Chapter IX: Book III: XV (4)

But the folds of Anne’s train were already slipping through her mother’s fingers, Anne was in motion on Uncle Hendrik’s stalwart arm. The rest of the family had drifted up to their front pews: Fred Landers, a little flushed, stood before Mrs. Clephane, his arm bent to receive her hand. The bride, softly smiling, drew aside to let her mother pass into the church before her. At the far end of the nave, on the chancel-steps, two figures had appeared against a background of lawn sleeves and lilies.

Blindly Kate Clephane moved forward, keeping step with Landers’s slow stride. At the chancel-steps he left her, taking his seat with Mrs. Drover. The mother stood alone and waited for her daughter.

XXIX.

The Drovers had wanted Mrs. Clephane to return to Long Island with them that afternoon; Nollie Tresselton had added her prayer; Anne herself had urged her mother to accept.

“How can I drive away thinking of you here all alone?” the girl had said; and Kate had managed to smile back: “You won’t be thinking of me at all!” and had added that she wanted to rest, and have time to gather up her things before sailing.

It had been settled, in the last days before the wedding, that she was to go abroad for the winter: to Italy, perhaps, or the south of France. The young couple, after a brief dash to Florida, were off for India, by Marseilles and Suez; it seemed only reasonable that Mrs. Clephane should not care to remain in New York. And Anne knew--though no one else did--that when her mother went abroad she would not go alone. Nothing was to be said ... not a word to any one; though by this time--an hour after bride and groom had driven away to the Palm Beach express--Chris Fenno was no doubt in the secret.

Anne had left without anxiety; she understood her mother’s wish to keep her plans to herself, and respected it. And in a few days now the family would be reassembling at St. Stephen’s for another, even quieter wedding.

* * * * *

Aline came downstairs to the long drawing-room, where Mrs. Clephane was sitting alone in a litter of fallen rose-petals, grains of rice and ends of wedding-cake ribbon. Beyond, in the dining-room, the servants were moving away the small tables, and carrying off the silver in green-lined baskets.

The house-keeper had come in to give the butler the address of the hospital to which Mrs. Fenno wished the flowers to be sent, and a footman was already removing the baskets and bouquets from the drawing-room.

“Madame will be much more comfortable upstairs than in all this untidiness; and Mr. Landers has telephoned to ask if he may see Madame in about half an hour.”

Aline, of course, knew everything; news reached her by every pore, as it circulates through an Eastern bazaar. Erect in the handsome dress that Mrs. Clephane had given her for the wedding, she smiled drily but approvingly upon her mistress. It was understood that Mr. Landers was _un bon parti_; and the servants’ hall knew him to be generous. So did Aline, whose gown was fastened by the diamond arrow he had offered her that morning.

“There’s a nice fire in Madame’s sitting-room,” she added persuasively.

Kate Clephane sat motionless, without looking up. She heard what the maid was saying, and could have repeated her exact words; but they conveyed no meaning.

“Madame must come up,” Aline again insisted.

The humiliation of being treated like a sick person at length roused Mrs. Clephane, and she got to her feet and followed the maid. On the way upstairs she said to her: “Presently I will tell you what I shall need on the steamer.” Then she turned into the sitting-room, and Aline softly closed the door on her.

The fire was burning briskly; Anne’s last bunch of violets stood on the low table near the lounge. Outside the windows the winter light was waning. Kate Clephane, sitting down on the lounge, remembered that the room had worn that same look of soothing intimacy on the day when Anne had first led her into it, little more than a year ago; and she remembered that, then, also, Fred Landers had joined her there, hurriedly summoned to reassure her loneliness. It was curious, in what neatly recurring patterns events often worked themselves out.

The door opened and he came in. He still wore his wedding clothes, and the dark morning coat and the pearl in his tie suited him, gave him a certain air of self-confidence and importance. He looked like a man who would smooth one’s way, manage all the tiresome details of life admirably, without fuss or bluster. The small point of consciousness left alive in Kate Clephane registered the fact, and was dimly comforted by it. Steamer chairs, for instance, and the right table in a ventilated corner of the dining-saloon--one wouldn’t have to bother about anything....

“I wish we could have got off tomorrow,” he said, sitting down beside her, and looking at her with a smile. “I would have, you know, if you’d thought it feasible. Why shouldn’t we have been married in Liverpool?”

“Or on board! Don’t they provide a registry office on these modern boats?” she jested with pale lips.

“But next week--next week I shall carry you off,” he continued with authority.

“Yes; next week.” She tried to add a word of sympathy, of affection; the word he was waiting for. But she could only turn her wan smile on him.

“My dear, you’re dead-beat; don’t you want me to go?”

She shook her head.

“No? You’d rather I stayed--you really would?” His face lit up. “You needn’t pretend with me, Kate, you know.”

“Needn’t I? Are you sure? All my life I seem never to have done anything but pretend,” she suddenly exclaimed.

“Well, you needn’t now; I’m sure.” He sealed it with his quiet smile, leaning toward her a little, but without moving his chair nearer. There was something infinitely reassuring in the way he took things for granted, without undue emphasis or enthusiasm.

