CHAPTER V.

MAUNEY MEETS MRS. MACDOWELL.

When Mauney arrived in Lockwood, on his way home, he completed certain reflections which had occupied him most of the day by deciding not to call upon Freda. But he found that his brother William, who had driven in for him from Lantern Marsh, had still some shopping to do before returning, and he made up his mind to stroll down Queen Street East, past her home. This little walk had the effect of making him quite unhappy. First of all he passed the Armouries, which recalled his unsuccessful attempt to enlist, eight years ago. In the associations of that memory there was bitterness which still troubled him. In the second place, although he had Freda’s street number, he could not find her house until he made the enquiry of an officious nurse-maid who pushed her baby-carriage no less haughtily than she pointed out the MacDowell residence. He stood still and gazed confusedly at the high stone wall and the forbidding gateway. Was there not some mistake? He had not thought of Freda as belonging to so grand a home. His perplexity, combined with a self-conscious sense of his own ill-groomed appearance after the train journey, strengthened his determination not to call.

It was hard to forego seeing her. Her house and his clothes, however, had little to do with it. The real obstacle was Lee. Why must he consider his old friend so much? Why should Lee’s attachment to Freda, unreciprocated and hopeless, have any influence? Mauney had labored these questions all day, and he had discovered the only possible answer. It was because he himself was constituted as he was.

On his way back to meet his brother in the centre of the town, he kept rehearsing his argument. He wished that he possessed enough indifference to Lee to disregard him. The present situation was characteristic of life as he had learned to know it. Never yet had he longed greatly for anything, but he must face obstacles apparently insuperable. Just now it was his respect for Maxwell Lee that held him back. Lee had not mentioned Freda during the trip to Rockland, but then, Max never mentioned anything that he felt keenly. He even omitted to thank Mauney for his kindness in providing help at a crucial moment.

The only course that Mauney could consider was to wait for events. If Lee recovered, there would no longer be any obstacle in the path that led him to Freda. If he died, the way was even clearer. But it might be months before either fate, and, in the meantime, Mauney determined to be towards Freda friendly at most.

He had not been home many days when a letter of acceptance came from the Lockwood Board of Education, and another letter from the collegiate principal, Henry Dover, requesting an early interview. He drove to town in William’s motor-car and spent an hour with Dover at the school, gaining some idea of his work, which was to begin in September.

Then he paid a call at MacDowell’s, which he was not soon to forget. Freda’s mother answered the door and, as she heard his name, favored him with a long, rude, critical stare that gradually shaded into a supercilious smile as she turned away without a word, leaving him standing in the doorway. Freda chanced to be in the library, close enough apparently to grasp the situation, for she came out at once, speaking calmly, to be sure, but with cheeks a flaming crimson. Mauney, to whom such an encounter was a new experience, was, for a time, too stunned to talk much.

“I’ve been expecting you for days,” Freda said, leading him to the farther verandah and arranging chairs. “Sit down and rest your weary bones, won’t you? Tell me all about what you’ve been doing. Aren’t you going to talk?”

“Yes,” he replied slowly, “I expect to say a few words; but may I enquire if it was your mother who came to the door?”

“Oh, please don’t mind her, Mauney,” said Freda, awkwardly. “You see, mother is quite unreasonable about some things. I’ll explain that all, some day. Tell me—any word about the school?”

While he was talking she sat wondering what difference she noticed in him. He had altered somehow. The smile of his eyes was gone. There was something stubbornly immovable about his big body as he sat with legs crossed and arms folded on his chest, and his eyes only glanced at her before they turned away sadly, as she thought.

“Freda,” he said after a pause. “I can’t place you in this house. There’s some mistake.”

“How do you mean?” she asked with an expression of great interest.

“You won’t mind me being frank?”

“Not one particle, Mauney.”

He unfolded his arms and leaned slowly forward, rubbing his cheek with his hand.

“I never knew I could get so darned worked up over a little thing,” he said, testily. “Your mother froze me in there. I’m beginning to think, Freda, that I can feel just about as snobbish as she does.”

“You said it, Mauney,” she whispered. “I’ve no sympathy at all for her. Please try to grasp that point right now. I told her about you, and she’s just been waiting to make you feel unwelcome.”

“She’s succeeded, too.”

“She succeeds in everything, but managing me,” Freda went on warmly. “Oh, I can’t, simply can’t tell you what I’ve had to put up with, Mauney. I don’t feel one-half as much at home here as I did at Gertrude’s. Listen. My mother—and I’m sorry I have to say it—is an inexcusable snob from the word go. Her ideas aren’t any more like mine than day is like night. So you can understand why I don’t spend much time in Lockwood.”

“Are you going back to Merlton this fall?”

“I don’t know.”

Mauney regarded her in silence for a moment, as their eyes met and did not waver.

“My God, Freda, you’re a comfort,” he said suddenly. With a little laugh he rose and picked up his hat from the table. “I’ve got to be going.”

“And don’t forget,” she said, as she walked beside him to the car, “that there will be somebody here waiting to see you again, soon.”

