Book Two Summer (continued 2)

“Don’t say anything about this to Lary’s mother. She would only worry, and she might do something, inadvertently, to spoil all our planning. Lary would like to have us accompany him when he makes his next business trip to Springdale. It is perfectly safe, as far as Eileen is concerned, I assure you. I do so want you to hear her play. It is not merely technique. I can fairly hear her soul grow. She is having her growing pains, but they are good for her. She never speaks of the ordeal that is before her, and for a week I thought she had forgotten it. When she brought me an exquisite little garment she had made, every stitch by hand, I knew I was mistaken.

“Professor Auersbach sees a great career for her. The strain in her nature that will militate against high artistic success, such as he hopes for, is her salvation now. She rebounds from disagreeable things with the resiliency of a rubber ball. Lary doesn’t want her to be famous. He only wants her to grow into a good woman. It would make you happy to see the little intimacy that is growing up between them. She doesn’t at all see in him the demigod he is to me; but I had the advantage of seeing him first through Theodora’s eyes. Tell her how I miss her, and give her a big hug from her Sister Judith.”

II

David put the letter away in the safe, with his few priceless possessions. He wanted to see his children—the two whose likeness to him had been a cause for half humorous apology or bitter reproach. He walked home from the office, lost in a flood of incoherent longing. If only Lavinia had never been kind! There was to be a concert in the college chapel on Thanksgiving evening. Perhaps Eileen could play in public. His soul revolted at such philandering with the truth; but he had taught himself to make peace with the powers that were stronger than his will or his ability. He quickened his step. He would offer the suggestion to Vine.

“It’s just the thing. I’ll go right over and tell Mrs. Henderson about it! The women of Springdale will remember the date—if anything should ever leak out. Eileen is built like the Trenches. I remember, your sister Edith was at church the Sunday before little Buddie was born—and when he came, it was a complete surprise. Nobody suspected anything.”

David covered his face with his hands. His wife’s bald physical view of Eileen’s soul-tragedy filled him with loathing. At long intervals, in the years that were gone, she had forced him to look within the steel-girt casket of her being, and always he had turned away horrified eyes—to restore as best he might the priceless jewels of his imagining. Could he censure his daughter because she had believed in Hal Marksley, to her hurt? How had he judged the one he loved, the woman he had given Eileen for a mother?

He put the thought aside as wickedly disloyal. Vine was the mother of his children. She had taken him, a simple-hearted boy with no ambition beyond the making of beautiful furniture, and she had made of him a successful business man. He could no longer make beautiful things. His fingers had lost their sure touch. But he had given his children the cultural advantages his own boyhood had lacked, and he had laid by enough to care for his family, if he should be taken. He had not been happy. He knew, all at once, that he had not been happy. He had never thought of it before. Still, what right had mortals to demand happiness? Had Vine been sympathetic, he might never have risen above the rank of a carpenter. His children would have toiled with their hands, to measure the stolid level of Bromfield or Olive Hill. It was Vine, with her far-seeing eyes and her two-edged tongue, who had made Lary’s achievement possible, who had given Sylvia the satisfaction of a marriage to her liking. It was patent that Sylvia, at least, was satisfied with her lot.

His eyes turned inward, he began to take stock of his children. Bob and Isabel were in heaven. The acts of God were not to be challenged. Lary had periods of morbid brooding, when life looked worse than worthless. It would be different, now that he had a wife to love him ... a wife who saw in him a demigod. Such devotion had stimulated him to greater endeavour than he had deemed worth while. It might not have worked that way with Lary’s father ... if he had had a wife to soothe and admire him. He might have been too happy to exert himself. He could not be sure.

The very qualities which had won Judith were fostered by Vine’s determination to send Larimore to Cornell. Just why Cornell, David had no means of knowing. Lary had not gone to Bromfield for any of his vacations. So the proximity of the old home town had nothing to do with it. With all his cultural charm, he might not have won Mrs. Ascott, had there been no strong incentive to action. He was inclined to drift, to shun the crass grip of reality. His happiness had been thrust upon him, because of Eileen’s drastic need.

Theodora was too young to be estimated with any degree of finality. As she was, so had Vine Larimore appeared to him when, as a boy, he had looked upon her with yearning eyes. In the after years Vine had been the prototype of Sylvia. She might have bargained better with her beauty—as Sylvia had bargained. What had prompted Vine to the breaking of that other engagement? She had told him, times without number, that he had won her—against her better judgment—by his persistent devotion ... had taken her by storm, and had thereby driven his rival to a hasty and ill-starred marriage. How could he have taken any woman by storm? He felt a little foolish pride in the thought that for one rash moment he had been bold.

