From Mrs. Stone’s darkened bedroom came bulletins of one collapse after another. The news that her darling had perished in the treacherous waters beneath the Victoria bridge affected her so profoundly that the physician resorted to nitroglycerine injections to restore her. Lavinia read the accounts with emotions that surged from exultation to a species of envy. The part she had been called upon to play was such a drab one, that Lettie Stone’s colourful rôle stung her. To ease her mind, she fell back on one passage of Scripture after another. She might have known all along that the marriage would end in something like this. It was right that it should end this way ... right that an immoral, unprincipled woman should suffer. And Calvin? No doubt he was suffering, too. But what was the good of going over that ground—ground that she had long since stripped bare of every sprig of comfort or misery?
At last came the startling denouement. Mrs. Calvin Stone was dead. There had been a simple private funeral—attended by everybody in Bromfield. That night Fournier had slipped stealthily into town, and out to the cemetery, where he had ended his life on his mother’s grave. The account of the double tragedy was not news to Lavinia. Ellen Larimore had sent a telegram ... just why, it was difficult to explain. The message came Sunday morning, while David and the girls were at church and Lary was at the office getting out some rush specifications. It conveyed only the bare information that Fournier Stone had shot himself, the night after his mother’s funeral.
“Dead ... Calvin free!” the woman muttered, staring in a daze at the words. And, after a moment of strangling emotion: “But what difference does it make—now? I can’t be there to see it. I wouldn’t go, if I could.”
At this juncture Lavinia’s thoughts took an unexpected turn. She was always thinking things she had no intention of harbouring within her consciousness—as if she had a whole cellar full of ideas she did not know she possessed. The one that came up to her now nauseated her. To see Calvin weeping over the body of his dead wife! Oh, the insolent superiority of the dead! You have no words with which to confront them. All their failings, all their sins are lifted above your most virtuous attack. It would be like this if David should die, and she could no longer upbraid him. No, it was better for people to go on living. You could at least speak your mind, without galling self-reproach.
II
Lavinia was determined to put Calvin Stone definitely and permanently from her thought. He had been amply punished for his monstrous treatment of her. The incident was closed, and at last she could have peace. And then something came to divert all her thinking into a channel that must have been present in the dark valley of her being all the while—unrecognized, because the need for it had been so hazily remote. A story—one of Larimore’s foolish stories. She seldom listened to them; but this one she could not escape. Eileen had gone home with Hal Marksley and had met his sister. It was Wednesday, and the outcome of the Stone imbroglio was still locked in her heart, the telegram having been burned in the kitchen range, Sunday morning, while Drusilla was on the second floor, doing up the bedrooms.
After dinner the Trench family had gravitated, one by one, to Mrs. Ascott’s summer house. David was there, laughing boyishly at something Eileen was telling. What were they talking about? Lavinia’s sharp ears caught a sentence now and then. It was not her wont to be out of things, the things that concerned her family. Her tenant seldom invited her—specifically. But then she never invited Mrs. Ascott, either. Going to the pantry, she filled a plate with raisin muffins, from the afternoon’s baking. Eileen would approach that shrine, armed with a sensational story; but her mother carried breakfast rolls.
III
When Nanny had taken the plate into the house, Judith made room for Mrs. Trench on the settle at her side. David leaned against the solid beam that he had set, seven years ago, to support the arch of the doorway. His blue eyes were full of unwonted content. Theodora was perched on the afternoon tea table, folded now to look like a packing case, steadying herself by a brown hand on her father’s arm. Eileen was on the other bench with Lary. She resumed the narrative that had been interrupted by her mother’s arrival: