CHAPTER IV

"I never see her from morning till night," Mrs. Payton said. "Rather different from my day! When I was a young lady, girls stayed indoors with their mothers."

Mrs. Payton's mother, stroking her white gloves down over her knuckly fingers, shrugged her shoulders: "You didn't like 'those days' so very much yourself, my dear. But of course Freddy is shocking. It isn't that she has bad taste—she has no taste! All I hope is that she won't publicly disgrace us. Bessie Childs says that her husband says this business idea is perfect nonsense."

The two ladies were in the double parlor on the left of the wide hall of No 15. It was a gloomy place, even when the ailanthus-trees had lost their leaves; the French windows were so smothered in plush and lace that the gleam of narrow mirrors between them could not lighten the costly ugliness. In its day the room had been very costly. The carpet, with its scrolls and garlands, the ebony cabinets, picked out in gilt—big and foolish and empty—the oil-paintings in vast, tarnished frames, must all have been very expensive. There was an ormolu clock on the black marble mantelpiece holding Time stationary at 7.20 o'clock of some forgotten morning or evening; the bronzes on either side of it—a fisher-maid with her string of fish,[Pg 46] and a hunter bearing an antelope on his shoulders—were dulled by the smoky years. Opposite the fireplace, against the chocolate-brown wall-paper, Andrew Payton, on a teakwood pedestal, glimmered in white marble blindness. Beside him, the key-board of a grand piano was yellowing in untouched silence. The room was so dim that Mrs. Holmes, coming in out of the sunshine, stumbled over a rug.

"You have such a clutter of things, Ellen," she complained, sharply.

"It's lighter up-stairs," Mrs. Payton defended herself.

"What did you say? Do speak more distinctly!"

"I said it was lighter up-stairs. Come up, and I'll show you a puzzle I've just worked out. Dreadfully difficult!"

But Mrs. Holmes never went up-stairs in the Payton house; to be sure, the door between the sitting-room and the room beyond it was always locked, but—you heard things. So she said she couldn't climb the stairs. "I'm getting old, I'm afraid," she said, archly.

"I suppose you are very rheumatic?" her daughter sympathized; "why don't you try—"

"Not at all!" the older lady interrupted; "just a little stiff. Mrs. Dale said her cousin thought you were my sister," she added, maliciously.

As far as clothes went, the cousin might have supposed Mrs. Holmes was Mrs. Payton's daughter—the skirt in the latest ugliness of style, the high heels, the white veil over the elaborate hair, were all far more youthful than the care-worn mother of Frederica (and Mortimore) would have permitted herself.

[Pg 47]

"I've been so dreadfully busy," Mrs. Holmes declared; "I meant to come in yesterday, but I had a thousand things to do! Bridge all afternoon at Bessie Childs's. I played with young Mrs. Dale. She ought to get another dressmaker."

"Did you know Mr. Dale's aunt was dying?" Mrs. Payton said.

Mrs. Holmes frowned. She was, as she often said, a very busy woman; she kept house, made calls, had "fittings," shopped, and read the newspapers. She did these things well and thoroughly, for, as her granddaughter had once said, she "was no fool." She was shrewd, capable, energetic, and entirely a woman of the world. Her daughter's social seclusion and mental apathy amazed and irritated her. But intelligent and busy as she was, she had leisure for one thing: Fear. She never said of what. Nor would she, if she could help it, allow the name of her Fear to be mentioned. "I always run away if people talk of unpleasant things!" she used to say, sharply. The mere reference to Mr. Dale's aunt made her pull her stole about her shoulders, and clutch for bags and card-cases that were always sliding off a steep and slippery lap.

"Why, Mama, you mustn't go," Mrs. Payton remonstrated, "you've just—"

"I only stopped a minute to say that if you don't keep Freddy in order, she will disgrace us all," Mrs. Holmes said, nervously; "but you keep talking about unpleasant things! I am all heart, and I can't bear to hear about other people's troubles."

Mrs. Payton understood; she gave her mother a [Pg 48]pitiful look. ("I believe she'd like to live to be a hundred!" she thought; "whereas, if it wasn't for poor Mortimore I'd be glad to go; I'm so—tired. And Freddy wouldn't miss me.") All the while she was talking in her kind voice, of living, not dying; of her intention of starting in early this year on her Christmas presents—"I get perfectly worn out with them each Christmas!" Of her cook's impertinence—"servants are really impossible!" Of Flora's low-spiritedness—"Miss Carter says she's simply wild to get married, but I can't think so; Flora is so refined."

"Human nature isn't very refined," Mrs. Holmes said.

"Miss Carter says she wants to take music lessons."

"That's terribly refined," Mrs. Holmes said, satirically.

