Chapter VIII: Book III: XV (3)

“But I will tell her--tell her what you’ve said.” She was aware that they were shaking hands, and that he was averting his apprehensive eyes from hers. “For God’s sake,” the eyes seemed to entreat her, “let’s get through with this before you betray yourself--if there’s anything further to betray.”

At the front door he bowed her out, repeating cordially: “And about a date for Anne’s wedding as soon as you and she are absolutely decided, remember I’m completely at your service.”

The door closed, and she found herself in the street.

XXIV.

She turned away from the Rectory and walked aimlessly up Madison Avenue. It was a warm summer-coloured October day. At Fifty-ninth Street she turned into the Park and wandered on over the yellowing leaf-drifts of the ramble. In just such a state of blind bewilderment she had followed those paths on the day when she had first caught sight of Chris Fenno and Lilla Gates in the twilight ahead of her. That was less than a year ago, and she looked back with amazement at the effect which that chance encounter had had on her. She seemed hardly to be suffering more now than she had suffered then. It had seemed unbearable, impossible, at the moment, that Chris Fenno should enter, even so episodically, so remotely, into her new life; and here he was, ensconced in its very centre, in complete possession of it.

She tried to think the situation out; but, as always, her trembling thoughts recoiled, just as she had seen Dr. Arklow’s recoil.

Every one to whom she had tried to communicate her secret without betraying it had had the same instantaneous revulsion. “Not that--don’t tell me that!” their averted eyes, their shrinking voices seemed to say. It was too horrible for any ears.

How then was she to obey Dr. Arklow’s bidding and impart the secret to Anne? He had said it as positively as if he were handing down a commandment from Sinai: “The daughter must be told.”

How easy to lay down abstract rules for other people’s guidance: “The daughter” was just an imaginary person--a convenient conversational pawn. But Kate Clephane’s daughter--her own Anne! She closed her eyes and tried to face the look in Anne’s as the truth dawned on her.

“You--_you_, mother? The mother I’ve come to adore--the mother I can’t live without, even with all my other happiness? _You?_”

Yes--perhaps that would be the worst of it, the way Anne would look at her and say “_You?_” For, once the girl knew the truth, her healthy youth might so revolt from Chris’s baseness, Chris’s duplicity, that the shock of the discovery would be its own cure. But when the blow had fallen, when Anne’s life had crashed about her, and the ruins been cleared away--what then of her mother? Why, her mother would be buried under those ruins; her life would be over; but a hideous indestructible image of her would remain, overshadowing, darkening the daughter’s future.

“This man you are going to marry has--”

No; Kate Clephane could go no farther than that. Such confessions were not to be made; were not for a daughter’s ears. She began the phrase to herself again and again, but could not end it....

And, after all, she suddenly thought, Dr. Arklow himself, having given the injunction, had at once qualified, had virtually withdrawn it. In declaring that such an abomination must at all costs be prevented he had spoken with the firmness of a priest; but almost at once the man had intervened, and had suggested to the hypothetical mother the alternative of not speaking at all, if only she could be sure of never betraying herself in the future, of sacrificing everything to the supreme object of avoiding what he called sterile pain. Those tentative, half-apologetic words now effaced the others in Kate’s mind. Though spoken with the accent of authority--and almost under his breath--she knew they represented what he really felt. But where should she find the courage to conform to them?

She had left the Park, aimlessly, unseeingly, and was walking eastward through a half-built street in the upper Nineties. The thought of returning home--re-entering that house where the white dress still lay on the bed--was unbearable. She walked on and on.... Suddenly she came upon an ugly sandstone church-front with a cross above the doorway. The leathern swing-doors were flapping back and forth, women passing in and out. Kate Clephane pushed open one of the doors and looked in. The day was fading, and in the dusky interior lights fluttered like butterflies about the paper flowers of the altar. There was no service, but praying figures were scattered here and there. Against the brown-washed walls of the aisles she observed a row of confessionals of varnished wood, like cigar-boxes set on end; before one or two, women were expectantly kneeling. Mrs. Clephane wondered what they had to tell.

Leaning against one of the piers of the nave she evoked all those imaginary confessions, and thought how trivial, how childish they would seem, compared to what she carried in her breast.... What a help it must be to turn to somebody who could tell one firmly, positively what to do--to be able to lay down one’s moral torture like a heavy load at the end of the day! Dr. Arklow had none of the authority which the habit of the confessional must give. He could only vaguely sympathize and deplore, and try to shuffle the horror out of sight as soon as he caught an unwilling glimpse of it. But these men whose office it was to bind and to unbind--who spoke as the mere impersonal mouth-pieces of a mighty Arbitrator, letting neither moral repugnance nor false delicacy interfere with the sacred task of alleviation and purification--how different must they be! Her eyes filled at the thought of laying her burden in such hands.

And why not? Why not entrust her anonymous secret to one of those anonymous ears? In talking to Dr. Arklow she had felt that both he and she were paralyzed by the personal relation, and all the embarrassments and complications arising from it. When she spoke of her friend in distress, and he replied with the same evasive formula, both were conscious of the evasion, and hampered by it. And so it had been from the first--there was not an ear into which she dared pour her agony. What if, now, at once, she were to join those unknown penitents? It was possible, she knew--she had but a step to take....

