“I knew you'd think so. That was, partly, why I acted as I did, for her, dear mother”—he leaned forward a little toward me and took up one end of the ruffle I was stitching again to cover my excitement—“and for Lorraine and for me, in engaging our passage abroad.”
He seemed not to expect me to speak at once, but after a little quiet pause, while we both sat thinking, went on, with great gentleness: “You know it's about our only way of really protecting her from any annoyance here, even that of thoughts of her own she doesn't like. There will be so very wonderfully much for her to see, and I believe she'll enjoy it. One of Lorraine's younger sisters is coming to be with us, perhaps, for a while in Switzerland—and the Elliots—animal sculptors. You remember them, don't you, and Arlington—studying decorative design that winter when you were in New York? They'll be abroad this summer. I believe we'll all have a very charming, care-free time walking and sketching and working—a time really so much more charming for a lovely and sensible young woman than sitting in a talking town subject to the incursions of a lover she doesn't truly like.” He stopped a moment before he added, sincerely: “Then—it isn't simply for her that this way would be better, mother, but for me, for every one.”
“For you and for every one?” I managed to make myself ask with tranquillity.
“Yes. Why wouldn't this relieve immensely all the sufferers from my commercial career at the factory? Don't you think that's somewhat unjust, not simply to Maria's and Tom's requirements for the family standing and fortunes”—he laughed a moment—“but to father's need there of a right-hand business man?” That was his way of putting it. “For a long time,” he pursued, more earnestly than I've ever heard him speak before in his life, “I've been planning, mother, to go away to study and to sketch. I'm doing nothing here. Maybe what I would do away from here might not seem to you so wonderful. But it would have one dignity—whatever else it were or were not, it would be my own.”
Perhaps it may seem strange, but in those few words and instants, when my son spoke so simply and sincerely of his own work, I felt, more than in his actual wedding with his wife, the cleaving pang of a marriage for him. At the same time I was stricken beyond all possible speech by my rising consciousness of the injustice of his sense of failure here in his own father's house, in my house. How weakly I had been lost in the thousand little anxieties and preoccupations of my every-day, to let myself be unwittingly engulfed in his older sister's strange, blank prejudice, to lose my own true understanding of the rights and the happiness of one of the children—I can think it, all unspoken and in silence—somehow most my own.
It seemed as though my heartstrings tightened. Everything blurred before me. I never in my life have tried so hard before to hold my soul absolutely still to see quite clearly, as though none of this were happening to myself, what would be best for my boy's future, for Peggy's, for their whole lives. It was in the midst of these close-pressing thoughts that I heard him saying: “So that perhaps this would truly be the right way for every one.” Only too inevitably I knew his words were true; and now I could force myself at last to say, quietly: “Why—yes—if that would make you happier, Charles.” He rose and came up to my chair then so beautifully, and moved it to a shadier place, as Peggy, catching sight of him from the garden, ran up with a cry of surprise to meet him, to talk about it all.
I scarcely know whether her father's consciousness of the coming separation for me, or my consciousness of the coming separation for him, made things harder or easier for both of us. Cyrus was obliged to make a business trip to Washington on the next day, and it was decided that as Peggy especially wished to be with him now before her long absence, she should accompany him in the morning.
On the midnight before we were all startled from sleep by the clang of the door-bell. Good little Billy, always hoping for excitement, and besides extremely sweet in doing errands, answered it. The rest of us absurdly assembled in kimonos and bathrobes at the head of the stairs, dreading we scarcely knew what, for the members of the family not in the house. Within a few minutes Billy dashed up-stairs again, considerately holding high, so that we all could see it, a special-delivery letter, the very same illegible, bleared envelope which had before annoyed us so extremely. It was addressed in washed-out characters to Miss — Talbert. The word Peggy, very clear and black, had been lately inserted in the same handwriting; and below, the street and number had been recently refreshed, apparently by the hand of Maria.
As this familiar, wearisome object reappeared before us all, Peggy, with a little quiver of mirth, looking out between her long braids, cried: “Call back the boy!” By the time the messenger had returned she had readdressed the envelope, unopened, to Mr. Goward. Billy took it back down-stairs again; and every one trooped off to bed, Alice and mother with positive snorts and flounces of impatience.
Needless to say, Tom and Maria returned in perfect safety on Saturday. Before then, at twelve o'clock on the same morning, when Cyrus and Peggy had gone, I was sitting on the piazza making a little money-bag for her, with mother sitting rocking beside me, and complaining of every one in peace, when Dr. Denbigh drove up to the horse-block, flung his weight out of the buggy, and hurried up the steps. He shook hands with us hastily and abstractedly, and asked if he might speak to me inside the house.