"It's absurd," her daughter declared, with annoyance; "music lessons! Rather different from the time I went to housekeeping—then, servants worked! I gave Flora a lovely embroidered collar the other day; and yet, the next thing I knew, Anne told me she was crying her eyes out down in the coal-cellar. I went right down to the cellar, and said, 'You must tell me what's the matter.' But all I could get out of her was that she was tired of living. Miss Carter says Anne says that Flora's young man has married somebody else, and she—"

"Don't mumble! It's almost impossible to hear you," her mother broke in; "as for servants, there are no such things nowadays. They have men callers, a thing my mother never tolerated! And they don't dream of being in at ten. My seventh cook in five months comes to-morrow."

[Pg 49]

"Don't you think you are rather strict—I mean about hours, and beaux, and all that sort of thing? My three all have beaux—only poor Flora's don't seem very faithful. Mama, don't you think you ought to see an aurist? You really are a little—"

"Not at all! I hear perfectly;—except when people mumble. And I shall never change; my way of keeping house is the right way, so why should I change?"

"I couldn't keep my girls a week if I were as strict as you," Mrs. Payton ventured.

"It wouldn't be much loss, my dear!" the older woman said; she ran a white-gloved finger along the top of the piano beside her, and held it up, with a dry laugh. "You could eat off the floor in my house; but you never were much of a housekeeper. However, I didn't come to talk about servants; I came to tell you that I am going to call on those cousins of Mr. Weston's, and explain that at any rate I don't approve of my granddaughter's going into business!"

"I'm sure I don't, either!" poor Mrs. Payton protested. "I am dreadfully distr—"

"Why don't you tell her it isn't done? Why do you allow it?" Mrs. Holmes demanded.

Mrs. Payton raised protesting hands: "'Allow' Freddy?"

"If you'd stop her allowance, you'd stop her nonsense. That is what I would do if a daughter of mine cut such didos!"

"I can't—she's of age. You can't control girls nowadays," Mrs. Payton sighed.

[Pg 50]

"She ought to be married," said Mrs. Holmes, clutching at the back of a gilt chair as she got on to her shaking old legs; "though I can't imagine any nice man wanting to marry a girl who talks as she does. Maria Spencer told me she heard that Fred said that men ought not to be allowed to marry unless they had a health certificate."

Mrs. Payton gasped with horror. "Mama! are you sure? I can't believe— What are we coming to?"

"It mortified me to death," said Mrs. Holmes. ("Oh, do pick up that card-case for me!) I wish Arthur Weston would marry her, but I suppose he never got over that Morrison girl's behavior? No; the real trouble is, you insist on living in this out-of-the-way place! Oh, yes, I know; poor Mortimore. Still, the men won't come after her here, because it looks as if she had no money—that, and her queerness. Really, you ought to try to get her settled. You ought to move over to the Hill; but you love that poor, brainless creature up-stairs more than you do Fred!"

Mrs. Payton stiffened. "I love both my children just the same; and I can't discuss Mortimore, Mama, with anybody. As for being brainless, Doctor Davis always said, 'The intellect is there; but it is veiled.'" The tears brimmed over. "You don't understand a mother's feelings, Mama."

Mrs. Holmes shrugged her shoulders and brushed a powdered cheek against her daughter's worn face. "Good-by. Of course, you never take any advice—I'm used to that! If I wasn't the warmest-hearted creature in the[Pg 51] world I should be very cross with you. I suppose you are terribly lonely without Freddy?"

"Oh, terribly," said Mrs. Payton.

