Chapter XXXI: A New Hilltop 224 (1)

Book Three: Belated Frost

XXXII Lavinia Flounders 231

XXXIII The Statue and the Bust 237

XXXIV Lavinia’s Credo 248

XXXV The Credo at Work 256

XXXVI Consummation 263

XXXVII In the “Personal” Column 268

XXXVIII The Greater Love 274

XXXIX Lavinia 282

Prologue

I Lavinia

I

Tense quiet filled the crooked streets of Bromfield, the quiet that presages storm. Vine Larimore looked anxiously from the window. She was not afraid of tempests: she reveled in them. But a great fear had gripped her in the night. Why had Calvin failed to stop on his way home from the station? What business was it that took Calvin Stone to Rochester every week or two? Another sweetheart? She would not give the hideous thought house room. Was not she, Lavinia Larimore, the handsomest girl in Bromfield? Was not her father, next to the Calvins and the Stones, the most important man in the rusty old New York village? Had she not worn Calvin’s ring for three endless years? Most of the girls in her set were already married, and at New Year’s she had worn the green stockings for her seventeen-year-old sister, Isabel. The wedding dress she had made with so much care and skill, two years agone, hid its once modish lines beneath the cover of the cedar chest--the hope chest that Calvin had ordered for her at Stephen Trench’s shop.

Calvin’s father had promised them the old house on High Street, to be remodeled and furnished with the best that Rochester could provide. Mr. Trench had twice figured on the contract, and yet Calvin dallied. It was first one pretext and then another. Once, when he asked her what she wanted for her birthday--it was the latter part of May, and Lavinia would be twenty--she took her courage in her shaking hands and pleaded for a wedding. It was an unmaidenly thing. Bromfield would have branded her as bold. But Calvin saw in her abashed eyes the image of his own dereliction. To be sure he still loved her. He had always intended to make good his pledge. They would be married the middle of August, when the G. A. R. was giving a great excursion to New York City. That would be a honeymoon well worth the waiting.

And then, on the second of July, the President was shot. Vine was shocked, as everyone was; but what had that to do with her wedding? Calvin could not think of marrying while Mr. Garfield’s life was in doubt.

The President had died, and it was now October. Vine saw Calvin almost daily. In a little town, with the Larimore home near the middle of the principal street, such contact was almost inevitable. But Lavinia found no avenue of approach. Calvin was usually sullen or distraught. Sometimes he took the long détour across the bridge and up behind Stephen Trench’s carpenter shop, on his way to and from the bank. This morning, with a storm brewing, he could hardly risk that walk. He must pass the house any minute. She would stop him and demand an explanation. She knew just what she wanted to say, and when she was thoroughly aroused her tongue never failed her.

There was a step on the grass-grown flag-stones, an eager step. Lavinia was on her feet--her fury gone, she knew not where, or why. He was coming. In another minute she would be in his arms, listening to the same old excuses, feeding her hope on the same old shreds of promise. And then.... The front door opened and Ellen Porter’s interrogating eyes met hers. Ellen and Ted Larimore were soon to be married, but the early morning call had nothing to do with the fever of activity that had disturbed the routine of two households for a month past.

“Vine, did Calvin show you what he bought in Rochester yesterday?”

“Who told you he bought anything?”

“Papa. He saw him in the jewelry store. He was looking at wedding rings. He turned his back when he saw somebody from Bromfield; but papa was almost sure he bought one. Viny, are you going to beat Ted and me out, after all?”

Lavinia thought for a moment that she would suffocate. The blood pounded in her ears and the room swam dizzily before her. And then the storm broke. She tried to fashion some convincing reply; but the thunder was deafening and the rain beat loudly against the windows. She ran to get a floor cloth, when little rivulets began to trickle over the sill. Ellen sought to help her with the transom, that was seldom closed from spring to fall, when the door was pushed open violently and Ted Larimore, dripping and out of temper, burst into the room. He had forgotten something. No, he could not stop to change his coat. He would take Ellen back to the store with him. For this, at least, his sister was grateful. By noon she would have seen Calvin--would know the meaning of the ring. She would see Calvin ... if she had to go to the bank. Things could not go on this way.

II Calvin

I

While Ted and Ellen strolled down Main Street, oblivious of the rain that swirled upon them, now from the east, now from the south, and while Lavinia plunged with headlong haste into the morning’s housework, a conversation was under way in the dining-room of the Stone mansion. Calvin was late coming down to breakfast and his father had waited for him.

“You have something on your mind, and you might as well out with it,” the elder was saying, as he drew his napkin from his collar and folded it crookedly.

Calvin drummed the table with uneasy fingers.

“Gambling again?”

“No, Sir.”

“Drinking?”

“No, Sir.”

“What then? Look here, Calvin Stone, you can’t fool your mother and me. You act like a sheep-stealing dog. What were you doing in Rochester yesterday?”

“I was married.”

The words fell with the dull impact of a mass of putty. His father’s eyes opened wide, then narrowed, and his huge shoulders bent forward.

“Who did you marry? Vine wasn’t with you.”

“That’s just the trouble, father. I didn’t marry Vine. Fact is, I didn’t intend to get married at all. Lettie took me by surprise when she told me--”

“Lettie who?”

“Arlette Fournier. She’s French--and a stunner. I met her at a dance last winter. Oh, she’s a good fellow. She’ll keep it secret till I get out of this scrape with Vine. She wouldn’t want me to bring her to Bromfield for a year or two.”

