X.
AFTER all, she was not going to be able to question Anne about Lilla. As she faced the situation the next day—as she faced the new Chris in her path—Kate Clephane saw the impossibility of using him as a key to her daughter’s confidence. There was one thing much closer to her now than any conceivable act of Chris’s could ever be; and that was her own relation to Anne. She simply could not talk to Anne about Chris—not yet. It was not that she regarded that episode in her life as a thing to be in itself ashamed of. She was not going, even now, to deny or disown it; she wanted only to deny and disown Chris. Quite conceivably, she might have said to her daughter: “Yes, I loved once—and the man I loved was not your father.” But to say it about Chris! To see the slow look of wonder in those inscrutable depths of Anne’s eyes: a look that said, not “I blame you”, or even “I disapprove you”, but, so much more scathingly, just: “You, mother—andChris?”
Yes; that was it. It was necessary for her pride and dignity, for her moral safety almost, that what people like Enid Drover would have called her“past” should remain unidentified, unembodied—or at least not embodied in Chris Fenno. Yet to know—to know!
There were, of course, other sources of enlightenment; if there were anything in her theory of a love-affair between Lilla and Chris, the family were probably not unaware of it. Kate had the sense that they never had their eyes off Lilla for long. But it was all very well to plan to talk to them—the question remained, how to begin? Before trying to find out about Lilla she would first have to find out about them. What did she know of any one of them? Nothing more, she now understood, than their glazed and impenetrable surfaces.
She was still a guest among them; she was a guest even in her daughter’s house. It was the character she had herself chosen; in her dread of seeming to assert rights she had forfeited, to thrust herself into a place she had deserted, she had perhaps erred in the other sense, held back too much, been too readily content with the easy part of the week-end visitor.
Well—it had all grown out of the other choice she had made when, years ago, she had said: “Thy gods shallnotbe my gods.” And now she but dimly guessed who their gods were. At the moment when her very life depended on her knowing their passwords, holding the clue to their labyrinth, she stoodoutside the mysterious circle and vainly groped for a way in.
Nollie Tresselton, of course, could have put the clue in her hand; but to speak to Nollie was too nearly like speaking to Anne. Not that Nollie would betray a confidence; but to be divined and judged by her would be almost as searing an experience as being divined and judged by Anne. And so Kate Clephane continued to sit there between them, hugging her new self in her anxious arms, turning its smooth face toward them, and furtively regulating its non-committal gestures and the sounds that issued from its lips.
Only the long nights of dreamless sleep were gone; and her heart stood still each time she slipped the key into the studio door.
“Mother, Uncle Fred wants to take us to Baltimore next week to see the Maclew library; you and Lilla and me.”
Anne threw it over her shoulder as she stood before her easel, frowning and narrowing her lips at the difficulty of a branch of red pyrus japonica in a brass pot, haloed with the light of the sunlit window.
Kate, behind her, was leaning back indolently in a deep wicker armchair. She started, and echoed in a blank voice: “Next week?”
“Well, you see, I’ve promised to spend a few daysin Washington with Madge Glenver, who has taken a house at Rock Creek for the spring. This is just the moment for the magnolias; and I thought we might stop at Baltimore on the way, and Uncle Fred could bring you and Lilla back from there.”
It sounded perfectly simple and sensible; Anne spoke of it in her usual matter-of-course tone. Her mother tried for the same intonation in answering, with a faint touch of surprise: “Lilla too?”
Anne turned around completely and smiled. “Oh, Lilla particularly! You mustn’t speak of it yet, please—not even to Aunt Enid—but there’s a chance ... a chance of Lilla’s marrying.”
Kate’s heart gave a great bound of relief or resentment—which? Why, relief, she instantly assured herself. She had been right then—that was the key to the mystery! And why not? After all, what did it matter to her? Had she, Kate, ever imagined that Chris’s love-affairs would cease when she passed from his life? Wasn’t it most probably in pursuit of a new one that he had left her? To think so had been, at any rate, in spite of the torturing images evoked, more bearable than believing he had gone because he was tired of her. For years, as she now saw, she had been sustained by her belief in that “other woman”; only, that she should take shape in Lilla was unbelievably humiliating.
