Chapter XV: A Widow

Josie was shocked and even hurt at the irresponsible gayety with which his mother bore her bereavement.

He thought with bitterness, "All she cares about, I guess, is that now she'll have some money of her own to spend--_my_ money!"

For of course every dollar his mother spent would take off just that much from _his_ ultimate inheritance. He was worried. He knew that his father had never allowed her any freedom in spending money--women were such spendthrifts! And here she was now, suddenly turned loose with absolute right (except for the restraint of that death-bed promise) over a great fortune! He could conceive of no other explanation of her unaccustomed brightness and joy. For though an intelligent youth, his perceptions were keen rather than fine; he lacked the sensitiveness which feels atmospheres and another's point of view.

It was a singular fact that Josie, though a graduate of a first-class college where he had really seen life, had never seemed to become aware of his father's extreme crudity. His familiarity with it, together with his genuine affection for his father, had mercifully kept him from seeing Joe as others saw him. Thanks to the unselfish tact with which Susan had always maintained domestic peace, he had never realized the tragic incompatibility between his parents. Hence his complete mystification at Susan's present offensive attitude; offensive, that is, to him.

Her refusal to wear black had outraged his middle-class sense of propriety; but her lack of even a pretence of a decently sorrowful demeanour--in public before their very neighbours!--made him more deeply ashamed of her than he had ever in his life been of his father.

"Didn't you care for Father at _all_, Mother?" he one day broke out after witnessing the gay encounter between Susan and Georgie, who had run over to the big house to greet her five minutes after his arrival at the cottage for the Christmas holidays.

Susan's radiant face grew sober at the question. She looked at Josie uncertainly. She would never be able to make him understand. She never had made him understand anything in her heart; while Georgie seemed to realize, without being told, everything about her. _He_ knew what a release was hers; what a chattel she had been; though she had never talked to him of herself.

How should she answer her step-son? Wasn't it better to be done with pretence and speak the truth, even if it were not understood?

"Try to think a bit, Josie--how could a woman like me have cared for a man like your father? Your father was so far beneath me that he could not hear the sound of my voice when I spoke!"

Susan felt herself tingle with a strange delight in speaking out at last the truth from her heart.

"That's a fine way for you to talk to me of my own father! For a wife to talk of her husband just dead a month! Father loved _you_!"

"I know he did, so he had the better of it, you see, for I never let him see how much I _didn't_ love _him_."

"Why did you marry a man you considered so far beneath you? If you ever _were_ so far above Father, as you seem to think yourself, you certainly must admit that you sank to his level by marrying him! Why did you do it?"

"One of the strongest reasons was----"

She almost said, "My longing to mother you!"

She checked herself in time. Not yet was she ready to tell him she was not his own mother. She knew instinctively that however much recreation Josie found in bullying her he did truly love her so much that the discovery that he was not hers would deal him a blow far deeper than that which his father's sudden death had given him.

"I can only tell you this, Josie--my reasons were unselfish. I have paid dear for the lesson that a woman had better cut her throat than marry a man she--despises." She used the word deliberately. It was such joy to call a spade a spade! "All the same, Josie, I am sure that my marriage harmed no one but myself; and did a few people some good, perhaps. But the past seems such an awful nightmare to me that I don't want to speak of it, to think of it, any more! Only--it may as well be understood between you and me that your father's death is to me a blessed release! Now let us forever drop the subject!"

Josie had always been intensely jealous of Georgie, not only as the rival heir to White Oak Farm, but because of the good comradeship that existed between his mother and his cousin. His mother was his exclusive possession, and no other boy had a right to any least part of her consideration. He hotly resented every friendly look or word that passed between them.

A third cause of his jealousy was Georgie's superior talents. He was already, at the age of nineteen, in the graduating class of a school of civil engineers and had manifested precocious and distinguished ability. His professors predicted that he would some day do something very big.

There were times when Susan saw, to her sorrow, that Josie's aversion to Georgie almost equalled the venom his father had always felt for Sidney.

Joe had died at the end of November, and it was the following spring, while Josie was home from his Jaw school for the Easter vacation, that the first real conflict between him and his mother occurred.

The habit of not spending money had become so fixed with Susan that when informed by her deceased husband's lawyer that she possessed three hundred thousand dollars, with no strings attached to it, to spend it and will it away as she liked, the fact left her rather uncomprehending. She was still vaguely under the spell of her husband's last injunctions, enjoining her to remember that she held his money only in trust for his son, the real heir, and that she must be most conscientiously economical.

So, upon Josie's return home at Easter, he was relieved to find no change in the old order of their life; no extra servants, no extravagant clothes, no new car.

