Chapter VII: Book III: XV (2)

“Hallo--Aunt Kate?” Mrs. Clephane caught the embarrassment in her niece’s rich careless voice, and guessed that the family had already been made aware of the situation existing between Anne and Anne’s mother, and probably, therefore, of the girl’s engagement. But Lilla Maclew was even more easy, self-confident and indifferent than Lilla Gates had been. The bolder dash of peroxyde on her hair, and the glint of jewels on her dusky skin, made her look like a tall bronze statue with traces of gilding on it.

“Hallo,” she repeated, rather blankly; “have you come to lunch?”

“I’ve come to see Anne,” Anne’s mother answered.

Lilla’s constraint visibly increased, and with it her sullen reluctance to make any unnecessary effort. One hadn’t married money, her tone proclaimed, to be loaded up like this with family bothers.

“Anne’s out. She’s gone off with Nollie to a tennis match or something. I’m just down; we played bridge till nearly daylight, and I haven’t seen anybody this morning. I suppose mother must be somewhere about.”

She glanced irritably around her, as if her look ought to have been potent enough to summon her mother to the spot; and apparently it was, for a door opened, and Mrs. Drover appeared.

“Kate! I didn’t know you were here! How did you come?” Her hostess’s mild countenance betrayed the same embarrassment as Lilla’s, and under it Mrs. Clephane detected the same aggrieved surprise. Having at last settled her own daughter’s difficulties, Mrs. Drover’s eyes seemed to ask, why should she so soon be called upon to deal with another family disturbance? Even juries, after a protracted trial, are excused from service for seven years; yet here she was being drawn into the thick of a new quarrel when the old one was barely composed.

“Anne’s out,” she added, offering a cool pink cheek to her sister-in-law.

“May I wait, then? I came to see her,” Kate said timidly.

“Of course, my dear! You must stay to lunch.” Mrs. Drover’s naturally ceremonious manner became stiff with apprehension. “You look tired, you know; this continuous travelling must be very exhausting. And the food!... Yes; Anne ought to be back for lunch. She and Nollie went off to the Glenvers’ to see the tennis finals; didn’t they, Lilla? Of course I can’t _promise_ they’ll be back ... but you must stay....” She rang and gave orders that another seat should be put at table. “We’re rather a large party; you won’t mind? The men are off at a polo practice at Hempstead. Dawson, how many shall we be for lunch?” she asked the butler. Under her breath she added: “Yes; champagne.” If we ever need it, she concluded in a parenthetic glance, it will be today!

The hall was already filling up with a jocund bustle of Drovers and Tresseltons. Young, middle-aged and elderly, they poured out of successive motors, all ruddy, prosperous, clamouring for food. Hardly distinguishable from the family were the week-end friends returning with them from one sportive spectacle or another. As Kate Clephane stood among them, going through the mechanical gestures of greeting and small-talk, she felt so tenuous and spectral that she almost wondered how she could be visible to their hearty senses. They were all glad to see her, all a little surprised at her being there, and all soon forgetful of their own surprise in discussing the more important questions of polo, tennis and lunch. Once more she had the impression of being hurried with them down a huge sliding stairway that perpetually revolved upon itself, and once more she recalled her difficulty in telling one of them from another, and in deciding whether it was the Tresseltons or the Drovers who had the smallest noses.

“But Anne--where’s Anne?” Hendrik Drover enquired, steering the tide of arrivals toward the shining stretch of a long luncheon-table. He put Mrs. Clephane at his left, and added, as he settled her in her seat: “Anne and Nollie went off early to the Glenver finals. But Joe was there too--weren’t you, Joe?”

He did not wait for Joe Tresselton’s answer, but addressed himself hurriedly to the lady on his right. Kate had the feeling that they all thought she had committed an error of taste in appearing among them at that particular moment, but that it was no business of theirs, after all, and they must act in concert in affecting that nothing could be more natural. The Drovers and Tresseltons were great at acting in concert, and at pretending that whatever happened was natural, usual, and not of a character to interfere with one’s lunch. When a member of the tribe was ill, the best doctors and most expensive nurses were summoned, but the illness was spoken of as a trifling indisposition; when misfortune befell any one of them, it was not spoken of at all. Taking Lilla for granted had brought this art to the highest point of perfection, and her capture of Horace Maclew had fully confirmed its usefulness.

All this flashed through Kate Clephane while she refused the champagne ordered on her behalf, and pretended to eat Maryland chicken and corn _soufflé_; but under the surface-rattle of her thoughts a watchful spirit brooded haggardly on the strangeness and unreality of the scene. She had come, in agony of soul, to seek her daughter, to have speech with her at all costs; and the daughter was away watching a tennis match, and no one seemed surprised or concerned. Life, even Anne’s life, was going on in its usual easy way. The girl had found her betrothed again, and been reunited to him; what would it matter to her, or to her approving family, if the intruder who for a few months had gone through the pretence of being one of them, and whose delusion they had good-naturedly abetted, should vanish again from the group? As she looked at them all, so obtuse and so powerful, so sure of themselves and each other, her own claim to belong to them became incredible even to herself. She had made her choice long ago, and she had not chosen them; and now their friendly indifference made the fact clear.

Well--perhaps it also made her own course clearer. She was as much divided from them already as death could divide her. Why not die, then--die altogether? She would tell Anne the truth, and then go away and never see her again; and that would be death....

