Chapter XIX: A Web in the Moonlight

I

Judith was glad, afterward, that the responsibility for Eileen had been lifted from David Trench’s shoulders, howsoever humiliating the conditions might be. All that would have made for guidance had long since been wrested from his hands, and the inevitable pain would be robbed of the corrosive quality of self-reproach. She wondered what he was thinking, that portentous Monday evening, as he gazed past her and Theodora to the row of seats across the aisle where Hal and Eileen sat, munching popcorn and making audible comments on the speeches, comments that bubbled with cleverness not always refined in its quality.

Just as the perspiring statesman appeared on the flag-draped platform, bearing a message from the Governor of the state, Dr. Schubert and his son came down the aisle, looking to right and left with searching eyes. Theodora stood on tiptoe to signal them. There was a shifting of the original seating arrangement, so that Sydney and Sylvia might be together. The first few sentences of the florid oration were lost in the general confusion, and when Judith looked again into the row of seats across the aisle, two places were vacant. Hal and Eileen had gone.

II

After the fireworks the town went home. Sydney Schubert walked with Sylvia, talking of other Fourth of July experiences in a tone from which the restraint of the disappointed lover was wholly wanting. David played sweetheart to Theodora, a rôle that had been developed by long practice. It came to Judith, walking behind them with Lary and Dr. Schubert, that David Trench was essentially a lover--and love must have something to feed upon.

“Will we wait for Eileen?” he asked, when the feast had been prepared.

“They’ll be here any minute,” Sylvia cried flippantly. Then, in a voice that echoed her mother’s objurgatory habit of speech: “For goodness’ sake, papa, stop worrying about that girl. She’s old enough to take care of herself. Syd and I were traipsing all over the country when I was her age, and I can’t remember that you sat up nights worrying about me.”

“Young Marksley isn’t Sydney Schubert,” her father reminded her.

III

It was one o’clock when the merry party separated, and still no Eileen. A light rain was falling, and the coat closet must be searched for umbrellas. Lary lingered at Judith Ascott’s door, unwilling to say good night. Some misshapen apprehension that had tormented him all evening struggled for expression.

“Do you believe, Judith, that whatever is, is right?”

“I can recall the time, less than six months ago, when I was convinced that whatever is--is wrong,” she answered, mystified.

“And now?” He searched her face, there in the moist dusk of the veranda. When he spoke again, it was with something of Theo’s kindling animation: “I don’t know what you have done to me. A moment ago I was facing a great onrushing wall of black water. And all at once it has broken into ripples of silver joy. Last night I watched a great black and yellow spider, playing with his web in the moonlight. He was such a handsome, capable fellow--and the moth was so blunderingly stupid. I wondered if there were not something to be said in favour of the spider. But--you will think me a fatalist, if I finish the thought I had in mind. You will believe me when I tell you that I am not, in the least?”

“No, Lary, I will not believe you--one whit more than I can believe that it was an empty accident that brought me to Springdale--to Vine Cottage--four months ago. You and Eileen and I are caught in the web. The spider is Fate. I begged the gods to burn my fingers with the fire of life ... and they heard my prayer....”

“You delicious pagan! I might fancy gentle Clotho spinning a silken strand for you. But to sear your fingers--” He caught them and pressed them to his lips. Then he hurried across the lawn in a panic, his bare head wet with the summer rain. Judith looked after him, Sylvia’s best umbrella in her hand. She wanted to call him back, but it would only mean a double wetting. And Sylvia need not know.

She went up to her room but not to sleep. Taking down the thick coils of her pale chestnut hair, she braided it deliberately. A strand, blown across her face by the breeze from the west window, reminded her, all at once, of the web. She relaxed weakly on a hassock, watching the glittering drops on the edge of the awning that shaded her window from the afternoon sun. Was the web inevitable ... Fate? As yet she was free. Could she view with equanimity a future that involved, not Lary and his two young sisters, but those others who were of his flesh? Could she bear the heartache that was David Trench? Could she.... Her head drooped low on the window sill and her mind drifted rudderless on a sea of dreams.

IV

When Hal and Eileen left the stadium it was in accordance with a prearranged plan to meet Ina and Kitten and two of the boys who had contrived the loan of a touring car for the evening. They would drive to Olive Hill for the celebration--the exciting part of it. Competitive drilling, not in gaudy uniforms, but that more useful drilling that had to do with ledges of shale and limestone. It was at best but a poor imitation of the annual drill contest in the gold mining country, where powerful muscles contended with steel bitted drills against the tough impediment of granite. Here the very ledge had to be faked--removed from the nearby hillside with infinite care, and mounted against an improvised wall of mine refuse. It was the best the coal mines of Illinois could afford, but it served its purpose. There were money prizes and lesser trophies--geese, chickens and baskets of provisions.

The contest finished, there was a dance in the pavilion. Hal had parked his roadster where he and Eileen could watch the antics of the dancers. He was not sorry when he learned that the borrowed car must be returned by midnight, and the others must be on their way towards Springdale. He and Eileen would be following in a little while, he said.

“I’ve been trying all evening to dodge them,” he added, as he waved farewell to the departing car. “Some people simply can’t take a hint.”

The girl nestled close. “Just you and me ... all alone in the universe.”

“Sweetheart,” Hal slipped his arm around her waist and laid his cheek against hers, “it’s all fixed with my father. He’s set on having me go to Pratt; but he’s agreed on an allowance that ought to take care of two. We’re in luck that you can cook. And you won’t mind a little flat? I can count on Adelaide to help us out if we get in a pinch. Of course my mother’ll raise Cain--and I’ll be on the lookout for a job, from the start. If they think I’m going to wait all that time for you--why, I can’t, Eileen!”

