V.
SMOOTHNESS, Kate Clephane could see, was going to mark the first stage of her re-embarkation on the waters of life. The truth came to her, after that first evening, with the surprised discovery that the family had refrained from touching on her past not so much from prudery, or discretion even, as because such retrogressions were jolting uncomfortable affairs, and the line of least resistance flowed forward, not back. She had been right in guessing that her questions as to what people thought of her past were embarrassing to Landers, but wrong in the interpretation of his embarrassment. Like every one else about her, he was caught up in the irresistible flow of existence, which somehow reminded her less of a mighty river tending seaward than of a moving stairway revolving on itself. “Only they all think it’s a river....” she mused.
But such thoughts barely lit on her tired mind and were gone. In the first days, after she had grasped (without seeking its explanation) the fact that she need no longer be on her guard, that henceforth there would be nothing to conjure away, or explain, or disguise, her chief feeling was one of illimitablerelief. The rapture with which she let herself sink into the sensation showed her for the first time how tired she was, and for how long she had been tired. It was almost as if this sense of relaxation were totally new to her, so far back did her memory have to travel to recover a time when she had not waked to apprehension, and fallen asleep rehearsing fresh precautions for the morrow. In the first years of her marriage there had been the continual vain effort to adapt herself to her husband’s point of view, to her mother-in-law’s standards, to all the unintelligible ritual with which they barricaded themselves against the alarming business of living. After that had come the bitterness of her first disenchantment, and the insatiable longing to be back on the nursery floor with Anne; then, through all the ensuing years, the many austere and lonely years, and the few consumed with her last passion, the ever-recurring need of one form of vigilance or another, the effort to keep hold of something that might at any moment slip from her, whether it were her painfully-regained “respectability” or the lover for whom she had forgone it. Yes; as she looked back, she saw herself always with taut muscles and the grimace of ease; always pretending that she felt herself free, and secretly knowing that the prison of her marriage had been liberty compared with what she had exchanged it for.
That was as far as her thoughts travelled in thefirst days. She abandoned herself with the others to the flood of material ease, the torrent of facilities on which they were all embarked. She had been scornful of luxury when it had symbolized the lack of everything else; now that it was an adjunct of her recovered peace she began to enjoy it with the rest, and to feel that the daily perfection of her breakfast-tray, the punctual renewal of the flowers in her sitting-room, the inexhaustible hot water in her bath, the swift gliding of Anne’s motor, and the attentions of her household of servants, were essential elements of this new life.
At last she was at rest. Even the nature of her sleep was changed. Waking one morning—not with a jerk, but slowly, voluntarily, as it were—out of a soundless, dreamless night, a miraculous draught of sleep, she understood that for years even her rest had been unrestful. She recalled the uncertainty and apprehension always woven through her dreams, the sudden nocturnal wakings to a blinding, inextinguishable sense of her fate, her future, her past; and the shallow turbid half-consciousness of her morning sleep, which would leave her, when she finally woke from it, emptied of all power of action, all hope and joy. Then every sound that broke the night-hush had been irritating, had pierced her rest like an insect’s nagging hum; now the noises that accompanied her falling asleep and awakening seemed to issue harmoniously out of the silence, and the late and earlyroar of Fifth Avenue to rock her like the great reiterations of the sea.
“This is peace ... thismustbe peace,” she repeated to herself, like a botanist arrested by an unknown flower, and at once guessing it to be the rare exquisite thing he has spent half his life in seeking.
