Chapter V: Book II: VIII (2)

“Yes; but it’s a pity. And not only for him, I mean. I think he had a good influence on Lilla,” Nollie went on.

Ah, now, really they were too simple--even Nollie was! Kate could hardly keep from shouting it out at her: “But can’t you see, you simpleton, that they’re lovers, the two of them, and have cooked up this match for their own convenience, and that your stupid Maclew is their dupe, as all the rest of you are?”

But something in her--was it pride or prudence?--recoiled from such an outburst, and from the need of justifying it. In God’s name, what did it matter to her--what did it matter? The risk was removed, the dreadful risk; she was safe again--as safe as she would ever be--unless some suicidal madness drove her to self-betrayal.

With dry lips and an aching smile she said: “You must help me to choose my wedding-present for Lilla.”

XII.

Anne’s sojourn in Washington prolonged itself for a fortnight. Her letters to her mother, though punctual, were inexpressive; but that was not her fault, Kate knew. She had inherited from her father a certain heaviness of pen, an inability to convey on paper shades of meaning or of feeling, and having said: “Isn’t it splendid about Lilla?” had evidently exhausted the subject, or rather her power of developing it.

At length she returned, bringing with her some studies of magnolias that were freer and more vigorous than any of her previous work. She greeted her mother with her usual tenderness, and to Kate her coming was like a lifting of clouds and opening of windows; the mother had never supposed that anything in her life could ever again strike such deep roots as this passion for her daughter. _Perfect love casteth out fear!_ “Does it? _How does any one know?_” she had often incredulously asked herself. But now, for the first time, love and security dwelt together in her in a kind of millennial quiet.

She grudged having to dine out on the evening of Anne’s return; but Mrs. Porter Lanfrey was celebrating Lilla’s betrothal by a big dinner, with music afterward, and Anne, arriving by a late train, had barely time to dress before the motor was announced. There was no way of avoiding the festivity; its social significance was immeasurable. Mrs. Lanfrey was one of the hostesses who had dropped Lilla from their lists after the divorce, and Mrs. Lanfrey’s yea or nay was almost the last survival of the old social code in New York. Those she invited, at any rate, said that hers was the only house where there was a “tradition” left; and though Lilla, at this, used to growl: “Yes, the tradition of how to bore people,” her reinstatement visibly elated her as much as it did her family. To Enid Drover--resplendent in all her jewels--the event had already reversed the parts in her daughter’s matrimonial drama, and relegated all the obloquy to the outraged Gates. “Of course this evening shows what Jessie Lanfrey really thinks of Phil Gates,” Enid whispered to Mrs. Clephane as the sisters-in-law took off their cloaks in the marble hall; and Kate inwardly emended, with a faint smile: “Or what she really thinks of Horace Maclew.”

Mrs. Clephane had entered the vast Lanfrey drawing-room with a shrinking not produced by the presence of most of her own former censors and judges--now transformed into staunch champions or carelessly benevolent acquaintances--but by the dread of seeing, behind Mr. Maclew’s momentous bulk, a slighter figure and more vivid face. But the moment of suspense was not long; Chris was not there; nor was his name announced after her arrival. The guests were all assembled; the dining-room doors were thrown open, and Mrs. Lanfrey, taking Mr. Maclew’s arm, majestically closed the procession from walnut-and-gold to gold-and-marble--for the Lanfrey house was “tradition” made visible, and even the _menu_ was exactly what a previous transmitter of the faith had thought a _menu_ ought to be when Mrs. Lanfrey gave her first dinner.

For a moment Kate Clephane felt herself in the faint bewildered world, between waking and sleeping. There they all were, the faces that had walled in her youth; she was not sure, at first, if they belonged to the same persons, or had been handed on, as part of the tradition, to a new generation. It even occurred to her that, by the mere act of entering Mrs. Lanfrey’s drawing-room, the latter’s guests acquired a facial conformity that belonged to the Lanfrey plan as much as the fat prima-donna islanded in a sea of Aubusson who warbled an air from _La Tosca_ exactly as a previous fat prima-donna had warbled it on the same spot years before. It seemed as if even Lilla, seated on a gilt sofa beside her betrothed, had smoothed her rebellious countenance to an official smirk. Only Anne and Nollie Tresselton resisted the enveloping conformity; Kate wondered if she herself were not stealthily beginning to resemble Enid Drover. “This is what I ran away from,” she thought; and found more reasons than ever for her flight. “And after all, I have Anne back,” she murmured blissfully ... for that still justified the rest. Ah, how fate, in creating Anne, had baffled its own designs against Anne’s mother!