“Lie down now; let me pull that shawl up. A cigarette--may I? I suppose there’ll be tea presently? We needn’t talk about plans till tomorrow.”

She tried to smile back. “But what else is there to talk about?” Her eyes rested on his face, and she read in it his effort to remain the unobtrusive and undemanding friend. The sight gave her a little twinge of compunction. “I mean, there’s nothing to say about me. Let’s talk about you,” she suggested.

The blood mounted to his temples, congesting his cheek-bones and the elderly fold above his stiff collar. He made a movement as if to rise, and then settled back resolutely into his chair. “About me? There’s nothing to say about me either--except in relation to you. And there there’s too much! Don’t get me going. Better take me for granted.”

“I do; that’s my comfort.” She was beginning to smile on him less painfully. “All your goodness to me--”

But now he stood up, his pink deepening to purple.

“Oh, not that, please! It rather hurts; even at my age. And I assure you I can be trusted to remind myself of it at proper intervals.”

She raised herself on her elbow, looking up at him in surprise.

“I’ve hurt you? I didn’t mean to.”

“Well--goodness, you know! A man doesn’t care to be eternally reminded of his goodness; not even if it’s supposed to be all he has to offer--in exchange for everything.”

“Oh--_everything_!” She gave a little shrug. “If ever a woman came to a man empty-handed....”

With a slight break in his voice he said: “You come with yourself.”

The answer, and his tone, woke in her a painful sense of his intense participation in their talk and her own remoteness from it. The phrase “come with yourself” shed a lightning-flash of irony on their reciprocal attitude. What self had she left to come with? She knew he was waiting for an answer; she felt the cruelty of letting his exclamation drop as if unheard; but what more had she to say to him--unless she should say everything?

The thought shot through her for the first time. Had she really meant to marry him without his knowing? Perhaps she had; she was not sure; she felt she would never again be very sure of her own intentions. But now, through all the confusion and exhaustion of her mind, one fact had become abruptly clear: that she would have to tell him. Whether she married him or not seemed a small matter in comparison. First she must look into those honest eyes with eyes as honest.

“Myself?” she said, echoing his last word. “What do you know of that self, I wonder?”

He continued to stand before her in the same absorbed and brooding attitude. “All I need to know is how unhappy you’ve been.”

She leaned on her arm, still looking up at him. “Yes; I’ve been unhappy; horribly unhappy. Beyond anything you can imagine. Beyond anything you’ve ever guessed.”

This did not seem to surprise him. He continued to return her gaze with the same tranquil eyes. “But I rather think I _have_ guessed,” he said.

Something in his voice seemed to tell her that after all she had not been alone in her struggle; it was as if he had turned a key in the most secret ward of her heart. Oh, if he had really guessed--if she were to be suddenly lifted beyond that miserable moment of avowal into a quiet heaven of understanding and compassion!

“You have guessed--you’ve understood?”

Yes; his face was still unperturbed, his eyes were indulgent. The tears rushed to her own; she wanted to sit down and cry her heart out. Instead, she got to her feet and went to him with outstretched hands. She must thank him; she would find the words now; she would be able to tell him what that perfect trust was to her, or at least what it would be when the present was far enough away for anything on earth to help her.

“Oh, Fred--you knew all the while? You saw I tried to the utmost, you saw I couldn’t do anything to stop it?”

He had her hands in his, and was holding them against his breast. “Stop it--the marriage? Is that what’s troubling you?” He was speaking now as if to a frightened disconsolate child. “Of course you couldn’t stop it. I know how you must have loathed it; all you must have suffered. But Anne’s happiness had to come first.”

He did understand, then; did pity her! She let herself lie in his hold. The relief of avowal was too exquisite, now that all peril of explanation was over and she could just yield herself up to his pity. But though he held her she no longer saw him; all her attention was centred on her own torturing problem. She thought of him only as of some one kinder and more understanding than any one else, and her heart overflowed.

“But wasn’t it just cowardice on my part? Wasn’t it wicked of me not to dare to tell her?”

“Of course it wasn’t wicked. What good would it have done? It’s hard that she made the choice she did; but a girl with a will like Anne’s has to take her chance. I always felt you’d end by seeing it. And you will, when you’re less tired and overwrought. Only trust me to look after you,” he said.

Her tears rose and began to run down. She would have liked to go on listening without having to attend to what he said. But again she felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and she tried to smile back at him. “I do trust you ... you do help me. You can’t tell the agony of the secret....” She hardly knew what she was saying.

“It needn’t be a secret now. Doesn’t that help?”

“Your knowing, and not loathing me? Oh, _that_--.” She gave a faint laugh. “You’re the only one of them all who’s not afraid of me.”

“Afraid of you?”

“Of what I might let out--if they hadn’t always stopped me. That’s my torture now; that I let them stop me. It always will be. I shall go over it and over it; I shall never be sure I oughtn’t to have told them.”

“Told _what_?”

“Why--what you know.”