Of course she would not have felt any of these things if Anne had not been the Anne she was. It was from Anne’s presence, her smile, her voice, the mystery of her eyes even, that the healing flowed. If Kate Clephane had an apprehension left, it was her awe—almost—of that completeness of Anne’s. Was it possible, humanly possible, that one could cast away one’s best treasure, and come back after nearly twenty years to find it there, not only as rare as one had remembered it, but ripened, enriched, as only beautiful things are enriched and ripened by time? It was as if one had set out some delicate plant under one’s window, so that it might be an object of constant vigilance, and then gone away, leaving it unwatched, unpruned, unwatered—how could one hope to find more than a dead stick in the dust when one returned? But Anne was real; she was not a mirage or a mockery; as the days passed, and her mother’s life and hers became adjusted to each other, Kate felt as if they were two parts of some delicate instrument which fitted together as perfectly as if they had never been disjoined—as if Anne were thatother half of her life, the half she had dreamed of and never lived. To see Anne living it would be almost the same as if it were her own; would be better, almost; since she would be there, with her experience, and tenderness, to hold out a guiding hand, to help shape the perfection she had sought and missed.
These thoughts came back to her with particular force on the evening of Anne’s reappearance at the Opera. During the weeks since old Mrs. Clephane’s death the Clephane box had stood severely empty; even when the Opera House was hired for some charity entertainment, Anne sent a cheque but refused to give the box. It was awfully “archaic”, as Nollie Tresselton said; but somehow it suited Anne, was as much in her “style” as the close braids folded about her temples. “After all, it’s not so easy to be statuesque, and I like Anne’s memorial manner,” Nollie concluded.
Tonight the period of formal mourning for old Mrs. Clephane was over, and Anne was to go to the Opera with her mother. She had asked the Joe Tresseltons and her guardian to join them first at a little dinner, and Kate Clephane had gone up to dress rather earlier than usual. It was her first public appearance, also, and—as on each occasion of her new life when she came on some unexpected survival of her youth, a face, a voice, a point of view, a room in which the furniture had not been changed—shewas astonished, and curiously agitated, at setting out from the very same house for the very same Opera box. The only difference would be in the mode of progression; she remembered the Parisian landau and sixteen-hand chestnuts with glittering plated harness that had waited at the door in her early married days. Then she had a vision of her own toilet, of the elaborate business it used to be: Aline’s predecessor, with cunning fingers, dividing and coiling the generous ripples of her hair, and building nests of curls about the temples and in the nape; then the dash up in her dressing-gown to Anne’s nursery for a last kiss, and the hurrying back to get into her splendid brocade, to fasten the diamond coronet, the ruby “sunburst”, the triple pearls. John Clephane was fond of jewels, and particularly proud of his wife’s, first because he had chosen them, and secondly because he had given them to her. She sometimes thought he really admired her only when she had them all on, and she often reflected ironically on Esther’s wifely guile in donning her regal finery before she ventured to importune Ahasuerus. It certainly increased Kate Clephane’s importance in her husband’s eyes to know that, when she entered her box, no pearls could hold their own against hers except Mrs. Beaufort’s and old Mrs. Goldmere’s.
It was years since Kate Clephane had thought of those jewels. She smiled at the memory, and at the contrast between the unobtrusive dress Aline hadjust prepared for her, and all those earlier splendours. The jewels, she supposed, were Anne’s now; since modern young girls dressed as richly as their elders, Anne had no doubt had them reset for her own use. Mrs. Clephane closed her eyes with a smile of pleasure, picturing Anne (as she had not yet seen her) with bare arms and shoulders, and the orient of the pearls merging in that of her young skin. It was lucky that Anne was tall enough to look her best in jewels. Thence the mother’s fancy wandered to the effect Anne must produce on other imaginations; on those, particularly, of young men. Was she already, as they used to say, “interested”? Among the young men Mrs. Clephane had seen, either calling at the house, or in the course of informal dinners at the Tresseltons’, the Drovers’, and other cousins or “in-laws”, she had remarked none who seemed to fix her daughter’s attention. But there had been, as yet, few opportunities: the mitigated mourning for old Mrs. Clephane did at least seclude them from general society, and when a girl as aloof as Anne was attracted, the law of contrasts might draw her to some one unfamiliar and undulled by propinquity.
