Chapter XXXI: A New Hilltop (1)

I

Eileen’s strength returned slowly. It was the middle of April before she ventured out to Rye, a pallid wraith of her former self. Griff and Laura were afraid for her ... a fear that was transformed into action by the potent chemistry of a woman’s mind.

“Round up a bunch of Lary’s patrons,” Mrs. Ramsay said in her decisive way, “and convince them that they ought to send him abroad to buy furnishings for their new homes. He and Judith can take Eileen along. The sea voyage will--”

“Capital!” Griff cut in. “Only yesterday I had Parkinson on my neck for an hour, howling about the difficulty of getting draperies and rugs for the stunning place Lary has made of his old junk heap. Commissioned a fellow in Paris to send him some things and--Lord love us! You should have seen the consignment! It wasn’t the price. But Parkinson hates to be laughed at, when he’s been stung.”

“Lary’s orderly mind would take care of the needs of a dozen men like Parkinson, and it would give him a chance to see Europe--right!”

II

Thus it came about that on a serene May morning Judith Trench dismissed the maids, closed the apartment and set her face towards the rising sun. For her it was the real adventure. She had looked at Europe so often. Now she would see through the shell, with Lary’s eyes.

At the Cherbourg pier Mr. Denslow met them. Mamma and the boys could hardly wait to see Judith’s new husband. But after a week Lary’s importance was blurred, sent into almost complete occultation, as Eileen’s vivid youth asserted itself. Ben was her slave from the first. The night after they left her in Brussels, to have a few lessons with Ysaye, and Lary and Judith set forth on their real honeymoon, he confided to his mother that he was going to add another Trench to the Denslow family, as soon as he was sure he could earn a living for two.

“Have you asked her?” Mrs. Denslow quizzed.

“No. She thinks I’m a boy. You might tell her that I’m nearly five years older than she. I thought I’d grow whiskers--to impress her.”

III

From Antwerp to Munich, from Venice to Constantinople, and thence by boat to Naples and the eastern coast of Spain, Lary and the other half of his being wandered, too happy to remember the fiery ordeal wherein their severed selves had been fused again. When they reached Paris, the middle of August, a great pile of letters awaited them. Lary thrust one of them into his inside pocket. It was from his mother. Another he tore open with eager fingers. A moment later he handed it to Judith, his eyes shining. It bore the signature of a discriminating editor:

“I never knew why Renaissance art, with all its brilliance and charm,
was unsatisfying to me, until I read your keenly analytical essay.
We would be glad to consider a series of essays, covering other
architectural periods and styles.”

Mr. Denslow read the letter with indifference, but the accompanying check had weight. He was coming to believe that his daughter had made a first-rate investment when she went to look after her interests in Olive Hill, and incidentally acquired a husband who could make good in New York in six months.

Judith followed Lary to his room, whither he had retreated to read the letters from home. One glance at his face satisfied her that all was not well. A moment he wavered, on the point of thrusting that disturbing letter out of sight. Then he recognized, in his feeling, not loyalty to his mother but a raw personal chagrin. Judith was his wife. She had earned the right to share even his humiliation. Yet he dared not look at her while she read the closely written pages.

His father was breaking. It was his duty to come home and assume the burden, now that the reason for his absence from Springdale, with Judith and Eileen, had been removed by an unhoped-for act of Providence. The building of a great place like the Marksley home was too much for David, who never could shoulder responsibility. She had tried to fire his ambition--make him see how proud he ought to be, to get a chance to put up such fine buildings. It was wasted breath. He went about as if he had a sack of concrete on his shoulders. He would certainly have to forfeit money on the contract. She was outdone with him, and must have help.

“Dearest, cable your father to throw over that contract, no matter what it costs. Can’t she see that his soul is being ground--because of you and Eileen?”

“I couldn’t send such a cablegram, dear. I didn’t want ever to see Springdale again. You and Eileen can stay on here with your mother.”

“But, Lary, I shouldn’t mind Springdale. David and Theo are there--and an arbour with a summer house--and Indian Summer coming. It would be worth all the rest ... a cheap price to pay, for another such afternoon as we had last November, on the road to Littlefield. Is it always as glorious as that, Lary?”

“Usually, but not always. I remember, once when I was a young boy, there was no frost at all until the first week of December. The glorious tints and that silver haze in the air are the result of a heavy frost that catches the foliage in full sap. But that year--it was the winter Theo was born--the trees were a sickly gray-green, and all the shrubs and vines looked as if they were suffering from some wasting disease. The leaves had shrivelled, and still they clung. The morning after the frost they fell like rain. Within three days the branches were stark and bare. It was absolutely startling.”

“You had no crimson and gold, no chiffon webs on the grass?”

“Not that year. It was an open winter, with a frost late in the spring, that killed all the fruit. Don’t set your heart on--I mean, dear, don’t go back to Springdale ... just for the Indian Summer.”

“I was going, Lary, to comfort your father.”

IV

That evening they told Mrs. Denslow that they would book passage for an early return to New York. And that lady, whose plans had been changed so often within the past year, was glad to have her shifting course in life directed by some one with a real necessity. They would all go home together, especially as Ben was eager to get to work. Not at his instance, but rather because the girl promised relief from the boredom that had begun to weigh heavy on her, Mrs. Denslow urged Eileen to spend the winter in New York.

