Chapter XVI

Mrs. Arden was enjoying herself very much. She was sitting under a large pink May-tree on the lawn, watching her children.

Daphne was in a lounge-chair half asleep; Anthony, with Max at his feet, was reading out loud emphatic modern poetry, which his mother could not understand; Jim was mending a fishing-rod; and nobody seemed to be in anybody else’s way.

The two men were going to play tennis after tea despite its being Sunday; but this did not really matter, as Mr. Arden was not there to object.

After thirty-five years of married life the moral law had sunk for Mrs. Arden into the consideration of what would or what would not upset Mr. Arden. It was an extremely happy marriage. Her husband was faithful, tyrannical, and kind, and she gave way to him on every point except when he interfered, as he sometimes did from the highest motives, with the happiness of his children. Mrs. Arden always asserted that her husband was the best judge of his children’s happiness, and spent her entire life in altering his judgments to suit the children. She had no intellectual ability, but she knew when children would rebel.

“When you are older you will understand your dear father better,” she often told them; but it had never occurred to her to think that when Mr. Arden was older he would understand his children better. She knew he never would. Mrs. Arden’s happiest hours were when she knew Mr. Arden was safe doing something he liked and the children were nowhere near him. She had never faced any problem that was not domestic, nor had she ever met a human being of her own class who was not respectable.

There had been a nervous flurry once over Tom and a musical-comedy star, but it had all ended most satisfactorily. The musical-comedy star had married a lord, and Tom had gone to India and killed a tiger.

Mrs. Arden looked reflectively at Anthony. He was getting over his imprisonment wonderfully well. His eyes no longer had that bright flickering look of an animal endangered, and he had ceased to keep himself in hand, as if what he was carrying would break if he forgot to hold it carefully.

Her tranquil eyes turned from their satisfaction in him to rest upon Daphne.

It was the hour of Daphne’s life when she was of most importance to the universe. Her husband’s every thought and hope centered in her, and nature had laid upon Daphne her greatest task and her supreme reward.

Mrs. Arden knew what Daphne felt like. She remembered her own sensations before the birth of Tom, her incredible deep content in the face of all physical inconvenience, and Mr. Arden’s frightened tenderness.

He had waited upon her hand and foot, as Jim waited upon Daphne now; his thoughts had hung on her wishes. Mr. Arden’s thought hung on his own wishes now, and he no longer waited upon his wife. She waited upon him instead, without, however, making him at all conspicuous by it. Mr. Arden liked to be thought a young man and to be treated with the deference due to an old one.

But Mrs. Arden did not look at the relinquished gifts of life with any self-pity. She realized that as you grow older, you have less and suffer more; but on the other hand you know how to suffer better, and you can enjoy with a delightful escape from responsibility the experiences of others.

Mrs. Arden approved the arrangement of Providence by which you had the prizes while you had the battles, and ceased to have the battles at the moment when the prizes became unobtainable.

It was a soft and peaceful afternoon. Anthony went on reading out loud, with obvious enjoyment. The startling paradoxes of modern poets rang harmlessly through the slumbering, flower-scented air. It was as if nothing very dreadful had ever happened.

Mrs. Arden sighed softly, because she never for an instant forgot Tom. When she repeated in the creed that she believed in the resurrection of the dead, she saw Tom in white flannels with his hat pulled forward over his eyes, precisely as she saw Anthony now, except that Tom’s shoulders were broader, and he was usually doing something useful with his hands.

The garden gate clicked, and an extraordinary vision appeared upon the lawn. It was Kitty, accompanied by Mr. Costrelle. Kitty wore the pink Malmaison dress, with pale-pink stockings and remarkably smart black suède shoes. She balanced a rose-pink parasol to perfection.

Mr. Costrelle trailed indolently beside her, long, lean, white-faced, without expression except for his pale eyes, which had a sharpened, appraising look, as if he were on the look-out for a new possession, but had no intention of being taken in by it. They approached the group under the pink May-tree with friendliness, but they belonged to a hostile tribe.

