The Lovely Lady Part 6

"Oh," said Peter, "wasn't it sudden?"

"Sort of. She'd been considerin' of it for some time, and last night she made up her mind. But I did think," said Mrs. Blodgett, "that she'd have said good-bye to _you_." And not eliciting anything by way of a reply, she added: "Miss Havens is a nice girl. I hate to think of her slavin'

her life out in an office. She'd ought to get married."

"A girl has ever so many more chances in her home town," Peter offered hopefully.

"Yes, I suppose so." Mrs. Blodgett sighed. "Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Weatheral?"

"Nothing, thank you." He was lingering still on the landing on Mrs.

Blodgett's account, but he found his finger slipping between the leaves of the volume he had brought from the library.

"Ah," she warned him, "readin' is an improvin' occupation, but there's a book we hadn't any of us ought to miss, and that's the Book of Life, Mr.

Weatheral." And somehow with that ringing in his ears, Peter spent several minutes walking up and down in his room before he could settle to his book again.

II

It was a week or ten days after Miss Havens left, before Peter went down to Bloombury for his midsummer vacation, a week in which he had the greatest difficulty in getting back to the House of the Shining Walls.

He set out for it almost immediately with a feeling akin to the release with which one returns to daily habit after the departure of an unexpected guest. But his thought would no sooner strike into the accustomed paths than Miss Minnie Havens would meet him there unaccountably, to begin again those long intimate conversations which led toward and about the House, but never quite to it. Peter found himself looking out for those meetings with some notion of dodging them, and yet once they were fairly off, he owned them a great relief from Blodgett's. Now that it was withdrawn, he realized in the girl's bright companionship the effect of the rose-red glow of the shade that Aggie drew down over the front parlour lamp on the evenings when the Gentlemen's Outfitter called. It had prevented his seeing until now, that the chief difference between himself and his fellow boarders, was that for most of them, this was a place where they had come to stay.

Having let Miss Havens go on alone to the place she was bound for, he had moments of dreadful sinking, as it occurred to him to wonder if he hadn't made a mistake in the nature of his own destination. Suppose, after all, he should find himself castaway in some oasis of determined sprightliness with Wally Whitaker in whose pocket pretenses of tips and margins he began to discern a poorer sort of subst.i.tute for the House.

He was as much bored by the permanently young shoe-salesman after this discovery as before it, but obliged to set a watch on himself lest in a moment of finding himself too much in the same case, he should make the mistake of inviting Wally to Bloombury for his vacation.

He was relieved, when at last he had got away without it, to be saved from such a misadventure, for he found his mother not standing the heat well, and Ellen anxious. He had never definitely shaped to himself the idea that there could anything happen to his mother; she was as much a part of his life as the aging apple trees and the hills that climbed, with low, gnarled pines to the sky's edge beyond the marshes, a point from which to take distance and direction. He began to note now the graying hair, the shrunken breast and the worn hands, so blue veined for all their brownness, and he could not sleep of nights because of the sweat that was on his soul, for fear of what might come to her. He would lie in the little room under the roof and hear the elms moving like the riffle of silence into sound, thinking of his mother until at last he would be obliged to rise and move softly about the place, as if by the mere a.s.sertion of himself he could make her safer in it. He wished nothing so much as not to disturb her, but she must have been lying awake often herself, for the second or third time this happened, she called to him. He came, half dressed as he was and drew the covers up close about her shoulders, and was exceedingly gay and tender with her.

"There's nothing troubling you, son?"

"Nothing--except to be sure there's nothing troubling _you_."

She gave a little, low laugh like a girl.

"That's so like your father. I remember he would get up in the night when you were little, and go prowling about ... he used to say he was afraid the roof tree would fall in and kill you. And yet here you are...." She reached out to give him a little pat, as if somehow to rea.s.sure him. The low dropping moon made a square block of light on the uncarpeted floor; outside, the orchard waited for the dawn, and the fields brimmed life up to their very doors.

"You're like him in other ways," she went on. "Somehow it's brought him back wonderfully the last two or three days, and especially at night when I'd hear you creaking down the stair. There's a board there which always does creak, and I'd hear you trying to remember which it was, the same as _he_ used to----"

"I haven't meant to keep you awake, mother."

"I've been awake. When you're getting along like, you don't sleep much, Peter. Sleep is for dreaming, some of it, and the old don't dream."

"You're not to go calling yourself old, mother!"

"And me with a son going twenty-three! We weren't so young either when we were married, your father and I ... but I want you should sleep, Peter, and dream when you can. You have pleasant dreams, son?"

"Any amount of them." He was going off into one of those bright fantasies of what he should do when he was rich as he meant to be, with which he had so often beguiled Ellen's pain, but she kissed him and sent him to bed again lest Ellen should hear them.

It was not more than a day or two after that the minister's wife caught young Mr. Weatheral walking with his mother in the back pasture with his arm about her, and was slightly shocked by it, for though it was thought highly commendable in him to have paid off the mortgage and managed a silk dress for her and Ellen besides, Bloombury was not habituated to a lively expression of family affection. Peter had consented to gather the huckleberries which Ellen insisted were of a superior flavour in the back pasture, on the sole condition that his mother should come with him, and the minister's wife had just stepped aside on her way to the Tillinghurst's to gather the southerwood which grew there, for the minister's winter cough, when she caught sight of them.

"She couldn't have stared more if she'd caught me with a girl." Peter protested.

"It's only that she'd have thought it more likely," his mother extenuated. "I hope you aren't going to be a girl-hater, Peter. I want you should marry some time, and if I haven't seemed anxious about it before now, you mustn't think it's because I want to keep you for Ellen and me. What I don't want is that you should take to it just _because_ there's a girl. Not but what that's natural, but there's more to it than that, Peter. For you," she supplemented. She sat down on a gray, round stone while Peter stripped the bushes at her feet, and watched to see if his colour rose while she talked, or his gaze failed to meet hers at any point.