“Papa’s health is failing. He needs me,” was the eminently satisfactory reply. To Judith the girl confided another reason. The apartment overlooking the Hudson held memories she did not wish to revive. She was done with that chapter of her story. She had climbed, with bleeding feet, to a hilltop ... and the future lay misty with promise before her.

Book Three

Belated Frost

XXXII Lavinia Flounders

I

It was like the home-coming of a national hero. The college paper and the little local daily had announced that Miss Eileen Trench had played at a private audience with the King of Belgium--the paragraph inspired by her mother, when one of the letters from Brussels brought the humorous announcement that His Majesty had stopped his motor car in front of her window while she was practicing a brilliant Chopin number.

Judith thought the crowd was at the station as a tribute to Lary’s recent triumphs. And Lary thought, bitterly, that his New York success had won him the plaudits of his native town. Theodora told them both the truth, on the way home. She was afraid too much adulation would turn Eileen’s head.

At first they did not miss David in the throng. A year ago he and Theodora had stood alone on the little station platform. Judith knew why he was not there now. Eileen knew, too, and her eyes darkened with suffering. He was at the gate as they approached. Lary caught his breath sharply, as he took in the shrunken figure and the mournful eyes. Eileen leaped from the cab and ran to greet him.

“Papa, darling!”

He looked at her as one awakening from deep sleep. Then all at once the smile broke ... it spread, like ripples on the surface of a placid pool. Every emotion of his heart was recorded on that transparent face. The blue eyes beamed with incredible joy, as he held out his arms.

“It’s my little girl. I thought I had lost you.”

“No, daddy dear, it’s only that I have found myself.”

Lavinia hurried into the house. She could not bear such spectacles in public. What would the neighbours think?

II

The following day an astounding thing came to pass. The president of the college and the dean of the musical faculty called on Miss Trench. They wanted to offer her a position in the conservatory. Naturally it could not be an actual professorship. A seventeen-year-old girl ... without a degree. They thought she might give recitals in the neighbouring towns, and take pupils in advanced technique. It would mean much to the college to announce an instructor who had studied with the great Ysaye. No one need know how young she was. Indeed she was altogether different from the immature girl they remembered--quite dignified and impressive. Marvellously changed.

“If they knew what changed her,” Mrs. Trench reflected, her gorge rising, “they wouldn’t be flattering her this way.” It was a mistake to tell that about the King of Belgium. She hadn’t thought about the effect on Eileen. Of late she blundered at every turn. Somehow things were slipping out of her grasp.

After they had gone, Eileen ran breathless to Vine Cottage to tell Judith. She could not contemplate any step without that guidance or approval.

“Lary will be pleased. This will put an end to your mother’s plan of having you enter the freshman class next Monday. But ... Eileen, I have an idea. You are not going to stop studying. I wonder if you and I couldn’t--I’m a horribly uneducated person.”

“With Lary for tutor, you mean? Well, in the first place, my brother’s no salesman when it comes to the things he knows. He can lay them out on the counter and let you pick what you want. What I want most is Latin. And he thinks it is bald and plebeian, compared with Greek. Syd reads Horace, in the original, to rest him when he’s tired and can’t get his mind off of the sick babies and their fool mothers. I’m crazy to translate Ovid and--”

“Syd’s just the thing. Don’t tell Lary, but I foundered on the Greek alphabet. It simply wouldn’t stick in my memory. I substituted organic chemistry. My classicist husband would be disgusted.”

“Lary’s a prig--and I love him! Judith, it was worth it--just to get acquainted with my brother.”

III

From Vine Cottage she went to the office for David’s stamp of approval. She had once called her father a rubber stamp. She thought of it now, with stinging chagrin. Would not he serve as her anchor, as Judith had been her pilot? Had she anything to fear? As she walked past the clump of shrubbery on the campus, where Hal Marksley had kissed her that first time, she thought with a thrill of exultation that her craft had outrun the storm.

From her father’s arms she hurried to Dr. Schubert’s office to tell the joyful and as yet half apprehended news. And the man who had heard her first shrill cry of protest against the life that was not of her choosing, drew her to him and kissed her. The act was paternal. She had always been more at home with him than with those of her own blood.

“Poor old Syd,” she beamed, “he doesn’t know what he’s in for.” And Sydney, coming through the laboratory door with a microscope slide in one hand and a bottle of red colouring fluid in the other, put up his mouth for the customary salutation.

“No more of that, old fellow. I’m a young lady now. Besides you’re going to be my preceptor, and it’s bad form for the dominie to kiss his pupils. You’re to teach Judith and me, and you couldn’t bestow osculations on one and not on the other. Now could you?”

“I should think Judith would be lovely to kiss.”

“She is ... but you and Lary can’t go out in the alley and fight duels. And while we are on the subject--you and Papa Schubert are ages behind the times--with all your X-rays and bacteriological tests. In Europe they have decided that kissing is unsanitary. Disease germs are carried that way.”

“Yes,” the elder assented, “the dangerous little amorococcus is usually conveyed from lip to lip.”

