“Shopping on Sunday, mamma?”
As the woman hurried from her son’s presence, Judith heard her mutter: “There’s more than one way to kill a cat.”
V
Saturday was consumed with the endless little things that went to the preparation for a journey. At noon Lavinia sent Dutton out to post a letter to Sylvia. It was plastered over the upper third with a combination of pink and green stamps. Lavinia Trench abhorred that sort of thing; but she would not ask Larimore for a proper stamp to insure Sunday delivery of her letter. She shunned him with an animosity that was not to be misinterpreted. He had angered her profoundly. She told Judith that she would go to the station in Hafferty’s cab and wait there until David came in. In such a case he would not mind sitting with her until her train arrived. She had evidently asked too many favours of her son. She had always supposed that sons were glad to serve their mothers.
Judith sought to analyse the woman’s torn state of mind. Did she always get into such a fever when she was going away from home? Lavinia had travelled much, in spite of her oft repeated assertion that she never went anywhere, never had any pleasure ... nothing but the dull drudgery of a wife and mother. Before her visit to Bromfield she had been in just such a mental state. But was it, exactly, this condition of mind? Two years ago, everything that Lavinia did—every subterfuge, every veiled speech or cruel innuendo—was carefully thought out. It all had a direct bearing on the main object. She must go to Bromfield, and she would not admit to her family—nor indeed to herself—that she had need to go. From infancy she had been devious, approaching her goal by the most tortuous path. She was this way in her housekeeping. One could not be a martyr if things were easy. The simple, natural way was hateful to her—the refuge of lazy wives.
This much Judith had set down, in her effort to understand her mother-in-law’s curiously warped psychology. But now there was a new phase. The episode of Sylvia’s letter, accidentally burned in the grate on a steaming July day, sufficed to betray a significant breaking-up of the tough fibre of an irrational but tremendously efficient mind. The mycelium of decay—some deadly fungus—had penetrated the heartwood of Lavinia Trench’s being. She went into a panic at the slightest turn in her plans. She no longer counted upon the unforeseen contingency, or guarded against it. That that crashing letter—the occasion for this hurried trip to Detroit—was not from Sylvia, Judith was morally certain. From whom, then? She laid the perplexity wearily aside. With one unknown quantity, she might have solved the equation. Here were two unknown and unknowable quantities, since Lavinia—after her two disastrous blunders—refused to talk except in monosyllables.
VI
When the suit case was in process of preparation, Judith invaded Mrs. Trench’s bedroom. She brought a dark negligée for the Pullman, in place of the delicate one that Sylvia had ridiculed, two years ago. As she offered it, her mother-in-law turned furtively to conceal something she was in the act of securing in the bottom of her small travelling bag. Her fingers caught at the edge of a night-dress, awkwardly, and the thing was revealed ... the borrowed volume of Browning.