When Mrs. Holmes had gone, teetering uncertainly down the front steps to her carriage, Freddy's mother, pausing a moment in the hall to make sure that Mr. Andrew Payton's silk hat had been dusted, went heavily up-stairs and sat down in her big cushioned chair. She wished that she had something to do. Of course, there was that new puzzle—but sometimes the thought of a puzzle gave her a qualm of repulsion, the sort of repulsion one feels at the sight of the drug that soothes and disgusts at the same moment. The household mending was a more wholesome anodyne; but there was very little of that; she had gone all through Freddy's stockings the day before, and found only one thin place. To-day there seemed nothing to do but sit in her soft chair and think of Freddy's shocking talk and how unkind Mrs. Holmes was about Mortimore. She knew, in the bottom of her heart, that her son's presence was painful to everybody except herself; she knew that Freddy didn't like to have people call, for fear they might see him, and that her reluctance dated back to her childhood. "But suppose she doesn't like it, what has that got to do with it?" Morty's mother thought, angrily; "it's a question of duty. Mama doesn't seem to remember that Freddy ought to do her duty!" It came over Mrs. Payton, with a thrill of pride, that she herself had always done her duty. Here, alone, with everything silent on the other side of the bolted door, she could allow [Pg 52]herself to think how well she had done it! To Mortimore, first and foremost—she paused there, with a pang of annoyance at her mother's words: "I do not love him best!" she declared. She did her duty to Freddy, just as much as to Morty. When Fred had scarlet fever no mother could have been more devoted. She hadn't taken her clothes off for four days and nights! Her supreme dutifulness, however, a dutifulness of which she had always been acutely conscious, was in enduring Andrew's behavior. "Some women wouldn't have stood it," she thought, proudly. But what a good wife she had been! She had let him have his own way in everything. When he was cross, she had been silent. When he was drunk, she had wept—silently, of course. When he had done other things, of which anonymous letters had informed her, she had still been silent;—but she had been too angry to weep. She shivered involuntarily to think what would have happened if she had not been silent—if she had dared to remonstrate with him! For Andrew Payton's temper had been as celebrated as the brains which had once filled the now empty hat. "Some wives would have left him," she told herself; "but I always did my duty! Nobody ever supposed that I—knew." When Andrew died, and her friends were secretly rejoicing over her release, how careful she had been to wear the very deepest crape! "I didn't go out of the house, even to church, for three weeks, and I didn't use a plain white handkerchief for two years," she thought—then flushed, for, side by side with her satisfaction at her exemplary conduct was a rankling memory—a memory which made her constantly tell herself, and[Pg 53] everybody else, that she "loved both her children just the same." The remorse—for it amounted to that—began a few weeks after Mr. Payton's death, when Freddy, listening to her mother's pride in the black-bordered handkerchief, had flung out: "If you told the truth, you'd use a flag for a handkerchief, and you'd go to church to return thanks!"

There had been a dreadful scene between the mother and daughter that day.

"As for 'mourning' him," Andrew Payton's daughter said, "you don't. It's a lie to smother yourself in that horrid, sticky veil. You are mighty glad to get rid of him! You were as afraid as death of him, and you didn't love him at all. All this talk about 'mourning' is rot."

Mrs. Payton cowered as if her daughter had struck her: "Oh, how can you be so wicked!"

"Is it wicked to tell the truth?"

Mrs. Payton clasped and unclasped her hands: "I did my duty! But do you suppose I've been happy?" Her breath caught in a sob. "I've lived in hell all these years, just to make a home for you! I did my duty."

"I should have thought 'duty' would have made you leave him," Frederica said; "hell isn't a very good home for a child." She was triumphantly aware that she had said something smart; her mother's wincing face admitted it. "I suppose you were afraid to make a break while he was alive," she said, "but why not tell the truth now?"

Already the consciousness of self-betrayal had swept over Andy Payton's wife; her face flamed with anger. "You had no business to make me say a thing like that![Pg 54] You only tell the truth to hurt my feelings. You are just like Andrew!" She looked straight at her daughter, her eyes fierce with candor. "I love Mortimore best," she said, in a whisper.

For a single instant they stared at each other like two strangers. The mother was the first to come to herself. "I—I didn't mean that, Freddy. I love you both alike. But it was wicked to speak so of your father."

"I was a beast to hurt your feelings!" Frederica said; "and I don't in the least mind your loving Mortimore best. But what I said about Father is true; his being my father doesn't alter the fact that he was horrid. Mother, you know he was horrid! Don't let's pretend, at any rate to each other."

Her face twitched with eagerness to be understood; she tried to put her arm around her mother; but Mrs. Payton turned a rigid cheek to her lips; and instantly Fred lapsed back into contempt of unreality. The fact was, the deed was done. Each had told the other the truth. Mother and daughter had both seen the flash of the blade of fact as it cut pretense between them. Never again would Mrs. Payton's vanity over duty done dare to raise its head in her daughter's presence: Freddy knew that, so far as her married life went, duty had been cowardly acquiescence. Never again would Frederica be able to fling at her mother her superior morality: Mrs. Payton knew she was cruel, knew she was "just like her father."... Like Andy Payton! She ground her teeth with disgust, but she could not deny it. She was so truthful that she saw the Truth; saw her father's intelligence in her own clear[Pg 55] mind; his ability in hers; his meanness in her ruthless smartness in proving a point. She hated him for these things—but she hated herself more.

Mrs. Payton told Arthur Weston of this revealing scene; but her confession confined itself to her remorse for having said she loved one child more than the other. "Of course I love them just exactly the same, but Freddy was wicked to speak disrespectfully of her father."

Then Frederica poured her contrition into his pitying ears.

"I was a beast, but I was not a liar."

"It isn't necessary to be a beast, to be truthful," he reminded her.

"I made her cry," she said. "Father used to do that. Do—do you think I'm like him?"

"Like your father? Good Lord, no!" he said, in horrified haste; then apologized. "I—I mean, Mr. Payton was a very able man, I had great respect for his brains; but he was—severe."

"'Severe'? Well, I'm 'severe,' I suppose? No; the trouble with me is, I'm hideously truthful—and I like to be."