Syd changed the subject. He had never been seriously touched by love. But he thought the shaft of his father’s playful humour might carry a poisoned barb for the girl. He demanded, with a grimace:

“Why don’t you take me into your confidence about the preceptorship? What do you need to learn ... after Brussels and Paris?”

“We had thought about Latin--and anything else you happen to have in your system that would help us to shine as intellectuals. But, seriously, Syd, I want you to do one thing for me. Get this _teaching_ idea across to me. You remember how you gave me the legato--when Prexie Irwin was making us whack the strings with the bow--everything jumpy staccato, don’t you remember? And how you showed me, in five minutes, how to produce the singing tones? I know how to do it; but you’ll have to show me how to teach the other fellow.”

IV

When the door had closed behind her, Dr. Schubert said jubilantly:

“The child isn’t spoiled a bit. I’ve been afraid she’d come home sophisticated and world-wise. She’s just an innocent girl, in spite of her long skirts.”

“Yes,” Sydney said, with a catch in his throat, “she’s as pure and fair as a May morning--and the fairest mornings are always the ones that follow the darkest nights. Father, couldn’t you trump up some excuse to bring her here to stay with us ... keep her away from her mother as much as possible?”

“Curious, Syd, but I was going to speak to you about that very thing. David came to me, when he knew Eileen was coming home and asked me--oh, it was tough for him to do it. He’s so damnably loyal! Don’t you think we could fit up the room next to Nanny’s, so that the child could sleep here, the nights when she’s going to have early classes at the college? It’s a shame to deprive David of even that much of her company. But we’ll make it up to him in ways his wife doesn’t suspect--if we can inject enough guile into him to enable him to play his part without fumbling. He feels that she must, _must_ be kept away from her mother.”

“What is the trouble with David?” Syd asked abruptly. “You’ve doped him on tonics all summer, and he doesn’t improve in the least.”

“The climacteric--and his wife’s merciless tongue. David is approaching fifty. A man’s mental and physical being undergoes a subtle change in that year. It’s not so crucial as the grand climacteric--the transformation from manhood to age--that comes at sixty-three. You young doctors will be telling us that it is an exploded theory; but I have followed it for forty years. To a sensitive chap like David Trench, it’s serious. Just this year, when he ought to be coddled and petted, his wife seasons his food with gall and puts a dash of aqua fortis in his tea.

“I’ve ordered him to sleep in a room by himself, with the door locked, so that she couldn’t wake him up with her nagging and upbraiding. I told her, point-blank, that she was killing him--and she did what I might have expected.”

“Yes, she ‘slipped from under’ by writing Lary that she was being terribly set upon by his father, and it was his duty to come home. Father”--Syd’s blue eyes blazed--“why didn’t David take a riding whip to his wife the first time she--”

The man who could look beneath sex interrupted with an impatient gesture.

“David is a woman. More than that, Sydney, Mrs. Trench is a man--trapped in a woman’s body. When nature makes a blunder like that, there’s usually the devil to pay. I have to keep reminding myself of that fact--or I’d be in danger of poisoning Lavinia Trench.”

XXXII The Statue and the Bust

I

Autumn was on the threshold of winter when Lavinia decided that things had to take a turn. Eileen was spending three mornings a week at the college, which necessitated her absence from home practically half the time. She was uniformly polite and gentle with her mother, an attitude that was not wholly the result of Judith’s stern schooling. Under the whip of her own discipline, she sought to round off the rough corners, to modulate her voice and temper her diction. Her outbursts of picturesque speech were reserved for Dr. Schubert and Syd, with Nanny in the background, shaking her ample sides with adoring laughter. Now there would be a fortnightly concert trip, and some elective work in the academic department, which promised further separation from the chilly atmosphere of her home.

“Judith, I want to have a talk with you,” Mrs. Trench began, and the stern set of her jaw left no doubt that the interview would be unpleasant. “I don’t like the way Eileen is acting.”

“Every one else does.” Judith sought to be impersonal. She had been expecting some such outburst and had framed a line of defence, against a possible attack.

“That’s just it! Everybody in Springdale thinks she has done something fine in going away to New York and Europe, and coming back here to teach in the college before she’s even been a student. You are making a rank hypocrite of her.”

“I?”

“Yes, you--who else but you? You did the whole thing. I am sure Larimore is as disgusted as I am; but he doesn’t dare to say--”

“We won’t discuss my relations with my husband.”

Lavinia’s face flamed scarlet and she tugged at the collar of her elaborate silk waist. But speech was not wanting, for more than the fraction of a second.

“Well, I want to know what other wild-goose schemes you have for her.”

Judith shifted impatiently in her chair. “You have a grievance. I wish you would be specific. Eileen is surely not causing you any anxiety. She is growing into a beautiful young woman and she has the respect of the entire community.”

“Respect! Yes!” The words crackled. “The whole town respects her. You can’t see what that means. You have no religion and no moral sense of your own. For a girl to do what she did--and then walk right back here into a position that she never would have had, if she’d been a good girl, is a positive slur on religion.”

Judith gasped. She wanted to laugh--to take her mother-in-law by the shoulders and shake her. But Lavinia had not done speaking:

“It says in the Bible--”

“It says a good many things in the Bible. You take from it what appeals to you--and shape your religion to suit your own needs.”