* * * * *

On the way home the girl was unusually silent. She leaned back against the cushions and let her lids drop. Was it because she was tired after her long day, or only because she was holding in her vision? Kate could not tell. In the passing flashes of the arc-lights the head at her side, bound about with dark braids, looked as firm and young as a Greek marble; Anne was still at the age when neither weariness nor anxiety mars the surface.

Kate Clephane always respected her daughter’s silences, and never felt herself excluded from them; but she was glad when, as they neared their door, Anne’s hand stole out to her. How many old breaches the touch healed! It was almost as if the girl had guessed how often Kate had driven up to that door inertly huddled in her corner, with her husband’s profile like a wall between her and the world beyond the windows.

“Dear! You seem to have been gone for months,” the mother said as they reached her sitting-room.

“Yes. So much has happened.” Anne spoke from far off, as if she were groping through a dream.

“But there’ll be time for all that tomorrow. You’re dead tired now--you’re falling with sleep.”

The girl opened her eyes wide, in the way she had when she came out of one of her fits of abstraction. “I’m not tired; I’m not sleepy.” She seemed to waver. “Can’t I come in and sit with you a little while?”

“Of course, dear.” Kate slipped an arm through hers, and they entered the shadowy welcoming room, lit by one veiled lamp and the faint red of the hearth. “After all, this is the best hour of the twenty-four for a talk,” the mother said, throwing herself back luxuriously on her lounge. It was delicious, after her fortnight of solitude, to think of talking things over with Anne. “And now tell me about everything,” she said.

“Yes; I want to.” Anne stood leaning against the chimney-piece, her head on her lifted arm. “There’s so much to say, isn’t there? Always, I mean--now that you and I are together. You don’t know the difference it makes, coming home to you, instead--” She broke off, and crossing the hearth knelt down by her mother. Their hands met, and the girl leant her forehead against Kate’s shoulder.

“I’ve been lonely too!” The confession sprang to Kate’s lips. Oh, if at last she might say it! But she dared not. The bond between her and her daughter was still too fragile; and how would such an avowal sound on her lips? It was better to let Anne guess--

Anne did guess. “You _have_ been happy here, haven’t you?”

“Happy? Little Anne!”

“And what a beautiful mother you are! Nollie was saying tonight that you’re younger looking every day. And nobody wears their clothes as you do. I knew from that old photograph that you were lovely; but I couldn’t guess that you hadn’t grown any older since it was taken.”

Kate lay still, letting the warmth of the words and the embrace flow through her. What praise had ever seemed as sweet? All the past faded in the sunset radiance of the present. “Little Anne,” she sighed again. The three syllables summed it all up.

Anne was silent for a moment; then she continued, her cheek still pressed against her mother: “I want you to stay here always, you know; I want the house to belong to you.”

“The house--?” Kate sat up with a start. The girl’s shoulder slipped from hers and they remained looking at each other, the space between them abruptly widened. “This house--belong to me? Why, what in the world--”

It was the first time such a question had arisen. On her arrival in America, when Landers, at Anne’s request, had tentatively broached the matter of financial arrangements, Kate had cut him short with the declaration that she would gladly accept her daughter’s hospitality, but preferred not to receive any money beyond the small allowance she had always had from the Clephane estate. After some argument Landers had understood the uselessness of insisting, and had doubtless made Anne understand it; for the girl had never spoken of the subject to her mother.

Kate put out an encircling arm. “What in the world should I do with this house, dear? Besides--need we look so far ahead?”

For a moment Anne remained somewhat passively in her mother’s embrace; then she freed herself and went back to lean against the mantel. “That’s just it, dear; I think we must,” she said. “With such years and years before you--and all that lovely hair!” Her eyes still lingered smilingly on her mother.

Kate sat upright again, and brushed back the lovely hair from her bewildered temples. What did Anne mean? What was it she was trying to say? The mother began to tremble with an undefined apprehension; then the truth flashed over her.

“Dearest--you mean you may be married?”

