In the verandah of her cottage at Nahant, where she always passed the
months of May and June, Mrs. Loring, Morris's mother, sat re-reading the
letter in which he told her of his engagement to Mrs. Chesney.
There had been a storm the night before, and the sea made a marvellous,
heroic music among the rocks. Mrs. Loring laid the open letter on her
knee, and her light, bright blue, short-sighted eyes gazed wistfully
towards the sound. Storms both in Nature and in human passions, when
distant enough, had always possessed a strange charm for her, the charm
of printed perils to minds congenitally timorous. She knew Sophy's
history and had read her poems when they first came out, with that same
sense of one enjoying a tempest in mid-ocean from the staunch deck of a
liner. In her case temperament was the liner--though she had always felt
in some inmost recess of her being, known only to herself and her
Creator, that, given the circumstances, she, too, might have been a
centre of tumult. And sometimes, gazing from the safe, close-curtained
windows of her present personality--the result of many careful,
cautiously repressed years--she wondered if the mistake makers, the
convention breakers, had not the best of it after all? Repentance must
be a wonderful emotion--that upheaving, ecstatic repentance that follows
big sins. So unconsciously and typically New England was Grace Loring,
that she could not think of splendid crime without following it up in
her mind by repentance even more gorgeous.
As Mrs. Loring sat there, with her son's letter on her lap, her sister,
Mrs. Charles Horton, came out of the house with a novel in her hand and
joined her.
"Still brooding over Morry's letter, Grace?" Mrs. Horton asked in a
brusque voice, sitting down beside her.
Mrs. Loring withdrew her vague, handsome eyes from the sea, and looked
quietly and directly at her sister.
"I'm not brooding, Eleanor," she said gently.
"Well, what then?" asked Mrs. Horton.
Mrs. Loring glanced at the letter through her _face-a-main_ as though
consulting it, then said in the same tranquil tone:
"I think I was rather admiring them both."
"What rubbish you talk sometimes, my dear Grace!" exclaimed her sister
explosively.
Mrs. Horton was short, brune, and rather plump. She had small,
chestnut-brown eyes, and rough, strong, crinkly dark hair. She was in
every way the opposite of her tall, distinguished, rather hushed sister.
Her manner of thinking and speaking was blunt and straightforward. Mrs.
Horton had no half-tones--she was like some effective national flag,
all clearly defined blocks of frank, crude colour.
"Are you going to write and remonstrate with that young fool, or are you
going to sit by and see him smash his life like crockery?" she said
abruptly.
Charles Horton had been a Californian and a man of exuberant vitality
and speech. His wife, who had loved him and admired him for every
contrast to the contained people among whom she had been brought up, had
adopted something of his vigorous way of expressing himself.
"Are you?" she repeated.
It was not Mrs. Loring's way to evade things, but she was so really
interested in Eleanor's point of view that instead of answering this
question she said:
"What are your reasons for inferring that Morris is ruining his life?"
Mrs. Horton tossed her book aside, and clasped her crisp, capable
looking little brown hands about one knee.
"'Reasons'!" said she. "Aren't facts enough for you? Isn't a love-sick
boy of twenty-six who marries a woman years older pretty well smashing
things up for himself?"
"Sophy Chesney is only thirty, Eleanor."
"Oh, what a hair-splitter you are, Grace! Four years' difference on the
wrong side--the woman's side, is a big chasm ... say what you will."
"There have been very happy marriages of that sort, Eleanor, and with
far greater difference in age. There was Miss Thackeray's marriage with
Mr. Ritchie----"
"Oh, do go on!" said Mrs. Horton, with an outward snuffing of
contemptuous breath. "Give us some more specimens from
literature--George Eliot and Mr. Cross for example."
Mrs. Loring put up her _face-a-main_ again and looked curiously at her
sister.
"Why are you so vexed, Eleanor?" she asked mildly. "After all, it's a
brilliant marriage for Morris in a way--Sophy Chesney is a very
distinguished woman. Had you ... er ... plans for Morris?"
Mrs. Horton blushed. She _had_ thought that Morris might marry her
step-daughter Belinda some day, but she had never admitted this even to
herself. Grace's random shot hit home. She retorted rather gruffly:
"Can't a woman take an interest in her own nephew, without being accused
of scheming?"
"Oh ... 'scheming'.... My _dear_ Eleanor!" protested her sister.