“Ah, here they are!” Hendrik Drover called out genially. Lunch was over; the guests, scattered about in the hall and billiard-room, were lighting their cigarettes over coffee and liqueurs. Mrs. Clephane, who had drifted out with the rest, and mechanically taken her cup of coffee as the tray passed her, lifted her head and saw Anne and Nollie Tresselton. Anne entered first. She paused to take off her motor coat, glanced indifferently about her, and said to Mrs. Drover: “You didn’t wait for us, Aunt Enid? We were so late that we stopped to lunch at Madge’s--.” Then she saw her mother and her pale cheek whitened.

Mrs. Clephane’s eyes filled, and she stood motionless. Everything about her was so blurred and wavering that she dared not stir, or even attempt to set down her cup.

“Mother!” the girl exclaimed. With a quick movement she made her way through the cluster of welcoming people, and went up with outstretched arms to Mrs. Clephane.

For a moment the two held each other; then Mrs. Drover, beaming up to them, said benevolently: “Your mother must be awfully tired, Anne. Do carry her off to your own quarters for a quiet talk--” and dazed, trembling, half-fearing she was in a dream from which the waking would be worse than death, Mrs. Clephane found herself mounting the stairs with her daughter.

On the first landing she regained her senses, said to herself: “She thinks I’ve come to take back what I said,” and tried to stiffen her soul against this new form of anguish. Anne moved silently at her side. After the first cry and the first kiss she had drawn back into herself, perhaps obscurely conscious of some inward resistance in her mother. But when the bedroom door had closed on them she drew Mrs. Clephane down into an armchair, dropped on her knees beside it, and whispered: “Mother--how could you and I ever give each other up?”

The words sounded like an echo of the dear unuttered things the mother had heard said to herself long ago, in her endless dialogues with an invisible Anne. No tears rose to her eyes, but their flood seemed to fill her thirsty breast. She drew Anne’s head against it. “Anne ... little Anne....” Her fingers crept through the warm crinklings of hair, wound about the turn of the temples, and slipped down the cheeks. She shut her eyes, softly saying over her daughter’s name.

Anne was the first to speak. “I’ve been so unhappy. I wanted you so to come.”

“Darling, you were sure I would?”

“How could I tell? You seemed so angry.”

“With you? Never, child!”

There was a slight pause; then, raising herself, the girl slipped her arms about her mother’s neck.

“Nor with him, any longer?”

The chill of reality smote through Mrs. Clephane’s happy trance. She felt herself turning again into the desolate stranger who had stood below watching for Anne’s return.

“Mother--you see, I want you both,” she heard the girl entreating; and “_Now!_” the inward voice admonished her.

Now indeed was the time to speak; to make an end. It was clear that no compromise would be of any use. Anne had obviously imagined that her mother had come to forgive and be forgiven, and that Chris was to be included in the general amnesty. On no other terms would any amnesty be accepted. Through the girl’s endearments Kate felt, as never before, the steely muscles of her resolution.

Anne pressed her closer. “Can’t we agree, mother, that I must take my chance--and that, if the risks are as great as you think, you’ll be there to help me? After all, we’ve all got to buy our own experience, haven’t we? And perhaps the point of view about ... about early mistakes ... is more indulgent now than in your time. But I don’t want to discuss that,” the girl hurried on. “Can’t we agree not to discuss anything--not even Chris--and just be the perfect friends we were before? You’d say yes if you knew the difference it has made, this last year, to have you back!” She lifted her face close to Mrs. Clephane’s to add, with a half-whimsical smile: “Mothers oughtn’t ever to leave their daughters.”

Kate Clephane sat motionless in that persuasive hold. It did not seem to her, at the moment, as if she and her child were two, but as if her whole self had passed into the young body pressed pleadingly against her.

“How can I leave her--how can I ever leave her?” was her only thought.

“You see,” the cajoling voice went on, “when I asked you to come back and live with me, though I _did_ want you to, most awfully, I wasn’t as sure ... well, as sure as Uncle Fred was ... that the experiment would be a success--a perfect success. My life had been rather lonely, but it had been very independent too, in spite of Granny, and I didn’t know how well I should behave to my new mother, or whether she’d like me, or whether we’d be happy together. And then you came, and the very first day I forgot all my doubts--didn’t _you_?”

Kate Clephane assented: “The very first day.”

“And every day afterward, as I saw how right Uncle Fred had been, and how perfectly he’d remembered what you were, and what you would have been to me if we hadn’t been separated when I was a baby, I was more and more grateful to you for coming, and more and more anxious to make you forget that we hadn’t always been together.”

“You did make me forget it--”

“And then, suddenly, the great gulf opened again, and there I was on one side of it, and you on the other, just as it was in all those dreary years when I was without you; and it seemed as if it was you who had chosen again that we should be divided, and in my unhappiness I said dreadful things.... I know I did....”

Kate felt as if it were her own sobs that were shaking her daughter’s body. She held her fast, saying over and over, as a mother would to a child that has fallen and hurt itself: “There, there ... don’t cry.” She no longer knew what she herself was feeling. All her consciousness had passed into Anne. This young anguish, which is the hardest of all to bear, must be allayed: she was ready to utter any words that should lift that broken head from her breast.

