The whole connection seethed! The notoriety of Flora's death was nothing compared with this notoriety. The police court! The newspapers! The gossip of Mrs. Childs's Bridge Club! And, on top of everything else, the shock to Laura.
"You see," Mrs. Payton explained to her daughter, "she's going to have a baby, and—"
"I know," Fred said, soberly; "she told me. Of course I wouldn't have let her go, if I'd known there was going to be rough-house."
"It's absurd to blame you," her mother said. "As I told your Aunt Bessie, 'It's absurd to blame Freddy!'"
"I don't mind being blamed. I oughtn't to have taken her, anyhow. She doesn't really care for the things I care for. She's entirely under Howard's thumb, poor dear!"
Mr. William Childs was almost sick with anger, and Mrs. Childs, with her calm interest in other people's troubles, agreed with Miss Mary Graham, who said that, of course, Miss Freddy meant well; but sometimes the brain defect didn't show at once, as it did in her brother. "It comes on when they are about twenty-five," said Miss Mary.
Mrs. Childs said that was the most charitable way tolook at it, and—amiably ready to tell anything to anybody—repeated the charitable opinion to Mrs. Payton.
"What did the older one say?" Fred's mother asked, distractedly.
Mrs. Childs hesitated: "Nothing very sensible; indeed, I don't know just what she meant. Something out of the Bible—that they said Christ had a devil, too. Quite profane, I thought."
"Fred isn't a devil!" Mrs. Payton said, angrily, her maternal claws ready to scratch the "older one," whose protection of Frederica was understood only by Arthur Weston, who loved her for it, but warned her that unless Bacon was the author of the phrase she had quoted it would not soothe the Childs family.
Certainly it did not soothe Bobby and Payton, who told their respective wives that Freddy ought to be shut up! "Allendale is the place for her," Bob said, mentioning a well-known insane-asylum. They told their brother-in-law that Laura ought to be ashamed of herself—which led to an in-law coolness that never quite thawed out.
"Of course I don't approve of it any more than you do," Howard said. "If I'd been at home, Laura wouldn't have gone with Fred. Trouble is, she's so sweet-tempered she does whatever anybody wants—and Fred insisted, you know. And when Laura was there she felt she had to stand by Fred—"
"Stand by your grandmother!" Payton Childs retorted. "If Fred was my sister, I'd stand by her—with a whip!"
"Well, there'll be no more speechifying inours," Howard said, grimly. "But I won't have Laura blamed. Whatshe did, she did out of loyalty to Fred. When it comes to standing by, Laura is as decent as a man!"
Miss Spencer was of the opinion that Mrs. Payton had better take the girl to Europe—"under another name, perhaps; then she can't disgrace you. After all, Ellen, I believe she's just like Mortimore—only she doesn't jibber!"
"Miss Spencer!"
"I mean that though she has intellect, she—"
"Morty has intellect! Doctor Davis always said the intellect was there, but it was veiled!"
"Fred had better veil something," Miss Spencer said, dryly. "Her face, for instance, when she goes to jail."
"It wasn't a jail," Mrs. Payton protested, whimperingly.
Mrs. Holmes had her opinion, too; all Fred's didos, she said, were due to the fact that Mrs. Payton had not brought her up properly. She said this just as she was leaving the parlor, teetering along on her high-heeled shoes; then her voice suddenly roughened; she turned and glared at her daughter through her white veil.
"The amount of it is," she said, "Fred is worth all the rest of us put together!That'swhy we are so provoked at her. We know we're on the shelf, and useless old fools, every one of us! Especially William Childs."
Mrs. Payton was so astounded that she let her mother go out to her carriage unattended. But the words were a comfort to her, for, poor woman, she was struck from every side.
As for Fred, she listened listlessly to the jangle ofcriticism, looking at her critics with curious eyes. How silly they all were! So long as the experience of being arrested had not injured Laura, what difference did it make? With her conception of the values of life, the momentary unpleasantness of newspaper notoriety was not worth thinking of. Fred was very listless now. Something had touched the garment of life, and energy and hope had gone out of it.
She ceased to be young.
