She saw that Miss Verney was sincerely interested in Dick’s work: it was the nature of her interest that remained in doubt. As if to solve this doubt, the girl presently reappeared alone on the threshold, and discovering Mrs. Peyton, advanced toward her with a smile.
“Are you tired of hearing us praise Mr. Peyton’s things?” she asked, dropping into a low chair beside her hostess. “Unintelligent admiration must be a bore to people who know, and Mr. Darrow tells me you are almost as learned as your son.”
Mrs. Peyton returned the smile, but evaded the question. “I should be sorry to think your admiration unintelligent,” she said. “I like to feel that my boy’s work is appreciated by people who understand it.”
“Oh, I have the usual smattering,” said Miss Verney carelessly. “I think I know why I admire his work; but then I am sure I see more in it when some one like Mr. Darrow tells me how remarkable it is.”
“Does Mr. Darrow say that?” the mother exclaimed, losing sight of her object in the rush of maternal pleasure.
“He has said nothing else: it seems to be the only subject which loosens his tongue. I believe he is more anxious to have your son win the competition than to win it himself.”
“He is a very good friend,” Mrs. Peyton assented. She was struck by the way in which the girl led the topic back to the special application of it which interested her. She had none of the artifices of prudery.
“He feels sure that Mr. Peyton will win,” Miss Verney continued. “It was very interesting to hear his reasons. He is an extraordinarily interesting man. It must be a tremendous incentive to have such a friend.”
Mrs. Peyton hesitated. “The friendship is delightful; but I don’t know that my son needs the incentive. He is almost too ambitious.”
Miss Verney looked up brightly. “Can one be?” she said. “Ambition is so splendid! It must be so glorious to be a man and go crashing through obstacles, straight up to the thing one is after. I’m afraid I don’t care for people who are superior to success. I like marriage by capture!” She rose with her wandering laugh, and stood flushed and sparkling above Mrs. Peyton, who continued to gaze at her gravely.
“What do you call success?” the latter asked. “It means so many different things.”
“Oh, yes, I know—the inward approval, and all that. Well, I’m afraid I like the other kind: the drums and wreaths and acclamations. If I were Mr. Peyton, for instance, I’d much rather win the competition than—than be as disinterested as Mr. Darrow.”
Mrs. Peyton smiled. “I hope you won’t tell him so,” she said half seriously. “He is over-stimulated already; and he is so easily influenced by any one who—whose opinion he values.”
She stopped abruptly, hearing herself, with a strange inward shock, re-echo the words which another man’s mother had once spoken to her. Miss Verney did not seem to take the allusion to herself, for she continued to fix on Mrs. Peyton a gaze of impartial sympathy.
“But we can’t help being interested!” she declared.
“It’s very kind of you; but I wish you would all help him to feel that his competition is after all of very little account compared with other things—his health and his peace of mind, for instance. He is looking horribly used up.”
The girl glanced over her shoulder at Dick, who was just reentering the room at Darrow’s side.
“Oh, do you think so?” she said. “I should have thought it was his friend who was used up.”
Mrs. Peyton followed the glance with surprise. She had been too preoccupied to notice Darrow, whose crudely modelled face was always of a dull pallour, to which his slow-moving grey eye lent no relief except in rare moments of expansion. Now the face had the fallen lines of a death-mask, in which only the smile he turned on Dick remained alive; and the sight smote her with compunction. Poor Darrow! He did look horribly fagged out: as if he needed care and petting and good food. No one knew exactly how he lived. His rooms, according to Dick’s report, were fireless and ill kept, but he stuck to them because his landlady, whom he had fished out of some financial plight, had difficulty in obtaining other lodgers. He belonged to no clubs, and wandered out alone for his meals, mysteriously refusing the hospitality which his friends pressed on him. It was plain that he was very poor, and Dick conjectured that he sent what he earned to an aunt in his native village; but he was so silent about such matters that, outside of his profession, he seemed to have no personal life.
Miss Verney’s companion having presently advised her of the lapse of time, there ensued a general leave-taking, at the close of which Dick accompanied the ladies to their carriage. Darrow was meanwhile blundering into his greatcoat, a process which always threw him into a state of perspiring embarrassment; but Mrs. Peyton, surprising him in the act, suggested that he should defer it and give her a few moments’ talk.
“Let me make you some fresh tea,” she said, as Darrow blushingly shed the garment, “and when Dick comes back we’ll all walk home together. I’ve not had a chance to say two words to you this winter.”
Darrow sank into a chair at her side and nervously contemplated his boots. “I’ve been tremendously hard at work,” he said.
“I know: too hard at work, I’m afraid. Dick tells me you have been wearing yourself out over your competition plans.”
“Oh, well, I shall have time to rest now,” he returned. “I put the last stroke to them this morning.”
Mrs. Peyton gave him a quick look. “You’re ahead of Dick, then.”
“In point of time only,” he said smiling.
“That is in itself an advantage,” she answered with a tinge of asperity. In spite of an honest effort for impartiality she could not, at the moment, help regarding Darrow as an obstacle in her son’s path.