“My Anne--how could I ever leave you?” she whispered. And as she spoke she felt herself instantly caught in the tight net of her renunciation. If she did not tell Anne now she would never tell her--and it was exactly on this that Chris had counted. He had known that she would never speak.

XXI.

It had been decided that Mrs. Clephane must, of course, stay over the Sunday; on Monday morning she would return to town with Anne. Meanwhile Aline was summoned with week-end raiment; and Kate Clephane, after watching the house-party drive off to a distant polo match, remained alone in the great house with her sister-in-law.

Mrs. Drover’s countenance, though worn from the strain of incessant hospitality, had lost its look of perturbation. It was clear that the affectionate meeting between mother and daughter had been a relief to the whole family, and Mrs. Drover’s ingenuous eye declared that since now, thank heaven, that matter was settled, there need be no farther pretence of mystery. She invited her sister-in-law to join her in her own sitting-room over a quiet cup of tea, and as she poured it out observed with a smile that she supposed the wedding would take place before Christmas.

“The wedding? Anne’s wedding?”

“Why, my dear, isn’t everything settled? We all supposed that was what you’d come down for. She told us of her engagement as soon as she arrived.” Wrinkles of apprehension reluctantly reformed themselves on Mrs. Drover’s brow. “At least you might have let me have my tea without this new worry!” her look seemed to protest. “Hendrik has the highest opinion of Major Fenno, you know,” she continued, in a tone that amicably sought to dismiss the subject.

Kate Clephane put down her untasted cup. What could she answer? What was the use of answering at all?

Misled by her silence, Mrs. Drover pursued with a clearing brow: “Of course nowadays, with the cut of everything changing every six months, there’s no use in ordering a huge trousseau. Besides, Anne tells me they mean to go to Europe almost immediately; and whatever people say, it _is_ more satisfactory to get the latest models on the spot....”

“Oh, Enid--Anne mustn’t marry him!” Kate Clephane cried, starting to her feet.

Mrs. Drover set down her own cup. Lines of disapproval hardened about her small concise mouth; but she had evidently resolved to restrain herself to the last limit of sisterly forbearance.

“Now, my dear, do sit down again and drink your tea quietly. What good will all this worrying do? You look feverish--and as thin as a rail. Are you sure you haven’t picked up one of those dreadful tropical microbes?... Of course, I understand your being unhappy at parting so soon again with Anne.... She feels it too; I know she does. It’s a pity you couldn’t have been together a little longer, just you two; but then--. And, after all, since Anne wants you to keep the Fifth Avenue house for yourself, why shouldn’t the young people buy that property just round the corner? Then the lower floors of the two houses could be thrown into one for entertaining. I’m not clever about plans, but Lilla’ll tell you exactly how it could be done. She’s got hold of such a clever young architect to modernize their Baltimore house. Of course, though Horace didn’t realize it, it was _all_ library; no room for dancing. And I daresay Anne--not that Anne ever cared much for dancing.... But I hear Major Fenno likes going out, and a young wife can’t make a greater mistake than to have a dull house if her husband is fond of gaiety. Lilla, now, has quite converted Horace--”

Kate Clephane had reseated herself and was automatically turning the spoon about in her cup. “It won’t happen; it can’t be; he’ll never dare.” The thought, flashing in on her aching brain, suddenly quieted her, helped her to compose her features, and even to interject the occasional vague murmur which was all her sister-in-law needed to feed her flow of talk. The mention of the Maclews and their clever architect had served to deflect the current of Mrs. Drover’s thoughts, and presently she was describing how wonderfully Lilla managed Horace, and how she and the architect had got him to think he could not live without the very alterations he had begun by resolutely opposing, on the ground that they were both extravagant and unnecessary.

“Just an innocent little conspiracy, you know.... They completely got the better of him, and now he’s delighted, and tells everybody it was his own idea,” Mrs. Drover chuckled; and then, her voice softening, and a plump hand reassuringly outstretched to Mrs. Clephane: “You’ll see, my dear, after you get over the first loneliness, what a lovely thing it is to have one’s child happily married.”

“It won’t happen; it can’t be; he’ll never dare!” the other mother continued to murmur to herself.

* * * * *

Horace Maclew, among numerous other guests, arrived for dinner. He sat nearly opposite Mrs. Clephane, and in the strange whirl and dazzle that surrounded her she instinctively anchored her gaze on his broad frame and ponderous countenance. What had his marriage done to him, she wondered, and what weight had it given him in the counsels of his new family? She had known of him but vaguely before, as the conscientious millionaire who collects works of art and relieves suffering; she imagined him as having been brought up by equally conscientious parents, themselves wealthy and scrupulous, and sincerely anxious to transmit their scruples, with their millions, to their only son. But other influences and tendencies had also been in play; one could fancy him rather heavily adjusting them to his inherited principles, with the “After all” designed to cover venial lapses. His marriage with Lilla must have been the outcome, the climax, of these private concessions, and have prepared him to view most of the problems of life from an easier angle. Undoubtedly, among the men present, though no quicker-witted than the others, he would have been the one most likely to understand Kate Clephane’s case, could she have put it to him. But to do so--one had only to intercept their glances across the table to be sure of it--would have been to take Lilla also into her confidence; and it suddenly became clear to Mrs. Clephane that no recoil of horror, and no Pharisaical disapproval, would be as intolerable to her as Lilla’s careless stare and Lilla’s lazy: “Why, what on earth’s all the fuss about? Don’t that sort of thing happen all the time?”

