CHAPTER XII
When they were gone, Sue looked down at the check in her hand. Yesterday, in the heat of a just resentment, she had boasted a new freedom. What had come of it was twelve hours without the presence of her mother—twelve hours shared with Hattie and Farvel.
They had been happy hours, for strangely enough Hattie had needed little cheering. It was Farvel who easily accomplished wonders with her. Sue did not know what passed between the clergyman and the bride-who-was-not-to-be during a long conference in the library. She had heard only the low murmur of their voices. And once she had heard Hattie laugh. When the two finally emerged, it was plain that Hattie had been weeping, and Farvel was noticeably kind to her, even tender. At dinner he was unwontedly cheerful, relieved at the whole solving of the old, sad mystery, though worried not a little by Clare's disappearance. After dinner he had taken himself out and away in a futile search that had lasted the whole night.
But happy as Sue had been since parting with her mother at Tottie's, nevertheless she felt strangely shaken, as if, somehow, she had been swept from her bearings. She attributed this to the fact that never before had she and her mother spent a night under different roofs. Until Sue's twenty-fourth birthday, there had been the daily partings that come with a girl's school duties. (Sue had continued through a business college after leaving high school.) But beyond the short trip to school and back, Mrs. Milo did not permit her daughter to go anywhere alone, urging Sue's youth as her excuse.
They shopped together; they sat side by side in the Milo pew at St. Giles; and after Sue's sixteenth birthday, though Wallace might have to be left at home with his father, Mrs. Milo did not permit her daughter to accept invitations, even to the home of a girl friend, unless she herself was included. It was said—and in praise of Mrs. Milo—that here was one woman who took "good care of her girl."
When Horatio Milo died (an expert accountant, he had no resistance with which to combat a sudden illness that was aggravated by a wound received in the Civil War), Mrs. Milo clung more closely than ever—if that was possible—to Sue. To the daughter, this was explained by her mother's pathetic grief; and by her dependence. For Sue was now, all at once, the breadwinner of the little family.
At this juncture, Mrs. Milo pleaded hard in behalf of an arrangement for earning that would not take her daughter from her even through a short business day. Sue met her mother's wishes by setting up an office in the living-room of their small apartment. Here she took some dictation—her mother seated close by, busy with her sewing, but not too busy to be graciousness itself to those men and women who desired Sue's services. There was copying to be done, too. The girl became a sort of general secretary, her clients including an author, a college professor, and a clergyman.
Thus for six years. Then, at thirty years of age, she went to fill the position at the Rectory. Her father had been a vestryman of the Church, and she had been christened there—as a small, freckle-faced girl in pigtails, fresh from a little village in northern New York.
And now, at this day that was so late, Sue knew that between her and her mother things could never again be as they had been. Their differences lay deep: and could not be adjusted. Mrs. Milo had always demanded from her daughter the unquestioning obedience of a child; she would not—and could not—alter her attitude after so many years.
But there was a reason for their parting that was more powerful than any other: down from its high pedestal had come the image of Mrs. Milo that her daughter had so long, and almost blindly, cherished. All at once, as if indeed her eyes had been suddenly and miraculously opened, Sue understood all the hypocrisy of her mother's gentleness, the affection that was only simulated, the smiles that were only muscle deep.