XXVII.
ONLY three days more now; for just three days more she and Anne would live under one roof.
And then?
The interrogation was not Anne’s. The news of Mrs. Clephane’s intended marriage had completely restored the girl’s serenity. Chris Fenno, detained in Baltimore by his mother’s sudden and somewhat alarming illness, had not yet reappeared; it seemed likely now that he would arrive in New York only the day before the wedding. Anne was to have her mother to herself to the last; and with every art of tenderness and dependence she tried to show her appreciation of these final days, sweet with the sweetness of dear things ending, yet without pain because they were not to precede a real separation. Her only anxiety—the alarm about Mrs. Fenno—had been allayed by a reassuring telegram, and she moved within that rainbow bubble that once or twice in life contrives to pass itself off as the real horizon.
The sight of her, Kate Clephane reasoned, ought to have been justification enough. Anything was worth doing or sacrificing to keep the bubble unbroken. And the last three days would pass—theDay itself would pass. The world, after it was over, would go on in the same old way. What was all the flurry about?
Mrs. Drover did not find it easy to maintain so detached an attitude. She, for one, could not conceive how her sister-in-law could remain so calm at such a moment.
“Of course Nellie’s wonderfully capable; she and Lilla have taken almost all the worry on their shoulders, haven’t they? I never could have struggled alone with that immense list of invitations. But still I don’t think you ought to assume thateverything’ssettled. After all, there are only three days left! And no one seems to have even begun to think who’s going to take you up the aisle....”
“Up the aisle?” Mrs. Clephane echoed blankly.
“Well, yes, my dear. Thereisan aisle at St. Stephen’s,” Enid Drover chirped with one of her rare attempts at irony. “And of course Hendrik must take up the bride, and you must be there, ready to receive her and give her away....”
“Give her away?”
“Hadn’t you thought of that either?” Mrs. Drover’s little laugh had a tinge of condescension. Though all the family had conspired to make Mrs. Clephane forget that she had lived for nearly twenty years outside the social pale, the fact remained; shehad. And it was on just such occasions as this thatshe betrayed it, somewhat embarrassingly to her sister-in-law. Not even to know that, when a bride’s father was dead, it was her mother who gave her away!
“You didn’t expect Hendrik to do it?” Mrs. Drover rippled on, half compassionate, half contemptuous. It was hard to understand how some people contrived to remain in ignorance of the most elementary rules of behaviour!
“Hendrik—well, why shouldn’t he?” Kate Clephane said.
Anne was passing through the room, a pile of belated presents in her arms.
“Do you hear, my dear? Your uncle Hendrik will be very much flattered.” Mrs. Drover’s little eyes grew sharp with the vision of Hendrik’s broad back and glossy collar playing the leading part in the ceremony. “The bride was given away by her uncle, Mr. Hendrik Drover, of—” It really would read very well.
“Flattered about what?” Anne paused to question.
“Your mother seems to think it’s your uncle who ought to give you away.”
“Not you, mother?” Kate Clephane caught the instant drop in the girl’s voice. Underneath her radiant security, what suspicion, what dread, still lingered?
“I’m so stupid, dear; I hadn’t realized it was the custom.”
“Don’t you want it to be?”
“I want what you want.” Their thin-edged smiles seemed to cross like blades.
“I want it to be you, mother.”
“Then of course, dear—”
Mrs. Drover heaved a faintly disappointed sigh. Hendrik would certainly have looked the part better. “Well,that’ssettled,” she said, in the tone of one who strikes one more item off an invisible list. “And now the question is, who’s to take your mother up the aisle?”
Anne and her mother were still exchanging smiles. “Why, Uncle Fred of course, isn’t he?” Anne cried.
“That’s the point. If your mother’s cousin comes from Meridia—”
Mrs. Clephane brushed aside the possible cousin from Meridia. “Fred shall take me up,” she declared; and Anne’s smile lost its nervous edge.
“Now, is there anything else left to settle?” the girl gaily challenged her aunt; and Mrs. Drover groaned back: “Anything else? But it seems as if we’d only just begun. If it weren’t for Nollie and Lilla I shouldn’t feel sure ofanybody’sbeing at the church when the time comes....”
The time had almost come: the sun had risen on the day before the wedding. It rose, mounted up in a serene heaven, bent its golden arch over an untroubled indifferent world, and stooped westward insplendid unawareness. The day, so full of outward bustle, of bell-ringing, telephone calls, rushings back and forth of friends, satellites and servants, had drooped to its close in the unnatural emptiness of such conclusions. Everything was done; every question was settled; every last order given; and Anne, with a kiss for her mother, had gone off with Nollie and Joe Tresselton for one of the crepuscular motor-dashes that clear the cobwebs from modern brains.
Anne had resolutely refused to have either bridesmaids or the conventional family dinner of the bridal eve. She wanted to strip the occasion of all its meaningless formalities, and Chris Fenno was of the same mind. He was to spend the evening alone with his parents at their hotel, and Anne had invited no one but Fred Landers to dine. She had warned her mother that she might be a little late in getting home, and had asked her, in view of Mr. Landers’s excessive punctuality, to be downstairs in time to receive and pacify him.