“I wish the competition were over!” she exclaimed, conscious that her voice had betrayed her. “I hate to see you both looking so fagged.”
Darrow smiled again, perhaps at her studied inclusion of himself.
“Oh, Dick‘s all right,” he said. “He’ll pull himself together in no time.”
He spoke with an emphasis which might have struck her, if her sympathies had not again been deflected by the allusion to her son.
“Not if he doesn’t win,” she exclaimed.
Darrow took the tea she had poured for him, knocking the spoon to the floor in his eagerness to perform the feat gracefully. In bending to recover the spoon he struck the tea-table with his shoulder, and set the cups dancing. Having regained a measure of composure, he took a swallow of the hot tea and set it down with a gasp, precariously near the edge of the tea-table. Mrs. Peyton rescued the cup, and Darrow, apparently forgetting its existence, rose and began to pace the room. It was always hard for him to sit still when he talked.
“You mean he’s so tremendously set on it?” he broke out.
Mrs. Peyton hesitated. “You know him almost as well as I do,” she said. “He’s capable of anything where there is a possibility of success; but I’m always afraid of the reaction.”
“Oh, well, Dick’s a man,” said Darrow bluntly. “Besides, he’s going to succeed.”
“I wish he didn’t feel so sure of it. You mustn’t think I’m afraid for him. He’s a man, and I want him to take his chances with other men; but I wish he didn’t care so much about what people think.”
“People?”
“Miss Verney, then: I suppose you know.”
Darrow paused in front of her. “Yes: he’s talked a good deal about her. You think she wants him to succeed?”
“At any price!”
He drew his brows together. “What do you call any price?”
“Well—herself, in this case, I believe.”
Darrow bent a puzzled stare on her. “You mean she attached that amount of importance to this competition?”
“She seems to regard it as symbolical: that’s what I gather. And I’m afraid she’s given him the same impression.”
Darrow’s sunken face was suffused by his rare smile. “Oh,
well, he’ll pull it off then!” he said.
Mrs. Peyton rose with a distracted sigh. “I half hope he won’t, for such a motive,” she exclaimed.
“The motive won’t show in his work,” said Darrow. He added, after a pause probably devoted to the search for the right word: “He seems to think a great deal of her.”
Mrs. Peyton fixed him thoughtfully. “I wish I knew what you think of her.”
“Why, I never saw her before.”
“No; but you talked with her to-day. You’ve formed an opinion: I think you came here on purpose.”
He chuckled joyously at her discernment: she had always seemed to him gifted with supernatural insight. “Well, I did want to see her,” he owned.
“And what do you think?”
He took a few vague steps and then halted before Mrs. Peyton. “I think,” he said, smiling, “that she likes to be helped first, and to have everything on her plate at once.” III
At dinner, with a rush of contrition, Mrs. Peyton remembered that she had after all not spoken to Darrow about his health. He had distracted her by beginning to talk of Dick; and besides, much as Darrow’s opinions interested her, his personality had never fixed her attention. He always seemed to her simply a vehicle for the transmission of ideas.
It was Dick who recalled her to a sense of her omission by asking if she hadn’t thought that old Paul looked rather more ragged than usual.
“He did look tired,” Mrs. Peyton conceded. “I meant to tell him to take care of himself.”
Dick laughed at the futility of the measure. “Old Paul is never tired: he can work twenty-five hours out of the twenty-four. The trouble with him is that he’s ill. Something wrong with the machinery, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Has he seen a doctor?”
“He wouldn’t listen to me when I suggested it the other day; but he’s so deuced mysterious that I don’t know what he may have done since.” Dick rose, putting down his coffee-cup and half-smoked cigarette. “I’ve half a mind to pop in on him tonight and see how he’s getting on.”
“But he lives at the other end of the earth; and you’re tired yourself.”
“I’m not tired; only a little strung-up,” he returned, smiling. “And besides, I’m going to meet Gill at the office by and by and put in a night’s work. It won’t hurt me to take a look at Paul first.”
Mrs. Peyton was silent. She knew it was useless to contend with her son about his work, and she tried to fortify herself with the remembrance of her own words to Darrow: Dick was a man and must take his chance with other men.
But Dick, glancing at his watch, uttered an exclamation of annoyance. “Oh, by Jove, I shan’t have time after all. Gill is waiting for me now; we must have dawdled over dinner.” He went to give his mother a caressing tap on the cheek. “Now don’t worry,” he adjured her; and as she smiled back at him he added with a sudden happy blush: “She doesn’t, you know: she’s so sure of me.”
Mrs. Peyton’s smile faded, and laying a detaining hand on his, she said with sudden directness: “Sure of you, or of your success?”
He hesitated. “Oh, she regards them as synonymous. She thinks I’m bound to get on.”
“But if you don’t?”
He shrugged laughingly, but with a slight contraction of his confident brows. “Why, I shall have to make way for some one else, I suppose. That’s the law of life.”
Mrs. Peyton sat upright, gazing at him with a kind of solemnity. “Is it the law of love?” she asked.
He looked down on her with a smile that trembled a little. “My dear romantic mother, I don’t want her pity, you know!”