She did not take it. Her unrest drove her forth again into the darkening street, drove her homeward with uncertain steps, in the mood of forlorn expectancy of those who, having failed to exert their will, wait helplessly on the unforeseen. After all, how could one tell? Chris must, in his own degree, be suffering as she was suffering. Why not stick to her old plan of waiting, holding on, enduring everything, in the hope of wearing him out? She reached the door of her house, set her teeth, and went in. Overhead, she remembered with a shudder, the white dress waited, with all that it implied....

The drawing-room was empty, and she went up to her own room. There, as usual, the fire shone invitingly, fresh flowers opened in the lamplight. All was warmth, peace, intimacy. As she sat down by the fireside she seemed to see Fred Landers’s heavy figure in the opposite armchair, his sturdy square-toed boots turned to the hearth. She remembered how, one day, as he sat there, she had said to herself that it might be pleasant to see him there always. Now, in the extremity of her loneliness, the thought returned. Since then he had confessed his own hope to her--shyly, obliquely, apologetically; but under his stammering words she had recognized the echo of a long desire. She knew he had always loved her; had not Anne betrayed that it was her guardian who had persuaded her to recall her unknown mother? Kate Clephane owed him everything, then--all her happiness and all her sorrow! He knew everything of her life--or nearly everything. To whom else could she turn with the peculiar sense of security which that certitude gave? She felt sorry that she had received his tentative advance so coldly, so inarticulately. After all, he might yet be her refuge--her escape. She closed her eyes, and tried to imagine what life would be--years and years of it--at Fred Landers’s side. To feel the nearness of that rugged patient kindness; would it not lighten her misery, make the thoughts and images that were torturing her less palpable, less acute, less real?

She sat there for a long time, brooding. Now and then a step passing her door, or a burst of voices on the landing, told her that Anne was probably receiving some of her friends in her own rooms at the other end of the passage. The wedding presents were already arriving; Anne, with a childish pleasure that was unlike her usual aloofness from material things, had set them out on a long table in her sitting-room. The mother pictured the eager group inspecting and admiring, the talk of future plans, the discussion of all the details of the wedding. The date for it would soon be fixed; ostensibly, her own visit to Dr. Arklow had been made for the purpose. But at the last moment her courage had failed her, and she had said vaguely, in leaving, that she would let him know.

As she sat there, she saw her daughter’s pale illuminated face as though it were before her. Anne’s happiness shone through her, making her opaque and guarded features luminous and transparent; and the mother could measure, from her own experience, the amount of heat and force that fed that incandescence. She herself had always had a terrible way of being happy--and that way was Anne’s.

She simply could not bear to picture to herself the change, in Anne’s face, from ecstasy to anguish. She had seen that change once, and the sight had burned itself into her eye-balls. To destroy Anne’s happiness seemed an act of murderous cruelty. What did it matter--as the chances of life went--of what elements such happiness was made? Had she, Kate Clephane, ever shrunk from her own bliss because of the hidden risks it contained? She had played high, staked everything--and lost. Could she blame her daughter for choosing to take the same risks? No; there was, in all great happiness, or the illusion momentarily passing for it, a quality so beatific, so supernatural, that no pain with which it might have to be paid could, at the time, seem too dear; could hardly, perhaps, ever seem so, to headlong hearts like hers and Anne’s.

Her own heart had begun to tremble and dilate with her new resolve; the resolve to accept the idea of Anne’s marriage, to cease her inward struggle against it, and try to be in reality what she was already pretending to be: the acquiescent, approving mother.... After all, why not? Legally, technically, there was nothing wrong, nothing socially punishable, in the case. And what was there on the higher, the more private grounds where she pretended to take her stand and deliver her judgment? Chris Fenno was a young man--she was old enough to be, if not his mother, at least his mother-in-law. What had she ever hoped or expected to be to him but a passing incident, a pleasant memory? From the first, she had pitched their relation in that key; had insisted on the difference in their ages, on her own sense of the necessary transiency of the tie, on the fact that she would not have it otherwise. Anything rather than to be the old woman clutching at an impossible prolongation of bliss--anything rather than be remembered as a burden instead of being regretted as a delight! How often had she told him that she wanted to remain with him like the memory of a flowering branch brushed by at night? “You won’t quite know if it was lilac or laburnum, or both--you’ll only know it was something vanishing and sweet.” Vanishing and sweet--that was what she had meant to be! And she had kept to her resolution till the blow fell--

Well, and was he so much to blame for its falling? She herself had been the witness of his resistance, of his loyal efforts to escape. The vehemence of Anne’s passion had thwarted him, had baffled them both; if he loved her as passionately as she loved him, was he not justified in accepting the happiness forced upon him? And how refuse it without destroying the girl’s life?

“If any one is to be destroyed, oh God, don’t let it be Anne!” the mother cried. She seemed at last to have reached a clearer height, a more breathable air. Renunciation--renunciation. If she could attain to that, what real obstacle was there to her daughter’s happiness?

“I would sell my soul for her--why not my memories?” she reflected.

The sound of steps and voices outside had ceased. From the landing had come a “Goodbye, dearest!” in Nollie Tresselton’s voice; no doubt she had been the last visitor to leave, and Anne was now alone; perhaps alone with her betrothed. Well; to that thought also Kate Clephane must accustom herself; by and bye they would be always alone, those two, in the sense of being nearer to each other than either of them was to any one else. The mother could bear that too. Not to lose Anne--at all costs to keep her hold on the girl’s confidence and tenderness: that was all that really mattered. She would go to Anne now. She herself would ask the girl to fix the date for the wedding.

