The Happiest Time of Their Lives Part 5

"They work, Vin."

He nodded as if no one knew that better than he.

Soon after dinner he went up-stairs to write some letters. She followed him about ten o'clock. She came and leaned one hand on his shoulder and one on his desk.

"Still working?" she said. She had been aware of no desire to see what he was writing, but she was instantly aware that his blotting-paper had fallen across the sheet, that the sheet was not a piece of note-paper, but one of a large pad on which he had been apparently making notes.

Her diamond bracelet had slipped down her wrist and lay upon the blotting-paper; he slowly and carefully pushed it up her slim, round arm until it once more clung in place.

"I've nearly finished," he said; and to her ears there was some under sound of pain or of constraint in his tone.

A little later he strolled, still dressed, into her room. She was already in bed, and he came and sat on the foot of the bed, with one foot tucked under him and his arms folded.

Her mind during the interval had been exclusively occupied with the position of that piece of blotting-paper. Could it be there was some other woman whose ghost-like presence she was just beginning to feel haunting their relation? The impersonality of Vincent's manner was an armor against such attacks, but this armor, as Adelaide knew, was more apparent than real. If one could get beyond that, one was at the very heart of the man. If some fortuitous circ.u.mstance had brought a sudden accidental intimacy between him and another woman--What woman loving strength and power could resist the sight of Vincent in action, Vincent as she saw him?

Yet with a good capacity for believing the worst of her fellow-creatures, Adelaide did not really believe in the other woman. That, she knew, would bring a change in the fundamentals of her relations.h.i.+p with her husband. This was only a barrier that left the relation itself untouched.

Before very long she began to think the situation was all in her own imagination. He was so amused, so eager to talk. Silent as he was apt to be with the rest of the world, with her he sometimes showed a love of gossip that enchanted her. And now it seemed to her that he was leading her on from subject to subject through a childish dislike to going to bed. They were actually giggling over Mr. Lanley's adventure when a motor-brake squeaked in the silence of the night, a motor-door slammed.

For the first time Adelaide remembered her daughter. It was after twelve o'clock. A knock came at her door. She wrapped her swan's-down garment about her and went to the door.

"O Mama, have you been worried?" the girl asked. She was standing in the narrow corridor, with her arms full of s.h.i.+ning favors; there could be no question whatever that she had stayed for the dance. "Are you angry?

Have I been keeping you awake?"

"I thought you would have been home an hour ago."

"I know. I want to tell you about it. Mama, how lovely you look in that blue thing! Won't you come up-stairs with me while I undress?"

Adelaide shook her head.

"Not to-night," she answered.

"You are angry with me," the girl went on. "But if you will come, I will explain. I have something to tell you, Mama."

Mrs. Farron's heart stood still. The phrase could mean only one thing.

She went up-stairs with her daughter, sent the maid away, and herself began to undo the soft, pink silk.

"It needs an extra hook," she murmured. "I told her it did."

Mathilde craned her neck over her shoulder, as if she had ever been able to see the middle of her back.

"But it doesn't show, does it?" she asked.

"It perfectly well might."

Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair. In her short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have been a child.

The silence began to grow awkward. Mathilde put on her dressing-gown; it was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white column. A gla.s.s of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her. She pushed a chair near her fire for her mother, and herself remained standing, with her gla.s.s of milk in her hand.

"Mama," she said suddenly, "I suppose I'm what you'd call engaged."

"O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day?"

"Why not to him?"

"I know nothing about him."

"I don't know very much myself. Yes, it's Pete Wayne. Pierson his name is, but every one calls him Pete. How strange it was that I did not even know his first name when you asked me!"

A single ray pierced Mrs. Farron's depression: Vincent had known, Vincent's infallibility was confirmed. She did not know what to say. She sat looking sadly, obliquely at the floor like a person who has been aggrieved. She was wondering whether she should be to her daughter a comrade or a ruler, a confederate or a policeman. Of course in all probability the thing would be better stopped. But could this be accomplished by immediate action, or could she invite confidences and yet commit herself to nothing?

She raised her eyes.

"I do not approve of youthful marriages," she said.

"O Mama! And you were only eighteen yourself."

"That is why."

Mathilde was frightened not only by the intense bitterness of her mother's tone, but also by the obvious fact that she was face to face with the explanation of the separation of her parents. She had been only nine years old at the time. She had loved her father, had found him a better playfellow than her mother, had wept bitterly at parting with him, and had missed him. And then gradually her mother, who had before seemed like a beautiful, but remote, princess, had begun to make of her an intimate and grown-up friend, to consult her and read with her and arrange happinesses in her life, to win, to, if the truth must be told, reconquer her. Perhaps even Adelaide would not have succeeded so easily in effacing Severance's image had not he himself so quickly remarried.

Mathilde went several times to stay with the new household after Adelaide in secret, tearful conference with her father had been forced to consent.

To Mathilde these visits had been an unacknowledged torture. She never knew quite what to mention and what to leave untouched. There was always a constraint between the three of them. Her father, when alone with her, would question her, with strange, eager pauses, as to how her mother looked. Her mother's successor, whom she could not really like, would question her more searchingly, more embarra.s.singly, with an ill-concealed note of jealousy in every word. Even at twelve years Mathilde was shocked by the strain of hatred in her father's new wife, who seemed to reproach her for fas.h.i.+on and fineness and fastidiousness, qualities of which the girl was utterly unaware. She could have loved her little half-brother when he appeared upon the scene, but Mrs. Severance did not encourage the bond, and gradually Mathilde's visits to her father ceased.

As a child she had been curious about the reasons for the parting, but as she grew older it had seemed mere loyalty to accept the fact without asking why; she had perhaps not wanted to know why. But now, she saw, she was to hear.

"Mathilde, do you still love your father?"

"I think I do, Mama. I feel very sorry for him."

"Why?"

"I don't know why. I dare say he is happy."

"I dare say he is, poor Joe." Adelaide paused. "Well, my dear, that was the reason of our parting. One can pity a son or a brother, but not a husband. Weakness kills love. A woman cannot be the leader, the guide, and keep any romance. O Mathilde, I never want you to feel the humiliation of finding yourself stronger than the man you love. That is why I left your father, and my justification is his present happiness.

This inferior little person he has married, she does as well. Any one would have done as well."

Mathilde was puzzled by her mother's evident conviction that the explanation was complete. She asked after a moment:

"But what was it that made you think at first that you did love him, Mama?"

"Just what makes you think you love this boy--youth, flattery, desire to love. He was magnificently handsome, your father. I saw him admired by other men, apparently a master; I was too young to judge, my dear. You shan't be allowed to make that mistake; you shall have time to consider."

Mathilde smiled.

"I don't want time," she said.

"I did not know I did."

"I don't think I feel about love as you do," said the girl, slowly.