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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sanctuary, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sanctuary
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+
+Release Date: February, 2005  [EBook #7517]
+This file was first posted on May 13, 2003
+[Last updated: October 1, 2017]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SANCTUARY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, William
+Flis, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SANCTUARY
+
+By Edith Wharton
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+It is not often that youth allows itself to feel undividedly happy: the
+sensation is too much the result of selection and elimination to be within
+reach of the awakening clutch on life. But Kate Orme, for once, had yielded
+herself to happiness; letting it permeate every faculty as a spring rain
+soaks into a germinating meadow. There was nothing to account for this
+sudden sense of beatitude; but was it not this precisely which made it
+so irresistible, so overwhelming? There had been, within the last two
+months--since her engagement to Denis Peyton--no distinct addition to
+the sum of her happiness, and no possibility, she would have affirmed,
+of adding perceptibly to a total already incalculable. Inwardly and
+outwardly the conditions of her life were unchanged; but whereas, before,
+the air had been full of flitting wings, now they seemed to pause over
+her and she could trust herself to their shelter.
+
+Many influences had combined to build up the centre of brooding peace in
+which she found herself. Her nature answered to the finest vibrations,
+and at first her joy in loving had been too great not to bring with it a
+certain confusion, a readjusting of the whole scenery of life. She found
+herself in a new country, wherein he who had led her there was least able
+to be her guide. There were moments when she felt that the first stranger
+in the street could have interpreted her happiness for her more easily
+than Denis. Then, as her eye adapted itself, as the lines flowed into each
+other, opening deep vistas upon new horizons, she began to enter into
+possession of her kingdom, to entertain the actual sense of its belonging
+to her. But she had never before felt that she also belonged to it; and
+this was the feeling which now came to complete her happiness, to give it
+the hallowing sense of permanence.
+
+She rose from the writing-table where, list in hand, she had been going
+over the wedding-invitations, and walked toward the drawing-room window.
+Everything about her seemed to contribute to that rare harmony of feeling
+which levied a tax on every sense. The large coolness of the room, its fine
+traditional air of spacious living, its outlook over field and woodland
+toward the lake lying under the silver bloom of September; the very scent
+of the late violets in a glass on the writing-table; the rosy-mauve masses
+of hydrangea in tubs along the terrace; the fall, now and then, of a leaf
+through the still air--all, somehow, were mingled in the suffusion of
+well-being that yet made them seem but so much dross upon its current.
+
+The girl's smile prolonged itself at the sight of a figure approaching from
+the lower slopes above the lake. The path was a short cut from the Peyton
+place, and she had known that Denis would appear in it at about that hour.
+Her smile, however, was prolonged not so much by his approach as by her
+sense of the impossibility of communicating her mood to him. The feeling
+did not disturb her. She could not imagine sharing her deepest moods with
+any one, and the world in which she lived with Denis was too bright and
+spacious to admit of any sense of constraint. Her smile was in truth a
+tribute to that clear-eyed directness of his which was so often a refuge
+from her own complexities.
+
+Denis Peyton was used to being met with a smile. He might have been
+pardoned for thinking smiles the habitual wear of the human countenance;
+and his estimate of life and of himself was necessarily tinged by the
+cordial terms on which they had always met each other. He had in fact found
+life, from the start, an uncommonly agreeable business, culminating fitly
+enough in his engagement to the only girl he had ever wished to marry,
+and the inheritance, from his unhappy step-brother, of a fortune which
+agreeably widened his horizon. Such a combination of circumstances might
+well justify a young man in thinking himself of some account in the
+universe; and it seemed the final touch of fitness that the mourning which
+Denis still wore for poor Arthur should lend a new distinction to his
+somewhat florid good looks.
+
+Kate Orme was not without an amused perception of her future husband's
+point of view; but she could enter into it with the tolerance which
+allows for the inconscient element in all our judgments. There was, for
+instance, no one more sentimentally humane than Denis's mother, the
+second Mrs. Peyton, a scented silvery person whose lavender silks and
+neutral-tinted manner expressed a mind with its blinds drawn down toward
+all the unpleasantness of life; yet it was clear that Mrs. Peyton saw a
+"dispensation" in the fact that her step-son had never married, and that
+his death had enabled Denis, at the right moment, to step gracefully into
+affluence. Was it not, after all, a sign of healthy-mindedness to take the
+gifts of the gods in this religious spirit, discovering fresh evidence of
+"design" in what had once seemed the sad fact of Arthur's inaccessibility
+to correction? Mrs. Peyton, beautifully conscious of having done her "best"
+for Arthur, would have thought it unchristian to repine at the providential
+failure of her efforts. Denis's deductions were, of course, a little less
+direct than his mother's. He had, besides, been fond of Arthur, and his
+efforts to keep the poor fellow straight had been less didactic and more
+spontaneous. Their result read itself, if not in any change in Arthur's
+character, at least in the revised wording of his will; and Denis's moral
+sense was pleasantly fortified by the discovery that it very substantially
+paid to be a good fellow.
