XI.
THERE was something so established and reassuring in the mere look of Enid Drover’s drawing-room that Kate Clephane, waiting there that afternoon for her sister-in-law to come in, felt a distinct renewal of confidence.
The house was old Mrs. Clephane’s wedding gift to her daughter, and everything in it had obviously been selected by some one whose first thought concerning any work of art was to ask if it would chip or fade. Nothing in the solid and costly drawing-room had chipped or faded; it had retained something of Enid’s invulnerable youthfulness, and, like herself, had looked as primly old-fashioned in its first bloom as in its well-kept maturity.
It was odd that so stable a setting should have produced that hurricane of a Lilla; and Kate smiled at the thought of the satisfaction with which the very armchairs, in their cushioned permanence, would welcome her back to domesticity.
But Mrs. Drover, when she appeared, took it on a higher plane. Had Lilla ever been unstable, or in any way failed to excel? If so, her mother, and her mother’s background, showed no signs of remembering.The armchairs stood there stolidly, as if asking what you meant by such ideas. Enid was a little troubled—she confessed—by the fact that Horace Maclew was a widower, and so much older than her child. “I’m not sure if such a difference of age is not always a risk.... But then Mr. Maclew is a man of such strong character, and has behaved so generously.... There will be such opportunities for doing good....”
Opportunities for doing good! It was on the tip of Kate’s tongue to say: “Ah, that must have been Lilla’s reason for accepting him!”; but Mrs. Drover was serenely continuing: “He has given her all the pearls already. She’s bringing them back tomorrow to be restrung.” And Kate understood that, for the present, the opportunities for doing good lay rather with the bridegroom than the bride.
“Of course,” Mrs. Drover went on, “it will be a great sacrifice for her father and me to let her go; though luckily Baltimore is not far off. And it will be a serious kind of life; a life full of responsibilities. Hendrik is afraid that, just at first, Lilla may miss the excitements of New York; but I think I know my child better. When Lilla isreally happyno one cares less than she does for excitement.”
The phrase gave Kate’s nerves a sudden twist. It was just what Chris used to say when she urged him to settle down to his painting—at least on the days when he didn’t say that excitement was necessaryto the artist.... She looked at her sister-in-law’s impenetrable pinkness, and thought: “It might be Mrs. Minity speaking.”
Fred Landers had telephoned that he had got back and was coming to dine; she fancied he had it on his mind not to let her feel her solitude while Anne was away; and she said to herself that from him at least she would get a glimpse of the truth.
Fred Landers, as became a friend of the family, was also beaming; but he called Lilla’s engagement a “solution” and not a “sacrifice”; and this made it easier for Kate at last to put her question: “How did it happen?”
He leaned back, pulling placidly at his after-dinner cigar, his old-fashioned square-toed pumps comfortably stretched to the fire; and for an instant Kate thought: “It might be pleasant to have him in that armchair every evening.” It was the first time such a possibility had occurred to her.
“How did she pull it off, you mean?” He screwed up his friendly blue eyes in a confidential grin. “Well, I’m naturally not initiated; but I suppose in one of the good old ways, Lilla probably knows most of the tricks—and I rather think Nollie Tresselton’s been aiding and abetting her. It’s been going on for the last six months, I know, and a shooting-box in South Carolina is mixed up with it. Of course they all have a theory that Lilla need only be happy to be good.”
“And what do you think about it?”
He shrugged. “Why, I think it’s an experiment for which Maclew is to furnish thecorpus vile. But he’s a thick-skinned subject, and it may not hurt him much, and may help Lilla. We can only look on and hope.”
Kate sat pondering her next question. At length she said: “Was Mr. Maclew’s private secretary there?”
“That fellow Fenno? Yes; he was on duty.” She fancied he frowned a little.
“Why do you call him ‘that fellow’?”
He turned toward her, and she saw that his friendly brows were beetling. “Is it necessary to speak of him more respectfully? The fact is, I don’t fancy him—never did.”
“You knew him before, then?” She felt the blood creeping to her forehead, and reached out for a painted hand-screen that she might seem to hold between her eyes and the fire.
Landers reflected. “Oh, yes. I’ve run across him now and then. I rather fancy he’s been mixed up in this too; stirring the brew with the others. That’s my impression.”
“Yes.—I wonder why,” said Kate suddenly.
Landers smiled a little, though his brows continued to jut. “To please Anne, perhaps.”
“Anne—Anne?”
The name, after she had uttered it, continuedto ring on between them, and she leaned back, pressing the screen against her closed lids. “Why?” she managed to question.
“Well—a good many people have wanted to please Anne, first and last. I simply conjectured that Fenno might be among them.”
“Oh, no; I’m sure you’re quite wrong. I wonder—.” She hesitated, and then went on with a rush: “The fact is, I wonder you haven’t noticed that he and Lilla—”
Landers sat up and flung his cigar-end into the embers. “Fenno and Lilla? By Jove—you might be right. I hadn’t thought of it—”
“Well, I have; I’ve met them together; when they didn’t expect to be met—.” She hurried it out with a kind of violence. Her heart was beating to suffocation; she had to utter her suspicion, to give it life and substance.