Lavinia was not slow to catch an idea that could be stopped by the mesh of her mental net. Her son’s philosophy usually passed through without leaving a fragment. But this idea was large enough to be arrested. Two facts conspired to give it substance and form. For his Sunday sermon, the minister had combined a passage from Isaiah with another from the Epistle to the Hebrews. And--wholly unrelated, but subtly significant--Lavinia had just finished an elaborate gelatine dessert for dinner.

“You mean that we pick from the Bible what we want and fit it together.”

“Practically that. We can’t get anything out of a book unless we have in our own minds the vessels to carry away the meaning. A cult or a religion is nothing more than the solidifying of a group of ideas. The Christian religion--”

“Like lemon jelly in a mould,” the woman said, thinking aloud. Then, arousing herself to the business at hand, she pursued: “That may be all true enough about religion; but it has nothing to do with Eileen, and the way she’s acting.”

“I asked you to be definite. What has she done that displeased you?”

“Staying at Dr. Schubert’s, three nights in the week--with no woman there except a housekeeper. What will the neighbours say?”

“Have you heard them say anything?”

“No, but they’re likely to. I’m sure I’d think it was queer if Ina Stevens--”

“I wouldn’t suggest it to them. And another thing--I wouldn’t say a word to Eileen--if I were you. She is doing so well that it would break Lary’s heart to have her thrown back on the old life. There is only one danger, as he sees it. She has a strong vein of stubbornness in her nature.”

“Yes, she gets that from her father,” Lavinia snapped.

“No, she doesn’t get it from her father. There is no obstinacy in father, except his stubborn clinging to his ideals. You can’t deal with Eileen as you did with Sylvia, and you’ll play havoc with her if you try.”

“No! Sylvia never caused me a moment’s anxiety in her life.”

Judith ignored the palpable falsehood. “You must know that Eileen couldn’t have finer moral influence than that of Dr. Schubert and his son. And my faithful Nanny is no ordinary servant. She was more to me than my own mother, when I was a girl.”

The innocent remark was flint and steel, with Lavinia’s powder heap in dangerous proximity. “I suppose your mother was _delighted_ with that. But of course she was a rich woman, and glad to be rid of the moral training of her children. I can say for myself that I never shirked my duty--and I don’t intend to hand it over to you or Nanny or Dr. Schubert now. I made up my mind that I wouldn’t say a word about this; but it’s grinding my heart out. I can’t stand it any longer.”

“Mother, I don’t follow you at all. I asked you to be frank with me.”

“Very well, I’ll put it so plain that you can’t pretend you don’t understand. How would you feel if you had a daughter, and some stranger came along and took that girl’s life clear out of your hands? I haven’t a word to say about her. She runs to you for all sorts of things--clothes--as if I wouldn’t know what was stylish or becoming. If she’s in doubt about what to do, she talks it over with Larimore or Syd. When anything comes along to make her proud, she tells her father. She talks to Theodora by the hour about the things she saw when she was abroad--and she never tells me one thing. I’m simply shut out on every side, and it’s killing me!” She burst into hysterical weeping.

“I’m so sorry, mother. I hadn’t realized. Perhaps if you weren’t always so short and critical with her--”

“Oh, I’m to go down on my knees to her? Indeed I won’t. As long as she is under eighteen, she takes her orders from me. She’ll go to the dogs, with all this flattery and praise--”

“The surest way to ruin Eileen is to take that attitude towards her.”

“Well, she is _my_ child, and I have a right to do with her as I please.”

“No--you--have--not!” Judith’s eyes flashed and her voice was hoarse with indignation. “Rather than permit you to wreck her chance for happiness, I’ll send her to Laura Ramsay--or even to my mother.”

II

Lavinia fled weeping through the door. She would tell Larimore how his wife had insulted her. Unfortunately he was in New York. At least she could write to him ... and the letter had distinct advantages. She would be spared interruption. Larimore always broke the point of her lance before she had time to drive it home. She wrote. She read the long letter through twice--and tore it into shreds. A second letter followed the first one. Then it was time to go down to luncheon.

When the noonday meal was over, and David and Theo had gone, she went again to Vine Cottage. Judith was in the library, an open volume of Browning on the table before her. Her face was pale and her eyes showed flecks of hazel.

“We had a misunderstanding this morning, my dear, and I don’t want to leave things that way.” The words came with a brave show of confidence, but Lavinia Trench looked like a corpse, an automaton that was made to speak by a force other than its own. “I am going to ask you to forgive me, and help me as you did Eileen.”

“Oh, mother!” The cry was from her heart.

“I knew you would be surprised. I never apologized to any one in my life. I’ve been fighting it for a week. When I said those things, this morning, it was to keep from saying what--what I’m going to say now. Since Eileen came home, I’ve been going over my life. David said she had missed the path, and you showed her the right way. I am the most unhappy woman in the world. If you could do that for Eileen, you could do it for me.”

It was a challenge, flung like a pelting of hail stones. Judith looked at her with troubled gaze. How could she deal with a mentality so different from her own? Eileen was young, and Eileen loved her. That her mother-in-law cordially detested her, she could not doubt.

“You know I would gladly....”