Stone brought his fist down on the table with a vehemence that rattled the breakfast china.

“Have you no conscience, no decency? How are you going to square yourself with that girl?”

“I couldn’t square myself with both of them. I’ve been thinking it over, since I got home last night. I thought I’d play on Vine’s pride ... snub her openly, you know, so that she’d get in a huff and throw me over. Then I could afterwards pretend I married the other girl for spite. That would save Vine’s feelings.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort, you miserable coward. You are going to Viny Larimore this very morning, and confess what you’ve done.”

“No. I am not!”

“I say you are.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about. I’d never get out of her house alive. You never saw Vine when she was mad. I’d go back to Rochester--I’d--jump in the river, before I’d face her. I don’t have to stay here. Lettie has money of her own, that we could live off of. She doesn’t want to live in this ugly village, any way.”

“You could take your living from this stranger, this foreigner that nobody ever heard of? You--you say she is rich? Who are her people?”

“Father, won’t you--”

Calvin’s voice, a moment before raucous with assurance and determination, broke into waves of impotent pleading. He had perceived the flaw in his parent’s armour. To press home his advantage was the task of the moment.

“Her uncle is one of the leading business men of Rochester, and she has money in her own right. She’s been an orphan since she was six years old--sent over here from France by herself, after her parents died, and nobody to look after her. Father, won’t you go and straighten it out with Vine? Honest, I can’t.”

The elder Stone spat with disgust.

II

In slicker and high rubber boots Calvin took the long muddy road to the bank. From every rain-drenched shrub along the way Lavinia Larimore’s outraged womanhood glared at him. For an hour he tried to work, conscious of his father’s eyes with their unfeeling condemnation. When the strain became unbearable, he took a silver-mounted pistol from the safe--with surreptitious gesture, yet making sure that the object in his hand did not escape notice--and thrust it into the drawer of his desk. The threat bore fruit.

Mr. Stone took down hat and umbrella and went forth into the abating storm. He was not a man to mince words when he had an unpleasant task before him. Vine greeted him at the door. Her dark cheeks blanched.

“What--where is Calvin? Is he sick? Has anything happened to him?”

“I wish to God he was dead. Viny, I hope you don’t care any too much for that young scoundrel. He isn’t worthy of the love of a decent girl.”

“He hasn’t-- You mean, he has embezzled money? Mr. Stone, you won’t let it be found out? I wouldn’t go back on him for--Oh, you won’t....”

“I’d brain him if he ever touched a penny that didn’t belong to him.”

“Then what--what has he done?”

“He was married, yesterday, to a girl in Rochester.”

“Married!” And then, in an incredulous whisper, “married.”

A moment only Lavinia stood numb and baffled. Then the words poured in a rising tide of indignation, rage, fury. Three years she had waited, and for this. She might have had any one of a dozen--the finest young men in Bromfield. Calvin Stone had won her away from them all. He had deprived her of her girlhood, her opportunities--everything but her self-respect. She had known for two years that he was a drunkard and a gambler. She had clung to him, because it was her Christian duty to reform him. His parents would not have her to blame when he reeled into a drunkard’s grave. It was fortunate that some fool woman had taken the burden from her shoulders. She would have stuck to her promise, in the face of certain misery. The Larimores had that kind of honour--such honour as all the Calvin and Stone money could not buy. But now she need no longer keep up the pretense of caring for a man who was not fit to wipe the mud from her shoes. She had tried to hold together what little manhood was in him--to spare his parents the disgrace he was sure to bring upon them.

Once and again the bank president, who was wont to command silence, to be granted a respectful hearing in the highest councils of the town, sought to breast the tide of her anger. His interruptions were swept away like spindrift. He wanted to offer financial restitution, since no other was possible. She met the proposal with scorn. Money could not cover up the disgrace of such a consummation. Calvin might rue his bargain, and come back to plead for forgiveness. The desperately proffered balm brought a more bitter outburst. She would not be any man’s second choice. No, the damage was irreparable. It was done.

III

As the man of finance turned the interview over in his mind, a curious balance was struck--and his heart softened towards his son. There might have been other tongue-lashings. No woman could have achieved such fluency without practice. Before he reached the front door of the little bank, Lavinia was in her own room, her compact figure half submerged in the feather bed, her hot tears of shame and chagrin wetting the scarlet stars of the quilt her own deft fingers had pieced. She had lost her temper--it was easily misplaced--but the scene she had raised had no share in her memory of the encounter. Her humiliation blotted all else from view. It was not only that she had aimed at the highest, and lost. She loved Calvin Stone with all the passion of a fiery nature--loved him with a depth and intensity that might be gauged by the hate that loomed on the surface of her wrath. And there was no one in the whole world to whom she could open her heart.

Mrs. Larimore knew there had been a quarrel, a quarrel that outran the morning’s tempest in violence; but when she ventured to ask what the trouble was, Lavinia told her curtly that it was none of her business. Now she stood outside the door, listening to her daughter’s stormy sobbing. She had never been on intimate terms with her children, and the relationship with her eldest daughter was most casual. A headstrong girl. Where she got her ambition--unless it was a heritage from her Grandmother Larimore--no one could say. The other members of the family were easygoing, content with the day’s pleasure and profit. But Lavinia was avid for work, for praise, for position. She would shine as Mrs. Calvin Stone, if ever.... And then Mrs. Larimore began afresh to wonder.

