Chapter XIV: A Broken Axle

I

Late Thursday afternoon Mrs. Trench crossed the lawn with tottering steps. She looked incredibly old, with the bloodless lips and the greenish pallor of her sunken cheeks. “No wonder her children are temperamental,” Judith thought, remembering the crispness of her step and the full flush of her dark skin as she crossed that same stretch of grass the previous evening, the plate of rolls in her hand. She came now with no offering of good will. There was set purpose in her eyes. And her mouth ... Judith wondered how she could have thought Eileen’s mouth looked like that. A sleepless night and the bald revelation of Calvin Stone’s sorrow--discussed at the luncheon table as the Bromfield paper was handed about--had reduced her resistive power to its lowest point. When her life stream was full, she had little difficulty concealing the slimy bed of her being. But now, with all her animation ebbed away, she groped within her own turbid depths, blinded by resentment and self-pity until even prudence forsook her. In any other state of mind, she would not have flung down the gauntlet to the one woman on whom she must depend for the furthering of her plans.

“Mrs. Ascott, would you mind going inside? I can’t stand this sunshine. I never could see why David put a door in the west side of this summer house, where the afternoon sun can shine right in your face. But David always bungles things.”

“You are ill. I am so sorry.”

“It’s nothing. I’ll be myself after I’ve had a night’s rest. The fact is, I want to have a plain talk with you.” Judith led the way to the library. With rigid lips, that marred her usual sharp enunciation, she began bluntly. “I feel that it’s my Christian duty to tell you some nasty truths about that Mrs. Nims.”

“Village gossip. I’m sure, Mrs. Trench, I’m not in the least interested.”

An ugly purplish red crept along Lavinia’s corded neck and up over the cheeks to the line of straight black hair.

“But you and Eileen are planning all sorts of intimacy--musical trio with you at the piano, playing accompaniments for the violin and ’cello--and Larimore and his father are terribly vexed. Of course you couldn’t be expected to know anything about the woman ... being a newcomer in the town. And you couldn’t know how important it is to me, right now, not to have my husband displeased.”

It transpired that Eileen had talked too much, at breakfast, that morning ... too many details of her call at the Marksleys’ home, the play the Dramatic Club was putting on, for the benefit of the laboratory fund, in which Hal Marksley had to kiss her, beneath the pale glow of a marvellously devised stage moon.

“The trio was only a tentative suggestion. If Mr. Trench--”

“It isn’t so much his opposition as Larimore’s. He never had any use for the Marksley family--and this big competition coming on. Villa residence, keeper’s lodge, garage and barns. It will mean a great deal to my son to win that commission. And the contract for the construction will be the biggest thing Mr. Trench has had since he put up the new Science Hall.

“I should think being kind to Mrs. Nims would be a help rather than a hindrance,” Mrs. Ascott said, perplexed.

“It would, if I had reasonable men to deal with. The fact is--if I _must_ speak plainly--young Mr. Marksley is very much in love with Eileen. I wouldn’t have anything come between them for the world. You are a married woman. You ought to know Eileen’s type. She isn’t the least bit like me. If she resembles any of my family, it is my sister Isabel--and we were thankful to get her safely married at seventeen.”

“But Mr. Marksley, they told me, is going to Pratt when he is graduated from the college, here. It will be four or five years before--”

“Some more of Eileen’s foolishness. What use has he for more education--with all that money? And she knows as well as I do that he can go into business with his brother Alfred, in St. Louis, the day after commencement. He doesn’t have to depend on his father, who detests him. I suppose Eileen has told you that fact, too.”

Mrs. Ascott shook her head, irritation mounting to anger, as her caller’s tone divested itself of that modicum of reserve that had been the inculcated habit of years. In all her experience she had never met a woman like Lavinia Trench. From their second meeting, there had been an undercurrent of hostility, which Lavinia was at great pains to subdue or conceal. A rich woman was a person to be envied ... and conciliated. In her normal state she would not have jeopardized the fragile bond of surface friendship that bound them.

II

Not that the interview reached the disgusting level of a quarrel. Yet Judith was betrayed into the fatal error of attempting to reason with a woman whose mental processes had never recognized the inevitable link between cause and effect. She did not know how to deal with the mind that leaped from one vantage point to another, with all the nimbleness and none of the objectivity of a circus acrobat. Dutton had once said of Mrs. Trench: “You can’t nail that woman down. When you trap her square, on her own proposition--she’s over yonder, on an entirely different subject, crowing over you. If she can’t make her point, she talks about something else.” But Judith gave little heed to Dutton’s mumblings.

The one thing Mrs. Trench had made unequivocally plain was that Larimore and his father must not be antagonized. This could be accomplished only by keeping Eileen’s fondness for Hal in the background, and avoiding any public contact with his highly immoral sister. It was in connection with Mrs. Nims that Judith blundered. She could not believe that either David or Larimore Trench would cast a stone at the woman who had sinned and was unhappy because of her sin.