He once heard his wife counselling Sylvia, when she was on the point of marrying for pique, an elderly widower in the college faculty. She could afford to swallow Tom Henderson’s neglect, Vine had said, if thereby she might some day step into Mrs. Dr. Henderson’s shoes. But Sylvia was in no need of advice. She would always make the best of her situation—glamour it over with a value calculated to inspire envy in the minds of her friends. It would have been the same, had she occupied a three-room cottage in Olive Hill, with miners’ wives for her social equals. She was developing into a snob. David had not known the meaning of the word until he felt it in Sylvia, that summer.

He turned for relief to Theodora, the one who was still plastic. His mind had climbed awkwardly over Eileen. He must do his work, and a father could not contemplate that catastrophe and live. Theo understood him, as none of the others did. She had rejoiced with him in the seven weeks of his belated honeymoon, and she sorrowed with him in the bitterness of the aftermath.

III

“What in the world is the matter with you? Have you gone stone deaf? I have spoken to you three times, and you haven’t turned a hair.” He was aroused from his musings by Vine’s raucous voice.

“I suppose my mind was wandering. What do you want, dear?”

“What were you thinking?” Her eyes were dark with suspicion.

“I—I believe I was thinking about old Selim, the saddle horse ... you know, Vine, that Dr. Schubert used to ride when the roads were too muddy for the buggy. And what sore places the saddle would make on the poor old fellow’s back—and how the sores would turn into kindly calluses after the saddle had been worn a few weeks. It was taking the saddle off, and putting it back on again, that made the new sores. It would be better never to feel relief from the calloused places than to have to harden them all over again.”

“Yes! I wish I had never gone to Bromfield. Not that the trip didn’t benefit my health wonderfully. But we wouldn’t be in all this trouble if I had stayed at home. And the worst of it isn’t Eileen, either. I had to give in to let Larimore marry that grass widow. That’s the part that can’t be so easily undone.”

“Vine!” David Trench towered his full height, his face stiff with indignation. “Have you no decency, no gratitude, no human kindness in your heart? For shame, to let such words pass your lips!”

Lavinia laughed, a strangled, empty giggle, while the red crept up her neck.

“I was only joking. Larimore says I have no sense of humour. I think you are the one who can’t see a joke.”

“I can’t see a joke in things that are not to be joked about. Judith is a noble woman and she has saved you from disgrace. We are the last people in the world who have a moral right to bring up her past. We all make mistakes, even you—”

“I made the mistake of my life when I married a man who always sides against me, no matter what comes up.” She began to weep loudly.

IV

David was wont to coax and comfort until the storm was over; but this time he put on his hat and left the house without a word. When he returned at dinner time the sky was serene and the atmosphere almost balmy. Lavinia kissed him on both cheeks and turned to pick a thread from his coat with wifely care. Her lips wore a satisfied smirk.

“It’s all fixed. I had the luck to run into a meeting of the committee at Mrs. Henderson’s, and they want Eileen to play three numbers. I have written Judith to get her the finest dress in New York—not to mind the cost—and to send the titles by return mail. I’m going to give a big reception, Friday afternoon.”

David smiled wearily. Another whirlpool in his domestic stream had been navigated, safely. Before him lay a week of tranquillity. Vine was always amiable, with some such absorbing task in prospect.

XXVIII Indian Summer

I

The trio arrived Wednesday morning, with half the freshman class at the station to meet Eileen. It was all so different from her going away. How strange the town looked, how tranquil and confiding the faces of her friends! What a long, long time she had been gone! Could she ever again talk to Kitten and Ina as in the old life? Could she adjust herself, for even a few days, to the environment that had been her whole world?

The change was not all in herself. There was her mother—kissing her ecstatically before all that crowd, telling her how sweet she looked, how lonely the big house was without her. And—did she hear aright?—declaring in ringing tones that she should not go back to New York with Larimore and Judith, but should enter college at the beginning of the second semester. A moment later Mrs. Trench passed from this demonstration to embrace Judith with equal warmth, to address her as “my dear daughter” and lament the shortness of the visit. The girl was bewildered. Only Theodora was unchanged. She bubbled and vibrated as of old, pouting disconsolately when the chapel bell summoned her.

II

The afternoon was taken up with rehearsal for to-morrow evening’s program in the college chapel. Once Eileen was on the brink of the sordid past. She had met Adelaide Nims with unruffled composure; but when Kitten joked her about her prospective sister-in-law, and Ina wanted to know how many evenings a week Hal was in the habit of spending with her, she almost forgot the rôle she had been playing ... that in New York she was Mrs. Winthrop, whereas in Springdale she was still Eileen Trench, and presumably betrothed to Mrs. Nims’ brother.

