II

Mrs. Bradley and her daughter-in-law sat together in the drawing-room.

They sat opposite each other on the two chintz chesterfields placed at

right angles to the pleasantly blazing fire, the chintz curtains drawn

against a rainy evening. It was a long, low room, with paneled walls;

and, like Mrs. Bradley's head, it had an air at once majestic,

decorated, and old-fashioned. It was a rather crowded room, with many

deep chairs and large couches, many tables with lamps and books and

photographs upon them, many porcelains, prints, and pots of growing

flowers. Mrs. Bradley, her tea-table before her, was in her evening

black silk; lace ruffles rose about her throat; she wore her accustomed

necklace of old enamel, blue, black, and white, set with small diamonds,

and the enamel locket which had within it Jack's face on one side and

his father's on the other; her white hands, moving gently among the

teacups, showed an ancient cluster of diamonds above the slender

wedding-ring.

From time to time she lifted her eyes and smiled quietly over at her

daughter-in-law. It was the first time that she had really seen Dollie,

that is, in any sense that meant contemplative observation. Dollie had

spent her first week at Dorrington in bed, sodden with fatigue rather

than ill. 'What you need' Mrs. Bradley had said, 'is to go to sleep for

a fortnight'; and Dollie had almost literally carried out the

prescription.

Stealing carefully into the darkened room, with its flowers and opened

windows and steadily glowing fire, Mrs. Bradley had stood and looked for

long moments at all that she could see of her daughter-in-law,--a

flushed, almost babyish face lying on the pillow between thick golden

braids, sleeping so deeply, so unconsciously,--her sleep making her

mother-in-law think of a little boat gliding slowly yet steadily on and

on, between new shores; so that, when she was to awake and look about

her, it would be as if, with no bewilderment or readjustment, she found

herself transformed, a denizen of an altered world. That was what Mrs.

Bradley wanted, that Dollie should become an inmate of Dorrington with

as little effort or consciousness for any of them as possible; and the

drowsy days and nights of infantine slumbers seemed indeed to have

brought her very near.

She and Pickering, the admirable woman who filled so skillfully the

combined positions of lady's maid and parlormaid in her little

establishment, had braided Dollie's thick tresses, one on either

side--Mrs. Bradley laughing a little and both older women touched,

almost happy in their sense of something so young and helpless to take

care of. Pickering understood, nearly as well as Jack's mother, that

Master Jack, as he had remained to her, had married very much beneath

him; but at this time of tragic issues and primitive values, she, nearly

as much as Jack's mother, felt only the claim, the pathos of youth and

helplessness. It was as if they had a singularly appealing case of a

refugee to take care of: social and even moral appraisals were

inapplicable to such a case, and Mrs. Bradley felt that she had never so

admired Pickering as when seeing that for her, too, they were in

abeyance. It was a comfort to feel so fond of Pickering at a time when

one was in need of any comfort one could get; and to feel that, creature

of codes and discriminations as she was, to a degree that had made her

mistress sometimes think of her as a sort of Samurai of service, a

function rather than a person, she was even more fundamentally a kind

and Christian woman. Between them, cook intelligently sustaining them

from below and the housemaids helpful in their degree, they fed and

tended and nursed Dollie, and by that eighth day she was more than ready

to get up and go down and investigate her new surroundings.

She sat there now, in the pretty tea-gown her mother-in-law had bought

for her, leaning back against her cushions, one arm lying along the back

of the couch and one foot in its patent-leather shoe, with its sparkling

buckle and alarming heel, thrusting forward a carefully arched instep.

The attitude made one realize, however completely tenderer

preoccupations held the foreground of one's consciousness, how often and

successfully she must have sat to theatrical photographers. Her way of

smiling, too, very softly, yet with the effect of a calculated and

dazzling display of pearly teeth, was impersonal, and directed, as it

were, to the public via the camera rather than to any individual

interlocutor. Mrs. Bradley even imagined, unversed as she was in the

methods of Dollie's world, that of allurement in its conscious and

determined sense, she was almost innocent. She placed herself, she

adjusted her arm and her foot, and she smiled gently; intention hardly

went further than that wish to look her best.