The girl’s breath came so thick, it choked her. The dancers swam dizzily before her eyes. The saplings in the little grove took up the dance, swaying with uncertain rhythm, their lithe trunks bending to the tumult in her brain. “Do you love me well enough to get along that way for a year or two? Will you come to me, sweetheart, when I send for you?”

And then the rain. Men and women went scurrying to places of shelter. The thin grove, the pavilion with its dilapidated roof, the mine house--whose inner spaces were always barred to the public as soon as the last workman had gone--these offered meagre protection. Over there behind the mine dump was a corn crib and feed room where provender for the now obsolete pit mules had formerly been kept. No one else had thought of this refuge. Hal and Eileen were alone, the rain pounding on the rusty tin roof to the tune of their madly beating hearts.

V

How long Judith lay asleep she did not know. She was aroused at length by voices, so close that they seemed to emanate from the lawn beneath her window. She tried to move. Her arm, her neck, her shoulder creaked with pain. She must have been there in that cramped position a long time. Her hair and her thin negligée were quite damp. As her scattered senses collected themselves she realized that the sound came from beyond the wall. A voice, hoarse with rapture, Eileen’s voice, murmured over and over:

“Oh, darling, I never knew I loved you until now.”

Some high platitude touching manly fidelity punctuated the girl’s impassioned utterance. The façade of the house lay in ghostly shadows that enveloped the figures completely. But out there across the lawn lay the white moonlight, frosting the wet grass with a shimmering incrustation of unearthly jewels. Hal Marksley’s substantial form came like a skulking wraith from the gloom, gliding along the thin edge of the shadow until he reached a convenient screen of shrubs, vaulted over the wall and crossed close beneath Judith’s casement. He was cranking the reluctant engine of his motor car, out there in the side street, as the clock in the chapel tower struck three.

VI

It was ten o’clock when Eileen came down stairs, refused breakfast and wandered listlessly out into the hot July air. She was pale and her full lips were swollen. Her eyes were set in murky pools of shadow, as yellow as ochre, beneath their screen of long lashes, and her blond braids hung stiff and obdurate. As she entered the summer house, Theodora greeted her with a derisive gesture.

“Lady Judith, tell her what she missed. I never saw the automobile yet that could take me away from such a lobster salad.”

“Perhaps she didn’t know about it.”

“Indeed she did. She made the mayonnaise herself. Sylvia can’t hit it one time in three. And mamma and Drusilla ... the oil always separates, on them.”

“Separates on them!” Eileen sniffed. “Where do you get that line of talk?”

She had relaxed on the oaken bench and sat kicking the gravel with the toe of her loose slipper. After a time she broke the sullen silence:

“I didn’t mean to be discourteous to you, Lady Judith. That’s what Sylvia scolded me about; but that wasn’t what she had in mind. She’s sore because I didn’t bring Hal to her party. I knew what kind of a frosty shoulder he’d get from Lary and papa. And the way she fawns over him! It makes me sick. He hates to be toadied to--because his people have money. He knows that if he didn’t have a rich father, mamma and Sylvia wouldn’t think any more of him than Lary does. He’d take me away from that house to-day, if he had his way about it. He knows what I’m in for ... Sylvia to order me around for a month. I almost wish mamma hadn’t gone to Bromfield.”

XX Red Dawn

I

For a day or two Eileen was abstracted and moody, a flaccid resignation taking the place of the high spiritual enthusiasm that ushered in her surrender. But it was not in the girl’s nature to remain long depressed. She could not, as Lavinia did, nurture a grouch to its final fruition. Her return to normal was accompanied by a sequence of quarrels with her elder sister, and she shunned her father with studied aversion. Hal resumed his old habit of asking her to meet him on the campus or around the corner on Sherman Avenue. “To escape Sylvia’s sticky patronage,” she explained to Mrs. Ascott.

Towards the end of the week she went with Theodora to the shady west porch of Vine Cottage, to assist with the drawing of innumerable threads and the hemming of a fresh supply of napkins for the two linen closets. Her lap was overflowing with damask when the postman’s whistle shrilled through the sultry morning air. Theo bounded to her feet, her eyes wide with excitement. The coming of the postman was always an adventure, vicarious but none the less interesting. Some day he might bring.... No, she was not expecting letters for herself. But Lary had sent away a poem and an essay. And then, there ought to be a long letter for daddy. As yet there had been nothing but a stingy post card, with the hackneyed old Niagara Falls on one side and on the other that offensive old cliché: “Will write soon.” And mamma had sent such attractive cards to all the others, not omitting Nanny and Mrs. Dutton.

After a few minutes she came slowly back, all the joy gone out of her face. There was a long envelope addressed to Mr. Larimore Trench. She inverted the hateful thing in Judith’s lap. Letters of acceptance did not come in long envelopes. There was another one, square and perfumed, bearing the name, Mrs. Raoul Ascott. Who was this Raoul Ascott, that he should intrude here?

“The dead have had their shining day;
Why should they try
To listen to the words we say
And breathe their blight upon our May
While the winds sigh?”

She had read the stanza in the back of one of Sylvia’s books ... written while Sylvia was temporarily engrossed with a young professor whose spouse had died. But, after all, it wasn’t quite fair to feel that way about people who couldn’t help being remembered. And Mr. Ascott _had_ vacated the place that belonged rightfully to Lary. The third letter was from mamma. It bore, in Lavinia’s cramped writing, the name of Mrs. Oliver Penrose. The little girl raged impotently as she called her sister.

II

Sylvia pushed Eileen none too gently aside, to make room for herself in the hammock beside Mrs. Ascott. Then she fell upon her letter, reading aloud such passages as involved no violation of the family’s privacy. The journey had been hot and dusty--not a familiar face on the train from beginning to end. Theodore had met her in Rochester with the new car, and she had enjoyed the first part of the ride, along the Genesee. She was glad Ellen was not along. It gave Ted a chance to tell her ever so many things, that she would otherwise not have heard.