III David

I

Early in the afternoon, when the sun was making furtive efforts to slip past the cloud-guard and repair the damage the rain had wrought, Lavinia stepped briskly from her room, clad in her best blue silk poplin. An hour past she had been bathing her eyes, and her mirror satisfied her that the redness and swelling were all gone. She went straight to her father’s store, across from the bank. Ellen Porter would be there, behind the bookkeeper’s desk.

“I want you to do something for me, Nell,” she began--noting the hollow in her voice, and striving against it. “I want you to take this to Mr. Stone.”

She held a small, neatly tied parcel in her hand. They walked to the wide doorway and stood watching the sun-glints in the pools of the muddy street, each waiting for the other to venture on some hospitable avenue of speech. Ellen considered her thin-soled shoes, scarce dry from the morning’s wetting, glanced at the precarious stepping stones, half a block away ... and caught sight of David Trench, coming towards them. She beckoned him.

David was a shy, fair-cheeked youth, a few months older than Lavinia and Ellen. The three had been christened the same Sunday in the little Presbyterian church. They had gone through the village school together, and David and Ellen sang leading parts in the church choir. It was Dave Trench who sharpened their skates, pulled their sleds up the hill, tuned their pianos, repaired their furniture, took them home from Sunday evening services when no other escort was available.

“Vine wants you to do an errand for her, Davy. Would you mind taking this little package over to the bank?”

“I wouldn’t mind going to Halifax for her.”

Ellen laid the parcel in his hand. He was to give it to Mr. Stone. In no case was he to give it to Calvin. As his lithe figure melted into the gloom of the building across the way, she turned for the information that was her due.

“It’s my engagement ring.”

“What!”

“Yes, I’ve given Calvin the mitten. His father came down this morning and laboured with me for more than an hour to get me to change my mind; but I told him I would never marry a man who smoked and drank and gambled. That was what I was about to tell you this morning, when Ted ran in on us. I’ve had him on probation since last spring--for two years, in fact. He’s promised me over and over. And yesterday, after he bought the ring for our wedding, he went and got roaring drunk--fell into the hands of some disreputable woman--and-- Why, Ellen, when he stopped at the house last night he was so maudlin that he couldn’t give an account of where he’d been or what had happened to him. You can guess how we parted. He told his father this morning that he’d go to the dogs if I turned him down. Mr. Stone almost got down on his knees to me, but it was all wasted. When I’m done, I’m done.”

Ellen Porter had but one grievous fault. When she found herself unable to keep a secret, she did not scruple to seek help. Lavinia thought afterward it had been almost an inspiration ... telling Ellen. By Sunday it would be all over town, each one of Ellen’s confidantes pledged to hold the revelation sacred. She knew, too, how Calvin’s lapse from virtue would grow with each fresh telling of the story. By another Sunday it would be murder he had committed.

II

The ring delivered, Vine went home to plan the next move. That she must leave Bromfield before the truth of Calvin’s marriage leaked out, she did not so much as debate. There was an uncle in the wilds of Illinois. Once she had visited him, with the result that the buffalo and Indian frontier had receded some leagues farther to the west. A coal mining town. She remembered that some adventurous investors dreamed of oil and natural gas. There ought to be employment for an energetic, fairly well educated girl who was accustomed to hard work.

Lavinia Larimore had not been blessed with an elastic nature, but in moments of desperation she manifested something like the elasticity of ivory. She could yield, yet show no after-trace of the yielding. By night her plans were well on the way towards maturity. She would write to her uncle, and wait for a reply before telling her parents of her purpose.

She opened the small drawer of the secretary, only to discover that it was bare of stamps. Her brother Theodore would be going to Ellen’s, and the post office was not far out of his way. But Ted would ask questions. No, she would wait for David Trench. He and his father worked at the shop every evening, and he would be passing at nine.

Up to this point Lavinia had thought of David as nothing more than an errand boy. But as she sat by the window in the gathering dusk, he began to change before her fevered eyes, to assert his height and the grace of his strong young hands. She had never thought about David’s hands before. Strange that the hard work had never rendered them unshapely. Calvin’s hands were pudgy, the fingers short and thick. She had always been conscious of Calvin’s hands--had viewed them almost with repugnance even when she craved their touch the most.

David’s smile was beautiful. He would grow into a fine-looking man, like his father. Now that they had taken to refinishing antique furniture, there would be money in the shop for two households. David would always be kind. He might even.... What was she thinking! A startled laugh burst from her lips. Davy, little Davy Trench! With a suppressed, “Huh! I might go farther and fare worse,” she tossed the absurd thought aside. A moment later it presented itself in another guise. She was still toying with the audacious intruder when she heard David’s slow, regular step on the stone flagging. Through the open window she called his name. With nervous haste she lighted the tall, flamboyantly shaded piano lamp and motioned him to a chair. Then she seated herself rather stiffly on the old-fashioned sparking settee, her heart pounding, her tongue thick and useless.

“Was there something I could do for you, Vine?”

“You wouldn’t--mind--going back to the post office, Dave? I want to get off an important letter to my uncle. He wants me to come out to Illinois, and--there isn’t a stamp in the house.”

“I’m sorry, but you can’t send it to-night. The post office was closed when I came by, and the last mail goes up to Rochester at half-past eight. If you had only told me sooner.... I’ll be glad to stop by and get it in the morning, on my way to the shop.”