+
+The sense of general providentialness on which Mrs. Peyton reposed had in
+fact been confirmed by events which reduced Denis's mourning to a mere
+tribute of respect--since it would have been a mockery to deplore the
+disappearance of any one who had left behind him such an unsavory wake as
+poor Arthur. Kate did not quite know what had happened: her father was as
+firmly convinced as Mrs. Peyton that young girls should not be admitted to
+any open discussion of life. She could only gather, from the silences and
+evasions amid which she moved, that a woman had turned up--a woman who was
+of course "dreadful," and whose dreadfulness appeared to include a sort
+of shadowy claim upon Arthur. But the claim, whatever it was, had been
+promptly discredited. The whole question had vanished and the woman with
+it. The blinds were drawn again on the ugly side of things, and life was
+resumed on the usual assumption that no such side existed. Kate knew only
+that a darkness had crossed her sky and left it as unclouded as before.
+
+Was it, perhaps, she now asked herself, the very lifting of the
+cloud--remote, unthreatening as it had been--which gave such new serenity
+to her heaven? It was horrible to think that one's deepest security was
+a mere sense of escape--that happiness was no more than a reprieve. The
+perversity of such ideas was emphasized by Peyton's approach. He had the
+gift of restoring things to their normal relations, of carrying one over
+the chasms of life through the closed tunnel of an incurious cheerfulness.
+All that was restless and questioning in the girl subsided in his presence,
+and she was content to take her love as a gift of grace, which began just
+where the office of reason ended. She was more than ever, to-day, in this
+mood of charmed surrender. More than ever he seemed the keynote of the
+accord between herself and life, the centre of a delightful complicity in
+every surrounding circumstance. One could not look at him without seeing
+that there was always a fair wind in his sails.
+
+It was carrying him toward her, as usual, at a quick confident pace,
+which nevertheless lagged a little, she noticed, as he emerged from the
+beech-grove and struck across the lawn. He walked as though he were tired.
+She had meant to wait for him on the terrace, held in check by her usual
+inclination to linger on the threshold of her pleasures; but now something
+drew her toward him, and she went quickly down the steps and across the
+lawn.
+
+"Denis, you look tired. I was afraid something had happened."
+
+She had slipped her hand through his arm, and as they moved forward she
+glanced up at him, struck not so much by any new look in his face as by the
+fact that her approach had made no change in it.
+
+"I am rather tired.--Is your father in?"
+
+"Papa?" She looked up in surprise. "He went to town yesterday. Don't you
+remember?"
+
+"Of course--I'd forgotten. You're alone, then?" She dropped his arm and
+stood before him. He was very pale now, with the furrowed look of extreme
+physical weariness.
+
+"Denis--are you ill? _Has_ anything happened?"
+
+He forced a smile. "Yes--but you needn't look so frightened."
+
+She drew a deep breath of reassurance. _He_ was safe, after all! And
+all else, for a moment, seemed to swing below the rim of her world.
+
+"Your mother--?" she then said, with a fresh start of fear.
+
+"It's not my mother." They had reached the terrace, and he moved toward the
+house. "Let us go indoors. There's such a beastly glare out here."
+
+He seemed to find relief in the cool obscurity of the drawing-room, where,
+after the brightness of the afternoon light, their faces were almost
+indistinguishable to each other. She sat down, and he moved a few paces
+away. Before the writing-table he paused to look at the neatly sorted heaps
+of wedding-cards.
+
+"They are to be sent out to-morrow?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He turned back and stood before her.
+
+"It's about the woman," he began abruptly--"the woman who pretended to be
+Arthur's wife."
+
+Kate started as at the clutch of an unacknowledged fear.
+
+"She _was_ his wife, then?"
+
+Peyton made an impatient movement of negation. "If she was, why didn't she
+prove it? She hadn't a shred of evidence. The courts rejected her appeal."
+
+"Well, then--?"
+
+"Well, she's dead." He paused, and the next words came with difficulty.
+"She and the child."
+
+"The child? There was a child?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Kate started up and then sank down. These were not things about which young
+girls were told. The confused sense of horror had been nothing to this
+first sharp edge of fact.
+
+"And both are dead?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How do you know? My father said she had gone away--gone back to the
+West--"
+
+"So we thought. But this morning we found her."
+
+"Found her?"
+
+He motioned toward the window. "Out there--in the lake."
+
+"Both?"
+
+"Both."
+
+She drooped before him shudderingly, her eyes hidden, as though to exclude
+the vision. "She had drowned herself?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh, poor thing--poor thing!"
+
+They paused awhile, the minutes delving an abyss between them till he threw
+a few irrelevant words across the silence.
+
+"One of the gardeners found them."
+
+"Poor thing!"
+
+"It was sufficiently horrible."
+
+"Horrible--oh!" She had swung round again to her pole. "Poor Denis!
+_You_ were not there--_you_ didn't have to--?"
+
+"I had to see her." She felt the instant relief in his voice. He could talk
+now, could distend his nerves in the warm air of her sympathy. "I had to
+identify her." He rose nervously and began to pace the room. "It's knocked
+the wind out of me. I--my God! I couldn't foresee it, could I?" He halted
+before her with outstretched hands of argument. "I did all I could--it's
+not _my_ fault, is it?"
+
+"Your fault? Denis!"
+
+"She wouldn't take the money--" He broke off, checked by her awakened
+glance.
+
+"The money? What money?" Her face changed, hardening as his relaxed. "Had
+you offered her _money_ to give up the case?"
+
+He stared a moment, and then dismissed the implication with a laugh.
+
+"No--no; after the case was decided against her. She seemed hard up, and I
+sent Hinton to her with a cheque."