The girl nodded, with the quick drop of the lids that called up such memories to her mother. “I couldn’t write it; I’m so bad at writing. I want you to be happy with me, darling. I’m going to marry Major Fenno.”

XIII.

Baltimore--the conductor called it out as the train ground its way into the station.

Kate Clephane, on her feet in the long swaying Pullman, looked about her at the faces of all the people in the other seats--the people _who didn’t know_. The whole world was divided, now, between people such as those, and the only two who did know: herself and one other. All lesser differences seemed to have been swallowed up in that....

She pushed her way between the seats, in the wake of the other travellers who were getting out--she wondered why!--at Baltimore. No one noticed her; she had no luggage; in a moment or two she was out of the station. She stood there, staring in a dazed way at the meaningless traffic of the streets. Where were all these people going, what could they possibly want, or hope for, or strive for, in a world such as she now knew it to be?

There was a spring mildness in the air, and presently, walking on through the hurrying crowd, she found herself in a quiet park-like square, with budding trees, and bulbs pushing up in the mounded flower-beds. She sat down on a bench.

Strength had been given her to get through that first hour with Anne ... she didn’t know how, but somehow, all at once, the shabby years of dissimulation, of manœuvring, of concealing, had leapt to her defence like a mercenary army roused in a righteous cause. She had to deceive Anne, to lull Anne’s suspicions, though she were to die in the attempt. And she had not died--

That was the worst of it.

She had never been more quiveringly, comprehensively alive than as she sat there, in that alien place, staring out alone into an alien future. She felt strong and light enough to jump up and walk for miles and miles--if only she had known where to go! They said grief was ageing--well, this agony seemed to have plunged her into a very Fountain of Youth.

No one could possibly know where she was. She had told her daughter that one of the aunts at Meridia was very ill; dying, she believed she had said. To reach Meridia one passed through Baltimore--it had all been simple enough. Luckily she had once or twice talked of the aunts to Anne; had said vaguely: “There was never much intimacy, but some day I ought to go and see them”--so that now it seemed quite natural, and Anne, like all her generation, was too used to sudden comings and goings, and violent changes of plan, to do more than ring up the motor to take her mother to the first train, and recommend carrying a warm wrap.

The hush, the solitude, the sense of being alone and unknown in a strange place to which no one knew she had gone, gradually steadied Kate Clephane’s mind, and fragments torn from the last hours began to drift through it, one by one. Curiously enough, it was Anne’s awkward little speech about giving her the house that came first--perhaps because it might so easily be the key to the rest.

Kate Clephane had never thought of money since she had been under her daughter’s roof, save on the one occasion when she had refused to have her allowance increased. Her disregard of the matter came not so much from conventional scruples as from a natural gay improvidence. If one were poor, and lived from hand to mouth, one had to think about money--worse luck! But once relieved from the need of doing so, she had dismissed the whole matter from her thoughts. Safely sheltered, becomingly arrayed, she cared no more than a child for the abstract power of possession. And the possession of money, in particular, had always been so associated in her mind with moral and mental dependence that after her break with Hylton Davies poverty had seemed one of the chief attributes of freedom.

It was Anne’s suggestion of giving her the house which had flung a sudden revealing glare on the situation. Anne was rich, then--very rich! Such a house--one of the few surviving from the time when Fifth Avenue had been New York’s fashionable quarter--must have grown greatly in value with the invasion of business. What could it be worth? Mrs. Clephane couldn’t conjecture ... could only feel that, to offer it in that way (and with it, of course, the means of living in it), Anne, who had none of her mother’s improvidence, must be securely and immensely wealthy. And if she were--

The mother stood up and stared about her. What she was now on the verge of thinking was worse, almost, than all the dreadful things she had thought before. If it were the money he wanted, she might conceivably buy him off--that was what she was thinking! And a nausea crept over her as she thought it; for he had never seemed to care any more for money than she did. His gay scorn of it, not only expressed but acted upon, had been one of his chief charms to her, after all her years in the Clephane atmosphere of thrifty wealth, and the showy opulence of the months with Hylton Davies. Chris Fenno, quite simply and naturally, had laughed with her at the cares of the anxious rich, and rejoiced that those, at least, would never weigh on either of them. But that was long ago; long at least in a life as full of chances and changes as his. Compared with the reckless boy she had known he struck her now as having something of the weight and prudence of middle-age. Might not his respect for money have increased with the increasing need of it? At any rate, she had to think of him, to believe it of him, if she could, for the possibility held out her one hope in a welter of darkness.

