AN UNEXPECTED DAUGHTER-IN-LAW.
When Justin returned to the parlour there was a slight flush on his face, and, taking off his spectacles, he wiped them with a somewhat weary air.
"I guess you've got a handful in your new wife," said his mother, with resentful relish.
He gave her an unexpected smile. "She hasn't been brought up as we have—" Then he paused and fell into a reverie out of which his mother inexorably roused him. "I wish you would get on with your story. I don't want to stay here all night."
Justin put on his glasses, brushed back the thick hair from his forehead, and, leaning forward in his chair, said, firmly, "It is just five weeks to-day since I came home with a telegram from Mr. Lancaster asking me to go to see him on urgent business."
"Yes, and I advised you not to go," said Mrs. Prymmer, squeezing her lips together. "'The way of transgressors is hard.'"
"You advised me not to go because you knew nothing of the circumstances. You know that Icannot give you the details of my business transactions. Can't you trust me to do what is right in such cases?"
"Put not your trust in princes," she said, stubbornly. "A man should have no secrets from his mother."
"You forget that I am not a boy," he said, calmly. Then he went on, "I hurried to California and found Mr. Lancaster in a seaside place sitting in the sun parlour of a hotel. He was pleased that I had come so quickly, and talked over his affairs with me—"
"It's a very odd thing," interrupted Mrs. Prymmer, "that a man who has travelled as much as this Mr. Lancaster of yours should do all his business in a little place like this. Why doesn't he go to banks in New York or Boston?"
"He probably knows his own mind," said Justin, with an unmoved face. "That day I did some writing for him, then he looked out the window. There was a long beach where a small number of young people were bathing in the surf. Mr. Lancaster said, 'You have never met my daughter,—come out, and I will introduce you. The bathing season has not begun, but she often gets up a party in the spirit of adventure.' We went outside, and when he called, 'Derrice,' one of the bathers came toward us. I saw that she was a pretty girl—"
"Well—" said Mrs. Prymmer, in an icy voice.
Her son had paused; it was intensely distasteful to him to give her this account of his journey, and he was only urged to it by a strict sense of duty. But not for worlds would he describe to her or to any one living his sensations on first meeting the girl who had become his wife. Through half-shut eyes he gazed at his mother, his memory busy recalling the scene on the California beach,—the dripping, glistening sea-nymph dancing over the sands in her short frock and black stockings, her face radiant, her teeth shining, her slender feet spurning the ground, her whole being so instinct with life and happiness that she seemed to be an incarnation of perpetual grace and motion.
She danced to meet him and he—stiff, awkward—had stood motionless, struck with admiration, his whole soul for the first time prostrate before feminine graces and perfection.
But he must continue his recital, and, rousing himself with an effort, he went on. "Her father said, 'Derrice, this is Mr. Mercer,' and she shook hands with me. Then he asked her to go out and let me see how well she could swim. She rushed into the breakers— They are very high out there and come in in three rows howling and plunging like dogs, and throwing up spray half as high as this house. She dived through one line and another and another, then we saw her head rising beyond them. After a timeI wondered why she didn't come in, but no one else seemed uneasy. The other young people had sat down on the hot sand, and her father was taken up with pride in her strength, when some one waved a marine glass from the hotel veranda and cried, 'The tide has turned,—Miss Derrice can't get in, she has been floating for some time.'"
Justin stopped again, and once more lived over his brief experience on the shores of the Pacific,—the quick agony of the father who turned and measured the strength of the young men before him, their responsive looks as they ran like deer down the beach to launch a boat, the cries of consternation of the girls as they hurried into the sea and stretched out helpless hands, and the furious beating and protesting of his own heart at the sudden snatching of his newly found treasure from him by the cruel sea. He would recover her alone and unaided, or he would die with her, and, tearing off his boots and coat, he had plunged through the rows of indignant breakers that slapped and buffeted him until he reached a region of calm where warm waves lapped his throat and playfully tried to blind his eyes with spray. In deliberate haste, for he was strong and broad of limb, he had hurried to the spot where she lay rising and falling on the water, her face like a lily-bud, her limbs stretched out like folded leaves. The glare of the sun, the brass of the sky, his steady,cool head, his beating heart, the look the girl gave him when she raised her head from the waves as from a pillow,—to his dying day he would never forget it all, and he grew pale at the remembrance.
His musings were interrupted by his mother's harsh voice, "Why couldn't she get in?"
"When the tide turns the undertow is frightful. Several drowning accidents had occurred there, it being a hard place to launch a boat, and as the bathing season had not begun, the life-saving appliances were not in readiness."
Mrs. Prymmer asked no question for a time, but encouraged by a gleam of sympathy on her face, Justin observed, dryly, "She was afraid we could not get out to her, and she was repeating poetry to keep herself from losing her presence of mind."
"I guess she wasn't much frightened," observed Mrs. Prymmer, hardening her heart again.
"She has a good deal of nerve," said Justin, quietly. "She doesn't look it, but she has."
"Well, they must have got her in," said his mother, impatiently, "as she is here; how did they do it?"
"I swam out and stayed by her," he said, laconically, "till the boat came. It kept upsetting in the breakers."
