XXII.
“MISS ANNE CLEPHANE weds War Hero. Announces engagement to Major Christopher Fenno, D.S.M., Chevalier of Legion of Honour.”
The headline glared at Kate Clephane from the first page of the paper she had absently picked up from the table of her sitting-room. She and Anne, that morning, had journeyed back from Long Island in Hendrik Drover’s motor, separated by his genial bulk, and shielded by it from the peril of private talk. On the day before—that aching endless Sunday—Anne, when with her mother, had steadily avoided the point at issue. She seemed too happy in their reunion to risk disturbing its first hours; perhaps, Kate thought, she was counting on the spell of that reunion to break down her mother’s opposition. But as they neared New York every mile brought them closer to the reality they were trying not to see; and here it was at last, deriding the mother from those hideous headlines. She heard Anne’s step behind her, and their glance crossed above the paragraph. A flush rose to the girl’s cheek, while her eyes hesitatingly questioned her mother.
The decisive moment in their struggle was at hand. Kate felt that everything depended on her holding fast to the line she had resolved to follow, and her voice sounded thin and small in the effort to steady it.
“Is Major Fenno in New York?”
“No. He went back to Baltimore on Saturday.” Anne wavered. “He’s waiting to hear from me ... before he comes.”
A hope leapt up in the mother’s breast, then sank its ineffectual wings. She glanced back slowly at the newspaper.
“This announcement was made with your permission?”
The unwonted colour still burned in the girl’s cheek. She made a motion of assent, and added, after another pause: “Uncle Hendrik and Aunt Enid thought it only fair.”
“Fair to Major Fenno?”
“Yes.”
The silence prolonged itself. At length the mother brought out: “But if you’ve announced your engagement he has a right to be with you.”
Anne looked at her almost timidly. “I wanted first ... we both wanted ... to feel that when he came you would ... would be ready to receive him.”
Kate Clephane turned away from her daughter’s eyes. The look in them was too intolerably sweetto her. Anne was imploring her approval—Anne could not bear to be happy without it. Yes; but she wanted her other happiness also; she wanted that more than anything else; she would not hesitate to sacrifice her mother to it if there were no other way.
All this rushed over Kate in a final flash of illumination. “I want you both!” Anne had said; but she wanted Chris Fenno infinitely the more.
“Dear—.” At her mother’s first syllable Anne was at her side again, beseechingly. Kate Clephane lifted her hands to the girl’s shoulders. “You’ve made your choice, dearest. When Major Fenno comes of course I will receive him.” Her lips felt dry and stiff as she uttered her prevarication. But all her old arts of casuistry had come back; what was the use of having practised them so long if they were not to serve her now? She let herself yield to Anne’s embrace.
That afternoon, as Mrs. Clephane sat alone upstairs, Fred Landers telephoned to ask if she would receive him. Anne was out, and her mother sent word that when Mr. Landers came he was to be shown up to her sitting-room. He entered it, presently, with outstretched hands and a smile of satisfaction.
“Well, it’s all settled, then? Thank God! You’ve done just the right thing; I knew you would.”
Her hand fell lifelessly into his; she could not answer.
He drew up an armchair to the little autumnal fire, and continued to contemplate her approvingly.
“I know how hard it must have been. But there was only one thing to be considered: Anne needs you!”
“She needs Major Fenno more.”
“Oh, well—that’s the law of life, isn’t it?” His tone seemed to say: “At any rate, it’s the one you obeyed in your own youth.” And again she found no answer.
She was conscious that the gaze he still fixed on her had passed from benevolence to wistfulness. “Do you still mind it so awfully?”
His question made her tears rise; but she was determined not to return upon the past. She had proved the uselessness of the attempt.
“Anne has announced her engagement. What more is there to say? You tell me she needs me; well, here I am with her.”
“And you don’t know how she appreciates it. She rang me up as soon as you got back this morning. She’s overcome by your generosity in going down to the Drovers’ after what had taken place between you—after her putting herself so completely in the wrong.” He paused again, as if weighing his next words. “You know I’m not any keenerthan you are about this marriage; but, my dear, I believe it had to be.”
“Had to be?”
His capacious forehead crimsoned with the effort to explain. “Well, Anne’s a young woman of considerable violence of feeling ... of ... of.... In short, there’s no knowing what she might have ended by doing if we’d all backed you up in opposing her. And I confess I didn’t feel sure enough of the young man to count on his not taking advantage of her ... her impetuosity, as it were, if he thought there was no other chance.... You understand?”
She understood. What he was trying to say was that, on the whole, given the girl’s self-will, and taking into account her ... well, her peculiar heredity ... taking into account, in fact, Kate Clephane herself ... the family had probably adopted the safest course in accepting the situation.
“Not that I mean to imply—of course not! Only the young people nowadays settle most questions for themselves, don’t they? And in this case ... Well, all’s well that ends well. We all know that some of the most successful marriages have had ... er ... rather risky preliminaries.”
Kate Clephane sat listening in a state of acquiescent lassitude. She felt as if she had been given a drug which had left her intelligence clear but paralyzed her will. What was the use of arguing,discussing, opposing? Later, of course, if everything else failed, Fred Landers was after all the person she would have to turn to, to whom her avowal would have to be made; but for the moment he was of no more use to her than any of the others. The game she had resolved to play must be played between herself and Chris Fenno; everything else was the vainest expenditure of breath.
“Youdoagree, don’t you?” she heard Landers rather nervously insisting; and: “Oh, I daresay you’re right,” she assented.
“And the great thing, you know, is that Anne shouldn’t lose you, or you lose Anne, because of this. All the rest will arrange itself somehow. Life generally does arrange things. And if it shouldn’t—”
He stood up rather awkwardly, and she was aware of his advancing toward her. His face had grown long and solemn, and his broad bulk seemed to have narrowed to the proportions of the lank youth suffused with blushes who had taken shelter behind his mother when old Mrs. Landers had offered a bridal banquet to the John Clephanes.