Her mind flagged. She averted her sickened eyes from the thought, and began to turn once more on the racking wheel of reiteration. “_I must see him.... I must see him.... I must see him._”... That was as far as she had got. She looked at her watch, and went up to a policeman to ask the way.

* * * * *

He was not to be found at Horace Maclew’s, and to her surprise she learned that he did not live there. Careless as he had always been of money in itself, he was by no means averse to what it provided. No one was more appreciative of the amenities of living when they came his way without his having to take thought; and she had pictured him quartered in a pleasant corner of Horace Maclew’s house, and participating in all the luxuries of his larder and cellar. But no; a super-butler, summoned at her request, informed her that Major Fenno had telephoned not to expect him that day, and that, as for his home address, the fact was he had never given it.

A new emotion shot through her, half sharper anguish, half relief. If he were not lodged under the Maclew roof, if his private address were not to be obtained there, might it not be because he was involved in some new tie, perhaps actually living with some unavowable woman? What a solution--Kate Clephane leapt on it--to be able to return to Anne with that announcement! It seemed to clear the way in a flash--but as a hurricane does, by ploughing its path through the ruins it makes. She supposed she would never, as long as she lived, be able to think evil of Chris without its hurting her.

She turned away from the wrought-iron and plate-glass portals that were so exactly what she had known the Maclew portals would be. Perhaps she would find his address at a post-office. She asked the way to the nearest one, and vainly sought for his name in the telephone book. Well, it was not likely that he would proclaim his whereabouts if what she suspected were true. But as her eye travelled down the page she caught his father’s name, and an address she remembered. Chris Fenno, though so habitually at odds with his parents, was fond of them in his easy way--especially fond of his mother. Kate had often posted letters for him to that address. She might hear of him there--if necessary she would ask for Mrs. Fenno.

A trolley carried her to a Quakerish quarter of low plain-faced brick houses: streets and streets of them there seemed to be, all alike. Here and there a tree budded before one; but the house at which she rang had an unbroken view of its dispirited duplicates. Kate Clephane was not surprised at the shabbiness of the neighbourhood. She knew that the Fennos, never well-off according to Clephane standards, had of late years been greatly straitened, partly, no doubt, through their son’s own exigencies, and his cheerful inability to curtail them. Her heart contracted as she stood looking down at Mrs. Fenno’s dingy door-mat--the kind on which only tired feet seem to have wiped themselves--and remembered her radiant idle months with Mrs. Fenno’s son.

She had to ring twice. Then the door was opened by an elderly negress with gray hair, who stood wiping her hands on a greasy apron, and repeating slowly: “Mr. Chris?”

“Yes. I suppose you can tell me where he lives?”

The woman stared. “Mr. Chris? Where’d he live? Why, right here.”

Kate returned the stare. Through the half-open door came the smell of chronic cooking; a mournful waterproof hung against the wall. “Major Fenno--here?”

Major Fenno; yes; the woman repeated it. Mr. Chris they always called him, she added with a toothless smile. Of course he lived there; she kinder thought he was upstairs now. His mother, she added gratuitously, had gone out--stepped round to the market, she reckoned. She’d go and look for Mr. Chris. Would the lady please walk in?

Kate was shown into a small dull sitting-room. All she remembered of it afterward was that there were funny tufted armchairs, blinds half down, a rosewood “what-not,” and other relics of vanished ease. Above the fireless chimney stood a too handsome photograph of Chris in uniform.

After all, it was natural enough to find that he was living there. He had always hated any dependence on other people’s plans and moods; she remembered how irritably he had spoken of his servitude as Mr. Maclew’s secretary, light as the yoke must be. And it was like him, since he was settled in Baltimore, to have returned to his parents. There was something in him--on the side she had always groped for, and occasionally known in happy glimpses--that would make him dislike to live in luxury in the same town in which his father and mother were struggling on the scant income his own follies had reduced them too. He would probably never relate cause and effect, or be much troubled if he did; he would merely say to himself: “It would be beastly wallowing in things here, when it’s such hard sledding for the old people”--in the same tone in which he used to say to Kate, on their lazy Riviera Sundays: “If I were at home now I’d be getting ready to take the old lady to church. I always go with her.” And no doubt he did. He loved his parents tenderly whenever they were near enough to be loved.

