"Mother--are you going to marry him?"
Cissy, studying the adjustment of her veil, confessed, "He hasn"t asked me."
"But he will--"
Mrs. Beale shrugged her shoulders. "Who knows?"
In the weeks which followed, the little lady was conscious that things were not drawing to a comfortable climax. By all the rules of the game, Landry should long ago have declared himself. But he seemed to be slipping more and more into the fatal role of good friend and comrade.
Cissy"s pride would not let her admit, even to herself, that she had failed to attract at the final moment. But there was something deeper than her pride involved, and she found her days restless and her nights sleepless. One night in the dense darkness she faced the truth relentlessly. "You"re in love, Cissy Beale," she told herself, scornfully. "You"re in love for the first time in your life--and you a--grandmother!"
Then she turned over on her pillow, hid her face in its white warmth, and cried as if her heart would break.
In the meantime the baby drooped. Cecily, worried, consulted her mother continually. Thus it came about that Mrs. Beale lived a double life.
From noon until midnight she was of to-day--smartly gowned, girlish; from midnight until dawn she was of yesterday--waking from her fitful slumbers at the first wailing note, presiding in gray gown and slippers over strange brews of catnip and of elderflower.
Cecily"s doctor, being up-to-date, remonstrated at this return to the primitive, but was forced to admit, after the baby had come triumphantly through a half-dozen critical attacks, that Cissy"s back-to-grandma methods were effective.
It was on a morning following one of these struggles that Cissy said to her daughter, wearily, "I can"t escape it--"
"Escape what?" demanded Cecily, who, in the pale-gray bedroom was endeavoring to observe the doctor"s injunction to let the wailing baby stay in her ba.s.sinet, instead of walking the floor with her.
"The black-silk-and-mitt destiny," said the depressed lady.
"What has happened?" Cecily demanded.
"Nothing has happened," responded her weary little mother, and refused to discuss the matter further.
But to herself she was beginning to admit that she had lost Landry. An hour later she had a telephone message from him.
"I want you to go with me for a last ride together," he said. "I leave to-morrow."
"To-morrow!" Her voice showed her dismay.
"But why this sudden decision--"
"I have played long enough," he said; "business calls--"
As Mrs. Beale made ready for the ride she surveyed herself wistfully in her mirror. There were shadows under her eyes, and faint little lines toward the corners of her lips--it even seemed to her that her chin sagged. She had a sudden sense of revolt. "If I were young, _really_ young," she thought, "he would not be going away--"
With this idea firmly fixed in her mind, she exerted herself to please him; and her little laugh made artificial music in his ears, her fixed smile wore upon his nerves, her staccato questions irritated him.
Again they had dinner together, and as she sat opposite him, gorgeous and gay in her gown of geranium red, he began to talk with her of her daughter.
"I"ve never met her. It has seemed to me that you might have let me see her--"
Cissy flushed. "She"s such a great grown-up," she said. "Somehow when I"m with her I feel--old--"
"You will never seem old," he said, with the nearest approach to tenderness that had softened his voice for days. "You have in you the spirit of eternal youth--"
Then he floundered on. "But a mother and a daughter--when you used to speak of her in Chicago, it seemed to me that I could see you together, and I liked the sweetness and womanliness of the thought; but I have never seen you together."
With a sense of recklessness upon her, Cissy suddenly determined to tell him the truth. "Cecily hasn"t been going out much. You see, there"s the baby--"
He stared. "The baby--?"
"Her baby--Cecily"s--"
"_Then you"re a grandmother_?"
It seemed to Cissy that the whole restaurant rang with the emphasis of the words. Yet he had not spoken loudly; not a head was turned in their direction; even the waiter stood unmoved.
When she came to herself Landry was laughing softly. "When are you going to let me see--the baby--?"
"Never--"
"Why not?"
Cissy went on to her doom. "Because you"ll want to put me on the shelf like all the rest of them. You"ll want to see me with--my hair--parted--and spectacles. And my eyes are perfectly good--and my hair is my own--"
She stopped. Landry was surveying her with hard eyes.
"Don"t you love--the baby--?"
Cissy shrugged. "Perhaps. I don"t know yet. Some day I may when I haven"t anything to do but sit in a chimney-corner."
Thus spoke Cissy Beale, making of herself a heartless creature, flinging back into the face of Valentine Landry his most cherished ideals.
But what did it matter? She had known from the moment of her confession that he would be repelled. What man could stand up in the face of the world and marry a grandmother!--the idea was preposterous.
She finished dinner with her head in the air; she was hypocritically lively during the drive home; she said "Good-night" and "Good-bye"
without feeling, and went up-stairs with her heart like lead to find the nurse weeping wildly on the first landing.
The baby, it appeared, was very ill. And the baby"s father and mother, having left the little cherub sleeping peacefully, were motoring somewhere in the wide s.p.a.ces of the world. The family doctor was out.
She had called up another doctor, and he would come as soon as he could.
But in the meantime the baby was dying--
"Nonsense, Kate," said Cissy Beale, and pulling off her gloves as she ran, she made for the pale-gray room.
Now, as it happened, Valentine Landry, driving away in a priggish state of mind, was suddenly overwhelmed by miserable remorse. Reviewing the evening, he seemed to see, for the first time, the unhappiness in the eyes of the little woman who had borne herself so bravely. In a sudden moment of illumination he realized all that she must have been feeling.
Perhaps it had not been heartlessness; perhaps it had been--heart hunger.
Leaning forward, he spoke to his chauffeur. They stopped at the first drug-store, and Landry called up Cissy. Her voice from the other end answered, sharply, then broke as he gave his name.
"I thought it was the doctor," she said. "Can you come back, please? The baby, oh, the baby is very ill!"
Five minutes later the nurse let him into the house. He followed her up the stairs and into the nursery. Cissy sat with the baby in her arms.
The baby was in a blanket and Cissy was in her gray wrapper. She had donned it while the nurse held the baby in the hot bath which saved its life. Cissy"s hair was out of curl and the color was out of her cheeks.
But to Valentine Landry she was beautiful.