The rebuff of unaccepted love she had faced gallantly; its accompanying knowledge of shame and pity and sympathy, had only steadied her; even her own irrationality in disliking Laura (she had recognized with chagrin that dislike was irrational, and she hated, she told herself, to be an idiot!)—all these emotional experiences had merely deepened and humanized her. But the discovery that the Howard Maitland she thought she knew, had never lived, was a staggering blow. The other Howard—the real Howard—honest, sweet-hearted, simple, who had found her conversation no end amusing and interesting, who had been a patient receptacle for her opinions and an amiable echo of her volubility, who had swallowed many yawns out of kindness as well as courtesy—the Howard beneath whose charm of good manners lurked the primitive fierceness of the male who protects his woman at any cost,thatHoward had never made the slightest appeal to her. The jar of stepping down from the ideal man to the real man racked her, body and soul. The old pain of not being loved had ceased as suddenly as a pulled tooth ceases to ache. The new pain was only a sense of nothingness.But, curiously enough, it was then that the old affection for Laura began to flow back. "Not that I get much out of her," she thought, dully; "dear little Lolly! She hasn't an idea beyond—him. She's a perfect slave to him. Well! I'm glad I'm a free woman! But she's a dear little thing." The soreness had all gone; she loved Lolly again—as one loves a kitten. She used to go to see her, and look at the baby clothes, and speculate as to whether it would be a girl or a boy. The softness, and silliness, and sweetness of it all was to her tired mind what cushions are to a tired body.
When the baby was born, early in September, the last barrier between the cousins was swept away—but Fred still made a point of not going to Laura's house at an hour when she was likely to find Howard at home. Laura's husband was an entire stranger to her. When, by accident, she did meet him, she used to say to herself, wonderingly, "HowcouldI—?"
All summer Frederica went regularly to her office. "But business isn't what you'd call booming," she told Arthur Weston. In the blind fumbling about of her stunned mind to discover a reality, he was the one person to whom she turned. His calls at 15 Payton Street, whenever Fred was in town, stirred even Mrs. Payton to speculation—although it was Miss Carter who put the idea into her head:
"He always comes when Miss Freddy is here;Ithink he's taken with her."
"I wish I could think so! There is nothing I should likebetter," said Mrs. Payton, sighing. But the mere hope of such a thing roused her to ask Mr. Weston to dinner whenever she knew that Fred was coming home for the night. Miss Graham, getting wind of those dinners, gave him, one day, a cousinly thrust in the ribs:
"Tortoise! I do really believe you have some sense, after all!"
"I have sense enough to know that the race is off for the tortoise, when the hare decides not to run," he said, dryly; "but that's no reason why I shouldn't dine with Mrs. Payton."
Miss Eliza was spending the summer at The Laurels, and she had Freddy on her mind. She went over to Lakeville to see her several times, and always, with elaborate carelessness, said something in Arthur Weston's favor. But she had to admit that Fred was blind to the pursuit of the faithful tortoise.
"I love the child," she told her sister; "but, I declare, I could spank her! Just think what a husband dear Arthur would make!"
"What kind of a wife would she make?" Miss Mary retorted. "I don't think she would insure any man's happiness."
"The pitiful thing about her is that she has aged so," said Miss Graham.
That sense of lost youth touched her so much that she was quite out of patience with dear Arthur. "Haven't you any heart?" she scolded. "The girl is unhappy! Carry her off, and make her happy."
"I'm too old to turn kidnapper," he defended himself.
"She is brooding over something," Miss Eliza said; "itcan'tbe because that foolish young man took her cousin when he could have got her? She has too much backbone for that!"
Mr. Weston agreed that Fred was not lacking backbone, but he could not deny the brooding. So it came about that the dear old matchmaker was moved, one day, to go to Sunrise Cottage and put her finger in the pie. After she had drunk a cup of tea, and listened for half an hour to Fred's ideas as to how Laura should bring up the baby, and the "slavery of mothers"—"Lolly hasn't time to read a line!" Fred said;—Miss Eliza suddenly touched her on the shoulder:
"My dear," she said, "you've got to live, whether you like it or not. Make the best of it!"
Fred gave a gasp of astonishment; then she said, in a low voice, "How did you know I didn't like living?"
"Because when I didn't, I was just as careless about my back hair as you are."
Involuntarily Fred put her hand up to her head. "Is it untidy?"
"It's indifferent. And when you think how fond Arthur is of you, it's very selfish in you not to look as pretty as you can."
