CHAPTER XXIII

Often, in those weeks before Laura's wedding, Mrs. Payton, working out a puzzle, or playing Canfield on the big rosewood table in the sitting-room, would stop and stare straight before her, with unseeing eyes.... Like a needle working its way through nerveless flesh toward some vital spot, a new emotion, anger, was penetrating the routine of her meaningless days.

Laura had cut Freddy out!


Love for Morty, the dam love, which is the habit of the body and has nothing to do with the intellect, was pushed aside by the new idea: Freddy was suffering because Laura had stolen her lover.

"It was despicable in her!" Mrs. Payton said to herself—and the needle-point of anger came a little nearer to that sleeping nerve of maternity, which, when it was reached, would, in a pang of exquisite pain, make her love Fred as she had never loved anything in her life.

Mrs. Payton put a black nine on a red eight; saw her mistake, frowned, and put out a mechanical hand to correct it. "I wonder if she would drink a glass of malted milk at night, if I fixed it for her?" she thought; and uncovered an ace. "Laura hasn't half her brains!" she said, and put the card in the ace row; "how could Mr. Maitland[Pg 250] see anything to her—except looks? She is pretty. But Freddy is worth a dozen of her, and he was head over ears in love with her! Yes; Laura simply took him from her! I shall never feel the same to Laura again;—and I suppose Bessie and William expect me to give her a handsome wedding-present." She wondered, with vague malice, whether there wasn't something in the house—the old wonder of the reluctant giver of gifts!—that she could send Laura? Some family silver; the epergne, for instance, three silver squirrels holding a platter on their heads.

The question of the wedding-present was so irritating to her, that in the afternoon, when Freddy came in, rather listlessly (this was in November—a month before the wedding), Mrs. Payton referred the matter to her—shifting her angry pain to Freddy's galled young shoulders. There was no wincing.

"What shall we give Laura?"

"Something bully! I was talking to her about it to-day, and asked her what she wanted. I think a rug is the thing."

"I wonder if some of the Payton silver—" Mrs. Payton began—but Fred threw up horrified hands.

"No! No second-hand goods! And it's got to be something first rate, too; (if it takes my last dollar!)" she added, under her breath.

The rug did not take quite the last dollar, but it took more than she could afford, and Laura was perfectly delighted with it. Howard, standing on it, his hands in his pockets, dug an appreciative heel into its silky nap, and[Pg 251] made his usual comment: "It's bully! Fred's taste is great!"

Sometimes, looking back on the night that Flora died, Howard wondered if it all (except the poor soul's suicide) was not a dream? For Fred was so "bully"!... Entering into all Laura's ecstasies and anxieties; crazy to know who would make the wedding-dress; perfectly wild over Howard's present to his bride; frantic because it was too early to get jonquils for the rope down each side of the aisle.... That astounding moment in the bungalow must have been, Howard told himself, a dream! Two dreams—his and Fred's, for she evidently cared no more for him than for old Weston.

So the days passed (Howard thought they never would pass!) and the Day drew near. When it came, Frederica Payton's head was as high as any of the other young heads. There were eight of them, in most marvelous and expensive yellow hats, to follow the shimmering Laura up the aisle. At the reception afterward, Frederica, in her vivid joyousness almost—so her Uncle William said—"took the shine off the bride! Remember Shakespeare (as you'd say)—
"Bring in our daughter
Clothed like a bride ...
See, where she comes,
Appareled like the spring,"—

Mr. Childs quoted, puffing happily—"but that frock you've got on is spring-like, too—all yellow and white, like buttercups and daisies."

[Pg 252]

"I'm rather stuck on it, myself," Fred said, complacently; she was standing beside Arthur Weston, eating ice-cream with appetite.

"Well," her uncle said, chuckling, "I may tell you in confidence—Hey, Howard!" he interrupted himself, clutching at the passing bridegroom, "I was just telling Freddy that I was very much astonished when I learned that you were to be my son-in-law. I thought you were making up to her!"

"To me?" said Fred, incredulously; "he never knew I existed when Laura was around!"