“It’s all perfectly simple--excepting two points. By all the rules of right and wrong, Eileen ought to be a miserable girl, broken in soul and body--and not respected by good people. It doesn’t make a particle of difference that she hid her wickedness. God knows what she did, and it is God that punishes sin. Instead of that, she comes back here better in every way than she was before. She’s prettier now than Sylvia. She used to be cross and hateful most of the time. Now she laughs and sings and whistles till I wish she would pout for a change. She sits up and discusses the most serious topics with grown men and women--and you know how she used to rattle slang, and sneer at people who were serious.”

“Her experience developed her marvellously. It might have wrecked her, just as a powerful dose of medicine might destroy your body, if administered in the wrong way. It was fearful medicine, but it was what her sick mind needed.”

“That takes care of one of the points,” Lavinia cried, her black eyes dilating. “You call it medicine. I saw it only as the consequences of sin.”

“The name doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, the name does matter. I want to get this thing down in black and white. All my life I have been discontented. It’s just one crushing disappointment after another. Eileen was the same way. I never used to think she was like me--but in some respects she is. I had a chance to marry the son of the richest man in town. But I have always been virtuous and upright--”

“Mother, perhaps if you--”

“Don’t interrupt me. I have to say this all at once, while it’s connected. You call Eileen’s discontentment and rebellious nature a kind of disease. Well then, I had the same disease, and she got it from me. After my grandmother died, there wasn’t one in the family that understood me. And the man I was engaged to--” She brought her teeth together, as if she were biting off and forcing back the words that strove to assert themselves in spite of her. “I threw him over, when I found out that he was an unprincipled scoundrel, like Hal Marksley. If I had gone on, as she did--but I never could have done such a thing.”

“Probably not. You were brought up in a provincial New York town. You were hedged about by customs and convictions that don’t obtain in Springdale, or among Eileen’s associates. You must make allowance for that.”

Lavinia sidestepped the interruption. “Eileen was sick--and God picked out a remedy that I thought God, in His purity, wouldn’t know anything about. I was taught that it was the devil that--well, I’ve been figuring that she had to come to grief, because she went over to Satan. That’s the only way I could square things with my religious training. I don’t believe, now, that she will ever be punished. That shows that it was God and not the devil that did it. I’m willing to admit that I was mistaken, if you’ll show me how to find happiness.”

“It isn’t a recipe, like the ingredients for a cake. And you must remember that I didn’t prescribe the remedy, in Eileen’s case. I only nursed her, after she had taken it. I haven’t the faintest idea why you are unhappy.”

“And I would have to tell you the whole story?”

“I wouldn’t pry into your heart. I would do anything in my power to give you peace. You are Lary’s mother. I have never overlooked my obligation to you.”

III

Lavinia took from the words an implication more humiliating than her daughter-in-law had intended. But this was no time for recrimination. She must hold on to herself. The canker in her heart had eaten so deep that help must come, or she would go mad. Mechanically she reached for the volume on the table. Her mind went back to those first years in Springdale, when she had conned Browning in an effort to shine in Mrs. Henderson’s club. Was it indeed for this that she had memorized poems, delved in abstruse literary criticism--that she might win Mrs. Henderson’s approbation? One half of her knew that it was not, while the other half as stoutly denied an ulterior motive for this, or for any other deliberate act of her life.

While she was giving the attic its annual overhauling, she had come upon the yellow files of the Bromfield Sentinel, the edges broken like pie crust. She had read again the spirited account of the meeting at which Mrs. David Trench was elected secretary of the most intellectual club in Springdale. Who was there in her girlhood home for whom this triumph would provide a thrill of gratification or a sting of envy? Ellen knew all about it. Isabel had long since removed to California. Her mother was dead. The girls of her social circle? The Browning craze had not invaded Bromfield, and there was not one among her old friends for whose opinion she cared a straw.

IV

She came back to herself with a start. “The Statue and the Bust,” she muttered. “We did that one, the winter before Isabel was born. I had to drop out--and Mrs. Henderson sent me her notes. It was a shockingly immoral thing, for the wife of a college president--a Presbyterian minister, at that. I never had quite the same opinion of her, after I read those notes. She said the lady who sat at the window and watched for the duke to ride by--would have been less wicked if she had actually run away with him. She said it was just as bad to want to commit sin as to actually commit it--”

“Yes, if they restrained themselves only because of fear of the consequences. There is no virtue in that kind of repression.”

To Lavinia Trench everything was personal. She turned the thought over in her mind ... “afraid of the consequences” ... “no virtue in that kind of repression.” Her whole life had been one of repression. Mrs. Henderson had stressed the lines:

“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.”

“That isn’t my idea of sin. At least it wasn’t, until....” She trailed off into incoherence, thumbing the pages nervously. “Judith, do you think a woman--a married woman--could go on caring for some other man--” She struggled with the obstruction in her throat. “I mean the bride of Riccardi, in the poem. I can’t see how caring, and just thinking how much she would like to be with him--was--wrong. She didn’t commit any act of sin--didn’t break the seventh commandment.”

“In the eyes of the world she was a virtuous woman. In her own heart she was an unsatisfied wanton. She added hypocrisy to the sin of desire, and on that hypocrisy she wrecked her only chance for happiness.”