There was a step in the passage. She turned with a start and he came in. At sight of her he closed the door quickly. He was very pale. “Kate!” he said, stopping on the threshold. She had been standing in the window, and she remained there, the width of the room between them. She was silenced by the curious deep shock of remembrance that his actual presence always gave her, and began to tremble lest it should weaken her resolve. “Didn’t you expect me?” she finally said.

He looked at her as if he hardly saw her. “Yes; I suppose I did,” he answered at length in a slow dragging voice. “I was going to write; to ask when I could see you.” As he stood there he seemed like some one snatched out of a trance. To her surprise she felt him singularly in her power. Their parts were reversed for the first time, and she said to herself: “I must act quickly, before he can collect himself.” Aloud she asked: “What have you got to say?”

“To say--” he began; and then, suddenly, with a quick change of voice, and moving toward her with outstretched hands: “For God’s sake don’t take that tone. It’s bad enough....”

She knew every modulation; he had pleaded with her so often before! His trying it now only hardened her mind and cleared her faculties; and with that flash of vision came the sense that she was actually seeing him for the first time. There he stood, stripped of her dreams, while she registered in a clear objective way all the strength and weakness, the flaws and graces of his person, marked the premature thinning of his smooth brown hair, the incipient crows’-feet about the lids, their too tender droop over eyes not tender enough, and that slight slackness of the mouth that had once seemed a half-persuasive pout, and was now only a sign of secret uncertainties and indulgences. She saw it all, and under the rich glaze of a greater prosperity, a harder maturity, a prompter self-assurance and resourcefulness, she reached to the central failure.

That was what she became aware of--and aware too that the awful fact of actually seeing another human being might happen to one for the first time only after years of intimacy. She averted her eyes as from a sight not meant for her.

“It’s bad enough,” she heard him repeat.

She turned back to him and her answer caught up his unfinished phrase. “Ah--you do realize how bad it is? That’s the reason why you’ve given up your job? Because you see that you must go? Are you going now--going at once?”

“Going--going?” He echoed the word in his flat sleep-walking voice. “How on earth can I go?”

The question completely hardened whatever his appearance, the startled beaten look of him, had begun to soften in her. She stood gazing at him and laughed.

“How can you go? Are you mad? Why, what else on earth can you do?”

As he stood before her she began to be aware that he had somehow achieved the attitude of dignity for which she was still struggling. He looked like an unhappy man, a cowed man; but not a guilty one.

“If you’d waited I should myself have asked you to let me explain--” he began.

“Explain? What is there to explain?”

“For one thing, why I can’t go away--go for good, as you suggest.”

“Suggest? I don’t suggest! I order it.”

“Well--I must disobey your order.”

They stood facing each other while she tried to gather up the shattered fragments of her authority. She had said to herself that what lay before her was horrible beyond human imagining; but never once had she imagined that, if she had the strength to speak, he would have the strength to defy her. She opened her lips, but no sound came.

“You seem ready to think the worst of me; I suppose that’s natural,” he continued. “The best’s bad enough. But at any rate, before ordering me to go, perhaps you ought to know that I _did_ go--once.”

She echoed the word blankly. “Once?”

He smiled a little. “You didn’t suppose--or did you?--that I’d drifted into this without a fight; a long fight? At the hospital, where I first met her, I hadn’t any idea who she was. I’m not a New Yorker; I knew nothing of your set of people in New York. You never spoke to me of her--I never even knew you had a daughter.”

It was true. In that other life she had led she had never spoken to any one of Anne. She had never been able to. From the time when she had returned to Europe, frustrated in her final attempt to get the child back, or even to have one last glimpse of her, to the day when her daughter’s cable had summoned her home, that daughter’s name had never been uttered by her except in the depths of her heart.

A darkness was about her feet; her head swam. She looked around her vaguely, and put out her hand for something to lean on. Chris Fenno moved a chair forward, and she sat down on it without knowing what she was doing.

He continued to stand in front of her. “You do believe me?” he repeated.

