XV Masked Benefaction
I
The day following her illuminating talk with her non-conformist neighbour, Mrs. Trench remained in bed. To some women a headache is a godsend. It obviates the necessity for explanation. When she emerged from the darkened room, she brought with her all the marks of physical illness, to account for the rasped state of her nerves; but to her son, at least, the evidence was not convincing. He had witnessed too many narrow brushes with Death, when Lavinia had something important to attain or conceal. Had she waited, she might have seized on a ready-made cause for a period of bad humour ... the outcome of the Marksley building competition. On Saturday afternoon the contest was settled, and Larimore Trench was not the winner. The prize had gone to a Chicago architect. That was not the worst of it. Mrs. Marksley wrote Lary a letter, informing him that his plans were too stiff and old-fashioned; but that she would like to buy from him the design for the cow barn, which was better in some respects than the one the up-to-date architect had made.
“You remember, Larimore, that was what I said, all along.” Lavinia’s voice cut both ways. “And if you had gone on, the way you did the cow barn.... I don’t believe you have forgotten that you put the ornament on the barn, to please me.”
“No, I haven’t forgotten. I designed the house for people, not for cows.”
II
Judith heard about it, in a burst of fierce indignation, from Theodora. It was Monday, and the atmosphere of her home was still so forbidding that she dreaded to enter the house, when she came from school. Mrs. Ascott might want her to do an errand, she argued. At least, it would do no harm to ask. But Mrs. Ascott did not want an errand. She wanted the very information Theo was only too eager to offer. From Eileen she had had a shaft of unpleasant illumination: “Lary has crawled in his hole and pulled the hole in after him.” There was no iron in his nature, nothing with which to fend himself against such clumsy insults. But Theodora inadvertently revealed the deep cause of his hurt. It was not the Marksleys, but his mother’s attitude, that offended him.
“To think, Lady Judith, of those stupid Marksley judges, turning down all Lary’s beautiful plans in favour of—” She gasped, her cheeks burning. “I wish you could see the front elevation of the house. It looks for all the world like a frumpy old woman. There’s a gable that reminds you of a poke bonnet, and under the gable are two round windows ... like staring eyes. If I’d gone that far, I would have had the nerve to put in a nose and a mouth. But, no, he has a door between those windows, opening out on a ledge. You don’t have a third story door opening on a ledge, unless you want some one to walk out there, in the dark, and get his neck broken. It ought to have been a balcony. Hm-m-m, I guess he used up all the balconies the law allows. He has them at both sides ... like the big hips that were in style when mamma was a bride. And a coat of arms above the door—the Marksleys never had a coat of arms.”
“How did you come to see the plans, Theo?”
“Hal smuggled them over, last night, to show mamma why Lary missed out. And she didn’t do a thing but roast him again, this morning ... because they took the cow barn, that he did to please her, and cut out the classical part, that he did to please himself. That wasn’t the only ruction we had at breakfast. But there’s no living with my mother, these days. Papa said he wouldn’t figure on the contract—after the way they treated Lary. And she nearly raised the roof. I guess my daddy’ll put in a bid, all right.”
III
More than once, in the weeks that followed, Judith’s mind swung back to the words: “There’s no living with my mother, these days.” Once she asked Dr. Schubert about it. Might not Mrs. Trench be, in fact, a very sick woman—keeping herself out of bed by sheer force of her indomitable will? To which Lavinia’s physician replied, with a none too sympathetic smile: “Yes, she is a very sick woman ... but there is nothing in my materia medica that will reach her case. I am looking for a return of her old trouble—a hardening of the fluid in the gall duct. She has passed through two sieges of jaundice. And at another time the hardening reached the stage of well solidified stones, that yielded to large and persistent doses of olive oil—a remedy that Mrs. Trench took as a peculiarly cruel and unnecessary punishment.”
“I’m glad to know it’s purely physical,” Mrs. Ascott breathed. “I was afraid it was ... spleen.”
Dr. Schubert’s eyes twinkled.
“Your neighbour’s liver trouble originates in her spleen. You’ll say my anatomy is defective; but Mrs. Trench’s body is the victim of an abnormal mind. To be physically unfit always infuriates her. Her passionate outbursts always react on that highly important gland, that nature designed for the cleansing of the physical body. Result? A clogged liver and a worse fit of temper. Poor David! He is so fine. Life ought to have given him velvet instead of gravel.”
At no time did Lavinia take to her bed for more than a few hours, and then only when some personal triumph was to be gained by a direct appeal to the sympathy of her family. If she harboured a feeling of ill-will against her neighbour, it was in effect to class her with those of her own household. She seldom glanced into the garden across the low stone barrier, and when she walked from the kitchen stoop to David’s shop, at the lower end of her own domain, she went with head inclined, as if she were battling against a furious northern gale. Even Theodora was beginning to practice caution, and a less amiable maid than Drusilla would have given notice, long ago.