V

Once before, Judith had attempted to implant an abstract idea in Mrs. Trench’s mind. Now she was betrayed into a discussion of moral responsibility, with no intent other than that of bridging over a trying period of her none too comfortable relations with her mother-in-law. That Lavinia would carry away even a germ of an idea, she did not suspect. She had merely reiterated what Mrs. Henderson had said, twenty years ago. As yet she had not fully perceived, in that warped mind, one dominating characteristic: the ability to find justification for anything that seemed desirable. True, Eileen had said--but Eileen was not always fair in her old-time strictures on her mother.

Judith looked at the abject figure, the pallid face and the hard mouth ... and pity overmastered her. She wanted to say something comforting. The door was shut, the discussion ended. Lavinia sat there, pondering. It was all so different from the groundwork of her religious training. Probably Browning and Judith and Mrs. Henderson were wrong. To her literal mind, their idea could not accord with the stern dictum: “The wages of sin is death.” Still, their theory would serve to explain Eileen. In her pondering, she went the length of formulating the postulate: “Eileen sinned and became happy. Her sin was the source of her regeneration.”

There must be something to it. She, Vine Larimore, had been virtuous--and disaster had overtaken her. Lettie Fournier had sinned ... and for all the years of her subsequent life she had worn the name of Calvin Stone. That this distinction brought her rival scant happiness, was beside the point. The transgression of the moral law was the barrier which both Lettie and Eileen had passed to the kind of satisfaction that had been denied her. Judith had not told her of the days and nights of self-purging. She saw only externals, and these were all in favour of the Browning theory. After a long interval she said:

“Would you mind telling her--Eileen--that I want her to come to me? You know better how to get hold of her. She thinks I don’t love her--that I’m partial to Sylvia. I do love her ... and I want her at home with me, where I can study her. It will be bitter enough dose for me to take my lesson from her. But I am willing to do it, if she can show me the way to happiness.” She looked incredibly old and tired and hopeless. “And would you mind lending me your copy of Browning? I want to read ‘The Statue and the Bust’ through. Sylvia took mine with her when she moved to Detroit. I didn’t think I would ever look at it again.”

XXXIV Lavinia’s Credo

I

“Sister Judy,” Jack Denslow called, “there’s a bully fire down the avenue. Come and watch the motor engine go by. Good-bye, old horse, your day is done.”

Judith Trench crossed to the window and stood beside her young brother; but her mind was not on the marvel of metal and speed that had gone from sight almost before its clanging bell-note reached her ears. Another fifth of March. A year ago ... Eileen ... there, in that very room. And now.... Did Eileen remember? Did any of the family remember? She and Lary had spent the winter in New York, going to Springdale only when business demanded, and each brief visit brought its fresh surprise.

With the Marksley contract off his hands, David improved in health so rapidly that he had long since ceased to be a source of anxiety. Eileen and her mother had effected an _entente cordiale_ which apparently worked well for both. The woman who had wrought the bridge, however frail and inadequate, over which mother and daughter might pass to an understanding hitherto unknown in their association, reflected with grave misgivings that the bridge was not the end of the journey.

Once she was on the point of telling Lary about his mother, their sharp dispute and the subsequent ethical discussion. The change in Lavinia, since that day, was so marked that the neighbours made comment. The woman who had spent her mature years surging from officious sweetness to the most violent outbursts of temper, went about in a state of tranquil meditation that could not be accounted for by anything external to herself. There was none of the rapturous devotion to David that had characterized her return from Bromfield; but at least she was not unkind. Of all those who watched her, only Judith could surmise what was going on in her mind. Might it be that Lavinia had achieved her Indian Summer without the killing frost? Had there, perhaps, been a revision of her _credo_ from the simple tenets of the catechism to the complex philosophy of Robert Browning? Judith shivered as she faced the thought and its possible consequences.

She had told the troubled woman that sin consisted, not in action, but in desire. Could Lavinia, literal-minded and creed-ridden, handle a concept so foreign to her convictions? Had Lary’s mother torn away the solid foundation of her existence, and was she building again--a substructure that would sustain her through the barren years to come? Could this be done, at Lavinia’s age and with the rigid material of Lavinia’s soul? Would the house of her being come crashing down, when she sought to shift from what she had been to what she hoped to be?

Judith was glad when Lary told her, that evening, that he must return to Springdale. Her mother-in-law might seek counsel of her, in the privacy of the library where their two natures had clashed again and yet again. All the tedious journey to the West, she turned over in her mind a working corollary to that elusive proposition, the nature of sin. How tenuous, how like shifting sand, the thought-mass on which our concrete actions must rest! Had she any assurance that her conception of duty, of principle, of right-thinking, was better for humanity than the set of fatuous concepts she had sought to displace?

II

If Lavinia had need of help, she gave no token. She was at the station to meet them, and she was bursting with a secret. There had been no mention of it in her letters, because one could not be sure about such things--and telling them in advance was likely to spoil the charm. Then she sealed her lips until they were well within the discreet walls of Vine Cottage.

“Of course I may be mistaken; but unless I miss my guess, there’s going to be a wedding before you go back to New York.”

“A wedding? Some one I have met?”