“You mean Mary Magdalene, and all that? Well, I don’t believe Christ expects _me_ to associate with the woman who ran away from two husbands--travelled with the first one for three weeks before they were married at all. There’s no reforming a woman like Adelaide Marksley. She’s bad, through and through.”

“There may have been extenuating circumstances. What do you and I know about her inside life? Until we have been tempted, as she was, we have no moral right to set up our code--”

“You think I have never been tempted? I could tell you a story ... if I was a-mind to. It was only my sense of honour and duty. And that ought to be enough for Adelaide Nims or any other woman.”

“She may not have had a very clear conception of the meaning of ‘honour’ and ‘duty.’ Do you think those terms mean the same thing to all women? Do they mean the same thing to any woman, at all times? You don’t know anything about the inner life of the girl who grows up in a loveless home, or is trapped in a childless home of her own, with a man who doesn’t love her. Your life has been crowded with responsibility and affection. You have a husband whose devotion to you is the most beautiful--”

“You think David is a paragon. You haven’t had to live with him for almost twenty-eight years. You haven’t had to drive him, every step he took, for fear he would sit down on you, and let the family starve. And as for the children ... what has that got to do with it? Why--it was when Isabel was so sick that--that the minister kept calling and calling. All the women in the church were crazy about him. I never dreamt he was in love with me till the night before the baby died. But I showed him his place, quick enough, when he told me he could see that David didn’t understand or appreciate me.” Her eyes gleamed with pride, as if she would have gloated: “There! You didn’t know I had been tempted--and by the minister, too!”

“For all that, Mrs. Trench, you can’t draw the line between the woman who sins and the one who is saved from sinning by some fortuitous accident. Your baby died, the next day. If she had lived ... and you had seized the chance for the happiness you had missed, I would have no condemnation for you. I know. I was almost in sight of that treacherous snare--when the axle of our motor car broke, and my father overtook us and--brought me to my senses. We were within a mile of the pier where his yacht was anchored--the man who was as unhappy in his loveless home as I was in mine. We were going to Italy, to hunt for what we both had missed. My husband had gone to Egypt with another woman. I told myself that my marriage vow was an empty mockery....” She stopped, a sickening wave of self-disgust overwhelming her. Why had she bared her soul to this woman?

Lavinia? She made no effort to conceal her horror. So this was why Mrs. Ascott did not wear mourning!

“And he, your husband--divorced you?”

“No, I divorced him. In New York there is only one cause for divorce, and in the eyes of the law, I had committed no offence. Mrs. Nims, with her bringing up--with the family environment that surrounds her and her brother--”

“Oh, with men it is different. You don’t expect morality in them. David says that Hal is fast. That’s at the bottom of the whole trouble. I wish I hadn’t said anything about the affair. I might have known you wouldn’t see it as I do. But then, I hadn’t suspected--” She checked herself. There were some things Lavinia wouldn’t say, even when she was indignant to the core.

III

When she went home, a few minutes later, she resolved to padlock the wicket gate--to secure it with hammer and nails, if need be. She would not have her family subjected to such an influence. Eileen was completely bewitched. It was “Mrs. Ascott this” and “Lady Judith that” from morning till night. Theo was even worse. David was getting to look like a boy, since he had been chatting across the wall with that designing woman. And Larimore! He was already in her clutches. How could a mother have been so blind? If the gate were closed, with obvious intent, Mrs. Ascott would take the hint, and move away.

Then she remembered the months that Vine Cottage had stood idle. It was a poor time to rent a furnished cottage, with vacation coming on, and ever so many of the faculty houses eager to be leased for the summer months. Besides ... Mrs. Ascott had her redeeming points. She was never at a loss which forks to put on the table, and how to add that chic effect to a costume. If Eileen were to shine as Mrs. Henry Marksley, Junior, she would need much coaching. And, after all, what had Mrs. Ascott done? She might have gone to Italy in a yacht. A flight in a motor car--pursuit--a broken axle--capture! There had never been anything like that in Lavinia Trench’s life. Then, too, her husband had deserted her ... had run away with another woman. It was always, in these cases, “running.” One could not conceive of a leisurely departure from the confines of the moral code. No doubt Mr. Ascott had abused her. Men usually did, when they were casting amorous eyes at some one else. That made a different case of it. Her father had taken her back. It could not have resulted in a public scandal. Probably the facts never leaked out. Mrs. Ascott had certainly been received by the best society in New York and Pelham before coming to Springdale.

Moreover ... this thing of nailing up gates did not always turn out the way one expected. She had nailed up one gate in her life that she would have given the whole world to open. And this was such a friendly little gate. Who could tell but that some day she, Vine--the self-sufficient--might need a friend? Mrs. Ascott was--potent phrase--“a woman of the world.” She made the women of Springdale look pitifully gauche. It was not a bad idea to have such a woman as a neighbour. Not too much intimacy. She would look to that. She might mention.... But what was there to tell? Mrs. Ascott had not sinned, as Adelaide Marksley had. Herein lay the crux of the whole matter. Still ... she was a dangerous woman. Larimore must be watched.

