XXIII.
EXTREME exhaustion—the sense of having reached the last limit of endurable emotion—plunged Kate Clephane, that night, into a dreamless sleep. It was months and months since she had reached those nethermost levels below sound or image or any mental movement; and she rose from them revived, renewed—and then suddenly understood that they had been only a grief-drugged mockery.
The return to reality was as painful as that of a traveller who has fallen asleep in the snow. One by one she had to readjust all her frozen faculties to the unchanged and intolerable situation; and she felt weaker, less able to contend with it. The thought that that very day she might have to face Chris Fenno paralyzed her. He had asked to see her alone—and she lay there, in the desolate dawn, rehearsing to herself all the cruel things he would find to say; for his ways of being cruel were innumerable. The day before she had felt almost light-heartedly confident of being able to outface, to outlast him; of her power of making the situation even more intolerable to him than he could make it to her. Now, in the merciless morning light, shehad a new view of their respective situations. Who had suffered most the previous evening, he or she? Whose wakening that morning was most oppressed by fears? He had proposed to have a talk with her; he had had the courage to do that; and she felt that by having that courage he had already gained another point in their silent struggle.
Slowly the days dragged by; their hours were filled, for mother and daughter, by the crowding obligations and preoccupations natural to such times. Mrs. Clephane was helping her daughter with the wedding preparations; a spectacle to charm and edify the rest of the family.
Chris Fenno, two or three days after the announcement of the engagement, had returned to Baltimore, where he had accepted a temporary job on a newspaper, and where he had that, and other matters, to wind up before his marriage. During his stay in New York, Mrs. Clephane had had but two or three brief glimpses of him, and always in the presence of others. It was natural that he should wish to devote the greater part of his time to his betrothed. He and Anne went off in the early afternoon, and when they returned were, on each evening, engaged to dine with some member of the family. It was easy for Mrs. Clephane to excuse herself from these entertainments. The fact of her having presided at the dinner at which the engagement was announced had sealed it with her approval;and at the little dinners organized by Nollie Tresselton and the other cousins her presence was hardly expected, and readily dispensed with.
All this fitted in with the new times. The old days of introspections and explanations were over; the era of taking things for granted was the only one that Anne’s generation knew, and in that respect Anne was of her day.
After the betrothal dinner she had said a tender goodnight to her mother, and the next evening, as she rushed up to dress after her long outing with Chris, had stopped at Kate’s door to wave a loving hand and call out: “He says you’ve been so perfect to him—” That was all. Kate Clephane’s own memories told her that to some natures happiness comes like a huge landslide burying all the past and spreading a fresh surface to life’s sowings: and it was from herself, she reflected, that Anne had inherited her capacity for such all-obliterating bliss.
The days passed, and Chris Fenno at length came back. He was staying with the Joe Tresseltons, and there was a constant coming and going of the young people between the two houses. Opportunities were not lacking to see Mrs. Clephane in private, and for the first days after his return she waited in numb terror for the inevitable, the incalculable moment. But it did not come; and gradually she understood that it never would. His little speech hadbeen a mere formula; he had nothing to say to her; no desire was farther from him than the wish to speak with her alone. What she had dreaded past expression, but supposed to be inevitable, he had probably never even seriously considered. Explanations? What was the use of explanations? He had gained his point; the thing now was to live at peace with everybody.
She saw that all her calculations had been mistaken. She had fancied that her tactics would render his situation intolerable; that if only she could bear to spend a few weeks in his presence she would demonstrate to him the impossibility of his spending the rest of his life in hers. But his reasoning reached a good deal farther, and embraced certain essential elements in human nature that hers had left out. He had said to himself—she was sure of it now—: “The next few weeks will be pretty bad, but after that I’ll have the upper hand.” He had only to hold out till the wedding; after that she would be a mere mother-in-law, and mothers-in-law are not a serious problem in modern life. How could she ever have imagined that he would not see through her game and out-manœuvre her, when he had done it so often before, and when his whole future depended on his doing it just once more? She felt herself beaten at every point.
Unless—unless she told the truth to Anne. Every day was making that impossible thing more impossible;yet every day was bringing them nearer to the day when not to do so—if all other measures failed—would be most impossible of all. She seemed to have reached that moment when, one morning, Anne came into her room and caught her by the hand.
“Dearest—you’ve got to come with me this very minute.”
Kate, yielding to the girl’s hand, was drawn along the corridor to her bedroom. There, on the bed, in a dazzle of whiteness, lay the wedding-dress.
“Will you help me to try it on?” Anne asked.
Kate Clephane rang the Rectory bell and found herself in the Rectory sitting-room. As she sat there, among photogravures of Botticelli Virgins and etchings of English cathedrals, she could not immediately remember why she had come, and looked with a kind of detached curiosity at the volumes of memoirs and sermons on the table at her elbow, at the perpendicular Gothic chairs against the wall, and the Morris armchairs which had superseded them. She had not been in a rectory sitting-room since the committee meeting at the Merrimans’, on the day when she had received Anne’s cable.
Her lapse of memory lasted only for a few seconds, but during that time she relived with intensity the sensations of that other day, she felt her happyheart dancing against the message folded under her dress, she saw the southern sun gilding the dull faces about the table, and smelt the violets and mimosa in Mrs. Merriman’s vases. She woke again to the present just as an austere parlour-maid was requesting her to step this way.