“Oh, well, it’s not so urgent. I’ll have it ready before breakfast. You won’t forget to stop?”

“Why, of course not, Vine.”

“David, would you be sorry if I should go away from Bromfield--to stay?”

“It wouldn’t be Bromfield without you.”

Lavinia Larimore took the bit in her teeth.

“Dave, what do you think Ellen Porter was saying to me when you came to the store, this afternoon?”

“I couldn’t guess.”

“She said it was all over town that you and I are going to be married.”

“I--” The boy gasped. He gripped the edge of his chair and the blood died out of his cheeks. “Vine, you oughtn’t to make fun of me that way. It isn’t kind.”

“I wasn’t making fun of you, Davy. Honest to goodness, everybody has noticed how much we have been together lately.”

“But Calvin?”

“Pooh! I broke off with him long ago. Dave, are you asleep, that you don’t know it is all over between Calvin and me?”

“I--I am afraid I’m dreaming now.”

“No, you aren’t. You are broad awake, and I’m telling you the truth. I would not marry Calvin Stone if he was the last man left on earth. He is a low-lived gambler--and I despise him. He isn’t worth your little finger.”

David slipped from his chair and gained the settee, somehow, his knees knocking together.

“Vine, do you mean-- Would I be a fool to--” Then his lips found hers.

At midnight David Trench stumbled drunkenly home, his head bumping the stars, while Lavinia took the two-year-old wedding dress from the cedar chest and planned to modernize its lines.

Book One

Spring

IV Vine Cottage

I

The cottage had been vacant almost four months, an economic waste that cut deeply into Lavinia Trench’s pin-money. Not that David stinted her in the matter of funds. The purse strings had always lain loosely in David’s hands. But her penurious soul, bent on making the best possible showing of whatever resources came within her reach, rebelled at the insolent idleness of invested capital. Vine Cottage had been hers, to do with as she pleased, since the completion of the big Colonial mansion that housed the remnant of the Trench family. There were not half-a-dozen furnished residences to let in Springdale, and that this one should have been unoccupied since the middle of November was inexplicable.

“You haven’t half way tried to rent it,” the woman charged, her eyes shifting from her husband’s face to the cottage beyond the low stone wall, with its sullenly drawn blinds and its air of insensate content. Her glance rested appraisingly on the broad veranda, now banked with wet February snow; the little glass-enclosed breakfast room that had been her own conservatory, in the years gone by; the sturdy-throated chimney, that would never draw--but that none the less served as one of the important talking points of the cottage. An attractive set of gas logs did away with the danger of stale wood smoke in the library; but the chimney remained--moss-covered at the corners, near the ground, a hardy ampelopsis tracing a pattern of brown lace against its dull red bricks. There were eight rooms and a capacious attic. The furniture was excellent. There was a garage, too, with living quarters for the servants. In the year of grace, nineteen hundred and nine, there were not many residences in Springdale with garages.

“I heard at church, Sunday, that Mrs. Marksley is looking for a house. You know, Vine, their place on Grant Drive is for sale--against the building of the new house in Marksley’s Addition. Do you want me to--”

“Mrs. Marksley! Humph!” Lavinia’s black eyes snapped. It would be to her liking to have the wife of the richest man in town as her tenant. Still ... the situation had its disadvantages, not the least of which was that they would be moving out again in a few months, and the same old problem to be faced afresh.

“Do as you like about speaking to Mr. Marksley. But remember, David, I don’t recommend it.”

“It’s your house, my dear. You blamed me for offering the place to Sylvia when she was married. I told you, last fall, I’d have nothing more to do with it.”

He bent to kiss her, a kiss that was part of the compulsory daily routine, and hurriedly left the house. Lavinia turned his words over in her mind, and her gorge rose. David was always that way. You could never make him shoulder responsibility. True, she had wanted Sylvia next door, where she could watch over her daughter’s blundering beginnings at housekeeping. And anyone would say it was an honour to have Professor Penrose in the family--even if his salary was small. But another lessee--with the boon of a commercial position in Detroit at four times the amount he received from the little denominational college in Springdale--would have been held to the strict interpretation of the lease. David would not hear of Oliver and Sylvia paying rent for a house they did not occupy, a sentiment promptly seconded by his daughter. Sylvia never failed to perceive her own advantage--a fact at once gratifying and maddening to her mother. What if David had been like that? What if.... She always put David aside. Why bother about the inevitable?

II

Mr. Trench did not go at once to the office of Trench & Son, architects and general building contractors. It was important to his domestic peace that some definite step be taken towards the renting of the cottage. He would stop, he thought, at the office of the Argus, and insert a three-time advertisement. He could bring the matter up with Henry Marksley, for whom he always had some construction work on hand. But second thought deterred him. It might be disastrous to have young Hal Marksley next door, if only for a few months. Hal was a senior in the Presbyterian college. His recent attentions to Eileen Trench, just approaching her sixteenth birthday, had been disquieting to her father, none the less because of her mother’s unconcealed approval.

Eileen was impressionable. A youth of Hal Marksley’s--David searched his mind for the word. Disposition? He was more than amiable. Principles? Not quite that, either. In short, there was nothing he could urge against the young man that had not been set at naught by Eileen’s mother. Money had lifted the Marksleys above the restrictions imposed upon common people. Their life had been unconventional, at times positively scandalous. Eileen’s iconoclastic spirit would grasp at anything to justify her revolt against the conventional trammels of her home, the puritanical regulations which served Lavinia in lieu of religion. There was enough friction in that quarter already.