XV Masked Benefaction

I

The day following her illuminating talk with her non-conformist neighbour, Mrs. Trench remained in bed. To some women a headache is a godsend. It obviates the necessity for explanation. When she emerged from the darkened room, she brought with her all the marks of physical illness, to account for the rasped state of her nerves; but to her son, at least, the evidence was not convincing. He had witnessed too many narrow brushes with Death, when Lavinia had something important to attain or conceal. Had she waited, she might have seized on a ready-made cause for a period of bad humour ... the outcome of the Marksley building competition. On Saturday afternoon the contest was settled, and Larimore Trench was not the winner. The prize had gone to a Chicago architect. That was not the worst of it. Mrs. Marksley wrote Lary a letter, informing him that his plans were too stiff and old-fashioned; but that she would like to buy from him the design for the cow barn, which was better in some respects than the one the up-to-date architect had made.

“You remember, Larimore, that was what I said, all along.” Lavinia’s voice cut both ways. “And if you had gone on, the way you did the cow barn.... I don’t believe you have forgotten that you put the ornament on the barn, to please me.”

“No, I haven’t forgotten. I designed the house for people, not for cows.”

II

Judith heard about it, in a burst of fierce indignation, from Theodora. It was Monday, and the atmosphere of her home was still so forbidding that she dreaded to enter the house, when she came from school. Mrs. Ascott might want her to do an errand, she argued. At least, it would do no harm to ask. But Mrs. Ascott did not want an errand. She wanted the very information Theo was only too eager to offer. From Eileen she had had a shaft of unpleasant illumination: “Lary has crawled in his hole and pulled the hole in after him.” There was no iron in his nature, nothing with which to fend himself against such clumsy insults. But Theodora inadvertently revealed the deep cause of his hurt. It was not the Marksleys, but his mother’s attitude, that offended him.

“To think, Lady Judith, of those stupid Marksley judges, turning down all Lary’s beautiful plans in favour of--” She gasped, her cheeks burning. “I wish you could see the front elevation of the house. It looks for all the world like a frumpy old woman. There’s a gable that reminds you of a poke bonnet, and under the gable are two round windows ... like staring eyes. If I’d gone that far, I would have had the nerve to put in a nose and a mouth. But, no, he has a door between those windows, opening out on a ledge. You don’t have a third story door opening on a ledge, unless you want some one to walk out there, in the dark, and get his neck broken. It ought to have been a balcony. Hm-m-m, I guess he used up all the balconies the law allows. He has them at both sides ... like the big hips that were in style when mamma was a bride. And a coat of arms above the door--the Marksleys never had a coat of arms.”

“How did you come to see the plans, Theo?”

“Hal smuggled them over, last night, to show mamma why Lary missed out. And she didn’t do a thing but roast him again, this morning ... because they took the cow barn, that he did to please her, and cut out the classical part, that he did to please himself. That wasn’t the only ruction we had at breakfast. But there’s no living with my mother, these days. Papa said he wouldn’t figure on the contract--after the way they treated Lary. And she nearly raised the roof. I guess my daddy’ll put in a bid, all right.”

III

More than once, in the weeks that followed, Judith’s mind swung back to the words: “There’s no living with my mother, these days.” Once she asked Dr. Schubert about it. Might not Mrs. Trench be, in fact, a very sick woman--keeping herself out of bed by sheer force of her indomitable will? To which Lavinia’s physician replied, with a none too sympathetic smile: “Yes, she is a very sick woman ... but there is nothing in my materia medica that will reach her case. I am looking for a return of her old trouble--a hardening of the fluid in the gall duct. She has passed through two sieges of jaundice. And at another time the hardening reached the stage of well solidified stones, that yielded to large and persistent doses of olive oil--a remedy that Mrs. Trench took as a peculiarly cruel and unnecessary punishment.”

“I’m glad to know it’s purely physical,” Mrs. Ascott breathed. “I was afraid it was ... spleen.”

Dr. Schubert’s eyes twinkled.

“Your neighbour’s liver trouble originates in her spleen. You’ll say my anatomy is defective; but Mrs. Trench’s body is the victim of an abnormal mind. To be physically unfit always infuriates her. Her passionate outbursts always react on that highly important gland, that nature designed for the cleansing of the physical body. Result? A clogged liver and a worse fit of temper. Poor David! He is so fine. Life ought to have given him velvet instead of gravel.”

At no time did Lavinia take to her bed for more than a few hours, and then only when some personal triumph was to be gained by a direct appeal to the sympathy of her family. If she harboured a feeling of ill-will against her neighbour, it was in effect to class her with those of her own household. She seldom glanced into the garden across the low stone barrier, and when she walked from the kitchen stoop to David’s shop, at the lower end of her own domain, she went with head inclined, as if she were battling against a furious northern gale. Even Theodora was beginning to practice caution, and a less amiable maid than Drusilla would have given notice, long ago.