Evidently she was taking her promises to his dying father very seriously. He had not really expected her to do otherwise; yet he found himself feeling greatly relieved.

But when, after the habit of his father, he prowled about the house to catch her up, perhaps, in some secret sin, he discovered in her bedroom--not hidden, but brazenly displayed in a new bookcase--several dozens of new, expensive volumes, poetry, essays, travels, fiction, economics, philosophy, he felt greatly annoyed. She had never bought books while his father lived; why should she find it necessary now?

"You could get enough books to satisfy any reasonable person at the Middleburg library, I should think, Mother. I don't see why you have to squander good money on books. It's certainly not being very economical with my money!"

How like old times it sounded to Susan!--except that it was couched in grammatical English. For four restful, heavenly months her ears had not once been rasped with the menace of that hateful word, "economical". Was it only a lovely dream? Was Josie going to take his father's place and nag at her, hamper her at every turn? She had so revelled in the luxury of buying books quite recklessly, for the first time in her life! It had been her only orgy since her freedom, except----

Must Josie be told just how she used every dollar of the money which the family lawyer was paying over to her? He was quite as penurious as his father had been--was she, then, going to have to account to him for every least little indulgence?

She did not even question his _ipse dixit_, "My money." Joe's money was of course his son's. When every now and then during his vacation a question of her expenditures came up, she always accepted quite placidly and as a matter of course his ultimatum, "That would be an unnecessary expense. I can't consent to it."

She told him that it was so lonely at White Oak Farm when he was away, and that the place involved so much more household work than seemed worth while for one person, that she thought it might be an economy of labour (as well as of coal) for them to take an apartment in Middleburg and sublet White Oak Farm.

But Josie would not consider it. Inasmuch as a desirable tenant could not readily be found, it was much more economical for them to remain on the farm.

"Especially as we don't have to pay Uncle Sidney nearly as much rent as we would have to pay for an apartment--seeing he still owes the estate money. What's more, it is only by living out here at White Oak Farm that we shall ever get out of Uncle Sidney the money he owes us."

"But we don't need to get it back, Josie; we've plenty to be comfortable with; so why sacrifice ourselves for a house--or a debt?"

"You've no business sense, Mother," was Josie's conclusive reply. "I would not consider moving away from here."

But it was not only in the matter of her use of money that Josie tyrannized. Georgie, too, was home just now for the Easter vacation; and during the whole two weeks of the two boys' sojourn at the farm Susan was never free for an hour from her sense of Josie's incessant spying upon her to intercept a tête-à-tête between her and Georgie.

She observed that this seemed to trouble Georgie very little. He had a way (most irritating to Josie) of ignoring the latter's slights, because the obvious fact was that he minded them no more than he would have minded the snarling of a cur. But the crowning offence to Josie, which made him almost hysterical with anger, was the utter failure of his own inimical attitude toward his cousin to put any restraint whatever upon the spontaneity of Georgie's intercourse with his "Aunt Susan".

"Any one would suppose you were more his mother than mine!" Josie would complain to Susan, like a jealous child. "What right has he coming round here to monopolize you, Mother? I'm only here for two weeks and I want you to myself a _little_ bit! He's always hanging 'round here as if the place were already his--and as if you were his!"

Susan had long since, in sheer self-defence, fallen into the way of curbing any expression of affection for Georgie when Josie was by.

"Why can't he stay at home with his father? _I_ haven't any father! I haven't any one but you. And he, who has a father, wants my mother as well, so that I'll have no one!"

Josie, who in some respects would never be a grown man, seemed to regard his orphaned condition as a claim to such honorable martyrdom as to entitle him to unlimited sympathy, indulgence, petting; just as, in his childhood, he had made large capital of his little illnesses, prolonging his convalescence and its attendant relaxation of discipline as long as he possibly could.

"Do you realize, Mother," Josie pursued the discussion, "that if Uncle Sidney should die (and he's miserable enough to die any old time) my cousin George could turn you and me off this place?"

"Yes, Josie."

"If he has any honour about him he won't repudiate his father's debts to my father!" Josie hotly maintained. "He'll let us live on here until the last dollar of that debt is wiped out!"

"I don't see why George should burden his young life with his father's debts, my dear."

"Oh, you don't, don't you? Do you realize that if Uncle Sidney does not pay back what he borrowed from Father, _I'm_ the loser? You'd take from me, your own son, and give to a boy that's no relation to you!"

"Georgie has lost enough through his father--without assuming his debts!"

"All your sympathy is for Georgie, of course! Why don't you give _me_ some sympathy for all I'd lose? A pretty mother you are, I must say!"