As he passed the college campus, with its motley group of buildings--dingy red brick of forty years’ standing, and the impudent modernity of Bedford stone with trimmings of terra cotta and Carthage marble--he caught sight of Dr. Schubert’s mud-bespattered buggy. The grey mare, these ten years a stranger to the restraining tether, nosed contentedly in the snow for the succulent sprigs that were already making their appearance among the exposed roots of the huge old elms. From the opposite side of the street the family physician waved a driving glove.

“Wait a minute, David.” He made his way cautiously through the ooze of the crudely paved avenue. “I was on my way out to your house. Stopped to look in on a pneumonia that kept me up nearly all night. Does Mrs. Trench still want to rent the cottage? Or is it true that Sylvia and Penrose are coming back?”

“They are well pleased with Detroit. And my wife is most anxious for a tenant. You know, Doctor, she draws the line on children and dogs.”

“We ought to be able to close a very satisfactory deal. My old friend, Griffith Ramsay, spent the night with us. He’s out here from New York--some legal business connected with the mines at Olive Hill, for a client of his, a Mrs. Ascott. The lady is recently widowed, and in need of some kind of diversion. I had been telling him about my experiments, my need for a competent assistant in the laboratory, and he arrived at the conclusion that these two needs would neutralize each other. Mrs. Ascott, having a large financial stake in the mines, would be interested in the possibility of increasing the value of soft coal. The more he though about it, the greater his enthusiasm. The one thing in the way, he thought, would be a suitable place for her to live. That was when Vine Cottage popped into my mind. I’ll send him around to the office to talk over the details of the lease with you.”

V Judith Goes West

I

Mrs. Ascott had an early appointment with her attorney. An early appointment necessitated her catching the nine-fifteen train for the city. That, again, implied the disruption of the entire household regimen, and Judith Ascott had learned not to try her mother’s patience too far. She was the unpleasant note in an otherwise satisfactory family. True, her mother had stood by her through all the scandal and unpleasantness. But the changing of the breakfast hour was quite another matter.

As she slipped into the pantry of the big suburban home and set the coffee machine going, she turned over in her mind another reason for her care not to disturb the family slumber. She did not know why her attorney wished to see her--was not even sure which member of the firm would be awaiting her, that still March morning. The long-distance message conveyed the bare information that the business was urgent. Might there be another delay in the divorce? She had been assured that the decree would be in her hands by the end of the week; but gruff old Sanderson, the senior partner, was not so sure. Any reference to the “distasteful affair” threw her mother into a nervous chill. A note on the breakfast table, informing the family that she had caught the early express for a morning at the art gallery, would suffice as well as any other explanation.

All the way in, between the snow-decked New York fields and the dreary waste of the Sound, she dwelt moodily on the unpleasant possibilities of the coming interview. But when she emerged from the confusion of the Grand Central station, already in the turmoil of reconstruction, she thought only of the relative merits of the taxicab and the subway. She had schooled herself, in times of stress, to take refuge in irrelevant trifles. She had learned, too, that the more she worried before the ordeal the less occasion she found for worry when the actual conditions confronted her. In view of her sleepless night, she would probably find roses and Griff Ramsay instead of thorns and Donald Sanderson.

II

The attorney had thought it all out, had decided just how he was going to break the news. But when he found his client confronting him, across the unaccustomed barrier of his desk, his assurance forsook him.

“Judith, what are you going to do, now that you are free?”

“What am I going to do, Griff? That, as usual, depends on mamma. You know I have never planned anything--vital--in my life. When she lays too much stress on the ‘must’ I do the opposite. She says that I am going to sail with her and the boys on the fifth of April, a month from to-day. Ben is going on with his architecture at the Beaux Arts and Jack is wild about airplanes. Paris has hideous memories--but there’s no other place for me.”

“You are not going to Paris.”

The woman started. “No?”

“Not if you have the qualities I believe you have. Judith, may I for once talk cold unpleasant facts? You are twenty-seven years old and the life you have made for yourself is a failure.” Mrs. Ascott deprecated the finality of the word, but she let it pass. “Going to Paris would only be temporizing. Your mother’s influence has always been bad. You and your father are scarcely acquainted. Your brothers are too young to count. Laura and I have been your only intimates, since your return to New York. I need not remind you of our staunch friendship for you.”

“Griff--tell me what you have in mind. I promise not to cry out, if I do squirm a little.”

He told her of Springdale, the kindly old physician who had a theory that soft coal could be transformed, at the mines, into clean fuel and a whole retinue of valuable by-products--of his need for a secretary and laboratory assistant, to keep his records and assist him with experiments. He told her of Vine Cottage, its wide garden and fruit trees. “The house faces south. Get that solidly established in your mind,” he admonished. He knew how important it was for Judith Ascott to be properly oriented. Other details of the place he painted, graphic and engaging. She would take with her her old nurse, Nanny. For servants he had leased Jeff Dutton and wife, who occupied the rooms above the garage. As an afterthought he added that she would spend four mornings a week in Dr. Schubert’s laboratory. Her compensation--a large block of treasury stock in the corporation that would result from the evolving of a process for the cleansing of soft coal.

“Where is this Springdale--this Utopia? What has it to do with Sutton and Olive Hill, where the mines are located?”

