Part 5

“I? Nonsense! But I ought to get her away from here. She could pull together faster in the country. That is to say, if she ever has strength enough to be moved. And there are the boys. I’m beginning to think this is no locality for them to grow up in. If I toss a pebble over the wall there it will land square in the melting pot--perhaps on some anarchist’s head who will throw a bomb at me one of these days.”

“It’s extraordinary how well Trezevant has held its own. There seems to be a spirit in the place that won’t allow it to be tainted.”

“Tainted enough by coal smoke!” he retorted. “Spirits won’t stop that. I’d really like to get out, way out. Not just to follow the crowd, as they say, but we’ve never had a satisfactory country place, and I’ve come to think you can’t unless you make it a life accomplishment.”

“A life is hardly enough, my dear brother,” replied Mrs. Seymour. “Trezevant is the accomplishment of three generations.”

“Bah!” he replied, good-humouredly, “we’re not the slow coaches we used to be. You can get twice as much done these days in a third of the time.”

“Well, at any rate, it’s unpractical now,” she replied, and he recognized the finality of her tone.

Blaydon smoked his cigar in silence, while she finished her second black coffee and leaned back in her chair swinging a tiny foot of which she was proud. In the shimmering, palpable light, shot with many colours, Mathilda’s face and hair were still amazingly pretty. There were many who would have accepted the kind of slavery that marriage with her would have entailed, and some among them who had no need for her money. But she was not thinking of that. The arts of vanity had ceased to be a conscious lure; they were the essentials of well-bred self-cultivation. She had accepted her widowhood as the final failure of man, so far as she was concerned. It had been a romantic love match, ecstatic but unhappy, the kind that she fancied exhausted the capacity for passion; and now her thoughts ran upon the future of her brother’s household. For if Blaydon entertained any illusions about the possibility of his wife’s recovery, Mathilda did not.

She had long held certain opinions regarding Jennie, which were not shared by the outside world. One of them was that her brother had never loved her, that he had found this out almost immediately after marrying, and determined to live the thing through because of his old-fashioned loyalty. Mathilda had quite certain knowledge that in the midst of the honeymoon he had rushed away and stayed several days. She knew it had been his hour of terrible trial, his angry realization of having made the first major mistake of his life, and made it in full maturity. His sister was proud of him for remaining a tree of marriage in a clearing of divorce stumps--for such their social world was rapidly becoming.

But her theory was that Jennie had never forgiven him, never in a sense recovered from it. She had welcomed her children in order the more to seal up the truth from others; but she had borne them late, and the birth of the second son, Robert, had doomed her to physical helplessness.

This theory explained to Mathilda every peculiarity of Mrs. Blaydon’s character, every inexplicable episode which had occurred in the house since she had joined them. Jennie had never liked her; perhaps suspected that she knew her secret. Part of Jennie’s satisfaction in having the children was that they would help her to dominate her sister-in-law and the household, in the rôle of mother. As adversaries they had a healthy respect for each other. But Jennie’s sustained firmness of will was less effective than Mathilda’s, because it was less charming and less hidden. Luck was simply against Jennie. It was Mathilda who would win and then (though Blaydon did not know she had thought much about it) they would go to the country. Naturally this would be their first move. It was inevitable because it was the thing that people of their sort were doing, and because automobiles had made it feasible.

As though she felt that she might hint some of this that was in her mind, she broke the silence.

“Speaking of the country, I’ve had my eye for a long time on those tracts in the Errant River hills, where the McNutts have bought.”

Sterling Blaydon slowly took his cigar from his mouth and smiled. Like all men of means he liked to have opportunities to display his foresight presented to him without going out of his way to invite them.

“Well then, you’ve had your eye on what will in all probability be your future home. I’ve been picking up that land right along. I’ve got about three hundred acres of it. Moreover, though the Country Club site committee hasn’t decided officially yet, I know for a fact they are going to take the contiguous property. It’s cheap enough just now, and the club isn’t lavish.”

