CHAPTER XXV

The whole connection seethed! The notoriety of Flora's death was nothing compared with this notoriety. The police court! The newspapers! The gossip of Mrs. Childs's Bridge Club! And, on top of everything else, the shock to Laura.

"You see," Mrs. Payton explained to her daughter, "she's going to have a baby, and—"

"I know," Fred said, soberly; "she told me. Of course I wouldn't have let her go, if I'd known there was going to be rough-house."

"It's absurd to blame you," her mother said. "As I told your Aunt Bessie, 'It's absurd to blame Freddy!'"

"I don't mind being blamed. I oughtn't to have taken her, anyhow. She doesn't really care for the things I care for. She's entirely under Howard's thumb, poor dear!"

Mr. William Childs was almost sick with anger, and Mrs. Childs, with her calm interest in other people's troubles, agreed with Miss Mary Graham, who said that, of course, Miss Freddy meant well; but sometimes the brain defect didn't show at once, as it did in her brother. "It comes on when they are about twenty-five," said Miss Mary.

Mrs. Childs said that was the most charitable way to[Pg 273] look at it, and—amiably ready to tell anything to anybody—repeated the charitable opinion to Mrs. Payton.

"What did the older one say?" Fred's mother asked, distractedly.

Mrs. Childs hesitated: "Nothing very sensible; indeed, I don't know just what she meant. Something out of the Bible—that they said Christ had a devil, too. Quite profane, I thought."

"Fred isn't a devil!" Mrs. Payton said, angrily, her maternal claws ready to scratch the "older one," whose protection of Frederica was understood only by Arthur Weston, who loved her for it, but warned her that unless Bacon was the author of the phrase she had quoted it would not soothe the Childs family.

Certainly it did not soothe Bobby and Payton, who told their respective wives that Freddy ought to be shut up! "Allendale is the place for her," Bob said, mentioning a well-known insane-asylum. They told their brother-in-law that Laura ought to be ashamed of herself—which led to an in-law coolness that never quite thawed out.

"Of course I don't approve of it any more than you do," Howard said. "If I'd been at home, Laura wouldn't have gone with Fred. Trouble is, she's so sweet-tempered she does whatever anybody wants—and Fred insisted, you know. And when Laura was there she felt she had to stand by Fred—"

"Stand by your grandmother!" Payton Childs retorted. "If Fred was my sister, I'd stand by her—with a whip!"

"Well, there'll be no more speechifying in ours," Howard said, grimly. "But I won't have Laura blamed. What[Pg 274] she did, she did out of loyalty to Fred. When it comes to standing by, Laura is as decent as a man!"

Miss Spencer was of the opinion that Mrs. Payton had better take the girl to Europe—"under another name, perhaps; then she can't disgrace you. After all, Ellen, I believe she's just like Mortimore—only she doesn't jibber!"

"Miss Spencer!"

"I mean that though she has intellect, she—"

"Morty has intellect! Doctor Davis always said the intellect was there, but it was veiled!"

"Fred had better veil something," Miss Spencer said, dryly. "Her face, for instance, when she goes to jail."

"It wasn't a jail," Mrs. Payton protested, whimperingly.

Mrs. Holmes had her opinion, too; all Fred's didos, she said, were due to the fact that Mrs. Payton had not brought her up properly. She said this just as she was leaving the parlor, teetering along on her high-heeled shoes; then her voice suddenly roughened; she turned and glared at her daughter through her white veil.

"The amount of it is," she said, "Fred is worth all the rest of us put together! That's why we are so provoked at her. We know we're on the shelf, and useless old fools, every one of us! Especially William Childs."

Mrs. Payton was so astounded that she let her mother go out to her carriage unattended. But the words were a comfort to her, for, poor woman, she was struck from every side.

As for Fred, she listened listlessly to the jangle of [Pg 275]criticism, looking at her critics with curious eyes. How silly they all were! So long as the experience of being arrested had not injured Laura, what difference did it make? With her conception of the values of life, the momentary unpleasantness of newspaper notoriety was not worth thinking of. Fred was very listless now. Something had touched the garment of life, and energy and hope had gone out of it.

She ceased to be young.

The rebuff of unaccepted love she had faced gallantly; its accompanying knowledge of shame and pity and sympathy, had only steadied her; even her own irrationality in disliking Laura (she had recognized with chagrin that dislike was irrational, and she hated, she told herself, to be an idiot!)—all these emotional experiences had merely deepened and humanized her. But the discovery that the Howard Maitland she thought she knew, had never lived, was a staggering blow. The other Howard—the real Howard—honest, sweet-hearted, simple, who had found her conversation no end amusing and interesting, who had been a patient receptacle for her opinions and an amiable echo of her volubility, who had swallowed many yawns out of kindness as well as courtesy—the Howard beneath whose charm of good manners lurked the primitive fierceness of the male who protects his woman at any cost, that Howard had never made the slightest appeal to her. The jar of stepping down from the ideal man to the real man racked her, body and soul. The old pain of not being loved had ceased as suddenly as a pulled tooth ceases to ache. The new pain was only a sense of nothingness.[Pg 276] But, curiously enough, it was then that the old affection for Laura began to flow back. "Not that I get much out of her," she thought, dully; "dear little Lolly! She hasn't an idea beyond—him. She's a perfect slave to him. Well! I'm glad I'm a free woman! But she's a dear little thing." The soreness had all gone; she loved Lolly again—as one loves a kitten. She used to go to see her, and look at the baby clothes, and speculate as to whether it would be a girl or a boy. The softness, and silliness, and sweetness of it all was to her tired mind what cushions are to a tired body.