Pink and white and gold as she was, and draped there on the chesterfield

in a profusion of youth and a frivolity that was yet all passivity, she

made her mother-in-law think, and with a certain sinking of the heart,

of a Dorothy Perkins rose, a flower she had never cared for; and Dollie

carried on the analogy in the sense she gave that there were such

myriads more just like her. On almost every page of every illustrated

weekly paper, one saw the ingenuous, limpid eyes, the display of

eyelash, the lips, their outline emphasized by just that touch of rouge,

those copious waves of hair. Like the Dorothy Perkins roses on their

pergolas, so these pretty faces seemed--looped, draped, festooned--to

climb over all the available spaces of the modern press.

But this, Mrs. Bradley told herself, was to see Dollie with a dry, hard

eye, was to see her superficially, from the social rather than from the

human point of view. Under the photographic creature must lie the young,

young girl--so young, so harmless that it would be very possible to

mould her, with all discretion, all tenderness, into some suitability as

Jack's wife. Dollie, from the moment that she had found her, a sodden,

battered rose indeed, in the London lodging-house, had shown herself

grateful, even humble, and endlessly acquiescent. She had not shown

herself at all abashed or apologetic, and that had been a relief; had

counted for her, indeed, in her mother-in-law's eyes, as a sort of

innocence, a sort of dignity. But if Dollie were contented with her new

mother, and very grateful to her, she was also contented with herself;

Mrs. Bradley had been aware of this at once; and she knew now that, if

she were being carefully and commendingly watched while she poured out

the tea, this concentration did not imply unqualified approval. Dollie

was the type of young woman to whom she herself stood as the type of the

'perfect lady'; but with the appreciation went the proviso of the sharp

little London mind,--versed in the whole ritual of smartness as it

displayed itself at theatre or restaurant,--that she was a rather dowdy

one. She was a lady, perfect but not smart, while, at the same time, the

quality of her defect was, she imagined, a little bewildering and

therefore a little impressive. Actually to awe Dollie and to make her

shy, it would be necessary to be smart; but it was far more pleasant and

perhaps as efficacious merely to impress her, and it was as well that

Dollie should be impressed; for anything in the nature of an advantage

that she could recognize would make it easier to direct, protect, and

mould her.

She asked her a good many leisurely and unstressed questions on this

first evening, and drew Dollie to ask others in return; and she saw

herself stooping thoughtfully over a flourishing young plant which yet

needed transplanting, softly moving the soil about its roots, softly

finding out if there were any very deep tap-root that would have to be

dealt with. But Dollie, so far as tastes and ideas went, hardly seemed

to have any roots at all; so few that it was a question if any change of

soil could affect a creature so shallow. She smiled, she was at ease;

she showed her complete assurance that a young lady so lavishly endowed

with all the most significant gifts, need not occupy herself with

mental adornments.

'You're a great one for books, I see,' she commented, looking about the

room. 'I suppose you do a great deal of reading down here to keep from

feeling too dull'; and she added that she herself, if there was 'nothing

doing,' liked a good novel, especially if she had a box of sweets to eat

while she read it.

'You shall have a box of sweets to-morrow,' Mrs. Bradley told her, 'with

or without the novel, as you like.'

And Dollie thanked her, watching her cut the cake, and, as the rain

lashed against the windows, remarking on the bad weather and cheerfully

hoping that 'poor old Jack' wasn't in those horrid trenches. 'I think

war's a wicked thing, don't you, Mrs. Bradley?' she added.

