s line, one would have fancied,
than in Anne’s.
Kate Clephane winced at the unconscious criticism. “He gave me his word
that he would go,” she said with a faint sigh of relief.
Fred Landers continued to lean meditatively against the chimney-piece.
“You said nothing at all to Anne herself at the time?” he asked, after
another interval.
“No. Perhaps I was wrong; but I was afraid to. I felt I didn’t know her
well enough--yet.”
Instantly she saw how he would interpret her avowal, and her colour
rose again. She must have felt, then, that she knew Major Fenno better;
the inference was inevitable.
“You found it easier to speak to Fenno?”
She hesitated. “I cared so much less for what he felt.”
“Of course,” he sighed. “And you knew damaging things about him?
Evidently, since he broke the engagement when you told him to.”
Again she faltered. “I knew something of his past life--enough to be
sure he wasn’t the kind of husband for Anne. I made him understand it.
That’s all.”
“Ah. Well, I’m not surprised. I suspected he was trying for her, and I
own I hated the idea. But now I suppose there’s no help for it--”
“No help?” She looked up in dismay.
“Well--is there? To be so savage with you she must be pretty well
determined to have him back. How the devil are you going to stop it?”
“I can’t. But _you_--oh, Fred, you must!”--Her eyes clung imploringly
to his troubled face.
“But I don’t know anything definite! If there _is_ anything--anything
one can really take hold of--you’ll have to tell me. I’ll do all I can;
but if I interfere without good reason, I know it will only make Anne
more determined. Have you forgotten what the Clephanes are like?”
She had lowered her head again, and sat desolately staring at the
floor. With the little wood-fire playing on the hearth, and this honest
kindly man looking down at her, how safe and homelike the room seemed!
Yet her real self was not in it at all, but blown about on a lonely
wind of anguish, outside in the night. And so it would always be, she
supposed.
“Won’t you tell me exactly what there is against him?” she heard
Landers repeat.
The answer choked in her throat. Finally she brought out: “Oh, I don’t
know ... women ... the usual thing.... He’s light....”
“But is it all just hearsay? Or have you proof--proof of any one
particular rotten thing?”
“Isn’t his giving up and going away sufficient proof?”
“Not if he comes back now when she sends for him.”
The words shot through her like a stab. “Oh, but she mustn’t--she
can’t!”
“You’re fairly sure he will come if she does?”
Kate Clephane put up her hands and pressed them against her ears. She
could not bear to hear another question. What had been the use of
coming to Fred Landers? He had no help to give her, and his insight had
only served to crystallize her hazy terrors. She rose slowly from her
armchair and held out her hand with a struggling smile.
“You’re right. I suppose there’s nothing more to do.”
“But you’re not going?”
“Yes; I’m tired. And I want to be by myself--to think. I must decide
about my own future.”
“Your own future? Oh, nonsense! Let all this blow over. Wait till Anne
comes back. The chief thing, of course, is that you should stay with
her, whatever happens.”
She put her hand in his. “Goodbye, Fred. And thank you.”
“I’ll do all I can, you know,” he said, as he followed her down the
stairs. “But you mustn’t desert Anne.”
The taxi he had called carried her back to her desolate house.
XVIII.
Her place was beside Anne--that was all she had got out of Fred
Landers. And in that respect she was by no means convinced that her
instinct was not surer than his, that she was not right in agreeing
with her daughter that their experiment had been a failure.
Yet, even if it had, she could not leave Anne now; not till she had
made sure there was no further danger from Chris. Ah--if she were once
certain of that, it would perhaps be easiest and simplest to go! But
not till then.
She did not know when Anne was coming back; no word had come from her.
Mrs. Clephane had an idea that the house-keeper knew; but she could not
ask the house-keeper. So for another twenty-four hours she remained
on, with a curious sense of ghostly unconcern, while she watched Aline
unpack her trunks and “settle” her into her rooms for the winter.
It was on the third day that Nollie Tresselton telephoned. She was in
town, and asked if she might see Mrs. Clephane at once. The very sound
of her voice brought reassurance; and Kate Clephane sat counting the
minutes till she appeared.
She had come up from the Drovers’, as Kate had guessed; and she brought
an embarrassed message of apology from Anne. “She couldn’t write--she’s
too upset. But she’s so sorry for what she said ... for the way she
said it. You must try to forgive her....”
“Oh, forgive her--that’s nothing!” the mother cried, her eyes searching
the other’s face. But Nollie’s vivid features were obscured by the
embarrassment of the message she had brought. She looked as if she were
tangled in Anne’s confusion.
“That’s nothing,” Kate Clephane repeated. “I hurt her horribly too--I
had to. I couldn’t expect her to understand.”
Mrs. Tresselton looked relieved. “Ah, you do see that? I knew you
would! I told her so--” She hesitated, and then went on, with a slight
tremor in her voice: “Your taking it in that way will make it all so
much easier--”
But she stopped again, and Kate, with a sinking heart, stood up.
“Nollie; she wants me to go?”
“No, no! How could you imagine it? She wants you to look upon this
house as yours; she has always wanted it.”
“But she’s not coming back to it?”
The younger woman laid a pleading hand on Mrs. Clephane’s arm. “Aunt
Kate--you must be patient. She feels she can’t; not now, at any rate.”
“Not now? Then it’s _she_ who hasn’t forgiven?”
“She would, you know--oh, so gladly!--she’d never think again of what’s
happened. Only she fears--”
“Fears?”
“Well--that your feeling about Chris is still the same....”
Mrs. Clephane caught at the hand that lay on her arm. “Nollie! She
knows where he is? She’s seen him?”
“No; but she means to. He’s been very ill--he’s had a bad time
since the engagement was broken. And that makes her feel still more
strongly--” The younger woman broke off and looked at Mrs. Clephane
compassionately, as if trying to make her understand the hopelessness
of the struggle. “Aunt Kate, really ... what’s the use?”
“The use? Where is he, Nollie? Here--now--in New York?”
Mrs. Tresselton was silent; the pity in her gaze had turned to a
guarded coolness. Of course Nollie couldn’t understand--never would!
Of course they were all on Anne’s side. Kate Clephane stood looking
helplessly about her. The memory of old scenes under that same
roof--threats, discussions, dissimulations and inward revolts--arose
within her, and she felt on her shoulders the whole oppression of the
past.
“Don’t think,” Nollie continued, her expression softening, “that
Anne hasn’t tried to understand ... to make allowances. The boy you
knew must have been so different from the Major Fenno we all like and
respect--yes, respect. He’s ‘made good’, you see. It’s not only his
war record, but everything since. He’s worked so hard--done so well at
his various jobs--and Anne’s sure that if he had the chance he would
make himself a name in the literary world. All that naturally makes it
more difficult for her to understand your objection--or your way of
asserting it.”
Mrs. Clephane lifted imploring eyes to her face. “I don’t expect Anne
to understand; not yet. But you must try to, Nollie; you must help me.”
“I want to, Aunt Kate.” The young woman stood before her,
affectionately perplexed. “If there’s anything ... anything really
wrong ... you ought to tell me.”
“I _do_ tell you,” Kate panted.
“Well--what is it?”
Silence fell--always the same silence. Kate glanced desperately about
the imprisoning room. Every panel and moulding of its walls, every
uncompromising angle or portly curve of its decorous furniture, seemed
equally leagued against her, forbidding her, defying her, to speak.
“Ask Fred Landers,” she said, at bay.
“But I have; I saw him on my way here. And he says he doesn’t
know--that you wouldn’t explain.”
“Why should I have to explain? I’ve said Major Fenno ought not to marry
Anne. I’ve known him longer than any of you. Isn’t it likely that I
know him better?”
The words came from her precipitate and shrill; she felt she was losing
all control of her face and voice, and lifted her handkerchief to her
lips to hide their twitching.
