XXXIV Lavinia’s Credo
I
“Sister Judy,” Jack Denslow called, “there’s a bully fire down the avenue. Come and watch the motor engine go by. Good-bye, old horse, your day is done.”
Judith Trench crossed to the window and stood beside her young brother; but her mind was not on the marvel of metal and speed that had gone from sight almost before its clanging bell-note reached her ears. Another fifth of March. A year ago ... Eileen ... there, in that very room. And now.... Did Eileen remember? Did any of the family remember? She and Lary had spent the winter in New York, going to Springdale only when business demanded, and each brief visit brought its fresh surprise.
With the Marksley contract off his hands, David improved in health so rapidly that he had long since ceased to be a source of anxiety. Eileen and her mother had effected an entente cordiale which apparently worked well for both. The woman who had wrought the bridge, however frail and inadequate, over which mother and daughter might pass to an understanding hitherto unknown in their association, reflected with grave misgivings that the bridge was not the end of the journey.
Once she was on the point of telling Lary about his mother, their sharp dispute and the subsequent ethical discussion. The change in Lavinia, since that day, was so marked that the neighbours made comment. The woman who had spent her mature years surging from officious sweetness to the most violent outbursts of temper, went about in a state of tranquil meditation that could not be accounted for by anything external to herself. There was none of the rapturous devotion to David that had characterized her return from Bromfield; but at least she was not unkind. Of all those who watched her, only Judith could surmise what was going on in her mind. Might it be that Lavinia had achieved her Indian Summer without the killing frost? Had there, perhaps, been a revision of her credo from the simple tenets of the catechism to the complex philosophy of Robert Browning? Judith shivered as she faced the thought and its possible consequences.
She had told the troubled woman that sin consisted, not in action, but in desire. Could Lavinia, literal-minded and creed-ridden, handle a concept so foreign to her convictions? Had Lary’s mother torn away the solid foundation of her existence, and was she building again—a substructure that would sustain her through the barren years to come? Could this be done, at Lavinia’s age and with the rigid material of Lavinia’s soul? Would the house of her being come crashing down, when she sought to shift from what she had been to what she hoped to be?
Judith was glad when Lary told her, that evening, that he must return to Springdale. Her mother-in-law might seek counsel of her, in the privacy of the library where their two natures had clashed again and yet again. All the tedious journey to the West, she turned over in her mind a working corollary to that elusive proposition, the nature of sin. How tenuous, how like shifting sand, the thought-mass on which our concrete actions must rest! Had she any assurance that her conception of duty, of principle, of right-thinking, was better for humanity than the set of fatuous concepts she had sought to displace?
II
If Lavinia had need of help, she gave no token. She was at the station to meet them, and she was bursting with a secret. There had been no mention of it in her letters, because one could not be sure about such things—and telling them in advance was likely to spoil the charm. Then she sealed her lips until they were well within the discreet walls of Vine Cottage.
“Of course I may be mistaken; but unless I miss my guess, there’s going to be a wedding before you go back to New York.”
“A wedding? Some one I have met?”
“There! I was sure you didn’t suspect. Though how you could have helped it—the way Syd acted, when you were here the end of January—”
“Dear old Syd! I hope he has fallen in love wisely. It would go hard with him if he should blunder.”
“I’m sure it will be all right. The difference in age doesn’t matter—and you know he will make her a noble husband. If only she doesn’t get some foolish notion of telling him all that wretched affair. I tried to caution her, in a roundabout way; but you know how stubborn Eileen is.”
“Eileen!” Judith dropped a handful of toilet articles on the dressing table and sat down, weakly.
“Mercy, Judith!” The woman’s tone carried positive contempt for such obtuseness. “He was with her every evening while you and Larimore were here, the last time. Of course they were reading Latin together, or working with the violin. But I knew what it would lead to. And it was my making her come home, after she’d been at their house three evenings a week, that did it. He missed her so dreadfully that he got over thinking about her as a little girl. Goodness knows, she’s more mature than Sylvia was at twenty—and Syd will always be a boy.”
“Has she told you?”
“No, but I wouldn’t look for her to do that. She’s been very nice to me. Oh, Judith, I hope she will tell you it’s true.”
“I’m sure it would be a great comfort to you to have her happily married.”
“Yes—but I wasn’t thinking so much about that part of it. I had my own case in mind. It would be the last straw of evidence—that all my old ideas were wrong. For the first time in my life, I want to be sure I was in the wrong.”
Her eyes glittered and her slender form seemed to dilate. She was not thinking of her cruelty to Eileen and her subsequent reluctance to admit that in her daughter’s case good might grow out of evil. Eileen was become, in her mother’s eyes, a manikin, to be posed this way and that for the studying of effects—an architect’s drawing, to serve as a pattern for the rebuilding of her mother’s life.
III
Later in the day the girl came, her face wearing an expression of deadly earnest. Already Mrs. Trench’s hope was transformed into certainty. Judith led the way to the little boudoir Lary had fitted for her on the second floor.