When Dollie talked in this conventionally solicitous tone of Jack, her

mother-in-law could but wish her upstairs again, merely young, merely

the tired and battered refugee. She had not much tenderness for Jack,

that was evident, nor much imaginativeness in regard to the feelings of

Jack's mother. But she soon passed from the theme of Jack and his

danger. Her tea was finished and she got up and went to the piano,

remarking that there was one thing she could do. 'Poor mother used to

always say I was made of music. From the time I was a mere tot I could

pick out anything on the piano.' And placing herself, pressing down the

patent-leather shoe on the loud pedal, she surged into a waltz as

foolish and as conventionally alluring as her own eyes. Her inaccuracy

was equaled only by her facility. Smiling, swaying over the keys with

alternate speed and languor, she addressed her audience with altogether

the easy mastery of a music-hall artiste: 'It's a lovely thing--one of

my favorites. I'll often play, Mrs. Bradley, and cheer us up. There is

nothing like music for that, is there? it speaks so to the heart.' And,

whole-heartedly indeed, she accompanied the melody by a passionate

humming.

The piano was Jack's and it was poor Jack who was made of music. How was

he to bear it, his mother asked herself, as she sat listening. Dollie,

after that initiation, spent many hours at the piano every day--so many

and such noisy hours, that her mother-in-law, unnoticed, could shut

herself in the little morning-room that overlooked the brick wall at the

front of the house and had the morning sun.

It was difficult to devise other occupations for Dollie. She earnestly

disclaimed any wish to have proper music lessons; and when her

mother-in-law, patiently persistent, arranged for a skillful mistress to

come down twice a week from London, Dollie showed such apathy and

dullness that any hope of developing such musical ability as she

possessed had to be abandoned. She did not like walking, and the sober

pageant of the winter days was a blank book to her. Sewing, she said,

had always given her frightful fidgets; and it was with the strangest

sense of a privilege, a joy unhoped-for and now thrust upon her, that

Mrs. Bradley sat alone working at the little garments which meant all

her future and all Jack's. The baby seemed already more hers than

Dollie's.

Sometimes, on a warm afternoon, Dollie, wrapped in her fur cloak, would

emerge for a little while and watch her mother-in-law at work in her

borders. The sight amused and surprised, but hardly interested her, and

she soon went tottering back to the house on the preposterous heels

which Mrs. Bradley had, as yet, found no means of tactfully banishing.

And sometimes, when the piano again resounded, Mrs. Bradley would leave

her borders and retreat to the hazel copse, where, as she sat on the

stone bench, she could hear, through the soft sound of the running

water, hardly more than the distant beat and hum of Dollie's waltzes;

and where, with more and more the sense of escape and safety, she could

find a refuge from the sight and sound and scent of Dollie--the thick,

sweet, penetrating scent which was always to be indelibly associated in

her mother-in-law's mind with this winter of foreboding, of hope, and of

growing hopelessness.

In her letters to Jack, she found herself, involuntarily at first, and

then deliberately, altering, suppressing, even falsifying. While Dollie

had been in bed, when so much hope had been possible of a creature so

unrevealed, she had written very tenderly, and she continued, now, to

write tenderly, and it was not false to do that; she could feel no

hardness or antagonism against poor Dollie. But she continued to write

hopefully, as, every day, hope grew less.

Jack, himself, did not say much of Dollie, though there was always the

affectionate message and the affectionate inquiry. But what was

difficult to deal with were the hints of his anxiety and fear that stole

among the terse, cheerful descriptions of his precarious days. What was

she doing with herself? How were she and Dollie getting on? Did Dollie

care about any of the things she cared about?

She told him that they got on excellently well, that Dollie spent a good

deal of time at the piano, and that when they went out to tea people

were perfectly nice and understanding. She knew, indeed, that she could

depend on her friends to be that. They accepted Dollie on the terms she

asked for her. From friends so near as Mrs. Crawley and Lady Wrexham she

had not concealed the fact that Dollie was a misfortune; but if others

thought so, they were not to show it. She still hoped, by degrees, to

make Dollie a figure easier to deal with at such neighborly gatherings.