“You can’t fool us,” Miss Henderson teased. “I bet Ina a pair of gold-buckled garters that you’d follow Hal to New York, instead of going to college here. And your mother didn’t get by, this morning, with that line of talk about keeping you at home. She wouldn’t tear you and Hal apart for the world.”

Eileen felt a sinking in the region of her solar plexus, but she contrived a flippant retort, and took up her violin. She had not remembered that Hal Marksley was in Brooklyn ... that she was likely to meet him in the subway or at the theatre, any day. In the onrush of her first disillusionment he had been carried beyond her ken, as an obstruction of logs and floating débris is torn from its moorings and scattered in meaningless fragments by the violence of a spring flood.

III

Judith, after a few hours with Mrs. Dutton and a hurried visit from Nanny—indeed the Doctors Schubert were dears; but her heart was still with her mistress—found Lary in the hall where, less than three months ago, she promised to love, honour and obey him. He must make a hurried run to Littlefield, on business for his father. It was a glorious autumn afternoon and the road was in fair condition. At his suggestion, Judith took an extra wrap, for the air would be chill after the sun went down.

It was the twenty-fourth of November, and the temperature was that of late spring; but the air held a dreamy content, as if the earth and her children were drunk with rare old amber wine. On the brow of a hill, a little way out from town, Lary stopped the car to point out a great diadem of irregular rubies, in a setting of Etruscan gold. That, he explained, was a scattering of scarlet oaks in a grove composed largely of soft maples. Here and there a flavescent green asserted itself, thinly.

“Walnuts,” he said, his face taking on a boyish look. “We had every tree marked, when Bob and Syd and I were youngsters. You have to pick out the location ... and remember it. The walnut has no community instinct. It seldom grows in friendly groups, like the sweet gums and sugar maples. The leaves are only yellowed by a frost that turns the oaks crimson over night, and their formation gives the effect of delicate filigree. Look at that sumac bush, Judith—like a great sang de boeuf vase, with a red on the shoulder that would have filled an ancient Chinese potter with awe. The flame-red in the sang de boeuf porcelain was supposed to be derived from the breath of the gods, while the kiln was at white heat. This red, that gives a flambé touch to so many of these sumacs, is an insolent growth of rhus toxicodendron, that has run wild all over these hills.”

“Poison ivy,” Judith cried. “Yes, we have it in New York and Connecticut—all up to the Sound. During the summer, city people often mistake it for Virginia creeper, to their sorrow. But after frost, its coral colour betrays it.”

Something on the grassy slope caught her eye, and she asked for explanation. Cobwebs. The shrubs were festooned with them, long streamers floating in the breeze, like knotted gossamer threads. Over the short grass they formed a continuous fabric, as delicate as crêpe chiffon.

“Millions of spiders set to work with their spinning, the morning after the first hard frost. No naturalist has ever explained, to my satisfaction, where they come from, or what purpose they serve by throwing out all this maze of webs. I can’t believe that there is any utilitarian end in view. As if nature couldn’t squander a little effort on pure beauty!”

When the car had rounded the shoulder of the hill, Judith touched her husband’s arm. “Look, Lary, is that fire? Not the red of the foliage, but that film of smoke, away beyond the field.”

He followed the lead of her gaze, across a dun field dotted at more or less regular intervals with huge shocks of withered corn, beside some of which lay piles of yellow and white ears, husked and ready for the crib. Beyond this were broad acres of wheat stubble, glistening silver in the sun. And then the creek, half hidden from view by a tangle of wild grape and trumpet creeper that well-nigh suffocated the stunted trees along its bank. Over the field, the stream, the low woods beyond, was a silver mist that deepened first to azure, then to smoky purple, as it met the far horizon.

“That isn’t the result of fire, dear. That is our much vaunted Indian Summer haze. The Indians had a legend to explain it. Ask Theo to tell you. It’s one of her favourites.”

“Yes, yes.... I had forgotten. I shall always associate it with Dr. Schubert—the peace that came to him after the long years of tragedy and the final shock of sudden death. Lary, do you think....”

“I am afraid not, dearest. My mother was born in an off season. Nothing in her case works out on normal lines.”

Then they rode on in silence, each wondering how the other had caught the unvoiced question that was in both minds.

IV

The concert, for the benefit of the scholarship fund, the following evening, was the social event of the season. Mrs. Trench was disappointed in the dress Judith had bought for Eileen—a simple affair of white chiffon, in long graceful lines, over a satin slip that showed a tracery of silver threads—until she heard Mrs. Nims whisper to Mrs. Henderson that it must have been a late Paris importation. After that she caught the “style” her village eyes had not perceived. It was worth the price, to have Mrs. Nims say that to Mrs. Henderson.