“Now, dear, what is it?” she asked when the door was shut.
“The most important trouble I ever had. I ought to have written you—when Syd first asked me. But I did so want to tell papa first ... before even you. I owe him that, for all the pain I caused him. Syd wants to be married on my eighteenth birthday, and that’s less than three weeks off.”
“And you love him, Eileen?”
“As I never thought it would be possible to love. We just belong together—like you and Lary, only, oh, so different. I can see it in a hundred ways. When I don’t get what he’s trying to tell me—abstract ideas, you know—he goes up to the landing in the reception hall and sits down at his mother’s pipe organ and puts the thought into something that I can get hold of. When a man can talk to you that way—and music is the only language you really do understand—there is only one answer. If I’m in an ugly mood, he doesn’t scold or upbraid me. He works out a theme in A-minor. I try to run away from it, and I can’t. I’ve made bold to go past him, up to my room, and my feet wouldn’t carry me up the stairs.”
“And then, Eileen?”
“I cry it out on his shoulder. After I have washed the meanness out, we can talk sense. I don’t mind in the least—that he’s always right.”
“And there’s one point on which you can’t come to an agreement?”
“Yes, only one. Judith, how far is it necessary to go with confession of something that you know will lose you the respect and affection of—”
“Oh, Eileen, my poor little sister!”
“Don’t let it hurt you,” the girl cried, her eyes filling. “If life isn’t so perfect, I can stand it. There is one thing more important than the man you love—and that is your conviction of what is square and honest. Syd can tell me what to do in other matters—but this is in your line, not his.”
“Dearest, it seems to me that there can be no sure foothold in marriage if a wife conceals from her husband an experience as important as that. I know what a humiliation it is to open such a secret chamber. I did it, Eileen.”
“Judith, you don’t think I—” She stared, aghast. “You couldn’t think me capable of taking Sydney Schubert’s love—a man as clean and honourable as he is—without telling him why I went to New York?”
“Then he knows?”
“He knew ... all along.” Her fair cheeks flamed. “When he told me he cared, I said there was a reason why I couldn’t ever marry any decent man. Judith, he put his two arms around me and looked me square in the eyes, and said: ‘You were a poor little wilful child, and you didn’t know that fire would burn. Any woman, my dear, is good enough for any man—if she is honest.’ The only thing he wanted to know was ... what we had done with it. He said that would make a difference. He was relieved when I told him. And he thinks you were made in heaven—to have saved me—for him.”
“But if you have told him, and he is satisfied—what is the obstacle?”
“It is his father. I can’t marry Syd and go there to live, letting Papa Schubert believe I am the pure white flower he thinks me. Syd says he won’t have his father’s ideal of me shattered—because his father wouldn’t look at it the way he does. He might forgive me: but I’d always be tarnished, to him.”
“Do you remember, Eileen, the day you told the truth to Laura Ramsay? You began by saying you were under no moral obligation to her mother. I don’t know how we can draw those lines of distinction; but I feel them with absolute certainty. You are under no need to confess your secret to Sylvia or Theodora—and for widely different reasons. Indeed we must go to any length to prevent Theo ever learning the truth. With Dr. Schubert it is the same. It would only give him useless pain.”
“That’s what Syd said. He led me over to that little peachblow vase—the one that was bequeathed to his father by one of his grateful patients. He told me the satin glaze and the peachbloom tints were the result of the heat in the kiln, that almost destroyed the body of the vase. He asked me if I would be willing to break that little amphora, that his father loves, just to prove to him that it isn’t as perfect on the inside as it looks to him. He might patch the fragments together, but he would always be conscious of the cracks.”
“Syd is right. It would be brutality—sheer vandalism.”
“You precious treasure. He told me that was what you would say. Now I am going to the office to tell my darling daddy that he is to have a real son-in-law.”
“When are you going to tell your mother, dear?”
“That’s Syd’s job. He is going to make formal application for my hand. He can get off a thing like that, without batting an eye, when he’s just dying to get out and yell. And the worst of it is, mamma’ll take it in dead earnest. I suppose Sylvia will have sarcastic things to say. I don’t care. Syd never was really in love with her—after he was old enough to cut his eye teeth.”
IV
Mrs. Penrose did not come home for the wedding. Just what she wrote her mother, the other members of the family never knew. Her letter came with another, which bore the Bromfield postmark, and the two were on Lavinia’s plate when she came down to breakfast. David and the girls were already at the table, and Theo had inspected the mail. Drusilla had been instructed not to take letters from the box, and the sight of two thick envelopes threw Lavinia into a nervous chill. She picked them up and carried them to the sun room, saying she had a headache and would eat nothing.
After a little, David followed her, distressed. “Is there anything wrong in Bromfield—at your brother’s house, or with my people?”
“There’s nothing the matter in Bromfield. Sylvia is a cat!”