She went away greatly pleased with herself. "It will touch her vanity to think he likes her to look pretty; and when a girl tries to look pretty for a man, the next step is to fall in love with him."
Alas! Fred's vanity was not in the slightest degree flattered. But her pride had felt the roweling of the spurof Truth. She must brace up—because she had got to live! The words were like a trumpet. "I've got to live—whether I like it or not. I must get action on something," she told herself, grimly.
That night she sat down on the little stool in front of her fire, and stared a long time into the flames. Yes, she must get busy. "I've been a pig. I've had a grouch on, just because I didn't get a stick of candy when I wanted it—and wouldn't I have been sick of my candy by this time, if I'd got it! HowcanLolly stand him? What a fool I was."... Yes, she must "get busy"; why not try and do something for those poor, wretched women who are sent to the House of Detention? What she had seen and heard in that stone-lined room had left a scar upon her mind. "I'll make Arthur tell me how to get at them," she thought. Suddenly she remembered Miss Eliza's thrust: "It's selfish in you—when he's so fond of you."
She gave a little start: "Oh, but that's impossible! That sort of thing is over for him. But he's my best friend," she told herself.
It was late in September, when she asked Arthur Weston to tell her how she could help "those awful women,"—as she called the poor creatures she had seen in jail. He had motored out to Lakeville for a cup of tea, and while they waited for the kettle to boil, they wandered off along the shore of the lake, and found a little inlet walled with willows, where they could sit on the beach and see nothing but the wrinkling flash of waves and a serene stretch of sky. They sat there, talking idly, and watching the willow leaves turn all their silvery backs to a hesitating breeze.
Weston listened silently to her plans for "getting busy" with prison reform—when she suddenly broke off:
"I don't see that the vote will do much."
He gave her an astonished look. "What! This fromyou?"
She nodded. "Of course I'm for suffrage, first, last, and all the time! But I'm sort of discouraged about what we can accomplish. Life is so big." The old cocksureness was gone. The pathos of common sense in Freddy made him wince. "But I've got to do something," she ended. "Miss Eliza told me I was selfish."
"Look here! I won't let Cousin Eliza call you names! I reserve that for myself."
She laughed. "You've done it, often enough."
Arthur Weston tickled the sleeping Zip and whistled.
"What do you suppose Laura told me the other day?" Fred said. "She said that 'no woman really knew what life meant unless she had a baby.' She said having a baby was like coming out of prison—because 'self' is a prison. Rather tall talk for little Laura, wasn't it?"
"Any of the great human experiences are keys to our prison-house," he said.
"True enough," she agreed; then, abruptly, her own great experience spoke: "Isn't it queer? I rather dislike Howard."
"It's unreasonable. He's the same old Howard—a mighty decent chap."
"He's not—what I supposed he was."
"Well, that's your fault, not his. You dressed him up in your ideas; when he got into his own clothes, you didn't like him. Howard never pretended to be anything he wasn't."
"Yes! Yes, he did!" she said, with sudden agitation. "He used to—listen to me."
"Good heavens, don't hold that up against him! Don't I listen to you?"
"Oh, but you never let me think you agree with me! I always know you don't."
"He agrees far more than I do."
"No," she said, with a somber look. "He just let me talk. He didn't care. The things that were real to meweren't real to him. His real things were—what's happening now. The baby, and Laura. Is it so with all of you? Don't you ever care with yourminds?"
He stopped tickling Zip, and looked out over the lake with narrowing eyes; after a while he said, gently:
"I think the caring with the mind comes second. When a man falls in love, the mind has nothing to do with it. Sometimes it reinforces the heart, so to speak; when that happens, you have the perfect marriage—which isn't awfully common. It's apt to be just the heart; which gets pretty dull after a while. But just the head is arid."
"He would have found just my head,—arid?" she pondered.
He looked straight at her, and said, quietly: "I think he would."
There was a long pause.
"Was it head, or heart, with you?" she said.
"It's both," he said.
She gave him a puzzled look: "Why, you don't mean that you care for that horrid Kate, still?"
He smiled, and looked off over the water.
"You are very stupid, Fred."
She was plainly perplexed. "I don't understand?"
"That's why I say you are stupid."
His face was turned away from her; he was breaking a dead twig into inch-long pieces, and carefully arranging them in a precise fagot on his knee; she saw, with a little shock of surprise, that his fingers were trembling.
