The Happiest Time of Their Lives Part 14

"I think your mother is perfectly wonderful--wonderful."

"I love you so."

The older people took a little longer to settle down. Mr. Lanley stood on the hearth-rug, with a cigar in his mouth and his head thrown very far back. Adelaide sank into a chair, looking, as she often did, as if she had just been brilliantly well posed for a photograph. Farron was silent. Mrs. Wayne sat, as she had a bad habit of doing, on one foot. The two groups were sufficiently separated for distinct conversations.

"Is this a conference?" asked Farron.

Mrs. Wayne made it so by her reply.

"The whole question is, Are they really in love? At least, that's my view."

"In love!" Adelaide twisted her shoulders. "What can they know of it for another ten years? You must have some character, some knowledge to fall in love. And these babes--"

"No," said Mr. Lanley, stoutly; "you're all wrong, Adelaide. It's first love that matters--_Romeo_ and _Juliet_, you know. Afterward we all get hardened and world-worn and cynical and material." He stopped short in his eloquence at the thought that Mrs. Wayne was quite obviously not hardened or world-worn or cynical or material. "By Jove!" he thought to himself, "that's it. The woman's spirit is as fresh as a girl's." He had by this time utterly forgotten what he had meant to say.

Adelaide turned to her husband.

"Do you think they are in love, Vin?"

Vincent looked at her for a second, and then he nodded two or three times.

Though no one at once recognized the fact, the engagement was settled at that moment.

It seemed obvious that Mr. Lanley should take the Waynes home in his car.

Mrs. Wayne, who had prepared for walking with overshoes and with pins for her trailing skirt, did not seem too enthusiastic at the suggestion. She stood a moment on the step and looked at the sky, where Orion, like a banner, was hung across the easterly opening of the side street.

"It's a lovely night," she said.

It was Pete who drew her into the car. Her reluctance deprived Mr.

Lanley of the delight of bestowing a benefit, but gave him a faint sense of capture.

In the drawing-room Mathilde was looking from one to the other of her natural guardians, like a well-trained puppy who wants to be fed. She wanted Pete praised. Instead, Adelaide said:

"Really, papa is growing too secretive! Do you know, Vin, he and Mrs.

Wayne quarreled like mad last evening, and he never told me a word about it!"

"How do you know?"

"Oh, I heard them trying to smooth it out at dinner."

"O Mama," wailed Mathilde, between admiration and complaint, "you hear everything!"

"Certainly, I do," Adelaide returned lightly. "Yes, and I heard you, too, and understood everything that you meant."

Vincent couldn't help smiling at his stepdaughter's horrified look.

"What a brute you are, Adelaide!" he said.

"Oh, my dear, you're much worse," she retorted. "You don't have to overhear. You just read the human heart by some black magic of your own.

That's really more cruel than my gross methods."

"Well, Mathilde," said Farron, "as a reader of the human heart, I want to tell you that I approve of the young man. He has a fine, delicate touch on life, which, I am inclined to think, goes only with a good deal of strength."

Mathilde blinked her eyes. Grat.i.tude and delight had brought tears to them.

"He thinks you're wonderful, Mr. Farron," she answered a little huskily.

"Better and better," answered Vincent, and he held out his hand for a letter that Pringle was bringing to him on a tray.

"What's that?" asked Adelaide. One of the first things she had impressed on Joe Severance was that he must never inquire about her mail; but she always asked Farron about his.

He seemed to be thinking and didn't answer her.

Mathilde, now simply insatiable, pressed nearer to him and asked:

"And what do you think of Mrs. Wayne?"

He raised his eyes from the envelope, and answered with a certain absence of tone:

"I thought she was an elderly wood-nymph."

Adelaide glanced over his shoulder, and, seeing that the letter had a printed address in the corner, lost interest.

"You may shut the house, Pringle," she said.

CHAPTER VII

Pringle, the last servant up, was soon heard discreetly drawing bolts and turning out electric lights. Mathilde went straight up-stairs without even an attempt at drawing her mother into an evening gossip. She was aware of being tired after two nights rendered almost sleepless by her awareness of joy. She went to her room and shut the door. Her bed was piled high with extra covers, soft, light blankets and a down coverlet covered with pink silk. She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent to which she always opened her bedroom windows even when, as at present, the night was bitterly cold. In the morning she ran, huddling on her dressing-gown, into a heated bathroom, and when she emerged from this, the maid had always lighted her fire, and laid her breakfast-tray close to the blaze. To-night, when she went to open her window, she noticed that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks. She stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays through the clear air. By turning her head to the west she could look down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced by rows of lights. The familiar sight suddenly seemed to her almost intolerably beautiful. "Oh, I love him so much!" she said to herself, and her lips actually whispered the words, "so much! so much!"

She threw the window high as a reproof of those s.h.i.+vers across the way, and, jumping into bed, hastily sandwiched her small body between the warm bedclothes. She was almost instantly asleep.

Overhead the faint, but heavy, footfall of Pringle ceased. The house was silent; the city had become so. An occasional Madison Avenue car could be heard ringing along the cold rails, or rhythmically bounding down hill on a flat wheel. Once some distance away came the long, continuous complaint of the siren of a fire-engine and the bells and gongs of its comrades; and then a young man went past, whistling with the purest accuracy of time and tune the air to which he had just been dancing.

At half-past five the kitchen-maid, a young Swede who feared not G.o.d, neither regarded man, but lived in absolute subjection to the cook, to whom, unknown to any one else, she every morning carried up breakfast, was stealing down with a candle in her hand. Her senses were alert, for a friend of hers had been strangled by burglars in similar circ.u.mstances, and she had never overcome her own terror of the cold, dark house in these early hours of a winter morning.

She went down not the back stairs, for Mr. Pringle objected that she woke him as she pa.s.sed, whereas the carpet on the front stairs was so thick that there wasn't the least chance of waking the family. As she pa.s.sed Mrs. Farron's room she was surprised to see a fine crack of light coming from under it. She paused, wondering if she was going to be caught, and if she had better run back and take to the back stairs despite Pringle's well-earned rest; and as she hesitated she heard a sob, then another--wild, hysterical sobs. The girl looked startled and then went on, shaking her head. What people like that had to cry about beat her.

But she was glad, because she knew such a splendid bit of news would soften the heart of the cook when she took up her breakfast.

By five o'clock it seemed to Adelaide that a whole eternity had pa.s.sed and that another was ahead of her, that this night would never end.

When they went up-stairs, while she was brus.h.i.+ng her hair--her hair rewarded brus.h.i.+ng, for it was fine and long and took a polish like bronze--she had wandered into Vincent's room to discuss with him the question of her father's secretiveness about Mrs. Wayne. It was not, she explained, standing in front of his fire, that she suspected anything, but that it was so unfriendly: it deprived one of so much legitimate amus.e.m.e.nt if one's own family practised that kind of reserve. Her just anger kept her from observing Farron very closely. As she talked she laid her brush on the mantelpiece, and as she did so she knocked down the letter that had come for him just before they went up-stairs. She stooped, and picked it up without attention, and stood holding it; she gesticulated a little with it as she repeated, for her own amus.e.m.e.nt rather than for Vincent's, phrases she had caught at dinner.

The horror to Farron of seeing her standing there chattering, with that death-dealing letter in her hand, suddenly and illogically broke down his resolution of silence. It was cruel, and though he might have denied himself her help, he could not endure cruelty.