XXII Midsummer Magic
I
Life moved on another fortnight, with little to vary the monotony of motor rides, luncheons, and irritating disputes, and all at once Sylvia’s reason for prolonging her visit in Springdale was removed. Lavinia Trench came home! She startled the girls by driving up to the gate in Hafferty’s lumbering old cab, her trunk toppling precariously on the driver’s seat and her trim body hemmed in between boxes and travelling bags. A letter that had arrived that very morning announced that she would yield to Ellen’s pleading that she remain another week—unless she were greatly needed at home.
Without waiting for the ceremony of the bath and a change of raiment, she hurried to Vine Cottage to present the souvenir she had brought from Rochester. Judith forgot to thank her, so amazed was she by the astounding change in the woman’s countenance. Such a change she had witnessed in her garden when Dutton, with hoe and fine-toothed rake, had obliterated the ridges and hummocks of his spading. All that had been Lavinia was gone. It was not that she looked girlish, rejuvenated. In the past few months she had made many swift changes from youth to age—had rebounded from dank depression to hysterical buoyancy. This change was different. It was, in fact, as if Lavinia had lent her body to some other woman.
“I can’t stay a minute,” she fluttered. “My precious old sweetheart is coming home early, and he thinks no one can cook chicken the way I can. You ought to have heard him when I called him on the ’phone, a minute ago. I thought he’d let the receiver fall, he was so astonished ... and pleased.”
II
During the next few days Judith forgot Eileen, well-nigh forgot Lary, in her perplexed contemplation of their mother. Some thaumaturge, endowed with more than a magician’s power, must have his habitation in Bromfield. The most audacious quack would guarantee no such cure of a sick body and a doubly sick mind in four short weeks. Lavinia had subtracted twenty years from her normal age, as neatly as a reptile discards an outworn skin. Her step was short and vigorous, with none of the stumping determination that so long marked it. Her head was carried high and the black eyes beamed with amiability. The very quality of her voice had undergone change. She no longer swung from cloying sweetness to acrid outbursts. More than all else, a half gentleness—that she still wore uncomfortably, like a fur cloak in August—held her family in puzzled wonder.
David moved as one walking in his sleep. He was afraid to breathe, lest he fall to earth and awaken to the old barren reality. When it appeared likely that the mood would remain, he accepted the goods the gods had provided. He had waited long, and the reward was justly his.
One evening Theodora sought her Lady Judith. She was agitated to the point of inarticulateness. Her little brown face was drawn with fear and two red spots burned in the thin cheeks. Twice, thrice she essayed to speak, her throat swelling and her bird-like eyes darting their mute appeal.
“Might I—might I sit in your lap?” she faltered at last. “I’m not so very heavy, and I can’t tell you unless I.... I have to tell you in your ear.”
“What are you afraid of, dearie?” Mrs. Ascott snuggled her close.
“It happened just a few minutes ago—and—I know I didn’t dream it. It was when Papa came downstairs from changing his clothes. You know, they are going to the reception for the Board of Trustees, and my daddy looked so handsome when he came in the library—with a pink carnation in his buttonhole.”
“There they go, now. Don’t you want to wave good-bye to them?”
“No, I don’t want to interrupt mamma. They don’t know I’m on earth. That’s what I came to tell you about. You see that mamma has on the yellow organdie dress. But you don’t know what that means—signifies,” she amended, weighing the word with unaccustomed deliberation. “Papa bought it for her, at a big store in St. Louis, when she was going away. And she was so hateful—wouldn’t put it on, or even take it with her. And to-night she said she was glad she’d saved it—just for him—because it was the prettiest dress she ever had.”
“I’m glad she said that, dear.”
“Oh, but that wasn’t all she said. She noticed that he picked a pink carnation, when everybody knows my daddy prefers red ones. I was sitting in the window niche, reading a book. Goodness knows, I was in plain sight. And they didn’t either one of them see me. Mamma came in first, talking to herself about how pretty her dress was ... and how happy she was....” Theodora’s breath came short, and the black eyes were luminous with tears.
“And, Lady Judith, all at once my daddy came in the room, and he tiptoed up behind her and cuddled her under the chin with his fingers. And she wheeled around and just nestled in his arms, like a kitten. And then she kissed him—the way you do when you just adore anyone.”
The voice sank to an awed whisper. Judith clasped the frail body, with its consuming emotional fire, her own heart pounding with vicarious passion.
“And she looked up in his eyes and told him he was the best man in the world, a million times handsomer and more successful than any man among their old friends. And she wanted to go back, on their anniversary, the first of November, to let all those silly people see for themselves what a fine man he had turned out to be. And papa looked as if he wanted to laugh and cry, at the same time, and his face was as beautiful as an angel’s, he was so happy. And I’m afraid my mamma is—going to—di-i-ie!” The voice broke in an agony of sobs.
“No, no, precious. She is just beginning to live.”
What had wrought the miracle? The absence that makes the heart grow fond? But Mrs. Trench had often been away from home and family, and it was certain that none of her former home-comings had had such sequential consummation. Had she, for some unfathomable reason, perceived David as he was? Had she fallen in love with her husband?
III
August was a glorious month for the circle that revolved around Vine Cottage. Eileen had been wooed by her mother to confession of her secret engagement, and David had given reluctant consent. He was too deeply steeped in his own belated bliss to deny any other human creature the benison of happiness. Hal would be leaving for Brooklyn the second week in September, and it was only right that the two young people should spend all their evenings together.