It did, no doubt; Mrs. Clephane had already tried to adjust her own mind to that. She had known such cases; everybody had; she had seen them smoothed over and lived down; but that she and Anne should ever figure as one of them was beyond human imagining. She would have felt herself befouled to the depths by Lilla’s tolerance.

Her unquiet eyes wandered from Horace Maclew to her daughter. Anne shone with recovered joy. Her anxiety had left only the happy traces of a summer shower on a drooping garden. Every now and then she smiled across the table at her mother, and Kate felt herself irresistibly smiling back. There was something so rich, dense and impregnable in the fact of possessing Anne’s heart that the mother could not remember to be alarmed when their eyes met.

Suddenly she noticed that Anne was absorbed in conversation with one of her neighbours. This was the Reverend Dr. Arklow, Rector of St. Stephen’s, the New York church of the Clephane and Drover clan. Old Mrs. Clephane had been a pillar of St. Stephen’s, and had bequeathed a handsome sum to the parish. Dr. Arklow, formerly the curate, had come back a few years previously as Rector of the church, and was now regarded as one of the foremost lights of the diocese, with a strong possibility of being named its Coadjutor, or possibly Bishop of the American Episcopal Churches in Europe.

The Drovers and all their tribe took their religion with moderation: they subscribed handsomely to parochial charities, the older members of the family still went to church on Sunday mornings, and once in the winter each of the family invited the Rector to a big dinner. But their relations with him, though amicable, were purely formal, and Kate concluded that his presence at one of the Drover week-ends was to be attributed to the prestige he had acquired as a certain Coadjutor or possible Bishop. The Drover social scheme was like a game of chess in which Bishops counted considerably more than Rectors.

The Rector of St. Stephen’s struck Mrs. Clephane, who had met him only once before, as a man accustomed to good company, and eager to prove it. He had a face as extensive as Mr. Maclew’s but running to length instead of width. His thin gray hair was carefully brushed back from a narrow benevolent forehead, and though he loved a good cigar, and wore a pepper-and-salt suit on his travels, he knew his value as a decorative element, and was fastidiously clerical on social occasions. His manly chest seemed outspread to receive the pectoral cross, and all his gestures were round and full, like the sleeves for which they were preparing.

As he leaned back, listening to Anne with lowered lids, and finger-tips thoughtfully laid against each other, his occasional faint smile and murmur of assent suggested to Mrs. Clephane that the girl was discussing with him the arrangements for the wedding; and the mother, laying down her fork, closed her eyes for an instant while the big resonant room reeled about her. Then she said to herself that, after all, this was only what was to be expected, and that if she hadn’t the courage to face such a possibility, and many others like it, she would assuredly never have the courage to carry out the plan which, all through the afternoon and evening, had been slowly forming in her mind. That plan was simply, for the present, to hold fast to Anne, and let things follow their course. She would return to New York the next day with Anne, she would passively assist at her daughter’s preparations--for an active share in them seemed beyond her powers--and she would be there when Chris came, and when they announced the engagement. Whatever happened, she would be there. She would let Chris see at once that he would have to reckon with that. And how would he be able to reckon with it? How could he stand it, day after day? They would perhaps never exchange another word in private--she prayed they might not--but he would understand by her mere presence what she meant, what she was determined on. He would understand that in the end he would have to give up Anne because she herself would never do so. The struggle between them would become a definite, practical, circumscribed thing; and, knowing Chris as she did, she felt almost sure she could hold out longer than he.

This new resolve gave her a sort of light-headed self-confidence: when she left the dinner-table she felt so easy and careless that she was surprised to see that the glass of champagne beside her plate was untouched. She felt as if all its sparkles were whirling through her.

On the return of the gentlemen to the drawing-room Dr. Arklow moved to her side, and she welcomed him with a smile. He opened with some mild generalities, and she said to herself that he was too anxiously observant of the social rules to speak of her daughter’s marriage before she herself alluded to it. For a few minutes she strove to find a word which should provide him with an opening; but to say to any one: “My daughter is going to be married” was beyond her, and they lingered on among slumbrous platitudes.

Suddenly Anne drifted up, sat down an on arm of her mother’s chair, and took her mother’s hand. Kate’s eyes filled, and through their mist she fancied she saw Dr. Arklow looking at her attentively. For the first time it occurred to her that, behind the scrupulous social puppet, there might be a simple-hearted man, familiar with the humble realities of pain and perplexity, and experienced in dealing with them. The thought gave her a sense of relief, and she said to herself: “I will try to speak to him alone. I will go to see him when we get to New York.” But meanwhile she merely continued to smile up at her daughter, and Dr. Arklow to say: “Our young lady has been telling me about the big tennis finals. There’s no doubt all these sports are going to be a great factor in building up a healthier, happier world.”

None of the three made any allusion to Anne’s engagement.

XXII.

“Miss Anne Clephane weds War Hero. Announces engagement to Major Christopher Fenno, D.S.M., Chevalier of Legion of Honour.”