He was fully satisfied with the glance of admiration Mathilda gave him.

“Why, Sterling,” she said, “how long have you been at that?”

“Since a little while after Hal was born. I got to thinking then this wouldn’t do.”

“Well, it never occurred to me until this year.”

He rose, stretching to his full height to shake the indolence from his body.

“I’ve even got an architect to work. But I dare say you’re right and we can’t think about it yet. I certainly can’t drag Jennie through a radical change like that, and I haven’t even told her for fear it would fret her. But the moment she’s better--You don’t say whether you would really like it or not, Mathilda.”

“Certainly I shall like it, dear boy.”

He went off humming to his wife’s room, before going out. He was, Mathilda thought, more attentive to her than many an enamoured husband, and she admired him for it.

The idea of moving to the country at first frightened Ellen, with that pitiful fear which all dependents have of impending change. What will become of them, they ask themselves, in the general forgetfulness?--and a hundred misgivings and imagined instances of dissatisfaction on the part of their masters throng their minds.

But had she felt secure it would have pleased her. The old house was too formal, too heavy with the fragrances and lingering stiffness of a past day. She could never quite grow to like the eternal quiet. A hearty clattering now and then would have relieved her pent-up vitality. She would have liked, just once in a long, long while to listen to one of Tom Meadowburn’s stories, or hear Bennet shouting in the back yard.

VIII

But Mrs. Blaydon grew neither better nor worse and they remained at Trezevant Place. And when Moira was a year and a half old a fresh sorrow visited her mother. So rapid and unforeseen were the steps by which it came that Ellen scarcely realized what was happening.

To her, indeed, the child seemed to acquire new marvels of goodness and beauty every day, but she imagined it was only her mother’s pride that made her think so. She was not the sort who would boast of the deeds of her offspring.

Then she grew aware that others shared her interest. More and more, in particular, she found the child, when she came to look for her, in the company of Aunt Mathilda, even in that lady’s arms, most happily at home and warmly welcome.

“It is going to be very improving for Moira,” was her thought, and she realized with a pang that she had been reading Hugo’s book for more than a year now, and was not yet halfway through it.

Mrs. Seymour’s brother was among those who noticed her partiality for the baby.

“Look,” she said to him one day, with enthusiasm, holding out one of the child’s tiny pink hands, “how remarkably made they are. She’s the same all over. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a perfect baby.”

Blaydon laughed, thereby eliciting a brilliant response in kind from Moira. The vibrations of his big voice had tickled her young flesh.

“Well, Mathilda, the broadest road to your heart is still a pair of hands. I remember your telling me that poor old Ned first got you with his.”

“Hands and feet,” she replied. “I don’t mind anything else but they ought to be beautiful.”

A few days afterward he came upon her in the garden, again with Ellen’s daughter.

“Que voulez-vous,” she was saying, “que voulez-vous, ma p’tite? Voulez-vous maman?”

The soft syllables seemed to please Moira’s ears, for she was mirthfully bubbling things that sounded not unlike them. As Blaydon stepped out he thought his sister a little apologetic, but she did not put down the child.

“The little thing wandered out here while I was reading,” she said. “She quite seems to follow me about.”

“You don’t find it annoying?” he asked.

Her reply served notice upon him that she had caught his note of irony.

“Oh, no.... I’m not such a busy woman as all that.”

He glanced at the book she had been reading. It lay flung face downward with both backs spread out on the table, “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard.” Blaydon recalled the story and somehow connected it in his mind with his sister’s essential solitude--her dependence upon his own family for affection.

“I suppose,” he pursued, the thought forming suddenly from nowhere, “that you are going to adopt her?”

Mathilda looked up sharply. She pretended to detect in his words more of approval than of inquiry and replied as though he had offered a suggestion.

“You’re not serious, Sterling?”

Blaydon’s intuition surprised him. He had struck fire, where hardly more than a joke had been intended.