Larimore and his mother were icily polite, as was their wont when no other form of civil intercourse was possible. The coldness began the day after Mrs. Trench taunted her son with his failure to win the Marksley commission. But her smug “I told you so” had little to do with the prolonged siege. Lary would have forgiven her. His father had schooled him not to hold her accountable for the bitter things she said. You could reason with Theodora; but Lavinia....
No, the rancour was not on this side. His had been the triumph. His mother had sought to deliver a blow that must shatter his dearest idol—and the blow had missed the mark. Dutton was wont to say that nobody ever got ahead of Vine Trench. And in this case it was Lavinia who defeated herself. So much the worse for Larimore, who had parried the thrust with a foreknowledge that staggered and infuriated her.
IV
It was the Friday following the close of the competition, and there were indications of a coming thaw in the big Colonial house. The girls had betaken themselves to Mrs. Ascott’s arbour, as soon as dinner was over. They spent every available minute at Vine Cottage—to make up for their mother’s open hostility. And their mother, seeing how happy they were, had dispatched Larimore to tell them that they were to accompany her to Mrs. Henderson’s on some inconsequential errand. When they had gone, Lary let himself wearily down on the bench at Mrs. Ascott’s side. All the boyishness was gone from his face and his eyes were deeply circled and dull. No word passed between them. The man reflected, feeling the warm presence so close to him, that most women chattered, preached or philosophized without cessation, as if the one thing demanded of femininity were an unbroken flow of talk. Judith Ascott knew when speech was obtrusive. She knew, too, when to break the thread of Lary’s morbid musings.
“Have you been watching that sunset? Theo called my attention to it, before you came out. She saw, in those clouds, the form of a woman with streaming red curls. ‘The red-haired wife of the sun,’ she called it. Now the locks are straight and almost gray. I never saw such sunsets as you have here, not even in Italy.”
“I didn’t know what bewitching colour effects we had, until I began to sit here on this bench with you. My father has often called us to enjoy a peculiarly beautiful sky with him. Mamma usually spoils it by reminding him that all the wealth of tints is produced by particles of dirt in the atmosphere. She hates dirt, even when it reveals itself in a form that doesn’t menace her housekeeping. If she had gone on living in Olive Hill, I believe she would have died of disgust.”
“Does the town—the immediate environment—make any difference, Lary? Olive Hill or Springdale, Florence or Pelham. I have been as wretchedly unhappy and ... alone ... in a crowded Paris café as ever I was on the deck of a steamer, in mid-ocean, when I wanted to climb overboard and end it, in the inviting black water.”
“You? Judith! I thought your life had been eminently satisfactory--barring the one sorrow.”
“You must not think I have been a happy woman. I have only been a coward—shutting the trap door on my failures. But I don’t want to talk about myself. I have a favour to ask. Will you—” Her voice took on the quality of appeal.
“What is it, Judith? A favour?”
She drew from its envelope a letter that had come, that afternoon, from her attorney. His partner, Mr. Sanderson, was planning to build a home on Long Island, as a wedding gift to his only daughter. She knew the girl’s taste. She wanted to send the plans that Mrs. Marksley had rejected. With such entrée as the Sandersons could give him, Larimore Trench ought to find success in New York. He was wasting his talents in Springdale.
“It’s good of you, my dear. But that kind of success—or failure—doesn’t mean much to me.”
“Then what would satisfy you, Lary? You have so much ability.”
“A little of the right kind of recognition—perhaps. I used to think I would experience the thrill at the acceptance of a poem or essay by some discriminating editor. The first time such an acceptance came, it left me numb and cold with disappointment ... in myself, I mean—my inability to rise to the occasion.”
“May I tell you what you want—what you demand of life?” Some one had struck a match in her darkness.
“I—wish you would.”
“The thing you have attained, Lary, the height you have reached ... is under your feet. You—you are superior to it. The only thing that could satisfy you is—” she paused, a fervid instant—“the unattainable.”
Larimore Trench turned and looked into her eyes.
Dusk had settled on the garden, but Luna’s fire illuminated her face. His body stiffened, and a dull anguish smote him.
“Judith—God help me—the unattainable is ... you!”
V
Judith Ascott had dreamed of the time when love should come, not such love as Raoul had given her in her romantic girlhood. Nor that other love, that had marched with slow musical cadence into the discord of her early maturity. It must be the masterful love, austere and tender, a discipline and a refuge for her unruly spirit. And now it was come ... the only love that had ever mattered to her—the only man she had known whose very faults and weaknesses were precious, and she had but one impulse—to fold him in her arms and soothe his aching spirit. Was this love? Or mayhap the thwarted motherhood within her, that perceived in Lary and Eileen the void left by the rebellious aversion of the woman who was their mother in the flesh? A long moment she scrutinized, challenged the stranger that had arisen, unheralded and undesired, in her own heart. Then she said, resolutely:
“No, Lary. I am the unattainable, only so long as I retain the wisdom to hold myself beyond your reach. I should prove as disappointing as all the others—the achievements that were to give you joy. The real Judith is not the peerless being your imagination has fashioned. Would you shrink from me in repugnance and horror if I should tell you that my husband is not dead?”
