The Happiest Time of Their Lives Part 6

"Every woman does."

Mathilde shook her head.

"It's just Pete as he is that I love. I don't care which of us leads."

"But you will."

The girl had not yet reached a point where she could describe the very essence of her pa.s.sion; she had to let this go. After a moment she said:

"I see now why you chose Mr. Farron."

"You mean you have never seen before?"

"Not so clearly."

Mrs. Farron bit her lips. To have missed understanding this seemed a sufficient proof of immaturity. She rose.

"Well, my darling," she said in a tone of extreme reasonableness, "we shall decide nothing to-night. I know nothing against Mr. Wayne. He may be just the right person. We must see more of him. Do you know anything about his family?"

Mathilde shook her head. "He lives alone with his mother. His father is dead. She's very good and interested in drunkards."

"In _drunkards_?" Mrs. Farron just shut her eyes a second.

"She has a mission that reforms them."

"Is that his profession, too?"

"Oh, no. He's in Wall Street--quite a good firm. O Mama, don't sigh like that! We know we can't be married at once. We are reasonable. You think not, because this has all happened so suddenly; but great things do happen suddenly. We love each other. That's all I wanted to tell you."

"Love!" Adelaide looked at the little person before her, tried to recall the fading image of the young man, and then thought of the dominating figure in her own life. "My dear, you have no idea what love is."

She took no notice of the queer, steady look the girl gave her in return.

She went down-stairs. She had been gone more than an hour, and she knew that Vincent would have been long since asleep. He had, and prided himself on having, a great capacity for sleep. She tiptoed past his door, stole into her own room, and then, glancing in the direction of his, was startled to see that a light was burning. She went in; he was reading, and once again, as his eyes turned toward her, she thought she saw the same tragic appeal that she had felt that afternoon in his kiss.

Trembling, she threw herself down beside him, clasping him to her.

"O Vincent! oh, my dear!" she whispered, and began to cry. He did not ask her why she was crying; she wished that he would; his silence admitted that he knew of some adequate reason.

"I feel that there is something wrong," she sobbed, "something terribly wrong."

"Nothing could go wrong between you and me, my darling," he answered. His tone comforted, his touch was a comfort. Perhaps she was a coward, she said to herself, but she questioned him no further.

CHAPTER IV

Wayne was not so prompt as Mathilde in making the announcement of their engagement. He and his mother breakfasted together rather hastily, for she was going to court that morning to testify in favor of one of her backsliding inebriates, and Wayne had not found the moment to introduce his own affairs.

That afternoon he came home earlier than usual; it was not five o'clock.

He pa.s.sed Dr. Parret's flat on the first floor--Dr. Lily MacComb Parret.

She was a great friend of his, and he felt a decided temptation to go in and tell her the news first; but reflecting that no one ought to hear it before his mother, he went on up-stairs. He lived on the fifth floor.

He opened the door of the flat and went into the sitting-room. It was empty. He lighted the gas, which flared up, squeaking like a bagpipe. The room was square and crowded. Shelves ran all the way round it, tightly filled with books. In the center was a large writing-table, littered with papers, and on each side of the fireplace stood two worn, but comfortable, arm-chairs, each with a reading-lamp at its side. There was nothing beautiful in the furniture, and yet the room had its own charm.

The house was a corner house and had once been a single dwelling. The shape of the room, its woodwork, its doors, its flat, white marble mantelpiece, belonged to an era of simple taste and good workmanship; but the greatest charm of the room was the view from the windows, of which it had four, two that looked east and two south, and gave a glimpse of the East River and its bridges.

Wayne was not sorry his mother was out. He had begun to dread the announcement he had to make. At first he had thought only of her keen interest in his affairs, but later he had come to consider what this particular piece of news would mean to her. Say what you will, he thought, to tell your mother of your engagement is a little like casting off an old love.

