The house stood mellow and homelike in the soft sunshine, with ivy and clematis clustering on walls and around windows. The lawn, smooth and well trimmed, stretched into the dimness of a little wilderness marked by shrubs. The sycamores on the other side of the house waved their tops above the roof. He remembered when they were planted. She planted them. What a number of years ago! And there in the old part of the house was her window. The clematis had always been there. He remembered how it used to brush her cheek as she leaned out to call to him. It was just such an afternoon as this that her delicate face, like a pink shell, flushed with excitement, had appeared and she had summoned him nearer.
“Mat, Baby has cut a tooth.”
My God! He could hear her voice now; almost wondered whether she had not withdrawn within, and whether the five and thirty years had not been a vague dream, and he himself was not young and vigorous and defiant of fate. But the quick memories of the day rushed back upon him and obscured the dearer vision.
The marriage was impossible. His heart yearned towards the girl whom he loved with an old man's tender affection. How could he allow her to marry a man whom he knew, from heredity, from actual facts that had come miserably within his own knowledge, to be an unprincipled adventurer? The misery of it was that his lips were sealed. He could not tell her of Roderick's real character. To do that would be to break virtually the promise he had kept for over thirty years.
“Whatever I do for my own son, I shall do for yours.”
He could no more blacken Roderick's reputation than he could Sylvester's. Perhaps the marriage would redeem him. Yet to stake the life's happiness of a human soul that was dear to him upon the chance of another's redemption was too great a responsibility. Why had she engaged herself to this man? It was not through love. He drew from his pocket the letter he had received from her that morning and read it through. It was constrained, artificial. The tone jarred upon their intimacy. Perhaps Ella had changed, grown worldly and cynical, lost her love for him. Or was it only the letter of a girl at war with her own heart? He had seen many such battles in his time.
“At any rate, I withhold my consent,” he said decisively.
Yet Usher's threat agitated him more than he dared confess. He had never defied him before on that point. For a moment he was racked with a spasm of fear lest Sylvester should know the secret of his relations with Usher. The fear had grown with the years into the roots of his life, had become an unreasoning terror. To save his son the knowledge, he had been killing himself by inches with work and worry.
Suddenly he rose, shook himself as if impatient of the clinging doubts, and walked briskly across the lawn. Usher daren't do it, for his own sake.
Usher turned the corner of the house and met him by the door. Matthew frowned and regarded him angrily.