Dr. Arklow’s study was full of books, of signed photographs of Church dignitaries, of more English cathedrals, of worn leather armchairs and scattered pipes and tobacco-pouches. The Rector himself, on the hearth, loomed before her at once bland and formidable. He had guessed, of course, that she had come to talk about the date and hour of the wedding, and all the formulas incidental to such visits fell from his large benevolent lips. The visit really passed off more easily than she had expected, and she was on her feet again and feeling him behind her like a gentle trade-wind accustomed to waft a succession of visitors to the door, when she stopped abruptly and faced him.
“Dr. Arklow—”
He waited benevolently.
“There’s something else—a case I’ve always wanted to put to you....”
“Dear Mrs. Clephane—do put it now.” He was waving her back into her armchair; but she stood before him, unconscious of the gesture.
“It’s about a friend of mine—”
“Yes: a friend? Do sit down.”
She sat down, still unaware of her movements or his.
“A most unhappy woman.... I told her I would ask ... ask what could be done.... She had an idea that you could tell her....”
He bowed expectantly.
Her parched lips brought out: “Of course it’s confidential,” and his gesture replied that communications, in that room, were always held to be so. “Whatever I can do—” he added.
“Yes. My friend thought—her position is really desperate.” She stopped, her voice failing her; then the words came forth in panting jerks. “She was most unhappily married ... things went against her—everything did. She tried ... tried her best.... Then she met him ... it was too difficult.... He was her lover; only for a short time. After that her life was perfectly ... was all it should be. She never saw him—oh, for years. Now her daughter wants to marry him....”
“Marry him?The same man?” The Rector’s voice swelled above her like a wave; his presence towered, blurred and gigantic. She felt the tears in her throat; but again she was seized by the besetting desire that her secret should not be guessed, and a desperate effort at self-control drove the tears back and cleared her voice.
Dr. Arklow still loomed and brooded. “And the man—”
A slow flush of agony rose to her forehead; but she remembered that she was seated with her back to the light, and took courage. “He—he is determined.” She paused, and then went on: “It’s too horrible. But at first he didn’t know ... when he first met the girl. Neither of them knew. And when he found out—”
“Yes?”
“Then—it was too late, he said. The girl doesn’t know even now; she doesn’t dream; and she’s grown to care—care desperately.”
“That’s his defence?”
Her voice failed her again, and she signed her assent.
There was another long pause. She sat motionless, looking down at her own interlocked hands. She felt that Dr. Arklow was uneasily pacing the hearth-rug; at last she was aware that he was once more standing before her.
“The lady you speak of—your friend—is she here?”
She started. “Here?”
“In New York, I mean?”
“No; no; she’s not here,” Kate cried precipitately. “That’s the reason why I offered to come—”
“I see.” She thought she caught a faint note of relief in his voice. “She wished you to consult me?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s done everything—everything, of course, to stop this abomination?”
“Oh, everything ... everything.”
“Except to tell her daughter?”
She made another sign of assent.
Dr. Arklow cleared his throat, and declared with emphasis: “It is her duty to tell her daughter.”
“Yes,” Kate Clephane faltered. She got to her feet and looked about her blindly for the door.
“She must tell her daughter,” the Rector repeated with rising vehemence. “Such a shocking situation must be avoided; avoided at all costs.”
“Yes,” she repeated. She was on the threshold now; automatically she held out her hand.
“Unless,” the Rector continued uncertainly, his eyes upon her, “she is absolutely convinced that less harm will come to all concerned if she has the courage to keep silence—always.” There was a pause. “As far as I can see into the blackness of it,” he went on, gaining firmness, “the whole problem turns on that. I may be mistaken; perhaps I am. But when a man has looked for thirty or forty years into pretty nearly every phase of human suffering and error, as men of my cloth have to do, he comes to see that there must be adjustments ... adjustments in the balance of evil. Compromises, politicians would call them. Well, I’m not afraid of the word.” He stood leaning against the jambof the door; her hand was on the doorknob, and she listened with lowered head.
“The thing in the world I’m most afraid of is sterile pain,” he said after a moment. “I should never want any one to be the cause of that.”
She lifted her eyes with an effort, and saw in his face the same look of understanding she had caught there for a moment while she talked with him at the Drovers’ after dinner.
“Sterile pain—” she murmured. She had crossed the threshold now; she felt that he was holding out his hand. His face once more wore the expression of worldly benevolence that was as much the badge of his profession as his dress. After all, she perceived, he was glad that she had said nothing more definite, glad that their talk was safely over. Yet she had caught that other look.
“If your friend were here; if there were anything I could do for her, or say to her—anything to help—”
“Oh, she’s not here; she won’t be here,” Kate repeated.
“In that case—” Again she caught the relief in his voice.
“But I will tell her—tell her what you’ve said.” She was aware that they were shaking hands, and that he was averting his apprehensive eyes from hers. “For God’s sake,” the eyes seemed to entreat her, “let’s get through with this before you betrayyourself—if there’s anything further to betray.”
At the front door he bowed her out, repeating cordially: “And about a date for Anne’s wedding as soon as you and she are absolutely decided, remember I’m completely at your service.”
The door closed, and she found herself in the street.