But Eileen’s appearance, as she emerged upon the chapel stage from the sheltering screen of palms, was no disappointment to her mother. As the burst of spontaneous applause died away—the violinist bowing recognition, as graciously as if this were a matter of daily occurrence—she heard Kitten exclaim to the girls near her:

“Gee, isn’t she stunning! If ten weeks in New York could do that for Eileen Trench, ten days of it ought to make a howling beauty of me.” Then she clapped her hand to her mouth, remembering Mrs. Trench’s lynx-ears.

V

The visit was one continuous triumphal procession for the girl. There was her mother’s reception, Friday afternoon, at which—according to the formally engraved cards of invitation—the best people of Springdale were requested to meet Mrs. Larimore Trench. But Eileen, behind the coffee urn, was the real attraction. On Saturday Mrs. Henderson and Mrs. Clarkson joined in a musical tea, and together they prevailed on the girl to play Schubert’s Ave Maria at church, Sunday morning.

When it was ended, and Sunday night saw her safely on the train, her mother went home to a three days’ sick headache. If she could “put that over” on the smartest people in Springdale, perhaps there was nothing to fear. Larimore had some ridiculous story he used to quote ... about a boy who held a fox under his cloak while it tore his vitals out. It was a stolen fox, she reminded herself. After all, it didn’t matter much what you did—so long as you had the grit to keep it under your cloak.

XXIX The Truth that is Clean

I

The winter wore away. Larimore Trench was too deeply occupied to give much time to his small family. “Success had come to him unsought: not the success he had hoped for or desired. Griffith Ramsay opened the way when, as toast-master at a convention banquet, he introduced Lary as Consulting Architect—a title the opulent New Yorker took seriously. And it was Ramsay who looked after the contracts, stipulating enormous fees for the service Lary would have given gratuitously, had he been left to his own devices.

“I feel like a robber,” he told Judith when he handed her a check in four figures—compensation for work that had actually consumed only a few hours of his time. “You know, I met the man at a stag dinner, early in December, and took a real liking to him. He had an option on a place, and he asked me to go out and look at it. It was one of the worst atrocities I ever saw—and I didn’t mince words with him. It was such a bargain that he could afford to spend a little money on drastic changes—and I told him what to do. I have often given that kind of advice to a friend. I wouldn’t think of sending in a bill.”

“And it hurts your pride, to be selling your taste.”

Lary looked at her, a light dawning in his limpid brown eyes.

“You are the most remarkable woman in the world. You have the insight of a sage ... and the intuition of a poet. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. And in a second you put your finger on the tender spot. It is precisely the feeling I had the first time an editor sent me a check for a poem. You don’t sell things that come out of your soul. To take money for them is like rubbing the bloom from the grape. It leaves your soul shiny and bare.”

“But, Lary, an artist takes money for his pictures. It is bad for his art if he lives by any other means. The painter who has no need to work is almost sure to go stale in a few years. If you had been born when Greece was at the climax of her glory—”

“I would have been an artisan—taking wages for my work, like Apollodorus and Praxiteles—with no more social opportunity and aspiration than an upper servant,” Lary retorted, laughing whimsically. “The Greeks had no illusions about art. It was as closely knit with the kitchen as with the temple. This idea that artists are fit associates for millionaires—that is, for the aristocracy—is purely a figment of modern times. My repugnance for money is not the result of my classical training. It was burned into my mind by the gruelling conflict of opinions between my father and mother. My father and I were born to an age that knows only the money standard. The world—and my mother—are not to blame, if he and I are out of joint with the times.”

“But you won’t let it hurt you, Lary ... let it embitter you?”

“No, sweetheart. I’ll make a joke of it. I’ll tell Ramsay to double his infamous bills.” And Larimore Trench went forth to rob another rich man.

II

Later in the day Laura came to the apartment. It was a dreary February morning and the outlook from the front windows was bleak and cheerless. Eileen had sat for an hour contemplating the waste of sullen water, and Judith had let her alone. She was thinking things out. She would come to her sister for help when she needed it. At times the older woman could follow her thought process by an intuition that was almost uncanny. This morning not a glimmer of light came through. Scarcely had Mrs. Ramsay disposed of her furs and selected her favourite rocker when the girl began, her face whiter than usual and her lips compressed:

“Judith, I am going to tell her. I can’t go on feeling like a dirty sneak.”

“You—what, Eileen?” Laura asked, her hazel eyes opening in wonder.

