The Three Fates

by F. Marion Crawford

“I will tell you what I will do,” he said. “I will come for a month——”

“No—I will not have you for a month, nor for two months—the whole summer or nothing.”

So George at last consented, and left town two or three days later with Mrs. Sherrington Trimm and her daughter. He had felt that in some way he was acting weakly, and that he had yielded too easily to his cousin’s invitation, but if he had been in any doubt about her sincere desire to keep him during the whole season, his anxiety was removed when as soon as he was established in his new quarters Totty immediately began to talk of plans for the months before them, in all of which George played a principal part, and Mamie took it for granted that there was to be no separation until they should all go back to New York together. During the first few days George allowed himself to be utterly idle and let the hours pass with an indifference to all thought which he had never known before.

He had been transported into a sort of fairyland, of which he had enjoyed occasional glimpses at other times, but which he had never had an opportunity of knowing intimately. It was unlike anything in his experience. Even the journey had not reminded him of other journeys, for it had been performed in that luxurious privacy which is dear to the refined American. Mr. Craik’s yacht was permanently at his sister’s disposal, and on the morning appointed for the departure she and Mamie and George had driven down to the pier at their leisure and had gone on board. It had been but a step from the perfectly appointed house in the city to the equally perfect dwelling on the water, and only one step more from the snowy deck of the yacht to the flower garden before the country mansion on the banks of the great river. Everything had been ready for them, on board and on shore, and George could not realise when the journey was over that he had been carried over a distance which he formerly only traversed in the heat and dust of a noisy train, or on the crowded deck of a river steamboat. He had passed the hot hours sitting under the cool shade of a double awning, in the most comfortable of chairs beside Mamie Trimm and opposite to her mother. There had been no noise, no tramping of sailors, no blowing of whistles, no shouting of orders. From time to time, indeed, he caught a glimpse of the captain’s feet as he paced the bridge, but that was all. At mid-day a servant had appeared and Totty had glanced at him, glanced at the table beside her and nodded. Immediately luncheon had been served and George had recognised the touch of the master in the two or three delicacies he had tasted, and had found in his glass wine of the famous brand which was said to have caused Sherry Trimm’s sufferings. He had divided with Mamie a priceless peach, which had no natural right to be ripe on the last day of May, and Totty had selected for him a little bunch of muscat grapes such as he might not have eaten in the south before September. George tasted the ambrosia and swallowed the nectar, and enjoyed the beautiful scenery, the two pretty faces and the pleasant voices in his ear, thinking, perhaps, of the old times when after a desperate morning’s work at reviewing trash, he had sat down to a luncheon of cold meat, pickles and tea. The thought of the contrast made the present more delightful.

The spell was not broken, and Totty’s country-house prolonged without interruption the series of exquisite sensations which had been intermittent during the last month in New York. If Totty had intended to play the part of the tempter instead of being the chief comforter, she could not have done it with a more diabolical skill. She believed that a man could always be more easily attacked by the senses than by his intelligence, and she put every principle of her belief into her acts. She partly knew, and partly guessed, the manner of George’s former life, the absence of luxury, the monotony of an existence in which common necessities were always provided for in the same way, without stint but without variety. Her art consisted in creating contrasts of unlike perfections, so that the senses, unable to decide between the amount of pleasure experienced yesterday, enjoyed to-day and anticipated to-morrow, should be kept in a constant state of suspended judgment. She had practised this system with her husband and it had often succeeded in persuading him to let her have her own way, and she practised it continually for her own personal satisfaction, as being the only means of extracting all possible enjoyment from her existence.

George fell under the charm without even making an effort to resist it. Why, he asked himself dreamily, should he resist anything that was good in itself and harmless in its consequences? His life had all at once fallen in pleasant places. Should he disappoint Totty and give Mamie pain by a sudden determination to break up all their plans and return to the heat of the city? He could work here as well as anywhere else, better if there was any truth in the theory that the mind should be more active when the body is subject to no pain or inconvenience. A deal of asceticism had been forced upon him since he had been seventeen years old, and he believed that a surfeit of luxuries would do him no harm now. He would get tired of it all, no doubt, and would be very glad to go back to his more simple existence.

