“Marry him if you want to, chickabiddy,” she said.
They were all astonished and a little uneasy. A change had come over that incomprehensible woman. Her color was as ruddy, her activity as great, she was as kind, as pleasant, as competent as ever. But an immense moral apathy had seized her, she no longer interfered, no longer gave advice. Let her husband smoke fifteen cigars a day, let her child marry whom she would, she seemed indifferent. She had become strangely and terribly remote. She seemed to have a grim secret of her own, a knowledge of some event in comparison with which all these things were of no importance.
No one realized what shadow had fallen upon her. They were willing to accept her change of heart as a whim. But she who was about to be exiled forever had come to see the futility of resistance. She saw her own death coming toward her; she could bear to watch it. And she saw so clearly too that when she was no longer standing in the highway, the others would still go on, and that cry after her child as she might, no sound would ever again reach her.
Gilbert and Claudine were married that autumn in a little church on Staten Island. Old Mrs. Vincelle was brought there, like a Buddha carried in a procession, and there were a certain number of Brooklyn haute bourgeoisie. But it was a Mason wedding, and Mrs. Mason dominated it. She gave a marvelous breakfast after it in the house on the hill, and hers was the last face they saw as they drove away. She had come out into the road, to look after them, a stout, dignified figure in black silk waving her hand, and smiling after her youngest child....
CHAPTER FIVE
CLAUDINE LEARNS TO ADAPT HERSELF
BEFORE she had been in that house an hour she knew that she could never be happy there. She wasn’t ready when the dinner gong sounded, but Gilbert hadn’t waited. Lateness upset his mother, he said. She had tried to hurry then, but she was an inveterate dawdler, and it was some time before she was quite dressed. She came downstairs with the sprightly air proper to a bride just returned from her honeymoon, but it was a forced and desperate sprightliness. She felt all the helplessness and terror of a deserted child among strangers as she descended the dark old staircase, padded so thickly with carpet that it was like walking in a bog.
On the newel post was a standing lamp in which burned a gas jet turned very low, in a shade of red, green and blue glass. She turned along the narrow hall, past the open door of the front parlour, feebly illuminated, the middle parlour, the obscure and neglected back parlour, all dark, still, and bitterly unfamiliar to her. She reached the steep flight of stairs leading to the basement, and began going down in utter darkness and silence. The door at the foot of the flight was closed; she fumbled for the handle in an absurd panic and stumbled forward as it burst open.
They were sitting at the table in there, Gilbert at the head, his mother at the foot, and they were taking their soup, evidently determined to begin right with the child, to show her, pleasantly but inexorably, that she would never, never be waited for. She sat down at the place laid for her, facing the door, and the servant brought her a plate of soup.
“Well!” said old Mrs. Vincelle.
Her tone was tart, but good-humoured, and she smiled at her daughter-in-law.