“Why not?” he asked, with a good-natured shrug.

“It seems cruel, somehow,” she replied. Her tone was as detached as though she had said, “it seems too green,” of a dress-cloth.

“I can’t quite see that. Mothers are proverbially unselfish--”

“She would have to be brought up with your boys, Sterling. Have you thought of that?”

He had not thought of that and there was more to Mathilda’s remark than banter. As if to influence his reply, the youngest boy, Robert, three and a half, scampered past them and climbed upon a favourite seat, between two clipped boxwood trees, chattering to himself and grinning across at his father as if to say, “I dare you to come and get me!” But Blaydon ignored him for the moment. He did not know that Mathilda’s mind had gone all over this matter of adoption, and that the question she had just put to him, in spite of its unconcerned air, was really a crucial one with her. Upon his feeling about it would depend a great deal, yet this did not imply that she felt herself bound to accept his decisions. There were scores of things that she might do if the whim possessed her, in spite of him. Blaydon was aware of this, and though he did not know how much she had thought about the child, he was inclined toward caution. She was a good sister--a better mother, he honestly believed, for his children than their own.... When he answered it was with a laugh that had the effect upon Mathilda of some one opening a door she wanted to go through.

“Well, I don’t know,” he went on, slowly. “I suppose that Ellen is a fixture anyhow, and young cubs are more likely to fall in love with a really beautiful Cinderella than just a handsome cousin. That is if the child is beautiful. How on earth can you tell anything about them at that age?”

“You can tell the day after they are born,” snapped back Mrs. Seymour. “I would venture to sit down and write the lives of your two sons to-day, and I shouldn’t be far from the truth, barring death and accidents.”

“So?” he asked, “and have I anything to fear?”

“Oh, no, they’ll come back to the fold, even as you did!”

Her look was one of benevolent sarcasm and he grinned. There were many things worse to remember than the pretty women of his younger days. But he had come back to the fold ... that was true, and it was not so pleasant after all. Change would be kind. He reached over and touched the blond head of his boy, who was sitting on the tiles now at his feet.

“Poor old Rob, she’s got you catalogued,” he said, and the talk of adoption stopped. Neither of them had taken it seriously--Jennie, unmentioned, remained insurmountable. But Mathilda had entered her wedge, without an effort. Being intensely feminine, circumstances moved toward her, not she toward them, an achievement that resulted from indicating definitely first, then vaguely opposing, everything she wanted.

Blaydon lifted his boy to his shoulder and walked through the house to the drawing room windows. He talked little more than monosyllabically to his children and had a great way of stilling their excited glee, when he wanted to, by the tone of his voice. As they stood at the window he wished that his gaze could go on over rolling hills to the horizon. He wanted these boys to grow up with horses and vigorous sports; to see them framed against green earth and wide skies. He wanted them to draw in their early appreciations from the bare soil of their own land. Somehow that now appeared to him a spiritual necessity of which he had had too little himself, and it was the leading ambition that possessed him after a life of sophisticated pleasure.

A week later Mrs. Blaydon died. It was as though the new direction of their thoughts had penetrated to her intuitively and left her without strength to battle further.

It was not long before Blaydon felt free to go ahead with his plans. But the speed with which Mathilda proceeded to execute hers surprised and even shocked him. She did not go directly to Ellen. Instead she consulted Dr. Schottman, and readily gained his partisanship. It was from Schottman that Ellen first heard of Aunt Mathilda’s intentions toward Moira....

For the life of her she could not tell at first whether she was happy or miserable at the suggestion. In one moment she rejoiced over the good fortune of her daughter; in the next she experienced a sense of terrible deprivation and loneliness. She was not so sentimental as to minimize the extent of her renunciation--to hope that some crumbs from the table of Moira’s affection would fall to her. It meant a thorough transfer of parenthood and a ruthless blotting out of the truth. One of Mrs. Seymour’s reasons for adopting the child at once, as she explained to Schottman, was that the boys were young enough to grow up none the wiser. Ellen did not deceive herself. Moira would never know her, never think of her except as a servant.

