"Long before I knew how much you would be liked, Rachael, and what a fuss people were going to make over you, I made you welcome,"
continued Florence simply, with tears in her eyes. "I thanked G.o.d that Clarence had married a good woman, and that Carol would have a refined and a--I may say a Christian home. Isn"t that true?"
"I know," Rachael said again with an effort, as she paused.
"Then think it over," besought the other woman eagerly. "Think that Carol will marry, and that Clarence--" Her ardent tone dropped suddenly. There was a moment"s pause. Then she added dryly, "How do, dear?"
"How do, Tante Firenze!" said Carol, who had come abruptly into the, room. "How are the girls? Say, listen! Is Isabelle going to the Bowditches"?"
"I don"t even know that Charlotte is going," Mrs. Haviland said, with an auntly smile of baffling sweetness that yet contained a subtle reproof. "Uncle Gardner and I haven"t made up our minds.
Isabelle in any case would only go to look on, so she is not so much interested, but poor Charlotte is simply on tenterhooks to know whether it"s to be yes or no. Girls" first parties"--her indulgent smile included Rachael--"dear me, how important they seem!"
"I should think you"d have to answer Mrs. Bowditch," said Carol in plain disgust at this maternal vacillation.
"Mrs. Bowditch is fortunately an old enough friend, dear, to waive the usual formalities," her aunt answered sweetly.
"But, my gracious--Charlotte"s two months older than I am, and she won"t know any of the men!" Carol protested.
"Don"t speak in that precocious way, Bill," Rachael said sharply.
"You went to your first dances last winter!"
Carol gave her stepmother a look conspicuously devoid of affection, and turned to adjust her smart little hat with the aid of a narrow mirror hanging between the gla.s.s dining-room doors.
"You couldn"t drop me at the club, on your way to church, Tante?"
she presently inquired. And to Rachael she added, with youthful impatience, "I told Dad where I was going!"
Mrs. Haviland rose somewhat heavily.
"Glad to. Any chance of you coming to lunch, Rachael? What are your plans?"
"Thank you, no, woman dear! I may go over to Gertrude"s for tea."
The little group broke up. Mrs. Haviland and her niece went out to the waiting motor car purring on the pebbled drive. Rachael idly watched them out of sight, sighed at the thought of wasting so beautiful a day indoors, and went slowly upstairs. Her husband, comfortably propped in pillows, looked better.
"Clarence," said she, depositing several pounds of morning papers upon the foot of his bed, "who"s Billy lunching with at the club?"
Clarence picked up the uppermost paper, fixed his eyes attentively upon it, and puffed upon his cigarette for reply.
"Do you know?" Rachael asked vigorously.
No answer. Mr. Breckenridge, his eyes still intent upon what he was reading, held his cigarette at arm"s length over the bra.s.s bowl on the table beside the bed, and dislodged a quarter-inch of ash with his little finger.
Rachael, briskly setting his cluttered table to rights, gave him an angry glance that, so far as any effect upon him was concerned, was thrown away.
"Don"t be so rude, Clarence," she said, in annoyance. "Billy said you agreed to her going to the club for golf. Who"s she with?"
At last Mr. Breckenridge raised sodden and redshot eyes to his wife"s face, moistening his dark and swollen lips carefully with his tongue before he spoke. He was a fat-faced man, who, despite evidences of dissipation, did not look his more than forty years.
There was no gray in his thin, silky hair, and there still lingered an air of youth and innocence in his round face. This morning he was in a bad temper because his whole body was still upset from the Friday night dinner and drinking party, and in his soul he knew that he had cut rather a poor figure before Billy, and that the little minx had taken instant advantage of the situation.
"I just want to say this, Rachael," Clarence said, with an icy dignity only slightly impaired by the lingering influences of drink. "I"m Billy"s father, and I understand her, and she understands me. That"s all that"s necessary; do you get me?" He put his cigarette holder back in his mouth, gripped it firmly between his teeth, and turned again to his paper. "If some of you d.a.m.ned jealous women who are always running around trying to make trouble would let her ALONE" he went on sulkily, "I"d be obliged to you--that"s all!"
Rachael settled her ruffles in a big wing-chair with the innocent expression of a casual caller. She took a book from the reading table, and fluttered a few pages indifferently.