“Aunt Kate--!” Nollie Tresselton gasped it out on a new note of terror;
then she too fell silent, slowly turning her eyes away.
In that instant Kate Clephane saw that she had guessed, or if not,
was at least on the point of guessing; and fresh alarm possessed the
mother. She tried to steady herself, to raise new defences against
this new danger. “Some men are not meant to marry: they’re sure to
make their wives unhappy. Isn’t that reason enough? It’s a question
of character. In those ways, I don’t believe character ever changes.
That’s all.”
“That’s all.” The word was said. She had been challenged again, and had
again shrunk away from the challenge.
Nollie Tresselton drew a deep breath of relief. “After knowing him so
well as a boy, you naturally don’t want to say anything more; but you
think they’re unsuited to each other.”
“Yes--that’s it. You do see?”
The younger woman considered; then she took Mrs. Clephane by the hand.
“I do see. And I’ll try to help--to persuade Anne to put off deciding.
Perhaps after she’s seen him it will be easier....”
Nollie was again silent, and Mrs. Clephane understood that, whatever
happened, the secret of Chris’s exact whereabouts was to be kept from
her. She thought: “Anne’s afraid to have me meet him again,” and there
was a sort of fierce satisfaction in the thought.
Nollie was gathering up her wrap and hand-bag. She had to get back to
Long Island, she said; Kate understood that she meant to return to
the Drovers’. As she reached the door a last impulse of avowal seized
the older woman. What if, by giving Nollie a hint of the truth, she
could make sure of her support and thus secure Anne’s safety? But what
argument against the marriage would be more efficacious on Nollie’s
lips than on her own? One only--the one that no one must ever use.
The terror lest Nollie, possessed of that truth, and sickened by it,
should after all reveal it in a final effort to prevent the marriage,
prevailed over Mrs. Clephane’s other fears. Once Nollie knew, Anne
would surely get to know; the horror of that possibility sealed the
mother’s lips.
Nollie, from the threshold, still looked at her wistfully, expectantly,
as if half-awaiting the confession; but Mrs. Clephane held out her
hand without a word.
* * * * *
“I must find out where he is.” It was Kate’s first thought after
the door had closed on her visitor. If he were in New York--and he
evidently was--she, Kate Clephane, must run him down, must get speech
with him, before he had been able to see her daughter.
But how was she to set about it? Fred Landers did not even know if he
were still with Horace Maclew or not--for the mere fact of Maclew’s
not alluding to him while they were together meant nothing, less than
nothing. And even if he had left the Maclews, the chances were that
Lilla knew where he was, and had already transmitted Anne’s summons.
Mrs. Clephane consulted the telephone book, but of course in vain.
Then, after some hesitation, she rang up Horace Maclew’s house in
Baltimore. No one was there, but she finally elicited from the servant
who answered the telephone that Mrs. Maclew was away on a motor trip.
Perhaps Mr. Maclew could be reached at his country-place.... Kate tried
the country-place, but Mr. Maclew had gone to Chicago.
The sense of loneliness and helplessness closed in on her more
impenetrably than ever. Night came, and Aline reminded her that she had
asked to have her dinner brought up on a tray. Solitary meals in John
Clephane’s dining-room were impossible to her.
“I don’t want any dinner.”
Aline’s look seemed to say that she knew why, and her mistress hastily
emended: “Or just some bouillon and toast. Whatever’s ready--”
She sat down to it without changing her dress. Every gesture, every
act, denoting intimacy with that house, or the air of permanence in
her relation to it, would also have been impossible. Again she had the
feeling of sitting in a railway station, waiting for a train to come
in. But now she knew for what she was waiting.
At the close of her brief meal Aline entered briskly with fruit and
coffee. Her harsh face illuminated with curiosity, she handed her
mistress a card. “The gentleman is downstairs. He hopes Madame will
excuse the hour.” Her tone seemed to imply: “Madame, in this case, will
excuse _everything_!” and Kate cast a startled glance at the name.
He had come to her, then--had come of his own accord! She felt dizzy
with relief and fear. Fear uppermost--yes; was she not always afraid of
him?
XIX.
Chris Fenno stood in the drawing-room. The servant who received him had
turned on a blast of lamps and wall-lights, and in the hard overhead
glare he looked drawn and worn, like a man recovering from severe
illness. His clothes, too, Kate fancied, were shabbier; everything in
his appearance showed a decline, a defeat.
She had not much believed in his illness when Nollie spoke of it; the
old habit of incredulity was too strong in her. But now his appearance
moved her. She felt herself responsible, almost guilty. But for her
folly, she thought, he might have been standing before her with a high
head, on easy terms with the world.
“You’ve been ill!” she exclaimed.
His gesture brushed that aside. “I’m well now, thanks.” He looked her
in the face and added: “May we have a few minutes’ talk?”
She faltered: “If you think it necessary.” Inwardly she had already
begun to tremble. When his blue eyes turned to that harsh slate-gray,
and the two perpendicular lines deepened between his brows, she had
always trembled.
“You’ve made it necessary,” he retorted, his voice as harsh as his eyes.
“I?”
“You’ve broken our compact. It’s not my doing. I stuck to my side of
it.” He flung out the short sentences like blows.
Her heart was beating so wildly that she could not follow what he said.
“What do you mean?” she stammered.
“That you agreed to help me if I gave up Anne. God knows what your idea
of helping me was. To me it meant only one thing: your keeping quiet,
keeping out of the whole business, and trusting me to carry out my side
of the bargain--as I did. I broke our engagement, chucked my job, went
away. And you? Instead of keeping out of it, of saying nothing, you’ve
talked against me, insinuated God knows what, and then refused to
explain your insinuations. You’ve put me in such a position that I’ve
got to take back my word to you, or appear to your daughter and your
family as a man who has run away because he knew he couldn’t face the
charge hanging over him.”
It was only in the white-heat of anger that he spoke with such
violence, and at such length; he seemed spent, and desperately at bay,
and the thought gave Kate Clephane courage.
“Well--_can_ you face it?” she asked.
His expression changed, as she had so often seen it change. From
menace it passed to petulance and then became almost pleading in its
perplexity. She said to herself: “It’s the first time I’ve ever been
brave with him, and he doesn’t know how to take it.” But even then she
felt the precariousness of the advantage. His ready wit had so often
served him instead of resolution. It served him now.
“You do mean to make the charge, then?” he retorted.
She stood silent, feeling herself defeated, and at the same time
humiliated that their angry thoughts should have dragged them down to
such a level.
“Don’t sneer--” she faltered.
“Sneer? At what? I’m in dead earnest--can’t you see it? You’ve ruined
me--or very nearly. I’m not speaking now of my feelings; that would
make _you_ sneer, probably. At any rate, this is no time for discussing
them. I’m merely putting my case as a poor devil who has to earn his
living, a man who has his good name to defend. On both counts you’ve
done me all the harm you could.”
“I had to stop this marriage.”
“Very well. I agreed to that. I did what I’d promised. Couldn’t you let
it alone?”
“No. Because Anne wouldn’t. She wanted to ask you to come back. She
saw I couldn’t bear it--she suspected me of knowing something. She
insisted.”
“And you sacrificed my good name rather--”
“Oh, I’d sacrifice anything. You’d better understand that.”
“I do understand it. That’s why I’m here. To tell you I consider that
what you’ve done has freed me from my promise.”
She stretched out her hands as if to catch him back. “Chris--no, stay!
You can’t! You can’t! You know you can’t!”
He stood leaning against the chimney-piece, his arms crossed, his head
a little bent and thrust forward, in the attitude of sullen obstinacy
that she knew so well. And all at once in her own cry she heard the
echo of other cries, other entreaties. She saw herself in another
scene, stretching her arms to him in the same desperate entreaty, with
the same sense of her inability to move him, even to reach him. Her
tears overflowed and ran down.