She recalled sorrowfully the two happy prospects she had brought with her into that house, “Moira will love me when she is grown up, and we will do so many nice things together,” and “Who knows, some day Moira may have a father....” But Moira would never have a real father now through her, and Moira would never love her in the sense she had meant. A gleam of comfort crept in the chinks of her hopeless speculation.

“If Moira should learn about this, much, much later--years later when it could do no harm--about how I have given her up, she would love me all the more!”

But the stray gleam crept out at once, leaving her mind darker than before. Moira would never know, never understand anything of all she had gone through. She buried her face in the pillow. In the middle of the night she suddenly started up, feeling frantically about the room for she knew not what. Was it affection, love, just the touch of something familiar? For Moira, of course ... but what a fool! Moira was gone, even the crib was gone. She was alone, absolutely alone, for the rest of her life.

As she stumbled back to her bed, her hand encountered the big volume of “Les Misérables.” She caught it up and held it to her breast. The book had grown to be a symbol for her of their life together in fabulous years to come. Now those years were dead. The book was no longer necessary, no longer had any meaning.... Ellen put it away in one of the drawers of her bureau. She would never have to read in its pages again. It would be better if she did not, better that the gulf between them should widen rather than diminish.

IX

It is four o’clock of a September afternoon and brightly still. Over on the clean rolling golf course tiny figures in all combinations of white and grey and brown move like insects soundlessly from one point to another making odd motions. Even the jays which have been haggling and shrieking all day are quiet. An occasional tree-toad or katydid creaks from the false dusk of the Eastern woods. Locusts drone, and from a long way off comes the faint click of a reaping machine at intervals, but all these sounds only accentuate the silence. An eternal, slow-breathing calm rests upon the treetops waiting patiently for the cold of autumn.

With a murmur that grows into a rumble the stillness is broken by a monstrous motor truck which swerves into the driveway from the road a quarter of a mile away and comes tumbling down the white track, its racket increasing with its nearness. The driver noisily shunts his gears at the kitchen door, and Ellen Sydney comes out to superintend the unloading and disposition of supplies. This done and the truckman sent away with a laugh, she strolls into the garden on that side of the house and is presently at work with a pair of shears snipping asters and marigolds for the table. There are many of them, so many they must be gathered in profusion. She has the air of one who is at home among the beds, who has worked on them and cherished them with her own hands.

She is a handsomer woman than before. Her figure has decidedly taken on dignity, and the colour of her face is a healthy brown pink. Her cheeks, thanks to the best skill of the Blaydon dentist, have lost their sunken hollows and her eyes have deepened from the effect of well-being and contented activity. She bears herself with some authority too, having taken a favoured place in her division of the housework. Her hair is greying very slightly over the ears and temples, but her step is as quick and her back as straight as a girl’s. She wears a blue uniform with sleeves rolled up and a white apron.

As she reaches the entrance portico, her arms overflowing with the yellow and brown and purple flowers, a little girl of six or so with dark hair bursts from the screen door.

“Ellney, Ellney. Give me a cookie. I’m hungry.”

“Can’t you wait till dinner, Miss Moira? Your mother wouldn’t like it.”

“Oh, what’s one cookie? _Maman_ won’t mind just one.”

“She will if she finds out, and if you don’t eat your dinner. It’s me that will get the lecture, not you!”--and with a look backward into the past, Ellen thinks of a boy who was once always asking for something to eat. The boy’s face has so dimmed in her mind now that if there is a resemblance she does not notice it.

“_Maman_ shan’t lecture you, Ellney. I shan’t ever let her lecture you.”

Ellen laughs, not only at what Moira says, but at the way she says it. She cannot ever get over the fact that her own child--who is now no longer her child--speaks the King’s English quite as carefully as her well-bred elders, and has adopted an air of superiority in her own right. But in Ellen’s laughter there is no ridicule. It is the sheer pleasure of maternal pride. Does not Moira, they say, speak French almost as well as English?