"Listen, Clancy," said she placatingly. "Florence was just here, and she says--and I agree--that there is no question that Joe Pickering is devoted to Bill. Now, I don"t say that Billy is equally devoted--"
"Ha! Better not!" said Clarence at white heat, one eye watchful over the top of the paper.
"But I DO say," pursued Rachael steadily, "that she is with him a good deal more than she will admit. Yesterday, for instance, when she was playing tennis with the Parmalees and the Pinckard boy, Kent came up to the house to get some ginger ale. I happened to be dummy, and I went out on the terrace. Joe"s horse was down near the courts, and Joe and Billy were sitting there on one of the benches--where the others were I don"t know. When Kent went down with the ginger ale, Joe got on his horse and went off. Of course it was only for a few minutes, but Billy didn"t say anything about it--"
Her voice, with a tentative question in it, rested in air.
Clarence turned a page with some rustling of paper.
"Then Florence says," Rachael went on after a moment, "that when she and Gardner stopped here Wednesday night Joe was here, and Vivvie Sartoris wasn"t here. Now, of course, I don"t KNOW, for I didn"t ask Alfred---"
"There you go," said the sick man witheringly. "That"s right--ask the maids, and get all the servants talking; all come down on the heels of a poor little girl like a pack of yapping wolves! I suppose if she was plain and unattractive--I should think you"d be ashamed," he went on, changing his high and querulous key to one of almost priestly authority and reproof, "Upon my word, it"s beneath your dignity. My little girl comes to me, and she explains the whole matter. Pickering admires her--she can"t help that--and she has an influence over him. She tells me he hasn"t touched a thing but beer for six weeks, just because she asked him to give up heavy drinking. He told her the other day that if he had met her a few years ago, Lucy never would have left him. She"s wakened the boy up, he"s a different fellow--"
"All that may be true," Rachael said quickly, the color that his preposterous rebuke had summoned to her cheeks still flushing them, "still, you don"t want Billy to marry Joe Pickering! You know that sort of pity, and that business of reforming a man--"
She paused, but Clarence did not speak. "Not that Billy herself realizes it, I daresay," Rachael added presently, watching the reader"s absorbed face for an answering look.
Silence.
"Clarence!" she began imperatively.
Clarence withdrew his attention from the paper with an obvious effort, and spoke in a laboriously polite tone.
"I don"t care to discuss it, Rachael."
"But--" Rachael stopped short on the word. Silence reigned in the big, bright room except for the occasional rustle of Clarence"s newspaper. His wife sat idle, her eyes roving indifferently from the gayly papered walls to the gayly flowered hangings, the great bowl of daffodils on the bookcase, the portrait of Carol that, youthful and self-conscious, looked down from the mantel. On the desk a later photograph of Carol, in a silver frame, was duly flanked by one of Rachael, the girl in the gown she had worn for her first big dance, the woman looking out from under the narrow brim of a snug winter hat, great furs framing her beautiful face, and her slender figure wrapped in furs. Here also was a picture of Florence Haviland, her handsome face self-satisfied, her trio of homely, distinguished-looking girls about her, and a small picture of Gardner, and two of Clarence"s dead mother: one, as they all remembered her, a prim-looking woman with gray hair and magnificent lace on her unfashionable gown, the other, taken thirty years before, showing her as cheerful and youthful, a cascade of ringlets falling over her shoulder, the arm that coquettishly supported her head resting upon an upholstered pedestal, a voluminous striped silk gown sweeping away from her in rich folds. There was even a picture of Clarence and Florence when they were respectively eight and twelve, Clarence in a b.u.t.toned serge kilt and plaid stockings, his fat, gentle little face framed in damp careful curls, Florence also with plaid stockings and a scalloped frock. Clarence sat in a swing; Florence, just behind him, leaned on an open gate, her legs crossed carelessly as she rested on her elbows. And there was a picture of their father, a simple-faced man in an ample beard, taken at that period when photographs were highly glazed, and raised in bas relief. Least conspicuous of all was a snapshot framed in a circle of battered blue-enamel daisies, the picture of a baby girl laughing against a background of dandelions and meadow gra.s.s. And Rachael knew that this was Clarence"s greatest treasure, that it went wherever he went, and that it was worn shabby and tarnished from his hands and his lips.
Sometimes she looked at it and wondered. What a bright-faced, gay little thing Billy had been! Who had set her down in that field, and quieted the rioting eyes and curls and dimples, and anch.o.r.ed the restless little feet, while Baby watched Dad and the black box with the birdie in it? Paula? Once, idly interested in those old days before she had known him, she had asked about the picture.
