The noise of wheels on the gravel driveway of the lawn brought the
reflections of Mrs. Meredith to an abrupt close. The sound was
extremely unpleasant to her; she did not feel in a mood to
entertain callers this morning. Rising with regret, she looked
out. The brougham of Mrs. Conyers, flashing in the sun, was being
driven toward the house--was being driven rapidly, as though speed
meant an urgency.
If Mrs. Meredith desired no visitor at all, she particularly
disliked the appearance of this one. Rowan's words to her were
full of meaning that she did not understand; but they rendered it
clear at least that his love affair had been interrupted, if not
been ended. She could not believe this due to any fault of his;
and friendly relations with the Conyers family was for her
instantly at an end with any wrong done to him.
She summoned a maid and instructed her regarding the room in which
the visitor was to be received (not in the parlors; they were too
full of solemn memories this morning). Then she passed down the
long hall to her bedchamber.
The intimacy between these ladies was susceptible of exact
analysis; every element comprising it could have been valued as
upon a quantitative scale. It did not involve any of those
incalculable forces which constitute friendship--a noble mystery
remaining forever beyond unravelling.
They found the first basis of their intimacy in a common wish for
the union of their offsprings. This subject had never been
mentioned between them. Mrs. Conyers would have discussed it had
she dared; but she knew at least the attitude of the other.
Furthermore, Mrs. Meredith brought to this association a beautiful
weakness: she was endowed with all but preternatural insight into
what is fine in human nature, but had slight power of discovering
what is base; she seemed endowed with far-sightedness in high,
clear, luminous atmospheres, but was short-sighted in moral
twilights. She was, therefore, no judge of the character of her
intimate. As for that lady's reputation, this was well known to
her; but she screened herself against this reputation behind what
she believed to be her own personal discovery of unsuspected
virtues in the misjudged. She probably experienced as much pride
in publicly declaring the misjudged a better woman than she was
reputed, as that lady would have felt in secretly declaring her to
be a worse one.
On the part of Mrs. Conyers, the motives which she brought to the
association presented nothing that must be captured and brought
down from the heights, she was usually to be explained by mining
rather than mounting. Whatever else she might not have been, she
was always ore; never rainbows.
Throughout bird and animal and insect life there runs what is
recognized as the law of protective assimilation. It represents
the necessity under which a creature lives to pretend to be
something else as a condition of continuing to be itself. The
rose-colored flamingo, curving its long neck in volutions that
suggest the petals of a corolla, burying its head under its wing
and lifting one leg out of sight, becomes a rank, marvellous
flower, blooming on too slight a stalk in its marshes. An insect
turns itself into one of the dried twigs of a dead stick. On the
margin of a shadowed pool the frog is hued like moss--greenness
beside greenness. Mrs. Conyers availed herself of a kind of
protective assimilation when she exposed herself to the environment
of Mrs. Meredith, adopting devices by which she would be taken for
any object in nature but herself. Two familiar devices were
applied to her habiliments and her conversations. Mrs. Meredith
always dressed well to the natural limit of her bountiful years;
Mrs. Conyers usually dressed more than well and more than a
generation behind hers. On occasions when she visited Rowan's
unconcealed mother, she allowed time to make regarding herself
almost an honest declaration. Ordinarily she Was a rose nearly
ready to drop, which is bound with a thread of its own color to
look as much as possible like a bud that is nearly ready to open.
Her conversations were even more assiduously tinged and fashioned
by the needs of accommodation. Sometimes she sat in Mrs.
Meredith's parlors as a soul sick of the world's vanities, an urban
spirit that hungered for country righteousness. During a walk one
day through the gardens she paused under the boughs of a weeping
willow and recited, "Cromwell, I charge thee fling away ambition--"
She uniformly imparted to Mrs. Meredith the assurance that with her
alone she could lay aside all disguises.
This morning she alighted from her carriage at the end of the
pavement behind some tall evergreens. As she walked toward the
house, though absorbed with a serious purpose, she continued to be
as observant of everything as usual. Had an eye been observant of
her, it would have been noticed that Mrs. Conyers in all her
self-concealment did not conceal one thing--her walk. This one
element of her conduct had its curious psychology. She had never
been able to forget that certain scandals set going many years
before, had altered the course of Mrs. Meredith's life and of the
lives of some others. After a lapse of so long a time she had no
fear now that she should be discovered. Nevertheless it was
impossible for her ever to approach this house without "coming
delicately." She "came delicately" in the same sense that Agag,
king of Amalek, walked when he was on his way to Saul, who was
about to hew him to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.