“May I, Judith? You know what I mean.”

“If you feel that it is right, dear. You know how it looks to you.”

“Then here goes! Mrs. Ramsay, you and your husband have been perfectly splendid to me—and I owe it to you, not to have you go on this way any longer. As far as your mother is concerned—she’s been a darling; but I’ve paid that with my violin. I don’t need to tell her. But I do need to tell you that I am not Mrs. Winthrop, and my husband didn’t drown in that Alaska steamship disaster. I am Eileen Trench—and I never had a husband....” She set her teeth hard, then went on heroically: “There won’t be any name for the baby that comes, the first of May.”

“Eileen, are you mad! Judith, what has come over the girl?”

“No. It’s just cold facts. I’m not twenty years. I’ll be seventeen, the last of March. Long before I was sixteen I was crazy mad in love with a man. It was mostly my fault—that he wasn’t the hero I made him out, I mean. We were engaged and we talked things over—things that aren’t safe for a girl and a man to talk about before they are married. I don’t need to tell you the rest.”

“And the contemptible cur deserted you?”

“Not exactly ... deserted. When we found out, he said at first that he would be loyal, and would marry me after he got through with college. To save my reputation, he wanted me to commit murder.”

“What did you say to him? How did you answer the cad?”

“I blacked his eye.”

The words fell cold and mirthless.

“I was going to kill myself, but Judith wouldn’t let me. She married Lary, so that they could take—”

Laura Ramsay’s usually placid face took on an expression of intense emotion. She rose to her feet and walked hurriedly to the window.

“If you are going to cut me off—well, that’s all the more reason why I had to tell you,” Eileen said, following her. “It’s what I have to expect.”

“But I don’t intend to cut you off, child. Judith, why couldn’t I do for her what I did in Nelka’s case? Especially if it turns out to be a little girl. Junior is wild for a sister—and it’s the only way I can hope to get one for him. And of course I’d be game, if it were another boy. Won’t you, Judith? I’m sure Griff would approve. Why—why, Eileen, what is the matter?”

The girl had flung herself on her knees, her face in Judith’s lap, her slender body shaken with sobs. When the paroxysm had passed, she slipped to the floor and sat looking from one to the other with a wry smile.

“There is only one stumbling block in the way, Mrs. Ramsay—and that’s me. Judith and I are going to the sanitarium, the middle of April. After the baby comes, I am to hand it over to her and forget about it. Why, I can’t. I croon over it every night, in my dreams. When I’m wide awake, I see him, a splendid man, thrilling audiences with his violin. Wouldn’t I lose my head, some day—go raving mad and tell the whole thing?”

“All the more reason why it should be in the nursery, out at Rye, where you wouldn’t see it. Boy or girl, you must let me have it. The child will be a musical genius,” Laura cried, her eyes beaming with expectant mother-pride.

III

That night Judith talked it over with Lary. She had known, all along, that the thought of this child, with the Marksley brand, filled him with dread. The following day Laura came again, with a whole chest of dainty things. She and her sister had made them before Junior’s coming, and he was such a robust baby that they were outgrown before they had been worn. Griff was as eager as she.

Gradually, as the weeks passed, Judith divorced herself from the thought of the child. Had she a right, when the Ramsays offered sanctuary to the nameless waif—especially in view of Eileen’s preternatural mother-love, and the great loneliness that had been Lary’s, before her coming? There might some day be a child of her own. Her homesickness for Theodora gave her pause—and Theodora had not twined tendrils of helplessness around her heart. Yes, it was best to let Laura have the baby....

XXX Katharsis

I

March came, and the layette was practically finished. Judith Trench looked up from her sewing to realize with a strange thrill that it was just a year since first she heard the name of Springdale. She and Lary would be going to the theatre, that evening. She wondered whether he had remembered, when he got the tickets. Eileen was leaving for Rye on an early afternoon train—indeed she must be well on the way, going directly from Professor Auersbach’s studio. The train must pass Pelham in a few minutes.

A year ago, Judith Ascott had gone out to Pelham with the buoyancy of a toy balloon released from its tether, to break the epoch-making news to her mother. Now the house at Pelham was in alien hands. Father was still abroad, was still complaining of floating specks in the air and a disheartening lack of appetite for breakfast. Mother was rapturous over the new house Lary was building for her. Ben was eager to get back to America, to try his hand at concrete construction. Jack thought he wanted to be a landscape architect—with brother Lary to instruct him. That would beat the Beaux Arts all hollow.