"I'm just looking for Laura now," Howard said, with a gasp; "she's deserted me!" he complained, laughing—and escaped.

"Oh," Mr. Childs said, clapping his niece on the shoulder so heartily that her ice-cream spilled over, "of course I know, now, that it's always been Laura!"

"Yes," Fred agreed, gaily, "he's been dead set for Lolly for the last two years."

So she got through with the Day.... When she reached home, and up in her own room took off the yellow hat, she took off that gallant smile, too; she had worn it until the muscles about her lips were stiff. She was profoundly fatigued; too fatigued to feel anything but relief that the wedding was over. Even the old ache of wishing she "hadn't told him" was numbed. It was part of the generosity of her honest, sore young heart, that she felt a faint satisfaction in the fact that, anyhow, he was happy; as for Laura—"how mean I am to—dislike her! It wasn't her fault, and she's just the same old Lolly. I[Pg 253] won't dislike her! I'll love her, just as I've always loved her." When she went down to dinner that night she put the smile on again, and was very airy and smart in her comments to Mrs. Payton upon the Childs family, and the company in general.

"Laura was perfectly sweet! But Aunt Bessie is too fat to wear such tight clothes. Why do the fat fifties always wear tight clothes?... Grandmother wasn't shy on powder, was she?... Billy-boy would talk about Bacon at his own funeral!... How many kinds of a fool do you suppose that old hag, Maria Spencer, is?... I—I guess I'll go to bed. I was an idiot to eat ice-cream; it always makes my head ache."

Perhaps her head ached too badly for sleep. At any rate, hours later, when 15 Payton Street had sunk into midnight darkness, she heard a board creak under a careful step in the hall, and sat up in bed, saying, sharply, "Who's that?"

"It's I, dear. Don't be frightened." Mrs. Payton came feeling her way across the room to Fred's bedside.

"Is anything the matter? Is Mortimore—"

"No, no; nothing! Only, Freddy, my darling, I—I just want to tell you something." She sat down on the edge of the bed, and Frederica heard her draw in her breath in a sob.

"Mother! Are you ill?"

"No—no. But Freddy, I—I didn't mean it when I said that about Mortimore."

"Said what?" Fred said, frowning with anxiety; "here, let me light the gas!"

[Pg 254]

"No, don't!" Mrs. Payton put a restraining hand on her daughter's shoulder; "about—about loving him best. I don't, dear; truly I don't."

"But, Mother!"—Fred put her arms about the soft, loose figure that tumbled into sobs against her—"I didn't know you said it, and if you did, I don't mind it in the least!" She felt her mother's tears on her cheek, and gathered her up against her breast; "Why, Mother! It's all right—really it is. It's all right to love him best—"

"But I don't—I don't! I love you best."

"Why," Fred soothed her, "I didn't even remember you'd said it. You only told me I was like Father—and that did me good."

"No! I never said you were! And it isn't so. You're not—not a bit! My little Freddy!"

Frederica smiled grimly in the darkness, and she let the statement pass; for suddenly something surged up in her breast; something she had never felt in her life; something that was actual pain; she had no name for it, but it made the tears sting in her eyes. "There, dear, there!" she comforted her cowering mother; ... "I understand," she said, brokenly; "I understand!"

It is a wonderful moment, this moment of "understanding." It made Fred draw the foolish gray head down on her young breast, and caress and comfort it, as years ago her own little head had been caressed and kissed. They were both "mothers" at that moment.

So Laura's wedding-day was lived through. And by and by the weeks that followed were lived through. And[Pg 255] then the months pushed in between Fred and that night at the camp. She never spoke of Howard and Laura.

"I wonder if she's got over it," Mrs. Payton speculated, wistfully. She was glad, for her part, that the bride and bridegroom had gone abroad, and she did not have to see them—"especially Laura!" she used to say to herself, bitterly. If Fred was bitter, she didn't show it; she was absorbed in league work, and a really growing real-estate business; it was all she could do to find time to listen when her mother talked, and talked, and talked—or people, or puzzles, or parlor-maids! But how could she fail to listen—no matter how dull and foolish the talk was—remembering that midnight of pity?