“As little as possible. You’ll note that Springdale draws its virtuous white skirts away from those filthy towns, with an air so smug that it would disgust you if it were not so amusingly naïve. It claims ten thousand inhabitants--when the census taker isn’t within hearing. There is a denominational college--co-ed, I believe--with a conservatory of music and a school of dramatic art. The President isn’t the lean sycophant in a shabby Prince Albert coat that you might expect. I met him--a singularly spruce-minded successor to that old Presbyterian war-horse, Thomas Henderson, who built the college out of Illinois dirt.”

“Sounds interesting, Griff. Is there any more?”

“Yes, ever so much. The college isn’t the whole show, by any means. At one end of the town is a Bible Institute and at the other an asylum for the feeble-minded. There is a manual training school for deaf-mutes and a sanitarium for drug fiends and booze fighters. On the whole, quite an intellectual centre. It is under no circumstances to be confused with Springfield, the capital of the state. You are sentenced to live there for a year. At the end of your term you may come back to New York--if you haven’t found yourself.”

“Only last night I was wishing that I could run away--somewhere--anywhere--to a place I had never heard of. Do you think I can do the work?”

“Oh, that part of it.... My only concern is for your mother. I’ll send Laura down to Pelham to help persuade her.”

Judith Ascott’s finely modelled shoulders came up in an almost imperceptible shrug. “Mamma will be so relieved. Don’t trouble Laura. I was only going to Paris because there was no convenient pigeonhole to stow me away ‘till wanted.’ Mamma, of course, hopes that I will marry. She wouldn’t want me tagging around after her, the rest of her life. _You_ know that I am done with men.”

“By-the-way,” Ramsay interrupted, “I led those people to suppose your husband was dead. It’s that kind of town. Not the old doctor, understand. His sympathy’s as wide as humanity. But your next-door neighbours--excellent people, though with small-town limitations. You’ll have to depend on them for such social life as your gregarious nature demands. How soon can you be ready to go west?”

“As soon as I can bring Nanny from Vermont. I ought to be on my way in a week.”

III

Later in the day, when she found herself alone in a quiet corner of the Metropolitan, Mrs. Ascott turned the preposterous proposition over in her mind. No doubt the Ramsays were as tired of her eternal flopping from one untenable situation to another as her own people were. In Springdale she would be safely off their hands ... at least until the sensation of her divorce had subsided. Would her late husband marry the nonchalant co-respondent? Would Herbert Faulkner, with whom she had all but eloped, while Raoul Ascott and the girl were in Egypt.... But she was not interested in Herbert Faulkner, and she cared not a straw whether Raoul married or pursued his butterfly career, free from the stimulating restrictions of domestic life. Was Griff afraid she would disturb the farcical relations of her late impassioned admirer and the stern-lipped woman who bore his name and made free with his check-book to further her aberrant social ambition? Was it for this that she had been banished to the coal fields of western Illinois--to save Maida Faulkner the annoyance of a divorce and consequent loss of income? Whatever the actuating motive, the thing was done. She had acquiesced without a murmur of protest. This was in keeping with her whole nondescript life. Nothing had been worth the effort of opposition. She had never known the stinging contact of human suffering. Oh, to burn her fingers with the flame of living! But Springdale--a hide-bound college town, where divorce is reckoned among the cardinal sins....

VI The Trench Children

I

Lavinia stood in the sun-room, staring perplexedly across the lawn in the direction of Vine Cottage. She was trying to decide a ponderous question. To call on the new tenant ... or to wait the prescribed two weeks? David and the children felt that a neighbourly visit was already overdue. Probably, Larimore had said at breakfast, Mrs. Ascott knew nothing of the silly custom which prevailed in Springdale, and would think her landlady either hostile or rude. For once in her life Lavinia Trench was uncertain. The new tenant was a woman of the world. Ominous distinction. How could one gauge a neighbour who had crossed the ocean sixteen times and had lived in every European capital from London to Constantinople? She did not wear black. Incomprehensible for a widow. Likely as not, she held Springdale unworthy the display of her expensive weeds. Or perhaps she was saving them for some adequate occasion. Just going to Dr. Schubert’s laboratory to work ... one’s old clothes would serve for that. Besides, there were so many new fads about mourning. It might be that taupe was the correct thing. She would write and ask Sylvia about it.

Sylvia was the one member of the family whose opinion was accorded a meed of respect--now that she had gone to Detroit to live. It was too bad that she should have moved to another city, just when a woman who might have been of service to her had come to Springdale. It was always that way. Life offered the great desideratum--after the wish or need for it had gone by. Life, Lavinia Trench’s life, was an endless chain of disappointments. Of this there was no shadow of doubt. David and the children had heard the statement reiterated with such consistent regularity that they failed now to hear it at all--like the noise of the trolley cars on Sherman Avenue, behind the Trench home, that at first made such a deafening clatter.

“You seem to get everything you ask for,” her second son, Robert, had once reminded her. “That’s more than you can say for the rest of us.” Whereat she reeled off such a catalogue of woes that even Bob was silenced.

II

There was something abnormal about the Trench children. Nothing ever went right with them. Sylvia was the college beauty, an exact replica of her mother, and she had been forced in sheer desperation to marry, at twenty-four, the baldheaded professor of chemistry and physics, whom half the girls in town had refused. Larimore was a successful architect, had taken honours at Cornell; but he detested girls and boys. Had his nose in a book most of the time. He might have done things for his sister, if he had not been so steeped in his own morbid fancies. Bob would have brought eligible young men to the house, if he had been the next one in age to Sylvia. Mrs. Trench shuddered when she thought about Bob. It was the culminating tragedy of her badly ordered life.

