VI.
KATE CLEPHANE lay awake all night thinking of the man who had been too shy to come into the box.
Her sense of security, of permanence, was gone. She understood now that it had been based on the idea that her life would henceforth go on just as it had for the two months since her return; that she and Anne would always remain side by side. The idea was absurd, of course; if she followed it up, her mind recoiled from it. To keep Anne for the rest of her life unchanged, and undesirous of change—the aspiration was inconceivable. She wanted for her daughter the common human round, no more, but certainly no less. Only she did not want her to marry yet—not till they two had grown to know each other better, till Kate had had time to establish herself in her new life.
So she put it to herself; but she knew that what she felt was just an abject fear of change, more change—of being uprooted again, cast once more upon her own resources.
No! She could not picture herself living alone in a little house in New York, dependent on Drovers and Tresseltons, and on the good Fred Landers, forher moral sustenance. To be with Anne, to play the part of Anne’s mother—the one part, she now saw, that fate had meant her for—that was what she wanted with all her starved and world-worn soul. To be the background, the atmosphere, of her daughter’s life; to depend on Anne, to feel that Anne depended on her; it was the one perfect companionship she had ever known, the only close tie unmarred by dissimulation and distrust. The mere restfulness of it had made her contracted soul expand as if it were sinking into a deep warm bath.
Now the sense of restfulness was gone. From the moment when she had seen Anne’s lids drop on that secret vision, the mother had known that her days of quietude were over. Anne’s choice might be perfect; she, Kate Clephane, might live out the rest of her days in peace between Anne and Anne’s husband. But the mere possibility of a husband made everything incalculable again.
The morning brought better counsel. There was Anne herself, in her riding-habit, aglow from an early canter, and bringing in her mother’s breakfast, without a trace of mystery in her clear eyes. There was the day’s pleasant routine, easy and insidious, the planning and adjusting of engagements, notes to be answered, invitations to be sent out; the habitual took Mrs. Clephane into its soothing hold. “After all,” she reflected, “young men don’t run away nowadays from falling in love.” Probably thewhole thing had been some cryptic chaff of the youth with the football face; Nollie, indirectly, might enlighten her.
Indirectly; for it was clear to Kate that whatever she learned about her daughter must be learned through observing her, and not through questioning others. The mother could not picture herself as having any rights over the girl, as being, under that roof, anything more than a privileged guest. Anne’s very insistence on treating her as the mistress of the house only emphasized her sense of not being so by right: it was the verbal courtesy of the Spaniard who puts all his possessions at the disposal of a casual visitor.
Not that there was anything in Anne’s manner to suggest this; but that to Kate it seemed inherent in the situation. It was absurd to assume that her mere return to John Clephane’s house could invest her, in any one else’s eyes, and much less in her own, with the authority she had lost in leaving it; she would never have dreamed of behaving as if she thought so. Her task, she knew, was gradually, patiently, to win back, of all she had forfeited, the one thing she really valued: her daughter’s love and confidence. The love, in a measure, was hers already; could the confidence fail to follow?
Meanwhile, at any rate, she could be no more than the fondest of lookers-on, the discreetest of listeners; and for the moment she neither saw norheard anything to explain that secret tremor of Anne’s eyelids.
At the Joe Tresseltons’, a few nights later, she had hoped for a glimpse, a hint. Nollie had invited mother and daughter (with affectionate insistence on the mother’s presence) to a little evening party at which some one who was not Russian was to sing—for Nollie was original in everything. The Joe Tresseltons had managed to lend a freshly picturesque air to a dull old Tresselton house near Washington Square, of which the stable had become a studio, and other apartments suffered like transformations, without too much loss of character. It was typical of Nollie that she could give an appearance of stability to her modern furnishings, just as her modern manner kept its repose.
The party was easy and amusing, but even Lilla Gates (whom Nollie always included) took her tone from the mistress of the house, and, dressed with a kind of savage soberness, sat there in her heavy lustreless beauty, bored but triumphant. It was evident that, though at Nollie’s she was not in her element, she would not for the world have been left out.
Kate Clephane, while the music immobilized the groups scattered about the great shadowy room, found herself scanning them with a fresh intensity of attention. She no longer thought of herself as an object of curiosity to any of these careless self-engrossedyoung people; she had learned that a woman of her age, however conspicuous her past, and whatever her present claims to notice, is fated to pass unremarked in a society where youth so undisputedly rules. The discovery had come with a slight shock; then she blessed the anonymity which made observation so much easier.
Only—what was there to observe? Again the sameness of the American Face encompassed her with its innocent uniformity. How many of them it seemed to take to make up a single individuality! Most of them were like the miles and miles between two railway stations. She saw again, with gathering wonder, that one may be young and handsome and healthy and eager, and yet unable, out of such rich elements, to evolve a personality.
Her thoughts wandered back to the shabby faces peopling her former life. She knew every seam of their shabbiness, but now for the first time she seemed to see that they had been worn down by emotions and passions, however selfish, however sordid, and not merely by ice-water and dyspepsia.
“Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia,” she reflected, “they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.”
Landers came up as the thought flashed through her mind, and apparently caught its reflection in her smile.