She had abandoned any hope that Dollie would grow: anything so feeble

and so foolish could not grow; there was no other girl under the little

dancer; she was simply no more and no less than she showed herself to

be; but, at this later stage of their relationship, Mrs. Bradley

essayed, now and then, a deliberate if kindly severity--as to heels, as

to scents, as to touches of rouge.

'Oh, but I'm as careful, just as careful, Mrs. Bradley!' Dollie

protested. 'I can't walk in lower heels. They hurt my instep. I've a

very high instep and it needs support.' She was genuinely amazed that

any one could dislike her scent and that any one could think the rouge

unbecoming. She seemed to acquiesce, but the acquiescence was followed

by moods of mournfulness and even by tears. There was no capacity in her

for temper or rebellion, and she was all unconscious of giving a warning

as she sobbed, 'It's nothing--really nothing, Mrs. Bradley. I'm sure you

mean to be kind. Only--it's rather quiet and lonely here. I've always

been used to so many people--to having everything so bright and jolly.'

She was not rapacious; she was not dissolute; she could be kept

respectable and even contented if she were not made too aware of the

contrast between her past existence and her present lot. With an air

only of pensive pride she would sometimes point out to Mrs. Bradley, in

the pages of those same illustrated weeklies with which her

mother-in-law associated her, the face of some former companion. One of

these young ladies had recently married the son of a peer. 'She _is_ in

luck, Floss,' said Dollie. 'We always thought it would come to that.

He's been gone on her for ages, but his people were horrid.'

Mrs. Bradley felt that, at all events, Dollie had no ground for thinking

her 'horrid'; yet she imagined that there lay drowsing at the back of

her mind a plaintive little sense of being caught and imprisoned. Floss

had stepped, triumphant, from the footlights to the registrar's office,

and apparently had succeeded in uniting the radiance of her past and

present status. No, Dollie could be kept respectable and contented only

if the pressure were of the lightest. She could not change, she could

only shift; and although Mrs. Bradley felt that for herself, her life

behind her, her story told, she could manage to put up with a merely

shifted Dollie, she could not see how Jack was to manage it. What was

Jack to do with her? was the thought that pressed with a growing weight

on her mother's heart. She could never be of Jack's life; yet here she

was, in it, planted there by his own generous yet inevitable act, and by

hers--in its very centre, and not to be evaded or forgotten.

And the contrast between what Jack's life might have been and what it

now must be was made more poignantly apparent to her when Frances Thorpe

came down to stay from a Saturday to Monday: Frances in her black, tired

and thin from Red-Cross work in London; bereaved in more, her old friend

knew, than dear Toppie's death; yet with her leisurely, unstressed

cheerfulness almost unaltered, the lightness that went with so much

tenderness, the drollery that went with so much depth. Dearest, most

charming of girls,--but for Jack's wretched stumble into 'fairyland'

last summer, destined obviously to be his wife,--could any presence have

shown more disastrously, in its contrast with poor Dollie, how Jack had

done for himself?

She watched the two together that evening--Frances with her thick,

crinkled hair and clearly curved brow and her merry, steady eyes,

leaning, elbow on knee, to talk and listen to Dollie; and Dollie, poor

Dollie, flushed, touched with an unbecoming sulkiness, aware, swiftly

and unerringly, of a rival type. Frances was of the type that young men

married when they did not 'do for themselves.' There was now no gulf of

age or habit to veil from Dollie her disadvantage. She answered shortly,

with now and then a dry, ironic little laugh; and, getting up at last,

she went to the piano and loudly played.

'He couldn't have done differently. It was the only thing he could do,'

Frances said that night before her bedroom fire. She did not hide her

recognition of Jack's plight, but she was staunch.

'I wouldn't have had him do differently. But it will ruin his life,'

said the mother. 'If he comes back, it will ruin his life.'

