And this happened midway of September, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seven.
CHAPTER II
THE LADY OF DIFFICULT OCCASIONS
THE Lady of Difficult Occasions—such was the title conferred upon Mrs. John McCandless Blair by Dick Wingfield—looked less than her thirty-two years. A slender, nervous woman, Mrs. Blair had contributed from early girlhood to the picturesqueness of life in her city. Her interests were many and varied; she did what she liked and was supremely indifferent to criticism. She wore colours that no other woman would have dared; for colour, she maintained, possesses the strongest psychical significance, and to keep in tune with things infinite one’s wardrobe must reflect the rainbow. She had tried all extant religions and had revived a number long considered obsolete; her garret was a valhalla of discarded gods. One day the scent of joss-sticks clung to the draperies of her library, the next she dipped her finger boldly in the holy water font at the door of the Catholic cathedral and sent a subscription to the Little Sisters of the Poor.
She appeared fitfully in the Blair pew at Memorial Presbyterian Church, where her father was ruling elder and her husband passed the plate; and Memorial, we may say, was the most fashionable house of prayer and worship in town, frowning down severely upon the Allequippa Club over the way. “Fanny Blair is sure of heaven,” Dick Wingfield said, “for she has tickets to all the gates.” Mrs. Blair was generous in her quixotic fashion; her husband had inherited wealth, and he was, moreover, a successful lawyer, who admired her immensely and encouraged her foibles. She dressed her twin boys after portraits of the Stuart princes, and their velvet and long curls caused many riots at the public school they attended—sent there, she said, that they might grow up strong in the democratic spirit.
When they had adjourned to the library Mrs. Blair spoke in practical ways of the new wife’s home-coming. She tendered her own services in any changes her father wished in the house. Some of her mother’s personal belongings she frankly stated her purpose to remove. They were things that did not, to Colonel Craighill’s masculine mind, seem particularly interesting or valuable. Wayne grew restless as his father and sister considered these matters. He moved about idly, throwing in a word now and then when Mrs. Blair appealed to him directly. Evenings at home had become unusual events, and domestic affairs bored him. Mrs. Blair was, however, sensitive to his moods and she continued her efforts to hold him within the circle of their talk.
“Don’t you think a reception—something large and general—would be a good thing at the start, Wayne?”
“Yes; oh, yes, by all means,” he replied, looking up from a publisher’s advertisement that he had been reading.
He left the room unnoticed a few minutes later and wandered into the wide hall, feeling the atmosphere of the house flow around him. It was the local custom, in our ready American fashion of conferring antiquity, to speak of the mansion as the old Craighill place. The house, built originally in the early seventies, had recently been remodelled and enlarged. It occupied half a block, and the grounds were beautifully kept, faithful to traditions of Mrs. Craighill’s taste. The full force of the impending change in his father’s life now struck Wayne for the first time. There is no eloquence like that of absence. He stood by the open drawing room door with his childhood and youth calling to all his senses. The thought of his mother stole across his memory—a gentle, bright, smiling spirit. The pictures on the walls; the familiar furniture; the broad fireplace; the tall bronze vases that guarded the glass doors of the conservatory, whose greenery showed at the end of the long room—those things cried to him now with a new appeal. A great bowl of yellow chrysanthemums, glowing in a far corner, struck upon his sight like flame. He walked the length of the room and gazed up at a portrait of his mother, painted in Paris by a famous artist. Its vitality had in some way vanished; the figure no longer seemed poised, ready to step down into the room. The luminous quality of the face was gone; the eyes were not so brightly responsive as of old—he was so sure of these differences that he flashed off the frame lights with a half-conscious feeling that a shadow had fallen upon the spirit represented there, and that it was kinder to leave it in darkness.
His sister called him on some pretext—he was very dear to her and the fact that he and his father were so utterly unsympathetic increased her tenderness—and repeated the programme of entertainments which she had proposed.
“It’s quite ample. There’s never any question about your doing enough, Fanny,” he remarked indifferently.