She got up and walked along the deep-piled carpet of the corridor. The door of Anne’s sitting-room was ajar, but no sound came from within. Every one was gone, then; even Chris Fenno. With a breath of relief the mother pushed the door open. The room was empty. One of the tall vases was full of branching chrysanthemums and autumn berries. In a corner stood a tea-table with scattered cups and plates. The Airedale drowsed by the hearth. As she stood there, Kate Clephane saw the little Anne who used to sit by that same fire trying to coax the red birds through the fender. The vision melted the last spot of resistance in her heart. The door of Anne’s bedroom was also ajar, but no sound came from there either. Perhaps the girl had gone out with her last visitors, escaping for a starlit rush up the Riverside Drive before dinner. These sudden sallies at queer hours were a way the young people had.

The mother listened a moment longer, then laid her hand on the bedroom door. Before her, directly in the line of her vision, was Anne’s narrow bed. On it the wedding-dress still lay, in a dazzle of whiteness; and between Mrs. Clephane and the bed, looking also at the dress, stood Anne and Chris Fenno. They had not heard her cross the sitting-room or push open the bedroom door; they did not hear her now. All their faculties were absorbed in each other. The young man’s arms were around the girl, her cheek was against his. One of his hands reached about her shoulder and, making a cup for her chin, pressed her face closer. They were looking at the dress; but the curves of their lips, hardly detached, were like those of a fruit that has burst apart of its own ripeness.

Kate Clephane stood behind them like a ghost. It made her feel like a ghost to be so invisible and inaudible. Then a furious flame of life rushed through her; in every cell of her body she felt that same embrace, felt the very texture of her lover’s cheek against her own, burned with the heat of his palm as it clasped Anne’s chin to press her closer.

“Oh, not that--not that--not that!” Mrs. Clephane imagined she had shrieked it out at them, and pressed her hands to her mouth to stifle the cry; then she became aware that it was only a dumb whisper within her. For a time which seemed without end she continued to stand there, invisible, inaudible, and they remained in each other’s embrace, motionless, speechless. Then she turned and went. They did not hear her.

A dark fermentation boiled up into her brain; every thought and feeling was clogged with thick entangling memories.... Jealous? Was she jealous of her daughter? Was she physically jealous? Was that the real secret of her repugnance, her instinctive revulsion? Was that why she had felt from the first as if some incestuous horror hung between them?

She did not know--it was impossible to analyze her anguish. She knew only that she must fly from it, fly as far as she could from the setting of these last indelible impressions. How had she ever imagined that she could keep her place at Anne’s side--that she could either outstay Chris, or continue to live under the same roof with them? Both projects seemed to her, now, equally nebulous and impossible. She must put the world between them--the whole width of the world was not enough. The very grave, she thought, would be hardly black enough to blot out that scene.

She found herself, she hardly knew how, at the foot of the stairs, in the front hall. Her precipitate descent recalled the early winter morning when, as hastily, almost as unconsciously, she had descended those same stairs, flying from her husband’s house. Nothing was changed in the hall: her eyes, once again morbidly receptive of details, noted on the door the same patent locks with which her fingers had then struggled. Now, as then, a man’s hat and stick lay on the hall table; on that other day they had been John Clephane’s, now they were Chris Fenno’s. That was the only difference.

She stood there, looking about her, wondering why she did not push back the bolts and rush out into the night, hatless and cloakless as she was. What else was there to do but to go straight to the river, or to some tram line with its mortal headlights bearing straight down on one? One didn’t have to have a hat and cloak to go out in search of annihilation....

As she stood there the door-bell rang, and she heard the step of a servant coming to open the door. She shrank back into the drawing-room, and in another moment Enid Drover had rustled in, her pink cheeks varnished with the cold, her furs full of the autumn freshness. Her little eyes were sharp with excitement.

“My dear Kate! I’ve rushed in with such good news: I shall be late for dinner, Hendrik will be furious. But never mind; I had to tell you. The house next door really _is_ for sale! Isn’t it too perfect? The agent thinks it could be got for a fairly reasonable price. But Hendrik says it may be snapped up at any minute, and Anne ought to decide at once. Then you could stay on comfortably here, and you and she and Chris would always be together, just as she wants you to be.... No; don’t send for her; I can’t wait. And besides, I want you to have the pleasure of telling her.” On the doorstep Mrs. Drover turned to call back: “Remember, Hendrik says she must decide.” Her limousine engulfed her.

XXV.

Mrs. Clephane excused herself from coming down to dinner; Aline was to say that she was very tired, and begged that no one should disturb her. The next morning, she knew, Chris was returning to Baltimore. Perhaps in his absence she would be able to breathe more freely, see more clearly.

Anne, as usual, respected her mother’s wishes; she neither came up nor sent to enquire. But the next morning, in the old way, fresh and shining, she appeared with Mrs. Clephane’s breakfast-tray. She wanted to be reassured as to her mother’s health, and Kate, under her solicitous eye, poured out a cup of tea and forced down a bit of toast.

“You look tired, mother. It’s only that?”

“Only that, dear.”

“You didn’t tell me that Aunt Enid had been in last night about the house next door--” Anne spoke the least little reproachfully.