'No, no,' said Frances, looking at the flames. 'Why should it? A man

does n't depend on his marriage like that. He has his career.'

'Yes. He has his career. A career isn't a life.'

'Isn't it?' The girl gazed down. 'But it's what so many people have to

put up with. And so many haven't even a career.' Something came into

her voice and she turned from it quickly. 'He's crippled, in a sense, of

course. But you are here. He will have you to come back to always.'

'I shall soon be old, dear, and she will always be here. That's

inevitable. Some day I shall have to leave her to Jack to bear with

alone.'

'She may become more of a companion.'

'No; no, she won't.'

The bitterness of the mother's heart expressed itself in the dry, light

utterance. It was a comfort to express bitterness, for once, to

somebody.

'She is a harmless little thing,' Frances offered after a moment.

'Harmless?' Mrs. Bradley turned it over dryly and lightly.' I can't feel

her that. I feel her blameless if you like. And it will be easy to keep

her contented. That is really the best that one can say of poor Dollie.

And then, there will be the child. I am pinning all my hopes to the

child, Frances.'

Frances understood that.

Dollie, as the winter wore on, kept remarkably well. She had felt it the

proper thing to allude to Jack and his danger; and so, now, she more and

more frequently felt it the proper thing to allude, humorously, if with

a touch of melancholy, to 'baby.' Her main interest in baby, Mrs.

Bradley felt, was an alarmed one. She was a good deal frightened, poor

little soul, and in need of constant reassurances; and it was when one

need only pet and pity Dollie that she was easier to deal with. Mrs.

Bradley tried to interest her in plans for the baby; what it should be

named, and how its hair should be done if it were a little girl--for

only on this assumption could Dollie's interest be at all vividly

roused; and Mrs. Bradley hoped more than ever for a boy when she found

Dollie's idle yet stubborn thoughts fixed on the name of Gloria.

She was able to evade discussion of this point, and when the baby came,

fortunately and robustly, into the world on a fine March morning, she

could feel it as a minor but very real cause for thanksgiving that

Dollie need now never know what she thought of Gloria as a name. The

baby was a boy, and now that he was here, Dollie seemed as well pleased

that he should be a commonplace Jack, and that there should be no

question of tying his hair with cockades of ribbon over each ear.

Smiling and rosy and languid, she lay in her charming room, not at all

more maternal,--though she showed a bland satisfaction in her child and

noted that his eyes were just like Jack's,--yet subtly more wifely.

Baby, she no doubt felt, with the dim instinct that did duty for thought

with her, placed and rooted her and gave her final rights. She referred

now to Jack with the pensive but open affection of their shared

complacency, and made her mother-in-law think, as she lay there, of a

soft and sleepy and tenacious creeper, fixing tentacle after tentacle in

the walls of Jack's house of life.

If only one could feel that she had furnished it with a treasure.

Gravely, with a sad fondness, the grandmother studied the little face,

so unfamiliar, for signs of Jack. She was a helplessly clear-sighted

woman, and remembrance was poignantly vivid in her of Jack's face at a

week old. Already she loved the baby since its eyes, indubitably, were

his; but she could find no other trace of him. It was not a Bradley

baby; and in the dreamy, foreboding flickers of individuality that pass

uncannily across an infant's features, her melancholy and steady

discernment could see only the Byles ancestry.

She was to do all she could for the baby: to save him, so far as might

be, from his Byles ancestry, and to keep him, so far as might be, Jack's

and hers. That was to be her task. But with all the moulding that could,

mercifully, be applied from the very beginning, she could not bring

herself to believe that this was ever to be a very significant human

being.

She sent Jack his wire: 'A son. Dollie doing splendidly.' And she had

his answer: 'Best thanks. Love to Dollie.' It was curious, indeed, this

strange new fact they had now, always, to deal with; this light little

'Dollie' that must be passed between them. The baby might have made Jack

happy, but it had not solved the problem of his future.