The headline glared at Kate Clephane from the first page of the paper she had absently picked up from the table of her sitting-room. She and Anne, that morning, had journeyed back from Long Island in Hendrik Drover’s motor, separated by his genial bulk, and shielded by it from the peril of private talk. On the day before--that aching endless Sunday--Anne, when with her mother, had steadily avoided the point at issue. She seemed too happy in their reunion to risk disturbing its first hours; perhaps, Kate thought, she was counting on the spell of that reunion to break down her mother’s opposition. But as they neared New York every mile brought them closer to the reality they were trying not to see; and here it was at last, deriding the mother from those hideous headlines. She heard Anne’s step behind her, and their glance crossed above the paragraph. A flush rose to the girl’s cheek, while her eyes hesitatingly questioned her mother.

The decisive moment in their struggle was at hand. Kate felt that everything depended on her holding fast to the line she had resolved to follow, and her voice sounded thin and small in the effort to steady it.

“Is Major Fenno in New York?”

“No. He went back to Baltimore on Saturday.” Anne wavered. “He’s waiting to hear from me ... before he comes.”

A hope leapt up in the mother’s breast, then sank its ineffectual wings. She glanced back slowly at the newspaper.

“This announcement was made with your permission?”

The unwonted colour still burned in the girl’s cheek. She made a motion of assent, and added, after another pause: “Uncle Hendrik and Aunt Enid thought it only fair.”

“Fair to Major Fenno?”

“Yes.”

The silence prolonged itself. At length the mother brought out: “But if you’ve announced your engagement he has a right to be with you.”

Anne looked at her almost timidly. “I wanted first ... we both wanted ... to feel that when he came you would ... would be ready to receive him.”

Kate Clephane turned away from her daughter’s eyes. The look in them was too intolerably sweet to her. Anne was imploring her approval--Anne could not bear to be happy without it. Yes; but she wanted her other happiness also; she wanted that more than anything else; she would not hesitate to sacrifice her mother to it if there were no other way.

All this rushed over Kate in a final flash of illumination. “I want you both!” Anne had said; but she wanted Chris Fenno infinitely the more.

“Dear--.” At her mother’s first syllable Anne was at her side again, beseechingly. Kate Clephane lifted her hands to the girl’s shoulders. “You’ve made your choice, dearest. When Major Fenno comes of course I will receive him.” Her lips felt dry and stiff as she uttered her prevarication. But all her old arts of casuistry had come back; what was the use of having practised them so long if they were not to serve her now? She let herself yield to Anne’s embrace.

* * * * *

That afternoon, as Mrs. Clephane sat alone upstairs, Fred Landers telephoned to ask if she would receive him. Anne was out, and her mother sent word that when Mr. Landers came he was to be shown up to her sitting-room. He entered it, presently, with outstretched hands and a smile of satisfaction.

“Well, it’s all settled, then? Thank God! You’ve done just the right thing; I knew you would.”

Her hand fell lifelessly into his; she could not answer.

He drew up an armchair to the little autumnal fire, and continued to contemplate her approvingly.

“I know how hard it must have been. But there was only one thing to be considered: Anne needs you!”

“She needs Major Fenno more.”

“Oh, well--that’s the law of life, isn’t it?” His tone seemed to say: “At any rate, it’s the one you obeyed in your own youth.” And again she found no answer.

She was conscious that the gaze he still fixed on her had passed from benevolence to wistfulness. “Do you still mind it so awfully?”

His question made her tears rise; but she was determined not to return upon the past. She had proved the uselessness of the attempt.

“Anne has announced her engagement. What more is there to say? You tell me she needs me; well, here I am with her.”

“And you don’t know how she appreciates it. She rang me up as soon as you got back this morning. She’s overcome by your generosity in going down to the Drovers’ after what had taken place between you--after her putting herself so completely in the wrong.” He paused again, as if weighing his next words. “You know I’m not any keener than you are about this marriage; but, my dear, I believe it had to be.”

“Had to be?”

His capacious forehead crimsoned with the effort to explain. “Well, Anne’s a young woman of considerable violence of feeling ... of ... of.... In short, there’s no knowing what she might have ended by doing if we’d all backed you up in opposing her. And I confess I didn’t feel sure enough of the young man to count on his not taking advantage of her ... her impetuosity, as it were, if he thought there was no other chance.... You understand?”

She understood. What he was trying to say was that, on the whole, given the girl’s self-will, and taking into account her ... well, her peculiar heredity ... taking into account, in fact, Kate Clephane herself ... the family had probably adopted the safest course in accepting the situation.

“Not that I mean to imply--of course not! Only the young people nowadays settle most questions for themselves, don’t they? And in this case ... Well, all’s well that ends well. We all know that some of the most successful marriages have had ... er ... rather risky preliminaries.”

Kate Clephane sat listening in a state of acquiescent lassitude. She felt as if she had been given a drug which had left her intelligence clear but paralyzed her will. What was the use of arguing, discussing, opposing? Later, of course, if everything else failed, Fred Landers was after all the person she would have to turn to, to whom her avowal would have to be made; but for the moment he was of no more use to her than any of the others. The game she had resolved to play must be played between herself and Chris Fenno; everything else was the vainest expenditure of breath.

“You _do_ agree, don’t you?” she heard Landers rather nervously insisting; and: “Oh, I daresay you’re right,” she assented.