"Why didn't her father go out? It was a queer thing to let you risk your life."
"He could not swim, and he was paralysed withfright." Justin lowered his eyes, for there was a mist on his glasses. Ah, that meeting between father and daughter when the boat came in! He had turned aside quickly from it, but not quickly enough to escape the expression in the eyes of the half-fainting man as he held out his arms to his recovered daughter.
"Did you make up your mind then to marry her?" pursued his mother, in a voice so harsh that it was almost a croak.
"No; I had already done so."
"You were pretty quick about it."
"I am not always slow."
"And she jumped at the chance."
"Not exactly," and, throwing back his head, he stared at her through his glasses. "If you will recall some of your own experiences when in love, you may remember some of the ways of your sex."
The obstinate face opposite him did not relax. No; although she had twice been wooed and successfully won, his mother had never felt in the slightest degree the influence of the gentle passion. She had not the remotest conception of the strength of a loving attachment except as she had felt it to a limited extent in the guise of maternal affection. However, she was not going to tell her son this, so she said, commandingly, "Go on with your story."
"There isn't much more to tell. The experience in the sea had given her a shock, and she was pale and quiet for a day or two, then she was all right and was about with her father all the time, and I—of course I was there."
He stopped in a somewhat lame fashion, and Mrs. Prymmer said, scornfully, "I guess her father made the match."
Justin maintained a discreet silence. It would be sacrilege to relate to this unsympathetic listener the history of the steady, sharp oversight that the father had taken in all matters pertaining to his daughter. Justin would not tell her that Mr. Lancaster had spoken first,—that one day he had turned to him with an abrupt, "You love my daughter, don't you?"
Mrs. Prymmer would only sneer if she should be told that her son's voice had trembled as he had answered, "Yes," and that his cheek had burned under the glance of Mr. Lancaster's keen eyes. Nor would he favour her with an account of his love-making to the spoiled and wayward Derrice. It would not inspire his mother with the same intensity of interest with which it had inspired her son. Therefore he remained thoughtful until she broke the silence by an accusation that goaded him into a response. "You promised your father when he died that you would take care of me."
"I know I did. I have married the only woman I have ever seen who would not be jealous of a mother's appropriation of a son."
Mrs. Prymmer thought over this sentence and decided that it contained an innuendo. "You must choose between us," she said, angrily, "a man must leave father and mother, and cleave to his wife."
"I know it. I should be the last one to gainsay instructions from the Bible."
"My house is not large enough for both," she continued, "I never wanted a daughter-in-law. You have forced one on me."
"You are considerably upset to-night, mother," he said, gently. "I ought to have warned you of my marriage by telegram, but I thought I had rather break it to you myself; you had better think over the matter of our leaving your house."
Her house, yes, it certainly was hers; for she had taken good care that her first husband should leave her in possession of all his worldly goods, and that their son should be dependent on her. However, she was not devoid of feeling, and she knew Justin was not thinking of losing the shelter of her roof, but rather of the sundering of the close ties between them, and, as this thought presented itself, her shrewd and calculating mind recalled the handsome gown of her daughter-in-law, and the costly fur cloak slipping from her shoulders.
"Is that Mr. Lancaster as rich as folks say?" she asked, with a softening of her tone.
"No," he replied, briefly.
"I suppose if anything happened to her you would get his money."
Justin surveyed her in such austere disapprobation that she was daunted, and stammered, "You are so queer about money,—your business is to handle it, yet you haven't any respect for it, not a mite. You fling good money after bad."
Justin understood her reference, and knew that it afforded him just grounds for a retort, yet he contented himself with a silent stare at her until she went on, meekly, "You needn't take your wife away for a day or two. I will make it a subject of prayer and if the Lord directs, of course you will have to stay."
"Of course."
Her resentment did not return to her, although his tone was ironical. He had offended her terribly, this inflexible young son of hers, and even though the new member of their family was ushered in with the glamour of wealth about her, this was but a salve, a flattering ointment for a grievous wound. But after all, he was her son, her only son, and her mother's heart was touched as she got up to leave him.
"Justin," she said, and though she was not moved enough for tears, a little—a very little—whimpercame at her bidding, "you have broken my heart, but I forgive you."
"No, mother, not broken," he said, also rising and laying a hand on her shoulder.
"Yes, broken," she persisted; "but you are my boy. Don't—don't let her take you away from me."
"Mother, am I likely to forget the long years that we have spent here together; the sicknesses you have nursed me through?"
"No, no, I can trust you," and she deposited her thick head of hair on his breast; "but what made you marry that chit of a thing? She looks as if she hadn't done growing. Now if it had been a woman—"
"She is older than she looks," he said, with a smile, "and she will be more tractable than a woman, and it was either 'take her or lose her.' Her father is a man of decision."
"And you—you like her?" said Mrs. Prymmer, raising her head.
He gently put her aside, and his face grew crimson. "I love her," he said, shortly.
Mrs. Prymmer went slowly from the room. She was confused in her mind, and falling on her knees by her bedside she wrestled in agitated prayer for a blessing on her son, a judgment on her daughter-in-law, and miraculous strength for herself, to bear this new and heavy cross that had been laid upon her.