"It isn't as though you needed this place; you'll have so much more than you will need!--more than any one ought to have! The whole scheme seems horribly wrong to me. You two young men have no social right to great wealth for which you have not worked--you nearly a million dollars and Georgie this great estate! It ought not to be allowed. Something ought to be done about it!"

"You know perfectly well there's no use your talking that kind of rot to me, Mother!"

"Yes, I do know that perfectly well, Josie, dear!" Susan sighed. "More's the pity!"

Josie just here experienced one of his sudden revulsions to demonstrative affection. "You're my little mother, so you are!" he exclaimed, rushing at her and burying his head on her bosom, kissing her roughly, rapturously, fondling her, insisting upon her fondling him, cooing over her incoherent love phrases.

She submitted, half appeased, half bored, marvelling at the boy's morbid nature, responding as warmly as she could.

Ever since Joe's death Susan had rioted in the delight, so long denied her, of doing little kindnesses for her aging sisters. She did not dream of using Joe's money in any large expenditures for them, but she constantly carried dainties to them, bought them trifling gifts, took them driving in her little car, insisted upon getting their laundry every week and having it done at White Oak Farm by her laundress, called for them every Sunday and took them out to her home to dinner.

It was this latter item which precipitated a discussion between her and Josie that led to far-reaching results.

"It seems to me you go gadding an awful lot, Mother," Josie grumbled when on Sunday morning she announced her intention of driving over to Reifsville. "You didn't squander gasoline so recklessly while Father lived!"

"The word gasoline, Josie, will ever bring up to me bright and tender memories of your father!"

"Your sarcasm doesn't cover your taking advantage!"

"Of whom?"

"Of poor Father--who you say you did not love!" he irrelevantly accused her.

"_Whom_ you did not love--not _who_," she automatically corrected him--then laughed at herself involuntarily, and so merrily that Josie, whose heart still mourned, winced perceptibly.

"What do you want to go to Reifsville for?" he inquired. "You were there just the other day."

"I'm going to bring your aunts over to dine with us."

"Huh! You've been doing that a lot, I guess, while I've been away--since Father's gone! You didn't do it when he was living."

"Do you think that's to his credit--that I did not invite my sisters here while he lived?"

"Don't fling gibes at my father, Mother! I won't stand for it!"

"'Fling gibes.' It sounds Shaksperean! 'Whips and arrows of outrageous fortune'--come, dear boy, please don't be an ass!"

"'An ass!' I never hear you call George an ass!"

"Josie, aren't you ever going to grow out of your infancy?" she asked with a long-drawn breath as turned away and left him.

This tilt with Josie rankled in her heart all the way over to Reifsville, preparing a fertile soil for the comments which her sisters let drop, from time to time, on the ride back. The Reifsville school would close in a month, they told Susan, and they would miss the needed board money which the teacher paid them, though they would be glad to be relieved of the extra work he made, even though a man teacher wasn't nearly so much trouble as a woman teacher had always been. They hoped they could get one or two summer boarders, if they could stand the work it would entail--they were not so strong as they used to be--they were really getting to be old women, now, "funny" as it seemed! And yet, how they were going to live at all without taking summer boarders as they had been doing for the past few years----

"I have so glad for you, Susie, that you'll never have to worry about money in your old age, nor have to work beyond your strength. Joe's left you that well-fixed, you can take it easy; ain't? It's a good thing he died too soon to get a will made a'ready, or mebby he'd of tied up his money so's you couldn't of had no freedom with it. But now that the law has gave you your widow's thirds, to do what you please with, you're _well_-fixed. Ain't?"

"To do what I please with?"

"Why, to be sure! You can even will it away from Josie if you want."

"Do you mind, Susie," asked Addie, "how oncet you was a-goin' to leave Joe and run off? _Ain't_, it's a good thing, now, you stuck! Look how nice-fixed you are--and a widdah and all!--and your own boss."

"My 'own boss'!" repeated Susan, vaguely.

"The _County Gazette_ says you are got an income of more than eighteen thousand dollars a year, Susan! Yi, yi, it wonders me! Is it so, Susie?"

"I--I--suppose it is. Yes, I really do have that income. Dear me! I had not realized it, Addie! I've thought of it as really belonging to Josie. Of course by rights it is Josie's."

"Josie's nothin'!" exclaimed Lizzie. "Sure you earnt everything Joe Houghton inherited to you, Susie!--the way you worked fur him when he could of hired for you; and you so good-educated and not used to hard work! And the way you brang up his son for him! That boy would not be the mannerly, genteel young man he kin be (when he wants to) if it hadn't of been for you, Susie. Yes, indeedy, you earnt all you got!"