Totty, however, was far too accomplished an Epicurean to allow her patient a surfeit of anything. She watched him more narrowly than he supposed and was ready with a change, not when she saw signs of fatigue in his manner, his face or his appetite, but before that, as soon as she had seen that he was pleased. She was playing a great game and her attention never relaxed. There was a fortune at stake of which he himself did not dream, and of which even she did not know the extent. She had everything in her favour. The coast was clear, for Sherrington was in Europe. The final scene was prepared, since Mamie was already in love with George. She herself was a past master of scene-shifting and her theatre was well provided with properties of every description. All that was necessary was that the hero should take a fancy to the heroine. But the very fact that it all looked so easy aroused Totty’s anxiety. She said to herself that what appeared to be most simple was often, in reality, most difficult, and she warned herself to be careful and diffident of success.

Fortunately Mamie was all she could desire her to be. She did not believe in beauty as a means of attracting a disappointed man. Beauty could only draw his mind into making comparisons, and comparisons must revive recollection and reawaken regret. She had more faith in Mamie’s subtle charm of manner, voice and motion than she would have had in all the faultless perfections of classic features, queenly stature and royal carriage. That charm of hers, gave her an individuality of her own, such as Constance Fearing had never possessed, unlike anything that George had ever noticed in other girls or women. Doubtless he might have too much of that, too, as well as of other things, but Totty was even more cautious of the effects she produced with Mamie than of those she brought about by her minute attention to the management of her house. And here her greatest skill appeared, for she had to play a game of three-sided duplicity. She had to please George, without wearying him, to regulate the intercourse between the two so as to suit her own ends, and to invent reasons for making Mamie behave as she desired that she should without communicating to the girl a word of her intentions. If George appeared to have been enjoying especially a quiet conversation with Mamie, he must be prevented from talking to her again alone for at least twenty-four hours, and even then he must be allowed to please himself in the matter. This was not easy, for Mamie was by this time blindly in love with him, and if she were not watched would be foolish enough to bore him by her frequent presence at his side. To keep her away from him long enough to make him want her company needed much diplomacy. If George went out for a turn in the garden, and if Mamie joined him without an invitation, Totty could not pursue the pair in order to protect George from being bored. Hitherto also, Mamie had made no confidences to her mother and did not seem inclined to make any. Manifestly, if an accident could happen by which Mamie could be brought to betray herself to her careful parent, great advantages would ensue. The careful parent would then appear as the firm and skilful ally of the love-lorn daughter, the two would act in concert and great results might be effected. Totty was not only really fond of George, in her own way, but it would not have suited her that a hair of his head should be injured. Nevertheless, she nourished all sorts of malicious hopes against him at this stage. She wished that he might be thrown from his horse and brought home unhurt but insensible, or that he might upset his boat on the river under Mamie’s eyes—in short that something might happen to him which should give Mamie a shock and throw her into her mother’s arms.

Providence, however, did not come to Totty’s assistance and she was thrown upon her own resources, aided in some small degree by an extraneous circumstance. The marriage of John Bond and Grace Fearing had been talked of for a long time, and Totty one morning learned that it was to take place immediately. She could not guess why they had chosen to be married in the very middle of the summer, when all their friends were out of town, and she had no inclination to go to the wedding, which was to be conducted without any great gathering or display of festivity. John Bond, as being Sherrington Trimm’s partner and an old friend of Totty’s, urged her of course to come down to town for the occasion and to bring Mamie, but the heat was intense, and as there would be nothing to see and no one present with whom she would care to talk, and nothing good to eat, and, on the whole, nothing whatever to do except to grin and look pleased, Totty made up her mind that she would have nothing to do with the affair, beyond sending Grace an expensive present. There were no regular invitations sent out, and George received no notice of what was happening. Totty, however, did not lose the opportunity of talking to Mamie about it all, with a view to sounding her views upon matrimony in general and upon her own future in particular.

“Johnnie Bond is such a fine fellow!” said Totty to her daughter, when they had been talking for some time.