+
+"And she refused it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know--the usual thing. That she'd only wanted to prove she was
+his wife--on the child's account. That she'd never wanted his money. Hinton
+said she was very quiet--not in the least excited--but she sent back the
+cheque."
+
+Kate sat motionless, her head bent, her hands clasped about her knees. She
+no longer looked at Peyton.
+
+"Could there have been a mistake?" she asked slowly.
+
+"A mistake?"
+
+She raised her head now, and fixed her eyes on his, with a strange
+insistence of observation. "Could they have been married?"
+
+"The courts didn't think so."
+
+"Could the courts have been mistaken?"
+
+He started up again, and threw himself into another chair. "Good God, Kate!
+We gave her every chance to prove her case--why didn't she do it? You don't
+know what you're talking about--such things are kept from girls. Why,
+whenever a man of Arthur's kind dies, such--such women turn up. There are
+lawyers who live on such jobs--ask your father about it. Of course, this
+woman expected to be bought off--"
+
+"But if she wouldn't take your money?"
+
+"She expected a big sum, I mean, to drop the case. When she found we meant
+to fight it, she saw the game was up. I suppose it was her last throw, and
+she was desperate; we don't know how many times she may have been through
+the same thing before. That kind of woman is always trying to make money
+out of the heirs of any man who--who has been about with them."
+
+Kate received this in silence. She had a sense of walking along a narrow
+ledge of consciousness above a sheer hallucinating depth into which she
+dared not look. But the depth drew her, and she plunged one terrified
+glance into it.
+
+"But the child--the child was Arthur's?"
+
+Peyton shrugged his shoulders. "There again--how can we tell? Why, I don't
+suppose the woman herself--I wish to heaven your father were here to
+explain!"
+
+She rose and crossed over to him, laying her hands on his shoulders with a
+gesture almost maternal.
+
+"Don't let us talk of it," she said. "You did all you could. Think what a
+comfort you were to poor Arthur."
+
+He let her hands lie where she had placed them, without response or
+resistance.
+
+"I tried--I tried hard to keep him straight!"
+
+"We all know that--every one knows it. And we know how grateful he
+was--what a difference it made to him in the end. It would have been
+dreadful to think of his dying out there alone."
+
+She drew him down on a sofa and seated herself by his side. A deep
+lassitude was upon him, and the hand she had possessed herself of lay in
+her hold inert.
+
+"It was splendid of you to travel day and night as you did. And then that
+dreadful week before he died! But for you he would have died alone among
+strangers."
+
+He sat silent, his head dropping forward, his eyes fixed. "Among
+strangers," he repeated absently.
+
+She looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought. "That poor woman--did you
+ever see her while you were out there?"
+
+He drew his hand away and gathered his brows together as if in an effort of
+remembrance.
+
+"I saw her--oh, yes, I saw her." He pushed the tumbled hair from his
+forehead and stood up. "Let us go out," he said. "My head is in a fog. I
+want to get away from it all."
+
+A wave of compunction drew her to her feet.
+
+"It was my fault! I ought not to have asked so many questions." She turned
+and rang the bell. "I'll order the ponies--we shall have time for a drive
+before sunset."
+
+
+II
+
+With the sunset in their faces they swept through the keen-scented autumn
+air at the swiftest pace of Kate's ponies. She had given the reins to
+Peyton, and he had turned the horses' heads away from the lake, rising by
+woody upland lanes to the high pastures which still held the sunlight. The
+horses were fresh enough to claim his undivided attention, and he drove in
+silence, his smooth fair profile turned to his companion, who sat silent
+also.
+
+Kate Orme was engaged in one of those rapid mental excursions which were
+forever sweeping her from the straight path of the actual into uncharted
+regions of conjecture. Her survey of life had always been marked by the
+tendency to seek out ultimate relations, to extend her researches to the
+limit of her imaginative experience. But hitherto she had been like some
+young captive brought up in a windowless palace whose painted walls she
+takes for the actual world. Now the palace had been shaken to its base, and
+through a cleft in the walls she looked out upon life. For the first moment
+all was indistinguishable blackness; then she began to detect vague shapes
+and confused gestures in the depths. There were people below there, men
+like Denis, girls like herself--for under the unlikeness she felt the
+strange affinity--all struggling in that awful coil of moral darkness, with
+agonized hands reaching up for rescue. Her heart shrank from the horror of
+it, and then, in a passion of pity, drew back to the edge of the abyss.
+Suddenly her eyes turned toward Denis. His face was grave, but less
+disturbed. And men knew about these things! They carried this abyss in
+their bosoms, and went about smiling, and sat at the feet of innocence.
+Could it be that Denis--Denis even--Ah, no! She remembered what he had been
+to poor Arthur; she understood, now, the vague allusions to what he had
+tried to do for his brother. He had seen Arthur down there, in that coiling
+blackness, and had leaned over and tried to drag him out. But Arthur was
+too deep down, and his arms were interlocked with other arms--they had
+dragged each other deeper, poor souls, like drowning people who fight
+together in the waves! Kate's visualizing habit gave a hateful precision
+and persistency to the image she had evoked--she could not rid herself of
+the vision of anguished shapes striving together in the darkness. The
+horror of it took her by the throat--she drew a choking breath, and felt
+the tears on her face.