“You don’t mean you’ll tell her?” she whispered.
He kept his dogged attitude. “I’ve got to clear myself--somehow.”
“Oh, don’t tell her, don’t tell her! Chris, don’t tell her!”
As the cry died on her lips she understood that, in uttering it, she
had at last cast herself completely on his mercy. For it was not
impossible that, if other means failed, he would risk justifying
himself to Anne by revealing the truth. There were times when he
was reckless enough to risk anything. And if Kate were right in her
conjecture--if he had the audacity he affected--then his hold over
her was complete, and he knew it. If any one else told Anne, the
girl’s horror would turn her from him at once. But what if he himself
told her? All this flashed on Kate Clephane in the same glare of
enlightenment.
There was a long silence. She had sunk into a chair and hidden her face
in her hands. Presently, through the enveloping cloud of her misery,
she felt his nearness, and a touch on her shoulder.
“Kate--won’t you try to understand; to listen quietly?”
She lifted her eyes and met his fugitively. They had lost their
harshness, and were almost frightened. “I was angry when I came here--a
man would be,” he continued. “But what’s to be gained by our talking
to each other in this way? You were awfully kind to me in old times; I
haven’t forgotten. But is that a reason for being so hard on me now? I
didn’t bring this situation on myself--you’re my witness that I didn’t.
But here it is; it’s a fact; we’ve got to face it.”
She lowered her eyes and voice to whisper painfully: “To face Anne’s
love for you?”
“Yes.”
“Her determination--?”
“Her absolute determination.”
His words made her tremble again; there had always been moments when
his reasonableness alarmed her more than his anger, because she knew
that, to be so gentle, he must be certain of eventually gaining his
point. But she gathered resolution to say: “And if I take back my
threats, as you call them? If I take back all I’ve said--‘clear’ you
entirely? That’s what you want, I understand? If I promise that,” she
panted, “will you promise too--promise me to find a way out?”
His hand fell from her shoulder, and he drew back a step. “A way
out--now? But there isn’t any.”
Mrs. Clephane stood up. She remembered wondering long ago--one day when
he had been very tender--how cruel Chris could be. The conjecture,
then, had seemed whimsical, almost morbid; now she understood that she
had guessed in him from the outset this genius for reaching, at the
first thrust, to the central point of his antagonist’s misery.
“You’ve seen my daughter, then?”
“I’ve seen her--yes. This morning. It was she who sent me here.”
“If she’s made up her mind, why did she send you?”
“To tell you how she’s suffering. She thinks, you know--” He wavered
again for a second or two, and then brought out: “She’s very unhappy
about the stand you take. She thinks you ought to say something to ...
to clear up....”
“What difference will it make, if she means to marry you?”
“Why--the immense difference of her feeling for _you_. She’s dreadfully
hurt ... she’s very miserable....”
“But absolutely determined?”
Again he made an embarrassed gesture of acquiescence.
Kate Clephane stood looking about the rich glaring room. She felt like
a dizzy moth battering itself to death against that implacable blaze.
She closed her lids for an instant.
“I shall tell her, then; I shall tell her the truth,” she said suddenly.
He stood in the doorway, his hard gaze upon her. “Well, tell her--do
tell her; if you want never to see her again,” he said.
XX.
He must have been very sure of her not acting on his final challenge,
or he would not have dared to make it. That was the continuous refrain
of Kate Clephane’s thoughts as the train carried her down to Long
Island the next morning.
“He’s convinced I shall never tell her; but what if I do?” The thought
sustained her through the long sleepless night, and gave her the
strength and clearness of mind to decide that she must at once see
Anne, however little her daughter might desire the meeting. After all,
she still had that weapon in her depleted armoury: she could reveal the
truth.
At the station she found one of the Drover motors, and remembered
with a start that it was a Saturday, and that she would probably come
upon a large house-party at her sister-in-law’s. But to her relief
she learned that the motor had only brought a departing visitor to
the up-train. She asked to be driven back in it, and in a few moments
was rolling between the wrought-iron gates and down the long drive to
the house. The front door stood open, and she went into the hall. The
long oak tables were so laden with golf-sticks, tennis racquets and
homespun garments that she saw she had been right in guessing she would
encounter a houseful. But it was too late to turn back; and besides,
what did the other people matter? They might, if they were numerous
enough, make it easier for her to isolate herself with Anne.
The hall seemed empty; but as she advanced she saw a woman’s figure
lazily outstretched in a deep armchair before the fire. Lilla Maclew
rose from the chair to greet her.
“Hallo--Aunt Kate?” Mrs. Clephane caught the embarrassment in her
niece’s rich careless voice, and guessed that the family had already
been made aware of the situation existing between Anne and Anne’s
mother, and probably, therefore, of the girl’s engagement. But Lilla
Maclew was even more easy, self-confident and indifferent than Lilla
Gates had been. The bolder dash of peroxyde on her hair, and the glint
of jewels on her dusky skin, made her look like a tall bronze statue
with traces of gilding on it.
“Hallo,” she repeated, rather blankly; “have you come to lunch?”
“I’ve come to see Anne,” Anne’s mother answered.
Lilla’s constraint visibly increased, and with it her sullen reluctance
to make any unnecessary effort. One hadn’t married money, her tone
proclaimed, to be loaded up like this with family bothers.
“Anne’s out. She’s gone off with Nollie to a tennis match or something.
I’m just down; we played bridge till nearly daylight, and I haven’t
seen anybody this morning. I suppose mother must be somewhere about.”
She glanced irritably around her, as if her look ought to have been
potent enough to summon her mother to the spot; and apparently it was,
for a door opened, and Mrs. Drover appeared.
“Kate! I didn’t know you were here! How did you come?” Her hostess’s
mild countenance betrayed the same embarrassment as Lilla’s, and under
it Mrs. Clephane detected the same aggrieved surprise. Having at last
settled her own daughter’s difficulties, Mrs. Drover’s eyes seemed to
ask, why should she so soon be called upon to deal with another family
disturbance? Even juries, after a protracted trial, are excused from
service for seven years; yet here she was being drawn into the thick of
a new quarrel when the old one was barely composed.
“Anne’s out,” she added, offering a cool pink cheek to her
sister-in-law.
“May I wait, then? I came to see her,” Kate said timidly.
“Of course, my dear! You must stay to lunch.” Mrs. Drover’s naturally
ceremonious manner became stiff with apprehension. “You look tired,
you know; this continuous travelling must be very exhausting. And the
food!... Yes; Anne ought to be back for lunch. She and Nollie went
off to the Glenvers’ to see the tennis finals; didn’t they, Lilla? Of
course I can’t _promise_ they’ll be back ... but you must stay....”
She rang and gave orders that another seat should be put at table.
“We’re rather a large party; you won’t mind? The men are off at a polo
practice at Hempstead. Dawson, how many shall we be for lunch?” she
asked the butler. Under her breath she added: “Yes; champagne.” If we
ever need it, she concluded in a parenthetic glance, it will be today!
The hall was already filling up with a jocund bustle of Drovers
and Tresseltons. Young, middle-aged and elderly, they poured out
of successive motors, all ruddy, prosperous, clamouring for food.
Hardly distinguishable from the family were the week-end friends
returning with them from one sportive spectacle or another. As Kate
Clephane stood among them, going through the mechanical gestures of
greeting and small-talk, she felt so tenuous and spectral that she
almost wondered how she could be visible to their hearty senses. They
were all glad to see her, all a little surprised at her being there,
and all soon forgetful of their own surprise in discussing the more
important questions of polo, tennis and lunch. Once more she had the
impression of being hurried with them down a huge sliding stairway
that perpetually revolved upon itself, and once more she recalled her
difficulty in telling one of them from another, and in deciding whether
it was the Tresseltons or the Drovers who had the smallest noses.