Larimore and his mother were icily polite, as was their wont when no other form of civil intercourse was possible. The coldness began the day after Mrs. Trench taunted her son with his failure to win the Marksley commission. But her smug “I told you so” had little to do with the prolonged siege. Lary would have forgiven her. His father had schooled him not to hold her accountable for the bitter things she said. You could reason with Theodora; but Lavinia....

No, the rancour was not on this side. His had been the triumph. His mother had sought to deliver a blow that must shatter his dearest idol--and the blow had missed the mark. Dutton was wont to say that nobody ever got ahead of Vine Trench. And in this case it was Lavinia who defeated herself. So much the worse for Larimore, who had parried the thrust with a foreknowledge that staggered and infuriated her.

IV

It was the Friday following the close of the competition, and there were indications of a coming thaw in the big Colonial house. The girls had betaken themselves to Mrs. Ascott’s arbour, as soon as dinner was over. They spent every available minute at Vine Cottage--to make up for their mother’s open hostility. And their mother, seeing how happy they were, had dispatched Larimore to tell them that they were to accompany her to Mrs. Henderson’s on some inconsequential errand. When they had gone, Lary let himself wearily down on the bench at Mrs. Ascott’s side. All the boyishness was gone from his face and his eyes were deeply circled and dull. No word passed between them. The man reflected, feeling the warm presence so close to him, that most women chattered, preached or philosophized without cessation, as if the one thing demanded of femininity were an unbroken flow of talk. Judith Ascott knew when speech was obtrusive. She knew, too, when to break the thread of Lary’s morbid musings.

“Have you been watching that sunset? Theo called my attention to it, before you came out. She saw, in those clouds, the form of a woman with streaming red curls. ‘The red-haired wife of the sun,’ she called it. Now the locks are straight and almost gray. I never saw such sunsets as you have here, not even in Italy.”

“I didn’t know what bewitching colour effects we had, until I began to sit here on this bench with you. My father has often called us to enjoy a peculiarly beautiful sky with him. Mamma usually spoils it by reminding him that all the wealth of tints is produced by particles of dirt in the atmosphere. She hates dirt, even when it reveals itself in a form that doesn’t menace her housekeeping. If she had gone on living in Olive Hill, I believe she would have died of disgust.”

“Does the town--the immediate environment--make any difference, Lary? Olive Hill or Springdale, Florence or Pelham. I have been as wretchedly unhappy and ... alone ... in a crowded Paris café as ever I was on the deck of a steamer, in mid-ocean, when I wanted to climb overboard and end it, in the inviting black water.”

“You? Judith! I thought your life had been eminently satisfactory--barring the one sorrow.”

“You must not think I have been a happy woman. I have only been a coward--shutting the trap door on my failures. But I don’t want to talk about myself. I have a favour to ask. Will you--” Her voice took on the quality of appeal.

“What is it, Judith? A favour?”

She drew from its envelope a letter that had come, that afternoon, from her attorney. His partner, Mr. Sanderson, was planning to build a home on Long Island, as a wedding gift to his only daughter. She knew the girl’s taste. She wanted to send the plans that Mrs. Marksley had rejected. With such entrée as the Sandersons could give him, Larimore Trench ought to find success in New York. He was wasting his talents in Springdale.

“It’s good of you, my dear. But that kind of success--or failure--doesn’t mean much to me.”

“Then what would satisfy you, Lary? You have so much ability.”

“A little of the right kind of recognition--perhaps. I used to think I would experience the thrill at the acceptance of a poem or essay by some discriminating editor. The first time such an acceptance came, it left me numb and cold with disappointment ... in myself, I mean--my inability to rise to the occasion.”

“May I tell you what you want--what you demand of life?” Some one had struck a match in her darkness.

“I--wish you would.”

“The thing you have attained, Lary, the height you have reached ... is under your feet. You--_you_ are superior to it. The only thing that could satisfy you is--” she paused, a fervid instant--“the unattainable.”

Larimore Trench turned and looked into her eyes.

Dusk had settled on the garden, but Luna’s fire illuminated her face. His body stiffened, and a dull anguish smote him.

“Judith--God help me--the unattainable is ... you!”

V

Judith Ascott had dreamed of the time when love should come, not such love as Raoul had given her in her romantic girlhood. Nor that other love, that had marched with slow musical cadence into the discord of her early maturity. It must be the masterful love, austere and tender, a discipline and a refuge for her unruly spirit. And now it was come ... the only love that had ever mattered to her--the only man she had known whose very faults and weaknesses were precious, and she had but one impulse--to fold him in her arms and soothe his aching spirit. Was this love? Or mayhap the thwarted motherhood within her, that perceived in Lary and Eileen the void left by the rebellious aversion of the woman who was their mother in the flesh? A long moment she scrutinized, challenged the stranger that had arisen, unheralded and undesired, in her own heart. Then she said, resolutely:

“No, Lary. I am the unattainable, only so long as I retain the wisdom to hold myself beyond your reach. I should prove as disappointing as all the others--the achievements that were to give you joy. The real Judith is not the peerless being your imagination has fashioned. Would you shrink from me in repugnance and horror if I should tell you that my husband is not dead?”