"Why, Arthur!" she began,—and stopped short, the color rising slowly to her forehead. He gave her a quick look.
"Why!" she said again, faintly, "you don't mean—? you're not—?"
He laughed, opening his hands in a gesture of amused and hopeless assent. "I am," he said, and flung the tiny fagot out on the water.
Fred dropped her chin on her fists and watched the twigs dancing off over the waves. They were both silent; then she said, frowning, and pausing a little between her words as if trying to take in their full meaning:—"You are in love with me."
"Has it just struck you?"
"How could it strike me—that you would care for a girl like me!"
"Considering your intelligence, you are astonishingly obtuse, at times. I couldn't care for any other kind of girl. Or for any girl, except you!"
"Miss Eliza said something that made me wonder if.... But I couldn't believe it. I thought that sort of thing was over for you. I never dreamed of—"
"Oh, well! don't dream of it now. Of course it doesn't make a particle of difference. I didn't mean to speak of it; it sort of broke loose," he ended, in rueful confession.
Fred was silent.
Arthur Weston, hiding the tremor that was tingling all through him, began to talk easily, of anything—Zip, the weather, whether Miss Carter could be induced to reconsider her annual resignation; "It would be very hard on Mrs. Payton to lose her," he said.
"Well," Frederica said, slowly, "I don't see any reason why I shouldn't marry you."
He caught his breath; then struck his hand on hers.
"You're a good sport! I take back my accusation that you weren't. I could name several reasons why you shouldn't marry me."
"Name them."
"Fred, look here; this is a serious business with me. I can't talk about it."
"I want to talk about it. I'd like to know your reasons."
"To begin with—age."
She nodded. "In years you are older. But I'm not young any more."
The water stung in his eyes; she was right—she was not "young" now. "The next reason," he went on, without looking at her, "is that you are not in love with me."
She thought that over: "But I am fond of you."
"That won't do for marriage."
"It's more than just fondness with you?" she asked, doubtfully.
He caught her hand, kissed it, and flung it from him. "Come!" he said, harshly, "let's go home!" He rose, but she did not move.
"Do youloveme?" she insisted, looking up at him.
He was silent. When he spoke his voice was rough with suffering. "I love you as much ... as I can. But it's not worth the taking. I know that. I wouldn't ask you to take it. You ought to have—fire and gold! I spent my gold ten years ago; and the fire burned itself out. Don't talk about it. I feel like lead, sometimes, compared with you. But I'm not adamant."
She got on her feet, and stood looking out over thelake. For a long while neither of them spoke. Then she said: "Arthur, I'm not in love with anybody else. I can't imagine, now, how I ever thought I was!"
"You will be in love with somebody else one of these days."
She shook her head. "No; that's all over. There is no fire and gold in me, either. Something—was killed, I think."
"It will come to life."
She gave a little gasp: "No. It's dead. But what is left is—well, it isn't bad, what's left. Sometimes," she said, with sudden sweet gaiety, "sometimes I think it's better than what Howard and Laura have!"
"No, it isn't," he said, sadly.
"I wonder," she pondered, "if I could have been ... like Laura? She hasn't a thought except for the baby and Howard. They are the center of Life to her;—which is all right, I suppose. But they are its circumference, too; which seems to me dreadfully cramping. I never could be like that."
He smiled, in spite of himself. "Nature is a pretty big thing, Fred; when you hold your own child in your arms—" he stopped short. "Life is bigger than theories," he said, in a low voice.
She nodded: "I know what you mean. But I never could be a fool, Arthur."
"I think," he said, and again something in his voice made her catch her breath; "Ithinkyou could be,—at moments."
"Better not count on it," she said; "but if you wantme, in spite of my 'arid' head,—you can take me! Of course, just for a minute, when I wrung it from you that you—cared, I was rather stunned, because I didn't believe Miss Eliza knew. But on the whole, I think—I'd like it." She smiled at him, and her eyes brimmed with affection. "You see, we're friends; and you never bore me. Howard would have bored me awfully. So—I will marry you, Arthur."
He was silent. "Rather hard," she said, mischievously, "to have to offer myself tw—"
"Stop!" he said; "don't say things like that!"
"Well, then—" she began; but he lifted a silencing hand:
"My dear, my dear, I love you too much to marry you."