A good many things made her shudder ... horrible patches of the past, that had been lived through, somehow. There were the first few years of her married life at Olive Hill, when David worked as a carpenter, and two babies invaded the three-room cottage before her second anniversary. She had not considered the possibility of children when, after an engagement lasting less than a month, she and David had been married. A little daughter--three weeks older than Ellen’s first child! Lavinia made it an occasion for rejoicing. Sent dainty announcements to Bromfield, tied with blue ribbon. But when, after fourteen months, a boy came, she began to question the leap she had made, that tempestuous October day.

The boy was called Larimore, in protest against the unmistakable lineaments of the Trenches that revealed themselves in his pathetic baby face. He was an anaemic child, given to wailing softly when in pain--a sharp contrast to Sylvia’s insistent screams. As he grew into boyhood he was quiet and studious, as David had been. Seldom gave his mother cause for anxiety, glutted her maternal pride with his achievements at school, and yet she never quite overcame the feeling that he was an interloper in her family. There were three years of immunity, and then came Robert, the child whom everybody else regarded as a stray. But Lavinia saw in his thick black hair and virile body the materialization of her contempt for David’s softness, as it had perpetuated itself in her first son.

There was nothing about Bob that was soft but his skin. And that was another Trench anomaly. Between Lary’s curling blond locks and Bob’s peach bloom complexion, Sylvia had a desperate time of it, before the period of adolescence when her own sallow cheeks began to clear. Those were the dim prehistoric days when, in Springdale, rouge and lip sticks carried all the sinister implication which had attached, in the Bromfield of Lavinia’s day, to the suggested idea that a “nice” girl wanted to marry. There was implicit in each the stigma of the wanton, and Lavinia had taught her children that, before all else, they must be respectable. Her own powder box was closely guarded, its existence denied with oaths that would have condemned a less righteous soul to perdition.

After David removed to Springdale, as junior member of the firm that had the contract for two new buildings on the college campus, and Vine Cottage had been erected beyond the residence district of the town, three other babies arrived--at perfectly decent intervals. They were all girls. Isabel, like Lary, was given an unequivocal Larimore name, because she was so exactly like her father. She was four years younger than Bob, and the death of these two made a strange break in the family continuity. Mrs. Ascott heard about the Trench children in a manner at once vivid and enlightening.

III

It was the ninth day of her tenancy at Vine Cottage, and she and Dr. Schubert were already old friends. With the exception of a reference to Eileen, whom the quality rather than the content of his allusion marked as his favourite, he had studiously avoided any comment on the Trenches that would serve to divert the free flow of her own sensitive perception. Larimore and Sydney Schubert were of about the same age--had been intimate friends from boyhood. Syd’s affection for Lary, at one period of his youth, had overflowed and engulfed Sylvia. But Mrs. Trench had set her face sternly against any such alliance. “The obstacle seems to have been that intangible thing, a discrepancy in age--on the wrong side of the ledger,” the physician explained. “_There_ is one woman,” he stressed the first word extravagantly, his eyes twinkling, “who has the whole scheme of life crystallized. With most of us, certain problems remain fluid. Mrs. Trench _knows_. The eternal verities don’t admit of argument. My boy was only a medical student when he went mooning after Sylvia, but his prospects were good. If he had been born the day before--instead of lagging a stupid sixteen months after the girl--it would have been all right for her to wait ten years for him. As it was, he simply wouldn’t do. Mrs. Trench objected to Walter Marksley on entirely different grounds. Mrs. Trench is strong for the moral code, and Walter kept a fairly luxuriant crop of wild oats in his front yard.... But my dear, my dear, I’m developing the garrulity that is a sure harbinger of old age. Don’t let a word I’ve been saying serve to bias you in your estimate of your landlady. I assure you, she’s a trump.”

IV

Judith reflected, on the way home that morning, that if she wanted to get on with Mrs. Trench, she must guard her own questionable past with double zeal. It came to her, with a curious feeling of separation, that she might care what Mrs. Trench thought. The concept was a new one, and she inspected it with interest. But then ... she had been so desperately lonely, so remote from everything she had known in the past. And she was, as Griff Ramsay suggested, a gregarious animal--recognizing only in its absence her need of the herd. For the sake of Griff and Laura she would endure her exile to the end, and she was, it seemed, dependent on the morally austere woman in the great Colonial house for such human contact as Springdale might offer--human contact which for the first time in her life she craved with poignant longing.

Nanny met her at the door, her face red with laughter, her ample sides shaking. There had been a gravel fight between Jeff Dutton and one of the Trench children. It appeared to be one of the regular institutions of Vine Cottage.

“You must hurry with your luncheon, Miss Judith, so as not to miss the next round. The little girl was furious. She said Dutton muffed his play, and that was against the rules. She’s coming back to settle with him.”

Nanny had prepared an unusually tempting repast, in the tiny breakfast room that looked out, with many windows, on the stretch of lawn that separated the two houses, on the little wicket gate in the low stone wall, and the ample kitchen garden beyond the wall, brown and scarred with the first spring spading. The lonely woman viewed, with chill apprehension, the imposing façade of the house, the crisp white curtains that served, with their thin opacity, to conceal all the activity of the Trench home life. A sugar-coated sphinx, that house, guarding its secret soul with a subtle reticence that belied its seeming candour. Larimore Trench had drawn the plans for the new home. Was he that sort of man--or was this another expression of the ubiquitous Lavinia, whom Dutton had characterized as “running the hull ranch”?