“I’m sorry. I had such a headache that when she left I went straight to my room. Did she telephone you?”

“Uncle Hendrik did. Isn’t it the greatest luck? It will be such fun arranging it all.” The girl paused and looked at her mother. “And this will make you decide, darling, won’t it?”

“Decide?”

“To stay on here. To keep this house for yourself. It will be almost like our all being together.”

“Yes--almost.”

“You will stay, won’t you?”

“Stay here? I can’t--I can’t!” The words escaped before Mrs. Clephane could repress them. Her heart began to rush about in her like a caged animal.

Anne’s brows darkened and drew together. “But I don’t understand. You told Chris you would--”

“Did I? Perhaps I did. But I must sometimes be allowed to change my mind,” Mrs. Clephane murmured, forcing a thin smile.

“To change your mind about being with us? You don’t want to, then, after all?”

Mrs. Clephane pushed the tray away and propped herself on her elbow. “No, I don’t want to.”

“How you say it, mother! As if I were a stranger. I don’t understand....” The girl’s lip was beginning to tremble. “I thought ... Chris and I both thought....”

“I’m sorry. But I must really decide as I think best. When you are married you won’t need me.”

“And shan’t you need me, mother? Not a little?” Anne hesitated, and then ventured, timidly: “You’re so alone--so awfully alone.”

“I’ve always been that. It can’t be otherwise. You’ve chosen ... you’ve chosen to be married....”

Anne stood up and looked down on her with searching imperious eyes. “Is it my being married--or my being married to Chris?”

“Ah--don’t let us talk of that again!”

The girl continued to scrutinize her strangely. “Once for all--you won’t tell me?”

Mrs. Clephane did not speak.

“Then I shall ask him--I shall ask him in your presence,” Anne exclaimed in a shaking voice.

At the sound of that break in her voice the dread of seeing her suffer once more superseded every other feeling in the mother’s breast. She leaned against the pillows, speechless for a moment; then she held out her hand, seeking Anne’s.

“There’s nothing to ask, dear; nothing to tell.”

“You don’t hate him, mother? You really don’t?”

Slowly Kate Clephane articulated: “I don’t--hate him.”

“But why won’t you see him with me, then? Why won’t you talk it all out with us once for all? Mother, what _is_ it? I must know.”

Mrs. Clephane, under her daughter’s relentless eyes, felt the blood rising from her throat to her pale lips and drawn cheeks, and to the forehead in which her pulses must be visibly beating. She lay there, bathed in a self-accusing crimson, and it seemed to her that those clear young eyes were like steel blades plunging into the deepest folds of her conscience.

“You don’t hate him? But then you’re in love with him--you’re in love with him, and I’ve known it all along!” The girl shrilled it out suddenly, and hid her face in her hands.

Kate Clephane lay without speaking. In the first shock of the outcry all her defences had crashed together about her head, and it had been almost a relief to feel them going, to feel that pretences and disguises were at an end. Then Anne’s hands dropped to her side, and the mother, meeting her gaze, lost the sense of her own plight in the sight of that other woe. All at once she felt herself strong and resolute; all the old forces of dissimulation were pouring back through her veins. The accusing red faded from her face, and she lay there and quietly met the question in Anne’s eyes.

“_Anne!_” she simply said, with a little shrug.

“Oh, mother--mother! I think I must be going mad!” Anne was on her knees at the bedside, her face buried in the coverlet. It was easier to speak to her while her eyes were hidden, and Kate laid a hand on her hair.

“Not mad, dear; but decidedly over-strung.” She heard the note of magnanimity in her own voice.

“But can you forgive me--ever?”

“Nonsense, dear; can I do anything else?”

“But then--if you _do_ forgive me, really--why must you go away? Why won’t you promise to stay with us?”

Kate Clephane lay against her pillows and meditated. Her hand was still in Anne’s hair; she held the girl’s head gently against the coverlet, still not wishing her own face to be too closely scrutinized. At length she spoke.

“I didn’t mean to tell you just yet; and you must tell no one.” She paused, and rallied her failing courage. “I can’t promise to stay with you, dear, because I may be going to get married too.” The first words were the most difficult to say; after that she heard her voice going on steadily. “Fred Landers has asked me to marry him; and I think I shall accept.... No; don’t hug me too hard, child; my head still aches--There; now you understand, don’t you? And you won’t scold me any more? But remember, it’s a secret from every one. It’s not to be spoken of till after you’re married.... Now go.”

After Anne had left her, subdued but jubilant, she lay there and remembered, with a twinge of humiliation, that the night before she had hurried downstairs in a mad rush to death. Anything--anything to escape from the coil of horror closing in on her!... And it had sufficed to her to meet Enid Drover in the hall, with that silly chatter about the house next door, to check the impulse, drive her back into the life she was flying from.... She reflected with self-derision that all her suicidal impulses seemed to end in the same way; by landing her in the arms of some man she didn’t care for. Then she remembered Anne’s illuminated face, and lay listening to the renewed life of the house, the bustle of happy preparations going on all about her.

“Poor Fred! Well--if it’s what he wants--” she thought. What she herself wanted, all she now wanted, was never again to see that dreadful question in Anne’s eyes. And she had found no other way of evading it.

XXVI.

Now that a day for the wedding was fixed, the preparations went on more rapidly. Soon there was only a fortnight left; then only ten days; then a week.