“Oh, yes--I believe you.” She was beginning to feel, now, the relief of finding him less base than he had at first appeared. She lifted her eyes to his. “But afterward--”

“Well; afterward--” He stopped, as if hoping she would help him to fill in the pause. But she made no sign, and he went on. “As I say, we met first in the hospital where she nursed me. It began there. Afterward she asked me to come and see her at her grandmother’s. It was only then that I found out--”

“Well, and then--?”

“Then I went away; went as soon as I found out.”

“Of course--”

“Yes; of course; only--”

“Only--you came back. You knew; and yet you came back.”

She saw his lips hardening again to doggedness. He had dropped into a chair facing hers, and sat there with lowered head, his hands clenched on his knees.

“Naturally you’re bound to think the worst of me--”

She interrupted him. “I’m still waiting to know what to think of you. Don’t let it be the worst!”

He made a hopeless gesture. “What is the worst?”

“The worst is that, having gone, you should ever have come back. Why did you?”

He stood up, and this time their eyes met. “You have the right to question me about my own feelings; but not about any one else’s.”

“Feelings? _Your_ feelings?” She laughed again. “And my own daughter’s--ah, but I didn’t mean to name her even!” she exclaimed.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve named her. You’ve answered your own question.” He paused, and then added in a low voice: “You know what she is when she cares....”

“Ah, don’t _you_ name her--I forbid you! You say you loved her, not knowing. I believe you.... I pity you.... I want to pity you.... But nothing can change the facts, can change the past. There’s nothing for you now but to go.”

He stood before her, his eyes on the ground. At last he raised them again, but only for the length of a quick glance. “You think then ... a past like that ... irrevocable?”

She sprang to her feet, strong now in her unmitigated scorn. “Irrevocable? Irrevocable? And you ask me this ... with _her_ in your mind? Ah--but you’re abominable!”

“Am I? I don’t know ... my head reels with it. She’s terribly young; she feels things terribly. She won’t give up--she wouldn’t before.”

“Don’t--don’t! Leave her out of this. I’m not here to discuss her with you, I’m here to tell you to go, and to go at once.”

He made no answer, but turned and walked across the room and back. Then he sank into his chair, and renewed his study of the carpet. Finally he looked up again, with one of the tentative glances she knew so well: those glances that seemed to meet one’s answer half-way in their desire to say what one would expect of him. “Is there any use in your taking this tone?”

Again that appeal--it was too preposterous! But suddenly, her eyes on the huddled misery of his attitude, the weakness of his fallen features, she understood that the cry was real; that he was in agony, and had turned to her for help. She crossed the room and laid her hand on his shoulder.

“No; you’re right; it’s of no use. If you’ll listen I’ll try to be calm. I want to spare you--why shouldn’t I want to?”

She felt her hand doubtfully taken and laid for a moment against his cheek. The cheek was wet. “I’ll listen.”

“Well, then; I won’t reproach you; I won’t argue with you. Why should I,” she exclaimed with a flash of inspiration, “when all the power is mine? If I came in anger, in abhorrence ... well, I feel only pity now. Don’t reject it--don’t reject my pity. This awful thing has fallen on both of us together; as much on me as on you. Let me help you--let us try to help each other.”

He pressed the hand closer to his face and then dropped it. “Ah, you’re merciful.... I think I understand the abhorrence better. I’ve been a cad and a blackguard, and everything else you like. I’ve been living with the thought of it day and night. Only, now--”

“Well, now,” she panted, “let me help you; let me--Chris,” she cried, “let me make it possible for you to go. I know there may be all sorts of difficulties--material as well as others--and those at least--”

He looked up at her sharply, as if slow to grasp her words. Then his face hardened and grew red. “You’re bribing me? I see. I didn’t at first. Well--you’ve the right to, I suppose; there’s hardly any indignity you haven’t the right to lay on me. Only--it’s not so simple. I’ve already told you--”

“Don’t name her again! Don’t make me remember.... Chris, I want to help you as if this were ... were any other difficulty.... Can’t we look at it together in that way?”

But she felt the speciousness of her words. How could one face the Gorgon-image of this difficulty as if it were like any other? His silence seemed to echo her thought. Slowly he rose again from his chair, plunged his hands deeply into his pockets, with a gesture she remembered when he was troubled, and went and leaned in the jamb of the window. What was he thinking, she wondered, as he glanced vacantly up and down the long featureless street? Smiling inwardly, perhaps, at the crudeness of her methods, the emptiness of her threats. For, after all--putting the case at its basest--if the money were really what had tempted him, how, with that fortune at his feet, could any offer of hers divert his purpose?

