Josiah was pacing the room, his hands clasped behind him. He had made a flying journey to New York and he was arrayed in his best finery—a capacious Prince Albert coat that flared below the waist like a rubber cylinder about to burst. His trousers were too tight. The knees were crinkled, puffy and turned-in, an anatomical detail which stout men share with women. He wore an upstanding collar and in the wide frontal gap his heavy chin thrust down in amiable meditation.
“Well,” he said, as he paced, “I’ll tell you: choose for yourselves where you want to go, and I’ll foot the bill. Your mother can take you. I got to stay near Town, this summer.”
The panorama of promise overwhelmed them. They were silent. All of them, save Rhoda, were without a thought. After a pause, she uttered one word:
“Europe!”
And with the comfortable way of crowds, all who were present fell upon her suggestion as if it had been the exact articulation of their desire.
“Good!” said Josiah. “Just make your plans,” and with a true sense of the dramatic, left the room. Jonas ran after him, noisily humming, half skipping. Rhoda and Adelaide clasped waists and danced away. There was the tramp of their feet, the sharp cadence of their voices. And then, came silence.
Marsden and Sarah and Quincy were left. And, as if by magic, the parlor’s mood had changed. Heavier than ever were the portières and other hangings; narrower and lower than before, the greyish cut of ceiling, the impress of walls. The cripple lay back in his cushions. His eyes were upturned. And he was musing. He did not philosophize his meditation. It was hurting too much for that.
But his looking up and within himself made it as if Sarah and her last-born had been alone.
She was seated on her favorite cane chair. At her knees stood Quincy, half leaning against them, his hands in hers, his head on a level with her eyes. And so, facing each other, they remained. There was a pathetic similarity between this aging woman and this growing boy. Their faces were long and drawn; their heads were generously moulded. The eyes of both were a deep blue-grey that reminded one in her of faded violets, in him of violets that were fresh but in a shadow. Even their mouths were alike—large, tender-pointed, mobile. And at this moment, there played upon them a tremor like the echo of a single pain.
Sarah shifted her gaze. To her, this searching intercourse between them had become almost unbearable. It was as if, in this deep sympathy that had annealed them, lay infidelity toward the others to whom she was attached. For Quincy could not be the only one. In the rapt intensity which drove his spirit toward her, and in her impulse to respond just so intensely, just so wholeheartedly, it was as if, easily, it might be brought about that there should be no others. But such a blessed gift was not ordained for Quincy. Sarah repulsed her passionate inner gesture of bestowal; she beat down this mother in her which threatened to clasp Quincy to the exclusion of all else. She summoned her sense of duty, her social sense, her common sense. She looked toward Marsden for aid in her resolve. And deliberately, coldly, though she knew not the full nature of her act, she broke this blinding, seething current that threatened to submerge the pair, one with the other. She felt the presence in her eyes, in the expression of her face, of just this feeling of exclusion, of hopelessness, of irony that she found in his. She wiped all this away, forcing her mind and smiling. Within herself, she knew that this wealth was mockery for her—the gilding of a death’s-head. It would not return her husband to her, after eleven years of tolerant estrangement.