Chris Fenno’s parents were to have come to New York to make the acquaintance of their son’s betrothed; but though a date had several times been appointed for their visit, Mrs. Fenno, whose health was not good, had never been well enough to come, and finally it was arranged that Anne should go to Baltimore to see them. She was to stay with the Maclews, who immediately seized the opportunity to organize a series of festivities in celebration of the event.

Lilla invited Mrs. Clephane to come with her daughter; but Kate declined, on the plea that she herself was not well. People were beginning to notice how tired and thin she looked. Her glass showed streaks of gray in her redundant hair, and about her lips and eyes the little lines she had so long kept at bay. Everybody in the family agreed that it would be a good thing for her to have a few days’ rest before the wedding.

With regard to her own future she had sworn Anne to unconditional secrecy. She explained that she did not intend to give Fred Landers a definite answer till after the wedding, and Anne, who had all the Clephane reticence, understood her wish to keep the matter quiet, and even in her guardian’s presence was careful not to betray that she knew of his hopes. She only made him feel that he was more than ever welcome, and touched him by showing an added cordiality at a moment when most girls are deaf and blind to all human concerns but their own.

“It’s so like Anne to find time to remember an old derelict just when she might be excused for forgetting that any of us exist.” He said it with a gentle complacency as he sat in Mrs. Clephane’s sitting-room one evening during Anne’s absence. “She’s like you--very like you,” he added, looking at Kate Clephane with shy beseeching eyes.

She smiled back at him, wondering if she would ever have the courage to tell him that she meant to marry him. He was thinking of that too, she knew. Why not tell him now, at once? She had only to lean forward and lay her hand on his. No words would be necessary. And surely she would feel less alone.... But she remained silent; it was easier to think of speaking than to speak.

It was he who questioned: “And afterward--have you decided what you’re going to do?”

She continued to smile. “There’ll be time to decide afterward.”

“Anne tells me you’ve definitely refused to remain in this house.”

“This house hasn’t many pleasant associations for me.”

He coloured as if she had caught him in a failure of tact. “I understand that. But with the young people here ... or next door ... she hoped you’d feel less lonely.”

Again she perceived that he was trying to remind her of a possible alternative, and again she let the allusion drop, answering merely: “I’m used to being lonely. It’s not as bad as people think.”

“You’ve known worse, you mean?” He seldom risked anything as direct as that. “And it would be worse for you, being with Anne after she’s married? You still hate the idea as much as ever?”

She rose impatiently and went to lean against the mantelpiece. “Fred, what’s the use? I shall never hate it less. But that’s all over--I’ve accepted it.”

“Yes, and made Anne so happy.”

“Oh, love is what is making Anne happy!” She hardly knew how she brought the word from her lips.

“Well--loving Fenno hasn’t made her cease to love you.”

“Anne is perfect. But suppose we talk of something else. At my age I find this bridal atmosphere a little suffocating. I shall go abroad again, probably--I don’t know.”

She turned and looked at herself in the glass above the mantel, seeing the gray streaks and the accusing crows’-feet. And as she stood there, she remembered how once, when she was standing in the same way before a mirror, Chris had come up behind her, and they had laughed at seeing their reflections kiss. How young she had been then--how young! Now, as she looked at herself, she saw behind her the reflection of Fred Landers’s comfortable bulk, sunk in an armchair in after-dinner repose, his shirt-front bulging a little, the lamplight varnishing the top of his head through the thinning hair. A middle-aged couple--perfectly suited to each other in age and appearance. She turned back and sat down beside him.

“Shall we try a Patience?” she said.

He accepted with a wistful alacrity which seemed to say it was the most he hoped for, and they drew up a table and sat down opposite each other, calmly disposing the little cards in elaborate patterns.

They had been playing for about half an hour when she rumpled up the cards abruptly, and sweeping them together into a passionate heap cried out: “I want it to be a gay wedding--the gayest wedding that ever was! I’m determined it shall be a gay wedding.”

She dropped her face into her hands, and sat there propping her elbows on the card-table, and laughing out between her intercrossed fingers: “A really gay wedding, you know....”

XXVII.

Only three days more now; for just three days more she and Anne would live under one roof.

And then?

The interrogation was not Anne’s. The news of Mrs. Clephane’s intended marriage had completely restored the girl’s serenity. Chris Fenno, detained in Baltimore by his mother’s sudden and somewhat alarming illness, had not yet reappeared; it seemed likely now that he would arrive in New York only the day before the wedding. Anne was to have her mother to herself to the last; and with every art of tenderness and dependence she tried to show her appreciation of these final days, sweet with the sweetness of dear things ending, yet without pain because they were not to precede a real separation. Her only anxiety--the alarm about Mrs. Fenno--had been allayed by a reassuring telegram, and she moved within that rainbow bubble that once or twice in life contrives to pass itself off as the real horizon.

The sight of her, Kate Clephane reasoned, ought to have been justification enough. Anything was worth doing or sacrificing to keep the bubble unbroken. And the last three days would pass--the Day itself would pass. The world, after it was over, would go on in the same old way. What was all the flurry about?

Mrs. Drover did not find it easy to maintain so detached an attitude. She, for one, could not conceive how her sister-in-law could remain so calm at such a moment.