"Well, I guess anyhow!" Addie corroborated this statement. "Don't you go thinkin' it ain't every cent of it yourn, Susie, to do what you like with!"

"Please don't speak of it before Josie," Susan warned them, hastily, as they drew up under the porte-cochère at White Oak Farm.

Josie's manner to his aunts that day aped so perfectly the inhospitable attitude his father had always taken toward them on their very occasional visits to White Oak Farm--the curtness with which Joe had been wont to answer their friendly or propitiatory overtures; his sullen and prolonged silences; his actual rudeness--that Susan was conscious of a shade of amusement conflicting with her mingled indignation and sorrow. She and her sisters had been, for the past four months, so greatly enjoying their restful, happy Sundays together, freed from Joe's kill-joy presence, that they all felt keenly this return to the old wretched atmosphere.

While the painfully embarrassing dinner was in progress Susan thought back over the unfailing kindnesses and generosity of her sisters to her step-son, through all his childhood and youth; of how he used to love to be taken to the Reifsville cottage for the animal cookies the "aunties" would bake for him; the "sticker" baskets they would patiently construct for him, and the chicken-coops and pig-pens they would build out of clothes pins; the little birthday and Christmas feasts and gifts they always managed to have for him, no matter how poor they found themselves.

How could Josie feel toward them, now, as he seemed to?

"Ain't these here oranges sweet, though?" Lizzie remarked as she tasted the "fruit hash" they had for dessert. "It gives an awful good taste. I have so fond for oranges and we don't never buy none no more--me and Addie--they come too high. They want eighty cents a dozen now, on the store, for oranges. Ain't, Addie?"

"Yes, anyhow!" said Addie.

"We get them for nothing," began Susan, "from Joe's Florida orange grove. We get----"

Josie interrupted her. "For nothing! I don't call it for nothing! We have to pay the freight, don't we? And the taxes and the labour, don't we? For nothing! That's just like a woman!"

"We've got so many more than we can use," said Susan, "you must take a basket full home with you, Lizzie."

"We haven't more than we can use!" Josie quickly contradicted her. "You can make me a lot of orange marmalade, Mother. You know how I love orange marmalade."

"I've already made you all the orange marmalade you can eat in a year, Josie."

"Well, we can find plenty of use for all the oranges we have," he persisted.

"You mustn't give us what you can't spare, Susie," Lizzie protested, flushing sensitively.

"Of course I can spare them. We have two big boxes of them in the storage room."

Josie, looking annoyed and offended, frowned into his coffee cup. But he said no more.

After dinner he neither left the women to themselves nor did he join them as they sat about the log fire in the parlour; but settling himself unsociably at the extreme other end of the room, he buried himself in a book.

The constraint which his inimical presence put upon their conversation, and the chilled atmosphere it created, drove Lizzie and Addie to make an early start for home.

At the first suggestion of their departure Josie laid down his book and sauntered toward them.

"You're going to catch the four o'clock trolley?" he asked as they rose to don their Mennonite black hoods and shawls.

Susan had gone to the storeroom to get the oranges.

"Why--we--Susie generally fetches us in her automobile--but----"

"It seems hardly worth while to bother taking out the automobile when the trolley is so handy," said Josie.

"We'll have the heavy basket of oranges, though," said Lizzie, hesitatingly, reluctant to lose their always greatly enjoyed ride with Susan.

"But I've had Mother to myself so little this vacation! I'd rather she didn't go away over to Reifsville this afternoon and leave me here all alone!" objected Josie, plaintively.

"Why, have you got the stomachache or whatever, Josie?" inquired Addie, solicitously.

"Don't you think I want my mother to myself sometimes? Georgie's had her this vacation nearly as much as I've had her!"

Lizzie and Addie exchanged hasty, scared glances.

"And," continued Josie, "gasoline's gone up so, and there's the toll both ways between Reifsville and White Oak Station. Do you know what a trip to Reifsville really costs in toll and gas and wear and tear on your car? It averages twelve cents a mile! Fact! Much more expensive, you see, than to go by trolley or train."

"But, you see, Josie, me and Addie, us we couldn't afford to visit our Susie if she didn't fetch and take us; for we couldn't afford the twenty-five cents trolley fare."

"Then Mother would better give you the trolley fare; it would be much cheaper for her. I'm thinking of selling our car, anyhow."

The sisters, without replying, continued to bundle up in their hoods and shawls and overshoes.

But Susan, upon returning to the parlour, refused to consider letting them go home by trolley.

"We all enjoy the automobile ride," she said. "And there's this heavy basket."