Ellen could think of nothing but the Stone scandal. Everybody felt sorry for Calvin. For her part, she thought he got only what he deserved. She had not seen him, as yet. His life was a terrible example of the consequences of sin. She hoped he had not forgotten how she tried for years to lead him into the church. She might remind him of this, when she saw him ... for Ellen had invited him--oh, much against her own wishes--to have dinner with them Sunday.

As Sylvia read, the long envelope addressed to Mr. Larimore Trench slipped from Judith’s lap and fell to the floor. Eileen stooped to restore it.

“Whee-oo! Lary’ll be down in the back cellar, eating coal to warm his heart,” she cried. “It certainly does take the tuck out of him to have the editors give him the back-fire.”

“I can imagine what you mean,” Mrs. Ascott smiled, “but you are wrong in your surmise. This is not a rejected manuscript. It is a business letter from one of my attorneys--not Mr. Ramsay.”

* * * * *

That evening, just as Hal and Eileen were driving away in the little roadster, with Sylvia watching them from a third-floor window, Lary sprang nimbly over the wall and hurried to the summer house, the long envelope in his hand. His feet scarce touched the grass ... he walked like Theodora in her most charming mood.

“It’s the contract for the plans. I couldn’t wait to let you know. It might have been the other thing. I wouldn’t let myself see how eager I was for ... success. Mr. Sanderson says they are charmed with the whole arrangement. They want me to come to New York at once for a conference. His daughter doesn’t care about the cow barn--since she isn’t operating a dairy. They would like to have me substitute a studio, somewhere out in the woods. It appears that the bride-to-be is a sculptor.”

“Yes, she and Hilda Travers were in Paris together--but of course you don’t know about Hilda.”

A queer, chilly feeling crept over Judith Ascott. She had forgotten Hilda. She had forgotten everything. It all belonged to another world, a story she had read in a book on an idle summer’s day.

“You didn’t--let the Marksleys have the cow barn?” she faltered.

“No.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. A lower nature than yours would have taken a mean revenge--by letting the dwelling of cattle shame the manor house.”

“It wasn’t that, Judith. They offered me a stiff price for that one set of plans, and I needed the money. But ... seeing anything of mine in that environment of cairngorms would make me feel the way it does to see Eileen running around with that--” He checked himself, and the slow red--Lavinia’s red that betokened impotent rage--crept above the line of his collar.

“When are they going to begin building? The Sandersons, I mean.”

“Immediately. They want me to go over the ground and outline the landscape features. I shall probably be back and forth the rest of the summer. They have asked me to serve in the capacity of supervising architect. We don’t do things that way in Springdale. But I have helped my father--long before I was out of college--so I have all the necessary experience. The only difference is that Mr. Sanderson will pay me a fee and flaunt my name on sign-boards all over the estate. I may as well get used to that part of it. I have always insisted that my father use his name, as contractor, in connection with the actual work. It’s a distinction I never relished. But if I’m going to invade the New York field--”

“I’m so happy. Have you told Sylvia?”

“No, I told the baby.”

“That was dear, Lary.”

Larimore Trench turned to look at her. The blue-grey eyes were suffused and the sweet lips trembled. The man wondered why he had no impulse to kiss so engaging a mouth. It was all spiritual, that strange contact that he was experiencing for the first time in his life. Then, too, kissing had always been associated with his mother, the outward symbol of a bond he knew did not exist.

“I am going down to the office to talk it over with papa. They have asked for an immediate answer by wire. It is not necessary to tell you what the answer will be. Won’t you come with me? I’ll turn the electric fan on you while we talk shop.”

“But, Lary, won’t I be horribly in the way?”

“How could the other half of me be in the way? Don’t you see, dear, you must be with me when my father has the proudest moment of his life. This will be the antidote for all that Marksley poison in his soul.”

XXI The Cloud on the Horizon

I

That night Theodora wrote a long letter to her mother. It was devoted almost wholly to Lary’s triumph. The following week the Bromfield Sentinel heralded on its front page the news of Mr. Larimore Trench’s latest artistic success. The florid paragraph hinted of other successes. One must not infer that the designing of a New York millionaire’s country home was a novel experience to the brilliant young architect, whose parents were natives of Bromfield. The item ended with the announcement that Mrs. David Trench was a guest in the home of her brother, “the Honourable T. J. Larimore.”

“Whew! we’d better confiscate this thing before Lary sees it,” Eileen ejaculated. “Mamma always could pull the long bow; but she pretty near overshot herself this time. You’d think Lary was a corporation.”

“Would Sylvia be vexed?” Judith asked. Sylvia was out riding with Dr. Schubert when the garrulous sheet left the postman’s hand.

“Yes ... because it smacks of the small town. She hasn’t any better taste than mamma has. It wouldn’t jolt her the way it would Lary or papa. Lady Judith, I used to cringe and sweat blood when Hal said crass things before Lary. Now it doesn’t matter what my brother thinks. I want to shout Hal from the house-tops. I don’t care who knows that we love each other, and that we have broken all the silly shackles that our stodgy civilization thinks are so important. Papa dislikes him because he isn’t the Sunday school kind, and Lary says he’s crude and common. Well, just the way he is ... is exactly right for me. I’m no Dresden china shepherdess, myself. How would I feel, marrying a man who couldn’t stand for a little slang--or expressing your real feelings, now and then? With such a man as Lary or Syd Schubert, I’d be a fish out of water.”

“Are you quite sure you are a fish?” Judith asked searchingly. “Did it ever occur to you, my dear, that you have been in the water with Hal until you fancy yourself a fish of his kind? Aren’t you afraid that you’ll be tossed up on the bank some day, a little drowned bird?”