“Or an older man, perhaps?” Kate considered. She thought of Anne’s half-daughterly, half-feminine ways with her former guardian, and then shrugged away the possibility that her old stolid Fred could exercise a sentimental charm. Yet theyoung men of Anne’s generation, those her mother had hitherto met, seemed curiously undifferentiated and immature, as if they had been kept too long in some pure and enlightened school, eternally preparing for a life into which their parents and professors could never decide to let them plunge.... It struck Mrs. Clephane that Chris, when she first met him, must have been about the age of these beautiful inarticulate athletes ... and Heaven knew how many lives he had already run through! As he said himself, he felt every morning when he woke as if he had come into a new fortune, and had somehow got to “blow it all in” before night.
Kate Clephane sat up and brushed her hand over her eyes. It was the first time Chris had been present to her, in that insistent immediate way, since her return to New York. She had thought of him, of course—how could she cast even a glance over her own past without seeing him there, woven into its very texture? But he seemed to have receded to the plane of that past: from his torturing actual presence her new life had delivered her.... She pressed both hands against her eyes, as if to crush and disperse the image stealthily forming; then she rose and went into her bedroom, where, a moment before, she had heard Aline laying out her dress.
The maid had finished and gone; the bedroom was empty. The change of scene, the mere passage from one room to another, the sight of the evening dressand opera-cloak on the bed, and of Beatrice Cenci looking down on them through her perpetual sniffle, sufficed to recall Kate to the present. She turned to the dressing-table, and noticed a box which had been placed before her mirror. It was of ebony and citron-wood, embossed with agates and cornelians, and heavily clasped with chiselled silver; and from the summit of the lid a silver Cupid bent his shaft at her.
Kate broke into a faint laugh. How well she remembered that box! She did not have to lift the lid to see its padded trays and tufted sky-blue satin lining! It was old Mrs. Clephane’s jewel-box, and on Kate’s marriage the dowager had solemnly handed it over to her daughter-in-law with all that it contained.
“I wonder where Anne found it?” Kate conjectured, amused by the sight of one more odd survival in that museum of the past which John Clephane’s house had become. A little key hung on one of the handles, and she put it in the lock, and saw all her jewels lying before her. On a slip of paper Anne had written: “Darling, these belong to you. Please wear some of them tonight....”
As she entered the opera box Kate Clephane felt as if the great central chandelier were raying all its shafts upon her, as if she were somehow caught up into and bound on the wheel of its devouring blaze. But only for a moment—after that it seemed perfectlynatural to be sitting there with her daughter and Nollie Tresselton, backed by the usual cluster of white waistcoats. After all, in this new existence it was Anne who mattered, not Anne’s mother; instantly, after the first plunge, Mrs. Clephane felt herself merged in the blessed anonymity of motherhood. She had never before understood how exposed and defenceless her poor unsupported personality had been through all the lonely years. Her eyes rested on Anne with a new tenderness; the glance crossed Nollie Tresselton’s, and the two triumphed in their shared admiration. “Oh, there’s no one like Anne,” their four eyes told each other.
Anne looked round and intercepted the exchange. Her eyes smiled too, and turned with a childish pleasure to the pearls hanging down over her mother’s black dress.
“Isn’t she beautiful, Nollie?”
Young Mrs. Tresselton laughed. “You two were made for each other,” she said.
Mrs. Clephane closed her lids for an instant; she wanted to drop a curtain between herself and the stir and brightness, and to keep in her eyes the look of Anne’s as they fell on the pearls. The episode of the jewels had moved the mother strangely. It had brought Anne closer than a hundred confidences or endearments. As Kate sat there in the dark, she saw, detached against the blackness of her closedlids, a child stumbling with unsteady steps across a windy beach, a funny flushed child with sand in her hair and in the creases of her fat legs, who clutched to her breast something she was bringing to her mother. “It’s for mummy,” she said solemnly, opening her pink palms on a dead star-fish. Kate saw again the child’s rapturous look, and felt the throb of catching her up, star-fish and all, and devouring with kisses the rosy body and tousled head.