Kitty moved swiftly across the lawn, kissed Daphne, who was half asleep and taken unawares, perfunctorily; noticed Jim and Anthony with a little lift of an eyebrow more perfunctory still, and turned her undivided attention upon Mrs. Arden.

“I’m Kitty Costrelle,” she announced, “and I know you’re Daphne’s mother. I’ve wanted to meet you for ages.” She sank into a chair by Mrs. Arden’s side and turned her shoulder upon the rest of the group.

Mrs. Arden had a flurried sense that both her son-in-law and Anthony wanted, for some unknown reason, to intervene, but they didn’t know how; and Daphne, who did know how, found herself fully occupied by the fixed attention of Mr. Costrelle.

Mrs. Arden was not accustomed to the forward notice of very smart-looking girls without shyness, who ignore the polite and cautious responses of the provincial well bred.

Jim and Anthony still made baffled efforts to enter into their conversation, but Kitty relentlessly forced them out. Her vivid eyes, her expressive gestures, were only for Mrs. Arden.

Mrs. Arden was confused by these advances, but beneath her confusion she was oddly aware of a feeling of compassion. She was shy and inconspicuous and old, and quite incapable of facile friendliness; but she felt as if this brilliant, effective girl was somehow at a disadvantage.

Kitty wasn’t as sure of herself as she pretended to be; she wasn’t as sure of any one or anything as Mrs. Arden had all her life taken for granted that people naturally were. Mrs. Arden had an ineffaceable background, and Kitty had no background at all.

Kitty, with all her air of easy conquests and perfect assurance, fluttered there before them all, like a bird in a high wind, perched upon a swinging bough.

She talked very sensibly to Mrs. Arden about the country and the growth of flowers; she referred sympathetically to Daphne, and asked Mrs. Arden if she didn’t find her son wonderfully better. She seemed to have very accurate information about the Ardens, and Pannell slipped in and out of her sentences as if it had been a part of her own career; but Mrs. Arden in return could not remember that Daphne had told her anything at all about Kitty Costrelle.

It was reassuring, however, to discover, since Anthony must have seen a good deal of her, that Kitty wasn’t an actress. Mrs. Arden knew Anthony’s temperament well, and she was aware that you could not have put an actress out of his head by the insertion of a tiger.

Kitty was still talking to her with the same flattering intimacy when Anthony returned from an abortive set of tennis with Jim.

“If you are interested in roses,” Mrs. Arden said to Kitty as Anthony joined them, “you must come and see my little rose garden at Pannell. Mustn’t she, dear?”

Anthony’s and Kitty’s eyes met like flint.

“I don’t think we’ve got very much to show her,” said Anthony, quietly.

“I’ll come with all the pleasure in the world,” said Kitty, rising to her feet. She looked past Anthony; the brightness of her eyes deepened suddenly. She had done what she could with Mrs. Arden more or less successfully, but all the power she had was in her eyes as she looked past Anthony toward Jim Wynne.

“Jim,” she said softly.

Daphne looked up from her fencing with Mr. Costrelle. Her eyes darkened suddenly; her words stumbled and broke off as if a wind had dispersed them. Kitty’s slow smile deepened.

“Jim,” she repeated, “I want one of those nectarines of yours, the jolly warm ones you grow in your houses. D’you remember you used to call them the apples of the Hesperides?”

“Did I?” mumbled Jim. “The deuce of a silly name for them!”

“I thought it a very pretty name,” said Kitty. “Of course I didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded such an awfully nice place to get apples from.”

She slipped her hand familiarly on Jim’s arm, and without a word he turned and followed her.

Daphne gathered up her sentence again, but the peace of the summer afternoon was gone. Only Mrs. Arden did not know what had happened. It seemed to her much safer to see Kitty walk off with Jim than if she had carried away Anthony.

“That’s a very attractive girl, dear,” she said to her son, “but what a curious thing none of you has ever happened to mention her to me before! I think, if I were you, I should go into the house and get a little shawl for Daphne. She shivered just now as if she had caught cold.”