“No! No!” Eileen screamed, her cheeks blanching. “Don’t take all the glory, all the wonder out of it. Don’t you understand that I am free? You talk about slave-women. Men don’t make slaves of them. It is their own selfishness that chains them. I wish I could pour out my heart to you ... make you see it as I do. Not the sordid thing that love usually is--Sylvia’s love for Oliver, that pays for a swell apartment and a bundle of gaudy rags. I want to be free, and I want to show other women the light.”

“My dear, dear girl,” Mrs. Ascott cried in alarm, “you are only sixteen. You haven’t even the rudiments of the system you are trying to teach. Can’t you get your feet on solid ground and stay there until you are a few years older? I was wrong when I suggested water. You are up in the clouds. If I thought it would serve to deter you from this madness, Eileen, I would open for you the darkest chapter of my life.”

“I know ... already. I heard mamma telling papa that you were divorced--that you tried to get even with your husband by running away with another man. It was contemptible of me to listen; but I did it because I wanted to see how bad she would make it out.”

Judith Ascott’s face flamed.

“And papa was quiet a long time--and then he said that there were some people who could touch pitch and not be defiled. When he said that--it got me by the heart, and I made a little gurgling noise in my throat. I was sure they heard me. But mamma flared back at him so furiously that I was half way down the stairs before they came out of their room. That was several weeks ago--a few days after you told her. And I wondered how it would affect him--towards you.”

“And--”

“The next morning at breakfast, he said you were the purest, noblest woman he had met in years. And Theo and Lary and I all raised such a chorus of approval that mamma ran out to the kitchen to tell Drusilla that the waffles were tough.”

An arm stole around the girl’s waist. What had come over Judith Ascott, that she should care ... that David Trench’s approval should mean so much? But Eileen misunderstood. In a sudden burst of confidence, she whispered:

“Will you take care of the wedding ring, along with the other?”

“You are married!”

“No, but we are going to be, before Hal leaves for college. We finally decided ... last night. Then I am going to him as soon as he is settled in Brooklyn. Of course his mother must not know.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do this, you poor, infatuated child. Give Hal the advantage of a little perspective. Look at him when he comes home for the holidays. It isn’t a summer romance--or a drama, to be disposed of in the fourth act.”

“But what if he saw some girl in Brooklyn he liked better than me?”

“Then you couldn’t possibly hold him--if you were ten times married. That is just the danger. You and Hal will almost surely grow apart when you are removed from identical influences. A year from now you may detest him, and he is more than likely to lose interest in you.”

Eileen sprang up and ran stumbling from the room.

II

When she returned, an hour later, her eyes were red and swollen from crying. She went straight to the telephone and took down the receiver. She wanted Hal to come to Mrs. Ascott’s home at once. When the youth had yielded reluctant assent, she threw herself down on the window seat to wait.

“I am going to have an adjustment,” she cried passionately. “It can’t go on this way. I was so sure of my ground ... and every word you said was ... just one puncture after another. I could fairly feel the tires sagging under me. Once I was on the point of writing to mamma. She’s the only one who agrees with me about Hal. Even Sylvia has been throwing cold water on me, the last day or two. Says I could do better--and I ought to go around with the other boys to show him I don’t care. I won’t be a liar. I do care!”

When young Marksley came into Mrs. Ascott’s presence, there was a shamed droop to his shoulders and he was plainly embarrassed.

“Hal, I have told her everything,” Eileen began. “Now I want you to--”

“You little fool!”

Judith Ascott sprang to her feet, but the youth was already striving to cover his blunder by an avalanche of apology. The expression was out of his mouth before he had time to think. He was shocked that Eileen should betray a secret they had sworn to keep. He hadn’t meant to be rude. He was stunned by her treachery.

“Well, we aren’t married yet. I only told her we intended to be--and wanted her to witness the ceremony, before you leave for college.”

Hal Marksley’s chest collapsed in a sigh of relief.

“When we get ready to be married, Mrs. Ascott, we’ll talk it over with you. Now, Eileen, run home and get your motor bonnet. I have to drive to Olive Hill on an errand for father. I left my car around the corner.”

III

At the side door of the Trench home, the girl had a sharp tilt with her sister, who had come back from the ride in time to see--and interpret--the tear-stained face. Sylvia would write to her mother. She would not continue to sponsor a love affair for a girl who had no sense. She would not play chaperone at long range. If Hal had any breeding, he would invite her to go with them.

“Oh, that’s the rub!” Eileen sneered.

“No, that isn’t the rub--and I might have known you wouldn’t appreciate anything I tried to do for you. If you keep on, the way you’re going, you’ll have Hal so sick and tired of you that he’ll be glad to get out of reach of the telephone. I tried to make you a little indifferent to him--and got insolence for my pains. If you had a grain of policy, you wouldn’t let him see that you are daft about him. That’s no way to hold a man’s love. I kept Syd Schubert dangling at my belt for four years by letting him half way think I cared.”

“Yes, and you lost Tom Henderson by the same tactics. Tom wanted whole hog or none, and you didn’t get on to the fact till he’d got sick of you.”

“Don’t, for heaven’s sake, use such vulgar expressions. Hal is such a gentleman, I don’t see how he stands you. Eileen, I wish you would see that I am doing this for your own good--and to please mamma. I have had experience, and I know what works with a man, nine times out of ten. I’ll hold Oliver Penrose to the end of the world ... by keeping him guessing. Look at the way mamma has kept papa on his knees for nearly twenty-eight years.”

“You think that a fine thing?” the girl flared. “If you pattern your life after mamma’s, at her age you’ll be as hard and cruel--”

“You outrageous, you impudent--” Words failed. “How do you dare speak that way about your parents? And Theo’s almost as bad. At your age, I never dreamed of being disrespectful, or saying a word back when mamma reproved me.”