A clock she had not noticed began to tick insistently. It seemed to be measuring out the last seconds before some nightmare crash that she felt herself powerless to arrest. Powerless, at least--

She saw his expression change, and he turned and moved back quickly into the room. “There’s my mother coming down the street. She’s been to market--my mother does her own marketing.” He spoke with a faint smile of irony. “But you needn’t be afraid of meeting her. She won’t come in here; she never does at this hour. She’ll go straight to the kitchen.”

Kate had begun to tremble again. “Afraid? Why should I be afraid of your mother? Or she of me? It’s you who are afraid now!” she exclaimed.

His face seemed to age as she watched it. “Well, yes, I am,” he acknowledged. “I’ve been a good deal of a nuisance to her first and last; and she’s old and ill. Let’s leave her out too, if we can.”

As he spoke, they heard, through the thin wall, the fumbling of a latch-key in the outer lock. Kate moved to the door; her decision was taken.

“You want to leave her out? Then promise me--give me your word that you’ll go. You know you can count on me if you need help. Only you must promise now; if not, I shall call your mother in--I shall tell her everything.” Her hand was on the doorknob when he caught it back.

“Don’t!”

The street door opened and closed again, a dragging step passed through the narrow hall, and a door was opened into the region from which the negress with the greasy apron had emerged in a waft of cooking.

“Phemia!” they heard Mrs. Fenno call in a tired elderly voice.

“I promise,” her son said, loosening his hold on Kate’s wrist.

The two continued to stand opposite each other with lowered heads. At length Mrs. Clephane moved away.

“I’m going now. You understand that you must leave at once ... tomorrow?” She paused. “I’ll do all I can for you as long as you keep your word; if you break it I won’t spare you. I’ve got the means to beat you in the end; only don’t make me use them--don’t make me!”

He stood a few feet away from her, his eyes on the ground. Decidedly, she had beaten him, and he understood it. If there were any degrees left in such misery she supposed that the worst of it was over.

XIV.

As Kate Clephane drove up late that night to the house in Fifth Avenue she seemed to be reliving all her former anguished returns there, real or imaginary, from the days when she had said to herself: “Shall I never escape?” to those others when, from far off, she had dreamed of the hated threshold, and yearned for it, and thought: “Shall I never get back?”

She had said she might be late in returning, and had begged that no one should stay up for her. Her wish, as usual, had been respected, and she let herself into the hushed house, put out the lights, and stole up past the door where Anne lay sleeping her last young sleep.

Ah, that thought of Anne’s awakening! The thought of seeing Anne’s face once again in all its radiant unawareness, and then assisting helpless at the darkening of its light! How would the blow fall? Suddenly and directly, or gradually, circuitously? Would the girl learn her fate on the instant, or be obliged to piece it together, bit by bit, through all the slow agonies of conjecture? What pretext would Chris give for the break? He was skilled enough in evasions and subterfuges--but what if he had decided to practise them on Anne’s mother, and not on Anne? What if the word he had given were already forfeited? What assurance had any promise of his ever conveyed?

Kate Clephane sat in her midnight room alone with these questions. She had forgotten to go to bed, she had forgotten to undress. She sat there, in her travelling dress and hat, as she had stepped from the train: it was as if this house which people called her own were itself no more than the waiting-room of a railway station where she was listening for the coming of another train that was to carry her--whither?

Ah, but she had forgotten--forgotten that she had him in her power! She had said to him: “I’ve got the means to beat you in the end,” and he had bowed his head to the warning and given his word. Why, the mere threat that she would tell his mother had thrown him on her mercy--what would it be if she were to threaten to tell Anne? She knew him ... under all his emancipated airs, his professed contempt for traditions and conformities, lurked an uneasy fear of being thought less than his own romantic image of himself.... No; even if his designs on Anne were wholly interested, it would kill him to have her know. There was no danger there.

The bitterness of death was passed; yes--but the bitterness of what came after? What of the time to come, when mother and daughter were left facing each other like two ghosts in a gray world of disenchantment? Well, the girl was young--time would help--they would travel.... Ah, no; her tortured nerves cried out that there could not be, in any woman’s life, another such hour as the one she had just lived through!