"The fact is," pursued Mrs. Horton, "I take the common-sense view of the
case and you the sentimental one. Linda!... What on earth have you been
doing to look so hot?"
This last sentence was addressed to her step-daughter, Belinda Horton,
who came racing up the verandah steps, her blowze of red-brown hair
blowing out behind her, and a tennis racquet in her hand. Belinda was a
triumphantly beautiful hoyden of sixteen, despite a slight powdering of
freckles and a tiny silvery scar through one raven black eyebrow, the
result of trying to equal a boy cousin on the trapeze when she was nine
years old. Her great, rich, challenging red-brown eyes, and her defiant
yet sweet-tempered mouth, the up-curve of her round chin, the tilt of
her nose, the way her head sat on her shoulders as though some
artist-god had flung it there with careless mastery, like a flower--her
lovely, long, still-growing body which had never known the "awkward
age"--all these things made even the most collected gasp a little when
Belinda first rushed upon their sight.
She now dropped upon the steps, near Mrs. Loring, pushed the sleeves of
her blouse still higher on her cream-white arms, and flourishing the
racquet at her step-mother, said in the rich, throaty voice of a pigeon
in the sun:
"What do I _look_ as if I'd been doing? Playing the organ?"
"Linda! _Don't_ talk in that slangy way."
Belinda showed her teeth, beautifully white if a trifle too large, in
the frankest grin.
"'Playing the organ' isn't slang, Mater."
Mrs. Horton returned her look severely.
"It's the way you say things that make them sound like slang--isn't it,
Grace?" she ended, appealing to her sister.
Mrs. Loring smiled very kindly.
"It's the fashion to be slangy nowadays, Eleanor."
Belinda's eyes shot garnet sparkles at her mother. She patted Mrs.
Loring's blue batiste skirt approvingly with her racquet.
"That's one for you, Mater!" she cried joyously, then to Mrs. Loring,
"You're always perfectly bully to me, Aunty Grace!"
The idea of applying the term "bully" to that over-refined, softly
majestic figure in its cane chair would have abashed any one less daring
than Belinda. But Mrs. Loring seemed not to mind in the least. She knew
that Belinda was "bad form." Belinda knew it herself. "Some people are
born 'bad form,'" she used to say with her wide, lovely grin. "That's
me."
In tapping her aunt's skirt with her racquet, she had dislodged Morris's
letter. It slipped to the floor beside her, and lifting it to hand it
back, she recognised his writing.
"Hullo!" she cried. "What's Morry writing such a screed about? He hates
writing long letters like the devil."
"_Belinda!_" from Mrs. Horton.
"All right, Mater--not till next time."
Then she turned again to her aunt, frankly curious.
"What _is_ he writing about, Aunt Grace? Not in a scrape, I hope--the
admirable Morry!"
"He wrote to announce his engagement, Belinda," said Mrs. Loring.
Belinda sat stock still for a moment. Then she said:
"Who is it?"
"A Mrs. Chesney--a very unusual woman. She wrote a remarkable book once
under her maiden name, Sophy Taliaferro."
Belinda sprung to her feet.
"Why, I've read some poems by a Sophy Taliaferro," she exclaimed.
"Red-hot stuff they were, too!"
"Linda! I forbid you to speak in that way," said her mother.
"All right, Mater--but they _were_ red-h--.... All right, I won't then.
But, Aunt Grace, it couldn't be _that_ Sophy Taliaferro--she must be a
hundred!"
"No--only thirty," said Mrs. Loring, smiling again.
"My _Gawd_!" cried Belinda, pronouncing the sacred name grotesquely so
as to take off the edge of her irreverence. She dropped back upon the
steps, and sat staring open-mouthed at her aunt. "He's gone nutty!" she
added, closing her lips with a snap. Then she sprang up again and
stamped her foot.
"You've got to save him!" she cried, tears of rage in her eyes. "It
isn't fair!-- She's roped him in!-- Morry is just at the age to do such
rotten foolishness!-- Thank God, this is a Land of Divorce!----"
"Belinda!"
"Yes--thank God for it!-- And I wish trial marriage was here, too!"
"Belinda!"
"Oh, stuff, Mater! Haven't you read Ellen Key--she'd make you sit up!"
Mrs. Horton got up, went to the girl, and grasped her firmly by the
shoulder. She was a determined little woman when roused and Belinda
recognised the expression in her eyes. She looked up at her, sulky but
silent for the moment.