But Clarence, glad to talk of it, had not mentioned his wife.
"It was before my father died; we were up in the old Maine place,"
he had said. "Gosh, Bill was cute that day! We went on a drive--no motor cars then--and took our lunch, and after lunch the kid comes and settles herself in my arms--for a nap, if you please! "Say, look-a-here," I said, "what do you think I am--a Pullman?" I wanted a smoke, by George! She wasn"t two, you know. Her fat little legs were bare, we"d put her into socks, and her face was flushed, and she just looked up at me through her hair and said, "Hing!" Well, it was good-bye smoke for me! I sang all right, and she cuddled down as pleased as a kitten, and off she went!"
To-day Rachael"s eyes wandered from the picture to Clarence"s face. She tried to study it dispa.s.sionately, but, still shaken by their recent conversation, and sitting there, as she knew she was sitting there, merely to prove that it had had no effect upon her, she felt this to be a little difficult.
What sort of a little boy had he been? A fat little boy, of course. She disliked fat little boys. A spoiled little boy, never crossed in any way. His mother made him go to Sunday-school, and dancing school, and to Miss Nesmith"s private academy, where he was coaxed and praised and indulged even more than at home. And old f.a.n.n.y, who was still with Florence, superintended his baths and took care of his clothes, and ran her finger over the bristles of his toothbrush every morning, to see if he had told her the truth. He rarely did; they used to laugh about those old deceptions. Clarence used to laugh as violently as the old woman when she accused him of occasional kicking and biting.
Other boys came in to play with him. Was it because of his magic lantern and his velocipede, his unending supply of cream puffs and licorice sticks, or because they liked him? Rachael knew only a detail here and there: that he had danced a fancy dance with Anna Vanderwall when he was a fat sixteen, at a Kermess, and that he had given a stag dinner to twenty youths of his own age a few days before he went off to college, and that they had drunk a hundred and fifty dollars" worth of champagne. She knew that his allowance at college was three hundred dollars a month, and that he never stayed within it, and it was old f.a.n.n.y"s boast that every st.i.tch the boy ever wore from the day he was born came from London or Paris. His underwear was as dainty as a bride"s; he had his first dress suit at fifteen; at college he had his suite of three big rooms furnished like showrooms, his monogrammed cigarettes, his boat, and his horse.
The thought of all these things used to distress his mother when she was old and much alone. She attempted to belittle the luxury of Clarence"s boyhood. She told Rachael that he was treated just as the other boys were. Her conscience was never quite easy about his upbringing.
"You can"t hold a boy too tight, you know, or else he"ll break away altogether," old lady Breckenridge would say to Rachael, sitting before a coal fire in the gloomy magnificence of her old- fashioned drawingroom and pressing the white fingers of one hand against the agonized joints of the other. "I was often severe with Clarence, and he was a good boy until he got with other boys; he was always loving to me. He never should have married Paula Verlaine," she would add fretfully. "A good woman would have overlooked his faults and made a fine man of him, but she was always an empty-headed little thing! Ah, well"--and the poor old woman would sigh as she drew her fluffy shawl about her shoulders- -"I cannot blame myself, that"s my great consolation now, Rachael, when I think of facing my Master and rendering an account. I have been heavily afflicted, but I am not the first G.o.d-fearing woman who has been visited with sorrow through her children!"
Clarence had visited his mother often in the weeks that preceded her death, but she did not take much heed of his somewhat embarra.s.sed presence, nor, to Rachael"s surprise, did her last hours contain any of those heroic joys that are supposedly the reward of long suffering and virtue. An unexpressed terror seemed to linger in her sickroom, indeed to pervade the whole house; the invalid lay staring drearily at the heavy furnishings of her immense dark room, a nurse slipped in and out; the b.l.o.o.d.y light of the westering sun, falling through stairway windows of colored gla.s.s, blazed in the great hallway all through the chilly October afternoons. Callers came and went, there were subdued voices and soft footsteps; flowers came, their wet fragrance breaking from oiled paper and soaked cardboard boxes, the cards that were wired to them resisting all attempts at detachment. Clergymen came, and Rachael imitated their manner afterward, to the general delight.
On the day before she died Mrs. Breckenridge caught her son"s plump cool hand in her own hot one, and made him promise to stop drinking, and to go to church, and to have Carol confirmed.
Clarence promised everything.