Mrs. Peyton uttered an assenting sigh. “It was a great grief to us—a great loss to my son.”
“Yes—I know. I can imagine what you must have felt. And then it was so unlucky that it should have happened just now.”
Mrs. Peyton shot a reconnoitring glance at her profile. “His dying, you mean, on the eve of success?”
Miss Verney turned a frank smile upon her. “One ought to feel that, of course—but I’m afraid I am very selfish where my friends are concerned, and I was thinking of Mr. Peyton’s having to give up his work at such a critical moment.” She spoke without a note of deprecation: there was a pagan freshness in her opportunism.
Mrs. Peyton was silent, and the girl continued after a pause: “I suppose now it will be almost impossible for him to finish his drawings in time. It’s a pity he hadn’t worked out the whole scheme a little sooner. Then the details would have come of themselves.”
Mrs. Peyton felt a contempt strangely mingled with exultation. If only the girl would talk in that way to Dick!
“He has hardly had time to think of himself lately,” she said, trying to keep the coldness out of her voice.
“No, of course not,” Miss Verney assented; “but isn’t that all the more reason for his friends to think of him? It was very dear of him to give up everything to nurse Mr. Darrow—but, after all, if a man is going to get on in his career there are times when he must think first of himself.”
Mrs. Peyton paused, trying to choose her words with deliberation. It was quite clear now that Dick had not spoken, and she felt the responsibility that devolved upon her.
“Getting on in a career—is that always the first thing to be considered?” she asked, letting her eyes rest musingly on the girl’s.
The glance did not disconcert Miss Verney, who returned it with one of equal comprehensiveness. “Yes,” she said quickly, and with a slight blush. “With a temperament like Mr. Peyton’s I believe it is. Some people can pick themselves up after any number of bad falls: I am not sure that he could. I think discouragement would weaken instead of strengthening him.”
Both women had forgotten external conditions in the quick reach for each other’s meanings. Mrs. Peyton flushed, her maternal pride in revolt; but the answer was checked on her lips by the sense of the girl’s unexpected insight. Here was some one who knew Dick as well as she did—should she say a partisan or an accomplice? A dim jealousy stirred beneath Mrs. Peyton’s other emotions: she was undergoing the agony which the mother feels at the first intrusion on her privilege of judging her child; and her voice had a flutter of resentment.
“You must have a poor opinion of his character,” she said.
Miss Verney did not remove her eyes, but her blush deepened beautifully. “I have, at any rate,” she Said, “a high one of his talent. I don’t suppose many men have an equal amount of moral and intellectual energy.”
“And you would cultivate the one at the expense of the other?”
“In certain cases—and up to a certain point.” She shook out the long fur of her muff, one of those silvery flexible furs which clothe a woman with a delicate sumptuousness. Everything about her, at the moment, seemed rich and cold—everything, as Mrs. Peyton quickly noted, but the blush lingering under her dark skin; and so complete was the girl’s self-command that the blush seemed to be there only because it had been forgotten.
“I dare say you think me strange,” she continued. “Most people do, because I speak the truth. It’s the easiest way of concealing one’s feelings. I can, for instance, talk quite openly about Mr. Peyton under shelter of your inference that I shouldn’t do so if I were what is called ‘interested’ in him. And as I am interested in him, my method has its advantages!” She ended with one of the fluttering laughs which seemed to flit from point to point of her expressive person.
Mrs. Peyton leaned toward her. “I believe you are interested,” she said quietly; “and since I suppose you allow others the privilege you claim for yourself, I am going to confess that I followed you here in the hope of finding out the nature of your interest.”
Miss Verney shot a glance at her, and drew away in a soft subsidence of undulating furs.
“Is this an embassy?” she asked smiling.
“No: not in any sense.”
The girl leaned back with an air of relief. “I’m glad; I should have disliked—” She looked again at Mrs. Peyton. “You want to know what I mean to do?”
“Yes.”
“Then I can only answer that I mean to wait and see what he does.”
“You mean that everything is contingent on his success?”
“I am—if I’m everything,” she admitted gaily.
The mother’s heart was beating in her throat, and her words seemed to force themselves out through the throbs.
“I—I don’t quite see why you attach such importance to this special success.”
“Because he does,” the girl returned instantly. “Because to him it is the final answer to his self-questioning—the questioning whether he is ever to amount to anything or not. He says if he has anything in him it ought to come out now. All the conditions are favourable—it is the chance he has always prayed for. You see,” she continued, almost confidentially, but without the least loss of composure—“you see he has told me a great deal about himself and his various experiments—his phrases of indecision and disgust. There are lots of tentative talents in the world, and the sooner they are crushed out by circumstances the better. But it seems as though he really had it in him to do something distinguished—as though the uncertainty lay in his character and not in his talent. That is what interests, what attracts me. One can’t teach a man to have genius, but if he has it one may show him how to use it. That is what I should be good for, you see—to keep him up to his opportunities.”
Mrs. Peyton had listened with an intensity of attention that left her reply unprepared. There was something startling and yet half attractive in the girl’s avowal of principles which are oftener lived by than professed.
