II
Hilda was serving breakfast in the basement dining room this morning, leaving the upper floor to the caterer’s men. That basement room had not been used since Joyce was a small girl and Mrs. Holland a young and very anxious mother. She had had no one to help her then except Hilda, and Hilda couldn’t be expected to go up and down stairs with the dishes.[Pg 410]
How different it had all been in those days—such a busy, eager sort of life, with herself and Hilda always doing something for the baby! She remembered other sunny mornings like this, and both of them in the kitchen, Hilda ironing little white dresses, while she prepared barley water for the precious bottles. Now there was a cook in the kitchen; a competent woman, but a trifle forbidding—a stranger, not a friend like Hilda. Everything was changed.
Frank was sitting at the table, a newspaper propped up before him.
“Oh, hello, Madeline!” he said with a vague sort of amiability. “How’s everything going, eh?”
“All right, thank you, Frank,” she replied, quietly.
As she sat down, he put aside the newspaper; but, after all, he found nothing to say. All he could think of this morning was Joyce, and he was afraid to mention her.
“Might upset Madeline,” he thought.
To be sure, it was a good many years since he had seen his wife at all upset. A quiet and dignified woman, she was, never at a loss; but this morning there was something about her that disquieted him.
“I remember how it used to be,” he thought, “when Joyce was a baby. That time when there was a blizzard, and the milkman didn’t come—Lord, she was almost wild! I had to go out in the storm to see what I could do. Couldn’t get milk anywhere, and I didn’t dare to go home and tell her so.”
He smiled a little at the memory of that very good-natured young husband, struggling through the blizzard in a vain search for milk. In the end he had gone to their family doctor. The doctor had laughed at him and told him to use condensed milk, and had written down directions on a piece of paper. Then Frank had gone home to find them all crying—Madeline and Hilda and the baby.
Mrs. Holland saw her husband’s smile, and it did not please her. It was so easy for Frank to smile, so easy for his nimble mind to turn away from anything disagreeable and go off upon another tack! She knew very well that his heart ached at the thought of losing Joyce. He had suffered and would suffer from that; but he could forget for a time, and she could not.
He had always been like that. There was gray in his hair, and he had grown much stouter—a big man, a handsome, jovial sort of Porthos, in place of the slender and romantic young fellow he had been; but he was changed in no other way. As he smiled, he had raised his hand to his mustache in a gesture that was familiar to her. It meant that something had amused him. He was not thinking about Joyce, because that would disturb him, and he did not like to be disturbed.
“Oh, life’s too short to worry!” he was fond of saying.
Sometimes the anxious young mother had found consolation in that debonair phrase, but to-day it seemed heartless and false. Life too short? It was the monstrous length of life that appalled her now. Twenty years more to her allotted span—twenty years, and they might be all empty, all useless.
Her divinely appointed work in the world had been to bear and to rear her child, and now it was done. Joyce was going away to a new life of her own in a distant city, and she no longer needed her mother. Nobody needed Madeline Holland any more—certainly not Frank. He loved her, but he was a remarkably independent creature, quite sufficient unto himself in his own cheerful fashion.
She looked across the table at him. He was a little downcast for the moment, but as he caught her eye he smiled. He had finished his breakfast. He rose, came round the table to her, and laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Well, old girl!” he said. “Here we are, eh? Day’s come at last! Thing is, she’s got a good man—fine fellow. She’ll be happy, eh?”
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Holland.
But her own words and her husband’s words had no meaning at all this morning. She had always hoped that Joyce would marry. Nick was a dear boy, and Joyce would be happy with him. If Joyce were happy, she, too, ought to be happy.
“Only—oh, I’m a selfish woman!” she thought. “A selfish, selfish woman! For I can’t be happy—not without my child, my baby, my one child. I don’t want to live without my child!”
Frank was speaking. She did not hear his words, for his voice sounded faint and far off, but she was grateful to him for his kindliness, and she looked up into his face with a smile.
He patted her shoulder.
“I know, old girl, I know,” he said.[Pg 411] “I’m sorry! Well, I’ll be off, now—some things to see about.”
She heard him go out of the room, and heard his heavy tread on the stairs. Halfway up the flight he stopped, and struck a match, and the scent of tobacco smoke drifted down to her. He had “things to see about”—he had his business, his many friends, his club. His life would go on as usual, but hers was ended. Her work was done.
She got up and crossed the room to the battered old high chair that had been Joyce’s. For a moment she thought she would sink on her knees before it, press her lips against the rung where scuffling little feet had worn away the paint, close her eyes, and let the black and bitter tide of pain close over her head; but the hour had not come yet. Joyce still needed her for a few hours more.