There was a commotion in the hall that led from the kitchen to the breakfast room, and Nanny opened the door. She was plainly perplexed. Miss Judith was still a child to her, but she was too instinctively a servant to venture upon the prerogative of her mistress.

“You let me by,” a shrill voice piped. “I’m going to tell her, myself.”

The housekeeper yielded to a vicious pinch in the rotund cushion of her thigh, and a small parcel of humanity slid adroitly into Mrs. Ascott’s field of vision. Her head was set defiantly on one side, but the dark eyes were inscrutable. A moment only she faltered, tucking in her long under lip and shifting her slight bulk from one foot to the other.

“I broke a window in your garage. It was Jeff’s fault. He had no business ducking. How did he know I had a rock in that handful of gravel? Just gravel wouldn’t have broken the window. I’m willing to shoulder the blame, and pay for the glass out of my allowance--if you’ll make Jeff put it in. I can swipe that much putty from my papa’s shop. And--and don’t let Jeff Dutton snitch on me--to Lary.”

She finished with an excited gasp, and stood awaiting the inevitable.

“Come here, little girl. Don’t mind about the pane. Are you Eileen Trench?”

“Me? Mercy, no!” Astonishment dissolved into mirth, mirth that savoured of derision. The next instant the laugh died and the high forehead was puckered in a frown of swift displeasure. She came a step nearer, her thin brown hand plucking at her skirt. “I shouldn’t have laughed that way, as if you’d said something silly. It goes hard with me to say I’m sorry--because--usually I’m not. I hate lying, just to be polite. Eileen’ll take a lickin’ any day, before she’ll say she’s sorry. But Sylvia says it’s better to apologize and be done with it. And I guess it does save time.”

The ideas appeared chaotic, as if the child were in the throes of a mighty change in ethical standards. Judith looked at her, a whimsical fancy taking possession of her mind that she was watching some fantastic mime--that this was no flesh-and-blood child, but an owl masquerading in wren’s attire.

“My dear old doctor mentioned Sylvia and Lary and Eileen. Would you mind telling me your name?”

“Theodora.”

“Theodora--the gift of God.”

“Yes, and it was a rummy gift. Jeff Dutton says the Lord hung a lemon on my mother’s Christmas tree. I was supposed to come a boy--there’d been too many girls already--and they were going to name me after my uncle Theodore. Jeff thinks I cried so much because I was disappointed at being just a girl. I guess I cried, all right. My brother, Bob, named me ‘Schubert’s Serenade’ because he and Lary had me ’neath their casement every night till two o’clock. Mamma’s room was where your library is now. I like this house lots better than ours.”

“Do you remember this one? I thought the new house was built five years ago.”

Theodora turned questioning eyes upon her. Then, in a flash, she understood.

“Dear me, you have an idea I’m about six years old. Strangers always do. I can’t help it that I never grow any bigger. I was twelve last Christmas, and I’m first year Prep. It’s horrid to be so little. People never have any respect for you. Eileen’s tall as a broom--but nobody has much respect for her, either.”

“Tell me about Eileen. Dr. Schubert is fond of her, I believe.”

“Yes, he sees good in her. He’s about the only one who does. She was sixteen last Sunday, and she’s third year Prep. Goes into college next fall, if she don’t flunk again. She’s getting too big for mamma’s slipper, and I don’t know what is going to become of her. She’s been ugly as sin, ever since mamma heard a Chautauqua lecturer say you had to go in for technique. You know, Eileen plays the violin. And when mamma shuts her up and makes her practice--she gets even by making her fiddle swear. It says ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ and some worse ones, just as plain. And when she’s mad, her eyes get as yellow as cat’s eyes. You never saw yellow eyes, did you?”

“My own look that way, at times--when I’m ill or out of sorts.”

“But they’re the loveliest--like gray violets!” She looked deep into Mrs. Ascott’s eyes, and her own kindled with admiration. “Dr. Schubert told us yours were like Lary’s. But they aren’t, a bit. His are light brown. That barely saves him from being a Trench.”

Manifestly Lavinia had impressed on her family the advantage of looking like the Larimores. And yet, Judith thought she had never seen a finer looking man than David Trench--not so well groomed as his son, and with the gait of a man perennially tired, but with a face that Fra Angelico would have loved to paint.

V

When the elfin child had gone, in response to the ringing of a great bell on the distant campus, Mrs. Ascott sat a long while in smiling silence. Not in years had she been so entertained. Bit by bit she added the child’s revelations to the broken comments of her garrulous gardener. The Duttons had been neighbours of the Trenches in Olive Hill, when Jeff and Dave were fellow workmen, and before Jeff’s baleful visit to the “Jag Institoot” that robbed him of his prowess as a brick mason, along with the appetite for undiluted whiskey. Mrs. Dutton “wasn’t very friendly” because her fortunes had declined until she was compelled to serve as laundress and house-maid to Mrs. Trench’s tenants. But there was a time when she and her husband were glad of a refuge in the rooms above the garage. This small brick structure, it transpired, had been David’s work shop, and here Lary had made his first architectural drawings.