August was a glorious month for the circle that revolved around Vine Cottage. Eileen had been wooed by her mother to confession of her secret engagement, and David had given reluctant consent. He was too deeply steeped in his own belated bliss to deny any other human creature the benison of happiness. Hal would be leaving for Brooklyn the second week in September, and it was only right that the two young people should spend all their evenings together.
Occasionally they went across the street for a musical feast with Mrs. Nims—whom society was accepting, since it had been noised abroad that only three lives stood between her and a peerage. More often they explored strange highways beneath the starlight. Lary, at home for brief periods, viewed the situation with equanimity. He had made many compromises, and this was only a little more galling than some of the others. He found a modicum of compensation in his father’s sweet content, and in his mother’s almost pathetic devotion to the woman who had rounded out his own being.
“She quotes you on every possible occasion,” he told Judith. “If you advised her to forswear the moral code, she would obey you.”
“It’s a fearsome responsibility,” the woman averred. “What if I should blunder?”
“You couldn’t make her any less happy than she was when you came. She says you are better medicine than anything Dr. Schubert ever prescribed. And she insists it was you who compelled her to go to Bromfield.”
“Lary, you must have read a story—I don’t recall the title—one of Pierre Loti’s exotic conceits ... the faithless lover who was tormented by remorse until he went back to Constantinople and spent a night on the grave of the woman he had wronged. Do you think some fancy of your mother’s girlhood has been dispelled by her visit ... perhaps some illusion shattered by crass reality?”
“I don’t know how to gauge my mother—now less than ever before.”
IV
When Lary had gone, Mrs. Trench slipped in at the back door. She had been waiting her turn. It was like the old Lavinia to know exactly what she wanted. And again, it was like Lavinia to veil her request in mystery and innuendo.