“Oh, Sylvia, come off! Mamma says she never talked back to her mother. And then she forgets, and tells the impudent things she used to say--and how her grandmother Larimore took her part against all the rest of the family. But there’s Hal, tooting his horn for me. I’ll ask him to invite you to ride with us some evening next week. I’m sure he’ll be charmed!”

XXII Midsummer Magic

I

Life moved on another fortnight, with little to vary the monotony of motor rides, luncheons, and irritating disputes, and all at once Sylvia’s reason for prolonging her visit in Springdale was removed. Lavinia Trench came home! She startled the girls by driving up to the gate in Hafferty’s lumbering old cab, her trunk toppling precariously on the driver’s seat and her trim body hemmed in between boxes and travelling bags. A letter that had arrived that very morning announced that she would yield to Ellen’s pleading that she remain another week--unless she were greatly needed at home.

Without waiting for the ceremony of the bath and a change of raiment, she hurried to Vine Cottage to present the souvenir she had brought from Rochester. Judith forgot to thank her, so amazed was she by the astounding change in the woman’s countenance. Such a change she had witnessed in her garden when Dutton, with hoe and fine-toothed rake, had obliterated the ridges and hummocks of his spading. All that had been Lavinia was gone. It was not that she looked girlish, rejuvenated. In the past few months she had made many swift changes from youth to age--had rebounded from dank depression to hysterical buoyancy. This change was different. It was, in fact, as if Lavinia had lent her body to some other woman.

“I can’t stay a minute,” she fluttered. “My precious old sweetheart is coming home early, and he thinks no one can cook chicken the way I can. You ought to have heard him when I called him on the ’phone, a minute ago. I thought he’d let the receiver fall, he was so astonished ... and pleased.”

II

During the next few days Judith forgot Eileen, well-nigh forgot Lary, in her perplexed contemplation of their mother. Some thaumaturge, endowed with more than a magician’s power, must have his habitation in Bromfield. The most audacious quack would guarantee no such cure of a sick body and a doubly sick mind in four short weeks. Lavinia had subtracted twenty years from her normal age, as neatly as a reptile discards an outworn skin. Her step was short and vigorous, with none of the stumping determination that so long marked it. Her head was carried high and the black eyes beamed with amiability. The very quality of her voice had undergone change. She no longer swung from cloying sweetness to acrid outbursts. More than all else, a half gentleness--that she still wore uncomfortably, like a fur cloak in August--held her family in puzzled wonder.

David moved as one walking in his sleep. He was afraid to breathe, lest he fall to earth and awaken to the old barren reality. When it appeared likely that the mood would remain, he accepted the goods the gods had provided. He had waited long, and the reward was justly his.

One evening Theodora sought her Lady Judith. She was agitated to the point of inarticulateness. Her little brown face was drawn with fear and two red spots burned in the thin cheeks. Twice, thrice she essayed to speak, her throat swelling and her bird-like eyes darting their mute appeal.

“Might I--might I sit in your lap?” she faltered at last. “I’m not so very heavy, and I can’t tell you unless I.... I have to tell you in your ear.”

“What are you afraid of, dearie?” Mrs. Ascott snuggled her close.

“It happened just a few minutes ago--and--I know I didn’t dream it. It was when Papa came downstairs from changing his clothes. You know, they are going to the reception for the Board of Trustees, and my daddy looked so handsome when he came in the library--with a pink carnation in his buttonhole.”

“There they go, now. Don’t you want to wave good-bye to them?”

“No, I don’t want to interrupt mamma. They don’t know I’m on earth. That’s what I came to tell you about. You see that mamma has on the yellow organdie dress. But you don’t know what that means--signifies,” she amended, weighing the word with unaccustomed deliberation. “Papa bought it for her, at a big store in St. Louis, when she was going away. And she was so hateful--wouldn’t put it on, or even take it with her. And to-night she said she was glad she’d saved it--just for him--because it was the prettiest dress she ever had.”

“I’m glad she said that, dear.”

“Oh, but that wasn’t all she said. She noticed that he picked a pink carnation, when everybody knows my daddy prefers red ones. I was sitting in the window niche, reading a book. Goodness knows, I was in plain sight. And they didn’t either one of them see me. Mamma came in first, talking to herself about how pretty her dress was ... and how happy she was....” Theodora’s breath came short, and the black eyes were luminous with tears.

“And, Lady Judith, all at once my daddy came in the room, and he tiptoed up behind her and cuddled her under the chin with his fingers. And she wheeled around and just nestled in his arms, like a kitten. And then she kissed him--the way you do when you just _adore_ anyone.”

The voice sank to an awed whisper. Judith clasped the frail body, with its consuming emotional fire, her own heart pounding with vicarious passion.

“And she looked up in his eyes and told him he was the best man in the world, a million times handsomer and more successful than any man among their old friends. And she wanted to go back, on their anniversary, the first of November, to let all those silly people see for themselves what a fine man he had turned out to be. And papa looked as if he wanted to laugh and cry, at the same time, and his face was as beautiful as an angel’s, he was so happy. And I’m afraid my mamma is--going to--di-i-ie!” The voice broke in an agony of sobs.

“No, no, precious. She is just beginning to live.”

What had wrought the miracle? The absence that makes the heart grow fond? But Mrs. Trench had often been away from home and family, and it was certain that none of her former home-comings had had such sequential consummation. Had she, for some unfathomable reason, perceived David as he was? Had she fallen in love with her husband?

III

August was a glorious month for the circle that revolved around Vine Cottage. Eileen had been wooed by her mother to confession of her secret engagement, and David had given reluctant consent. He was too deeply steeped in his own belated bliss to deny any other human creature the benison of happiness. Hal would be leaving for Brooklyn the second week in September, and it was only right that the two young people should spend all their evenings together.