Toward dawn she roused herself, undressed, and crawled into bed; and there she lay in the darkness, sharpening her aching wits for the continuation of the struggle.

* * * * *

“A telegram--” Aline always said it with the same slightly ironic intonation, as if it were still matter of wonder and amusement to her that any one should be in such haste to communicate with her mistress. Mrs. Clephane, in sables and pearls, with a great house at her orders, was evidently a more considerable person than the stray tenant of the little third-floor room at the Hôtel de Minorque, and no one was more competent to measure the distance between them than Aline. But still--a telegram!

Kate opened the envelope with bloodless fingers. “I am going.” That was all--there was not even a signature. He had kept his word; and he wanted her to know it.

She felt the loosening of the cords about her heart; a deep breath of relief welled up in her. He had kept his word.

There was a tap on the door, and Anne, radiant, confident, came in.

“You’ve had a telegram? Not about Aunt Janey--”

Aunt Janey? For a second Kate could not remember, could not associate the question with anything related to the last hours. Then she collected herself, just in time to restrain a self-betraying clutch at the telegram. With a superhuman effort at composure she kept her hands from moving, and left the message lying, face up, on the coverlet between herself and Anne. Yet what if Anne were to read the _Baltimore_ above the unsigned words?

“No; it’s not about Aunt Janey.” She made a farther effort at recollection. “The fact is, the aunts had a panic ... an absurd panic.... Aunt Janey’s failed a good deal, of course; it’s the beginning of the end. But there’s no danger of anything sudden--not the least.... I’m glad I went, though; it comforted them to see me.... And it was really rather wrong of me not to have been before.”

Ah, now, at last she remembered, and how thankfully, that she had, after all, been to Meridia; had, automatically, after leaving Chris, continued her journey, surprised and flattered the aunts by her unannounced appearance, and spent an hour with them before taking the train back to New York. She had had the wit, at the time, to see how useful such an alibi might be, and then, in the disorder of her dreadful vigil, had forgotten about it till Anne’s question recalled her to herself. The complete gap in her memory frightened her, and made her feel more than ever unfitted to deal with what might still be coming--what must be coming.

Anne still shed about her the reflected radiance of her bliss. “I’m so glad it’s all right--so glad you went. And of course, dear, you didn’t tell them anything, did you?”

“Tell them anything--?”

“About me.” The lids dropped, the lashes clasped her vision. How could her mother have forgotten?--that flutter of the lids seemed to say.

“Darling! But of course not.” Kate Clephane brought the words out with dry lips. Her hand stole out to Anne’s, then drew back, affecting to pick up the telegram. She could not put her hand in her daughter’s just yet.

The girl sat down beside her on the bed. “I want it to be our secret, remember--just yours and mine--till he comes next week. He can’t get away before.”

Ah, thank God for that! The mother remembered now that Anne had told her this during their first talk--the talk of which, at the time, no details had remained in her shattered mind. Now, as she listened, those details came back, bit by bit, phantasmagorically mingled.

No one was to be told of the engagement; no, not even Nollie Tresselton; not till Chris came to New York. And that was not to be for another week. He could not get away sooner, and Anne had decreed that he must see her mother before their betrothal was made public. “I suppose I’m absurdly out-of-date--but I want it to be like that,” the girl had said; and Kate Clephane understood that it was out of regard for her, with the desire to “situate” her again, and once for all, as the head of the house, that her daughter had insisted on this almost obsolete formality, had stipulated that her suitor should ask Mrs. Clephane’s consent in the solemn old-fashioned way.

The girl bent nearer, her radiance veiled in tenderness. “If you knew, mother, how I want you to like him--” ah, the familiar cruel words!--“You did, didn’t you, in old times, when you used to know him so well? Though he says he was just a silly conceited boy then, and wonders that anybody could endure his floods of nonsense....”

Ah, God, how long would it go on? Kate Clephane again reached out her hand, and this time clasped her daughter’s with a silent nod of assent. Speech was impossible. She moistened her parched lips, but no sound came from them; and suddenly she felt everything slipping away from her in a great gulf of oblivion.

“Mother! You’re ill--you’re over-tired....” She was just aware, through the twilight of her faintness, that Anne’s arm was under her, that Anne was ringing the bell and moistening her forehead.