She looked up at him, surprised, and saw that a faint veil had fallen over the light in his eyes. His face had grown pale and she felt that he was holding her hands without knowing that he held them.

“I know you’ve been most unhappy ... most cruelly treated....” He straightened his shoulders and looked at her. “That there’ve been things in the past that you regret ... must regret....” He paused, as if waiting for her to speak; then, with a visible effort, went on: “In all those lonely years--when you were so friendless--I’ve naturally supposed you were not always ... alone....”

She freed herself gently and moved away from him.

“Is that all?”

She was conscious in him of a slowly dawning surprise. “All--what else is there?”

“What else? The shame ... the misery ... the truth....”

For a moment he seemed hardly to take in the words she was flinging at him. He looked like a man who has not yet felt the pain of the wound he has received.

“I certainly don’t know--of any shame,” he answered slowly.

“Then you don’t know anything. You don’t know any more than the others.” She had almost laughed out as she said it.

He seemed to be struggling with an inconceivable idea: an idea for which there were no terms in his vocabulary. His lips moved once or twice before he became articulate. “You mean: some sort of complicity--some sort of secret--between you and--and Anne’s husband?”

She made a faint gesture of assent.

“Something--” he still wavered over it--“something you ought to have told Anne before ... before she....” Abruptly he broke off, took a few steps away from her, and came back. “Not you--not you and that man?” She was silent.

The silence continued. He stood without moving, turned away from her. She had dropped down on the foot of the lounge, and sat gazing at the pattern of the carpet. He put his hands over his eyes. Presently, hearing him move, she looked up. He had uncovered his eyes and was staring about the room as if he had never seen it before, and could not remember what had brought him there. His face had shrunk and yellowed; he seemed years older.

As she looked at him, she marvelled at her folly in imagining even for a moment that he had read any farther into her secret than the others. She remembered his first visit after her return; remembered how she had plied him with uncomfortable questions, and detected in his kindly eyes the terror of the man who, all his life, has tried to buy off fate by optimistic evasions. Fate had caught up with him now--Kate Clephane would have given the world if it had not been through her agency. Sterile pain--it appeared that she was to inflict it after all, and on the one being who really loved her, who would really have helped her had he known how!

He moved nearer, and stood in front of her, forcing a thin smile. “You’ll think me as obtuse as the rest of them,” he said.

She could not find anything to answer. Her tears had stopped, and she sat dry-eyed, counting the circles in the carpet. When she had reached the fifteenth she heard him speaking again in the same stiff concise tone. “I--I was unprepared, I confess.”

“Yes. I ought to have known--” She stood up, and continued in a low colourless voice, as if the words were being dictated to her: “I meant to tell you; I really did; at least I suppose I did. But I’ve lived so long with the idea of the thing that I wasn’t surprised when you said you knew--knew everything. I thought you meant that you’d guessed. There were times when I thought everybody must have guessed--”

“Oh, God forbid!” he ejaculated.

She smiled faintly. “I don’t know that it much matters. Except that I want to keep it from Anne--that I must keep it from her now. I daresay it was wicked of me not to stop the marriage at any cost; but when I tried to, and saw her agony, I couldn’t. The only way would have been to tell her outright; and I couldn’t do that--I couldn’t! Coming back to her was like dying and going to heaven. It _was_ heaven to me here till he came. Then I tried.... I tried.... But how can I ever make you understand? For nearly twenty years no one had thought much of me--I hadn’t thought much of myself. I’d never really forgiven myself for leaving Anne. And then, when she sent for me, and I came, and we were so happy together, and she seemed so fond of me, I thought ... I thought perhaps after all it hadn’t made any difference. But as soon as the struggle began I saw I hadn’t any power--any hold over her. She told me so herself: she said I was a stranger to her. She said I’d given up any claim on her, any right to influence her, when I went away and left her years ago. And so she wouldn’t listen to me. That was my punishment: that I couldn’t stop her.”

“Oh, Anne--Anne can look out for herself. What do I care for Anne?” he exclaimed harshly. “But you--you--you--and that man!” He dropped down into his armchair and hid his eyes again.

She waited a minute or two; then she ventured: “Don’t mind so much.”

He made no answer. At length he lifted his head, but without looking directly at her.

“It was--long ago?”

“Yes. Six years--eight years. I don’t know....” She heard herself pushing the date back farther and farther, but she could not help it.

“At a time when you were desperately lonely and unhappy?”

“Oh--not much more than usual.” She added, after a moment: “I don’t claim any extenuating circumstances.”

“The cad--the blackguard! I--”

She interrupted him. “Not that either--quite. When he first met Anne he didn’t know; didn’t know she was even related to me. When he found out he went away; he went away twice. She made him come back. She reproached me for separating them. Nothing could have stopped her except my telling her. And I couldn’t tell her when I saw how she cared.”

“No--” There was a slight break in the harshness of his voice.

Again she was silent, not through the wish to avoid speaking, but from sheer inability to find anything more to say.

Suddenly he lifted his miserable eyes, and looked at her for a second. “You’ve been through hell,” he said.