"Why, then," she said, simply, "you love me, it seems to me, enough to marry me. Don't you see?"
He looked at her with hungry eyes. "I think I am man enough to save you from myself," he said; "but don't—don't tempt me too far!"...
That was in September. It was the first of December when Howard Maitland came leaping up-stairs, two steps at a time, and burst into the nursery, so chock-full of news that he could hardly wait to see the way Betty's toes would grip your finger if you put it on the sole of her pink foot.
"Whodoyou suppose is engaged?"
"Jack McKnight," Laura said; "Howard, kiss her little neck, right under her ear."
He kissed it, and said, "No! Not McKnight. You wouldn't guess in a hundred years!"
"Well, then, you'd better tell me. See, Father, she's smiling! Howard, I think she's really a very distinguished-looking baby; don't you?"
"She looks like her ma, so of course she is!"
"Nonsense! She's the image of you. What do you think? When I went down to luncheon, Sarah says she turned her head right around to watch me go out of the room."
"Gosh! She'll be reading Browning next! Laura—why don't you rise about the engagement? You'll scream when I tell you."
"Well, tell me."
"Fred Payton and—"
"What!"
"Hold on. I've not begun to holler yet.And—old Weston."
"What!"
"I thought you'd sit up."
"Howard! I don't believe it."
"It's true. I met Mrs. Payton, and she told me. She kept me standing on the corner for a quarter of an hour while she explained that she was going to do up her Christmas presents now, so she could get the house in order for the wedding. It's to be in January. The engagement comes out to-morrow. It's been cooking since September, but they didn't really tie up until last week. I'm pledged to secrecy, but your Aunt Nelly said I could tell you."
"I never was so astonished in my life!" Laura gasped.
"I was—surprised, myself," Howard said.
"Well," said Laura, "I'm glad poor old Fred is going to be married—but howcanshe! Of course I know he's been gone on her for ages; but I don't see how he dared to propose to her—he's old enough to be her father! Maybe she took pity on him and proposed to him," Laura declared, giggling.
"The baby has a double chin," her husband said, hurriedly.
"Fred converted him to suffrage last summer," Laura said; "that showed which way the wind was blowing."
Howard stopped tickling his daughter's neck, and frowned, as if trying to remember something. "Westona suffragist? That's interesting! Leighton—you remember?—the man who went to the Philippines with me?"
Laura nodded abstractedly.
"Well, he said that if a man was a suffragist it was because he was either in the cradle or the grave. He said the man of affairs was bored to extinction by the whole hullabaloo business. He considered me in the cradle; so I suppose he'd say that Weston—"
"Mr. Weston may be in the grave, but you're not in the cradle," Laura interrupted, affronted; "you are the father of a family!"
"Well, to be candid, I'm not crazy about suffrage," Howard confessed, and was pummeled by his baby's fists, carefully directed by the maternal hand.
"I'm ashamed of you! Betty and I are going to walk in the parade, and you shall carry a banner."
"Thanks so much; I fear business will call me to Philadelphia that day. Too bad!"
"Freddy and Mr. Weston!" Laura repeated; "well, Idon'tunderstand it!"
"Neither do I," said her husband. He walked over to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out into the rain; behind him he heard the nursery door open, and Laura's contented voice:
"No, Sarah, I don't need you. I'm going to put her to bed myself. You go down and have your supper. Just put her little nightie on the fender before you go, so it will be nice and warm." Then the door closed again, and he could hear Laura mumbling in the baby's neck:
"Sweety! Mother loves! Put little hanny into thesleeve.... Oh, Howard, look at her! Did you ever see anything so killing? Howard, just think! Fred told me once that she was going to have a trained nurse for her children. Well, she'll know better when she has 'em! Ooo-oo—sweety!—don't pull mother's hair!" The firelit warmth, the little night-gown scorching on the fender, Laura in the low chair, his child's head on her breast—the young man, staring out into the rain and darkness, felt something tighten in his throat. Life was so perfect! There, behind him, by the hearth, in warm security, were his two Treasures—to be cared for, and guarded, and made happy. He lived only to stand between them and Fate. His very flesh and blood were theirs! "I wouldn't let the wind blow on them!" he thought, fiercely. But Fred Payton wouldn't let anybody stand between her and the gales of life. He couldn't imagine Arthur Weston protecting Fred. Imagine any man trying to take care of Fred! "She'd be taking care of him, the first thing he'd know! Still, I take off my hat to her, every time. She's big."
