XIV A Broken Axle
I
Late Thursday afternoon Mrs. Trench crossed the lawn with tottering steps. She looked incredibly old, with the bloodless lips and the greenish pallor of her sunken cheeks. “No wonder her children are temperamental,” Judith thought, remembering the crispness of her step and the full flush of her dark skin as she crossed that same stretch of grass the previous evening, the plate of rolls in her hand. She came now with no offering of good will. There was set purpose in her eyes. And her mouth ... Judith wondered how she could have thought Eileen’s mouth looked like that. A sleepless night and the bald revelation of Calvin Stone’s sorrow—discussed at the luncheon table as the Bromfield paper was handed about—had reduced her resistive power to its lowest point. When her life stream was full, she had little difficulty concealing the slimy bed of her being. But now, with all her animation ebbed away, she groped within her own turbid depths, blinded by resentment and self-pity until even prudence forsook her. In any other state of mind, she would not have flung down the gauntlet to the one woman on whom she must depend for the furthering of her plans.
“Mrs. Ascott, would you mind going inside? I can’t stand this sunshine. I never could see why David put a door in the west side of this summer house, where the afternoon sun can shine right in your face. But David always bungles things.”
“You are ill. I am so sorry.”
“It’s nothing. I’ll be myself after I’ve had a night’s rest. The fact is, I want to have a plain talk with you.” Judith led the way to the library. With rigid lips, that marred her usual sharp enunciation, she began bluntly. “I feel that it’s my Christian duty to tell you some nasty truths about that Mrs. Nims.”
“Village gossip. I’m sure, Mrs. Trench, I’m not in the least interested.”
An ugly purplish red crept along Lavinia’s corded neck and up over the cheeks to the line of straight black hair.
“But you and Eileen are planning all sorts of intimacy—musical trio with you at the piano, playing accompaniments for the violin and ’cello—and Larimore and his father are terribly vexed. Of course you couldn’t be expected to know anything about the woman ... being a newcomer in the town. And you couldn’t know how important it is to me, right now, not to have my husband displeased.”
It transpired that Eileen had talked too much, at breakfast, that morning ... too many details of her call at the Marksleys’ home, the play the Dramatic Club was putting on, for the benefit of the laboratory fund, in which Hal Marksley had to kiss her, beneath the pale glow of a marvellously devised stage moon.
“The trio was only a tentative suggestion. If Mr. Trench—”
“It isn’t so much his opposition as Larimore’s. He never had any use for the Marksley family—and this big competition coming on. Villa residence, keeper’s lodge, garage and barns. It will mean a great deal to my son to win that commission. And the contract for the construction will be the biggest thing Mr. Trench has had since he put up the new Science Hall.
“I should think being kind to Mrs. Nims would be a help rather than a hindrance,” Mrs. Ascott said, perplexed.
“It would, if I had reasonable men to deal with. The fact is—if I must speak plainly—young Mr. Marksley is very much in love with Eileen. I wouldn’t have anything come between them for the world. You are a married woman. You ought to know Eileen’s type. She isn’t the least bit like me. If she resembles any of my family, it is my sister Isabel—and we were thankful to get her safely married at seventeen.”
“But Mr. Marksley, they told me, is going to Pratt when he is graduated from the college, here. It will be four or five years before—”
“Some more of Eileen’s foolishness. What use has he for more education—with all that money? And she knows as well as I do that he can go into business with his brother Alfred, in St. Louis, the day after commencement. He doesn’t have to depend on his father, who detests him. I suppose Eileen has told you that fact, too.”
Mrs. Ascott shook her head, irritation mounting to anger, as her caller’s tone divested itself of that modicum of reserve that had been the inculcated habit of years. In all her experience she had never met a woman like Lavinia Trench. From their second meeting, there had been an undercurrent of hostility, which Lavinia was at great pains to subdue or conceal. A rich woman was a person to be envied ... and conciliated. In her normal state she would not have jeopardized the fragile bond of surface friendship that bound them.
II
Not that the interview reached the disgusting level of a quarrel. Yet Judith was betrayed into the fatal error of attempting to reason with a woman whose mental processes had never recognized the inevitable link between cause and effect. She did not know how to deal with the mind that leaped from one vantage point to another, with all the nimbleness and none of the objectivity of a circus acrobat. Dutton had once said of Mrs. Trench: “You can’t nail that woman down. When you trap her square, on her own proposition—she’s over yonder, on an entirely different subject, crowing over you. If she can’t make her point, she talks about something else.” But Judith gave little heed to Dutton’s mumblings.
The one thing Mrs. Trench had made unequivocally plain was that Larimore and his father must not be antagonized. This could be accomplished only by keeping Eileen’s fondness for Hal in the background, and avoiding any public contact with his highly immoral sister. It was in connection with Mrs. Nims that Judith blundered. She could not believe that either David or Larimore Trench would cast a stone at the woman who had sinned and was unhappy because of her sin.
