II
Judith heard about it, in a burst of fierce indignation, from Theodora. It was Monday, and the atmosphere of her home was still so forbidding that she dreaded to enter the house, when she came from school. Mrs. Ascott might want her to do an errand, she argued. At least, it would do no harm to ask. But Mrs. Ascott did not want an errand. She wanted the very information Theo was only too eager to offer. From Eileen she had had a shaft of unpleasant illumination: “Lary has crawled in his hole and pulled the hole in after him.” There was no iron in his nature, nothing with which to fend himself against such clumsy insults. But Theodora inadvertently revealed the deep cause of his hurt. It was not the Marksleys, but his mother’s attitude, that offended him.
“To think, Lady Judith, of those stupid Marksley judges, turning down all Lary’s beautiful plans in favour of—” She gasped, her cheeks burning. “I wish you could see the front elevation of the house. It looks for all the world like a frumpy old woman. There’s a gable that reminds you of a poke bonnet, and under the gable are two round windows ... like staring eyes. If I’d gone that far, I would have had the nerve to put in a nose and a mouth. But, no, he has a door between those windows, opening out on a ledge. You don’t have a third story door opening on a ledge, unless you want some one to walk out there, in the dark, and get his neck broken. It ought to have been a balcony. Hm-m-m, I guess he used up all the balconies the law allows. He has them at both sides ... like the big hips that were in style when mamma was a bride. And a coat of arms above the door—the Marksleys never had a coat of arms.”
“How did you come to see the plans, Theo?”
“Hal smuggled them over, last night, to show mamma why Lary missed out. And she didn’t do a thing but roast him again, this morning ... because they took the cow barn, that he did to please her, and cut out the classical part, that he did to please himself. That wasn’t the only ruction we had at breakfast. But there’s no living with my mother, these days. Papa said he wouldn’t figure on the contract—after the way they treated Lary. And she nearly raised the roof. I guess my daddy’ll put in a bid, all right.”
III
More than once, in the weeks that followed, Judith’s mind swung back to the words: “There’s no living with my mother, these days.” Once she asked Dr. Schubert about it. Might not Mrs. Trench be, in fact, a very sick woman—keeping herself out of bed by sheer force of her indomitable will? To which Lavinia’s physician replied, with a none too sympathetic smile: “Yes, she is a very sick woman ... but there is nothing in my materia medica that will reach her case. I am looking for a return of her old trouble—a hardening of the fluid in the gall duct. She has passed through two sieges of jaundice. And at another time the hardening reached the stage of well solidified stones, that yielded to large and persistent doses of olive oil—a remedy that Mrs. Trench took as a peculiarly cruel and unnecessary punishment.”
“I’m glad to know it’s purely physical,” Mrs. Ascott breathed. “I was afraid it was ... spleen.”
Dr. Schubert’s eyes twinkled.
“Your neighbour’s liver trouble originates in her spleen. You’ll say my anatomy is defective; but Mrs. Trench’s body is the victim of an abnormal mind. To be physically unfit always infuriates her. Her passionate outbursts always react on that highly important gland, that nature designed for the cleansing of the physical body. Result? A clogged liver and a worse fit of temper. Poor David! He is so fine. Life ought to have given him velvet instead of gravel.”