“Of course Nellie’s wonderfully capable; she and Lilla have taken almost all the worry on their shoulders, haven’t they? I never could have struggled alone with that immense list of invitations. But still I don’t think you ought to assume that _everything’s_ settled. After all, there are only three days left! And no one seems to have even begun to think who’s going to take you up the aisle....”

“Up the aisle?” Mrs. Clephane echoed blankly.

“Well, yes, my dear. There _is_ an aisle at St. Stephen’s,” Enid Drover chirped with one of her rare attempts at irony. “And of course Hendrik must take up the bride, and you must be there, ready to receive her and give her away....”

“Give her away?”

“Hadn’t you thought of that either?” Mrs. Drover’s little laugh had a tinge of condescension. Though all the family had conspired to make Mrs. Clephane forget that she had lived for nearly twenty years outside the social pale, the fact remained; she _had_. And it was on just such occasions as this that she betrayed it, somewhat embarrassingly to her sister-in-law. Not even to know that, when a bride’s father was dead, it was her mother who gave her away!

“You didn’t expect Hendrik to do it?” Mrs. Drover rippled on, half compassionate, half contemptuous. It was hard to understand how some people contrived to remain in ignorance of the most elementary rules of behaviour!

“Hendrik--well, why shouldn’t he?” Kate Clephane said.

Anne was passing through the room, a pile of belated presents in her arms.

“Do you hear, my dear? Your uncle Hendrik will be very much flattered.” Mrs. Drover’s little eyes grew sharp with the vision of Hendrik’s broad back and glossy collar playing the leading part in the ceremony. “The bride was given away by her uncle, Mr. Hendrik Drover, of--” It really would read very well.

“Flattered about what?” Anne paused to question.

“Your mother seems to think it’s your uncle who ought to give you away.”

“Not you, mother?” Kate Clephane caught the instant drop in the girl’s voice. Underneath her radiant security, what suspicion, what dread, still lingered?

“I’m so stupid, dear; I hadn’t realized it was the custom.”

“Don’t you want it to be?”

“I want what you want.” Their thin-edged smiles seemed to cross like blades.

“I want it to be you, mother.”

“Then of course, dear--”

Mrs. Drover heaved a faintly disappointed sigh. Hendrik would certainly have looked the part better. “Well, _that’s_ settled,” she said, in the tone of one who strikes one more item off an invisible list. “And now the question is, who’s to take your mother up the aisle?”

Anne and her mother were still exchanging smiles. “Why, Uncle Fred of course, isn’t he?” Anne cried.

“That’s the point. If your mother’s cousin comes from Meridia--”

Mrs. Clephane brushed aside the possible cousin from Meridia. “Fred shall take me up,” she declared; and Anne’s smile lost its nervous edge.

“Now, is there anything else left to settle?” the girl gaily challenged her aunt; and Mrs. Drover groaned back: “Anything else? But it seems as if we’d only just begun. If it weren’t for Nollie and Lilla I shouldn’t feel sure of _anybody’s_ being at the church when the time comes....”

* * * * *

The time had almost come: the sun had risen on the day before the wedding. It rose, mounted up in a serene heaven, bent its golden arch over an untroubled indifferent world, and stooped westward in splendid unawareness. The day, so full of outward bustle, of bell-ringing, telephone calls, rushings back and forth of friends, satellites and servants, had drooped to its close in the unnatural emptiness of such conclusions. Everything was done; every question was settled; every last order given; and Anne, with a kiss for her mother, had gone off with Nollie and Joe Tresselton for one of the crepuscular motor-dashes that clear the cobwebs from modern brains.

Anne had resolutely refused to have either bridesmaids or the conventional family dinner of the bridal eve. She wanted to strip the occasion of all its meaningless formalities, and Chris Fenno was of the same mind. He was to spend the evening alone with his parents at their hotel, and Anne had invited no one but Fred Landers to dine. She had warned her mother that she might be a little late in getting home, and had asked her, in view of Mr. Landers’s excessive punctuality, to be downstairs in time to receive and pacify him.

Mrs. Clephane had seen through the simple manœuvre, and had not resented it. After all, it would be the best opportunity to tell Fred Landers what she had decided to tell him. As she sat by the drawing-room fire listening for the door-bell she felt a curious sense of aloofness, almost of pacification. It might be only the quiet of exhaustion; she half-suspected it was, but she was too exhausted to feel sure. Yet one thing was clear to her; she had suffered less savagely since she had known that Dr. Arklow had guessed what she was suffering. The problem had been almost too difficult for him; but it was enough that he had perceived its difficulty, had seen that it was too deeply rooted in living fibres to be torn out without mortal hurt.

“Sterile pain ... I should never want any one to be the cause of sterile pain....” That phrase of his helped her even now; her mind clung fast to it as she sat waiting for Landers’s ring.

It came punctually, even sooner than the hour, as Anne had foreseen; and in another moment he was advancing across the room in his slow bulky way, with excuses for his early arrival.

“But I did it on purpose. I was sure Anne would be late--”

“Anne! She isn’t even in--”

“I knew it! They’re all a pack of vagabonds. And I hoped you’d be punctual,” he continued, letting himself down into an armchair as if he were lowering a bale of goods over the side of a ship. “After all, you and I belong to the punctual generation.”