“Yes. I’m there still.” She stopped, and then, drawn by the pity in his tone, once more felt herself slipping down the inevitable slope of confession. “It’s not only _that_ hell--there’s another. I want to tell you everything now. It was not only for fear of Anne’s suffering that I couldn’t speak; it was because I couldn’t bear the thought of what she would think of me if I did. It was so sweet being her mother--I couldn’t bear to give it up. And the triumph of your all thinking she’d done right to bring me back--I couldn’t give that up either, because I knew how much it counted in her feeling for me. Somehow, it turned me once more into the person I was meant to be--or thought I was meant to be. That’s all. I’m glad I’ve told you.... Only you mustn’t let it hurt you; not for long....”

After she had ended he continued to sit without moving; she had the impression that he had not heard what she had said. His attention, his receptive capacity, were still engrossed by the stark fact of her confession: her image and Chris Fenno’s were slowly burning themselves into his shrinking vision. To assist at the process was like peeping into a torture-chamber, and for the moment she lost the sense of her own misery in the helpless contemplation of his. Sterile pain, if ever there was--

At last she crossed over to where he sat, and laid a touch on his shoulder.

“Fred--you mustn’t let this hurt you. It has done me good to tell you ... it has helped. Your being so sorry has helped. And now it’s all over ... it’s ended....”

He did not change his attitude or even look up again. She still doubted if he heard her. After a minute or two she withdrew her hand and moved away. The strain had been too great; she had imposed on him more than he could bear. She saw that clearly now: she said to herself that their talk was over, that they were already leagues apart. Her sentimental experience had shown her how often two people still in the act of exchanging tender or violent words are in reality at the opposite ends of the earth, and she reflected, ironically, how much success in human affairs depends on the power to detect such displacements. She herself had no such successes to her credit; hers was at best the doubtful gift of discerning, perhaps more quickly than most people, why she failed. But to all such shades of suffering her friend was impervious: he was taking his ordeal in bulk.

She sat down and waited. Curiously enough, she was less unhappy than for a long time past. His pain and his pity were perhaps what she had most needed from him: the centre of her wretchedness seemed the point at which they were meant to meet. If only she could have put it in words simple enough to reach him--but to thank him for what he was suffering would have seemed like mockery; and she could only wait and say to herself that perhaps before long he would go.

After a while he lifted his head and slowly got to his feet. For a moment he seemed to waver; then he crossed the space between them, and stood before her. She rose too, and held out her hand; but he did not appear to notice the gesture, though his eyes were now intensely fixed on her.

“The time will come,” he said, “when all this will seem very far off from both of us. That’s all I want to think of now.”

She looked up, not understanding. Then she began to tremble in all her body; her very lips trembled, and the lids of her dazzled eyes. He was still looking at her, and she saw the dawn of the old kindness in his. He seemed to have come out on the other side of a great darkness. But all she found to say was the denial of what she was feeling. “Oh, no--no--no--”; and she put him from her.

“No?”

“It’s enough; enough; what you’ve just said is enough.” She stammered it out incoherently. “Don’t you see that I can’t bear any more?”

He stood rooted there in his mild obstinate kindness. “There’s got to be a great deal more, though.”

“Not now--not now!” She caught his hand, and just laid it to her cheek. Then she drew back, with a sense of resolution, of finality, that must have shown itself in her face and air. “Now you’re to go; you’re to leave me. I’m dreadfully tired.” She said it almost like a child who asks to be taken up and carried. It seemed to her that for the first time in her life she had been picked up out of the dust and weariness, and set down in a quiet place where no harm could come.

He was still looking at her, uncertainly, pleadingly. “Tomorrow, then? Tomorrow morning?”

She hesitated. “Tomorrow afternoon.”

“And now you’ll rest?”

“Now I’ll rest.”

With that--their hands just clasping--she guided him gently to the door, and stood waiting till she heard his step go down the stair. Then she turned back into the room and opened the door of her bedroom.

The maid was there, preparing a becoming tea-gown. She had no doubt conjectured that Mr. Landers would be coming back for dinner.

“Aline! Tomorrow’s steamer--it’s not too late to call up the office?”

The maid stood staring, incredulous, the shimmering dress on her arm.

“The steamer--not tomorrow’s steamer?”

“The steamer on which I had taken passages,” Mrs. Clephane explained, hurriedly reaching for the telephone book.

Aline’s look seemed to say that this was beyond all reasonable explanation.

“But those passages--Madame ordered me to give them up. Madame said we were not to sail till next week.”

“Never mind. At this season there’s no crowd. You must call up at once and get them back.”

“Madame is not really thinking of sailing tomorrow? The boat leaves at six in the morning.”

Mrs. Clephane almost laughed in her face. “I’m not thinking of doing it; I’m going to do it. Ah, here’s the number--” She unhooked the receiver.

XXX.

Kate Clephane was wakened by the slant of Riviera sun across her bed.

The hotel was different; it was several rungs higher on the ladder than the Minorque et l’Univers, as its name--the Petit Palais--plainly indicated. The bedroom, too, was bigger, more modern, more freshly painted; and the corner window of the tiny adjoining _salon_ actually clipped a wedge of sea in its narrow frame.

