“I suppose our severest winter weather will hardly equal the cold you have been used to in Vermont,” she remarked, stirring her cup.
“It gets very cold there, but it is bracing and wholesome,” replied Adelaide, meeting Fanny’s gaze. “But I have hardly been there since I grew up. Mama found she couldn’t stand the climate about the time I needed some schooling, so we went abroad, and you know how easy it is to stay on once you are over there. Our home in Vermont was at Burlington—you know, on the lake?—and the winds do come howling terribly down from Canada! It is lovely in summer, though. I’m going to take your father up there next summer,” she ended, smiling at her husband, who gazed at her fondly.
It had been some time since Mrs. Blair had heard anyone speak of taking her father anywhere. Her memory pricked her at once with the recollection that in her mother’s lifetime her father had yielded reluctantly to all pleas for vacations. The children had usually been taken away by their mother—sometimes to hotels at quiet summer places, at other times to houses rented for the season. Colonel Craighill did not always like the places chosen by his wife, but he had never quarrelled with her plans and decisions in such matters. He liked to travel and fell into the habit of an annual trip abroad, going usually alone, chiefly, he declared, for the sea trip. Now, however, Mrs. Blair reflected, everything would be different.
Breakfast passed smoothly, and they lingered later in the library. Mrs. Craighill seemed in no awe of her elderly husband. She talked more freely now, and mentioned many foreign places where she and her mother had lived at different periods. Most of them were obscure and unfashionable, and some of them were wholly unknown to Mrs. Blair; but she was dimly conscious that there was cleverness behind this careless sketching of the leisurely foreign itinerary pursued by this young woman and her widowed mother. At the same time the background which Mrs. Craighill created for herself was shadowy; against it she and her mother were as unsubstantial as figures on a screen. There was nothing that you could put your hand on. Vermont, to Mrs. Blair, was even more remote and inaccessible than those French and German towns where winters and summers had been spent by the mother and daughter. Mrs. Blair, in her rapid visualization of their flights, saw them huddled where the pension charges were lightest.
Wayne soon called for his runabout and went to the office, as his father had announced that he would remain at home until after luncheon. Wayne had acted becomingly, to his father’s satisfaction and to his sister’s great relief. Mrs. Blair was, in fact, quite proud of him as he said good-bye to her and stood very straight and tall before his stepmother and bade her good morning. He bore the stamp of breeding—she had never felt this more than now—and he could be relied on in emergencies.
“Are you all coming over to-night—the children and everybody?” asked Colonel Craighill.
“No; you must have your first dinner alone,” Mrs. Blair replied; “but to-morrow night you are coming to us.”
“I am dining with Fanny to-night, so you will have a clean sweep,” said Wayne, in conformity with his sister’s earlier instructions.
The sensation of being suddenly established as mistress of a home over which another woman had presided for twenty years, and in which she has borne and reared children and died, was to be Mrs. Craighill’s fully to-day. Mrs. Blair went thoroughly into all the domestic arrangements with the housekeeper attending. She revealed the repositories of linen, the moth-proof lodgments for woollen fabrics, the secret storehouses of fruit and vegetables. On these rounds Mrs. Blair evinced a sincere desire to be of help. She had fortified herself against heartache, but there were things that hurt. The ineffaceable marks of her mother’s forethought and labour were wrought into the deeper history of the house, and could never be understood by this newcomer, who laid ignorant hands upon the ark of the domestic covenant and yet escaped destruction.
Several times, on this tour of inspection, Colonel Craighill spoke his first wife’s name, and his manner and tone gave to his daughter’s sensitive intelligence a completer idea of his perfect detachment from the earlier tie. She felt the tightening of the heart that every woman feels when an illustration of man’s forgetfulness strikes close home. She foresees at once her own replacement by another; fickle flowers of remembrance are rusty patches on her grave where the winds of December moan forever. Fanny Blair, already, by this prevision, saw herself forgotten and her own successor entering her husband’s door, while her children, unkempt and tearful, wailed dolorously before the gates of oblivion.