Occasionally they went across the street for a musical feast with Mrs. Nims—whom society was accepting, since it had been noised abroad that only three lives stood between her and a peerage. More often they explored strange highways beneath the starlight. Lary, at home for brief periods, viewed the situation with equanimity. He had made many compromises, and this was only a little more galling than some of the others. He found a modicum of compensation in his father’s sweet content, and in his mother’s almost pathetic devotion to the woman who had rounded out his own being.
“She quotes you on every possible occasion,” he told Judith. “If you advised her to forswear the moral code, she would obey you.”
“It’s a fearsome responsibility,” the woman averred. “What if I should blunder?”
“You couldn’t make her any less happy than she was when you came. She says you are better medicine than anything Dr. Schubert ever prescribed. And she insists it was you who compelled her to go to Bromfield.”
“Lary, you must have read a story—I don’t recall the title—one of Pierre Loti’s exotic conceits ... the faithless lover who was tormented by remorse until he went back to Constantinople and spent a night on the grave of the woman he had wronged. Do you think some fancy of your mother’s girlhood has been dispelled by her visit ... perhaps some illusion shattered by crass reality?”
“I don’t know how to gauge my mother—now less than ever before.”
IV
When Lary had gone, Mrs. Trench slipped in at the back door. She had been waiting her turn. It was like the old Lavinia to know exactly what she wanted. And again, it was like Lavinia to veil her request in mystery and innuendo.
“I want to ask your advice. You know so much more about the ways of the world than I do.” She drew from the pocket of her muslin dress a thick letter. “Do you think there are any circumstances under which it would be right for a married woman to receive—”
She was so naïve, Judith could with difficulty repress a smile.
“I write a good many letters to my attorney, Mr. Ramsay. He has a wife.”
“But those are business letters.”
“Not always. I write to him when I am blue or in doubt. His wife detests letter-writing. She usually adds a postscript.”
“She sees the letters—and replies?”
“Why, to be sure. You mean, Mrs. Trench, the kind of letters a woman could not show her husband? I’m afraid that is never quite safe.”
“I ignored the first—and the second. This one came on Friday. And then the minister preached that sermon on regeneration through suffering. He said it was our duty to help God to chastise the wayward soul. This man ... the one who wrote to me....” She faltered, then went on resolutely: “He is very unhappy. It is a man I met on the train—and he fell in love with me. Of course I repulsed him. I told him what a splendid husband I had. And in this letter he says that when I praised David to him—on the train—it was all he could do to keep from carrying me off bodily—it threw him into such a jealous rage. I ought to be furious with him.” She stared into vacancy, adding slowly: “but I’m not.”
This new Lavinia had suddenly come upon some bewildering apparition. Her fingers twitched, and a yellow pallor drank up the flush in her rounded cheeks. A chance acquaintance on a railroad train! Eileen might have fallen beneath the glamour of such a romance. But for a woman of Mrs. Trench’s age and temperament! It was unthinkable.
“Mrs. Ascott, tell me ... do people ever really get over things?”
All the fire of her being leaped to her eyes as she put the question, leaving her face ghastly. It was as if her whole life hung on the answer.
“Sorrow and disappointment? Oh, I am sure they do. And, my dear Mrs. Trench, I wouldn’t lay too much stress on the infatuation of a man you met in the Pullman. To write to him—letters you couldn’t show your husband—might be followed by serious complications.”
“Don’t you think I have character—stability enough to—you won’t say anything about this to Larimore?”
“Surely not.”
V
That evening David and Lavinia went out to sprinkle the vegetable garden, their arms around each other’s waists, their attitude that of a honeymoon pair. When the task was done they came to the summer house for an hour’s visit. Not even Hal and Eileen, in the first fever of their revealed engagement, were more frankly devoted than they. It seemed to Judith, sitting with them, that the woman was the aggressor, that she multiplied endearing terms and half-concealed caresses, to assure herself that she truly felt what her lips were saying. For David these manifestations were unnecessary. His whole being was a caress.
VI
August passed, and the first hot days of September—their discomfort forgotten in the excitement of Eileen’s entrance into college. There was yet another week before Hal must depart for his examinations, and on Thursday evening he failed to report, either in person or by telephone. The omission elicited no comment. But when the week had slipped by, and it became known that the youth had departed for New York without calling to say good-bye, Lavinia made bold to question her daughter.
“If he didn’t want to come, I’m sure nobody was going to ask him,” the girl flung back, her eyes darkening.
“Never mind, dear. These little quarrels only prove that it is true love. You and Hal will make it all up in your letters.”
“There aren’t going to be any letters.”
After her mother had gone into the house, Theodora drew near the hammock where Eileen had been studying Christian Ethics, squinting her burning eyes as the daylight waned, striving to focus her mind on the empty paragraphs.
“What did you and Hal quarrel about? Go on—tell me,” the child teased.
“Get out and let me alone. Don’t you know any better than to interrupt a fellow who has to bone freshman ethics? I almost had a philosophic thought by the tail, when you butted in on my painful ratiocinations.”
“I don’t want to pry, Eileen. Honest, I don’t. But you’ve cried every night since Wednesday. And when you talked in your sleep, last night—”
“I did!” The girl sat up, sending the textbook flying across the lawn. “What did I say? Tell me every word.”
“You’d been kind of mumbling, and all at once you said right out loud: ‘Hal Marksley, to think I could have loved a dirty calf like you.’”
“I didn’t say ‘calf’—I said—” She clapped her hand to her mouth and her cheeks went white. “I’m going to have a separate room. That’s all there is about it. If I can’t keep from babbling in my sleep....”