From one to another of the family, her mind flitted. Had they not accepted Lary without reservation? Was not her own life complete? She turned questioning eyes towards the door. A key in the outer lock. Had Lary come home early ... remembering? Was he ill? The living-room door opened, slowly, as if it were pushing some imponderable but deadly weight. In an instant she was on her feet.

“Eileen! What has happened?”

The girl sank into the nearest chair and buried her face from sight. After a moment she said, in a voice hollow and remote:

“There’s no use torturing you with suspense. I’m not hurt.”

“But something has happened to you—something dreadful.”

“Judith, you don’t need to go out of your way to hunt punishment, when you’ve sinned. And you don’t need to dodge it, either. A little while ago I would have thrown myself in front of a subway train, if I hadn’t been a coward. Last summer I thought I had done something heroic. But when I saw him, this afternoon—”

“Hal Marksley? Eileen!”

“Now you know the worst.” She nodded slowly. “If you’ll let me, Judith, I’ll tell you from the beginning. I guess I’m like mamma in that, too. She has to tell a thing all in one piece, or she loses the thread of it. In the first place, I had a great lesson. I was the last, before luncheon, and Professor Auersbach stopped to compliment me. It was the first time. He explained the meaning of hypsos, the sublime reach of spiritual exaltation—and he said it had come into my playing because of what I had suffered. He talked like Syd Schubert. I went out of the studio walking on air. I don’t know what I ate—or where. All I remember is that I left too large a tip, because the change came out wrong.

“I went to the Grand Central and bought a ticket. It was ever so long before train time, but I thought I’d better scout around and see how to get down to the tracks. You know, the construction people change the route every few days. The first passage I tried had been barricaded. I went half way up the stairs when I came face to face with three men. The one in the middle was Hal.”

“He recognized you?”

“Not at first—and I hurried past them and into a side aisle. It was a blind pocket, and before I could get out of it I heard him calling my name. Judith, I was all alone. Hundreds of people within hearing, and I was all alone with the man I loathe. It was like a nightmare—my feet hobbled with ropes. Before I knew it, he had me in his arms and was kissing me. I suppose I fainted. When I began to see things again, we were in that little temporary waiting-room, and my head was on his shoulder. I looked at him through a mist ... and every minute of last summer rolled over me. It was a flood from a sewer. They say you review your life when you are about to die. You don’t need any hell after that.”

When the tumultuous beating of her heart subsided a little, she went on:

“He wanted to call a taxicab and take me to a hotel. I didn’t get his meaning at first. When I did—life came back to me. I suppose the people around us thought we were a married couple, having our first public quarrel. Once he looked at me with a leer and said: ‘So you were mistaken about what you told me, the first of September—or else you took my advice’. I told him I was mistaken about a good many things, last summer. Then he said he had gone to the studio to look me up, after his sister wrote him that I was studying music in New York, and the secretary said there was no one enrolled there by the name of Trench. He chuckled and said I was a smart kid, and he had half a mind to take me with him to Rio.”

“Rio?”

“Yes. He hasn’t been at Pratt Institute at all. He flunked his entrance exams. He didn’t let his people know, but has been taking all the money they’d sent him. Has a position in a Brazilian importing house, and has been studying Portuguese all winter. They are sending him down there in an important place—and he hopes he’ll never see this ratty old country again. He even said he’d marry me, if ...”

“And there was no return of the old ardour?”

“No, Judith, only a sick disgust.”

II

They were still talking when Larimore came home, surprised and a shade annoyed when he found that Eileen was there. He had but two tickets, and he wanted to be alone with his wife.

“Don’t tell him,” the girl whispered when he left the room to dress for dinner. “He is just beginning to respect me a little. I so want his—respect.”

When dinner was over she went to her room. No, she was not ill. She only wanted to be alone. If Lary had planned an evening at the theatre, thinking that she would spend the night at Rye, there was no reason for a change in his plans. She was glad they were going out, so that she might be alone. She knew the meaning of hypsos, now that she had made the descent, within the brief space of an hour, from that height to bathos, the lowest depth of sordid physical reality. She wanted to play again the winged notes that had carried her beyond the farthest reach of her own being—to purge her soul of the earth-taint that was in her.

“You are perfectly sure you are all right?” Judith asked when she told her good-night. “You won’t brood or cry?”

“No, I am past all that. When you strike bottom—there isn’t any farther to go.”

III

After the play there was a little supper, and then the long ride in the taxicab. It was nearing two o’clock when Judith looked into Eileen’s room. The bed was empty. In swift alarm she turned, to catch a faint cry from the bathroom.

“I came in here to get some hot water—and—I couldn’t get back,” the girl groaned, striving to make light of a desperate situation.

“Oh, it was heartless of me to leave you alone, at such a time.”