Occasionally they went across the street for a musical feast with Mrs. Nims--whom society was accepting, since it had been noised abroad that only three lives stood between her and a peerage. More often they explored strange highways beneath the starlight. Lary, at home for brief periods, viewed the situation with equanimity. He had made many compromises, and this was only a little more galling than some of the others. He found a modicum of compensation in his father’s sweet content, and in his mother’s almost pathetic devotion to the woman who had rounded out his own being.

“She quotes you on every possible occasion,” he told Judith. “If you advised her to forswear the moral code, she would obey you.”

“It’s a fearsome responsibility,” the woman averred. “What if I should blunder?”

“You couldn’t make her any less happy than she was when you came. She says you are better medicine than anything Dr. Schubert ever prescribed. And she insists it was you who compelled her to go to Bromfield.”

“Lary, you must have read a story--I don’t recall the title--one of Pierre Loti’s exotic conceits ... the faithless lover who was tormented by remorse until he went back to Constantinople and spent a night on the grave of the woman he had wronged. Do you think some fancy of your mother’s girlhood has been dispelled by her visit ... perhaps some illusion shattered by crass reality?”

“I don’t know how to gauge my mother--now less than ever before.”

IV

When Lary had gone, Mrs. Trench slipped in at the back door. She had been waiting her turn. It was like the old Lavinia to know exactly what she wanted. And again, it was like Lavinia to veil her request in mystery and innuendo.

“I want to ask your advice. You know so much more about the ways of the world than I do.” She drew from the pocket of her muslin dress a thick letter. “Do you think there are any circumstances under which it would be right for a married woman to receive--”

She was so naïve, Judith could with difficulty repress a smile.

“I write a good many letters to my attorney, Mr. Ramsay. He has a wife.”

“But those are business letters.”

“Not always. I write to him when I am blue or in doubt. His wife detests letter-writing. She usually adds a postscript.”

“She sees the letters--and replies?”

“Why, to be sure. You mean, Mrs. Trench, the kind of letters a woman could not show her husband? I’m afraid that is never quite safe.”

“I ignored the first--and the second. This one came on Friday. And then the minister preached that sermon on regeneration through suffering. He said it was our duty to help God to chastise the wayward soul. This man ... the one who wrote to me....” She faltered, then went on resolutely: “He is very unhappy. It is a man I met on the train--and he fell in love with me. Of course I repulsed him. I told him what a splendid husband I had. And in this letter he says that when I praised David to him--on the train--it was all he could do to keep from carrying me off bodily--it threw him into such a jealous rage. I ought to be furious with him.” She stared into vacancy, adding slowly: “but I’m not.”

This new Lavinia had suddenly come upon some bewildering apparition. Her fingers twitched, and a yellow pallor drank up the flush in her rounded cheeks. A chance acquaintance on a railroad train! Eileen might have fallen beneath the glamour of such a romance. But for a woman of Mrs. Trench’s age and temperament! It was unthinkable.

“Mrs. Ascott, tell me ... do people ever really get over things?”

All the fire of her being leaped to her eyes as she put the question, leaving her face ghastly. It was as if her whole life hung on the answer.

“Sorrow and disappointment? Oh, I am sure they do. And, my dear Mrs. Trench, I wouldn’t lay too much stress on the infatuation of a man you met in the Pullman. To write to him--letters you couldn’t show your husband--might be followed by serious complications.”

“Don’t you think I have character--stability enough to--you won’t say anything about this to Larimore?”

“Surely not.”

V

That evening David and Lavinia went out to sprinkle the vegetable garden, their arms around each other’s waists, their attitude that of a honeymoon pair. When the task was done they came to the summer house for an hour’s visit. Not even Hal and Eileen, in the first fever of their revealed engagement, were more frankly devoted than they. It seemed to Judith, sitting with them, that the woman was the aggressor, that she multiplied endearing terms and half-concealed caresses, to assure herself that she truly felt what her lips were saying. For David these manifestations were unnecessary. His whole being was a caress.

VI

August passed, and the first hot days of September--their discomfort forgotten in the excitement of Eileen’s entrance into college. There was yet another week before Hal must depart for his examinations, and on Thursday evening he failed to report, either in person or by telephone. The omission elicited no comment. But when the week had slipped by, and it became known that the youth had departed for New York without calling to say good-bye, Lavinia made bold to question her daughter.

“If he didn’t want to come, I’m sure nobody was going to ask him,” the girl flung back, her eyes darkening.

“Never mind, dear. These little quarrels only prove that it is true love. You and Hal will make it all up in your letters.”

“There aren’t going to be any letters.”

After her mother had gone into the house, Theodora drew near the hammock where Eileen had been studying Christian Ethics, squinting her burning eyes as the daylight waned, striving to focus her mind on the empty paragraphs.

“What did you and Hal quarrel about? Go on--tell me,” the child teased.

“Get out and let me alone. Don’t you know any better than to interrupt a fellow who has to bone freshman ethics? I almost had a philosophic thought by the tail, when you butted in on my painful ratiocinations.”

“I don’t want to pry, Eileen. Honest, I don’t. But you’ve cried every night since Wednesday. And when you talked in your sleep, last night--”

“I did!” The girl sat up, sending the textbook flying across the lawn. “What did I say? Tell me every word.”

“You’d been kind of mumbling, and all at once you said right out loud: ‘Hal Marksley, to think I could have loved a dirty calf like you.’”

“I didn’t say ‘calf’--I said--” She clapped her hand to her mouth and her cheeks went white. “I’m going to have a separate room. That’s all there is about it. If I can’t keep from babbling in my sleep....”