“You are another man’s wife?”

“I was. The divorce was granted a few days before I came to Springdale, less than three months ago.”

Lary breathed a sigh so sharp that it cut him like a knife.

“But that isn’t all. There was another man ... a man I fancied I loved. Perhaps I pitied him. Most of all, I pitied myself. I was more than willing to listen to his arguments. We would go to some place where no one knew us. We had not the courage to brush away the falsehoods and conventions of society. I faced all the consequences. It was no impulse of youth. I was twenty-five, and had been married almost seven years. We both knew what we were doing when I told him I would go.”

All at once she felt the man at her side shrink--involuntarily, she was sure. It was as if his body had repulsed her, while his mind was striving to be just, even magnanimous. She had thought it all out, after Theodora’s revelation, knowing that some day Lary would come to her with the pure white offering of his love. And she had resolved to tell him of Herbert Faulkner--not the fiasco, but the fact of her elopement. Perhaps it was this submerged thought that had leaped to the surface, in her talk with Lary’s mother. With him she would not take refuge in the timely intervention of a broken axle and a prudent father. Her sin was as complete as if she had carried elopement to its inevitable conclusion. He must hear the story in all its sordid aspect. She waited for him to speak. The clear outline of his face cut the shadow, incisive and still as an Egyptian profile in stone. Not a quiver of the lips betrayed his emotion. Yet Judith Ascott knew she had dealt him the cruelest blow of his life.

“You won’t let it interfere with our friendship, Lary?” It was a stupid, girlish question, such as Eileen or Kitten Henderson might have asked. She felt incredibly young and inexperienced. When the man spoke, his voice was hoarse with pain.

“I don’t want friendship. I want, oh, God! the unattainable. Judith, it is not what you have done. I am not such a cad as to judge you. I long since freed myself from the tyranny of an absolute thing called virtue. That isn’t the--the obstacle. At bottom I am a selfish brute, jealous and unreasonable. If there is another man in the world who has meant that much to you.... Oh, not that I blame him. If I had known you when you were another man’s wife, I wouldn’t have scrupled to take you from him. You are my other self. I have known it--from the moment I looked into your eyes, under the little apricot lamp. All my life I have been heart-hungry, wanting something I couldn’t find. Zeus cleft us apart, in the beginning of time. And now that you are here--” He set his teeth hard and his frame shook.

A long, long time they sat silent. The night settled about them and clouds covered the face of the moon. In the great house next door, lights gleamed here and there as the family came home and prepared for bed. Mrs. Trench had arrived in Hal Marksley’s touring car, with the girls. Apparently they had been for a ride. As she went to the back door, to be sure Drusilla had put out the milk bottles, she caught sight of the two motionless figures in the summer house. She went to the sun room and turned on a light that shimmered faintly through the Venetian blinds. Judith saw, without perceiving it. The whole irony of life lay between her and that impatient light.

The tower clock chimed eleven, when, like a stage illumination, the garden was bathed in golden glory. With a single impulse the two on the settee turned and looked up through the roof of the summer house, where the vines were thin. And there, in a little clear blue lake, piled high around the marge with mountains of sombre clouds, the yellow moon floated, serene and detached. Lary took the fevered hands between his cold, moist palms.

“Will you wait for me ... wait till I can search myself? Perhaps there is a man, hidden somewhere in the husk of me. If I find him ... I will come and lay him at your feet.”

VI

Mrs. Trench was waiting for her son. She had dallied too long with that warning. She was in the door of the sun room at the first sound of his key in the lock.

“Larimore!” as he crossed the hall and made for the stairs.

“Yes, mamma. Why aren’t you in bed?”

“I have something to say to you. I don’t often meddle in your affairs; but there come times when it is a mother’s duty to speak. I wish you would be a little more careful in your associations with that Mrs. Ascott. She isn’t the pure, virtuous woman we thought her. She told me--in the most brazen way--that her husband ran away to Africa with another woman. Though what anybody would want to go to Africa for-- But he wasn’t entirely to blame for leaving her. She had an affair with another man. A low scoundrel who pretended to be her husband’s friend. She told me, without the least bit of shame, that the only thing that saved her from breaking her marriage vow was--her father catching up with them, when the axle of their automobile broke--before they reached the yacht that they were going to Italy in ... alone ... not a touring party. Alone!”

The words poured forth in a disorderly phalanx. Larimore stood patiently waiting until the need for breath stopped her utterance. Then he said incisively:

“So there was a broken axle.”

And in a flash Lavinia knew that she had lifted a load of doubt and misery from her son’s mind--had destroyed, with her revelation, the barrier that stood between him and Judith Ascott. He could hear the grinding of her sharp teeth as he turned and ascended the stairs.

XVI Coming Storm

I

Mrs. Ascott and Theodora were up in the attic searching through trunks and boxes for a fan that would harmonize with Eileen’s graduating dress. Lavinia had made a special trip to St. Louis in quest of accessories, and had returned with a marvel of lacquer sticks and landscape, befitting a mandarin’s banquet board--and Lary had said things that threw the family into a superlative state of stress.

