It was her portrait that Lorenz had painted, together with his own, whatever the mystic word “Eucharistia” might mean. He had not forgotten her, then, and he was loath to part with the picture. She did not formulate the pleasure the thought gave her,—it was enough in itself.
Then the brougham stopped before the blazing lights of the St. Hilaire, where the Lawtons were making a temporary home, a sort of bridge, that both mother and daughter had long wearied of, between the simpler past and the long-delayed, complex future, when in the new house, now building, her father promised once and for all to drop the reins of tape and wire, cease from hurrying, and take rest.
CHAPTER VI
THE LAWTONS
With Mrs. Lawton the afternoon of the Park musical had been a time of irresolution. When the man of a family is noted for swift arbitrary decisions and often unexplained action in all domestic affairs, in important matters and petty details alike, his wife is apt, simply by force of reaction, to be driven to the opposite extreme in those things that concern herself alone. Not that Adam Lawton’s wife had ever been lacking in spirit, and when, as Pamela Brooke, a girl of twenty, he had taken her from her southern plantation home, then crippled and impoverished by war, yet where she still held absolute sway, many nodded their heads, and said that the calculating, keen-eyed Yankee would some day be startled by the fire of southern blood.
Not but what his coming, seeing, and conquering had been as swift as the most romantic could desire, one short month compassing it all, for there was a certain magnetism about Adam Lawton that, when he chose to exert it, was irresistible, while to those outside its influence he was doubly a bit of chilling steel.
Nor had his wife ever faltered in her loyalty to him; she would have given much more than he would take, for in the beginning hers had been a nature that sought happiness in pouring out her love freely and enveloping its object in it, at the same time giving the man she had chosen, through imagination, every noble and winning attribute that would increase her passion.
Two sons had been born to her before she had awakened from this ecstatic period and was perforce obliged to separate the real from the ideal. Not that Adam Lawton loved her a degree less strongly than when, calling upon her father on purely business matters, he had first seen her riding up the unkempt avenue of her home, her beauty and bearing lending distinction to the faded habit that she wore. His love was of a strange quality, a sort of transmutation of metals by sudden fire that, having once taken place, must of necessity be welded for all time. In reality an egotist, from his own point of view he was wholly unselfish, for he asked little for what he gave, and would allow none of the little daily services that nourish love, whose best food must have the flavour of mutual dependence.
The two boys died of scarlet fever almost together, before they were well out of babyhood, and after a lapse of many years a daughter, Brooke, had come, then another lapse, and another son, called Adam, now about sixteen; and like many a son of a father who has planned a boy’s career to the minutest detail, he seemed not only bound not to go in the desired way, but to lack the bump of direction, which turns a boy from being merely driftwood and guides him in any sort of way whatsoever.