She winced a little at being so definitely relegated to the rank where she belonged. Yes: he and she were nearly of an age. She remembered, in her newly-married precocity, thinking of him as a shy shambling boy, years younger than herself. Now he had the deliberate movements of the elderly, and though he shot, fished, played golf, and kept up the activities common to his age, his mind, in maturing, had grown heavier, and seemed to have communicated its prudent motions to his body. She shut her eyes for a second from the vision. Her own body still seemed so supple, free and imponderable. If it had not been for her looking-glass she would never have known she was more than twenty.

She glanced up at the clock; a quarter to eight. Very likely Anne would not be back for another half hour. How would the evening ever drag itself to an end?

They exchanged a few words about the wedding, but the topic was intolerable to Mrs. Clephane. She had managed to face the situation as a whole: to consider its details was still beyond her. Yet if she left that subject, just beyond it lay the question her companion was waiting to ask; and that alternative was intolerable too. She got up from her seat, moved aimlessly across the room, straightened a flower in a vase, put out a superfluous wall-light.

“That’s enough illumination--at our age,” she said, coming back to her seat.

“Oh--_you_!” He threw all his unspoken worship into the word. “With that hair of yours....”

“My hair--my hair!” Her hands went up to the rich mass as if she would have liked to tear it from her head. At that moment she hated it, as she did everything else that mocked her with the barren illusion of youth.

Fred Landers had coloured to the edge of his own thin hair; no doubt he was afraid of her resenting even this expression of admiration. His embarrassment irritated yet touched her, and raising her eyes she looked into his.

“I never knew till the other day that it’s to you I owe the fact of being here,” she said.

He was evidently unprepared for this, and did not know whether to be distressed or gratified. His faint blush turned to crimson.

“To me?”

“Oh, well--I’m not sorry it should be,” she rejoined, her voice softening.

“But it’s all nonsense. Anne was determined to get you back.”

“Yes; because you told her she must. She owned up frankly. She said she wasn’t sure, at first, how the plan would work; but you were. You backed me for all you were worth.”

“Oh, if you mean that; of course I backed you. You see, she didn’t know you; and I did.”

She continued to look at him thoughtfully, almost tenderly. “Very few people have taken the trouble to care what became of me. And you hadn’t seen me for nearly twenty years.”

“No; but I remembered; and I knew you’d had a rotten bad start.”

“Lots of women have that, and nobody bothers. But you did; you remembered and you brought me here.”

She turned again, restlessly, and went and stood by the chimney-piece, resting her chin on her hand.

Landers smiled up at her, half deprecatingly. “If I did, don’t be too hard on me.”

“Why should I be? I’ve had over a year. As happiness goes, that’s a lifetime.”

“Don’t speak as if yours were over.”

“Oh, it’s been good enough to be worth while!”

He sat silent for a while, meditatively considering his honest boot-tips. At length he spoke again, in a tone of sudden authority, such as came into his voice when business matters were being discussed. “You mustn’t come back alone to this empty house.”

She looked slowly about her. “No; I never want to see this house again.”

“Where shall you go, then?”

“After tomorrow? There’s a steamer sailing for the Mediterranean the next day. I think I shall just go down and get on board.”

“Alone?”

She shed a sudden smile on him. “Will you come with me?”

At the question he sprang up out of his armchair with the headlong haste of a young man. The movement upset a little table at his elbow; but he let the table lie.

“By God, yes!” he shouted, reaching out to her with both hands.

She shrank back a little, not from reluctance but from a sense of paralyzing inadequacy. “It’s I who am old now,” she thought with a shiver.

“What--you really would come with me? The day after tomorrow?” she said.

“I’d come with you today, if there was enough of it left to get us anywhere.” He stood looking at her, waiting for her to speak; then, as she remained silent, he slowly drew back a step or two. “Kate--this isn’t one of your jokes?”

As she returned his look she was aware that her sight of him was becoming faintly blurred. “Perhaps it was, when I began. It isn’t now.” She put her hands in his.

XXVIII.

In the stillness of the sleeping house she sat up with a start, plucked out of a tormented sleep.

“But it can’t be--it can’t be--it can’t be!”

She jumped out of bed, turned on the light, and stared about her. What secret warning had waked her with that cry on her lips? She could not recall having dreamed: she had only tossed and fought with some impalpable oppression. And now, as she stood there, in that hideously familiar room, the silence went on echoing with her cry. All the excuses, accommodations, mitigations, mufflings, disguisings, had dropped away from the bare fact that her lover was going to marry her daughter, and that nothing she could do would prevent it.

A few hours ago she had still counted on the blessed interval of time, the lulling possibilities of delay. She had kissed Anne goodnight very quietly, she remembered. Then it was eleven o’clock of the night before; now it was the morning of the day. A pitch-black winter morning: there would be no daylight for another three hours. No daylight--but the Day was here!

She glanced at the clock. Half-past four. The longing seized her to go and look at Anne for the last time; but the next moment she felt that hardly a sight in the world would be less bearable.

She turned back into her room, wrapped herself in her dressing-gown, and went and sat in the window.

What did Fifth Avenue look like nowadays at half-past four o’clock of a winter morning? Much as it had when she had kept the same vigil nearly twenty years earlier, on the morning of her flight with Hylton Davies. That night too she had not slept, and for the same reason: the thought of Anne. On that other day she had deserted her daughter for the first time--and now it seemed as though she were deserting her again. One betrayal of trust had led inexorably to the other.