“Not at all. I’ve had a wonderful evening. I took my violin ... and we worked it out together. I went to bed and slept like a rock until—oh, oh!”

“Lary!” Judith cried in fright, “telephone for a doctor. Eileen is dreadfully ill.” The tortured girl had striven to rise, but fell back convulsed on the rug.

When Larimore had carried her to her bed, he said huskily:

“Only this evening, when we were going out, I was thinking how fortunate it was to have a doctor here in the apartment. He came up in the elevator with us. He may not care to take this kind of case, but—”

“Lary, you must be mistaken. It’s not to be for almost two months. And if you were right—wouldn’t it be over by this time? She’s been suffering two hours.”

“The first one is often premature. Eileen is a highly emotional nature. And I suspected at dinner that something was wrong. As to the duration—no one can gauge that. I was with my mother for three hours before Theodora was born. My father was out of town, and mamma wouldn’t have Sylvia around. Bob had been sent for the nurse, and there was nothing to do but wait. Dr. Schubert knew my mother’s habits. He said there was no hurry.” They had reached the outer door of the apartment, his hand on the knob. “In those three hours, Judith, I was transformed from a sentimental boy to a morbid, cynical man. Syd has tried to change my viewpoint; but all his reasoning is empty. He will never be called upon to bear children.”

A few minutes later he returned with the physician, in bathrobe and slippers. It was almost morning before a nurse arrived; but one of the maids was herself a mother, and intelligent help was not wanting. After an hour Lary led his wife from the room.

“Sweetheart, you can’t help her, and you are enduring every pang she suffers. Her pain is mostly physical now. Yours is both physical and mental. You must not squander your strength. We will need it for the harder part to come. Won’t you lie down and try to sleep?”

“Sleep! when the most terribly significant thing in the world is under way? How can we grow so callous? I never realized the marvel of life until now. I must go through every heart-throb of it. I need it! I will have more pity for your mother, more toleration for my own mother, more love for you, Lary—if there is any more.”

Larimore Trench closed his eyes, bitter self-abasement surging through his being. He had never been at grips with life. Nay, rather, he had turned from it in a superior attitude of disdain. He would not touch the woman he loved. She was too holy for his coward’s hands.

IV

As the grey dawn was breaking over the snow-whitened Hudson, the nurse aroused the two who dozed in their chairs in the living-room.

“You’d better come,” she said excitedly. “Mrs. Winthrop isn’t going to hold out.”

At the door the physician waved them back. Judith caught a glimpse of Eileen’s deathlike face and she ran sobbing down the hall. A long time she stood, her husband’s cherishing arms around her. Then a petulant wail from the room at the end of the long hall told them it was over.

At noon a letter to David was posted.

“You must be prepared for the worst. Early this morning a little girl came. It weighs less than four pounds. The doctor says, considering its premature condition, the extreme youth of the mother, and the circumstances of delivery, there is not one chance in ten that it will survive. We are more concerned for the mother. I will telegraph you, only in case of extremity.”

V

Laura Ramsay had come, in response to a long-distance call, and she and Judith stood beside the nurse when, after twelve hours of earth-life, the unformed morsel of humanity gave up the struggle.

It was not until the following morning that they told Eileen her baby had died. Lary was with them. He had looked for a passionate outburst. He could not fathom her mood as she lay, quite tranquil, on her pillow, a smile gathering radiance in her deepset eyes.

“It’s the only way,” she said at length. “I’m glad it won’t have to face life—with such a handicap. It’s better for all of us.”

Lary stooped and kissed her. He wondered why women were so much stronger than men, why, in most of life’s crises, they must bear the shock.

XXXI A New Hilltop

I

Eileen’s strength returned slowly. It was the middle of April before she ventured out to Rye, a pallid wraith of her former self. Griff and Laura were afraid for her ... a fear that was transformed into action by the potent chemistry of a woman’s mind.

“Round up a bunch of Lary’s patrons,” Mrs. Ramsay said in her decisive way, “and convince them that they ought to send him abroad to buy furnishings for their new homes. He and Judith can take Eileen along. The sea voyage will—”

“Capital!” Griff cut in. “Only yesterday I had Parkinson on my neck for an hour, howling about the difficulty of getting draperies and rugs for the stunning place Lary has made of his old junk heap. Commissioned a fellow in Paris to send him some things and—Lord love us! You should have seen the consignment! It wasn’t the price. But Parkinson hates to be laughed at, when he’s been stung.”

“Lary’s orderly mind would take care of the needs of a dozen men like Parkinson, and it would give him a chance to see Europe—right!”