"I'd have liked to have Ellen marry," said Ellen's mother, "she's that kind. Having a man of her own, most any kind of a man so as he would be good to her, would mean such a lot. If Ellen can have a little of what everybody's having, she's satisfied. But there are some who can get a great deal more out of it than that ... and if they don't the rest of it is a drag and a weariness." He left off stripping the bushes and turned contentedly against her knees.

"You're my home, Mumsey."

"And not even," she gently insisted, "when I'm not here to make it for you. There's a kind of life goes with loving; it's like--like the lovely inside colour of a sh.e.l.l, and somehow, this winter I've wondered if you'd got to the place where you knew what that would be like if you should find it." She turned his face up to her with a tender anxiety and yet with a little timidity; they did not talk much of such things in Bloombury.

"I know, mother."

"Yes...." after a long look, "you would; you're so like your father. But if you know, you mustn't ever be led by dullness or loneliness into anything less, Peter. Not that I'm afraid you'll be led into anything wrong ... but there are things that are almost more wrong than downright wickedness....

"I've been thinking a great deal lately about when I was your age, and there didn't seem anything for me but to marry one of the neighbour's boys that I'd known always, or a long plain piece of school teaching. It wasn't easy with everybody egging me on--but I stuck it out, and at the last along came your father ... I'd like you to have something like that, Peter,--and your son coming to you the way you came to me, like it was through a cloud of glory...." He looked up presently on her silence, silver tipped now with the hope of renewal, and he saw her as a man sometimes when he is young and clean, sees his mother, the Sacred Door ... and he did not observe at all that her hands were berry stained and the nails broken, nor that her cheek had fallen in and her hair gray and wispy. But being a young man and never good at talking, it made no difference with him except that as they walked home across the pastures he was more than ever careful of her and teased her more whimsically.

He forgot, after he had settled in his room again at Blodgett's, that Miss Minnie Havens had ever walked with him in the purlieus of the House, for he was quite taken up with a new set of rooms he had thrown out from it for his mother. She was always there with him now until the day of her death and long after, made a part of all his dreaming by the touch with which she had limned in herself for him, the feature of all Lovely Ladies.

He would write her long letters into which crept much that had been uttered only in the House, which that winter became an estate in Florida, moved there because of Mrs. Weatheral's need of mild climate.

They went abroad after the Christmas Holidays in which she had coughed more than usual and consented to have her breakfast brought up to bed, setting out every evening from Peter's reading-lamp and arriving very shortly at Italian Cathedrals and old Roman seaport towns that smelled of history.

Dreaming of lovely ladies who have no face or form other than they borrow from the pa.s.sing incident is a very pleasant way of pa.s.sing the time, and does not necessarily lead to anything; but when a man goes about afraid lest his mother should die for lack of something he might have got for her, he dreams closer at home. More than ever since the revelation of his mother's frailness, Peter dreamed of being rich, and since there was nothing nearer to him than the way Siegel Brothers had managed it, he devoted so much time to the scrutiny of their methods that he pa.s.sed in a very short time from being head of the delivery department to the right hand of Mr. Croker. Even Blinders could not recall, in the three years he had been bundle boy, so marked an example of favouritism.

"They don't make partners any more out of underlings," Croker let him know confidentially. "What do you think you're headed for?" Peter explained himself.

"I wanted to find out how they did it."

"And when you find out," Croker wagged at him, "you won't be able to do anything with it. You have to have capital. Look at the time I've been with them!"

"How long is that?" Peter was interested.

"Twenty years." Croker told him.

"In twenty years," Peter was confident, "a man ought to be able to find some capital." After that he began to observe Mr. Croker.

It is probable at this time that if he had not been concerned for his mother's health, he might have grown as dry and uninteresting as at Blodgett's they began to think him.

He was a thin young man with hair of no particular colour, and eyes that were good and rather shy about women. He went out very little and had not, Miss Thatcher who sat opposite him was sure, a mind above his business. Aggie had married her Outfitter, and J. Wilkinson Cohn, who had become a full partner in his brother's cigar stand, had moved out to Fifty-fourth Street, so that there was n.o.body who could have contradicted her. But lying awake planning how he might piece out life for his mother with comforts, and hearing in every knock the precursor of what might have happened to her, his heart was exercised as it is good for the heart to be even with pain and anxiety. And beyond the heart stretching there was always the House. He could seldom get away to it in his waking hours, but he knew it was there for him, and visiting it in dreams he kept in spite of the anxiety and Mr. Croker, his young resiliency. Along in December, about two weeks before his midwinter holiday, Ellen sent for him.

"It's not as if there hadn't been time for everything. You must think of that, Peter. And your being able to come down every Sat.u.r.day since the first stroke. There's plenty that are hurried away without a good-bye or anything."

"I know, Ellen."

"And it isn't as if there hadn't been plenty to say, either. Six weeks would have been too long for anybody less loving than mother. They wouldn't have known how to go through your life and say just the things you'll be glad to remember when the time comes for them. You've got to keep your mind on those things, Peter."

"Yes, Ellen."

The front room had been well rid up after the funeral and everybody at Ellen's earnest entreaty had left them quite alone. Although there was fire in the base burner, they were sitting together by the kitchen stove, the front of which was thrown open for the sake of the warm glow of the coals. By and by the kettle began to sing and the bare tips of the lilac scratched on the pane like a live thing waiting to be let in.

The little familiar sounds refilled for them the empty room.