"Freddy is getting very companionable," Mrs. Payton told Arthur Weston. He had come upon Fred bending over a puzzle spread out on the big table in the sitting-room, and trying to fit one wriggly piece of blue after another into a maliciously large expanse of uncharted sky; she had been obviously relieved at the chance to shift the entertainment of Mrs. Payton to his shoulders.

"I've got to go to a league meeting," she excused herself. When she had gone and he was standing with his back to the fire, sipping his tea and talking pleasantly of the weather, or the barber's children, or poor Flora's tendency to put too much starch in the table linen (raising his voice, in a matter-of-fact way, when there was a noise behind the door of the other room), he agreed warmly with Mrs. Payton's tribute to her daughter: "Freddy is getting companionable."

"Indeed she is!" he said, and added that she was [Pg 256]remarkably clever about puzzles—which pleased Mrs. Payton very much. This new sense of sympathy which held Fred down to picture puzzles, made her try to avoid topics on which she knew she and her mother could not agree. As the winter went on, the especial topic to be avoided was a strike among the rubber workers. Fred was passionately for the strikers, who were all girls. She went constantly to Hazelton, where the factory was, to give what help she could to the union women, and to admonish them that the way to cure industrial conditions, which all fair-minded people admitted were frightful, was by the ballot.

"Get the man's ballot, and you'll get the man's wages!" was her slogan—and she was quite fierce with her man of business when he pointed out the economic fallacy of her words.

"The kingdom of God cometh not by the ballot," he admonished her.

"I feel as if I were going to Sunday-school!"

"A little Sunday-school wouldn't hurt you. It never seems to strike you," he ruminated, "that if 'laws,' which you are so anxious to have a hand in making, could settle supply and demand, the men, poor creatures, would have feathered their own nests a little better."

To which Miss Payton replied, concisely, "Rot!"—and continued to tell the strikers that suffrage was a cure-all.

It was in March that one of the morning papers announced, with snobbish detail, that Miss Freddy Payton, a "young society girl," had "patrolled" to keep off scabs. That evening, at dinner, Mrs. Payton, mortified to death[Pg 257] at the notoriety, and encouraged by Arthur Weston's presence at the table, ventured into controversy:

"When I was a young lady—" she began, and instantly Frederica's lance was in rest! She did not mean to be cruel—but she couldn't help being smart. Her mother's injured sense of propriety was batted back to her across the dinner-table, like a shuttlecock from a resounding battledore.

"You may say what you like," Mrs. Payton said, obstinately, "but I don't believe it would make a bit of difference to give those perfectly uneducated Italian girls a vote. It hasn't," she ended, with one of those flashes of shrewdness so characteristic of dull women, "made any difference in the men's wages. And, anyhow, I don't understand why you like to mix yourself up with all sorts of persons."

"The Founder of your religion mixed Himself with all sorts of persons," Frederica said, wickedly; "but, of course, He would not be in society to-day."

"That is a very irreverent thing to say," Mrs. Payton said, stiffly.

("Now, why," Mr. Weston pondered, "why doesn't the atrocious taste of that sort of talk cure me? Because," he answered himself, "it 'amuses' me! Oh, Cousin Eliza, you are a wise old woman!")

As for Frederica, she was not conscious that her lack of taste was amusing; but she knew it was unkind, and felt the instant stab of remorse. ("I'm just like Father!" she groaned to herself); then with resolution she began to talk about puzzles; she said she thought the reason her[Pg 258] mother couldn't work out that six-hundred-piece one was because the people who made it had omitted some pieces, and it never could be got out.

"Try it a few days longer," Fred said, "and then, if you want me to, I'll write to the people who manufactured it and ask them about it. Arthur Weston! I am going to stand by those girls in Hazelton until they win out!"

"When they do, their work will stop," he prophesied, mildly. "The factory hasn't paid a dividend for three years, and if wages go up, it will shut up. I happen to know how they stand."

"Laura's back," Fred said, abruptly; "they got home yesterday. I asked her if she'd walk in the parade, and she said, 'Howard wouldn't like it!' That sort of thing makes me tired."