So much was changed for the better in Mrs. Clephane’s condition; in other respects, she had the feeling of having simply turned back a chapter, and begun again at the top of the same dull page.

Her maid, Aline, was obviously of the same opinion; in spite of the more commodious room, and the sitting-room with its costly inset of sea, Mrs. Clephane had not recovered her lost prestige in Aline’s estimation. “What was the good of all the fuss if it was to end in _this_?” Aline’s look seemed to say, every morning when she brought in the breakfast-tray. Even the fact that letters now lay on it more frequently, and that telegrams were no longer considered epoch-making, did not compensate for the general collapse of Aline’s plans and ambitions. When one had had a good roof over one’s head, and a good motor at one’s door, what was the sense of bolting away from them at a moment’s notice and coming back to second-rate hotels and rattling taxis, with all the loss of consequence implied? Aline remained icily silent when her mistress, after a few weeks at the Petit Palais, mentioned that she had written to enquire about prices at Dinard for the summer.

Kate Clephane, on the whole, took the change more philosophically. To begin with, it had been her own choice to fly as she had; and that in itself was a help--at times; and then--well, yes,--already, after the first weeks, she had begun to be aware that she was slipping back without too much discomfort into the old groove.

The first month after her arrival wouldn’t yet bear thinking about; but it was well behind her now, and habit was working its usual miracle. She had been touched by the welcome her old friends and acquaintances had given her, and exquisitely relieved--after the first plunge--to find herself again among people who asked no questions about her absence, betrayed no curiosity about it, and probably felt none. They were all very much occupied with each other’s doings when they were together, but the group was so continually breaking up and reshaping itself, with the addition of new elements, and the departing scattered in so many different directions, and toward destinations so unguessable, that once out of sight they seemed to have no more substance or permanence than figures twitching by on a film.

This sense of unsubstantiality had eased Kate Clephane’s taut nerves, and helped her to sink back almost unaware into her old way of life. Enough was known of her own existence in the interval--a shadowy glimpse of New York opulence, an Opera box, a massive and important family, a beautiful daughter married to a War Hero--to add considerably to her standing in the group; but her Riviera friends were all pleasantly incurious as to details. In most of their lives there were episodes to be bridged over by verbal acrobatics, and they were all accustomed to taking each other’s fibs at their face-value. Of Mrs. Clephane they did not even ask any: she came back handsomer, better dressed--yes, my dear, actually _sables_!--and she offered them cock-tails and Mah-Jongg in her own sitting-room (with a view of the sea thrown in). They were glad of so useful a recruit, and the distance between her social state and theirs was not wide enough to awaken acrimony or envy.

“Aline!”

The maid’s door was just across the passage now; she appeared almost at once, bearing a breakfast-tray on which were several letters.

“Violets!” she announced with a smile; Aline’s severity had of late been tempered by an occasional smile. But Mrs. Clephane did not turn her head; her colour did not change. These violets were not from the little lame boy whose bouquet had flushed her with mysterious hopes on the day when her daughter’s cable had called her home; the boy she had set up for life (it had been her first thought after landing) because of that happy coincidence. Today’s violets embodied neither hope nor mystery. She knew from whom they came, and what stage in what game they represented; and lifting them from the tray after a brief sniff, she poured out her chocolate with a steady hand. Aline, perceptibly rebuffed, but not defeated, put the flowers into a glass on her mistress’s dressing-table. “There,” the gesture said, “she can’t help seeing them.”

Mrs. Clephane leaned back against her pink-lined pillows, and sipped her chocolate with deliberation. She had not yet opened the letters, or done more than briefly muster their superscriptions. None from her daughter: Anne, at the moment, was half-way across the Red Sea, on her way to India, and there would be no news of her for several weeks to come. None of the letters was interesting enough to be worth a glance. Mrs. Clephane went over them once or twice, as if looking for one that was missing; then she pushed them aside and took up the local newspaper.

She had got back into her old habit of lingering on every little daily act, making the most of it, spreading it out over as many minutes as possible, in the effort to cram her hours so full that there should be no time for introspection or remembrance; and she read the paper carefully, from the grandiloquent leading article on the wonders of the approaching Carnival to the column in which the doings of the local and foreign society were glowingly recorded.

“The flower of the American colony and the most distinguished French and foreign notabilities of the Riviera will meet this afternoon at the brilliant reception which Mrs. Parley Plush has organized at her magnificent Villa Mimosa in honour of the Bishop of the American Episcopal churches in Europe.”