Mrs. Clephane had seen through the simple manœuvre, and had not resented it. After all, it would be the best opportunity to tell Fred Landers what she had decided to tell him. As she sat by the drawing-room fire listening for the door-bell she felt a curious sense of aloofness, almost of pacification. It might be only the quiet of exhaustion; she half-suspected it was, but she was too exhausted to feelsure. Yet one thing was clear to her; she had suffered less savagely since she had known that Dr. Arklow had guessed what she was suffering. The problem had been almost too difficult for him; but it was enough that he had perceived its difficulty, had seen that it was too deeply rooted in living fibres to be torn out without mortal hurt.
“Sterile pain ... I should never want any one to be the cause of sterile pain....” That phrase of his helped her even now; her mind clung fast to it as she sat waiting for Landers’s ring.
It came punctually, even sooner than the hour, as Anne had foreseen; and in another moment he was advancing across the room in his slow bulky way, with excuses for his early arrival.
“But I did it on purpose. I was sure Anne would be late—”
“Anne! She isn’t even in—”
“I knew it! They’re all a pack of vagabonds. And I hoped you’d be punctual,” he continued, letting himself down into an armchair as if he were lowering a bale of goods over the side of a ship. “After all, you and I belong to the punctual generation.”
She winced a little at being so definitely relegated to the rank where she belonged. Yes: he and she were nearly of an age. She remembered, in her newly-married precocity, thinking of him as a shy shambling boy, years younger than herself. Nowhe had the deliberate movements of the elderly, and though he shot, fished, played golf, and kept up the activities common to his age, his mind, in maturing, had grown heavier, and seemed to have communicated its prudent motions to his body. She shut her eyes for a second from the vision. Her own body still seemed so supple, free and imponderable. If it had not been for her looking-glass she would never have known she was more than twenty.
She glanced up at the clock; a quarter to eight. Very likely Anne would not be back for another half hour. How would the evening ever drag itself to an end?
They exchanged a few words about the wedding, but the topic was intolerable to Mrs. Clephane. She had managed to face the situation as a whole: to consider its details was still beyond her. Yet if she left that subject, just beyond it lay the question her companion was waiting to ask; and that alternative was intolerable too. She got up from her seat, moved aimlessly across the room, straightened a flower in a vase, put out a superfluous wall-light.
“That’s enough illumination—at our age,” she said, coming back to her seat.
“Oh—you!” He threw all his unspoken worship into the word. “With that hair of yours....”
“My hair—my hair!” Her hands went up to the rich mass as if she would have liked to tear it from her head. At that moment she hated it, as she dideverything else that mocked her with the barren illusion of youth.
Fred Landers had coloured to the edge of his own thin hair; no doubt he was afraid of her resenting even this expression of admiration. His embarrassment irritated yet touched her, and raising her eyes she looked into his.
“I never knew till the other day that it’s to you I owe the fact of being here,” she said.
He was evidently unprepared for this, and did not know whether to be distressed or gratified. His faint blush turned to crimson.
“To me?”
“Oh, well—I’m not sorry it should be,” she rejoined, her voice softening.
“But it’s all nonsense. Anne was determined to get you back.”
“Yes; because you told her she must. She owned up frankly. She said she wasn’t sure, at first, how the plan would work; but you were. You backed me for all you were worth.”
“Oh, if you mean that; of course I backed you. You see, she didn’t know you; and I did.”
She continued to look at him thoughtfully, almost tenderly. “Very few people have taken the trouble to care what became of me. And you hadn’t seen me for nearly twenty years.”
“No; but I remembered; and I knew you’d had a rotten bad start.”
“Lots of women have that, and nobody bothers. But you did; you remembered and you brought me here.”
She turned again, restlessly, and went and stood by the chimney-piece, resting her chin on her hand.
Landers smiled up at her, half deprecatingly. “If I did, don’t be too hard on me.”
“Why should I be? I’ve had over a year. As happiness goes, that’s a lifetime.”
“Don’t speak as if yours were over.”
“Oh, it’s been good enough to be worth while!”
He sat silent for a while, meditatively considering his honest boot-tips. At length he spoke again, in a tone of sudden authority, such as came into his voice when business matters were being discussed. “You mustn’t come back alone to this empty house.”
She looked slowly about her. “No; I never want to see this house again.”
“Where shall you go, then?”
“After tomorrow? There’s a steamer sailing for the Mediterranean the next day. I think I shall just go down and get on board.”
“Alone?”
She shed a sudden smile on him. “Will you come with me?”
At the question he sprang up out of his armchair with the headlong haste of a young man. The movement upset a little table at his elbow; but he let the table lie.
“By God, yes!” he shouted, reaching out to her with both hands.
She shrank back a little, not from reluctance but from a sense of paralyzing inadequacy. “It’s I who am old now,” she thought with a shiver.
“What—you really would come with me? The day after tomorrow?” she said.
“I’d come with you today, if there was enough of it left to get us anywhere.” He stood looking at her, waiting for her to speak; then, as she remained silent, he slowly drew back a step or two. “Kate—this isn’t one of your jokes?”
As she returned his look she was aware that her sight of him was becoming faintly blurred. “Perhaps it was, when I began. It isn’t now.” She put her hands in his.