When the baby was born, early in September, the last barrier between the cousins was swept away—but Fred still made a point of not going to Laura's house at an hour when she was likely to find Howard at home. Laura's husband was an entire stranger to her. When, by accident, she did meet him, she used to say to herself, wonderingly, "How could I—?"

All summer Frederica went regularly to her office. "But business isn't what you'd call booming," she told Arthur Weston. In the blind fumbling about of her stunned mind to discover a reality, he was the one person to whom she turned. His calls at 15 Payton Street, whenever Fred was in town, stirred even Mrs. Payton to speculation—although it was Miss Carter who put the idea into her head:

"He always comes when Miss Freddy is here; I think he's taken with her."

"I wish I could think so! There is nothing I should like[Pg 277] better," said Mrs. Payton, sighing. But the mere hope of such a thing roused her to ask Mr. Weston to dinner whenever she knew that Fred was coming home for the night. Miss Graham, getting wind of those dinners, gave him, one day, a cousinly thrust in the ribs:

"Tortoise! I do really believe you have some sense, after all!"

"I have sense enough to know that the race is off for the tortoise, when the hare decides not to run," he said, dryly; "but that's no reason why I shouldn't dine with Mrs. Payton."

Miss Eliza was spending the summer at The Laurels, and she had Freddy on her mind. She went over to Lakeville to see her several times, and always, with elaborate carelessness, said something in Arthur Weston's favor. But she had to admit that Fred was blind to the pursuit of the faithful tortoise.

"I love the child," she told her sister; "but, I declare, I could spank her! Just think what a husband dear Arthur would make!"

"What kind of a wife would she make?" Miss Mary retorted. "I don't think she would insure any man's happiness."

"The pitiful thing about her is that she has aged so," said Miss Graham.

That sense of lost youth touched her so much that she was quite out of patience with dear Arthur. "Haven't you any heart?" she scolded. "The girl is unhappy! Carry her off, and make her happy."

"I'm too old to turn kidnapper," he defended himself.

[Pg 278]

"She is brooding over something," Miss Eliza said; "it can't be because that foolish young man took her cousin when he could have got her? She has too much backbone for that!"

Mr. Weston agreed that Fred was not lacking backbone, but he could not deny the brooding. So it came about that the dear old matchmaker was moved, one day, to go to Sunrise Cottage and put her finger in the pie. After she had drunk a cup of tea, and listened for half an hour to Fred's ideas as to how Laura should bring up the baby, and the "slavery of mothers"—"Lolly hasn't time to read a line!" Fred said;—Miss Eliza suddenly touched her on the shoulder:

"My dear," she said, "you've got to live, whether you like it or not. Make the best of it!"

Fred gave a gasp of astonishment; then she said, in a low voice, "How did you know I didn't like living?"

"Because when I didn't, I was just as careless about my back hair as you are."

Involuntarily Fred put her hand up to her head. "Is it untidy?"

"It's indifferent. And when you think how fond Arthur is of you, it's very selfish in you not to look as pretty as you can."

She went away greatly pleased with herself. "It will touch her vanity to think he likes her to look pretty; and when a girl tries to look pretty for a man, the next step is to fall in love with him."

Alas! Fred's vanity was not in the slightest degree flattered. But her pride had felt the roweling of the spur[Pg 279] of Truth. She must brace up—because she had got to live! The words were like a trumpet. "I've got to live—whether I like it or not. I must get action on something," she told herself, grimly.

That night she sat down on the little stool in front of her fire, and stared a long time into the flames. Yes, she must get busy. "I've been a pig. I've had a grouch on, just because I didn't get a stick of candy when I wanted it—and wouldn't I have been sick of my candy by this time, if I'd got it! How can Lolly stand him? What a fool I was."... Yes, she must "get busy"; why not try and do something for those poor, wretched women who are sent to the House of Detention? What she had seen and heard in that stone-lined room had left a scar upon her mind. "I'll make Arthur tell me how to get at them," she thought. Suddenly she remembered Miss Eliza's thrust: "It's selfish in you—when he's so fond of you."

She gave a little start: "Oh, but that's impossible! That sort of thing is over for him. But he's my best friend," she told herself.