Ever since he could remember, he and his mother had lived in the happiest comradeship. His father, a promising young doctor, had died within a few years of his marriage. Pete had been brought up by his mother, but he had very little remembrance of any process of molding. It seemed to him as if they had lived in a sort of partnership since he had been able to walk and talk. It had been as natural for him to spend his hours after school in stamping and sealing her large correspondence as it had been for her to pinch and arrange for years so as to send him to the university from which his father had been graduated. She would have been glad, he knew, if he had decided to follow his father in the study of medicine, but he recoiled from so long a period of dependence; he liked to think that he brought to his financial reports something of a scientific inheritance.

She had, he thought, every virtue that a mother could have, and she combined them with a gaiety of spirit that made her take her virtues as if they were the most delightful amus.e.m.e.nts. It was of this gaiety that he had first thought until Mathilde had pointed out to him that there was tragedy in the situation. "What will your mother do without you?" the girl kept saying. There was indeed nothing in his mother's life that could fill the vacancy he would leave. She had few intimate relationships. For all her devotion to her drunkards, he was the only personal happiness in her life.

He went into the kitchen in search of her. This was evidently one of their servant's uncounted hours. While he was making himself some tea he heard his mother's key in the door. He called to her, and she appeared.

"Why my hat, Mother dear?" he asked gently as he kissed her.

Mrs. Wayne smiled absently, and put up her hand to the soft felt hat she was wearing.

"I just went out to post some letters," she said, as if this were a complete explanation; then she removed a mackintosh that she happened to have on, though the day was fine. She was then seen to be wearing a dark skirt and a neat plain shirt that was open at the throat. Though no longer young, she somehow suggested a boy--a boy rather overtrained; she was far more boyish than Wayne. She had a certain queer beauty, too; not beauty of Adelaide's type, of structure and coloring and elegance, but beauty of expression. Life itself had written some fine lines of humor and resolve upon her face, and her blue-gray eyes seemed actually to flare with hope and intention. Her hair was of that light-brown shade in which plentiful gray made little change of shade; it was wound in a knot at the back of her head and gave her trouble. She was always pushing it up and repinning it into place, as if it were too heavy for her small head.

"I wonder if there's anything to eat in the house," her son said.

"I wonder." They moved together toward the ice-box.

"Mother," said Pete, "that piece of pie has been in the ice-box at least three days. Let's throw it away."

She took the saucer thoughtfully.

"I like it so much," she said.

"Then why don't you eat it?"

"It's not good for me." She let Wayne take the saucer. "What do you know?" she asked.

She had adopted slang as she adopted most labor-saving devices.

"Well, I do know something new," said Wayne. He sat down on the kitchen table and poured out his tea. "New as the garden of Eden. I'm in love."

"O Pete!" his mother cried, and the purest, most conventional maternal agony was in the tone. For an instant, crushed and terrified, she looked at him; and then something gay and impish appeared in her eyes, and she asked with a grin:

"Is it some one perfectly awful?"

"I'm afraid you'll think so. She's a sheltered, young, luxurious child, with birth, breeding, and money, everything you hate most."

"O Pete!" she said again, but this time with a sort of sad resignation.

Then shaking her head as if to say that she wasn't, after all, as narrow as he thought, she hitched her chair nearer the table and said eagerly, "Well, tell me all about it."

Wayne looked down at his mother as she sat opposite him, with her elbows on the table, as keen as a child and as lively as a cricket. He asked himself if he had not drifted into a needlessly sentimental state of mind about her. He even asked himself, as he had done once or twice before in his life, whether her love for him implied the slightest dependence upon his society. Wasn't it perfectly possible that his going would free her life, would make it easier instead of harder? Every man, he knew, felt the element of freedom beneath the despair of breaking even the tenderest of ties. Some women, he supposed, might feel the same way about their love-affairs. But could they feel the same about their maternal relations? Could it be that his mother, that pure, heroic, self-sacrificing soul, was now thinking more about her liberty than her loss? Had not their relation always been peculiarly free? he found himself thinking reproachfully. Once, he remembered, when he had been working unusually hard he had welcomed her absence at one of her conferences on inebriety. Never before had he imagined that she could feel anything but regret at his absences. "Everybody is just alike," he found himself rather bitterly thinking.