“You look at me as if you’d never seen me before;is it because my tie’s crooked?” he asked, sitting down beside her.
“No; your tie is absolutely straight. So is everything else about you. That’s the reason I was looking at you in that way. I can’t get used to it!”
He reddened a little, as if unaccustomed to such insistent scrutiny. “Used to what?”
“The universal straightness. You’re all so young and—and so regular! I feel as if I were in a gallery of marble masterpieces.”
“As that can hardly apply to our features, I suppose it’s intended to describe our morals,” he said with a faint grimace.
“I don’t know—I wish I did! What I’m trying to do, of course,” she added abruptly and unguardedly, “is to guess how I should feel about all these young men—if I were Anne.”
She was vexed with herself that the words should have slipped out, and yet not altogether sorry. After all, one could always trust Landers to hold his tongue—and almost always to understand. His smile showed that he understood now.
“Of course you’re trying; we all are. But, as far as I know, Sister Anne hasn’t yet seen any one from her tower.”
A breath of relief expanded the mother’s heart.
“Ah, well, you’d be sure to know—especially as, when she does, it ought to be some one visible a long way off!”
“It ought to be, yes. The more so as she seems to be in no hurry.” He looked away. “But don’t build too much on that,” he added. “I learned long ago, in such matters, to expect only the unexpected.”
Kate Clephane glanced at him quickly; his ingenuous countenance wore an unaccustomed shadow. She remembered that, in old days, John Clephane had always jokingly declared—in a tone proclaiming the matter to be one mentionable only as a joke—that Fred Landers was in love with her; and she said to herself that the lesson her old friend referred to was perhaps the one she had unwittingly given him when she went away with another man.
It was on the tip of her tongue to exclaim: “Oh, but I didn’t know anything then—I wasn’t anybody! My real life, my only life, began years later—” but she checked herself with a start. Why, in the very act of thinking of her daughter, had she suddenly strayed away into thinking of Chris? It was the first time it had happened to her to confront the two images, and she felt as if she had committed a sort of profanation.
She took refuge in another thought that Landers’s last words had suggested—the thought that if she herself had matured late, why so might Anne. The idea was faintly reassuring.
“No; I won’t build on any theory,” she said, answering him. “But one can’t help hoping she’llwait till some one turns up good enough for what she’s going to be.”
“Oh, these mothers!” he laughed, his face smoothing out into its usual guileless lines.
The music was over. The groups flowed past them toward the little tables in another picturesque room, and Lilla Gates swept by in a cluster of guffawing youths. She seemed to have attracted all the kindred spirits in the room, and her sluggish stare was shot with provocation. Ah, there was another mystery! No one explained Lilla—every one seemed to take her for granted. Not that it really mattered; Kate had seen enough of Anne to feel sure she would never be in danger of falling under Lilla’s influence. The perils in wait for her would wear a subtler form. But, as a matter of curiosity, and a possible light on the new America, Kate would have liked to know why her husband’s niece—surprising offshoot of the prudent Clephanes and stolid Drovers—had been singled out, in this new easy-going society, to be at once reproved and countenanced. Lilla in herself was too uninteresting to stimulate curiosity; but as a symptom she might prove enlightening. Only, here again, Kate had the sense that she, of all the world, was least in a position to ask questions. What if people should turn around and ask them abouther? Since she had been living under her old roof, and at her daughter’s side, the mere suggestion made hertremble. It was curious—and she herself was aware of it—how quickly, unconsciously almost, she had slipped at last into the very attitude the Clephanes had so long tried to force upon her: the attitude of caution and conservatism.
Her glance, in following Lilla, caught Fred Landers’s, and he smiled again, but with a slight constraint. Instantly she thought: “He’d like to tell me her whole story, but he doesn’t dare, because very likely it began like my own. And it will always go on being like that: whatever I’m afraid to ask they’ll be equally afraid to tell.” Well, that was what people called “starting with a clean slate”, she supposed; would no one ever again scribble anything unguardedly on hers? She felt indescribably alone.
On the way home the mere feeling of Anne’s arm against hers drew her out of her solitariness. After all, she had only to wait. The new life was but a few weeks old; and already Anne’s nearness seemed to fill it. If only she could keep Anne near enough!
“Did you like it, mother? How do we all strike you, I wonder?” the girl asked suddenly.
“As kinder than anything I ever dreamed.”
She thought she felt Anne’s surprised glance in the darkness. “Oh,that! But why not? It’s you who must try to be kind to us. I feel as if we must be so hard to tell apart. In Europe there are morecontrasts, I suppose. I saw Uncle Fred helping you to sort us out this evening.”
“You mean you caught me staring? I daresay I do. I want so much not to miss anything ... anything that’s a part of your life....” Her voice shook with the avowal.
She was answered by a closer pressure. “You wonderful mother! I don’t believe you ever will.” She was conscious in Anne, mysteriously, of a tension answering her own. “Isn’t it splendid to be two to talk things over?” the girl said joyously.
“What things?” Kate Clephane thought; but dared not speak. Her hand on Anne’s, she sat silent, feeling her child’s heart tremble nearer.