“The idea sheds floods of light—no doubt of that. Poor Maclew! I’m beginning to be sorry for him. But I think the lot of them are capable of taking pretty good care of themselves. On the whole,” Landers added with a sudden sigh of relief, “I’m jolly glad it’s Lilla—if it’s anybody.”
“Iknowit’s Lilla.” Kate spoke with a passionate emphasis. She had to prove to some one that Chris was Lilla’s lover in order to believe it herself, and she had to believe it herself in order to dispel thedreadful supposition raised by Landers’s words. She found herself, now, able to smile away his suggestion quite easily, to understand that he had meant it only as a random joke. People in America were always making jokes of that kind, juvenile jokes about flirtations and engagements; they were the staple topic of the comic papers. But the shock of finding herself for a second over that abyss sent her stumbling back half-dazed to the safe footing of reality. If she were going to let her imagination run away at any chance word, what peace would there ever be for her?
The next day Nollie Tresselton reappeared, smiling and fresh, like a sick-nurse whose patient has “turned the corner”. With Lilla off her hands her keen boyish face had lost its expression of premature vigilance, and she looked positively rejuvenated. She was more outspoken than Landers.
“At last we can talk about it—thank goodness!” And she began. Horace Maclew and Lilla had met the previous autumn, duck-shooting in South Carolina. Lilla was a wonderful shot when she wasn’t ... well, when she was in training ... and Maclew, like most heavy solemn men of his type, who theoretically admire helpless feminine women, had been bowled over by the sight of this bold huntress, who damned up and down the birds she missed, smoked and drank with the men, and in the evening lay back silent, with lids half-dropped over smoulderingsullen eyes, and didn’t bore one with sporting chatter or sentimental airs. It had been a revelation, the traditional thunderbolt; only, once back in Baltimore, Maclew had been caught in the usual network of habits and associations; or perhaps other influences had intervened. No doubt, with a man like that, there would be a “settled attachment” in the background. Then Lilla, for a while, was more outrageous than ever, and when he came to New York to see her, dragged him to one of her rowdiest parties, and went away from it in the small hours with another man, leaving Maclew and his super-Rolls to find their way home uncompanioned. After that the suitor had vanished, and it had taken the combined efforts of all the family, and the family’s friends, to draw him back. (“And no one helped us more than Major Fenno,” Nollie added with a grateful sigh.)
The name, dropping suddenly into their talk, made Lilla and her wooer and all the other figures in the tale shrivel up like toy balloons. Kate Clephane felt her blood rising again; would she never be able to hear Chris mentioned without this rush of the pulses?
“He was so clever and tactful about it,” Nollie was going on. “And he reallybelievesin Lilla, just as I do. Otherwise, of course, he couldn’t have done what he did—when Horace Maclew has been such a friend to him. He believes she’ll keepstraight, and that they’ll be awfully happy. I fancy he knows a good deal about women, don’t you?”
“About women like Lilla, perhaps.” The words had flashed out before Kate even knew the thought had formed itself. It must have welled up from some depth of bitterness she had long thought dry.
Nollie’s eyes looked grieved. “Oh—you don’t like him?”
“I haven’t seen him for years,” Kate answered lifelessly.
“He admires you so much; he says he used to look up to you so when he was a boy. But I daresay he wasn’t half as interesting then; he says himself he was a sort of intellectual rolling stone, never sure of what he wanted to be or to do, and always hurting and offending people in his perpetual efforts to find himself. That’s how he puts it.”
Look up to her when he was a boy! Yes; that’s how hewouldput it. And the rest too; how often she had heard that old analogy of the rolling stone and its victims!
“I think the war transformed him; made a man of him. He says so himself. And now he believes he’s really found his vocation; he doesn’t think of anything but his writing, and some of his poetry seems to me very beautiful. I’m only sorry,” Nollie continued thoughtfully, “that he feels obliged togive up his present job. It seems a pity, when he has so little money, and has been looking so long for a post of the sort—”
“Ah ... he’s giving it up?”
“Well, yes; he says he must have more mental elbow-room; for his writing, I mean. He can’t be tied down to hours and places.”
“Ah, no; he never could—” Again the words had nearly slipped out. The effort to suppress them left Kate dumb for a moment, though she felt that Nollie was waiting for her to speak.
“Then of course he must go,” she assented. Inwardly she was thinking: “After all, if I’m right—and this seems to prove I’m right—about him and Lilla, it’s only decent of him to give up his job.” And her eyes suddenly filled with tears at the thought of his making a sacrifice, behaving at a crucial moment as her old ideal of him would have had him behave. After all, he was perhaps right in saying that the war had made a man of him.
“Yes; but it’s a pity. And not only for him, I mean. I think he had a good influence on Lilla,” Nollie went on.
Ah, now, really they were too simple—even Nollie was! Kate could hardly keep from shouting it out at her: “But can’t you see, you simpleton, that they’re lovers, the two of them, and have cooked up this match for their own convenience, and thatyour stupid Maclew is their dupe, as all the rest of you are?”
But something in her—was it pride or prudence?—recoiled from such an outburst, and from the need of justifying it. In God’s name, what did it matter to her—what did it matter? The risk was removed, the dreadful risk; she was safe again—as safe as she would ever be—unless some suicidal madness drove her to self-betrayal.
With dry lips and an aching smile she said: “You must help me to choose my wedding-present for Lilla.”