“And the great thing, you know, is that Anne shouldn’t lose you, or you lose Anne, because of this. All the rest will arrange itself somehow. Life generally does arrange things. And if it shouldn’t--”

He stood up rather awkwardly, and she was aware of his advancing toward her. His face had grown long and solemn, and his broad bulk seemed to have narrowed to the proportions of the lank youth suffused with blushes who had taken shelter behind his mother when old Mrs. Landers had offered a bridal banquet to the John Clephanes.

“If it doesn’t work out for you as we hope ... there’s my house ... that’s been waiting for you for ever so long ... though I shouldn’t ever have ventured to suggest it....”

“Oh--” she faltered out, the clutch of pain relaxing a little about her heart.

“Well, well,” her visitor stammered, rubbing his hands together deprecatingly, “I only suggest it as a sort of last expedient ... a forlorn hope....” His nervous laugh tried to give the words a humorous turn, but his eyes were still grave. Kate rose and put her hand in his.

“You’re awfully good to me,” was all she found to say. Inwardly she was thinking, with a fresh thrill of anguish: “And now I shall never be able to tell him--never!”

He had caught the note of dismissal in her voice, and was trying to gather up the scattered fragments of his self-possession. “Of course, at our age ... _my_ age, I mean ... all that kind of thing is rather.... But there: I didn’t want you to feel there was no one you could turn to. That’s all. You won’t bear me a grudge, though? Now then; that’s all right. And you’ll see: this other business will shake down in time. Bound to, you know. I daresay the young man has merits that you and I don’t see. And you’ll let me go on dropping in as usual? After all, I’m Anne’s guardian!” he ended with his clumsy laugh.

“I shall want you more than ever, Fred,” Mrs. Clephane said simply.

* * * * *

The next evening, as she looked down the long dinner-table from her seat at its head, she was fantastically reminded of the first family dinner over which she had presided after her marriage.

The background was the same; the faces were the same, or so like that they seemed merely rejuvenated issues of the same coinage. Hendrik Drover sat in his brother-in-law’s place; but even that change was not marked enough to disturb the illusion. Hendrik Drover’s heavy good-natured face belonged to the same type as John Clephane’s; one saw that the two had gone to the same schools and the same University, frequented the same clubs, fished the same salmon rivers; Hendrik Drover might have been the ghost of John Clephane revisiting the scene of his earthly trials in a mood softened by celestial influences. And as for herself--Kate Clephane--if she had conformed to the plan of life prepared for her, instead of turning from it and denying it, might she not reasonably have hoped to reappear on the scene in the form of Enid Drover?

These grotesque fancies had begun to weave their spirals through her brain only after a first impact had emptied it of everything else, swept it suddenly clear of all meaning and all reason. That moment had come when Chris Fenno had entered in the wake of the other guests; when she had heard his name announced like that of any other member of the family; had seen him advance across the interminable length of the room, all the lights in it converging upon him as she felt that all the eyes in it converged on her; when she had seen Anne at his side, felt her presence between them, heard the girl’s voice, imperious, beseeching: “Mother--here’s Chris,” and felt her hand drop into that other hand with the awful plunge that the heart makes when a sudden shock flings it from its seat.

She had lived through all that; she and he had faced each other; had exchanged greetings, she supposed; had even, perhaps, said something to each other about Anne, and about their future relation. She did not know what; she judged only, from the undisturbed faces about them, that there had been nothing alarming, nothing to scandalize or grieve; that it had all, to the tribal eye, passed off decently and what they called “suitably”. Her past training had served her--his boundless assurance had served him. It was what the French called “a moment to pass”; they had passed it. And in that mad world beyond the abyss, where she now found herself, here they all were with the old faces, saying the same old things with the same old complacency, eating their way through the same Clephane courses, expressing the same approval of the Clephane cellar (“It was Hendrik, you know, who advised John to lay down that ninety-five Clicquot,” she caught Enid Drover breathing across the bubbles to her son-in-law). It was all, in short, as natural and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she had become young again, with all her desolate and unavoidable life stretching away ahead of her to--this.

And, in the mad phantasmagoria, there was Chris himself, symbolizing what she had flown to in her wild escape; representing, in some horrible duality, at once her sin and its harvest, her flight and her return. At the thought, her brain began to spin again, and she saw her own youth embodied before her in Anne, with Anne’s uncompromising scorns and scruples, Anne’s confident forward-looking gaze.

“Ah, well,” she heard Hendrik Drover say as they rose from the table, “these occasions will come round from time to time in the best-regulated families, and I suppose we all feel--” while, at the other side of the table, Enid Drover, pink and melting from a last libation, sighed to Horace Maclew: “I only wish dear mother and John could have been here with us!” and Lilla, overhearing her, bracketed the observation in an ironic laugh.

It had all gone off wonderfully; thanks to Anne’s tact the meeting between her mother and her betrothed had been thickly swaddled in layer on layer of non-conducting, non-explosive “family”. A sense of mutual congratulation was in the air as the groups formed themselves again in the drawing-room. The girl herself moved from one to another, pale, vigilant, radiant; Chris Fenno, in a distant corner, was settled with coffee-cup and cigarette at Lilla Maclew’s side; Mrs. Clephane found herself barricaded behind Hendrik Drover and one of the older Tresseltons. They were the very two men, she remembered, between whom she had spent her evening after that first family dinner in which this one was so hallucinatingly merged.

Not until the party was breaking up, and farewells filled the hall, did she suddenly find herself--she knew not how--isolated in the inner drawing-room with Chris Fenno. He stood there before her, and she seemed to hear his voice for the first time.