+
+Peyton turned to her. The horses were climbing a hill, and his attention
+had strayed from them.
+
+"This has done me good," he began; but as he looked his voice changed.
+"Kate! What is it? Why are you crying? Oh, for God's sake, _don't_!"
+he ended, his hand closing on her wrist.
+
+She steadied herself and raised her eyes to his.
+
+"I--I couldn't help it," she stammered, struggling in the sudden release of
+her pent compassion. "It seems so awful that we should stand so close to
+this horror--that it might have been you who--"
+
+"I who--what on earth do you mean?" he broke in stridently.
+
+"Oh, don't you see? I found myself exulting that you and I were so far from
+it--above it--safe in ourselves and each other--and then the other feeling
+came--the sense of selfishness, of going by on the other side; and I tried
+to realize that it might have been you and I who--who were down there in
+the night and the flood--"
+
+Peyton let the whip fall on the ponies' flanks. "Upon my soul," he said
+with a laugh, "you must have a nice opinion of both of us."
+
+The words fell chillingly on the blaze of her self-immolation. Would
+she never learn to remember that Denis was incapable of mounting such
+hypothetical pyres? He might be as alive as herself to the direct demands
+of duty, but of its imaginative claims he was robustly unconscious. The
+thought brought a wholesome reaction of thankfulness.
+
+"Ah, well," she said, the sunset dilating through her tears, "don't you see
+that I can bear to think such things only because they're impossibilities?
+It's easy to look over into the depths if one has a rampart to lean on.
+What I most pity poor Arthur for is that, instead of that woman lying
+there, so dreadfully dead, there might have been a girl like me, so
+exquisitely alive because of him; but it seems cruel, doesn't it, to let
+what he was not add ever so little to the value of what you are? To let him
+contribute ever so little to my happiness by the difference there is
+between you?"
+
+She was conscious, as she spoke, of straying again beyond his
+reach, through intricacies of sensation new even to her exploring
+susceptibilities. A happy literalness usually enabled him to strike a short
+cut through such labyrinths, and rejoin her smiling on the other side; but
+now she became wonderingly aware that he had been caught in the thick of
+her hypothesis.
+
+"It's the difference that makes you care for me, then?" he broke out, with
+a kind of violence which seemed to renew his clutch on her wrist.
+
+"The difference?"
+
+He lashed the ponies again, so sharply that a murmur escaped her, and he
+drew them up, quivering, with an inconsequent "Steady, boys," at which
+their back-laid ears protested.
+
+"It's because I'm moral and respectable, and all that, that you're fond of
+me," he went on; "you're--you're simply in love with my virtues. You
+couldn't imagine caring if I were down there in the ditch, as you say, with
+Arthur?"
+
+The question fell on a silence which seemed to deepen suddenly within
+herself. Every thought hung bated on the sense that something was coming:
+her whole consciousness became a void to receive it.
+
+"Denis!" she cried.
+
+He turned on her almost savagely. "I don't want your pity, you know," he
+burst out. "You can keep that for Arthur. I had an idea women loved men for
+themselves--through everything, I mean. But I wouldn't steal your love--I
+don't want it on false pretenses, you understand. Go and look into other
+men's lives, that's all I ask of you. I slipped into it--it was just a case
+of holding my tongue when I ought to have spoken--but I--I--for God's sake,
+don't sit there staring! I suppose you've seen all along that I knew he was
+married to the woman."
+
+
+III
+
+The housekeeper's reminding her that Mr. Orme would be at home the next day
+for dinner, and did she think he would like the venison with claret sauce
+or jelly, roused Kate to the first consciousness of her surroundings.
+Her father would return on the morrow: he would give to the dressing of
+the venison such minute consideration as, in his opinion, every detail
+affecting his comfort or convenience quite obviously merited. And if
+it were not the venison it would be something else; if it were not the
+housekeeper it would be Mr. Orme, charged with the results of a conference
+with his agent, a committee-meeting at his club, or any of the other
+incidents which, by happening to himself, became events. Kate found herself
+caught in the inexorable continuity of life, found herself gazing over a
+scene of ruin lit up by the punctual recurrence of habit as nature's calm
+stare lights the morrow of a whirlwind.
+
+Life was going on, then, and dragging her at its wheels. She could
+neither check its rush nor wrench loose from it and drop out--oh, how
+blessedly--into darkness and cessation. She must go bounding on, racked,
+broken, but alive in every fibre. The most she could hope was a few hours'
+respite, not from her own terrors, but from the pressure of outward claims:
+the midday halt, during which the victim is unbound while his torturers
+rest from their efforts. Till her father's return she would have the house
+to herself, and, the question of the venison despatched, could give herself
+to long lonely pacings of the empty rooms, and shuddering subsidences upon
+her pillow.
+
+Her first impulse, as the mist cleared from her brain, was the habitual one
+of reaching out for ultimate relations. She wanted to know the worst; and
+for her, as she saw in a flash, the worst of it was the core of fatality
+in what had happened. She shrank from her own way of putting it--nor was
+it even figuratively true that she had ever felt, under faith in Denis,
+any such doubt as the perception implied. But that was merely because her
+imagination had never put him to the test. She was fond of exposing herself
+to hypothetical ordeals, but somehow she had never carried Denis with her
+on these adventures. What she saw now was that, in a world of strangeness,
+he remained the object least strange to her. She was not in the tragic case
+of the girl who suddenly sees her lover unmasked. No mask had dropped from
+Denis's face: the pink shades had simply been lifted from the lamps, and
+she saw him for the first time in an unmitigated glare.