Ah--to be sure; it was today! Kate Clephane laid down the newspaper with a smile. She was recalling Mrs. Minity’s wrath when it had been announced that the reception for the new Bishop was to be given by Mrs. Parley Plush--Mrs. Plush, of all people! Mrs. Minity was not an active member of the Reverend Mr. Merriman’s parochial committees; her bodily inertia, and the haunting fear of what might happen if her coachman tried to turn the horses in the narrow street in which the Rectory stood, debarred her from such participation; but she was nevertheless a pillar of the church, by reason of a small but regular donation to its fund and a large and equally regular commentary on its affairs. Mr. Merriman gave her opinions almost the importance she thought they deserved; and a dozen times in the season Mrs. Merriman was expected to bear the brunt of her criticisms, and persuade her not to give up her pew and stop her subscription. “That woman,” Mrs. Minity would cry, “whom I have taken regularly for a drive once a fortnight all winter, and supplied with brandy-peaches when I had to go without myself!”

Mrs. Minity, on the occasion of the last drive, had not failed to tell Mrs. Merriman what she thought of the idea--put forward, of course, by Mrs. Plush herself--of that lady’s being chosen to entertain the new Bishop on his first tour of his diocese. The scandal was bad enough: did Mrs. Merriman want Mrs. Minity to tell her what the woman had been, what her reputation was? No; Mrs. Merriman would rather not. She probably knew well enough herself, if she had chosen to admit it ... but for Mrs. Minity the real bitterness of the situation lay in the fact that she herself could not eclipse Mrs. Plush by giving the reception because she lived in a small flat instead of a large--a vulgarly large--villa.

“No; don’t try to explain it away, my dear”; (this to Kate Clephane, the day after Mrs. Merriman had been taken on the latest of her penitential drives); “don’t try to put me off with that Rectory humbug. Everybody at home knows that Mrs. Parley Plush came from Anaconda, Georgia, and everybody in Anaconda knows _what_ she came from. And now, because she has a big showy villa (at least, so they tell me--for naturally I’ve never set foot in it, and never shall); now that she’s been white-washed by those poor simple-minded Merrimans, who have lived in this place for twenty years as if it were a Quaker colony, the woman dares to put herself forward as the proper person--Mrs. Parley Plush _proper_!--to welcome our new Bishop in the name of the American Colony! Well,” said Mrs. Minity in the voice of Cassandra, “if the Bishop knew a quarter of what I do about her--and what I daresay it is my duty, as a member of this diocese, to tell him.... But there: what am I to do, my dear, with a doctor who _absolutely forbids_ all agitating discussions, and warns me that if anybody should say anything disagreeable to me I might be snuffed out on the spot?”

Kate Clephane had smiled; these little rivalries were beginning to amuse her again. And the amusement of seeing Mrs. Minity appear (as of course she would) at Mrs. Plush’s that afternoon made it seem almost worth while to go there. Mrs. Clephane reached out for her engagement-book, scrutinized the day’s page, and found--with another smile, this one at herself--that she had already noted down: “Plush”. Yes; it was true; she knew it herself: she still had to go on cramming things into her days, things good, bad or indifferent, it hardly mattered which as long as they were crammed tight enough to leave no chinks for backward glances. Her old training in the art of taking things easily--all the narcotic tricks of evasion and ignoring--had come gradually to her help in the struggle to remake her life. Of course she would go to Mrs. Plush’s ... just as surely as Mrs. Minity would.

* * * * *

The day was glorious; exactly the kind of day, all the ladies said, on which one would want the dear Bishop to have his first sight of his new diocese. The whole strength of the Anglo-American colony was assembled on Mrs. Plush’s flowery terraces, among the beds of cineraria and cyclamen, and the giant blue china frogs which, as Mrs. Plush said, made the garden look “more natural”. Mrs. Plush herself sailed majestically from group to group, keeping one eye on the loggia through which the Bishop and Mr. Merriman were to arrive.

“Ah, dear Lord Charles--this is kind! You’ll find _all_ your friends here. Yes, Mrs. Clephane is over there at the other end of the terrace,” Mrs. Plush beamed, waving a tall disenchanted-looking man in the direction of a palm-tree emerging from a cushion of pansies.

Mrs. Clephane, from under the palm, had seen the manœuvre, and smiled at that also. She knew she was Lord Charles’s pretext for coming to the reception, but she knew, also, that he was glad to have a pretext, because if he hadn’t come he wouldn’t have known any more than she did what to do with the afternoon. There was nothing, she sometimes felt, that she didn’t know about Lord Charles, though they had met only three months ago. He was so exactly what medical men call “a typical case,” and she had had such unlimited time and opportunity for the study of his particular type. The only difference was that he was a gentleman--a gentleman still; while the others, most of them, never had been, or else had long since abdicated that with the rest.

As he moved over the sunlit gravel in her direction she asked herself for the hundredth time what she meant to do about it. Marry him? God forbid! Even if she had been sure--and in her heart of hearts she wasn’t--that he intended to give her the chance. Fall in love with him? That too she shrugged away. Let him make love to her? Well a little ... perhaps ... when one was too lonely ... and because he was the only man at all “possible” in their set.... But what she most wanted of him was simply to fill certain empty hours; to know that when she came home at five he would be waiting there, half the days of the week, by her tea-table; that when she dined out, people would be sure to invite him and put him next to her; that when there was no bridge or Mah-Jongg going he would always be ready for a tour of the antiquity shops, and so sharp at picking up bargains for the little flat she had in view.