“You are another man’s wife?”
“I was. The divorce was granted a few days before I came to Springdale, less than three months ago.”
Lary breathed a sigh so sharp that it cut him like a knife.
“But that isn’t all. There was another man ... a man I fancied I loved. Perhaps I pitied him. Most of all, I pitied myself. I was more than willing to listen to his arguments. We would go to some place where no one knew us. We had not the courage to brush away the falsehoods and conventions of society. I faced all the consequences. It was no impulse of youth. I was twenty-five, and had been married almost seven years. We both knew what we were doing when I told him I would go.”
All at once she felt the man at her side shrink—involuntarily, she was sure. It was as if his body had repulsed her, while his mind was striving to be just, even magnanimous. She had thought it all out, after Theodora’s revelation, knowing that some day Lary would come to her with the pure white offering of his love. And she had resolved to tell him of Herbert Faulkner—not the fiasco, but the fact of her elopement. Perhaps it was this submerged thought that had leaped to the surface, in her talk with Lary’s mother. With him she would not take refuge in the timely intervention of a broken axle and a prudent father. Her sin was as complete as if she had carried elopement to its inevitable conclusion. He must hear the story in all its sordid aspect. She waited for him to speak. The clear outline of his face cut the shadow, incisive and still as an Egyptian profile in stone. Not a quiver of the lips betrayed his emotion. Yet Judith Ascott knew she had dealt him the cruelest blow of his life.
“You won’t let it interfere with our friendship, Lary?” It was a stupid, girlish question, such as Eileen or Kitten Henderson might have asked. She felt incredibly young and inexperienced. When the man spoke, his voice was hoarse with pain.
“I don’t want friendship. I want, oh, God! the unattainable. Judith, it is not what you have done. I am not such a cad as to judge you. I long since freed myself from the tyranny of an absolute thing called virtue. That isn’t the—the obstacle. At bottom I am a selfish brute, jealous and unreasonable. If there is another man in the world who has meant that much to you.... Oh, not that I blame him. If I had known you when you were another man’s wife, I wouldn’t have scrupled to take you from him. You are my other self. I have known it—from the moment I looked into your eyes, under the little apricot lamp. All my life I have been heart-hungry, wanting something I couldn’t find. Zeus cleft us apart, in the beginning of time. And now that you are here—” He set his teeth hard and his frame shook.
A long, long time they sat silent. The night settled about them and clouds covered the face of the moon. In the great house next door, lights gleamed here and there as the family came home and prepared for bed. Mrs. Trench had arrived in Hal Marksley’s touring car, with the girls. Apparently they had been for a ride. As she went to the back door, to be sure Drusilla had put out the milk bottles, she caught sight of the two motionless figures in the summer house. She went to the sun room and turned on a light that shimmered faintly through the Venetian blinds. Judith saw, without perceiving it. The whole irony of life lay between her and that impatient light.
The tower clock chimed eleven, when, like a stage illumination, the garden was bathed in golden glory. With a single impulse the two on the settee turned and looked up through the roof of the summer house, where the vines were thin. And there, in a little clear blue lake, piled high around the marge with mountains of sombre clouds, the yellow moon floated, serene and detached. Lary took the fevered hands between his cold, moist palms.
“Will you wait for me ... wait till I can search myself? Perhaps there is a man, hidden somewhere in the husk of me. If I find him ... I will come and lay him at your feet.”
VI
Mrs. Trench was waiting for her son. She had dallied too long with that warning. She was in the door of the sun room at the first sound of his key in the lock.
“Larimore!” as he crossed the hall and made for the stairs.
“Yes, mamma. Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I have something to say to you. I don’t often meddle in your affairs; but there come times when it is a mother’s duty to speak. I wish you would be a little more careful in your associations with that Mrs. Ascott. She isn’t the pure, virtuous woman we thought her. She told me—in the most brazen way—that her husband ran away to Africa with another woman. Though what anybody would want to go to Africa for— But he wasn’t entirely to blame for leaving her. She had an affair with another man. A low scoundrel who pretended to be her husband’s friend. She told me, without the least bit of shame, that the only thing that saved her from breaking her marriage vow was—her father catching up with them, when the axle of their automobile broke—before they reached the yacht that they were going to Italy in ... alone ... not a touring party. Alone!”
The words poured forth in a disorderly phalanx. Larimore stood patiently waiting until the need for breath stopped her utterance. Then he said incisively:
“So there was a broken axle.”
And in a flash Lavinia knew that she had lifted a load of doubt and misery from her son’s mind—had destroyed, with her revelation, the barrier that stood between him and Judith Ascott. He could hear the grinding of her sharp teeth as he turned and ascended the stairs.