She approached the house now, observant of everything as she
tripped. Had a shutter been hung awry; if a window shade had been
drawn too low or a pane of glass had not sparkled, or there had
been loose paper on the ground or moulted feathers on the bricks,
she would have discovered this with the victorious satisfaction of
finding fault. But orderliness prevailed. No; the mat at the
front door had been displaced by Rowan's foot as he had hurried
from the house. (The impulse was irresistible: she adjusted it
with her toe and planted herself on it with a sense of triumph.)
As she took out her own and Isabel's cards, she turned and looked
out across the old estate. This was the home she had designed for
Isabel: the land, the house, the silver, the glass, the memories,
the distinction--they must all be Isabel's.
Some time passed before Mrs. Meredith appeared. Always a woman of
dignity and reserve, she had never before in her life perhaps worn
a demeanor so dignified and reserved. Her nature called for peace;
but if Rowan had been wronged, then there was no peace--and a
sacred war is a cruel one. The instant that the two ladies
confronted each other, each realized that each concealed something
from the other. This discovery instantly made Mrs. Meredith cooler
still; it rendered Mrs. Conyers more cordial.
"Isabel regretted that she could not come."
"I am sorry." The tone called for the dismissal of the subject.
"This is scarcely a visit to you," Mrs. Conyers went on; "I have
been paying one of my usual pastoral calls: I have been to Ambrose
Webb's to see if my cows are ready to return to town. Strawberries
are ripe and strawberries call for more cream, and more cream calls
for more calves, and more calves call for--well, we have all heard
them! I do not understand how a man who looks like Ambrose can so
stimulate cattle. Of course my cows are not as fine and fat as
Rowan's--that is not to be expected. The country is looking very
beautiful. I never come for a drive without regretting that I live
in town." (She would have found the country intolerable for the
same reason that causes criminals to flock to cities.)
Constraint deepened as the visit was prolonged. Mrs. Conyers
begged Mrs. Meredith for a recipe that she knew to be bad; and when
Mrs. Meredith had left the room for it, she rose and looked eagerly
out of the windows for any sign of Rowan. When Mrs. Meredith
returned, for the same reason she asked to be taken into the
garden, which was in its splendor of bloom. Mrs. Meredith culled
for her a few of the most resplendent blossoms--she could not have
offered to any one anything less. Mrs. Conyers was careful not to
pin any one of these on; she had discovered that she possessed a
peculiarity known to some florists and concealed by those women who
suffer from it--that flowers soon wilt when worn by them.
Meanwhile as they walked she talked of flowers, of housekeeping;
she discussed Marguerite's coming ball and Dent's brilliant
graduation. She enlarged upon this, praising Dent to the
disparagement of her own grandson Victor, now in retreat from
college on account of an injury received as centre-rush in his
football team. Victor, she protested, was above education; his
college was a kind of dormitory to athletics.
When we are most earnest ourselves, we are surest to feel the lack
of earnestness in others; sincerity stirred to the depths will
tolerate nothing less. It thus becomes a new test of a companion.
So a weak solution may not reveal a poison when a strong one will.
Mrs. Meredith felt this morning as never before the real nature of
the woman over whom for years she had tried to throw a concealing
charity; and Mrs. Conyers saw as never before in what an impossible
soil she had tried to plant poison oak and call it castle ivy.
The ladies parted with coldness. When she was once more seated in
her carriage, Mrs. Conyers thrust her head through the window and
told the coachman to drive slowly. She tossed the recipe into a
pine tree and took in her head. Then she caught hold of a brown
silk cord attached to a little brown silk curtain in the front of
the brougham opposite her face. It sprang aside, revealing a
little toilette mirror. On the cushion beside her lay something
under a spread newspaper. She quickly drew off her sombre visiting
gloves; and lifting the newspaper, revealed under it a fresh pair
of gloves, pearl-colored. She worked her tinted hands nimbly into
these. Then she took out a rose-colored scarf or shawl as light as
a summer cloud. This she threw round her shoulders; it added no
warmth, it added color, meaning. There were a few other youthward
changes and additions; and then the brown silk curtain closed over
the mirror.
Another woman leaned back in a corner of the brougham. By a trick
of the face she had juggled away a generation of her years. The
hands were moved backward on the horologe of mortality as we move
backward the pointers on the dial of a clock: her face ticked at
the hour of two in the afternoon of life instead of half-past five.
There was still time enough left to be malicious.