The Empty Sack Part 8

For Dauphin, the most beastly experience of the day began about four each afternoon, at the minute when the dog-clock told him that his master might be expected home. That was the hour at which from time immemorial he had taken possession of the great front portico where the distant burr of the motor-car first reached him. When the burr became a throb he knew it was pa.s.sing the oak that marked the Collingham boundary; and, since it had arrived on his own ground, he could run down the driveway to meet it. This had been his exclusive right. To be joined daily now by a frisky, irrepressible pup made him feel like an old man tied to an insupportable young wife from whom his own death will be the sole deliverance. Life to Dauphin had thus become a mingling of impatience and anguish, poorly masked beneath an air of dignity.

And as far as he could judge, his master's wife, of whom he had no great opinion, had begun to share these emotions. Anguish and impatience had become of late the chief elements in the aura she threw out, and by which dogs take their sense of men. It was not that her words or expressions betrayed her. It was only that when she came within his sphere of perception he was aware that she felt the kind of pa.s.sion the police dog roused in himself.

He was aware of it on this May afternoon, more than six months after she had first learned of Bob's infatuation for the Follett girl, when she came out on the portico to listen for the expected car. She would come out, listen, and go in. Each time she came out, each time she listened, each time she retired, he felt the sweeping to and fro of an imperious will worried or frustrated, though he sat on his haunches and gave no sign. He couldn't give a sign, because Max would misunderstand it. There he was, down on the lawn before the portico, grinning, prancing, joking, calling names-names quite audible in dog intercourse, though a human being couldn't catch them-and the least little movement Dauphin made would be taken as concession. The old setter was sorry. He would have liked showing his master's wife-he didn't consider her his mistress-that he understood her distress; but he was nailed to the doorstep by _force majeure_.

And the woman envied him. He was perfectly aware of that. She a.s.sumed that dogs had no social problems. All he had to do, she thought, was to sit and blink at the magnolias, hawthorns, and lilacs pursuing one another into bloom. All he had to think of was the up hill and down dale of the view before him, a haze of blue and green and rose melting to the mauve of hills.

As a matter of fact, this was something like what was pa.s.sing through her mind. A masterful woman, she was nevertheless reaching that point of self-pity where she envied the untroubled dogs. While she carried the cares of so many others, no one else carried hers. All through the winter she had had Edith and Bob on her mind, and now she had Bradley.

On leaving for the bank that morning, he had been so terribly upset that she couldn't rest till knowing how he had got through his day. She was the more worried because of being entirely alone and thus thrown in on herself.

Edith had gone to stay with people in the Berkshires. Of that her mother was glad. She meant for the present to keep her there. With her queer ideas, she would only make her brother the more difficult to deal with, though she had not been difficult herself. Nearly seven months had pa.s.sed, and yet her affair with Ayling was exactly where it had been in the previous October. That was the advantage of a girl; you could always tell where she stood. Edith was tenacious, but not defiant. Though capable of engaging herself to this young man, she would hardly marry him in face of her father's opposition.

Bob, on the other hand, was not only head-strong, but unreasonable. He would marry the Follett girl if she would marry him, whatever might be the consequences. She, his mother, had it "out" with him, and he had said so. It was a terrible thing to have their whole domestic happiness hang on the whim of a creature like the Follett girl; but apparently it did.

She had not spoken to Bob till Hubert Wray had surrendered all he had to tell. He had done this through a process of "pumping" of which he himself had hardly been aware. Having ascertained that his New England connections were unexceptional, Junia had been attentive to him through the winter, making him feel that Collingham Lodge was a second home.

What he didn't tell to her he told to Edith, and what Edith knew the mother had no great difficulty in finding out. Thus when, on the previous Sat.u.r.day, Bob was about to leave for a party on Long Island, they had had the plain talk which could no longer be deferred.

They had had it after lunch, seated on a bench overlooking the tennis court. They had come out ostensibly to talk over the sacrifice of the pink-and-white hawthorn in the shade of which they sat in favor of extending the court so that Bob and Edith could both have parties simultaneously. While the new court would be an improvement, they would regret the celestial flowering of the hawthorn whenever, as at present, it was May.

"Not that it would make so very much difference to your father and me,"

Junia began, in a quavering tone, "if things we're afraid of were to happen."

So the subject was opened up. Bob could only ask, "What things?" and his mother could only tell him.