XXIII Lavinia Sees the Abyss

I

Four days without incident ... and then Eileen fainted at the dressmaker’s. The afternoon was hot and she had stood for a long fitting. It was nothing unusual to the seamstress, but it was a thrilling experience for the girl who had never known oblivion other than that of normal sleep. She went home with a bump on her head, to tell how near she came to being impaled on Miss Denison’s shears. Saturday morning she fainted again. It was after a long telephone conversation with Kitten Henderson. Lavinia sent for Dr. Schubert. He was making a country call. In a panic of fear she summoned Mrs. Ascott. When they had chafed the girl’s hands and bathed her temples with brandy, consciousness returned slowly.

“I thought I was dying,” she murmured between stiffened lips. “My hands felt like clubs, and all at once my whole body seemed to be climbing into my head.”

A cry--the sudden baffled scream of a trapped animal--burst from Lavinia Trench, as she sprang to the side of the divan. “What have you done? Oh, my God, what have you done?”

“My dear Mrs. Trench,” Judith expostulated, “what has come over you!”

“You don’t know what it means. You haven’t been through it six times. I never fainted at any other time--and that scapegrace of a Hal Marksley off to college without a word. Oh, I’ll go mad!”

Relief came in a torrential flood of abuse, of self-pity. All the store that had been repressed since the early days of July poured its acrid waters over the girl. In vain Eileen sought to defend herself, to declare furiously that her mother’s accusation was untrue. In such moods, Lavinia was never careful to choose her words. When the tirade became insulting, beyond endurance, she sprang from the couch and fled to a room on the third floor where she could lock herself in and defy the family to drag her forth.

Judith went home, dumb with anguish. Would Eileen do violence to herself? Would David’s heart break? Would Lary.... She paused, panting, to frame the question: “Would Lary rise to the occasion?” On the answer hung all her hope. After an hour of thinking, such as she had never done before, she went again through the wicket gate. She would take the girl with her for the laboratory experiment--an unusually important one, that called for an extra pair of hands. Lavinia was nowhere in sight; but from the cellar came the sound of mop and broom. Absinthe might give surcease to the roué in the boulevard restaurant but for Lavinia Trench the safety-valve was hard manual labor.

II

The experiment, that morning, narrowly missed success. At the moment when three pairs of eyes were watching with anxious interest, the fumes from a heated retort were wafted into Eileen’s face, and she collapsed in Dr. Schubert’s arms. Judith turned off the flame beneath the mass of glowing coal and hurried to the consultation room where the girl lay, white and deathlike.

“Unfasten her corsets, quick! Her pulse is almost gone.” The physician’s command held an unwonted blend of terror. Eileen Trench was the core of his soul. He could not be impersonal, where she was concerned. At an opportune moment Sydney arrived, to lend a hand.

It was decided that the girl must lie quiet for an hour. And of course Mrs. Ascott would stop for luncheon. Luncheon! Could one eat food, with the world in shambles? She went to the divan, choking with distress. The amber eyes were half closed and great tears welled over the lids.

“It’s beastly to be such a nuisance to those we love....” The blue lips scarcely moved to articulate the poignantly empty words. Then the long lashes drooped in utter weariness, and Eileen slept.

Judith Ascott left the office. She wanted to get away from herself, away from every familiar thing. Unconsciously she turned her back on the cross-street that would have led to the campus and thence to her home. How many miles she walked, she could not guess. She was hazily conscious of smiling meadows and orchards, panting beneath their load of ruddy fruit. Winding hill roads, ankle-deep in dust, and brooks that laughed at obstructing pebbles; pastures where cattle grazed, and acres of coreopsis, resplendent with their wealth of fleeting gold, she viewed with eyes that saw not.

When at last her strength waned and hunger overcame her, she perceived that she was approaching a town. She would go to the station and inquire for a train to Springdale. A little way to her left, graders were at work with shovels that scarred the helpless earth. Great piles of stone and other piles of yellow brick and moulded terra cotta crowned the rising ground. In the midst of all this orderly confusion she perceived a sign-board, insolent with new paint:

DAVID TRENCH
BUILDING CONTRACTOR

She stared in astonishment. Then, by some magic of the mind the solid earth beneath her feet shifted. She was no longer facing south. This was Springdale, and she was approaching her home from the west. The work on Henry Marksley’s mansion had already begun. She shuddered as she thought of David.

From the high point in the parked boulevard, near which the sign-board stood, she could see the distant tower clock, its face gilded by the late afternoon sun. And over there on the newly paved extension of Sherman Avenue the foolish little trolley car was bobbing serenely along. She could catch it on the return trip if she hurried.

XXIV One Way Out

I

Early Sunday morning Mrs. Trench came to the back door, brushed Nanny aside as if her redundant bulk had been a wisp of grass in the path, crossed the immaculate kitchen, and climbed the rear stairs. She knew that the mistress of Vine Cottage was having breakfast in her bedroom, and the ultimate degree of privacy was necessary. She was no longer the gentle Lavinia of those seven charmed weeks. All the softness had vanished from her countenance, and her voice was flinty as she spoke. There was no need of mincing words. Mrs. Ascott was in the secret, and she might as well know the worst. Eileen was guilty. There was no excuse and no help for it. She had confessed the whole thing to her father.

“I have been afraid from the first that she was in danger. She is too young to discriminate, and she was madly in love. Have you told her brother?”

“Yes. It was lucky for Larimore that that dog of a Hal Marksley was safe out of town. There would have been murder, and another scandal.”

“And her father?”

“David! He makes me sick. He sits and stares at the carpet as if he’d been turned to stone. Oh, why did I marry such a dolt! If he would only whip her--anything to show that he is a man! Mrs. Ascott, you are a woman of the world. You have had affairs of your own, and have got through them unscathed. Can’t you help me? Don’t you see that I am distracted?”