“You little darling,” she cries, stooping and endeavouring to take the child’s hand in spite of her overflowing burden, “I’ll give you just one.”

“No, two, Ellney--but one is for Hal, on my word. Isn’t it funny, he’s afraid to ask!”

Ellen thought there never had been a child whose laughter was more like everything good and who laughed more often than Moira....

* * * * *

Turning in from the Marquette road to Sterling Blaydon’s new country house, “Thornhill” as they called it, a visitor with a sculptor’s eye might describe the formation of the land as the huge thigh of a woman, resting horizontally on the earth. The private driveway ran along the crest which sloped on both sides downward to gentle valleys, while the whole ridge tapered in width gradually to a round end or knee on which rested the house in a semi-circle of green. Beyond the house lay a few hundred feet of clipped lawn and well spaced trees, and then the Titan calf plunged into the earth, its declivitous sides covered with exposed rock and a thick undergrowth of every imaginable scrub and bramble, with a plentiful scattering of dogwood and plumb and thorn. It was holy with blossoms in the Spring, beginning with the ghostly shad-bush. The edge of the hill overlooked a broad meadow fifty yards below, as flat as a lake.

Spread out in three directions from this crowning point lay Blaydon’s land, perhaps a third of it in rocky knolls and wood, and the remainder under cultivation by tenant farmers. The driveway to the site led almost due west but the axis of the house itself, which was narrow and long despite its irregularities, turned toward the south. It was built to the shingle eaves of rubble-rock and dominated at either end by two enormous chimneys of the same gorgeous, parti-coloured material, all of which had been found on the place. Broad verandahs, a wide, tiled terrace reached by French windows; a quaint Dutch Colonial door and portico facing the road; screened balconies skilfully masked by the eaves; the great living and dining rooms and library which took up almost all of the lower floor; the correspondingly spacious chambers overhead, attested its inhabitants’ means and love of comfort. The entrance lawn and slopes to the north were laid out in series of irregular, charming gardens. On the southeast the hill descended almost horizontally from the tiled and parapeted terrace near the house, so that from the living room windows one looked through the tops of trees to the Country Club on another hill less than a mile away.

With greater spaces had come more movement, more things to be interested in, more excitement and sound, all of which Ellen had welcomed. She meddled in everything. She had become a creditable sub-assistant gardener and something of a bee-keeper, having watched the professionals at work. The four dogs were her especial care. Two were morbidly shy collies called “Count” and “Countess” by Mathilda, and Ellen won the privilege of touching their magnificent coats and standing by while they fed, only after many months of gentleness and coaxing. They seldom allowed the other members of the household to come near them and ran wild in the woods. On the other hand the beagle and setter were almost annoyingly chummy. The animals in the stable had their daily histories also, which concerned her intimately. She was a splendid milker in emergencies and would have liked to keep fowls, but this Mathilda, who respected sleep in the mornings, would not permit.

Of the two boys in the house, Hal, nine and a half, was the keener-witted and the more attractive. He was already at home among the horses and rode bare-back as well as in the saddle. She often felt sorry for Rob, who was left behind much of the time by his older brother and the swift, tiny Moira, but she did not humour him as much as she did Hal.

It was Hal, however, who had ridden a cow so successfully one day that Moira pleaded to be helped up herself, and whether the beast thought her a less formidable antagonist, or was frightened by her skirts, the little girl was thrown off and severely jolted. Hal supported her into the house, himself more frightened than she, and vowed to his aunt solemnly that from that day he would never lead her into danger again, and if she got into it he would get her out. Yet she and the boy quarrelled too and sometimes went for days without speaking. Moira would take up with Rob then, scheming with all her mind to devise adventures that would make his brother envious. She often succeeded in these stratagems, until a time came when he did not concern himself with her at all, being grown beyond little girls.