“I’m not likely to forget it,” he said, giving her arm a gentle pinch. “The fact is, nothing else much suits me, but being around where you are.”

That evening, after Freda had washed the dinner dishes, she remained thoughtfully busy in the kitchen. Presently her mother, as she had been expecting, came out to prepare some grape-fruit for the breakfast, and incidentally, to pass a few remarks about Mauney. She had sunk the blade of her knife into the green fruit before she glanced up to behold Freda, who, in accordance with old custom, was sitting perched on the back of a kitchen chair with her feet resting on its seat. With a thin sigh that expressed her disapproval of the posture, Mrs. MacDowell took up a pair of scissors and proceeded with her work.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” she commenced, in a delicately scornful tone, “that this Bard person is a rather stiffish youth?”

“He’s stiffish all right enough, Mother,” said Freda with an amused chuckle. “I used to always fall for the foppish variety, didn’t I? But I’m getting old, and my taste in men is changing.”

“I’m not so sure, but that he’s related to the Bards of Beulah, who bring turnips to the market,” submitted her mother, calmly, as she snipped away with her scissors.

“I imagine you’re quite right,” Freda said. “Mauney has hoed ’em himself lots of times, and is proud of it.”

“He seems to have practically no social address, no ease of manner.”

“I fancy he’ll carry away an equal contempt for yours. Was that your highest code of manners you were practising on him? As for social address—you’re right. He wasn’t around when they were handing that stuff out. He has never had his spine manicured!”

“Spine!” Mrs. MacDowell scoffed very gently. “What a delightful Franklin Street vocabulary you have acquired! As long as I care to remember, you have never been willing to listen to a word from me.”

“Well, Mother, you never said a word that appealed to me. That’s why.”

Freda rapped with her toes in an aggravating tattoo on the chair seat, and then began teetering back and forth in such a way that the front legs kept dropping noisily against the floor. Mrs. MacDowell worked on quietly for a few moments.

“Freda,” she said at length, without looking up, “I sincerely wish that you, some time or other, will gratify a long-cherished desire of mine by falling flat off that confounded chair.”

“And cracking my skull, I suppose,” added Freda, the meanwhile balancing skilfully on the two back legs. “Well, this is my favorite sport, and it’s worth a skull any time. Do you know, Mother, I’ve a good notion not to go back to Merlton this fall.”

Mrs. MacDowell did not at once reply.

“That is almost the brightest idea that has emerged from your skull since you came home,” she said presently, in a tone of sarcasm. “How would you propose to amuse yourself in Lockwood?”

“I could get a job as private secretary to Ted Courtney. Ted needs somebody to help him look after his money. I was talking to him on the street last night, and asked him if he could give me a job. He jumped right at the idea like a bulldog. Says he’s needed some one for a long time, and, I may say, he offers me a splendid proposition. I said I’d have to take a few days to consider it.”

Mrs. MacDowell gazed on Freda with the expression of one who has learned by experience to credit even the most preposterous of her daughter’s statements. “I trust,” she interrupted seriously, “that there is no truth in what you are saying.”

“Get me a Bible, then,” replied Freda. “I suppose the idea of me working for a Courtney is about the same to you, Mother, as a long drink of twenty percent. Paris Green.”

“Why, it’s so absurd!” mused Mrs. MacDowell, “so utterly absurd!”

“You mean humiliating, don’t you?” asked Freda, tapping thoughtfully now with her toes. “There used to be a time when social position depended on brains, ability, blood, and such personal things. That’s so long ago that Herodotus would have to scratch his dome to remember it. Right now, it depends on how one’s daughter spends her time. If I could float around in a new Packard roadster with a Pekinese pup sitting on a blue cushion beside me, why your dear, old prestige would be as safe as the Bank of England. But I’ve got imbued, Mother, with the thoroughly low-brow idea that a woman of my age—of any age for that matter—is better when she’s at work.”

“And I’m quite sure,” said Mrs. MacDowell, with considerable emphasis, “that your reason for wishing to stay in Lockwood is merely to be near our young turnip-digger.”

Freda’s face flushed, but she disregarded the reference. “I shouldn’t be at all surprised, Mother,” she replied with a growing warmth, “if that had something to do with it. But there is also another reason. I’ve just simply ached, these last six years, to enjoy a little home life, undisturbed, and you’ve given me no chance. I come home and all the time either you are away off somewhere, or else so surrounded by a bunch of darned fools that I never see you.”

“That’s _quite_ enough!” commanded Mrs. MacDowell. “Surely you’re growing irresponsible.”

Freda’s face was crimson and her eyes flashing with a dangerous light. She tried to swallow something that stuck in her throat. Her mother knew these symptoms well enough. They meant rage. They meant that Freda must be left alone for the balance of the evening.

Several minutes after Mrs. MacDowell had gone her husband sauntered into the kitchen, to find his daughter sitting in the same position, but with her face in her hands.

“You women folk astonish me,” he laughed. “There’s nothing in it, Freda; nothing in it. Your mother is a Smith, remember. Enough said. She’s different. There’s nothing in it at all, by gad!”