The Happiest Time of Their Lives Part 21

Mrs. Farron laughed good-temperedly.

"Did you go and see about having your pink silk shortened?" she said.

Mathilde stared at her mother, and in the momentary silence Lucie came in and asked what madame wanted for the evening, and Adelaide in her fluent French began explaining that what she really desired most was that Lucie should not make so much noise in her room that monsieur could not sleep.

In the midst of it she stopped and turned to her daughter.

"Won't you be late for dinner, darling?" she said.

Mathilde thought it very possible, and went away to get dressed. She went into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.

All the time she was dressing she tried to rehea.r.s.e her case--that it was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother's would make it sound childish and absurd even in her own ears. She had counted on a long evening, but when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother's were to dine and go to the theater. The dinner was amusing, the talk, though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the whole first act, appeared, in the entr'acte, to feel no hesitation in condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed heartily over the playwright's conception of social usages, and made Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the guiltiest of secrets.

As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at once the sentence she had determined on:

"I don't think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said this afternoon."

Mrs. Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a picture-dealer's window. It was a picture of an empty room. Hot summer sunlight filtered through the lowered Venetian blinds, and fell in bands on the golden wood of the floor. Outside the air was burned and dusty, but inside the room all was clear, cool, and pure.

"How perfect his things are," murmured Mrs. Farron to herself, and then added to her daughter: "Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don't you? It's immensely to your credit, darling," she went on, her tone taking on a flattering sweetness, "to care so much about any one who has such funny, stubby little hands--most unattractive hands," she added almost dreamily.

There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to Mathilde. She found that it didn't make the very slightest difference to her what her mother thought of Pete or his hands, that it would never make any difference to her again. It was as if her will had suddenly been born, and the first act of that will was to decide to go with the man she loved. How could she have doubted for an instant? It was so simple, and no opposition would or could mean anything to her. She was not in the least angry; on the contrary, she felt extremely pitiful, as if she were saying good-by to some one who did not know she was going away, as if in a sense she had now parted from her mother forever. Tears came into her eyes.

"Ah, Mama!" she said like a sigh.

Mrs. Farron felt she had been cruel, but without regretting it; for that, she thought, was often a parent's duty.

"I don't want to hurt your feelings, Mathilde. The boy is a nice enough little person, but really I could not let you set off for China at a minute's notice with any broker's clerk who happened to fall in love with your golden hair. When you have a little more experience you will discriminate between the men you like to have love you and the men there is the smallest chance of your loving. I a.s.sure you, if little Wayne were not in love with you, you would think him a perfectly commonplace boy. If one of your friends were engaged to him, you would be the first to say that you wondered what it was she saw in him. That isn't the way one wants people to feel about one's husband, is it? And as to going to China with him, you know that's impossible, don't you?"

"It would be impossible to let him go without me."

"Really, Mathilde!" said Mrs. Farron, gently, as if she, so willing to play fair, were being put off with fantasies. "I don't understand you,"

she added.

"No, Mama; you don't."

The motor stopped at the door, and they went in silence to Mrs. Farron's room, where for a bitter hour they talked, neither yielding an inch. At last Adelaide sent the girl to bed. Mathilde was aware of profound physical exhaustion, and yet underneath there was a high knowledge of something unbreakable within her.

Left alone, Adelaide turned instinctively toward her husband's door.

There were her strength and vision. Then she remembered, and drew back; but presently, hearing a stir there, she knocked very softly. A nurse appeared on the instant.

"Oh, _please_, Mrs. Farron! Mr. Farron has just got to sleep."

Adelaide stood alone in the middle of the floor. Once again, she thought, in a crisis of her life she had no one to depend on but herself. She lifted her shoulders. No one was to blame, but there the fact was. They urged you to cling and be guided, but when the pinch came, you had to act for yourself. She had learned her lesson now. Henceforward she took her own life over into her own hands.

She reviewed her past dependences. Her youth, with its dependence on her father, particularly in matters of dress. She recalled her early photographs with a shudder. Had she really dressed so badly or was it only the change of fashion? And then her dependence on Joe Severance.

What could be more ridiculous than for a woman of her intelligence to allow herself to be guided in everything by a man like Joe, who had nothing himself but a certain shrewd masculinity? And now Vincent. She was still under the spell of his superiority, but perhaps she would come to judge him too. She had learned much from him. Perhaps she had learned all he had to teach her. Her face looked as if it were carved out of some smooth white stone.

CHAPTER X

After she had gone up-stairs, Mathilde went down again to telephone Pete that she had made her decision. She went boldly snapping electric switches, for her going was a sort of a.s.sertion of her right to independent action. She would have hesitated even less if she had known how welcome her news was, how he had suffered since their parting.

On going home from his interview with her, he found his mother dressing to dine with Mr. Lanley, a party arranged before the unexpected arrival of Mrs. Baxter. The only part of dressing that delayed Mrs. Wayne was her hair, which was so long that the brushing of it took time. In this process she was engaged when her son, in response to her answer, came into her room.

"How is Mr. Farron?" she asked at once, and he, rather touched at the genuineness of her interest, answered her in detail before her next exclamation betrayed that it was entirely for the employer of Marty Burke that she was solicitous. "Isn't it too bad he was taken ill just now?" she said.

The bitterness and doubt from which Wayne was suffering were not emotions that disposed him to confidence. He did not want to tell his mother what he was going through, for the obvious and perhaps unworthy reason that it was just what she would have expected him to go through. At the same time a real deceit was involved in concealing it, and so, tipping his chair back against her wall, he said:

"The firm has asked me to go to China for them."

His mother turned, her whole face lit up with interest.

"To China! How interesting!" she said. "China is a wonderful country. How I should like to go to China!"

"Come along. I don't start for two weeks."

She shook her head.

"No, if you go, I'll make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr.

Platerbridge's; and if I can learn the trick, I will open one here."

The idea crossed Wayne's mind that perhaps he had not the power of inspiring affection.

"You don't miss people a bit, do you, Mother?" he said.

"Yes, Pete, I do; only there is so much to be done. What does Mathilde say to you going off like this? How long will you be gone?"

"More than a year."

"Pete, how awful for her!"

"There is nothing to prevent her going with me."

"You couldn't take that child to China."

"You may be glad to know that she is cordially of your opinion."

The feeling behind his tone at last attracted his mother's full attention.

"But, my dear boy," she said gently, "she has never been anywhere in her life without a maid. She probably doesn't know how to do her hair or mend her clothes or anything practical."

"Mother dear, you are not so awfully practical yourself," he answered; "but you would have gone."

Mrs. Wayne looked impish.

"I always loved that sort of thing," she said; and then, becoming more maternal, she added, "and that doesn't mean it would be sensible because I'd do it."