That was all she wanted of him; perhaps all he wanted of her. But the possibility of his wanting more (at which the violets seemed to hint) produced an uncertainty not wholly disagreeable, especially when he and she met in company, and she guessed the other women’s envy. “One has to have something to help one out--” It was the old argument of the drug-takers: well, call Lord Charles her drug! Why not, when she was so visibly his?

She settled herself in a garden-chair and watched his approach. It was a skilful bit of manœuvring: she knew he intended to “eliminate the bores” and join her only when there was no danger of their being disturbed. She could imagine how, in old days, he would have stalked contemptuously through such a company, without a glance to right or left. But not now. He had reached a phase in his decline when it became prudent to pause and admire the view at Mrs. Plush’s side, exchange affabilities with the Consul’s wife, nod familiarly to Mr. Paly, and even suffer himself to be boisterously hailed by Mrs. Horace Betterly, who came clinking down the loggia steps to shout out a reminder that they counted on him for dinner that evening. It was the fate of those who had to stuff their days full, and could no longer be particular about the quality of the stuffing. Kate could almost see the time when Lord Charles, very lean and wizened, would be collecting china frogs for Mrs. Plush.

He was half-way across the terrace when a sudden expanding and agitating of Mrs. Plush’s plumes seemed to forerun the approach of the Bishop. An impressive black figure appeared under the central arch of the loggia. Mrs. Plush surged forward, every fold of her draperies swelling: but the new arrival was not the Bishop--it was only Mrs. Minity who, clothed in black cashmere and majesty, paused and looked about her.

Mrs. Plush, checked in her forward plunge, stood an instant rigid, almost tilted backward; her right hand sketched the gesture of two barely extended fingers; then her just resentment of Mrs. Minity’s strictures was swept away in the triumph of having her there at last, and Mrs. Plush swept on full sail, welcoming her unexpected guest as obsequiously as if Mrs. Minity had been the Bishop.

Kate Clephane looked on with lazy amusement. She could enjoy the humours of her little world now that her mind was more at leisure. She hoped the scene between Mrs. Plush and Mrs. Minity would prolong itself, and was getting up to move within ear-shot when the Bishop, supported by Mr. and Mrs. Merriman, at length appeared.

Mrs. Clephane stopped short half-way across the terrace. She had never dreamed of this--never once thought it possible. Yet now she remembered that Dr. Arklow had been spoken of at the Drovers’ as one of the candidates for this new diocese; and there he stood, on the steps just above her, benignant and impressive as when she had last seen him, at St. Stephen’s, placing Anne’s hand in Chris Fenno’s....

Mrs. Clephane’s first impulse was to turn and lose herself in the crowd. The sight of that figure brought with it too many banished scenes and obliterated memories. Back they all rushed on her, fiercely importunate; she felt their cruel fingers at her throat. For a moment she stood irresolute, detached in the middle of the terrace; then, just as she was turning, she heard Mrs. Plush’s trumpet-call: “Mrs. Clephane? Yes, of course; there she is! Dear Mrs. Clephane, the Bishop has spied you out already!”

He seemed to reach her in a stride, so completely did his approach span distances and wipe out time. She saw herself sitting again in a deep leather armchair, under the photogravure of Salisbury Cathedral, while he paced the worn rug before the hearth, and his preacher’s voice broke on the words: “Sterile pain....”

“Shall we walk a little way? The garden seems very beautiful,” the Bishop suggested.

They stood by a white balustrade under mimosa boughs, and exchanged futilities about the blueness of the sea and the heat of the sun. “A New York February ... brr....” “Yes, don’t you envy us? Day after day of this.... Oh, of course a puff of _mistral_ now and then ... but then that’s healthy ... and the flowers!”

He laid his large hand deliberately on hers. “My dear--when are you coming home to New York?” She felt her face just brushed by the understanding look she had caught twice before in his eyes.

“To New York? Never.”

He waited as if to weigh the answer, and then turned his eyes on the Mediterranean.

“Never is a long word. There is some one there who would be very happy if you did.”

She answered precipitately: “It would never have been what he imagines....”

“Isn’t he the best judge of that? He thinks you ought to have given him the chance.”

She dropped her voice to say: “I wonder he can ask me to think of ever living in New York again.”

“He doesn’t ask it of you; I’m charged to say so. He understands fully.... He would be prepared to begin his life again anywhere.... It lies with you....”

There was a silence. At length she mastered her voice enough to say: “Yes; I know. I’m very grateful. It’s a comfort to me....”

“No more?”

She waited again, and then, lifting her eyes, caught once more the understanding look in his.

“I don’t know how to tell you--how to explain. It seems to me ... my refusing ...” she lowered her voice still more ... “the one thing that keeps me from being too hopeless, too unhappy.”

She saw the first tinge of perplexity in his gaze. “The fact of refusing?”

“The fact of refusing.”

Ah, it was useless; he would never understand! How could she have imagined that he would?

“But is this really your last word; the very last?” he questioned mildly.

