III
There was the strangeness of a dream about it. Madeline Holland stood there and smiled and chatted with her guests, and nobody looked at her curiously, nobody suspected her anguish. It was incredible, inhuman, unreal.
There was a slight confusion in the hall. Looking across the crowded room, she saw the chauffeur and another young fellow bringing down Joyce’s trunks to the car that waited outside. It was over. Joyce was married—only it didn’t seem real yet.
Even in the church it hadn’t seemed real. Madeline had been preoccupied, distrait, her mind filled with the stupidest little thoughts. The caterer’s men had been a little late. No one had remembered to thank old Mrs. Marriott for her candlesticks, and she looked affronted. Would Hilda be sure to stitch the collar and cuffs on that jersey dress before she packed it?
There was Frank standing before the altar; and he and Joyce and Nick all looked so strange, so pale, so grave, so unfamiliar. Joyce’s veil was a little too long. It was the veil that Madeline had worn at her own wedding, but the fashion had changed so!
No, the whole thing hadn’t been real. It was a dream, like all these last days, when she had gone shopping with Joyce, when people had always been coming and going in the house, and presents arriving, with such a queer, excited sort of gayety in the air, and so much to be done. There had been no time to think.
She wasn’t really thinking now—only waiting, in a daze, for that last moment which she knew she could not endure. The perfume of the roses made her feel a little faint. There were roses everywhere, the breeze from the open windows made a soft stir among them, and the petals floated down silently upon the carpet.
The big dining room had lost its look of solemn formality. It was thronged with people, and filled with the sound of gay, light voices and little muffled clinkings of silver on china. When a lull came in the talk, Mrs. Holland could hear the familiar noises of the city streets, of daily life going on out there in the heat and dust of the June day. Unreal, all of it!
She remembered a children’s party, here in this very room, years and years ago, yet a hundred times more real than this. It was a dreadful failure, for Joyce had been the worst of young hostesses—such an absurd, impulsive little thing! She had devoted herself entirely to a rather obnoxious little girl with blond pigtails and a smug face. She had neglected all her other guests, even quarreling with them in defense of this idolized creature; and afterward she had been so sorry. She had knelt in her mother’s lap, with tears running down her flushed face into Mrs. Holland’s neck, and their arms clasped tight about each other.
“It’s so—so awful hard to be polite!” Joyce had sobbed.
But really it wasn’t. Mrs. Holland found it easy enough to be polite, even cheerful, with that last moment drawing nearer and nearer. Mrs. Marriott was giving her an account of her grandson’s wedding in California.
“In a bower of roses!” concluded the old lady, with a triumphant glance at Mrs. Holland’s mere bowls and jars.
“That must have been very pretty,” said Mrs. Holland.
“It was beautiful!” the old lady corrected her, rather severely.
She went on talking, but Mrs. Holland no longer heard her, for some one had touched the piano in the drawing-room—a little chain of arpeggios like a sweet and drawling voice. It hurt her to hear it, for she did not want any one else to touch that piano. She remembered Joyce, so straight and correct, her long braid hanging down her back, playing her new pieces for her mother and father. Such funny, sprightly[Pg 412] pieces they were—“The Bullfrogs’ Carnival,” “The Elfin Schottische,” “Romping in the Barn”; and so earnestly, so heavily, so determinedly were they played by the blunt little fingers!
No, that surely was not Joyce’s touch. Madeline wanted to know who it could be, sitting there in Joyce’s place.
Skillfully she maneuvered the talkative old lady to the center of the room, where she could look through the open doorway into the drawing-room, and there she saw her—a little blond creature with the fragile figure of a child. She was a pretty girl, very young, and a little pitiful in her flimsy silk dress, sleeveless and short-skirted; but Mrs. Holland saw no pathos in her at that minute, for Frank Holland was standing beside her, looking down at her with an air of bland indulgence.
The blond girl touched the keys again, and then she raised her eyes to Frank’s face with a languishing smile. She spoke, and he raised his hand to his mustache with that familiar gesture.
“He’s flattered!” thought Mrs. Holland.
She forgot all about Mrs. Marriott, and stood staring over the old lady’s head at the pitiful scene—Frank so pleased and flattered by that silly, vulgar little thing.
“Madeline,” said old Mrs. Marriott, “who’s that young woman talking to Frank? I never set eyes on her before.”
“She’s poor Stella’s daughter,” replied Mrs. Holland. “I thought I ought to ask them.”
“Humph!” said the old lady thoughtfully. “Stella here?”
“No—only the girl.”
“Humph!” said the old lady again, and was silent.
She remembered Stella very well—a cousin of Madeline’s, a pale, silent girl, mulishly obstinate, who had taken a fancy to a man against whom all her family and her friends had warned her. She had been bent upon marrying him, had married him, and had vanished into a forlorn limbo.
“And that’s her child,” observed old Mrs. Marriott. “A saucy chit, I should call her!”
“Mother!” said a voice beside Madeline, and she looked up to see Joyce’s husband.
It was the first time he had ever called her that, and in her heart she winced at the word on his lips. It was hard for him to say it—she could see that. His honest young face had flushed, and his voice was not very steady. He was a little in awe of the grave and quiet Mrs. Holland, and yet he was doggedly determined to say what he wanted to say.
“I’ll—I’ll do my best,” he said. “She’s so fond of you, and she’s always been so happy with you, but I—I’ll try to make her happy. I’ll—”
Mrs. Holland held out her hand, and he seized it in a nervous grasp.
“There’s no reason in the world why you shouldn’t both be very happy, dear boy,” she said earnestly. “You’re both—”
She stopped, because Joyce had come. The last minute was here. She looked at her daughter, but that beloved and wonderful face swam in a haze before her.
“Mother!” cried Joyce. “Oh, mother!”
She threw her arms about her mother, and for a moment they clung to each other, forgetting everything else in the world. Mrs. Holland felt her child’s tears warm on her cheek, felt the poor, eager young heart beat against her own. This was the last moment—and she could endure it. Shaken by a tenderness that was anguish, she could think quite clearly, could tell herself that her feeling was wrong, could detach herself from those clinging arms.
“This will never do!” she cried. “We mustn’t be so silly, must we?”
Her steady, smiling eyes were fixed upon her child. There was not the faintest shadow on her face, not the least tremor in her voice. There was nothing in her heart but the one passionate wish that Joyce should go away untroubled and happy, to begin her new life.
For a moment Joyce wavered, ready to fly once more into those faithful arms. Then, with a laugh that was half a sob, she gave her mother one more kiss—and was gone.
Mrs. Holland went out with the others and stood on the top step in a cheerful, excited group. As Joyce leaned out of the car, her mother had a last glimpse of her face, her eyes soft with tears, a trembling smile on her lips. Then the car started. Everything was over. Joyce was gone.