"It's quite true, old lady," he confessed. "You might as well know it first as last."

Junia had not brought up her children without having learned that, while Edith could be controlled, Bob could only be managed. With Edith, she could say, "I forbid," with Bob, it had to be, "I suffer."

"Of course, dear," she said now, "I'm your mother, and whatever you do I shall try to accept. It will be hard, naturally-it's hard already-but you can count on me."

He took her hand and squeezed it.

"Thanks, old lady."

"Of course I can't answer for your father. You know for yourself how stern and unyielding he is."

"Oh, I'm not so sure about that. It's always seemed to me that he'd give in to a lot of things, if you'd only let him."

This perspicacity being dangerous, she glided to another aspect of her theme.

"What I don't understand is why, if you've been in love with her for seven or eight months, and you mean to marry her, you haven't done it already."

He took two or three puffs at his cigarette before tossing off:

"I'd do it like a shot, if she would."

"And she won't?"

"Not yet."

"And you think she will?"

"I'm sure she will."

"What makes you so certain?"

"Nothing. I just know."

Having had her fears verified, Junia had no object in pushing the inquiry further. Her duty in life was to take events as they touched her family and mold them for the best. When she called it "the best" she meant it as the best. She was not a worldly woman with mere fashionable ends in view. Eager for the good of her children, she was conscientious in pursuit of the things she truly believed to be worthiest.

All through Sunday she took counsel with herself, going to communion at the restful little Marillo church, and putting new intensity into her devotion. She had guests at lunch and went out to dinner, and, though equal to all the social demands, her mind did not relinquish the purpose she had in view. Could she have accomplished it without her husband's aid, she would probably not have taken him into her confidence. It being her special task to deal with the children, the less he knew of their mistakes and escapades the simpler it was for them all.

It may be an illuminating digression here to say that there had been a time, some fifteen years earlier, when Junia had had an experience as difficult as the one she was facing now. Nothing but a trained subconsciousness had carried her through that, and she looked for the same mainstay of the self to come to her aid again. One of the lessons she had learned at that time was the value of quietude, of reserve in "giving herself away." She was not one to whom this restraint came natural; but for the very reason that it was acquired, it had the intenser force.

It was at a time when they had lived in the Marillo house only a little while, and the Bradley of that day was not the portly, domesticated bigwig of the present. He was a tempestuous sea of pa.s.sions right at the dangerous flood-tide, the middle forties. The first ardor of married life was at an end for both of them; but while, for her, existence was running more and more into one quiet purposeful stream, for him it was raging off in new directions.

Whatever Junia suspected she was too wise to know it as a certainty.

Knowing, she argued, would probably weaken her and do nothing to strengthen him. Already she was more intensely a mother than she was a wife, living in the amazing careers she was planning for her children.

Edith would marry an English peer, while Bob would take a brilliant place in his own country. Their victories would be her victories, till, in some far-distant, beatified old age, she would be translated to the stars.

And then one afternoon, when the flagged pavement had only recently been laid and they were drinking tea on it, Bradley had said, right out of a clear sky:

"Junia I don't know whether you've suspected it or not, but for some time past I've had a mistress."

That was the instant when she first learned the value of a schooled subconsciousness. It seemed to her that she had been slain; and yet, with a nerve little less than miraculous, she went on with her tasks among the tea things.

"If you've done it so far without telling me, Bradley," she said, at last, with only the slightest tremor in her tone, "why shouldn't you let me remain ignorant?"

"Does that mean that you don't care if I go on?"

"I think you can answer that as well as I. What I don't care for is to be drawn into an affair from which your own good taste-merely to put it on that ground-should be anxious to leave me out."

He looked at her savagely.

"Don't you resent it any more than that?"

"Is that why you're giving me the information-to see how much I resent it?"

"Partly."

"Then I'm afraid you will have your labor for your pains. You'll never see more than you're seeing at this instant."

That stand was a master stroke. It gave her the advantage of being enigmatic. It enabled her to take blows without seeming to have felt them, and to deliver them without betraying the quarter from which the next would come.

Right there and then Bradley had been monstrous enough to suggest that, since she liked Collingham Lodge, she should remain there and let him go away. He would make generous provision for her and the children, and in return expect his divorce.

But she had taken her stand-the enigmatic. She didn't argue; she didn't plead; she didn't reproach him; she didn't treat him to the scene through which weaker women would have put him.