“But Anne--where’s Anne?” Hendrik Drover enquired, steering the tide of
arrivals toward the shining stretch of a long luncheon-table. He put
Mrs. Clephane at his left, and added, as he settled her in her seat:
“Anne and Nollie went off early to the Glenver finals. But Joe was
there too--weren’t you, Joe?”
He did not wait for Joe Tresselton’s answer, but addressed himself
hurriedly to the lady on his right. Kate had the feeling that they all
thought she had committed an error of taste in appearing among them at
that particular moment, but that it was no business of theirs, after
all, and they must act in concert in affecting that nothing could be
more natural. The Drovers and Tresseltons were great at acting in
concert, and at pretending that whatever happened was natural, usual,
and not of a character to interfere with one’s lunch. When a member
of the tribe was ill, the best doctors and most expensive nurses were
summoned, but the illness was spoken of as a trifling indisposition;
when misfortune befell any one of them, it was not spoken of at all.
Taking Lilla for granted had brought this art to the highest point of
perfection, and her capture of Horace Maclew had fully confirmed its
usefulness.
All this flashed through Kate Clephane while she refused the champagne
ordered on her behalf, and pretended to eat Maryland chicken and corn
_soufflé_; but under the surface-rattle of her thoughts a watchful
spirit brooded haggardly on the strangeness and unreality of the scene.
She had come, in agony of soul, to seek her daughter, to have speech
with her at all costs; and the daughter was away watching a tennis
match, and no one seemed surprised or concerned. Life, even Anne’s
life, was going on in its usual easy way. The girl had found her
betrothed again, and been reunited to him; what would it matter to her,
or to her approving family, if the intruder who for a few months had
gone through the pretence of being one of them, and whose delusion they
had good-naturedly abetted, should vanish again from the group? As she
looked at them all, so obtuse and so powerful, so sure of themselves
and each other, her own claim to belong to them became incredible even
to herself. She had made her choice long ago, and she had not chosen
them; and now their friendly indifference made the fact clear.
Well--perhaps it also made her own course clearer. She was as much
divided from them already as death could divide her. Why not die,
then--die altogether? She would tell Anne the truth, and then go away
and never see her again; and that would be death....
“Ah, here they are!” Hendrik Drover called out genially. Lunch was
over; the guests, scattered about in the hall and billiard-room, were
lighting their cigarettes over coffee and liqueurs. Mrs. Clephane,
who had drifted out with the rest, and mechanically taken her cup of
coffee as the tray passed her, lifted her head and saw Anne and Nollie
Tresselton. Anne entered first. She paused to take off her motor coat,
glanced indifferently about her, and said to Mrs. Drover: “You didn’t
wait for us, Aunt Enid? We were so late that we stopped to lunch at
Madge’s--.” Then she saw her mother and her pale cheek whitened.
Mrs. Clephane’s eyes filled, and she stood motionless. Everything
about her was so blurred and wavering that she dared not stir, or even
attempt to set down her cup.
“Mother!” the girl exclaimed. With a quick movement she made her way
through the cluster of welcoming people, and went up with outstretched
arms to Mrs. Clephane.
For a moment the two held each other; then Mrs. Drover, beaming up to
them, said benevolently: “Your mother must be awfully tired, Anne.
Do carry her off to your own quarters for a quiet talk--” and dazed,
trembling, half-fearing she was in a dream from which the waking would
be worse than death, Mrs. Clephane found herself mounting the stairs
with her daughter.
On the first landing she regained her senses, said to herself: “She
thinks I’ve come to take back what I said,” and tried to stiffen her
soul against this new form of anguish. Anne moved silently at her side.
After the first cry and the first kiss she had drawn back into herself,
perhaps obscurely conscious of some inward resistance in her mother.
But when the bedroom door had closed on them she drew Mrs. Clephane
down into an armchair, dropped on her knees beside it, and whispered:
“Mother--how could you and I ever give each other up?”
The words sounded like an echo of the dear unuttered things the mother
had heard said to herself long ago, in her endless dialogues with an
invisible Anne. No tears rose to her eyes, but their flood seemed to
fill her thirsty breast. She drew Anne’s head against it. “Anne ...
little Anne....” Her fingers crept through the warm crinklings of hair,
wound about the turn of the temples, and slipped down the cheeks. She
shut her eyes, softly saying over her daughter’s name.
Anne was the first to speak. “I’ve been so unhappy. I wanted you so to
come.”
“Darling, you were sure I would?”
“How could I tell? You seemed so angry.”
“With you? Never, child!”
There was a slight pause; then, raising herself, the girl slipped her
arms about her mother’s neck.
“Nor with him, any longer?”
The chill of reality smote through Mrs. Clephane’s happy trance. She
felt herself turning again into the desolate stranger who had stood
below watching for Anne’s return.
“Mother--you see, I want you both,” she heard the girl entreating; and
“_Now!_” the inward voice admonished her.
Now indeed was the time to speak; to make an end. It was clear that no
compromise would be of any use. Anne had obviously imagined that her
mother had come to forgive and be forgiven, and that Chris was to be
included in the general amnesty. On no other terms would any amnesty be
accepted. Through the girl’s endearments Kate felt, as never before,
the steely muscles of her resolution.
Anne pressed her closer. “Can’t we agree, mother, that I must take my
chance--and that, if the risks are as great as you think, you’ll be
there to help me? After all, we’ve all got to buy our own experience,
haven’t we? And perhaps the point of view about ... about early
mistakes ... is more indulgent now than in your time. But I don’t want
to discuss that,” the girl hurried on. “Can’t we agree not to discuss
anything--not even Chris--and just be the perfect friends we were
before? You’d say yes if you knew the difference it has made, this last
year, to have you back!” She lifted her face close to Mrs. Clephane’s
to add, with a half-whimsical smile: “Mothers oughtn’t ever to leave
their daughters.”
Kate Clephane sat motionless in that persuasive hold. It did not seem
to her, at the moment, as if she and her child were two, but as if her
whole self had passed into the young body pressed pleadingly against
her.
“How can I leave her--how can I ever leave her?” was her only thought.
“You see,” the cajoling voice went on, “when I asked you to come back
and live with me, though I _did_ want you to, most awfully, I wasn’t as
sure ... well, as sure as Uncle Fred was ... that the experiment would
be a success--a perfect success. My life had been rather lonely, but it
had been very independent too, in spite of Granny, and I didn’t know
how well I should behave to my new mother, or whether she’d like me, or
whether we’d be happy together. And then you came, and the very first
day I forgot all my doubts--didn’t _you_?”
Kate Clephane assented: “The very first day.”
“And every day afterward, as I saw how right Uncle Fred had been, and
how perfectly he’d remembered what you were, and what you would have
been to me if we hadn’t been separated when I was a baby, I was more
and more grateful to you for coming, and more and more anxious to make
you forget that we hadn’t always been together.”
“You did make me forget it--”
“And then, suddenly, the great gulf opened again, and there I was on
one side of it, and you on the other, just as it was in all those
dreary years when I was without you; and it seemed as if it was you who
had chosen again that we should be divided, and in my unhappiness I
said dreadful things.... I know I did....”
Kate felt as if it were her own sobs that were shaking her daughter’s
body. She held her fast, saying over and over, as a mother would to a
child that has fallen and hurt itself: “There, there ... don’t cry.”
She no longer knew what she herself was feeling. All her consciousness
had passed into Anne. This young anguish, which is the hardest of all
to bear, must be allayed: she was ready to utter any words that should
lift that broken head from her breast.
“My Anne--how could I ever leave you?” she whispered. And as she spoke
she felt herself instantly caught in the tight net of her renunciation.
