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?”