II

Thus it came about that on a serene May morning Judith Trench dismissed the maids, closed the apartment and set her face towards the rising sun. For her it was the real adventure. She had looked at Europe so often. Now she would see through the shell, with Lary’s eyes.

At the Cherbourg pier Mr. Denslow met them. Mamma and the boys could hardly wait to see Judith’s new husband. But after a week Lary’s importance was blurred, sent into almost complete occultation, as Eileen’s vivid youth asserted itself. Ben was her slave from the first. The night after they left her in Brussels, to have a few lessons with Ysaye, and Lary and Judith set forth on their real honeymoon, he confided to his mother that he was going to add another Trench to the Denslow family, as soon as he was sure he could earn a living for two.

“Have you asked her?” Mrs. Denslow quizzed.

“No. She thinks I’m a boy. You might tell her that I’m nearly five years older than she. I thought I’d grow whiskers—to impress her.”

III

From Antwerp to Munich, from Venice to Constantinople, and thence by boat to Naples and the eastern coast of Spain, Lary and the other half of his being wandered, too happy to remember the fiery ordeal wherein their severed selves had been fused again. When they reached Paris, the middle of August, a great pile of letters awaited them. Lary thrust one of them into his inside pocket. It was from his mother. Another he tore open with eager fingers. A moment later he handed it to Judith, his eyes shining. It bore the signature of a discriminating editor:

“I never knew why Renaissance art, with all its brilliance and charm, was unsatisfying to me, until I read your keenly analytical essay. We would be glad to consider a series of essays, covering other architectural periods and styles.”

Mr. Denslow read the letter with indifference, but the accompanying check had weight. He was coming to believe that his daughter had made a first-rate investment when she went to look after her interests in Olive Hill, and incidentally acquired a husband who could make good in New York in six months.

Judith followed Lary to his room, whither he had retreated to read the letters from home. One glance at his face satisfied her that all was not well. A moment he wavered, on the point of thrusting that disturbing letter out of sight. Then he recognized, in his feeling, not loyalty to his mother but a raw personal chagrin. Judith was his wife. She had earned the right to share even his humiliation. Yet he dared not look at her while she read the closely written pages.

His father was breaking. It was his duty to come home and assume the burden, now that the reason for his absence from Springdale, with Judith and Eileen, had been removed by an unhoped-for act of Providence. The building of a great place like the Marksley home was too much for David, who never could shoulder responsibility. She had tried to fire his ambition—make him see how proud he ought to be, to get a chance to put up such fine buildings. It was wasted breath. He went about as if he had a sack of concrete on his shoulders. He would certainly have to forfeit money on the contract. She was outdone with him, and must have help.

“Dearest, cable your father to throw over that contract, no matter what it costs. Can’t she see that his soul is being ground—because of you and Eileen?”

“I couldn’t send such a cablegram, dear. I didn’t want ever to see Springdale again. You and Eileen can stay on here with your mother.”

“But, Lary, I shouldn’t mind Springdale. David and Theo are there—and an arbour with a summer house—and Indian Summer coming. It would be worth all the rest ... a cheap price to pay, for another such afternoon as we had last November, on the road to Littlefield. Is it always as glorious as that, Lary?”

“Usually, but not always. I remember, once when I was a young boy, there was no frost at all until the first week of December. The glorious tints and that silver haze in the air are the result of a heavy frost that catches the foliage in full sap. But that year—it was the winter Theo was born—the trees were a sickly gray-green, and all the shrubs and vines looked as if they were suffering from some wasting disease. The leaves had shrivelled, and still they clung. The morning after the frost they fell like rain. Within three days the branches were stark and bare. It was absolutely startling.”

“You had no crimson and gold, no chiffon webs on the grass?”

“Not that year. It was an open winter, with a frost late in the spring, that killed all the fruit. Don’t set your heart on—I mean, dear, don’t go back to Springdale ... just for the Indian Summer.”

“I was going, Lary, to comfort your father.”

IV

That evening they told Mrs. Denslow that they would book passage for an early return to New York. And that lady, whose plans had been changed so often within the past year, was glad to have her shifting course in life directed by some one with a real necessity. They would all go home together, especially as Ben was eager to get to work. Not at his instance, but rather because the girl promised relief from the boredom that had begun to weigh heavy on her, Mrs. Denslow urged Eileen to spend the winter in New York.

“Papa’s health is failing. He needs me,” was the eminently satisfactory reply. To Judith the girl confided another reason. The apartment overlooking the Hudson held memories she did not wish to revive. She was done with that chapter of her story. She had climbed, with bleeding feet, to a hilltop ... and the future lay misty with promise before her.