“I want to thank you....” He appeared to feel it was a bad beginning, and tried again. “Shan’t I have the chance, some day soon, of finding you--for a word or two, quietly?” he asked.

She faced him, erect and unflinching; she dragged her eyes up to his.

“A chance? But as soon as you like--as many chances as you like! You’ll always find me--I shall always be here. I’m never going to leave Anne,” she announced.

It had been almost worth the agony she had bought it with to see the look in his eyes when he heard that.

XXIII.

Extreme exhaustion--the sense of having reached the last limit of endurable emotion--plunged Kate Clephane, that night, into a dreamless sleep. It was months and months since she had reached those nethermost levels below sound or image or any mental movement; and she rose from them revived, renewed--and then suddenly understood that they had been only a grief-drugged mockery.

The return to reality was as painful as that of a traveller who has fallen asleep in the snow. One by one she had to readjust all her frozen faculties to the unchanged and intolerable situation; and she felt weaker, less able to contend with it. The thought that that very day she might have to face Chris Fenno paralyzed her. He had asked to see her alone--and she lay there, in the desolate dawn, rehearsing to herself all the cruel things he would find to say; for his ways of being cruel were innumerable. The day before she had felt almost light-heartedly confident of being able to outface, to outlast him; of her power of making the situation even more intolerable to him than he could make it to her. Now, in the merciless morning light, she had a new view of their respective situations. Who had suffered most the previous evening, he or she? Whose wakening that morning was most oppressed by fears? He had proposed to have a talk with her; he had had the courage to do that; and she felt that by having that courage he had already gained another point in their silent struggle.

Slowly the days dragged by; their hours were filled, for mother and daughter, by the crowding obligations and preoccupations natural to such times. Mrs. Clephane was helping her daughter with the wedding preparations; a spectacle to charm and edify the rest of the family.

Chris Fenno, two or three days after the announcement of the engagement, had returned to Baltimore, where he had accepted a temporary job on a newspaper, and where he had that, and other matters, to wind up before his marriage. During his stay in New York, Mrs. Clephane had had but two or three brief glimpses of him, and always in the presence of others. It was natural that he should wish to devote the greater part of his time to his betrothed. He and Anne went off in the early afternoon, and when they returned were, on each evening, engaged to dine with some member of the family. It was easy for Mrs. Clephane to excuse herself from these entertainments. The fact of her having presided at the dinner at which the engagement was announced had sealed it with her approval; and at the little dinners organized by Nollie Tresselton and the other cousins her presence was hardly expected, and readily dispensed with.

All this fitted in with the new times. The old days of introspections and explanations were over; the era of taking things for granted was the only one that Anne’s generation knew, and in that respect Anne was of her day.

After the betrothal dinner she had said a tender goodnight to her mother, and the next evening, as she rushed up to dress after her long outing with Chris, had stopped at Kate’s door to wave a loving hand and call out: “He says you’ve been so perfect to him--” That was all. Kate Clephane’s own memories told her that to some natures happiness comes like a huge landslide burying all the past and spreading a fresh surface to life’s sowings: and it was from herself, she reflected, that Anne had inherited her capacity for such all-obliterating bliss.

The days passed, and Chris Fenno at length came back. He was staying with the Joe Tresseltons, and there was a constant coming and going of the young people between the two houses. Opportunities were not lacking to see Mrs. Clephane in private, and for the first days after his return she waited in numb terror for the inevitable, the incalculable moment. But it did not come; and gradually she understood that it never would. His little speech had been a mere formula; he had nothing to say to her; no desire was farther from him than the wish to speak with her alone. What she had dreaded past expression, but supposed to be inevitable, he had probably never even seriously considered. Explanations? What was the use of explanations? He had gained his point; the thing now was to live at peace with everybody.

She saw that all her calculations had been mistaken. She had fancied that her tactics would render his situation intolerable; that if only she could bear to spend a few weeks in his presence she would demonstrate to him the impossibility of his spending the rest of his life in hers. But his reasoning reached a good deal farther, and embraced certain essential elements in human nature that hers had left out. He had said to himself--she was sure of it now--: “The next few weeks will be pretty bad, but after that I’ll have the upper hand.” He had only to hold out till the wedding; after that she would be a mere mother-in-law, and mothers-in-law are not a serious problem in modern life. How could she ever have imagined that he would not see through her game and out-manœuvre her, when he had done it so often before, and when his whole future depended on his doing it just once more? She felt herself beaten at every point.

Unless--unless she told the truth to Anne. Every day was making that impossible thing more impossible; yet every day was bringing them nearer to the day when not to do so--if all other measures failed--would be most impossible of all. She seemed to have reached that moment when, one morning, Anne came into her room and caught her by the hand.

“Dearest--you’ve got to come with me this very minute.”

Kate, yielding to the girl’s hand, was drawn along the corridor to her bedroom. There, on the bed, in a dazzle of whiteness, lay the wedding-dress.

“Will you help me to try it on?” Anne asked.

* * * * *

Kate Clephane rang the Rectory bell and found herself in the Rectory sitting-room. As she sat there, among photogravures of Botticelli Virgins and etchings of English cathedrals, she could not immediately remember why she had come, and looked with a kind of detached curiosity at the volumes of memoirs and sermons on the table at her elbow, at the perpendicular Gothic chairs against the wall, and the Morris armchairs which had superseded them. She had not been in a rectory sitting-room since the committee meeting at the Merrimans’, on the day when she had received Anne’s cable.