“You mean Mary Magdalene, and all that? Well, I don’t believe Christ expects me to associate with the woman who ran away from two husbands—travelled with the first one for three weeks before they were married at all. There’s no reforming a woman like Adelaide Marksley. She’s bad, through and through.”
“There may have been extenuating circumstances. What do you and I know about her inside life? Until we have been tempted, as she was, we have no moral right to set up our code—”
“You think I have never been tempted? I could tell you a story ... if I was a-mind to. It was only my sense of honour and duty. And that ought to be enough for Adelaide Nims or any other woman.”
“She may not have had a very clear conception of the meaning of ‘honour’ and ‘duty.’ Do you think those terms mean the same thing to all women? Do they mean the same thing to any woman, at all times? You don’t know anything about the inner life of the girl who grows up in a loveless home, or is trapped in a childless home of her own, with a man who doesn’t love her. Your life has been crowded with responsibility and affection. You have a husband whose devotion to you is the most beautiful—”
“You think David is a paragon. You haven’t had to live with him for almost twenty-eight years. You haven’t had to drive him, every step he took, for fear he would sit down on you, and let the family starve. And as for the children ... what has that got to do with it? Why—it was when Isabel was so sick that—that the minister kept calling and calling. All the women in the church were crazy about him. I never dreamt he was in love with me till the night before the baby died. But I showed him his place, quick enough, when he told me he could see that David didn’t understand or appreciate me.” Her eyes gleamed with pride, as if she would have gloated: “There! You didn’t know I had been tempted—and by the minister, too!”
“For all that, Mrs. Trench, you can’t draw the line between the woman who sins and the one who is saved from sinning by some fortuitous accident. Your baby died, the next day. If she had lived ... and you had seized the chance for the happiness you had missed, I would have no condemnation for you. I know. I was almost in sight of that treacherous snare—when the axle of our motor car broke, and my father overtook us and—brought me to my senses. We were within a mile of the pier where his yacht was anchored—the man who was as unhappy in his loveless home as I was in mine. We were going to Italy, to hunt for what we both had missed. My husband had gone to Egypt with another woman. I told myself that my marriage vow was an empty mockery....” She stopped, a sickening wave of self-disgust overwhelming her. Why had she bared her soul to this woman?
Lavinia? She made no effort to conceal her horror. So this was why Mrs. Ascott did not wear mourning!
“And he, your husband—divorced you?”
“No, I divorced him. In New York there is only one cause for divorce, and in the eyes of the law, I had committed no offence. Mrs. Nims, with her bringing up—with the family environment that surrounds her and her brother—”
“Oh, with men it is different. You don’t expect morality in them. David says that Hal is fast. That’s at the bottom of the whole trouble. I wish I hadn’t said anything about the affair. I might have known you wouldn’t see it as I do. But then, I hadn’t suspected—” She checked herself. There were some things Lavinia wouldn’t say, even when she was indignant to the core.
III
When she went home, a few minutes later, she resolved to padlock the wicket gate—to secure it with hammer and nails, if need be. She would not have her family subjected to such an influence. Eileen was completely bewitched. It was “Mrs. Ascott this” and “Lady Judith that” from morning till night. Theo was even worse. David was getting to look like a boy, since he had been chatting across the wall with that designing woman. And Larimore! He was already in her clutches. How could a mother have been so blind? If the gate were closed, with obvious intent, Mrs. Ascott would take the hint, and move away.
Then she remembered the months that Vine Cottage had stood idle. It was a poor time to rent a furnished cottage, with vacation coming on, and ever so many of the faculty houses eager to be leased for the summer months. Besides ... Mrs. Ascott had her redeeming points. She was never at a loss which forks to put on the table, and how to add that chic effect to a costume. If Eileen were to shine as Mrs. Henry Marksley, Junior, she would need much coaching. And, after all, what had Mrs. Ascott done? She might have gone to Italy in a yacht. A flight in a motor car—pursuit—a broken axle—capture! There had never been anything like that in Lavinia Trench’s life. Then, too, her husband had deserted her ... had run away with another woman. It was always, in these cases, “running.” One could not conceive of a leisurely departure from the confines of the moral code. No doubt Mr. Ascott had abused her. Men usually did, when they were casting amorous eyes at some one else. That made a different case of it. Her father had taken her back. It could not have resulted in a public scandal. Probably the facts never leaked out. Mrs. Ascott had certainly been received by the best society in New York and Pelham before coming to Springdale.
Moreover ... this thing of nailing up gates did not always turn out the way one expected. She had nailed up one gate in her life that she would have given the whole world to open. And this was such a friendly little gate. Who could tell but that some day she, Vine—the self-sufficient—might need a friend? Mrs. Ascott was—potent phrase—“a woman of the world.” She made the women of Springdale look pitifully gauche. It was not a bad idea to have such a woman as a neighbour. Not too much intimacy. She would look to that. She might mention.... But what was there to tell? Mrs. Ascott had not sinned, as Adelaide Marksley had. Herein lay the crux of the whole matter. Still ... she was a dangerous woman. Larimore must be watched.