If she did not tell Anne now she would never tell her--and it was
exactly on this that Chris had counted. He had known that she would
never speak.
XXI.
It had been decided that Mrs. Clephane must, of course, stay over the
Sunday; on Monday morning she would return to town with Anne. Meanwhile
Aline was summoned with week-end raiment; and Kate Clephane, after
watching the house-party drive off to a distant polo match, remained
alone in the great house with her sister-in-law.
Mrs. Drover’s countenance, though worn from the strain of incessant
hospitality, had lost its look of perturbation. It was clear that the
affectionate meeting between mother and daughter had been a relief to
the whole family, and Mrs. Drover’s ingenuous eye declared that since
now, thank heaven, that matter was settled, there need be no farther
pretence of mystery. She invited her sister-in-law to join her in her
own sitting-room over a quiet cup of tea, and as she poured it out
observed with a smile that she supposed the wedding would take place
before Christmas.
“The wedding? Anne’s wedding?”
“Why, my dear, isn’t everything settled? We all supposed that was what
you’d come down for. She told us of her engagement as soon as she
arrived.” Wrinkles of apprehension reluctantly reformed themselves on
Mrs. Drover’s brow. “At least you might have let me have my tea without
this new worry!” her look seemed to protest. “Hendrik has the highest
opinion of Major Fenno, you know,” she continued, in a tone that
amicably sought to dismiss the subject.
Kate Clephane put down her untasted cup. What could she answer? What
was the use of answering at all?
Misled by her silence, Mrs. Drover pursued with a clearing brow: “Of
course nowadays, with the cut of everything changing every six months,
there’s no use in ordering a huge trousseau. Besides, Anne tells me
they mean to go to Europe almost immediately; and whatever people say,
it _is_ more satisfactory to get the latest models on the spot....”
“Oh, Enid--Anne mustn’t marry him!” Kate Clephane cried, starting to
her feet.
Mrs. Drover set down her own cup. Lines of disapproval hardened about
her small concise mouth; but she had evidently resolved to restrain
herself to the last limit of sisterly forbearance.
“Now, my dear, do sit down again and drink your tea quietly. What good
will all this worrying do? You look feverish--and as thin as a rail.
Are you sure you haven’t picked up one of those dreadful tropical
microbes?... Of course, I understand your being unhappy at parting so
soon again with Anne.... She feels it too; I know she does. It’s a
pity you couldn’t have been together a little longer, just you two; but
then--. And, after all, since Anne wants you to keep the Fifth Avenue
house for yourself, why shouldn’t the young people buy that property
just round the corner? Then the lower floors of the two houses could
be thrown into one for entertaining. I’m not clever about plans, but
Lilla’ll tell you exactly how it could be done. She’s got hold of
such a clever young architect to modernize their Baltimore house. Of
course, though Horace didn’t realize it, it was _all_ library; no room
for dancing. And I daresay Anne--not that Anne ever cared much for
dancing.... But I hear Major Fenno likes going out, and a young wife
can’t make a greater mistake than to have a dull house if her husband
is fond of gaiety. Lilla, now, has quite converted Horace--”
Kate Clephane had reseated herself and was automatically turning the
spoon about in her cup. “It won’t happen; it can’t be; he’ll never
dare.” The thought, flashing in on her aching brain, suddenly quieted
her, helped her to compose her features, and even to interject the
occasional vague murmur which was all her sister-in-law needed to
feed her flow of talk. The mention of the Maclews and their clever
architect had served to deflect the current of Mrs. Drover’s thoughts,
and presently she was describing how wonderfully Lilla managed Horace,
and how she and the architect had got him to think he could not live
without the very alterations he had begun by resolutely opposing, on
the ground that they were both extravagant and unnecessary.
“Just an innocent little conspiracy, you know.... They completely got
the better of him, and now he’s delighted, and tells everybody it was
his own idea,” Mrs. Drover chuckled; and then, her voice softening, and
a plump hand reassuringly outstretched to Mrs. Clephane: “You’ll see,
my dear, after you get over the first loneliness, what a lovely thing
it is to have one’s child happily married.”
“It won’t happen; it can’t be; he’ll never dare!” the other mother
continued to murmur to herself.
* * * * *
Horace Maclew, among numerous other guests, arrived for dinner. He sat
nearly opposite Mrs. Clephane, and in the strange whirl and dazzle
that surrounded her she instinctively anchored her gaze on his broad
frame and ponderous countenance. What had his marriage done to him, she
wondered, and what weight had it given him in the counsels of his new
family? She had known of him but vaguely before, as the conscientious
millionaire who collects works of art and relieves suffering; she
imagined him as having been brought up by equally conscientious
parents, themselves wealthy and scrupulous, and sincerely anxious to
transmit their scruples, with their millions, to their only son. But
other influences and tendencies had also been in play; one could
fancy him rather heavily adjusting them to his inherited principles,
with the “After all” designed to cover venial lapses. His marriage
with Lilla must have been the outcome, the climax, of these private
concessions, and have prepared him to view most of the problems of life
from an easier angle. Undoubtedly, among the men present, though no
quicker-witted than the others, he would have been the one most likely
to understand Kate Clephane’s case, could she have put it to him. But
to do so--one had only to intercept their glances across the table to
be sure of it--would have been to take Lilla also into her confidence;
and it suddenly became clear to Mrs. Clephane that no recoil of horror,
and no Pharisaical disapproval, would be as intolerable to her as
Lilla’s careless stare and Lilla’s lazy: “Why, what on earth’s all the
fuss about? Don’t that sort of thing happen all the time?”
It did, no doubt; Mrs. Clephane had already tried to adjust her own
mind to that. She had known such cases; everybody had; she had seen
them smoothed over and lived down; but that she and Anne should ever
figure as one of them was beyond human imagining. She would have felt
herself befouled to the depths by Lilla’s tolerance.
Her unquiet eyes wandered from Horace Maclew to her daughter. Anne
shone with recovered joy. Her anxiety had left only the happy traces of
a summer shower on a drooping garden. Every now and then she smiled
across the table at her mother, and Kate felt herself irresistibly
smiling back. There was something so rich, dense and impregnable in the
fact of possessing Anne’s heart that the mother could not remember to
be alarmed when their eyes met.
Suddenly she noticed that Anne was absorbed in conversation with one
of her neighbours. This was the Reverend Dr. Arklow, Rector of St.
Stephen’s, the New York church of the Clephane and Drover clan. Old
Mrs. Clephane had been a pillar of St. Stephen’s, and had bequeathed
a handsome sum to the parish. Dr. Arklow, formerly the curate, had
come back a few years previously as Rector of the church, and was now
regarded as one of the foremost lights of the diocese, with a strong
possibility of being named its Coadjutor, or possibly Bishop of the
American Episcopal Churches in Europe.
The Drovers and all their tribe took their religion with moderation:
they subscribed handsomely to parochial charities, the older members
of the family still went to church on Sunday mornings, and once in
the winter each of the family invited the Rector to a big dinner. But
their relations with him, though amicable, were purely formal, and Kate
concluded that his presence at one of the Drover week-ends was to be
attributed to the prestige he had acquired as a certain Coadjutor or
possible Bishop. The Drover social scheme was like a game of chess in
which Bishops counted considerably more than Rectors.
The Rector of St. Stephen’s struck Mrs. Clephane, who had met him only
once before, as a man accustomed to good company, and eager to prove
it. He had a face as extensive as Mr. Maclew’s but running to length
instead of width. His thin gray hair was carefully brushed back from
a narrow benevolent forehead, and though he loved a good cigar, and
wore a pepper-and-salt suit on his travels, he knew his value as a
decorative element, and was fastidiously clerical on social occasions.
His manly chest seemed outspread to receive the pectoral cross, and all
his gestures were round and full, like the sleeves for which they were
preparing.