Anne continued to smile softly down on her mother. In her smile there was something veiledand tender, as faint as sunlight refracted from water—a radiance striking up from those mysterious depths that Kate had never yet reached. “We should all be so glad if it happened,” the girl continued; and Kate said to herself: “What she’s really thinking of when she smiles in that way is her own marriage....” She remembered the cryptic allusion of the football-faced youth at the Opera, and the way those vigilant lids of Anne’s had shut down on her vision.
“Of course—poor Lilla!” Mrs. Clephane absently assented. Inwardly she was saying to herself that it would be impossible for her to go to Baltimore on that particular errand. Chris and Lilla—Chris and Lilla! The coupled names began again to jangle maddeningly through her brain. She stood up and moved away to the window. No, she couldn’t!
“Next week, dear? It doesn’t matter—but I think you’ll have to go without me.” She spoke from the window, without turning her head toward her daughter, who had gone back to the easel.
“Oh—.” There was distinct disappointment in Anne’s voice.
“The fact is I’ve made two or three dinner engagements; I don’t think I can very well break them, do you? People have been so awfully kind—all my old friends,” Kate stammered, while the“couldn’t, couldn’t” kept booming on in her ears. “Besides,” she added, “why not take Nollie instead? A young party will be more amusing for Mr. Maclew.”
Anne laughed. “Oh, I don’t believe he’ll notice Nollie and me,” she said with a gay significance; but added at once: “Of course you must do exactly as you please. That’s the foundation of our agreement, isn’t it?”
“Our agreement?”
“To be the two most perfect pals that ever were.”
Mrs. Clephane sprang up impulsively and moved toward her daughter. “Wearethat, aren’t we, Anne?”
Anne’s lips dropped; she nodded, screwed her mouth up, and opened her other eyes—her painter’s eyes—on the branch of pyrus with its coral-like studding of red cups. “From the very first,” she agreed.
The young party went, Fred Landers beaming in attendance. The family thought it a pity that Mrs. Clephane should miss such a chance, for Horace Maclew was chary of exhibiting his books. But there was something absent-minded and perfunctory in the tone of these regrets; Kate could see that the family interest was passionately centred in Lilla. And she felt, more and more, that in the circumstances she herself was better out of the way. For, at the last moment, the party had been invited to stay atHorace Maclew’s; and to have assisted, in an almost official capacity, at the betrothal of Chris and Lilla, with all the solemnity and champagne likely to ensue in such a setting, was more than her newly healed nerves could have endured. It was easier to sit at home and wait, and try to prepare herself for this new and unbelievable situation. Chris and Lilla—!
It was on the third day that Aline, bringing in the breakfast-tray with a bunch of violets (Anne’s daily attention since she had been gone), produced also a telegram; as on that far-off morning, four months ago, when the girl’s first message had come to her mother with the same flowers.
Kate held the envelope for a moment before opening it, as she had done on that other occasion—but not because she wanted to prolong her illusion. This time there was no illusion in the thin envelope between her fingers; she could feel through it the hard knife-edge of reality. If she delayed she did so from cowardice. Chris and Lilla—
She tore open the envelope and read: “Engaged to Horace Maclew madly happy Lilla.”
The telegram fluttered to the floor, and Kate Clephane leaned back on her pillows, feeling a little light-headed.
“Is Madame not well?” Aline sharply questioned.
“Oh, yes; perfectly well. Perfectly well!” Kate repeated joyously. But she continued to lean back,staring vacantly ahead of her, till Aline admonished her, as she had done when the other message came, that the chocolate would be getting cold.
A respite—a respite. Oh, yes, it was at least a respite!