“You may count on me for anything I can do,” Judith told her coldly.

II

When the heavy Sunday dinner was over, and Drusilla had gone out for the afternoon, Lary and Theodora walked hand in hand to the shop behind the vegetable garden. A minute later, Judith saw the child flitting across the alley in the direction of the Stevens home. She knew that now Larimore Trench would come to her.

Her heart stood still and all her senses swam.

When, after an interminable period of waiting--how stupid the clock that measures our travail by its rigid tape of minutes!--the man stood before her, she saw that his face was white with grief and his hands shook.

“Are you willing to come to us? All the manhood has gone out of me. I can’t go through it alone.”

“Yes, Lary.” And they crossed the lawn together.

III

The library blinds were drawn and the room was hot and still. Eileen lay back in the chaise longue, her eyes half closed, her lips pouting surlily. Her father paced the floor, his blue eyes lost in shadow.

“Mrs. Ascott,” he began in a choked voice, “you know the pitiful thing that has come upon us. You have been a good neighbour, and we come to you for advice. We are simple people, and my wife feels that you....” He finished the sentence with his deep, appealing eyes. “I wanted to go to Mr. Marksley and insist that his son make restitution.”

“Yes!” Lavinia screamed, the remnant of her self-control tearing to tatters as she looked at her daughter, “and that idiot of a girl threatening to kill herself if we go a step.”

“I won’t be married to any man at the point of a gun--as long as there is a river in Springdale where people can be drowned.”

“It is a mortal sin to take your own life,” her father pleaded. “You couldn’t face your God with such a crime on your hands.”

“When it comes to a choice between facing God and you people--I’d take my chances with God any day. If I have committed the unpardonable sin, I don’t see how marrying Hal Marksley would make it any better.”

She sat bolt upright and her eyes blazed.

“What is right? What is sin? You would hound a woman to death because she has a child without being tied body and soul to a man she despises. Hal’s mother and father hate each other ... and look at their children. There isn’t one of them that’s fit to live. Look at us. We are another family of misfits. And why? Mamma hates papa, lets him follow her around like a hungry dog begging for a bone.”

“You insolent girl!” Lavinia gasped.

“You don’t know anything about love--and what it means to come into the world all warped and out of tune. Do you imagine that I am going to tie myself to a cad--let him be responsible for other children of mine? There isn’t any fidelity in a man who is born of hate. If you knew what a contemptible pup he is, you’d see why the river looks better to me.”

“You might have thought of that, before--” David offered gently.

“I didn’t know him till it was too late.” She relaxed ever so little. “We had talked it all over, and he had the most advanced ideas. But when it came to facing the music.... Bah! I despise a man who whimpers. _He was afraid of his mother._ I could have stood even that. But when he wanted to take me to Sutton, to a doctor he said was in the habit of helping those factory girls out of their scrapes ... I slapped him; I beat him with my two fists; I spit in his face. I told him that if he was not a man, I would take the consequences alone.”

She paused to gather breath, her cheeks burning, her gaze detached. She was living over again that monstrous cataclysm. “He tried to defend himself by saying I had no right to disgrace his family. Imagine! Disgrace Henry Marksley and Adelaide Nims! I told him I wasn’t going through life with murder on my soul.”

“I’m glad you told him that, daughter,” David said, his eyes warming.

Judith Ascott crossed the room and laid a hand protectingly on Eileen’s shoulder. “May I offer a solution? You have asked me to use my wits. I know of a case--not unlike this one--a young girl who made the same blunder. She had a married sister who had no child. Among all their friends, I am the only one who knows that the splendid little boy is not that sister’s child.”

“How--how was it managed?” Lavinia’s practical mind demanded.

“They went together to a sanitarium, where not even the superintendent knew which was the wife of the man whose name the baby was to bear. I should suggest sending at once for Sylvia. She and Eileen could--”

“Never work in the world!” Lavinia exploded. “Oliver detests children. He won’t let Sylvia have one of her own--even if she wanted it. And he’d leave her ... if he knew there was such a disgrace in the family.”

“Yes,” Eileen said with bitter scorn, “he was born in Salem, where they put scarlet letters on women who sin. I guess it’s the river for me.”

“There is another way,” Judith cried, defiant and exultant. “I can take the baby for my own. I will go away with you, until it’s over, and you can come back alone, with nobody to know--”

“You mean--” Lavinia Trench stood up, her eyes wild, her throat swelling--“you mean, marry Larimore and palm the child off as his?”

“That--if no other way can be found. We could go to New York, where the building of the Sanderson home would provide the necessary explanation. Eileen might take lessons from Professor Auersbach for several months. She could come home in a year. I would not return until a child in my arms would cause no remark.”

David moved to her side and pressed his lips reverently to her brow. “Daughter,” he murmured, his eyes overflowing.

IV

That evening Lary came to the summer house. There was a crescent moon and the air was heavy with the scent of flowers.

“I can’t let you make this sacrifice for me,” he began huskily.

“Sacrifice? Oh, my darling.... I have been so hungry for you. I could cry for joy that Eileen has opened the way.”

“Dear, my heart went cold when she said what she did about the children of hate. Are you willing to trust me?”

“You born of hate? Lary, Lary ... such love as your father’s ... the love that could survive twenty-eight years of starvation!”

The man gripped her hand until it hurt. Then he drew her into his arms and his cheek rested against hers. The young moon sank to sleep; the garden throbbed in the velvet darkness; a moon-flower burst its bonds, just above them, sending forth a shower of perfume.

“You are too wonderful,” he murmured. “Judith, I know the man that is in me. I have met him face to face. I saw him reflected in your eyes, there in the library. Now I shall never be alone. I have attained the unattainable.”