“There! I was sure you didn’t suspect. Though how you could have helped it--the way Syd acted, when you were here the end of January--”

“Dear old Syd! I hope he has fallen in love wisely. It would go hard with him if he should blunder.”

“I’m sure it will be all right. The difference in age doesn’t matter--and you know he will make her a noble husband. If only she doesn’t get some foolish notion of telling him all that wretched affair. I tried to caution her, in a roundabout way; but you know how stubborn Eileen is.”

“Eileen!” Judith dropped a handful of toilet articles on the dressing table and sat down, weakly.

“Mercy, Judith!” The woman’s tone carried positive contempt for such obtuseness. “He was with her every evening while you and Larimore were here, the last time. Of course they were reading Latin together, or working with the violin. But I knew what it would lead to. And it was my making her come home, after she’d been at their house three evenings a week, that did it. He missed her so dreadfully that he got over thinking about her as a little girl. Goodness knows, she’s more mature than Sylvia was at twenty--and Syd will always be a boy.”

“Has she told you?”

“No, but I wouldn’t look for her to do that. She’s been very nice to me. Oh, Judith, I hope she will tell you it’s true.”

“I’m sure it would be a great comfort to you to have her happily married.”

“Yes--but I wasn’t thinking so much about that part of it. I had my own case in mind. It would be the last straw of evidence--that all my old ideas were wrong. For the first time in my life, I want to be sure I was in the wrong.”

Her eyes glittered and her slender form seemed to dilate. She was not thinking of her cruelty to Eileen and her subsequent reluctance to admit that in her daughter’s case good might grow out of evil. Eileen was become, in her mother’s eyes, a manikin, to be posed this way and that for the studying of effects--an architect’s drawing, to serve as a pattern for the rebuilding of her mother’s life.

III

Later in the day the girl came, her face wearing an expression of deadly earnest. Already Mrs. Trench’s hope was transformed into certainty. Judith led the way to the little boudoir Lary had fitted for her on the second floor.

“Now, dear, what is it?” she asked when the door was shut.

“The most important trouble I ever had. I ought to have written you--when Syd first asked me. But I did so want to tell papa first ... before even you. I owe him that, for all the pain I caused him. Syd wants to be married on my eighteenth birthday, and that’s less than three weeks off.”

“And you love him, Eileen?”

“As I never thought it would be possible to love. We just belong together--like you and Lary, only, oh, so different. I can see it in a hundred ways. When I don’t get what he’s trying to tell me--abstract ideas, you know--he goes up to the landing in the reception hall and sits down at his mother’s pipe organ and puts the thought into something that I can get hold of. When a man can talk to you that way--and music is the only language you really do understand--there is only one answer. If I’m in an ugly mood, he doesn’t scold or upbraid me. He works out a theme in A-minor. I try to run away from it, and I can’t. I’ve made bold to go past him, up to my room, and my feet wouldn’t carry me up the stairs.”

“And then, Eileen?”

“I cry it out on his shoulder. After I have washed the meanness out, we can talk sense. I don’t mind in the least--that he’s always right.”

“And there’s one point on which you can’t come to an agreement?”

“Yes, only one. Judith, how far is it necessary to go with confession of something that you know will lose you the respect and affection of--”

“Oh, Eileen, my poor little sister!”

“Don’t let it hurt you,” the girl cried, her eyes filling. “If life isn’t so perfect, I can stand it. There is one thing more important than the man you love--and that is your conviction of what is square and honest. Syd can tell me what to do in other matters--but this is in your line, not his.”

“Dearest, it seems to me that there can be no sure foothold in marriage if a wife conceals from her husband an experience as important as that. I know what a humiliation it is to open such a secret chamber. I did it, Eileen.”

“Judith, you don’t think I--” She stared, aghast. “You couldn’t think me capable of taking Sydney Schubert’s love--a man as clean and honourable as he is--without telling him why I went to New York?”

“Then he knows?”

“He knew ... all along.” Her fair cheeks flamed. “When he told me he cared, I said there was a reason why I couldn’t ever marry any decent man. Judith, he put his two arms around me and looked me square in the eyes, and said: ‘You were a poor little wilful child, and you didn’t know that fire would burn. Any woman, my dear, is good enough for any man--if she is honest.’ The only thing he wanted to know was ... what we had done with it. He said that would make a difference. He was relieved when I told him. And he thinks you were made in heaven--to have saved me--for him.”

“But if you have told him, and he is satisfied--what is the obstacle?”

“It is his father. I can’t marry Syd and go there to live, letting Papa Schubert believe I am the pure white flower he thinks me. Syd says he won’t have his father’s ideal of me shattered--because his father wouldn’t look at it the way he does. He might forgive me: but I’d always be tarnished, to him.”

“Do you remember, Eileen, the day you told the truth to Laura Ramsay? You began by saying you were under no moral obligation to her mother. I don’t know how we can draw those lines of distinction; but I feel them with absolute certainty. You are under no need to confess your secret to Sylvia or Theodora--and for widely different reasons. Indeed we must go to any length to prevent Theo ever learning the truth. With Dr. Schubert it is the same. It would only give him useless pain.”