“And you think,” she began at length, “that in this case he has fallen below his opportunity?”
“No one can tell, of course; but his discouragement, his abattement, is a bad sign. I don’t think he has any hope of succeeding.”
The mother again wavered a moment. “Since you are so frank,” she then said, “will you let me be equally so, and ask how lately you have seen him?”
The girl smiled at the circumlocution. “Yesterday afternoon,” she said simply.
“And you thought him—”
“Horribly down on his luck. He said himself that his brain was empty.”
Again Mrs. Peyton felt the throb in her throat, and a slow blush rose to her cheek. “Was that all he said?”
“About himself—was there anything else?” said the girl quickly.
“He didn’t tell you of—of an opportunity to make up for the time he has lost?”
“An opportunity? I don’t understand.”
“He didn’t speak to you, then, of Mr. Darrow’s letter?”
“He said nothing of any letter.”
“There was one, which was found after poor Darrow’s death. In it he gave Dick leave to use his design for the competition. Dick says the design is wonderful—it would give him just what he needs.”
Miss Verney sat listening raptly, with a rush of colour that suffused her like light.
“But when was this? Where was the letter found? He never said a word of it!” she exclaimed.
“The letter was found on the day of Darrow’s death.”
“But I don’t understand! Why has he never told me? Why should he seem so hopeless?” She turned an ignorant appealing face on Mrs. Peyton. It was prodigious, but it was true—she felt nothing, saw nothing, but the crude fact of the opportunity.
Mrs. Peyton’s voice trembled with the completeness of her triumph. “I suppose his reason for not speaking is that he has scruples.”
“Scruples?”
&nb
sp; “He feels that to use the design would be dishonest.”
Miss Verney’s eyes fixed themselves on her in a commiserating stare. “Dishonest? When the poor man wished it himself? When it was his last request? When the letter is there to prove it? Why, the design belongs to your son! No one else had any right to it.”
“But Dick’s right does not extend to passing it off as his own—at least that is his feeling, I believe. If he won the competition he would be winning it on false pretenses.”
“Why should you call them false pretenses? His design might have been better than Darrow’s if he had had time to carry it out. It seems to me that Mr. Darrow must have felt this—must have felt that he owed his friend some compensation for the time he took from him. I can imagine nothing more natural than his wishing to make this return for your son’s sacrifice.”
She positively glowed with the force of her conviction, and Mrs. Peyton, for a strange instant, felt her own resistance wavering. She herself had never considered the question in that light—the light of Darrow’s viewing his gift as a justifiable compensation. But the glimpse she caught of it drove her shuddering behind her retrenchments.
“That argument,” she said coldly, “would naturally be more convincing to Darrow than to my son.”
Miss Verney glanced up, struck by the change in Mrs. Peyton’s voice.
“Ah, then you agree with him? You think it would be dishonest?”
Mrs. Peyton saw that she had slipped into self-betrayal. “My son and I have not spoken of the matter,” she said evasively. She caught the flash of relief in Miss Verney’s face.
“You haven’t spoken? Then how do you know how he feels about it?”
“I only judge from—well, perhaps from his not speaking.”
The girl drew a deep breath. “I see,” she murmured. “That is the very reason that prevents his speaking.”
“The reason?”
“Your knowing what he thinks—and his knowing that you know.”
Mrs. Peyton was startled at her subtlety. “I assure you,” she said, rising, “that I have done nothing to influence him.”
The girl gazed at her musingly. “No,” she said with a faint smile, “nothing except to read his thoughts.” VI
Mrs. Peyton reached home in the state of exhaustion which follows on a physical struggle. It seemed to her as though her talk with Clemence Verney had been an actual combat, a measuring of wrist and eye. For a moment she was frightened at what she had done—she felt as though she had betrayed her son to the enemy. But before long she regained her moral balance, and saw that she had merely shifted the conflict to the ground on which it could best be fought out—since the prize fought for was the natural battlefield. The reaction brought with it a sense of helplessness, a realization that she had let the issue pass out of her hold; but since, in the last analysis, it had never lain there, since it was above all needful that the determining touch should be given by any hand but hers, she presently found courage to subside into inaction. She had done all she could—even more, perhaps, than prudence warranted—and now she could but await passively the working of the forces she had set in motion.
For two days after her talk with Miss Verney she saw little of Dick. He went early to his office and came back late. He seemed less tired, more self-possessed, than during the first days after Darrow’s death; but there was a new inscrutableness in his manner, a note of reserve, of resistance almost, as though he had barricaded himself against her conjectures. She had been struck by Miss Verney’s reply to the anxious asseveration that she had done nothing to influence Dick—“Nothing,” the girl had answered, “except to read his thoughts.” Mrs. Peyton shrank from this detection of a tacit interference with her son’s liberty of action. She longed—how passionately he would never know—to stand apart from him in this struggle between his two destinies, and it was almost a relief that he on his side should hold aloof, should, for the first time in their relation, seem to feel her tenderness as an intrusion.