"Listen to me," said her step-mother. "I will not have you talking in
this manner. How dare you read Ellen Key, and--and poems that I've never
given you?"
Belinda's radiant grin shone out again in spite of her.
"Oh, cut it out, Mater," she said amiably. "I hooked Roderick Random and
Boccaccio when I was twelve--but you needn't worry. They made me
sick--what I could understand of them. Yes, Mater--I've naturally got
what they call a 'clean mind'--nastiness never would attract me. But
this is a new age beginning, and a new sort of girl is beginning, too,
and she wants to know what's what about everything, and-- I'm _her_!"
she wound up defiantly.
Mrs. Loring had put up her _face-a-main_, and earnestly regarded the
girl's face during this speech. She had again that sensation of watching
an interesting tempest from safe decks.
"I shall send you to school in France this winter," said Mrs. Horton
grimly. "If you're so bent on acquiring knowledge it shall be given to
you in ordered doses."
"All right, Mater!" said Belinda. Then she flung her racquet viciously
on the steps, and groaned, thrusting her hands in the thick, red-brown
clusters on either side of her face:
"French schools or not, Morry is a damn fool!" said she.
Then Mrs. Horton rose in all the severity of step-motherhood.
"You shall go to bed this instant!" said she, pointing. "You shall have
only soup for dinner. You shall not leave these grounds for a week. Nor
play tennis--nor go sailing."
"I couldn't very well go sailing in the grounds," said Belinda, with
inextinguishable pertness. But she rose, and went upstairs to bed as
the maternal finger indicated, making hideous, gargoylish faces all the
way, which she did not dare turn to deliver.
And once, alone in her bedroom, having slammed the door so that the
cottage jarred with it, she flung herself face down upon the floor, and
sobbed furiously. With one clenched hand she beat the matting near her
head. She strangled with this violent sobbing. Her whole body heaved
with it.
"O God ... punish him!" choked Belinda. "O God ... help me to get even
with him some day ... somehow...."
She rose after a half-hour of this frantic weeping; and, hiccoughing
with spent grief, like a passionate child, went and unlocked a little
drawer. She took out a photograph of Morris. Under it was written in her
black, loopy handwriting, "My Hero and my Love." She gazed a moment at
his face, all distorted and magnified by her tears; then she
deliberately spat upon it, tore it in pieces, and ground them under her
heel. "I hate you.... I hate you.... Beast!... Pig!... Liar!" choked the
little fury. All at once, down she flopped, her skirt making a "cheese"
about her, and gathered the desecrated morsels to her lips.
"Oh ... oh...." she moaned. "My heart is broken ... it's broken...."
Balling the fragments in her fist, and still seated on the floor, she
shook her fist with the rags of love in it, at the empty air.
"I'll get even with you, Morry...." she said between her teeth, as
though he were present in person. "I'll get even with you ... if I have
to wait till _I'm_ thirty!... Oh, _I_ know you!... You dared to kiss me
... _like that_...." Her face flamed at the memory. "And then ... in
less than a year ... oh!... But if you tired of _me_ ... after just
_one_ kiss ... you'll tire of _her_ ... after some hundreds.... _Then_,
Mr. Morry...." Her beautiful face was quite savage--a woman's jealous
face under the childish mop of hair--"then _I'll_ be waiting! In two
years I'll be eighteen.... I'll give you just two years ... then _my_
innings begin...."
Belinda knew well that she was beautiful. She had known it supremely
when she tempted Morris to kiss her--for she had tempted him--but then
she loved him wildly. She was morally a little Oriental--with all her
passions at white heat though she was but a schoolgirl. She had thought
that his kiss meant that he loved her in like wise. He had been sorry
the moment the kiss was over. But then--she had really tempted him
beyond endurance, and he had always thought she had the most kissable
mouth in the world. Besides, just at that psychological moment he
happened to be bored to desperation. He had been spending the two weeks
at Nahant that his mother always exacted from him in the summer. It was
the only thing that she ever did exact from him, but they always seemed
interminable. Then had come Belinda, tempting him with her passionate,
sparkling eyes, and the desireful red fruit of her mouth ... fruit cleft
for kisses....
He had hurried away the next day. He was honestly ashamed of that
sensual kiss laid on a school-girl's lips. She was only fifteen then. He
raged at himself and at her, too. "Kitten Cleopatra," he called her in
his thought. "Amorous little devil-- Jove! I pity her husband...."
For he never realised for an instant that the girl was really in love
with him.