As he leaned back, listening to Anne with lowered lids, and finger-tips
thoughtfully laid against each other, his occasional faint smile
and murmur of assent suggested to Mrs. Clephane that the girl was
discussing with him the arrangements for the wedding; and the mother,
laying down her fork, closed her eyes for an instant while the big
resonant room reeled about her. Then she said to herself that, after
all, this was only what was to be expected, and that if she hadn’t
the courage to face such a possibility, and many others like it, she
would assuredly never have the courage to carry out the plan which,
all through the afternoon and evening, had been slowly forming in her
mind. That plan was simply, for the present, to hold fast to Anne,
and let things follow their course. She would return to New York the
next day with Anne, she would passively assist at her daughter’s
preparations--for an active share in them seemed beyond her powers--and
she would be there when Chris came, and when they announced the
engagement. Whatever happened, she would be there. She would let Chris
see at once that he would have to reckon with that. And how would he
be able to reckon with it? How could he stand it, day after day? They
would perhaps never exchange another word in private--she prayed they
might not--but he would understand by her mere presence what she meant,
what she was determined on. He would understand that in the end he
would have to give up Anne because she herself would never do so. The
struggle between them would become a definite, practical, circumscribed
thing; and, knowing Chris as she did, she felt almost sure she could
hold out longer than he.
This new resolve gave her a sort of light-headed self-confidence:
when she left the dinner-table she felt so easy and careless that she
was surprised to see that the glass of champagne beside her plate was
untouched. She felt as if all its sparkles were whirling through her.
On the return of the gentlemen to the drawing-room Dr. Arklow moved
to her side, and she welcomed him with a smile. He opened with some
mild generalities, and she said to herself that he was too anxiously
observant of the social rules to speak of her daughter’s marriage
before she herself alluded to it. For a few minutes she strove to find
a word which should provide him with an opening; but to say to any one:
“My daughter is going to be married” was beyond her, and they lingered
on among slumbrous platitudes.
Suddenly Anne drifted up, sat down an on arm of her mother’s chair,
and took her mother’s hand. Kate’s eyes filled, and through their
mist she fancied she saw Dr. Arklow looking at her attentively. For
the first time it occurred to her that, behind the scrupulous social
puppet, there might be a simple-hearted man, familiar with the humble
realities of pain and perplexity, and experienced in dealing with them.
The thought gave her a sense of relief, and she said to herself: “I
will try to speak to him alone. I will go to see him when we get to New
York.” But meanwhile she merely continued to smile up at her daughter,
and Dr. Arklow to say: “Our young lady has been telling me about the
big tennis finals. There’s no doubt all these sports are going to be a
great factor in building up a healthier, happier world.”
None of the three made any allusion to Anne’s engagement.
XXII.
“Miss Anne Clephane weds War Hero. Announces engagement to Major
Christopher Fenno, D.S.M., Chevalier of Legion of Honour.”
The headline glared at Kate Clephane from the first page of the paper
she had absently picked up from the table of her sitting-room. She and
Anne, that morning, had journeyed back from Long Island in Hendrik
Drover’s motor, separated by his genial bulk, and shielded by it from
the peril of private talk. On the day before--that aching endless
Sunday--Anne, when with her mother, had steadily avoided the point at
issue. She seemed too happy in their reunion to risk disturbing its
first hours; perhaps, Kate thought, she was counting on the spell of
that reunion to break down her mother’s opposition. But as they neared
New York every mile brought them closer to the reality they were trying
not to see; and here it was at last, deriding the mother from those
hideous headlines. She heard Anne’s step behind her, and their glance
crossed above the paragraph. A flush rose to the girl’s cheek, while
her eyes hesitatingly questioned her mother.
The decisive moment in their struggle was at hand. Kate felt that
everything depended on her holding fast to the line she had resolved to
follow, and her voice sounded thin and small in the effort to steady it.
“Is Major Fenno in New York?”
“No. He went back to Baltimore on Saturday.” Anne wavered. “He’s
waiting to hear from me ... before he comes.”
A hope leapt up in the mother’s breast, then sank its ineffectual
wings. She glanced back slowly at the newspaper.
“This announcement was made with your permission?”
The unwonted colour still burned in the girl’s cheek. She made a motion
of assent, and added, after another pause: “Uncle Hendrik and Aunt Enid
thought it only fair.”
“Fair to Major Fenno?”
“Yes.”
The silence prolonged itself. At length the mother brought out: “But if
you’ve announced your engagement he has a right to be with you.”
Anne looked at her almost timidly. “I wanted first ... we both wanted
... to feel that when he came you would ... would be ready to receive
him.”
Kate Clephane turned away from her daughter’s eyes. The look in
them was too intolerably sweet to her. Anne was imploring her
approval--Anne could not bear to be happy without it. Yes; but she
wanted her other happiness also; she wanted that more than anything
else; she would not hesitate to sacrifice her mother to it if there
were no other way.
All this rushed over Kate in a final flash of illumination. “I want you
both!” Anne had said; but she wanted Chris Fenno infinitely the more.
“Dear--.” At her mother’s first syllable Anne was at her side again,
beseechingly. Kate Clephane lifted her hands to the girl’s shoulders.
“You’ve made your choice, dearest. When Major Fenno comes of course
I will receive him.” Her lips felt dry and stiff as she uttered her
prevarication. But all her old arts of casuistry had come back; what
was the use of having practised them so long if they were not to serve
her now? She let herself yield to Anne’s embrace.
* * * * *
That afternoon, as Mrs. Clephane sat alone upstairs, Fred Landers
telephoned to ask if she would receive him. Anne was out, and her
mother sent word that when Mr. Landers came he was to be shown up to
her sitting-room. He entered it, presently, with outstretched hands and
a smile of satisfaction.
“Well, it’s all settled, then? Thank God! You’ve done just the right
thing; I knew you would.”
Her hand fell lifelessly into his; she could not answer.
He drew up an armchair to the little autumnal fire, and continued to
contemplate her approvingly.
“I know how hard it must have been. But there was only one thing to be
considered: Anne needs you!”
“She needs Major Fenno more.”
“Oh, well--that’s the law of life, isn’t it?” His tone seemed to say:
“At any rate, it’s the one you obeyed in your own youth.” And again she
found no answer.
She was conscious that the gaze he still fixed on her had passed from
benevolence to wistfulness. “Do you still mind it so awfully?”
His question made her tears rise; but she was determined not to return
upon the past. She had proved the uselessness of the attempt.
“Anne has announced her engagement. What more is there to say? You tell
me she needs me; well, here I am with her.”
“And you don’t know how she appreciates it. She rang me up as soon as
you got back this morning. She’s overcome by your generosity in going
down to the Drovers’ after what had taken place between you--after her
putting herself so completely in the wrong.” He paused again, as if
weighing his next words. “You know I’m not any keener than you are
about this marriage; but, my dear, I believe it had to be.”
“Had to be?”
His capacious forehead crimsoned with the effort to explain. “Well,
Anne’s a young woman of considerable violence of feeling ... of ...
of.... In short, there’s no knowing what she might have ended by doing
if we’d all backed you up in opposing her. And I confess I didn’t feel
sure enough of the young man to count on his not taking advantage of
her ... her impetuosity, as it were, if he thought there was no other
chance.... You understand?”
She understood. What he was trying to say was that, on the whole,
given the girl’s self-will, and taking into account her ... well, her
peculiar heredity ... taking into account, in fact, Kate Clephane
herself ... the family had probably adopted the safest course in
accepting the situation.
“Not that I mean to imply--of course not! Only the young people
nowadays settle most questions for themselves, don’t they? And in
this case ... Well, all’s well that ends well. We all know that some
of the most successful marriages have had ... er ... rather risky
preliminaries.”