+
+Such exposure does not alter the features, but it lays an ugly emphasis
+on the most charming lines, pushing the smile to a grin, the curve of
+good-nature to the droop of slackness. And it was precisely into the
+flagging lines of extreme weakness that Denis's graceful contour flowed.
+In the terrible talk which had followed his avowal, and wherein every word
+flashed a light on his moral processes, she had been less startled by what
+he had done than by the way in which his conscience had already become a
+passive surface for the channelling of consequences. He was like a child
+who had put a match to the curtains, and stands agape at the blaze.
+It was horribly naughty to put the match--but beyond that the child's
+responsibility did not extend. In this business of Arthur's, where all had
+been wrong from the beginning--where self-defence might well find a plea
+for its casuistries in the absence of a definite right to be measured
+by--it had been easy, after the first slip, to drop a little lower with
+each struggle. The woman--oh, the woman was--well, of the kind who prey on
+such men. Arthur, out there, at his lowest ebb, had drifted into living
+with her as a man drifts into drink or opium. He knew what she was--he
+knew where she had come from. But he had fallen ill, and she had nursed
+him--nursed him devotedly, of course. That was her chance, and she knew it.
+Before he was out of the fever she had the noose around him--he came to and
+found himself married. Such cases were common enough--if the man recovered
+he bought off the woman and got a divorce. It was all a part of the
+business--the marriage, the bribe, the divorce. Some of those women made a
+big income out of it--they were married and divorced once a year. If Arthur
+had only got well--but, instead, he had a relapse and died. And there was
+the woman, made his widow by mischance as it were, with her child on her
+arm--whose child?--and a scoundrelly black-mailing lawyer to work up her
+case for her. Her claim was clear enough--the right of dower, a third of
+his estate. But if he had never meant to marry her? If he had been trapped
+as patently as a rustic fleeced in a gambling-hell? Arthur, in his last
+hours, had confessed to the marriage, but had also acknowledged its folly.
+And after his death, when Denis came to look about him and make inquiries,
+he found that the witnesses, if there had been any, were dispersed and
+undiscoverable. The whole question hinged on Arthur's statement to his
+brother. Suppress that statement, and the claim vanished, and with it the
+scandal, the humiliation, the life-long burden of the woman and child
+dragging the name of Peyton through heaven knew what depths. He had thought
+of that first, Denis swore, rather than of the money. The money, of course,
+had made a difference,--he was too honest not to own it--but not till
+afterward, he declared--would have declared on his honour, but that the
+word tripped him up, and sent a flush to his forehead.
+
+Thus, in broken phrases, he flung his defence at her: a defence improvised,
+pieced together as he went along, to mask the crude instinctiveness of his
+act. For with increasing clearness Kate saw, as she listened, that there
+had been no real struggle in his mind; that, but for the grim logic of
+chance, he might never have felt the need of any justification. If the
+woman, after the manner of such baffled huntresses, had wandered off in
+search of fresh prey, he might, quite sincerely, have congratulated himself
+on having saved a decent name and an honest fortune from her talons. It was
+the price she had paid to establish her claim that for the first time
+brought him to a startled sense of its justice. His conscience responded
+only to the concrete pressure of facts.
+
+It was with the anguish of this discovery that Kate Orme locked herself in
+at the end of their talk. How the talk had ended, how at length she had got
+him from the room and the house, she recalled but confusedly. The tragedy
+of the woman's death, and of his own share in it, were as nothing in the
+disaster of his bright irreclaimableness. Once, when she had cried out,
+"You would have married me and said nothing," and he groaned back, "But
+I _have_ told you," she felt like a trainer with a lash above some
+bewildered animal.
+
+But she persisted savagely. "You told me because you had to; because your
+nerves gave way; because you knew it couldn't hurt you to tell." The
+perplexed appeal of his gaze had almost checked her. "You told me because
+it was a relief; but nothing will really relieve you--nothing will really
+help you--till you have told some one who--who _will_ hurt you."
+
+"Who will hurt me--?"
+
+"Till you have told the truth as--as openly as you lied."
+
+He started up, ghastly with fear. "I don't understand you."
+
+"You must confess, then--publicly--openly--you must go to the judge. I
+don't know how it's done."
+
+"To the judge? When they're both dead? When everything is at an end? What
+good could that do?" he groaned.
+
+"Everything is not at an end for you--everything is just beginning. You
+must clear yourself of this guilt; and there is only one way--to confess
+it. And you must give back the money."
+
+This seemed to strike him as conclusive proof of her irrelevance. "I wish I
+had never heard of the money! But to whom would you have me give it back? I
+tell you she was a waif out of the gutter. I don't believe any one knew her
+real name--I don't believe she had one."
+
+"She must have had a mother and father."
+
+"Am I to devote my life to hunting for them through the slums of
+California? And how shall I know when I have found them? It's impossible to
+make you understand. I did wrong--I did horribly wrong--but that is not the
+way to repair it."
+
+"What is, then?"
+
+He paused, a little askance at the question. "To do better--to do my best,"
+he said, with a sudden flourish of firmness. "To take warning by this
+dreadful--"
+
+"Oh, be silent," she cried out, and hid her face. He looked at her
+hopelessly.