“If it doesn’t work out for you as we hope ... there’s my house ... that’s been waiting for you for ever so long ... though I shouldn’t ever have ventured to suggest it....”
“Oh—” she faltered out, the clutch of pain relaxing a little about her heart.
“Well, well,” her visitor stammered, rubbing his hands together deprecatingly, “I only suggest it as a sort of last expedient ... a forlorn hope....” His nervous laugh tried to give the words a humorous turn, but his eyes were still grave. Kate rose and put her hand in his.
“You’re awfully good to me,” was all she found to say. Inwardly she was thinking, with a fresh thrill of anguish: “And now I shall never be able to tell him—never!”
He had caught the note of dismissal in her voice, and was trying to gather up the scattered fragments of his self-possession. “Of course, at our age ...myage, I mean ... all that kind of thing is rather.... But there: I didn’t want you to feel there was no one you could turn to. That’s all. You won’t bear me a grudge, though? Now then; that’s all right. And you’ll see: this other business will shake down in time. Bound to, you know. I daresay the young man has merits that you and I don’t see. And you’ll let me go on dropping in as usual? After all, I’m Anne’s guardian!” he ended with his clumsy laugh.
“I shall want you more than ever, Fred,” Mrs. Clephane said simply.
The next evening, as she looked down the long dinner-table from her seat at its head, she was fantastically reminded of the first family dinnerover which she had presided after her marriage.
The background was the same; the faces were the same, or so like that they seemed merely rejuvenated issues of the same coinage. Hendrik Drover sat in his brother-in-law’s place; but even that change was not marked enough to disturb the illusion. Hendrik Drover’s heavy good-natured face belonged to the same type as John Clephane’s; one saw that the two had gone to the same schools and the same University, frequented the same clubs, fished the same salmon rivers; Hendrik Drover might have been the ghost of John Clephane revisiting the scene of his earthly trials in a mood softened by celestial influences. And as for herself—Kate Clephane—if she had conformed to the plan of life prepared for her, instead of turning from it and denying it, might she not reasonably have hoped to reappear on the scene in the form of Enid Drover?
These grotesque fancies had begun to weave their spirals through her brain only after a first impact had emptied it of everything else, swept it suddenly clear of all meaning and all reason. That moment had come when Chris Fenno had entered in the wake of the other guests; when she had heard his name announced like that of any other member of the family; had seen him advance across the interminable length of the room, all the lights in it converging upon him as she felt that all the eyes in it converged on her; when she had seen Anneat his side, felt her presence between them, heard the girl’s voice, imperious, beseeching: “Mother—here’s Chris,” and felt her hand drop into that other hand with the awful plunge that the heart makes when a sudden shock flings it from its seat.
She had lived through all that; she and he had faced each other; had exchanged greetings, she supposed; had even, perhaps, said something to each other about Anne, and about their future relation. She did not know what; she judged only, from the undisturbed faces about them, that there had been nothing alarming, nothing to scandalize or grieve; that it had all, to the tribal eye, passed off decently and what they called “suitably”. Her past training had served her—his boundless assurance had served him. It was what the French called “a moment to pass”; they had passed it. And in that mad world beyond the abyss, where she now found herself, here they all were with the old faces, saying the same old things with the same old complacency, eating their way through the same Clephane courses, expressing the same approval of the Clephane cellar (“It was Hendrik, you know, who advised John to lay down that ninety-five Clicquot,” she caught Enid Drover breathing across the bubbles to her son-in-law). It was all, in short, as natural and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she had become young again, with all her desolate andunavoidable life stretching away ahead of her to—this.
And, in the mad phantasmagoria, there was Chris himself, symbolizing what she had flown to in her wild escape; representing, in some horrible duality, at once her sin and its harvest, her flight and her return. At the thought, her brain began to spin again, and she saw her own youth embodied before her in Anne, with Anne’s uncompromising scorns and scruples, Anne’s confident forward-looking gaze.
“Ah, well,” she heard Hendrik Drover say as they rose from the table, “these occasions will come round from time to time in the best-regulated families, and I suppose we all feel—” while, at the other side of the table, Enid Drover, pink and melting from a last libation, sighed to Horace Maclew: “I only wish dear mother and John could have been here with us!” and Lilla, overhearing her, bracketed the observation in an ironic laugh.
It had all gone off wonderfully; thanks to Anne’s tact the meeting between her mother and her betrothed had been thickly swaddled in layer on layer of non-conducting, non-explosive “family”. A sense of mutual congratulation was in the air as the groups formed themselves again in the drawing-room. The girl herself moved from one to another, pale, vigilant, radiant; Chris Fenno, in a distant corner, was settled with coffee-cup and cigarette at Lilla Maclew’s side; Mrs. Clephanefound herself barricaded behind Hendrik Drover and one of the older Tresseltons. They were the very two men, she remembered, between whom she had spent her evening after that first family dinner in which this one was so hallucinatingly merged.
Not until the party was breaking up, and farewells filled the hall, did she suddenly find herself—she knew not how—isolated in the inner drawing-room with Chris Fenno. He stood there before her, and she seemed to hear his voice for the first time.
“I want to thank you....” He appeared to feel it was a bad beginning, and tried again. “Shan’t I have the chance, some day soon, of finding you—for a word or two, quietly?” he asked.
She faced him, erect and unflinching; she dragged her eyes up to his.
“A chance? But as soon as you like—as many chances as you like! You’ll always find me—I shall always be here. I’m never going to leave Anne,” she announced.
It had been almost worth the agony she had bought it with to see the look in his eyes when he heard that.