Kate Clephane sat listening in a state of acquiescent lassitude. She
felt as if she had been given a drug which had left her intelligence
clear but paralyzed her will. What was the use of arguing, discussing,
opposing? Later, of course, if everything else failed, Fred Landers
was after all the person she would have to turn to, to whom her avowal
would have to be made; but for the moment he was of no more use to
her than any of the others. The game she had resolved to play must be
played between herself and Chris Fenno; everything else was the vainest
expenditure of breath.
“You _do_ agree, don’t you?” she heard Landers rather nervously
insisting; and: “Oh, I daresay you’re right,” she assented.
“And the great thing, you know, is that Anne shouldn’t lose you, or you
lose Anne, because of this. All the rest will arrange itself somehow.
Life generally does arrange things. And if it shouldn’t--”
He stood up rather awkwardly, and she was aware of his advancing toward
her. His face had grown long and solemn, and his broad bulk seemed
to have narrowed to the proportions of the lank youth suffused with
blushes who had taken shelter behind his mother when old Mrs. Landers
had offered a bridal banquet to the John Clephanes.
“If it doesn’t work out for you as we hope ... there’s my house ...
that’s been waiting for you for ever so long ... though I shouldn’t
ever have ventured to suggest it....”
“Oh--” she faltered out, the clutch of pain relaxing a little about her
heart.
“Well, well,” her visitor stammered, rubbing his hands together
deprecatingly, “I only suggest it as a sort of last expedient ... a
forlorn hope....” His nervous laugh tried to give the words a humorous
turn, but his eyes were still grave. Kate rose and put her hand in his.
“You’re awfully good to me,” was all she found to say. Inwardly she was
thinking, with a fresh thrill of anguish: “And now I shall never be
able to tell him--never!”
He had caught the note of dismissal in her voice, and was trying
to gather up the scattered fragments of his self-possession. “Of
course, at our age ... _my_ age, I mean ... all that kind of thing is
rather.... But there: I didn’t want you to feel there was no one you
could turn to. That’s all. You won’t bear me a grudge, though? Now
then; that’s all right. And you’ll see: this other business will shake
down in time. Bound to, you know. I daresay the young man has merits
that you and I don’t see. And you’ll let me go on dropping in as usual?
After all, I’m Anne’s guardian!” he ended with his clumsy laugh.
“I shall want you more than ever, Fred,” Mrs. Clephane said simply.
* * * * *
The next evening, as she looked down the long dinner-table from her
seat at its head, she was fantastically reminded of the first family
dinner over which she had presided after her marriage.
The background was the same; the faces were the same, or so like that
they seemed merely rejuvenated issues of the same coinage. Hendrik
Drover sat in his brother-in-law’s place; but even that change was
not marked enough to disturb the illusion. Hendrik Drover’s heavy
good-natured face belonged to the same type as John Clephane’s; one
saw that the two had gone to the same schools and the same University,
frequented the same clubs, fished the same salmon rivers; Hendrik
Drover might have been the ghost of John Clephane revisiting the scene
of his earthly trials in a mood softened by celestial influences. And
as for herself--Kate Clephane--if she had conformed to the plan of life
prepared for her, instead of turning from it and denying it, might she
not reasonably have hoped to reappear on the scene in the form of Enid
Drover?
These grotesque fancies had begun to weave their spirals through her
brain only after a first impact had emptied it of everything else,
swept it suddenly clear of all meaning and all reason. That moment had
come when Chris Fenno had entered in the wake of the other guests;
when she had heard his name announced like that of any other member of
the family; had seen him advance across the interminable length of the
room, all the lights in it converging upon him as she felt that all
the eyes in it converged on her; when she had seen Anne at his side,
felt her presence between them, heard the girl’s voice, imperious,
beseeching: “Mother--here’s Chris,” and felt her hand drop into that
other hand with the awful plunge that the heart makes when a sudden
shock flings it from its seat.
She had lived through all that; she and he had faced each other; had
exchanged greetings, she supposed; had even, perhaps, said something
to each other about Anne, and about their future relation. She did not
know what; she judged only, from the undisturbed faces about them,
that there had been nothing alarming, nothing to scandalize or grieve;
that it had all, to the tribal eye, passed off decently and what they
called “suitably”. Her past training had served her--his boundless
assurance had served him. It was what the French called “a moment to
pass”; they had passed it. And in that mad world beyond the abyss,
where she now found herself, here they all were with the old faces,
saying the same old things with the same old complacency, eating their
way through the same Clephane courses, expressing the same approval of
the Clephane cellar (“It was Hendrik, you know, who advised John to
lay down that ninety-five Clicquot,” she caught Enid Drover breathing
across the bubbles to her son-in-law). It was all, in short, as natural
and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she
had become young again, with all her desolate and unavoidable life
stretching away ahead of her to--this.
And, in the mad phantasmagoria, there was Chris himself, symbolizing
what she had flown to in her wild escape; representing, in some
horrible duality, at once her sin and its harvest, her flight and her
return. At the thought, her brain began to spin again, and she saw
her own youth embodied before her in Anne, with Anne’s uncompromising
scorns and scruples, Anne’s confident forward-looking gaze.
“Ah, well,” she heard Hendrik Drover say as they rose from the
table, “these occasions will come round from time to time in the
best-regulated families, and I suppose we all feel--” while, at the
other side of the table, Enid Drover, pink and melting from a last
libation, sighed to Horace Maclew: “I only wish dear mother and John
could have been here with us!” and Lilla, overhearing her, bracketed
the observation in an ironic laugh.
It had all gone off wonderfully; thanks to Anne’s tact the meeting
between her mother and her betrothed had been thickly swaddled in
layer on layer of non-conducting, non-explosive “family”. A sense of
mutual congratulation was in the air as the groups formed themselves
again in the drawing-room. The girl herself moved from one to another,
pale, vigilant, radiant; Chris Fenno, in a distant corner, was settled
with coffee-cup and cigarette at Lilla Maclew’s side; Mrs. Clephane
found herself barricaded behind Hendrik Drover and one of the older
Tresseltons. They were the very two men, she remembered, between whom
she had spent her evening after that first family dinner in which this
one was so hallucinatingly merged.
Not until the party was breaking up, and farewells filled the hall,
did she suddenly find herself--she knew not how--isolated in the inner
drawing-room with Chris Fenno. He stood there before her, and she
seemed to hear his voice for the first time.
“I want to thank you....” He appeared to feel it was a bad beginning,
and tried again. “Shan’t I have the chance, some day soon, of finding
you--for a word or two, quietly?” he asked.
She faced him, erect and unflinching; she dragged her eyes up to his.
“A chance? But as soon as you like--as many chances as you like! You’ll
always find me--I shall always be here. I’m never going to leave Anne,”
she announced.
It had been almost worth the agony she had bought it with to see the
look in his eyes when he heard that.
XXIII.
Extreme exhaustion--the sense of having reached the last limit of
endurable emotion--plunged Kate Clephane, that night, into a dreamless
sleep. It was months and months since she had reached those nethermost
levels below sound or image or any mental movement; and she rose from
them revived, renewed--and then suddenly understood that they had been
only a grief-drugged mockery.
The return to reality was as painful as that of a traveller who has
fallen asleep in the snow. One by one she had to readjust all her
frozen faculties to the unchanged and intolerable situation; and she
felt weaker, less able to contend with it. The thought that that very
day she might have to face Chris Fenno paralyzed her. He had asked to
see her alone--and she lay there, in the desolate dawn, rehearsing
to herself all the cruel things he would find to say; for his ways
of being cruel were innumerable. The day before she had felt almost
light-heartedly confident of being able to outface, to outlast him; of
her power of making the situation even more intolerable to him than
he could make it to her. Now, in the merciless morning light, she
had a new view of their respective situations. Who had suffered most
the previous evening, he or she? Whose wakening that morning was most
oppressed by fears? He had proposed to have a talk with her; he had had
the courage to do that; and she felt that by having that courage he had
already gained another point in their silent struggle.