+
+At last he said: "I don't know what good it can do to go on talking. I have
+only one more thing to say. Of course you know that you are free."
+
+He spoke simply, with a sudden return to his old voice and accent, at which
+she weakened as under a caress. She lifted her head and gazed at him. "Am
+I?" she said musingly.
+
+"Kate!" burst from him; but she raised a silencing hand.
+
+"It seems to me," she said, "that I am imprisoned--imprisoned with you in
+this dreadful thing. First I must help you to get out--then it will be time
+enough to think of myself."
+
+His face fell and he stammered: "I don't understand you."
+
+"I can't say what I shall do--or how I shall feel--till I know what you are
+going to do and feel."
+
+"You must see how I feel--that I'm half dead with it."
+
+"Yes--but that is only half."
+
+He turned this over for a perceptible space of time before asking slowly:
+"You mean that you'll give me up, if I don't do this crazy thing you
+propose?"
+
+She paused in turn. "No," she said; "I don't want to bribe you. You must
+feel the need of it yourself."
+
+"The need of proclaiming this thing publicly?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He sat staring before him. "Of course you realize what it would mean?" he
+began at length.
+
+"To you?" she returned.
+
+"I put that aside. To others--to you. I should go to prison."
+
+"I suppose so," she said simply.
+
+"You seem to take it very easily--I'm afraid my mother wouldn't."
+
+"Your mother?" This produced the effect he had expected.
+
+"You hadn't thought of her, I suppose? It would probably kill her."
+
+"It would have killed her to think that you could do what you have done!"
+
+"It would have made her very unhappy; but there's a difference."
+
+Yes: there was a difference; a difference which no rhetoric could disguise.
+The secret sin would have made Mrs. Peyton wretched, but it would not
+have killed her. And she would have taken precisely Denis's view of the
+elasticity of atonement: she would have accepted private regrets as
+the genteel equivalent of open expiation. Kate could even imagine her
+extracting a "lesson" from the providential fact that her son had not
+been found out.
+
+"You see it's not so simple," he broke out, with a tinge of doleful
+triumph.
+
+"No: it's not simple," she assented.
+
+"One must think of others," he continued, gathering faith in his argument
+as he saw her reduced to acquiescence.
+
+She made no answer, and after a moment he rose to go. So far, in
+retrospect, she could follow the course of their talk; but when, in the
+act of parting, argument lapsed into entreaty, and renunciation into the
+passionate appeal to give him at least one more hearing, her memory lost
+itself in a tumult of pain, and she recalled only that, when the door
+closed on him, he took with him her promise to see him once again.
+
+
+IV
+
+She had promised to see him again; but the promise did not imply that she
+had rejected his offer of freedom. In the first rush of misery she had not
+fully repossessed herself, had felt herself entangled in his fate by a
+hundred meshes of association and habit; but after a sleepless night spent
+with the thought of him--that dreadful bridal of their souls--she woke to a
+morrow in which he had no part. She had not sought her freedom, nor had he
+given it; but a chasm had opened at their feet, and they found themselves
+on different sides.
+
+Now she was able to scan the disaster from the melancholy vantage of her
+independence. She could even draw a solace from the fact that she had
+ceased to love Denis. It was inconceivable that an emotion so interwoven
+with every fibre of consciousness should cease as suddenly as the flow of
+sap in an uprooted plant; but she had never allowed herself to be tricked
+by the current phraseology of sentiment, and there were no stock axioms to
+protect her from the truth.
+
+It was probably because she had ceased to love him that she could look
+forward with a kind of ghastly composure to seeing him again. She had
+stipulated, of course, that the wedding should be put off, but she had
+named no other condition beyond asking for two days to herself--two days
+during which he was not even to write. She wished to shut herself in with
+her misery, to accustom herself to it as she had accustomed herself to
+happiness. But actual seclusion was impossible: the subtle reactions of
+life almost at once began to break down her defences. She could no more
+have her wretchedness to herself than any other emotion: all the lives
+about her were so many unconscious factors in her sensations. She tried
+to concentrate herself on the thought as to how she could best help poor
+Denis; for love, in ebbing, had laid bare an unsuspected depth of pity.
+But she found it more and more difficult to consider his situation in the
+abstract light of right and wrong. Open expiation still seemed to her the
+only possible way of healing; but she tried vainly to think of Mrs. Peyton
+as taking such a view. Yet Mrs. Peyton ought at least to know what had
+happened: was it not, in the last resort, she who should pronounce on
+her son's course? For a moment Kate was fascinated by this evasion of
+responsibility; she had nearly decided to tell Denis that he must begin by
+confessing everything to his mother. But almost at once she began to shrink
+from the consequences. There was nothing she so dreaded for him as that any
+one should take a light view of his act: should turn its irremediableness
+into an excuse. And this, she foresaw, was what Mrs. Peyton would do. The
+first burst of misery over, she would envelop the whole situation in a mist
+of expediency. Brought to the bar of Kate's judgment, she at once revealed
+herself incapable of higher action.
+
+Kate's conception of her was still under arraignment when the actual Mrs.