Down in the bottom of his heart was a queer uneasiness: he was not "big," himself; "I am satisfied just to be happy; Fred wants something more than that. She's more worth-while than I am," he thought, humbly. He turned and looked at the two by the fire, then came over, and, kneeling down, took his World into his arms.
"Oh,Laura!" he said; he rested his head on his wife's shoulder, and felt the baby's silky hair against his lips. "Laura, how perfect life is! I'm so happy, I'm frightened!—and I don't deserve it. Fred Payton is worth six of me."
Laura gave a little squeal. "As if any girl was as good as you! Besides, poor, dear Freddy—nobody appreciates her more than I do, but Howard, you know perfectly well that she is—I mean she isn't—I mean, well,youknow? Poor Fred, she's perfectly fine, but nobody except somebody like Mr. Weston would want to marry her, because she is awfully bossy. And a man doesn't like a bossy woman, now does he?"
"You bet he doesn't!" Howard said. "But I take my hat off to Fred."
"Oh, of course," said Laura.
"Thank God, she's got a man to keep her in order!" said Mr. William Childs.
"What shall we give her for a wedding-present?" Mrs. Childs ruminated.
"Give Weston a switch!" said Billy-boy.
"I shall miss her terribly," said Mrs. Payton; "I don't know how I'm going to get along without her." Her lip trembled and she looked at her mother, who was running a furtive, white-gloved finger across Mr. Andrew Payton's marble toga. "Oh, yes; it isn't dusted," Mrs. Payton sighed; "you can't get servants to dust anything nowadays."
"Fred will make 'em dust!" Mrs. Holmes said, with satisfaction. "All Fred needs is to be married. Miss Eliza Graham told me that she had gumption. I saidhehad gumption, to get her!"
"I wonder if he knows about her affair with Laura's husband," Miss Spencer ruminated. "Some one ought to tell him, just out of kindness." (And the very next day an anonymous letter did tell him, for which he was duly grateful.)
"Ihopeshe will make you happy," Miss Mary Graham told her cousin, sighing.
"Well, Arthur will make her happy," Miss Eliza said, decidedly; "and that's what he cares about! As for her making him happy, it will be his own fault if she doesn't. She'll interest you, Arthur—that's what a man like you wants."
"I'm to be 'amused,' am I?" Arthur Weston said, grimly. "But suppose I don't 'amuse' her?" And as the older sister went out to the door with him to say good-by, he added: "Am I a thief? Of course, I've got the best of the bargain."
She did not contradict him. "I think," she said, her face full of pain and pity, "that Fred has got the very best bargain that, being Fred, she could possibly get."
"No!" he said, "you're wrong! But pray God she never finds it out."
He did not mean to let her find it out!
But that afternoon when he went into No. 15 for his tea and for a chance to look at Frederica, and tease her, and feel her frank arm over his shoulder, he was very silent.
They were in the sitting-room, Mrs. Payton having tactfully withdrawn to the entry outside of Morty's room. "When I was a young lady," she told Miss Carter, "Iused to receive Mr. Payton in the back parlor, and Mama always sat in the front parlor. But Mama was very old-fashioned—Ibelieve in the new ideas! And then, after all, Mr. Weston is so much older than Freddy—oh, dear me! What a blessing it was to have him fall in love with her!"
"Mother is going round," Fred told her lover, as she handed him his tea, "saying, 'Now lettest thou thy servant ...!' She's so ecstatic over our engagement."
"I'm rather ecstatic myself," he said; "Fred—I am a highway robber."
"Be still!" she said; and gave him another lump of sugar.
"I love you," he said. "But you—no, it isn't fair; it isn't fair."
She took his teacup from him and snuggled down beside him; "I'm satisfied," she said.
The sense of her content stabbed him. She ought to have so much more than content. He had told her so often enough, in those two months of standing out against his own heart; he told her so when, at last, he yielded. But when he said it now, she would not listen. "I tell you,I'msatisfied!" She dropped her head on his shoulder, and hummed a little to herself.
How was a man to break through such content!
"But Iwill!" he told himself.
THE END