Her lapse of memory lasted only for a few seconds, but during that time she relived with intensity the sensations of that other day, she felt her happy heart dancing against the message folded under her dress, she saw the southern sun gilding the dull faces about the table, and smelt the violets and mimosa in Mrs. Merriman’s vases. She woke again to the present just as an austere parlour-maid was requesting her to step this way.

Dr. Arklow’s study was full of books, of signed photographs of Church dignitaries, of more English cathedrals, of worn leather armchairs and scattered pipes and tobacco-pouches. The Rector himself, on the hearth, loomed before her at once bland and formidable. He had guessed, of course, that she had come to talk about the date and hour of the wedding, and all the formulas incidental to such visits fell from his large benevolent lips. The visit really passed off more easily than she had expected, and she was on her feet again and feeling him behind her like a gentle trade-wind accustomed to waft a succession of visitors to the door, when she stopped abruptly and faced him.

“Dr. Arklow--”

He waited benevolently.

“There’s something else--a case I’ve always wanted to put to you....”

“Dear Mrs. Clephane--do put it now.” He was waving her back into her armchair; but she stood before him, unconscious of the gesture.

“It’s about a friend of mine--”

“Yes: a friend? Do sit down.”

She sat down, still unaware of her movements or his.

“A most unhappy woman.... I told her I would ask ... ask what could be done.... She had an idea that you could tell her....”

He bowed expectantly.

Her parched lips brought out: “Of course it’s confidential,” and his gesture replied that communications, in that room, were always held to be so. “Whatever I can do--” he added.

“Yes. My friend thought--her position is really desperate.” She stopped, her voice failing her; then the words came forth in panting jerks. “She was most unhappily married ... things went against her--everything did. She tried ... tried her best.... Then she met him ... it was too difficult.... He was her lover; only for a short time. After that her life was perfectly ... was all it should be. She never saw him--oh, for years. Now her daughter wants to marry him....”

“Marry him? _The same man?_” The Rector’s voice swelled above her like a wave; his presence towered, blurred and gigantic. She felt the tears in her throat; but again she was seized by the besetting desire that her secret should not be guessed, and a desperate effort at self-control drove the tears back and cleared her voice.

Dr. Arklow still loomed and brooded. “And the man--”

A slow flush of agony rose to her forehead; but she remembered that she was seated with her back to the light, and took courage. “He--he is determined.” She paused, and then went on: “It’s too horrible. But at first he didn’t know ... when he first met the girl. Neither of them knew. And when he found out--”

“Yes?”

“Then--it was too late, he said. The girl doesn’t know even now; she doesn’t dream; and she’s grown to care--care desperately.”

“That’s his defence?”

Her voice failed her again, and she signed her assent.

There was another long pause. She sat motionless, looking down at her own interlocked hands. She felt that Dr. Arklow was uneasily pacing the hearth-rug; at last she was aware that he was once more standing before her.

“The lady you speak of--your friend--is she here?”

She started. “_Here?_”

“In New York, I mean?”

“No; no; she’s not here,” Kate cried precipitately. “That’s the reason why I offered to come--”

“I see.” She thought she caught a faint note of relief in his voice. “She wished you to consult me?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s done everything--everything, of course, to stop this abomination?”

“Oh, everything ... everything.”

“Except to tell her daughter?”

She made another sign of assent.

Dr. Arklow cleared his throat, and declared with emphasis: “It is her duty to tell her daughter.”

“Yes,” Kate Clephane faltered. She got to her feet and looked about her blindly for the door.

“She must tell her daughter,” the Rector repeated with rising vehemence. “Such a shocking situation must be avoided; avoided at all costs.”

“Yes,” she repeated. She was on the threshold now; automatically she held out her hand.

“Unless,” the Rector continued uncertainly, his eyes upon her, “she is absolutely convinced that less harm will come to all concerned if she has the courage to keep silence--always.” There was a pause. “As far as I can see into the blackness of it,” he went on, gaining firmness, “the whole problem turns on that. I may be mistaken; perhaps I am. But when a man has looked for thirty or forty years into pretty nearly every phase of human suffering and error, as men of my cloth have to do, he comes to see that there must be adjustments ... adjustments in the balance of evil. Compromises, politicians would call them. Well, I’m not afraid of the word.” He stood leaning against the jamb of the door; her hand was on the doorknob, and she listened with lowered head.

“The thing in the world I’m most afraid of is sterile pain,” he said after a moment. “I should never want any one to be the cause of that.”

She lifted her eyes with an effort, and saw in his face the same look of understanding she had caught there for a moment while she talked with him at the Drovers’ after dinner.

“Sterile pain--” she murmured. She had crossed the threshold now; she felt that he was holding out his hand. His face once more wore the expression of worldly benevolence that was as much the badge of his profession as his dress. After all, she perceived, he was glad that she had said nothing more definite, glad that their talk was safely over. Yet she had caught that other look.

“If your friend were here; if there were anything I could do for her, or say to her--anything to help--”

“Oh, she’s not here; she won’t be here,” Kate repeated.

“In that case--” Again she caught the relief in his voice.