+Peyton fluttered in. It was the afternoon of the second day, as the girl
+phrased it in the dismal re-creation of her universe. She had been thinking
+so hard of Mrs. Peyton that the lady's silvery insubstantial presence
+seemed hardly more than a projection of the thought; but as Kate collected
+herself, and regained contact with the outer world, her preoccupation
+yielded to surprise. It was unusual for Mrs. Peyton to pay visits. For
+years she had remained enthroned in a semi-invalidism which prohibited
+effort while it did not preclude diversion; and the girl at once divined a
+special purpose in her coming.
+
+Mrs. Peyton's traditions would not have permitted any direct method of
+attack; and Kate had to sit through the usual prelude of ejaculation and
+anecdote. Presently, however, the elder lady's voice gathered significance,
+and laying her hand on Kate's she murmured: "I have come to talk to you of
+this sad affair."
+
+Kate began to tremble. Was it possible that Denis had after all spoken? A
+rising hope checked her utterance, and she saw in a flash that it still lay
+with him to regain his hold on her. But Mrs. Peyton went on delicately:
+"It has been a great shock to my poor boy. To be brought in contact with
+Arthur's past was in itself inexpressibly painful; but this last dreadful
+business--that woman's wicked act--"
+
+"Wicked?" Kate exclaimed.
+
+Mrs. Peyton's gentle stare reproved her. "Surely religion teaches us that
+suicide is a sin? And to murder her child! I ought not to speak to you of
+such things, my dear. No one has ever mentioned anything so dreadful in my
+presence: my dear husband used to screen me so carefully from the painful
+side of life. Where there is so much that is beautiful to dwell upon, we
+should try to ignore the existence of such horrors. But nowadays everything
+is in the papers; and Denis told me he thought it better that you should
+hear the news first from him."
+
+Kate nodded without speaking.
+
+"He felt how _dreadful_ it was to have to tell you. But I tell him he
+takes a morbid view of the case. Of course one is shocked at the woman's
+crime--but, if one looks a little deeper, how can one help seeing that it
+may have been designed as the means of rescuing that poor child from a life
+of vice and misery? That is the view I want Denis to take: I want him to
+see how all the difficulties of life disappear when one has learned to look
+for a divine purpose in human sufferings."
+
+Mrs. Peyton rested a moment on this period, as an experienced climber
+pauses to be overtaken by a less agile companion; but presently she became
+aware that Kate was still far below her, and perhaps needed a stronger
+incentive to the ascent.
+
+"My dear child," she said adroitly, "I said just now that I was sorry you
+had been obliged to hear of this sad affair; but after all it is only you
+who can avert its consequences."
+
+Kate drew an eager breath. "Its consequences?" she faltered.
+
+Mrs. Peyton's voice dropped solemnly. "Denis has told me everything," she
+said.
+
+"Everything?"
+
+"That you insist on putting off the marriage. Oh, my dear, I do implore you
+to reconsider that!"
+
+Kate sank back with the sense of having passed again into a region of
+leaden shadow. "Is that all he told you?"
+
+Mrs. Peyton gazed at her with arch raillery. "All? Isn't it everything--to
+him?"
+
+"Did he give you my reason, I mean?"
+
+"He said you felt that, after this shocking tragedy, there ought, in
+decency, to be a delay; and I quite understand the feeling. It does seem
+too unfortunate that the woman should have chosen this particular time! But
+you will find as you grow older that life is full of such sad contrasts."
+
+Kate felt herself slowly petrifying under the warm drip of Mrs. Peyton's
+platitudes.
+
+"It seems to me," the elder lady continued, "that there is only one point
+from which we ought to consider the question--and that is, its effect on
+Denis. But for that we ought to refuse to know anything about it. But it
+has made my boy so unhappy. The law-suit was a cruel ordeal to him--the
+dreadful notoriety, the revelation of poor Arthur's infirmities. Denis is
+as sensitive as a woman; it is his unusual refinement of feeling that makes
+him so worthy of being loved by you. But such sensitiveness may be carried
+to excess. He ought not to let this unhappy incident prey on him: it shows
+a lack of trust in the divine ordering of things. That is what troubles
+me: his faith in life has been shaken. And--you must forgive me, dear
+child--you _will_ forgive me, I know--but I can't help blaming you a
+little--"
+
+Mrs. Peyton's accent converted the accusation into a caress, which
+prolonged itself in a tremulous pressure of Kate's hand.
+
+The girl gazed at her blankly. "You blame _me_--?"
+
+"Don't be offended, my child. I only fear that your excessive sympathy with
+Denis, your own delicacy of feeling, may have led you to encourage his
+morbid ideas. He tells me you were very much shocked--as you naturally
+would be--as any girl must be--I would not have you otherwise, dear Kate!
+It is _beautiful_ that you should both feel so; most beautiful; but
+you know religion teaches us not to yield too much to our grief. Let the
+dead bury their dead; the living owe themselves to each other. And what had
+this wretched woman to do with either of you? It is a misfortune for Denis
+to have been connected in any way with a man of Arthur Peyton's character;
+but after all, poor Arthur did all he could to atone for the disgrace he
+brought on us, by making Denis his heir--and I am sure I have no wish to
+question the decrees of Providence." Mrs. Peyton paused again, and then
+softly absorbed both of Kate's hands. "For my part," she continued, "I see
+in it another instance of the beautiful ordering of events. Just after dear
+Denis's inheritance has removed the last obstacle to your marriage, this
+sad incident comes to show how desperately he needs you, how cruel it would
+be to ask him to defer his happiness."
