Together Part 20

"Oh, you must cancel that stock agreement. I shouldn't want to own it now that I have quit. The other things, the money, I shall keep. You would like me to have it, father, and it will be quite enough."

The old man made a gesture as if to wave aside the money matter.

"Good-by, father!" he said slowly, tenderly.

"You'll see your mother?"

"Yes--I'm going there now."

Thus father and son parted.

Nothing, it seemed to Vickers, after this painful half hour, could be as miserable as what he had been through, and as a matter of fact his interview with his mother was comparatively easy.

To Mrs. Price her son's determination was merely an unexpected outburst of wild folly, such as happened in other families,--coming rather late in Vick's life, but by no means irremediable. Vickers had fallen into the hands of a designing woman, who intended to capture a rich man's son. Her first thought was that the Colonel would have to buy Mrs. Conry off, as Mr.

Stewart had done in a similar accident that befell Ted Stewart, and when Vickers finally made it plain to her that his was not that kind of case, she fell to berating him for the scandal he would create by "trapesing off to Europe with a singer." Oddly enough that delicate modesty, like a woman's, which had made it almost impossible for the Colonel to mention the affair, did not seem to trouble her. To live with another man's wife was in the Colonel's eyes a sin little short of incest, and more shocking than many kinds of murder. But his wife, with a deeper comprehension of the powers of her s.e.x, of the appeal of woman to man, saw in it merely a weakness that threatened to become a family disgrace. When she found after an hour's talk that her arguments made no impression, while Vickers sat, hara.s.sed and silent, his head resting on his hands, she burst into tears.

"It's just like those things you read of in the papers," she sobbed, "those queer Pittsburg people, who are always doing some nasty thing, and no decent folks will a.s.sociate with them."

"It's not the thing you do, mother; it's the way you do it, the purpose, the feeling," the young man protested. "And there won't be a scandal, if that's what's troubling you. You can tell your friends that I have gone abroad suddenly for my health."

"Who would believe that? Do you think her husband's going to keep quiet?"

Mrs. Price sniffled, with considerable worldly wisdom.

"Well, let them believe what they like. They'll forget me in a week."

"Where are you going?"

"To Europe, somewhere,--I haven't thought about the place. I'll let you know."

"And how about her child?"

"We shall take her with us."

"She wants her along, does she?"

"Of course!"

Vickers rose impatiently.

"Good-by, mother."

She let him kiss her.

"I shall come to see you sometimes, if you want me to."

"Oh, you'll be coming back fast enough," she retorted quickly.

And then she straightened the sofa pillows where he had been sitting and picked up a book she had been reading. As Vickers went to his room to get a bag, Isabelle opened the door of her mother's room, where she had been waiting for him. She put her arms about his neck, as she had that night of her marriage on the station platform at Grafton, and pressed him tightly to her.

"Vick! Vick!" she cried. "That it had to be like this, your love! Like this!"

"It had to be, Belle," he answered with a smile. "It comes to us in different ways, old girl."

"But you! You!" She led him by the hand to the sofa, where she threw herself, a white exhausted look coming into her face. He stroked her hair with the ends of his fingers. Suddenly she half turned, grasping his hand with both of hers.

"Can you be happy--really happy?"

"I think so; but even that makes no difference, perhaps. I should do it all the same, if I knew it meant no happiness for me."

She looked at him searchingly, trying to read his heart in his eyes. After the year of her marriage, knowing now the mystery of human relations, she wondered whether he might not be right. That precious something, pain or joy, which was wanting in her union he might find in this forbidden by-path, in this woman who seemed to her so immeasurably beneath her brother. She kissed him, and he went away.

When the hall door clicked, she rose from the lounge and dragged herself to the window to watch him, holding her breath, her heart beating rapidly, almost glad that he was strong enough to take his fate in his hands, to test life, to break the rules, to defy reason! "Vick, dear Vick," she murmured.

In the room below Mrs. Price, also, was looking out of the bay window, watching her son disappear down the avenue. She had not been reading, and she had heard him come down into the hall, but let him go without another word. He walked slowly, erect as the Colonel used to walk. Tears dropped from her eyes,--tears of mortification. For in her heart she knew that he would come back some day, this woman who had lured him having fallen from him like a dead leaf. She sat on at the window until the Colonel's figure appeared in the distance coming up the avenue. His head was bent; he looked neither to the right nor to the left; and he walked very slowly, like an old man, dragging his feet after him. He was crushed. It would not have been thus if he had lost his fortune, the work of all his years. Such a fate he would have looked in the eye, with raised head....

That night Vickers and Stacia Conry left for New York, and a few days later Mrs. Price read their names in a list of outgoing pa.s.sengers for Genoa. She did not show the list to the Colonel, and their son's name was never mentioned in the house.

When the people who knew the Prices intimately began to whisper, then chatter, they said many hard things of Vickers, chiefly that he was a Fool, a judgment that could not be gainsaid. Nevertheless the heart of a Fool may be pure.

CHAPTER XVIII

Isabelle did not regain her strength after the birth of her child. She lay nerveless and white, so that her husband, her mother, the Colonel, all became alarmed. The celebrated accoucheur who had attended her alarmed them still more.

"Something's wrong,--she couldn't stand the strain. Oh, it's another case of American woman,--too finely organized for the plain animal duties. A lot of my women patients are the same way. They take child-bearing hard,--d.a.m.ned hard.... What's the matter with them? I don't know!" he concluded irritably. "She must just go slow until she gets back her strength."

She went "slow," but Nature refused to a.s.sert itself, to proclaim the will to live. For months the days crept by with hardly a sign of change in her condition, and then began the period of doctors. The family physician, who had a reputation for diagnosis, p.r.o.nounced her case "anaemia and nervous debility." "She must be built up,--baths, ma.s.sage, distraction." Of course she was not to nurse her child, and the little girl was handed over to a trained nurse. Then this doctor called in another, a specialist in nerves, who listened to all that the others said, tapped her here and there, and wished the opinion of an obstetrical surgeon. After his examination there was a discussion of the advisability of "surgical interference," and the conclusion "to wait."

"It may be a long time--years--before Mrs. Lane fully recovers her tone,"

the nerve specialist told the husband. "We must have patience. It would be a good thing to take her to Europe for a change."

This was the invariable suggestion that he made to his wealthy patients when he saw no immediate results from his treatment. It could do no harm, Europe, and most of his patients liked the prescription. They returned, to be sure, in many cases in about the same condition as when they left, or merely rested temporarily,--but of course that was the fault of the patient.

When Lane objected that it would be almost impossible for him to leave his duties for a trip abroad and that he did not like to have his wife go without him, the specialist advised California:--

"A mild climate where she can be out-of-doors and relaxed."

Isabelle went to California with her mother, the trained nurse, and the child. But instead of the "mild climate," Pasadena happened to be raw and rainy. She disliked the hotel, and the hosts of idle, overdressed, and vulgar women. So her mother brought her back, as we have seen, and then there was talk of the Virginia Springs, "an excellent spring climate."

A new doctor was called in, who had his own peculiar regime of sprays and baths, of subcutaneous medicine, and then a third nerve specialist, who said, "We must find the right key," and looked as if he might have it in his office.

"The right key?"

"Her combination, the secret of her vitality. We must find it for her,--distraction, a system of physical exercises, perhaps. But we must occupy the mind. Those Christian Scientists have an idea, you know,--not that I recommend their tomfoolery; but we must accomplish their results by scientific means." And he went away highly satisfied with his liberality of view....