Slowly the days dragged by; their hours were filled, for mother and
daughter, by the crowding obligations and preoccupations natural to
such times. Mrs. Clephane was helping her daughter with the wedding
preparations; a spectacle to charm and edify the rest of the family.
Chris Fenno, two or three days after the announcement of the
engagement, had returned to Baltimore, where he had accepted a
temporary job on a newspaper, and where he had that, and other matters,
to wind up before his marriage. During his stay in New York, Mrs.
Clephane had had but two or three brief glimpses of him, and always in
the presence of others. It was natural that he should wish to devote
the greater part of his time to his betrothed. He and Anne went off
in the early afternoon, and when they returned were, on each evening,
engaged to dine with some member of the family. It was easy for Mrs.
Clephane to excuse herself from these entertainments. The fact of her
having presided at the dinner at which the engagement was announced
had sealed it with her approval; and at the little dinners organized
by Nollie Tresselton and the other cousins her presence was hardly
expected, and readily dispensed with.
All this fitted in with the new times. The old days of introspections
and explanations were over; the era of taking things for granted was
the only one that Anne’s generation knew, and in that respect Anne was
of her day.
After the betrothal dinner she had said a tender goodnight to her
mother, and the next evening, as she rushed up to dress after her long
outing with Chris, had stopped at Kate’s door to wave a loving hand
and call out: “He says you’ve been so perfect to him--” That was all.
Kate Clephane’s own memories told her that to some natures happiness
comes like a huge landslide burying all the past and spreading a fresh
surface to life’s sowings: and it was from herself, she reflected, that
Anne had inherited her capacity for such all-obliterating bliss.
The days passed, and Chris Fenno at length came back. He was staying
with the Joe Tresseltons, and there was a constant coming and going of
the young people between the two houses. Opportunities were not lacking
to see Mrs. Clephane in private, and for the first days after his
return she waited in numb terror for the inevitable, the incalculable
moment. But it did not come; and gradually she understood that it never
would. His little speech had been a mere formula; he had nothing to
say to her; no desire was farther from him than the wish to speak
with her alone. What she had dreaded past expression, but supposed
to be inevitable, he had probably never even seriously considered.
Explanations? What was the use of explanations? He had gained his
point; the thing now was to live at peace with everybody.
She saw that all her calculations had been mistaken. She had fancied
that her tactics would render his situation intolerable; that if
only she could bear to spend a few weeks in his presence she would
demonstrate to him the impossibility of his spending the rest of his
life in hers. But his reasoning reached a good deal farther, and
embraced certain essential elements in human nature that hers had left
out. He had said to himself--she was sure of it now--: “The next few
weeks will be pretty bad, but after that I’ll have the upper hand.” He
had only to hold out till the wedding; after that she would be a mere
mother-in-law, and mothers-in-law are not a serious problem in modern
life. How could she ever have imagined that he would not see through
her game and out-manœuvre her, when he had done it so often before, and
when his whole future depended on his doing it just once more? She felt
herself beaten at every point.
Unless--unless she told the truth to Anne. Every day was making
that impossible thing more impossible; yet every day was bringing
them nearer to the day when not to do so--if all other measures
failed--would be most impossible of all. She seemed to have reached
that moment when, one morning, Anne came into her room and caught her
by the hand.
“Dearest--you’ve got to come with me this very minute.”
Kate, yielding to the girl’s hand, was drawn along the corridor to
her bedroom. There, on the bed, in a dazzle of whiteness, lay the
wedding-dress.
“Will you help me to try it on?” Anne asked.
* * * * *
Kate Clephane rang the Rectory bell and found herself in the Rectory
sitting-room. As she sat there, among photogravures of Botticelli
Virgins and etchings of English cathedrals, she could not immediately
remember why she had come, and looked with a kind of detached curiosity
at the volumes of memoirs and sermons on the table at her elbow, at the
perpendicular Gothic chairs against the wall, and the Morris armchairs
which had superseded them. She had not been in a rectory sitting-room
since the committee meeting at the Merrimans’, on the day when she had
received Anne’s cable.
Her lapse of memory lasted only for a few seconds, but during that time
she relived with intensity the sensations of that other day, she felt
her happy heart dancing against the message folded under her dress,
she saw the southern sun gilding the dull faces about the table, and
smelt the violets and mimosa in Mrs. Merriman’s vases. She woke again
to the present just as an austere parlour-maid was requesting her to
step this way.
Dr. Arklow’s study was full of books, of signed photographs of Church
dignitaries, of more English cathedrals, of worn leather armchairs
and scattered pipes and tobacco-pouches. The Rector himself, on the
hearth, loomed before her at once bland and formidable. He had guessed,
of course, that she had come to talk about the date and hour of the
wedding, and all the formulas incidental to such visits fell from his
large benevolent lips. The visit really passed off more easily than she
had expected, and she was on her feet again and feeling him behind her
like a gentle trade-wind accustomed to waft a succession of visitors to
the door, when she stopped abruptly and faced him.
“Dr. Arklow--”
He waited benevolently.
“There’s something else--a case I’ve always wanted to put to you....”
“Dear Mrs. Clephane--do put it now.” He was waving her back into her
armchair; but she stood before him, unconscious of the gesture.
“It’s about a friend of mine--”
“Yes: a friend? Do sit down.”
She sat down, still unaware of her movements or his.
“A most unhappy woman.... I told her I would ask ... ask what could be
done.... She had an idea that you could tell her....”
He bowed expectantly.
Her parched lips brought out: “Of course it’s confidential,” and his
gesture replied that communications, in that room, were always held to
be so. “Whatever I can do--” he added.
“Yes. My friend thought--her position is really desperate.” She
stopped, her voice failing her; then the words came forth in panting
jerks. “She was most unhappily married ... things went against
her--everything did. She tried ... tried her best.... Then she met him
... it was too difficult.... He was her lover; only for a short time.
After that her life was perfectly ... was all it should be. She never
saw him--oh, for years. Now her daughter wants to marry him....”
“Marry him? _The same man?_” The Rector’s voice swelled above her
like a wave; his presence towered, blurred and gigantic. She felt the
tears in her throat; but again she was seized by the besetting desire
that her secret should not be guessed, and a desperate effort at
self-control drove the tears back and cleared her voice.
Dr. Arklow still loomed and brooded. “And the man--”
A slow flush of agony rose to her forehead; but she remembered that she
was seated with her back to the light, and took courage. “He--he is
determined.” She paused, and then went on: “It’s too horrible. But at
first he didn’t know ... when he first met the girl. Neither of them
knew. And when he found out--”
“Yes?”
“Then--it was too late, he said. The girl doesn’t know even now; she
doesn’t dream; and she’s grown to care--care desperately.”
“That’s his defence?”
Her voice failed her again, and she signed her assent.
There was another long pause. She sat motionless, looking down at her
own interlocked hands. She felt that Dr. Arklow was uneasily pacing the
hearth-rug; at last she was aware that he was once more standing before
her.
“The lady you speak of--your friend--is she here?”
She started. “_Here?_”
“In New York, I mean?”
“No; no; she’s not here,” Kate cried precipitately. “That’s the reason
why I offered to come--”
“I see.” She thought she caught a faint note of relief in his voice.
“She wished you to consult me?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s done everything--everything, of course, to stop this
abomination?”
“Oh, everything ... everything.”
“Except to tell her daughter?”
She made another sign of assent.
Dr. Arklow cleared his throat, and declared with emphasis: “It is her
duty to tell her daughter.”
“Yes,” Kate Clephane faltered. She got to her feet and looked about her
blindly for the door.