“That’s what Syd said. He led me over to that little peachblow vase--the one that was bequeathed to his father by one of his grateful patients. He told me the satin glaze and the peachbloom tints were the result of the heat in the kiln, that almost destroyed the body of the vase. He asked me if I would be willing to break that little amphora, that his father loves, just to prove to him that it isn’t as perfect on the inside as it looks to him. He might patch the fragments together, but he would always be conscious of the cracks.”

“Syd is right. It would be brutality--sheer vandalism.”

“You precious treasure. He told me that was what you would say. Now I am going to the office to tell my darling daddy that he is to have a _real_ son-in-law.”

“When are you going to tell your mother, dear?”

“That’s Syd’s job. He is going to make formal application for my hand. He can get off a thing like that, without batting an eye, when he’s just dying to get out and yell. And the worst of it is, mamma’ll take it in dead earnest. I suppose Sylvia will have sarcastic things to say. I don’t care. Syd never was really in love with her--after he was old enough to cut his eye teeth.”

IV

Mrs. Penrose did not come home for the wedding. Just what she wrote her mother, the other members of the family never knew. Her letter came with another, which bore the Bromfield postmark, and the two were on Lavinia’s plate when she came down to breakfast. David and the girls were already at the table, and Theo had inspected the mail. Drusilla had been instructed not to take letters from the box, and the sight of two thick envelopes threw Lavinia into a nervous chill. She picked them up and carried them to the sun room, saying she had a headache and would eat nothing.

After a little, David followed her, distressed. “Is there anything wrong in Bromfield--at your brother’s house, or with my people?”

“There’s nothing the matter in Bromfield. Sylvia is a cat!”

XXXV The Credo at Work

I

When school closed in June, Judith took Theodora for the long promised visit to New York. Sydney and Eileen were off for a belated honeymoon in the mountains of Colorado, and Lavinia Trench reflected that the coveted privacy had come at the crucial moment. She would be alone to think things out. David was away from home much of the time, and when he was in the house his wife was only mechanically conscious of his presence. She viewed the neighbours as through a mist. Orders were given to Drusilla, with the monotonous intonation of a talking machine. That the orders were rational was evidence of the complete detachment that could enable her mind to function without conscious effort. It was as if she had wound up the machinery of her being and had withdrawn, leaving it to the old familiar routine.

After three weeks, her cloistered retreat was invaded by the most disturbing member of her family. The passionate devotion that had centered in her youngest-born--to her purblind vision the most perfect copy of herself--had undergone insidious change, as she centered her interest in Eileen. Theodora was irritating beyond endurance. With the child in the house, there could be no peace. Reluctantly, almost bitterly, she came back to the dull reality of life. David was still in Jacksonville from Monday to Saturday. After a day or two, she consented to let Theo stay with Dr. Schubert and Nanny. To her daughter-in-law she confessed that it was not because the old doctor was so lonely, but that she could not endure the child’s incessant chatter. The dropping of a fork behind her chair would send her into a paroxysm of shaking--Lavinia, who had always laughed at nervous women.

II

One morning Judith stood with her husband at an upper window, watching the agitated woman as she paced up and down before the house. The postman was late.

“She watched for him just that way yesterday, Lary. And when he failed to bring what she was expecting, her disappointment was pitiful.”

“My mother is going through some deep transition. I wish I could help her; but she has always shut me out. She is a hundred times more frank and confidential with you than she has ever been with me or with her own daughters. Do you think, dear, you could induce her to tell you what is troubling her?”

“I have tried. She talks freely about the emptiness and misery of her life. She is gnawingly unsatisfied; but she gives no clue. Such devotion as your father’s ought to have won her, years ago. I spoke rather plainly to her about it. I knew it would anger her; but I wanted to shock her into some line of rational thinking. The mention of her husband’s tenderness only infuriated her. She said such cruel things about him. And, Lary, he is as much in the dark as we are. He talked to me about it, Sunday night. Is it possible....”

“What, dear?”

“I wondered if there might be something in her life--long ago--a scar that is still sensitive--some shock that left a buried impression.”

“A lover, you mean? I hardly think so. She has always teased or brutally insulted my father with the mention of an old sweetheart of hers. It seems, they were deadly rivals, and papa won her because of his clean morals. The other man was the rakish sort--and in a town like Bromfield--with my mother’s prejudices and the thing that in her case passes for religious conviction....”

Just then the postman rounded the corner. There was only one letter for the Trench household, but its effect was electrical. Lavinia took it from his hand and ran stumbling into the house. At the sill she dropped to her knees, regained her footing and hurried inside. She had not opened the envelope, hence its contents could not account for her perturbed state of mind. It came to Judith ... that the whole future hung on the tenor of a reply.

III

At noon she appeared in the dining-room of Vine Cottage. Her cheeks were pasty, ashen, but her eyes burned with insane luster. She must send an important letter to Sylvia, and it was too late-- She floundered, catching a chair for support. Would Larimore send the office boy out with a special delivery stamp?

“I’ll take your letter with me, and post it at the office,” Lary said, annoyed by the crafty manner that marked his mother’s too frequent subterfuges.

“I haven’t written it yet. It isn’t the kind I could dash off in a minute. Sylvia wants me to be in Detroit by Friday noon. I’ll have to get word--”

“Papa won’t be home until Saturday evening,” her son said sharply. “You can’t go off without consulting him.”