“Mamma and my brother don’t gee worth a cent,” the child lamented, peering with eager eyes into the shadowy recesses of a chest that ought to yield treasure. “For the last month, they’re on each other’s nerves all the time. It’s mostly Lary’s fault ... and ... I believe he does it to save papa. My poor daddy can’t do a blessed thing the way it ought to be. And you know, mamma gets good and mad at only one of us at a time. Eileen says, if she felt that way about her people, she’d clean up the whole bunch at once, and get it out of her ‘cistern.’ But mamma’s just naturally economical, and this way she can make her grouches go farther. We thought Drusilla would quit us, last week, because mamma laid her out so hard--when she scorched the bottom layer of a short cake. So I guess it was a good thing Lary said what he did about the fan.”

“Lightning rod for Drusilla,” Larimore Trench called, from the foot of the narrow stairway. “You don’t mind if I come up? I’d like to see the old attic again.” His face was beaming and his gesture catlike as he mounted the steep stairs. “Bob and Syd and I used to have some wild times up here. I wonder if the ghosts of our youth ever disturb your slumbers, sweet Lady Judith. We were a rough trio, in our day.”

“You and Sydney Schubert rough! I wonder what you would call my two incorrigible brothers.”

“Yes, but they were,” Theo broke in. “Bob could get them to do anything. We got awful quiet at our house after he went away. Come over here, Lary, where you can get the breeze. I’ll let you have half of my box to sit on.” With a wisp of paper she wiped the dust from the top of a packing case that bore in bold black letters the legend: “Books--Keep Dry.”

“Look at this, Lady Judith!” The small frame shook with reminiscent mirth. “It belongs to mamma ... twenty volumes of general information, in doses to match the monthly payments. ‘Keep Dry!’ You couldn’t wet ’em with a fire hose. We had to leave them here, because Lary planned the book-cases, in the other house, so that they wouldn’t quite go in. And mamma had one awful set-to with Professor Ferguson when he had the nerve to use her box of canned culture to lay out his herbarium specimens for mounting. Sylvia said it taught mamma a lesson. If she wanted to rent Vine Cottage, she couldn’t go on deciding how often the silver must be polished, and what the tenant could do with the old plunder she left in the attic. _Plunder!_ Think of it!”

“She has been an exemplary ‘landlord’ since I have been here,” Judith said, ignoring Lary and his too evident embarrassment. “I don’t in the least mind her ordering Dutton around. It saves my humiliating myself in the eyes of my gardener. How was I to know that you can’t grow sweet potatoes from seed, and that Brussels sprouts aren’t good until after frost?”

II

Down on the street there was a harsh grinding of brakes and an excited cry, as Hal Marksley’s car stopped so abruptly as to precipitate Eileen from her seat. Theodora darted to the window, cupped her hands around her mouth, and shouted:

“Come on up. Mrs. Ascott’s got three fans for you to choose from.”

A moment later, two pairs of feet were heard ascending the stairs. A swift sense of impending disaster sent Theo’s glance from the face of her hostess to that of her brother. She wondered how she ought to have worded her invitation so that Hal could not have assumed it to include him. A young man of fine breeding would not need to be told that she was not asking him to Mrs. Ascott’s attic, when Mrs. Ascott had never invited him to her reception room. He just didn’t know how to discriminate. Lately Eileen didn’t seem to discriminate, either. She should have told Hal not to come. He would be terribly embarrassed, meeting Lary. But of course neither of them knew Lary was there.

If young Marksley knew he was not welcome in the sultry store room of Vine cottage, he gave no token. Eileen’s breathless condition, when she reached the top of the steep stair, gave him a momentary conversational advantage.

“I’m going over to my sister’s to dinner, this evening, and the kid and I were wondering how we’d put in the time till the rest of the folks arrive.”

“You don’t mean you’re going to _eat_ again--just coming from Ina’s graduation party!” Theodora gasped. “What did she serve?”

“Oh, the usual sumptuous Stevens spread. What did she have, Eileen? All I can remember is that Kitten said she borrowed the microtome from the lab. to cut the sandwiches. I believe there was an olive apiece, by actual count.”

“Don’t you remember, Hal? The feast began with frappéd essence of rose fragrance, served in cocktail glasses, with hearts of doughnuts. Then there was a salad of last year’s ambitions and next year’s hopes. And something to drink that had a reminiscent flavour of coffee. But her china was lovely. She borrowed most of it from Mrs. Marksley. That’s how Hal came to be invited with the preps. Gee, when I ask a bunch of hungry kids to my house, I _feed_ ’em. But then, I know how to cook. And I don’t have to be so desperately dainty, for fear of blundering in the menu.”

“You might have waited for some one else to say that,” Larimore rebuked.