“Oh, it has to be--it has to be. It’s what I live by,” she almost sobbed.

No; he would never understand. His face had once more become blank and benedictory. He pressed her hand, said: “My dear child, I must see you again--we must talk of this!” and passed on, urbane and unperceiving.

Her eyes filled; for a moment her loneliness came down on her like a pall. It was always so whenever she tried to explain, not only to others but even to herself. Yet deep down in her, deeper far than her poor understanding could reach, there was something that said “No” whenever that particular temptation stirred in her. Something that told her that, as Fred Lander’s pity had been the most precious thing he had to give her, so her refusal to accept it, her precipitate flight from it, was the most precious thing she could give him in return. He had overcome his strongest feelings, his most deep-rooted repugnance; he had held out his hand to her, in the extremity of her need, across the whole width of his traditions and his convictions; and she had blessed him for it, and stood fast on her own side. And this afternoon, when she returned home and found his weekly letter--as she was sure she would, since it had not come with that morning’s post--she would bless him again, bless him both for writing the letter, and for giving her the strength to hold out against its pleadings.

Perhaps no one else would ever understand; assuredly he would never understand himself. But there it was. Nothing on earth would ever again help her--help to blot out the old horrors and the new loneliness--as much as the fact of being able to take her stand on that resolve, of being able to say to herself, whenever she began to drift toward new uncertainties and fresh concessions, that once at least she had stood fast, shutting away in a little space of peace and light the best thing that had ever happened to her.

THE END

FOUR PERIOD STORIES OF OLD NEW YORK

A distinct and extremely pleasing innovation is this collection of four new stories by America’s foremost woman fiction writer. Each tells a separate story, but the four cover successive periods in the life of old New York. The society of New York’s earlier days lives again in these four books by

_EDITH WHARTON_

=FALSE DAWN= _The ’Forties_

The son of an old New York family comes under artistic influences from abroad and acquires tastes and opinions which the New York of the ’Forties can neither understand nor tolerate.

=THE OLD MAID= _The ’Fifties_

Beneath the outwardly respectable fabric of old New York runs this powerfully appealing and dramatic story of two sisters and the daughter of one of these women.

=THE SPARK= _The ’Sixties_

A study in influences. The central character is strangely out of tune with his surroundings. As is finally disclosed, this is because he had come under the influence of a great man, a herald of a later time.

=NEW YEAR’S DAY= _The ’Seventies_

The poignant story of Lizzie Hazeldean, ostracized from her social sphere because the New York of the ’Seventies could not comprehend the sacrifice she had made for her husband.

_Each $1.25. The four, in ornamental period gift box, $5.00_

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
New York London

EDITH WHARTON’S THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

Awarded the $1,000 Pulitzer Prize by Columbia University in June, 1921, as “the American novel published during the year which best presented the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.”

“The best piece of fiction of the present season.”--_The Outlook._

“Edith Wharton is a writer who brings glory on the name of America, and this is her best book. A consummate work of art. It is one of the best novels of the twentieth century and looks like a permanent addition to literature.”--William Lyon Phelps in the _New York Times Book Review_.

“A fine novel, beautifully written, ‘big’ in the best sense. A credit to American literature.”--Henry Seidel Canby in the _New York Evening Post_.

“Of this American generation Edith Wharton is unquestionably the novelist foremost in intellectual distinction.”--_The Philadelphia North American._

“A work of surpassing art.”--_The Philadelphia Public Ledger._

“Edith Wharton has proved herself again a superb novelist.”--_The Chicago Tribune._

“‘The Age of Innocence’ is by all odds the great novel of the year.”--_The Christian World._

“Mrs. Wharton has written a brilliant novel. Her picture of a place and period is extraordinarily fascinating.”--Heywood Broun in the _New York Tribune_.

“Mrs. Wharton has added another victory to her varied triumphs in the field of fiction.”--_The Atlantic Monthly._

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
New York London

BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON

=THE AGE OF INNOCENCE=

Awarded the $1000 Pulitzer Prize by Columbia University as the outstanding American novel of 1921. “One of the best novels of the twentieth century.”--William Lyon Phelps.

=SUMMER=

“The Story of a New England community and of a girl’s life there. Mrs. Wharton has analyzed and vivified for us, with that sure artist’s touch that we know so well, a bit of life.”--New York Times.

=THE REEF=

“Mrs. Wharton has produced one of her most adroit and scintillant dissections of the human relation. She has made of Anna Leath an extraordinary study of awakening impulses in a woman.”--McClure’s Magazine.

=THE MARNE=

“Within its pages is concentrated much if not the whole of the meaning of the Marne both to France and America. Mrs. Wharton has never written a broader, keener criticism of life than this.”--New York Times.

* * * * *

=FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING=

An extraordinarily keen study of the French people, for which the salient qualities of the Gallic spirit form a basis--taste, reverence, continuity, intellectual honesty.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
LONDON NEW YORK

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized or underlined text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

In this edition, on page 118, a line was repeated and another line was
omitted. The text has been corrected using the 1925 Grosset & Dunlap
edition as a reference.