Only four days remained before the date fixed for the sending in of the designs, and still Dick had not referred to his work. Of Darrow, also, he had made no mention. His mother longed to know if he had spoken to Clemence Verney—or rather if the girl had forced his confidence. Mrs. Peyton was almost certain that Miss Verney would not remain silent—there were times when Dick’s renewed application to his work seemed an earnest of her having spoken, and spoken convincingly. At the thought Kate’s heart grew chill. What if her experiment should succeed in a sense she had not intended? If the girl should reconcile Dick to his weakness, should pluck the sting from his temptation? In this round of uncertainties the mother revolved for two interminable days; but the second evening brought an answer to her question.
Dick, returning earlier than usual from the office, had found, on the hall-table, a note which, since morning, had been under his mother’s observation. The envelope, fashionable in tint and texture, was addressed in a rapid staccato hand which seemed the very imprint of Miss Verney’s utterance. Mrs. Peyton did not know the girl’s writing; but such notes had of late lain often enough on the hall-table to make their attribution easy. This communication Dick, as his mother poured his tea, looked over with a face of shifting lights; then he folded it into his note-case, and said, with a glance at his watch: “If you haven’t asked any one for this evening I think I’ll dine out.”
“Do, dear; the change will be good for you,” his mother assented.
He made no answer, but sat leaning back, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes fixed on the fire. Every line of his body expressed a profound physical lassitude, but the face remained alert and guarded. Mrs. Peyton, in silence, was busying herself with the details of the tea-making, when suddenly, inexplicably, a question forced itself to her lips.
“And your work—?” she said, strangely hearing herself speak.
“My work—?” He sat up, on the defensive almost, but without a tremor of the guarded face.
“You’re getting on well? You’ve made up for lost time?”
“Oh, yes: things are going better.” He rose, with another glance at his watch. “Time to dress,” he said, nodding to her as he turned to the door.
It was an hour later, during her own solitary dinner, that a ring at the door was followed by the parlour-maid’s announcement that Mr. Gill was there from the office. In the hall, in fact, Kate found her son’s partner, who explained apologetically that he had understood Peyton was dining at home, and had come to consult him about a difficulty which had arisen since he had left the office. On hearing that Dick was out, and that his mother did not know where he had gone, Mr. Gill’s perplexity became so manifest that Mrs. Peyton, after a moment, said hesitatingly: “He may be at a friend’s house; I could give you the address.”
The architect caught up his hat. “Thank you; I’ll have a try for him.”
Mrs. Peyton hesitated again. “Perhaps,” she suggested, “it would be better to telephone.”
She led the way into the little study behind the drawing-room, where a telephone stood on the writing-table. The folding doors between the two rooms were open: should she close them as she passed back into the drawing-room? On the threshold she wavered an instant; then she walked on and took her usual seat by the fire.
Gill, meanwhile, at the telephone, had “rung up” the Verney house, and inquired if his partner were dining there. The reply was evidently affirmative; and a moment later Kate knew that he was in communication with her son. She sat motionless, her hands clasped on the arms of her chair, her head erect, in an attitude of avowed attention. If she listened she would listen openly: there should be no suspicion of eavesdropping. Gill, engrossed in his message, was probably hardly conscious of her presence; but if he turned his head he should at least have no difficulty in seeing her, and in being aware that she could hear what he said. Gill, however, as she was quick to remember, was doubtless ignorant of any need for secrecy in his communication to Dick. He had often heard the
affairs of the office discussed openly before Mrs. Peyton, had been led to regard her as familiar with all the details of her son’s work. He talked on unconcernedly, and she listened.
Ten minutes later, when he rose to go, she knew all that she had wanted to find out. Long familiarity with the technicalities of her son’s profession made it easy for her to translate the stenographic jargon of the office. She could lengthen out all Gill’s abbreviations, interpret all his allusions, and reconstruct Dick’s answers from the questions addressed to him. And when the door closed on the architect she was left face to face with the fact that her son, unknown to any one but herself, was using Darrow’s drawings to complete his work.
Mrs. Peyton, left alone, found it easier to continue her vigil by the drawing-room fire than to carry up to the darkness and silence of her own room the truth she had been at such pains to acquire. She had no thought of sitting up for Dick. Doubtless, his dinner over, he would rejoin Gill at the office, and prolong through, the night the task in which she now knew him to be engaged. But it was less lonely by the fire than in the wide-eyed darkness which awaited her upstairs. A mortal loneliness enveloped her. She felt as though she had fallen by the way, spent and broken in a struggle of which even its object had been unconscious. She had tried to deflect the natural course of events, she had sacrificed her personal happiness to a fantastic ideal of duty, and it was her punishment to be left alone with her failure, outside the normal current of human strivings and regrets.
She had no wish to see her son just then: she would have preferred to let the inner tumult subside, to repossess herself in this new adjustment to life, before meeting his eyes again. But as she sat there, far adrift on her misery, she was aroused by the turning of his key in the latch. She started up, her heart sounding a retreat, but her faculties too dispersed to obey it; and while she stood wavering, the door opened and he was in the room.
In the room, and with face illumined: a Dick she had not seen since the strain of the contest had cast its shade on him. Now he shone as in a sunrise of victory, holding out exultant hands from which she hung back instinctively.
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