"And it is mine to have Dudley wait on me. But you do make an unfair difference between us, Aunt Chris. Why did you call me "uncharitable"
when I said Mrs. Gordon painted immodestly! Dudley said the same thing this morning, and you only smiled."
"It was uncharitable, my dear, and besides it is too palpable to need mention--but men will be men."
Eugenia frowned. "I wish you would occasionally remember that women will be women," she suggested. She wore a scarlet shirtwaist, and the glow from the fire seemed to follow her about.
"I won"t have Aunt Chris bullied, Eugie," declared Dudley as he rose.
"Well, I"m off again. I may bring a legislator or two back to dinner.
What have we got?"
"The Lord knows," replied Eugenia desperately. "Our third cook this month for one thing, and Congo refuses to serve dinner in courses. He says "dar"s too much shufflin" er de dishes for too little victuals.""
Dudley laughed at her mimicry.
"Oh, I suppose we"ll do," he said. "By the way, don"t forget to call on Mrs. Rann to-day."
Miss Chris was gazing placidly into the fire. As Dudley turned with his hand on the door k.n.o.b, she looked up.
"I was surprised to find the Capitol so dirty," she observed regretfully.
Dudley swung round breathlessly.
"Well, I am--blessed!" he gasped.
"So that"s where you"ve been!" cried Eugenia. She threw herself beside Miss Chris"s chair. "What did he say, Aunt Chris?" she implored.
Miss Chris blushed with confusion.
"Well, if I haven"t let it out!" she exclaimed. "Who"d have thought I couldn"t keep a secret at my age." Then she patted Eugenia"s hand. "He"s a good man," she said softly, "and it"s all right about Bernard."
"I knew it would be," said Dudley quickly. "You know, Eugie, I always told you he"d do it."
But Eugenia had turned away with swimming eyes. "I must tell Lottie,"
she said hurriedly. "Oh, Aunt Chris, how could you keep it? To think the children are at school!"
Dudley, with an afterthought, turned from the door and gave her an affectionate pat on the shoulder. "It"s fine news, old girl," he said cheerfully, and Eugenia smiled at him through her tears.
As he went out she followed him into the hall and slowly ascended the stairs. On the landing above she entered a room where Bernard"s wife was lying on a wicker couch, cutting the pages of a magazine.
"Lottie, I"ve good news for you," she exclaimed, "the best of news."
Lottie tossed aside the magazine and raised herself on her elbow. She had a pretty, ineffectual face and a girlish figure, and, despite her faded colouring, looked almost helplessly young. Her round white hands were as weak as a child"s.
"I"m sure I don"t know what it can be," she returned. "You look awfully well in that red waist, Eugie. I think I"ll get one like it."
Eugenia picked up a child"s story book from the rug and laid it on the table; then she stood looking gravely down on the younger woman.
"Can"t you guess what it is?" she asked.
Lottie looked up with a nervous blinking of her eyes. She had paled slightly and she leaned over and drew an eiderdown quilt across her knees.
"It--it"s not about Bernard?" she asked in a whisper.
"Yes, it is about Bernard. You may go to him and bring him home. You may go to-morrow. Oh, Lottie, doesn"t it make you happy?"
Lottie drew the eiderdown quilt still higher. She was not looking at Eugenia, and her mouth had grown sullen. "I don"t see why you send me,"
she said. "Why can"t Jack Tucker bring him home? He"s with him."
"But I thought you wanted to go," returned Eugenia blankly.
"I haven"t seen him for six years," said Lottie, her face still turned away. "He is almost a stranger--and I am afraid of him."
"Oh, Lottie, he loves you so!"
"I don"t know," protested Lottie. "He has been so wicked."
Eugenia was looking down upon her with dismayed eyes.
"Don"t you love him, Lottie?" she asked.
For a moment the other did not reply. Her lips trembled and her knees were shaking beneath the eiderdown quilt. Then with a slow turn of the head she looked up doggedly. "I believe I hate him," she answered.
A swift flush rose to Eugenia"s face, her eyes flashed angrily, she took a step forward. "And you are his wife!" she cried.
But Lottie had turned at last. She flung the quilt aside and rose to her feet, her girlish figure quivering in its beribboned wrapper. There were bright pink spots in her cheeks.
"Yes, I am his wife, G.o.d help me," she said.
Eugenia had drawn back before the childish desperation. Lottie had never revolted before--she had thought Eugenia"s thoughts and weakly lived up to Eugenia"s conception of her duty. She had been meek and amiable and ineffectual; but it came to Eugenia with a shock that she had never admired her until to-day--until the hour of her rebellion.
She spoke sternly--as she might have spoken to herself in a moment of dear, but dismal failure.
"Hush," she commanded. "You are one of us, and you have no right to desert us. It is because you are his wife that my home is yours and your children"s. I am only his sister, and I have stood by him through it all. Do you think, if his sins were twenty times as great, that I should fall away from him now?"
Lottie looked at her and laughed--a little heartless laugh.
"Oh, but I am not a Battle," she replied bitterly. "Battle sins are just like other people"s sins to me."
Then she raised her pretty, nerveless hands to her throat.
"I have wanted to be free all these years," she said. "All these years when you would not let me forget Bernard Battle--when you shut me up and hid me away, and made me old when I was young. And now--just as I am beginning to be happy with my children--you tell me that I must go back to him and start afresh."
Her voice grated upon Eugenia"s ears, and she realised more acutely than her pity the fact that Lottie was common--hopelessly common. For an instant she forgot Bernard"s greater transgressions in the wonder that a Battle should have married a woman who did not know how to behave in a crisis--who could even chant her wrongs from the housetop. At the moment this seemed to her the weightier share of the family remissness. The loyalty of the Battle wives had been as a lasting memorial to the Battle breeding--which, after all, was more invincible than the Battle virtue.
She crossed to the window and stood looking out upon the winter sunshine falling on the gray church across the way. On the stone steps a negro nurse was sitting, drowsily trundling back and forth before her a beruffled baby carriage. Nearer at hand, in the yard on the left of the tesselated entrance below, a pointed magnolia tree shone evergreen beside the naked poplars, and a bevy of sparrows fluttered in and out amid the sheltering leaves.
"Oh, you will never understand," wailed Lottie. She had flung herself upon the couch and was sobbing weakly. "It is so different with you and Dudley."
Eugenia turned and came back. "I do understand," she returned gently, and before Lottie could raise her lowered head she left the room.