Part 42 (1/2)

CHAPTER XXII

On landing from the _Venezuela_, Bob drove out to Collingham Lodge. He knew that by this time the family were in the Adirondacks, and that with Gull and his wife to look after him he should have the place to himself.

Now that he was known to be married he had first thought it possible to bring Jennie there, but had decided that the big empty house might frighten her with its loneliness. A hotel in New York was what she would probably prefer; and with all he had to do for Teddy, it would doubtless be most convenient for himself. He went to his old home, therefore, only as to a base from which to make further arrangements. Having unpacked a few things and eaten a snack of lunch, he would go to see his wife at once.

Though he had not expected to hear from her on landing, and still less to see her at the dock, he was faintly disappointed to receive neither of these forms of greeting. He reminded himself that not her coldness, but her inexperience, would account for this, and so made the more of his antic.i.p.ations for the afternoon. She had written to him while he was away, short, noncommittal letters, betraying a mind unused to correspondence rather than a heart opposed to it. Lack of habit, he told himself, would for a long time to come make her seem unresponsive when she would only be hesitating and observant.

It was the hot season at Marillo, and those houses which were not closed were somnolent. At Collingham Lodge, Max, with his madly joyful demonstrations, was the only expression of life. Within the house, the shades were down, the furniture befrocked. Nevertheless, it was home, and all the more home after the alien pageantry of the tropics and the south. Having bathed and changed his clothes, he found pleasure in roaming from one dim airless room to another, as if he had been absent for a year.

It was a greater pleasure for the reason that, ever since receiving his father's amazing cablegram, the vague antagonism he had felt for two or three years toward his parents had given place to affection and grat.i.tude. They had seemingly come round after all to acknowledging his right to be himself. The concession gave him a sense of loving them, of loving the things that belonged to them. He strolled into their rooms, looking about on the objects they used, as though in this way he got some contact with their personalities.

As yet, Jennie's family hardly entered the sphere of his conceptions. He knew she had a mother and sisters; he had seen and spoken to Teddy at the bank. But even the knowledge that the boy was in jail for killing a man didn't bring him or them near to him as realities. While there were things he should do for the boy, they would not be done for him, but for Jennie. What concerned her naturally concerned her husband; but otherwise his father and mother came first. For this new generosity on their part, for this opening of the arms, his heart glowed toward them, making them sensibly his own.

He was thinking of this as he stood in his mother's room, gazing round on the chintzy comfort he had all his life regarded with some awe. Not since he had been a little boy had he felt so warmly toward her as now.

A note from her at Quarantine had a.s.sured him, as she had a.s.sured him before he went to South America, that she was his mother and that in all trials he could count on her. Counting on her, he could count on everything, for however difficult his father might prove, she could manage him in the end. It made everything easier for him and for Jennie, turning an anxious outlook on life into a splendid hopefulness.

He was leaving the room to go and see if Mrs. Gull had cooked a chop for him when he noticed, propped against the wall and near the door by which he had come in, what looked like a picture carelessly covered with a crimson cloth. His mother had long talked of having her portrait done; he wondered if it could be that. He put his hand on it, and felt the frame. It was a picture, and, if a picture, undoubtedly the portrait.

”Let's see what the old lady looks like,” were the words that pa.s.sed through his mind.

With a twitch the cloth was off, and he sprang back. The start was one of surprise. Looking for no more than the exquisite conventionality he knew so well, this vital nudity caught his breath and made his heart leap. It was as if he had actually come on some living pagan loveliness seated in one of the empty rooms. Tannhauser first beholding the G.o.ddess in the secrecy of the Venusberg must have felt something like this amazed tumult of the senses.

Turning from the great bay window in which he had hastily pulled up the shades, his excitement had consciously in it a presentiment of evil. She was so alive, and so much there on purpose!

Then a horror stole over him, like a chill that struck his bones. He crept forward, with a stricken, fascinated stare. _It couldn't be_, he was saying to himself; and yet-and yet-_it was_.

The bearings of this conviction didn't come to him all at once. The fact was as much as he could deal with. She had sat and been painted like this! His impressions were as poignant and confused as if he had seen her struck dead. He couldn't account for it. He couldn't explain the presence of the thing here in his mother's room.

On the lower bar of the frame he saw an inscription plate, getting down on all fours to read it-”Life and Death: by Hubert Wray.”

So Hubert had done it; Hubert had seen her in this flinging-off of mystery. Of course!

His thought flashed back to the day when he had first made her acquaintance. Leaning a little forward, she was sitting in this very Byzantine chair, on this very dais, wearing a flowered dress, a flower-wreathed Leghorn hat in her lap. Wray, in a painting smock, was standing with the palette and brushes in his hand, making a sketch of her more or less on the lines of a Reynolds or a Gainsborough. He had dropped him a line telling him he had taken a studio and inviting him to look him up. He hadn't looked him up till a week or two had gone by; but, having once seen this girl, he did so soon again.

Of him she had taken little or no notice. When, later, he forced himself on her attention, she made his approaches difficult. When he asked her to marry him she had at first laughed him off, and then refused him in so many words. But as she generally based her refusal, unconsciously, perhaps, on the social differences between them, he wouldn't take her ”No” for an answer. If he could ignore the social differences, it seemed to him that she could, while the advantages to her in marrying a Collingham were evident.

”And all the while this is what the trouble was.”

What he meant by _this_ was more than the picture, ”Life and Death,”

though how much more he made no attempt to measure. The truth that now emerged for him out of his memory of the winter months was that Wray loved Jennie, that Jennie loved Wray, and that he had been a blind fool never to have seen it. He threw himself on his mother's couch, burying his face in the cus.h.i.+ons.

As much as from anything else he suffered from the breakdown of his convictions. He had been so glib on the subject of his instinct. Love could make mistakes, he had said to Edith, but instinct couldn't. He had been the other half of Jennie; Jennie had been the other half of him.

She couldn't be unfaithful to him, because he knew she couldn't. His love was protecting her like a magic cloak, while she was.... The awful shame of a man whose foolish stammerings of pa.s.sion are held up to public ridicule seemed to kill the heart in his body.

And yet, when he staggered to his feet and strode toward the obsessing thing to pull the cloth over it again, he started back once more. The woman with the skull had changed. She was a coa.r.s.e creature now, common and sensual. Amazement pinned him to the spot, his hands raised as if at sight of an apparition. Then slowly, insensibly, weirdly, Jennie came back again, though not quite the Jennie he had seen at first. This Jennie retained the traits of the second woman-a Jennie coa.r.s.ened, common, and sensual, in spite of being exquisite, too.

He walked in and out of the other rooms on the floor, so as to clear his mind of the suggestion. When he came back, he saw the second woman, and the second woman only; but having moved into a new light, he found Jennie there as before. It was like sorcery. Whether the thing had a baleful life, or whether his perceptions were growing crazed, he couldn't tell.

Neither could he tell what he was to do with regard to the plans he had been making. A hotel in New York _now_....