Dick, coming home the next morning shortly before daylight, left the house again after a hurried breakfast, and Mrs. Peyton heard nothing of him till nightfall. He had promised to be back for dinner, but a few moments before eight, as she was coming down to the drawing-room, the parlour-maid handed her a hastily pencilled note.
“Don’t wait for me,” it ran. “Darrow is ill and I can’t leave him. I’ll send a line when the doctor has seen him.”
Mrs. Peyton, who was a woman of rapid reactions, read the words with a pang. She was ashamed of the jealous thoughts she had harboured of Darrow, and of the selfishness which had made her lose sight of his troubles in the consideration of Dick’s welfare. Even Clemence Verney, whom she secretly accused of a want of heart, had been struck by Darrow’s ill looks, while she had had eyes only for her son. Poor Darrow! How cold and self-engrossed he must have thought her! In the first rush of penitence her impulse was to drive at once to his lodgings; but the infection of his own shyness restrained her. Dick’s note gave no details; the illness was evidently grave, but might not Darrow regard her coming as an intrusion? To repair her negligence of yesterday by a sudden invasion of his privacy might be only a greater failure in tact; and after a moment of deliberation she resolved on sending to ask Dick if he wished her to go to him.
The reply, which came late, was what she had expected. “No, we have all the help we need. The doctor has sent a good nurse, and is coming again later. It’s pneumonia, but of course he doesn’t say much yet. Let me have some beef-juice as soon as the cook can make it.”
The beef-juice ordered and dispatched, she was left to a vigil in melancholy contrast to that of the previous evening. Then she had been enclosed in the narrow limits of her maternal interests; now the barriers of self were broken down, and her personal preoccupations swept away on the current of a wider sympathy. As she sat there in the radius of lamp-light which, for so many evenings, had held Dick and herself in a charmed circle of tenderness, she saw that her love for her boy had come to be merely a kind of extended egotism. Love had narrowed instead of widening her, had rebuilt between herself and life the very walls which, years and years before, she had laid low with bleeding fingers. It was horrible, how she had come to sacrifice everything to the one passion of ambition for her boy….
At daylight she sent another messenger, one of her own servants, who returned without having seen Dick. Mr. Peyton had sent word that there was no change. He would write later; he wanted nothing. The day wore on drearily. Once Kate found herself computing the precious hours lost to Dick’s unfinished task. She blushed at her ineradicable selfishness, and tried to turn her mind to poor Darrow. But she could not master her impulses; and now she caught herself indulging the thought that his illness would at least exclude him from the competition. But no—she remembered that he had said his work was finished. Come what might, he stood in the path of her boy’s success. She hated herself for the thought, but it would not down.
Evening drew on, but there was no note from Dick. At length, in the shamed reaction from her fears, she rang for a carriage and went upstairs to dress. She could stand aloof no longer: she must go to Darrow, if only to escape from her wicked thoughts of him. As she came down again she heard Dick’s key in the door. She hastened her steps, and as she reached the hall he stood before her without speaking.
She looked at him and the question died on her lips. He nodded, and walked slowly past her.
“There was no hope from the first,” he said.
The next day Dick was taken up with the preparations for the funeral. The distant aunt, who appeared to be Darrow’s only relation, had been duly notified of his death; but no answer having been received from her, it was left to his friend to fulfil the customary duties. He was again absent for the best part of the day; and when he returned at dusk Mrs. Peyton, looking up from the tea-table behind which she awaited him, was startled by the deep-lined misery of his face.
Her own thoughts were too painful for ready expression, and they sat for a while in a mute community of wretchedness.
“Is everything arranged?” she asked at length.
“Yes. Everything.”
“And you have not heard from the aunt?”
He shook his head.
“Can you find no trace of any other relations?”
“None. I went over all his paper
s. There were very few, and I found no address but the aunt’s.” He sat thrown back in his chair, disregarding the cup of tea she had mechanically poured for him. “I found this, though,” he added, after a pause, drawing a letter from his pocket and holding it out to her.
She took it doubtfully. “Ought I to read it?”
“Yes.”
She saw then that the envelope, in Darrow’s hand, was addressed to her son. Within were a few pencilled words, dated on the first day of his illness, the morrow of the day on which she had last seen him.
“Dear Dick,” she read, “I want you to use my plans for the museum if you can get any good out of them. Even if I pull out of this I want you to. I shall have other chances, and I have an idea this one means a lot to you.”
Mrs. Peyton sat speechless, gazing at the date of the letter, which she had instantly connected with her last talk with Darrow. She saw that he had understood her, and the thought scorched her to the soul.
“Wasn’t it glorious of him?” Dick said.
She dropped the letter, and hid her face in her hands.
IV
The funeral took place the next morning, and on the return from the cemetery Dick told his mother that he must go and look over things at Darrow’s office. He had heard the day before from his friend’s aunt, a helpless person to whom telegraphy was difficult and travel inconceivable, and who, in eight pages of unpunctuated eloquence, made over to Dick what she called the melancholy privilege of winding up her nephew’s affairs.
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