“It’s just the thing. I’ll go right over and tell Mrs. Henderson about it! The women of Springdale will remember the date—if anything should ever leak out. Eileen is built like the Trenches. I remember, your sister Edith was at church the Sunday before little Buddie was born—and when he came, it was a complete surprise. Nobody suspected anything.”
David covered his face with his hands. His wife’s bald physical view of Eileen’s soul-tragedy filled him with loathing. At long intervals, in the years that were gone, she had forced him to look within the steel-girt casket of her being, and always he had turned away horrified eyes—to restore as best he might the priceless jewels of his imagining. Could he censure his daughter because she had believed in Hal Marksley, to her hurt? How had he judged the one he loved, the woman he had given Eileen for a mother?
He put the thought aside as wickedly disloyal. Vine was the mother of his children. She had taken him, a simple-hearted boy with no ambition beyond the making of beautiful furniture, and she had made of him a successful business man. He could no longer make beautiful things. His fingers had lost their sure touch. But he had given his children the cultural advantages his own boyhood had lacked, and he had laid by enough to care for his family, if he should be taken. He had not been happy. He knew, all at once, that he had not been happy. He had never thought of it before. Still, what right had mortals to demand happiness? Had Vine been sympathetic, he might never have risen above the rank of a carpenter. His children would have toiled with their hands, to measure the stolid level of Bromfield or Olive Hill. It was Vine, with her far-seeing eyes and her two-edged tongue, who had made Lary’s achievement possible, who had given Sylvia the satisfaction of a marriage to her liking. It was patent that Sylvia, at least, was satisfied with her lot.
His eyes turned inward, he began to take stock of his children. Bob and Isabel were in heaven. The acts of God were not to be challenged. Lary had periods of morbid brooding, when life looked worse than worthless. It would be different, now that he had a wife to love him ... a wife who saw in him a demigod. Such devotion had stimulated him to greater endeavour than he had deemed worth while. It might not have worked that way with Lary’s father ... if he had had a wife to soothe and admire him. He might have been too happy to exert himself. He could not be sure.
The very qualities which had won Judith were fostered by Vine’s determination to send Larimore to Cornell. Just why Cornell, David had no means of knowing. Lary had not gone to Bromfield for any of his vacations. So the proximity of the old home town had nothing to do with it. With all his cultural charm, he might not have won Mrs. Ascott, had there been no strong incentive to action. He was inclined to drift, to shun the crass grip of reality. His happiness had been thrust upon him, because of Eileen’s drastic need.
Theodora was too young to be estimated with any degree of finality. As she was, so had Vine Larimore appeared to him when, as a boy, he had looked upon her with yearning eyes. In the after years Vine had been the prototype of Sylvia. She might have bargained better with her beauty—as Sylvia had bargained. What had prompted Vine to the breaking of that other engagement? She had told him, times without number, that he had won her—against her better judgment—by his persistent devotion ... had taken her by storm, and had thereby driven his rival to a hasty and ill-starred marriage. How could he have taken any woman by storm? He felt a little foolish pride in the thought that for one rash moment he had been bold.
He once heard his wife counselling Sylvia, when she was on the point of marrying for pique, an elderly widower in the college faculty. She could afford to swallow Tom Henderson’s neglect, Vine had said, if thereby she might some day step into Mrs. Dr. Henderson’s shoes. But Sylvia was in no need of advice. She would always make the best of her situation—glamour it over with a value calculated to inspire envy in the minds of her friends. It would have been the same, had she occupied a three-room cottage in Olive Hill, with miners’ wives for her social equals. She was developing into a snob. David had not known the meaning of the word until he felt it in Sylvia, that summer.
He turned for relief to Theodora, the one who was still plastic. His mind had climbed awkwardly over Eileen. He must do his work, and a father could not contemplate that catastrophe and live. Theo understood him, as none of the others did. She had rejoiced with him in the seven weeks of his belated honeymoon, and she sorrowed with him in the bitterness of the aftermath.
III
“What in the world is the matter with you? Have you gone stone deaf? I have spoken to you three times, and you haven’t turned a hair.” He was aroused from his musings by Vine’s raucous voice.