Fifth Avenue was much more brilliantly lit than on that other far-off morning. Long streamers of radiance floated on the glittering asphalt like tropical sea-weeds on a leaden sea. But overhead the canopy of darkness was as dense, except for the tall lights hanging it here and there with a planetary glory.

The street itself was empty. In old times one would have heard the desolate nocturnal sound of a lame hoof-beat as a market-gardener’s cart went by: they always brought out in the small hours the horses that were too bad to be seen by day. But all that was changed. The last lame horse had probably long since gone to the knacker’s yard, and no link of sound was left between the Niagara-roar of the day and the hush before dawn.

On that other morning a hansom-cab had been waiting around the corner for young Mrs. Clephane. It had all been very well arranged--Hylton Davies had a gift for arranging. His yacht was a marvel of luxury: food, service, appointments. He was the kind of man who would lean across the table to say confidentially: “I particularly recommend that sauce.” He had the soul of a club steward. It was curious to be thinking of him now....

She remembered that, as she jumped into the hansom on that fateful morning, she had thought to herself: “Now I shall never again hear my mother-in-law say: ‘I do think, my dear, you make a mistake not to humour John’s prejudices a little more’.” She had fixed her mind with intensity on the things she most detested in the life she was leaving; it struck her now that she had thought hardly at all of the life she was going to. Above all, that day, she had crammed into her head every possible thought that might crowd out the image of little Anne: John Clephane’s bad temper, his pettiness about money, his obstinacy, his obtuseness, the detested sound of his latch-key when he came home, flown with self-importance, from his club. “Thank God,” she remembered thinking, “there can’t possibly be a latch-key on a yacht!”

Now she suddenly reminded herself that before long she would have to get used to the click of another key. Dear Fred Landers! That click would symbolize all the securities and placidities: all the thick layers of affection enfolding her from loneliness, from regret, from remorse. It comforted her already to know that, after tomorrow, there would always be some one between herself and her thoughts. In that mild warmth she would bask like one of those late bunches of grapes that have just time, before they drop, to turn from sourness to insipidity.

Now again she was at the old game of packing into her mind every thought that might crowd out the thought of Anne; but her mind was like a vast echoing vault, and the thoughts she had to put into it would not have filled the palm of her hand.

Where would she and Landers live? A few months of travel, no doubt; and then--New York. Could she picture him anywhere else? Would it be materially possible for him to give up his profession--renounce “the office”? Her mind refused to see him in any other setting. And yet--and yet.... But no; it was useless to linger on that. Nothing, nothing that she could invent would crowd out the thought of Anne.

She sat in the window, and watched the sky turn from black to gray, and then to the blank absence of colour before daylight....

* * * * *

In the motor, on the way to St. Stephen’s, the silence had become oppressive, and Kate suddenly laid her hand on her daughter’s.

“My darling, I wish you all the happiness there ever was in the world--happiness beyond all imagining.”

“Oh, mother, take care! Not too much! You frighten me....” Through the white mist of tulle Kate caught the girl’s constrained smile. She had been too vehement, then? She had over-emphasized? Doubtless she would never get exactly the right note. She heard herself murmuring vaguely: “But there can’t be too much, can there?” and Anne’s answer: “Oh, I don’t know....” and mercifully that brought them to the verge of the crimson carpet and the awning.

In the vestibule of the church they were received into a flutter of family. No bridesmaids; but Fred Landers and Hendrik Drover, stationed there as participants in the bridal procession, amid a cluster of Drovers and Tresseltons who had lingered for a glimpse of the bride before making their way to the front pews. A pervading lustre of pearls and tall hats; a cloud of expensive furs, a gradual vague impression of something having possibly gone wrong, and no one wishing to be the first to suggest it. Finally Joe Tresselton approached to say in Mrs. Clephane’s ear: “He’s not here yet--”

Anne had caught the whisper. Her mother saw her lips whiten as they framed a laugh. “Chris late? How like him! Or is it that we’re too indecently punctual--?”

Oh, the tidal rush in the mother’s breast! The _Not here! Not here! Not here!_ shouted down at her from every shaft and curve of the vaulting, rained down on her from the accomplice heavens! And she had called the sky indifferent! But of course he was not here--he would not be here. She had always known that she would wear him out in the end. Her case was so much stronger than his. In a flash all her torturing doubts fell away from her.

All about her, wrist-watches were being furtively consulted. Anne stood between the groups, a pillar of snow.

“Anne always _is_ indecently punctual,” Nollie Tresselton laughed; Uncle Hendrik mumbled something ponderous about traffic obstruction. Once or twice the sexton’s black gown fluttered enquiringly out of an aisle door and back; the bridal group began to be aware of the pressure, behind them, of late arrivals checked in the doorway till the procession should have passed into the church.

Kate Clephane caught Fred Landers’s eyes anxiously fixed on her; she suspected her own of shooting out rays of triumph, and bent down hurriedly to straighten a fold of Anne’s train. _Not here! Not here! Not here!_ the sky shouted down at her. And none of them--except perhaps Anne--knew why.... Anne--yes; Anne’s suffering would be terrible. But she was young--she was young; and some day she would know what she had been saved from....

The central doors were suddenly flung open; the Mendelssohn march rolled out. Mrs. Clephane started up from her stooping posture to signal to Fred Landers that the doors must be shut.... The music stopped ... since the bridegroom was not coming.