In themselves the jewels were nothing. If Anne had handed her a bit of coal—or another dead star-fish—with that look and that intention, the gift would have seemed as priceless. Probably it would have been impossible to convey to Anne how indifferent her mother had grown to the Clephane jewels. In her other life—that confused intermediate life which now seemed so much more remote than the day when the little girl had given her the star-fish—jewels, she supposed, might have pleased her, as pretty clothes had, or flowers, or anything that flattered the eye. Yet she could never remember having regretted John Clephane’s jewels; and now they would have filled her with disgust, with abhorrence almost, had they not, in the interval, become Anne’s.... It was the girl who gave them their beauty, made them exquisite to the mother’s sight and touch, as though they had been a part of her daughter’s loveliness, the expression of something she could not speak.
Mrs. Clephane suddenly exclaimed to herself: “I am rewarded!” It was a queer, almost blasphemous, fancy—but it came to her so. She was rewarded for having given up her daughter; if she had not, could she ever have known such a moment as this? She had been too careless and impetuous in her own youth to be worthy to form and guide this rare creature; and while she seemed to be rushing blindly to her destruction, Providence had saved the best part of her in saving Anne. All these scrupulous self-controlled people—Enid and Hendrik Drover, Fred Landers, even the arch enemy, old Mrs. Clephane—had taken up the task she had flung aside, and carried it out as she could never have done. And she had somehow run the mad course allotted to her, and come out of it sane and sound, to find them all waiting there to give her back her daughter. It was incredible, but there it was. She bowed her head in self-abasement.
The box door was opening and shutting softly, on the stage voices and instruments soared and fell. She did not know how long she sat there in a kind of brooding rapture. But presently she was roused by hearing a different voice at her elbow. She half opened her eyes, and saw a newcomer sitting by Anne. It was one of the young men who came to the house; his fresh blunt face was as inexpressive as a football; he might have been made by a manufacturer of sporting-goods.
“—in the box over there; but he’s gone now; bolted. Said he was too shy to come over and speak to you. Give you my word, he’s got it bad; we couldn’t get him off the subject.”
“Shy?” Anne murmured ironically.
“That’s what he said. Said he’s never had the microbe before. Anyhow, he’s bolted off home. Says he don’t know when he’ll come back to New York.”
Kate Clephane, watching her daughter through narrowed lids, perceived a subtle change in her face. Anne did not blush—that close-textured skin of hers seldom revealed the motions of her blood. Her delicate profile remained shut, immovable; she merely lowered her lids as if to keep in a vision. It was Kate’s own gesture, and the mother recognized it with a start. She had been right, then; there was some one—some one whom Anne had to close her eyes to see! But who was he? Why had he been too shy to come to the box? Where did he come from, and whither had he fled?
Kate glanced at Nollie Tresselton, wondering if she had overheard; but Nollie, in the far corner of the box, leaned forward, deep in the music. Joe Tresselton had vanished, Landers slumbered in the rear. With a little tremor of satisfaction, Kate saw that she had her daughter’s secret to herself: if there was no one to enlighten her about it at least there was no one to share it with her, and she wasglad. For the first time she felt a little nearer to Anne than all the others.
“It’s odd,” she thought, “I always knew it would be some one from a distance.” But there are no real distances nowadays, and she reflected with an inward smile that the fugitive would doubtless soon reappear, and her curiosity be satisfied.
That evening, when Anne followed her into her bedroom, Mrs. Clephane opened the wardrobe in which she had placed the jewel-box. “Here, my dear; you shall choose one thing for me to wear. But I want you to take back all the rest.”
The girl’s face clouded. “You won’t keep them, then? But they’re all yours!”
“Even if they were, I shouldn’t want them any longer. But they’re not, they’re only a trust—” she paused, half smiling—“a trust till your wedding.”
She had tried to say the word lightly, but it echoed on through the silence like a peal of silver bells.
“Oh, my wedding! But I shall never marry,” said Anne, laughing joyously, and catching her mother in her arms. It was the first time she had made so impulsive a movement; Kate Clephane, trembling a little, held her close.
It brought the girl nearer, made her less aloof, to hear that familiar old denial. “Some day before long,” the mother thought, “she’ll tell me who he is.”