“Huh! it’s a poor dog that can’t wag its own tail. Besides, I can’t remember when you or any of my family made me duck to keep from being pelted with praise. That poor boy is almost starved. He pretended he didn’t like olives, so that I could have two. And he was about to smuggle another sandwich when Mrs. Stevens told what they charge for a beef tongue, and how it shrinks in cooking.”

“Yes,” the youth roared, “when you go to Ina’s for a meal, your oesophagus rings a bell every time you swallow. Her mother makes you feel as if you were eating the grocery bill. We eat like pigs at our house--all but sister, and she’s sure no recommendation for the æsthetic diet. She’d be a stunner, with a little more meat on her bones.”

Eileen flushed and changed the subject. A few minutes later, Hal lounged across the room to where Lary and Theo sat silently side by side. He began, in a tone that sought to be intimate:

“I say, old man, it was a rotten shame about those plans. I was just as sorry as could be. But my mother--”

“One doesn’t speak of such things,” Larimore said curtly.

Judith saved the situation by the timely intervention of the fan--a woman’s device that evoked from Lary gratitude, from Theo worship. An exclamation of delight, a moment’s perplexed comparison, a hasty choice, and Eileen and her uncouth cavalier were gone.

III

When Theodora looked from the window, some minutes later, the two were crossing the street in the direction of the Nims’ house. A full minute she stood, perplexed. Then her chest heaved with futile indignation. In that minute, the scattered troubles of the past six weeks had danced into form, like iron filings on the glass disc, when Sydney drew his violin bow across its vibrating edge. She understood. Mamma had given permission for Eileen to go with Hal to Mrs. Nims’--to dinner. After all she had said about Mrs. Nims! A quarrel with papa was inevitable. _Mamma wanted to provoke a quarrel with papa._ There was no other explanation. Things had gone from bad to worse, with only an occasional rift in her mother’s lowering sky. Whatever the cause of her displeasure, it had reached a climax. Something must be done to protect papa--done quickly. Lary was not always tactful--when people acted that way. And mamma always took it out on papa, when Lary got the best of her.

“Lady Judith, couldn’t you call her to come right back here ... eat dinner with you?” The plea tumbled from the inchoate depth of her distress. Mrs. Ascott and Lary interrupted a flow of intimate talk, to look at the pale face and the preternaturally bright eyes.

“What, darling?”

“Eileen! I think my mother has gone crazy. First she says Mrs. Nims isn’t fit for a decent woman to speak to--when papa talked about Christian charity--and now she lets Eileen go over there to dinner.”

“How do you know that, baby?”

“Well, Lary Trench, look for yourself. I guess I can put two and two together. If I didn’t want papa to think Mrs. Nims was a dangerous woman--I wouldn’t tell him that Christ himself couldn’t save her. Either my mother hasn’t got any system at all ... or ... she wants to have one awful row with my father.”

“We might as well face a sickeningly unpleasant situation,” Larimore said to Judith. “You are seeing my mother at her absolute worst. Something has occurred to annoy her, desperately. And we can’t even surmise what it is. The baby and I have laid plots to trap her into betraying the cause of her hurt. But only last night we acknowledged ourselves beaten.”

“May I confess that I have been trying, too, at Dr. Schubert’s suggestion? He tells me that this state of her mind may lead to serious consequences. Some obscure liver trouble, I believe.”

“Not obscure,” Lary amended. “Dr. Schubert understands its pathological aspect. It is the mental cause that baffles all of us. Gall stones are not uncommon in women of my mother’s temperament. She has too much energy for the small engine she has to operate. Her physician has tried to impress on her the need for keeping herself tranquil. He might as well advise a tornado to be calm and rational.”

“Yet she does take advice from him--if he makes it specific and definite.”

“You have the index to my mother’s mind--that cost me years of search. She learns one thing at a time. She has no faculty for making logical deductions. When she tries to apply a known principle to a new set of conditions the chances are nine to one that she will go wrong.”

As he spoke, the woman’s eyes turned to Theodora ... impelled by some unrecognized attraction. The little head was nodding in sage approval. She was only half conscious of what those two were saying. The fact that it was intimate--confidential--sufficed. Things were coming on, entirely to her liking. It was almost the end of June, and she wanted to be sure there would be no backslidings, while she and her mother were in Minneapolis, the following month. She had never been anywhere--excepting the week in St. Louis for the Exposition, when she was seven--and a trip up the river on a steamer had been particularly alluring. Now she would almost rather not go. She might be needed. Oh, not to patch up a quarrel! Lary and Lady Judith were too wellbred for that. But Lary did need to have his courage bucked up, now and then.

She was only a child, she reflected, but she knew that when people were in love, they had no business mooning around in the dark--_in separate yards_. She could go over the wall without touching anything but her hands. And Lary was much more athletic than she. Besides, the gate was there--even if mamma did padlock it, one morning. What if Lady Judith should try to go through that gate--and have her feelings hurt!