"Heavy! I should say it is heavy!" exclaimed Josie as he lifted it tentatively and set it down again. "What on earth have you got in it?"

"All it will hold of the good things your aunts are fond of," Susan briefly answered.

"Make the load lighter so they _can_ carry it. I don't want you to take the car so far again to-day, Mother."

"Please carry the basket out to the car for us, Josie," Susan coldly requested him.

"But, Mother, I don't want the car used so hard! You use it much too hard. Aunties can just as well take the trolley home, and----"

"Carry the basket out for me, please," she cut him short.

Josie obeyed so ungraciously that the sisters looked mortified and worried, and Susan's face took on the weary, drawn expression that it had quite lost during the past four months.

No reference was made, during the ride over to Reifsville, to the unpleasantnesses of the visit, though the sisters were sad at heart in realizing afresh how "mean-dispositioned" Susan's step-son was and how unappreciative and ungrateful he seemed for all she had always been to him.

On the way back Susan drove slowly to give herself time to think. And her thinking covered a considerable area, ranging from the vague, only half-realized "promises" (if such they had really been) with which she had tried to comfort Joe's last moments on earth, to the chance words her sisters had dropped that morning--"The law has given you your widow's thirds _to do what you please with_." "An income of over eighteen thousand dollars a year." "You surely _earned_ everything Joe left you!"

That was the crux of the whole matter! Was she, indeed, by virtue of her seventeen years of service in Joe's interests, morally entitled, as she was legally, to full freedom in the use and disposal of her "widow's third" of her husband's estate? Legally she owed no accounting to Josie or any one else----

There was no question in her mind of her being bound by her last words to her husband; she had spoken them only to soothe him and had not realized their full significance. She did not feel herself held by them in the least. She was not at all sure that she had really made any definite promises.

"But even if I did and had meant them, a bad promise is better broken than kept."

The only possible question she had to decide was the extent of Josie's moral right over the property that had been his father's.

She remembered that Sidney had once told her that if he had not inherited his uncle's fortune, but had had to work for his living, he might not have been the wreck he was.

"Why, even if I didn't want this money (and God knows I do!) I would be doing the worst possible harm to Josie by saving it for him--pampering his horrible selfishness and stinginess! The best service I can do him is to _spend it up_!"

In a flash she began to see what the command of such an income might mean to her. And suddenly she gave herself over to lovely dreams of all the things she could do with it. The first thing she would want to do would be to buy Georgie the new suit he so badly needed and some chemicals and tools he had told her he lacked for carrying out a daring experiment he had in his head.

The next thing she would love to do would be to settle a comfortable income--a very comfortable one--upon her sisters. Oh, heavenly joy! What a lovely thing money could be! To be able to tell Addie and Lizzie that never more need their "declining years" be fretted and harassed with anxious cares about the wherewithal to live, never more need they labour beyond their strength or be worried with boarders or frightened at the expense of illness or the creeping ravages of old age.

After that, she would like to buy a really good automobile; she mentally apologized to her faithful little old car which had so often carried her far away from the strained and cramping atmosphere of her home, out into the fresh air and sunshine, and had recreated her.

Next thing, how she would dearly love to go to some fearfully expensive New York shops and buy some real clothes!

By the time she reached home, the weary, care-worn countenance with which she had started out was replaced by a radiance which made her look so very girlish that Josie, coming into the hall to greet her, prepared with a recitation of his several reasons for being highly offended with her, was startled and surprised.

In a moment, however, he recovered his sense of wrong at her hands, with several points added to the score. What right had she coming in like a breeze, with rosy cheeks and smiling lips and sparkling eyes, looking so provokingly kissable?--when all day long she had been going against his wishes, neglecting him, her fatherless son, giving her time and his substance to outsiders.

He had expected her to return to him apologetic, remorseful, troubled, anxious to propitiate him! And just look at her!

He began at once to reproach her for that huge basketful of food that had been given away.

"You never gave away our provisions like that when Father lived, so why should you do it now, Mother? You wouldn't even tell me what was in that basket. Goodness knows what mightn't have been in it! What _was_ in it?"

"Josie, darling, will you kindly mind your own business?" she gaily retorted, to his utter consternation, tripping up the wide, winding staircase as lightly as a child.

The next moment he heard her bedroom door close with a snap.

He stood dumbfounded. _She_ was offended with _him_! After the way she had treated him all day! What had _she_ to be offended about, he'd like to know!

Never, from his babyhood up, had he been able to endure having her offended with him.

He set his lips tight, walked firmly upstairs to her bedroom door, and rapped peremptorily.