IV

Theodora glanced up from her troubled musings to perceive that she was quite alone in the attic. They had gone and left her. They had forgotten all about her. She sprang from the packing case and danced for joy. It was the first time in all her life that Lary had forgotten her. It was the best omen of all. They were standing at the foot of the stairs--and they weren’t saying a word. She paused, on tiptoe, afraid to breathe lest she break the witching spell. What did people think about, when they were all alone in that kind of heaven? Now she heard their feet on the lower stairs. She hurried to the window to see them go down to the grassy plot before the house, where her father joined them.

The rosy picture was obscured, in an instant, as if she had spilled the ink bottle over it, and daddy’s danger loomed before her. She trudged wearily down to join them on the grass. Things never were what you thought they were going to be. When she reached the edge of the veranda, a pair of strong arms caught her in a yearning embrace.

“Aren’t you going to congratulate your papa?”

“If there’s any reason. Did you get the Marksley contract?”

David’s transparent face darkened.

“Yes ... but that’s not a matter for congratulation. I figured so high that I counted on escaping. I didn’t want it at any price.”

“Then what is it?”

“You know, this was the annual meeting of the college Board--and they elected your papa treasurer. When Dr. Clarkson made his nominating speech, I didn’t dream he was talking about me.”

“Mamma said this morning that they’d shove it off on you--after the way the last two treasurers handled the funds. She couldn’t see why you would want to do all that work, just to be called the most honest man on the Board.”

“Mamma and I don’t always look at things alike. Come, my dears, she is at the door, and dinner may be waiting.”

“Eileen went to a party, over at Ina’s,” Theo cried, mindful of danger. To herself she added: “Well, she did. I didn’t tell him she wasn’t there still.” Daddy must not find out that she was right across the street. There had been too many disagreements, and it never did daddy any good to fight back. He always got the worst of it, and it made him sick. She wanted to ask Mrs. Ascott to come with them, and eat dinner in Eileen’s place. Mamma would hardly raise a scene before company. As the invitation took shape on her lips, it was halted by her mother’s curt voice:

“I suppose you like your victuals cold, the way you stand there and gossip.”

The three Trenches stepped over the wall, which at the front was little more than an ornamental coping, and Judith went in to her lonely meal.

V

Dinner was scarcely over when the room was plunged in a glare of fire, the startling illumination followed almost instantly by thunder that crackled and smote. Then the storm, that had hovered all afternoon in the sultry air, broke with the fury of explosively released wind and rain. Nanny called for help, as the deluge poured through the screens at three sides of the cottage in quick succession. Before the east windows had been closed, the rain was driving straight from the south--and the attic window wide open. Nanny’s bulk halted at the foot of the breath-exhausting stairs, and her mistress ran past her, to make good the publisher’s injunction, “Keep Dry.” When the sash had been lowered, Judith went to the rear of the attic and looked down into the garden, tossing in the summer storm.

Sharp, hissing flames heralded the detonation of thunder such as she had heard nowhere save in the Alps or the tropics. The earth, a moment ago black with the pall of midnight, leaped into the semblance of a stage set with dancing marionets, that vanished in the ensuing darkness to rise again with the next purple flash. Now the wind swooned, lay panting and breathless against the palpitating bosom of the earth. And now it leaped with renewed ardour, gripped the pear tree and shook it as an ill-controlled mother shakes an unruly child. One of the trellises at the east side of the lawn went over with a crash, carrying in its wake a shower of Prairie Queen roses. The Dorothy Perkins looked on with serene security from the shoulder of the garage, her petals draggled, but exultant in the garish light.

The air was clearing now. Gradually the tender green corn slumped down in the softened loam and a disconsolate toad hopped mournfully across the white gravel walk. This was too much even for a toad. With a long, soul-sickening lunge he disappeared in the shrubbery, as the thunder rumbled its retreat behind the western horizon. Out of its dying reverberation, music came floating up through the moist air ... marvellous strains. Judith crossed the attic and threw open the window. Yes, her surmise was right. Eileen and Mrs. Nims were playing Debussy’s matchless tone picture, “Garden in the Rain,” the ’cello blending exquisitely with the piano. Would David hear? Would he recognize his daughter’s touch? But Eileen had never played like this. The tones came, moist and meaningful, lulling the conscious mind to dreams, steeping the senses in the drowsy calm that follows the delirium of summer heat.

Judith Ascott felt her soul at one with the garden ... arid clay, whose thirst had been quenched. She had played Debussy’s imagist arrangement, and had rejected it because it failed to symbolize a prosaic natural phenomenon. Now she knew that it was not the rain, but the garden, which the composer had in mind. She had approached the theme from overhead, just as a moment ago she had looked down on her own garden. With a thrill she perceived Debussy’s thought in all its naked, elemental beauty--the primitive consciousness of maternal Earth, glad and grateful for the benison of summer rain.

Had something new come into Eileen’s playing? Was it Adelaide Marksley’s ’cello that made the elusive thought tangible? Was it, rather, something that had come into her own soul? She had been so long athirst. Must one faint beneath the heat, brave the wind and the lightning’s terror, in order to drink in at last the bountiful rain? Was there any price one would not pay for such peace as had found habitation within her soul?