+
+She broke off, shaken out of her habitual placidity by the abrupt
+withdrawal of the girl's hands. Kate sat inertly staring, but no answer
+rose to her lips.
+
+At length Mrs. Peyton resumed, gathering her draperies about her with a
+tentative hint of leave-taking: "I may go home and tell him that you will
+not put off the wedding?"
+
+Kate was still silent, and her visitor looked at her with the mild surprise
+of an advocate unaccustomed to plead in vain.
+
+"If your silence means refusal, my dear, I think you ought to realize the
+responsibility you assume." Mrs. Peyton's voice had acquired an edge of
+righteous asperity. "If Denis has a fault it is that he is too gentle, too
+yielding, too readily influenced by those he cares for. Your influence is
+paramount with him now--but if you turn from him just when he needs your
+help, who can say what the result will be?"
+
+The argument, though impressively delivered, was hardly of a nature to
+carry conviction to its hearer; but it was perhaps for that very reason
+that she suddenly and unexpectedly replied to it by sinking back into her
+seat with a burst of tears. To Mrs. Peyton, however, tears were the signal
+of surrender, and, at Kate's side in an instant she hastened to temper her
+triumph with magnanimity.
+
+"Don't think I don't feel with you; but we must both forget ourselves for
+our boy's sake. I told him I should come back with your promise."
+
+The arm she had slipped about Kate's shoulder fell back with the girl's
+start. Kate had seen in a flash what capital would be made of her emotion.
+
+"No, no, you misunderstand me. I can make no promise," she declared.
+
+The older lady sat a moment irresolute; then she restored her arm to the
+shoulder from which it had been so abruptly displaced.
+
+"My dear child," she said, in a tone of tender confidence, "if I have
+misunderstood you, ought you not to enlighten me? You asked me just now
+if Denis had given me your reason for this strange postponement. He gave
+me one reason, but it seems hardly sufficient to explain your conduct.
+If there is any other,--and I know you well enough to feel sure there
+is,--will you not trust me with it? If my boy has been unhappy enough to
+displease you, will you not give his mother the chance to plead his cause?
+Remember, no one should be condemned unheard. As Denis's mother, I have the
+right to ask for your reason."
+
+"My reason? My reason?" Kate stammered, panting with the exhaustion of the
+struggle. Oh, if only Mrs. Peyton would release her! "If you have the right
+to know it, why doesn't he tell you?" she cried.
+
+Mrs. Peyton stood up, quivering. "I will go home and ask him," she said. "I
+will tell him he had your permission to speak."
+
+She moved toward the door, with the nervous haste of a person unaccustomed
+to decisive action. But Kate sprang before her.
+
+"No, no; don't ask him! I implore you not to ask him," she cried.
+
+Mrs. Peyton turned on her with sudden authority of voice and gesture. "Do
+I understand you?" she said. "You admit that you have a reason for putting
+off your marriage, and yet you forbid me--me, Denis's mother--to ask him
+what it is? My poor child, I needn't ask, for I know already. If he has
+offended you, and you refuse him the chance to defend himself, I needn't
+look farther for your reason: it is simply that you have ceased to love
+him."
+
+Kate fell back from the door which she had instinctively barricaded.
+
+"Perhaps that is it," she murmured, letting Mrs. Peyton pass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Orme's returning carriage-wheels crossed Mrs. Peyton's indignant
+flight; and an hour later Kate, in the bland candle-light of the
+dinner-hour, sat listening with practised fortitude to her father's
+comments on the venison.
+
+She had wondered, as she awaited him in the drawing-room, if he would
+notice any change in her appearance. It seemed to her that the flagellation
+of her thoughts must have left visible traces. But Mr. Orme was not a man
+of subtle perceptions, save where his personal comfort was affected: though
+his egoism was clothed in the finest feelers, he did not suspect a similar
+surface in others. His daughter, as part of himself, came within the normal
+range of his solicitude; but she was an outlying region, a subject
+province; and Mr. Orme's was a highly centralized polity.
+
+News of the painful incident--he often used Mrs. Peyton's vocabulary--had
+reached him at his club, and to some extent disturbed the assimilation of a
+carefully ordered breakfast; but since then two days had passed, and it did
+not take Mr. Orme forty-eight hours to resign himself to the misfortunes of
+others. It was all very nasty, of course, and he wished to heaven it hadn't
+happened to any one about to be connected with him; but he viewed it with
+the transient annoyance of a gentleman who has been splashed by the mud of
+a fatal runaway.
+
+Mr. Orme affected, under such circumstances, a bluff and hearty stoicism
+as remote as possible from Mrs. Peyton's deprecating evasion of facts. It
+was a bad business; he was sorry Kate should have been mixed up with it;
+but she would be married soon now, and then she would see that life wasn't
+exactly a Sunday-school story. Everybody was exposed to such disagreeable
+accidents: he remembered a case in their own family--oh, a distant cousin
+whom Kate wouldn't have heard of--a poor fellow who had got entangled with
+just such a woman, and having (most properly) been sent packing by his
+father, had justified the latter's course by promptly forging his name--a
+very nasty affair altogether; but luckily the scandal had been hushed up,
+the woman bought off, and the prodigal, after a season of probation, safely
+married to a nice girl with a good income, who was told by the family that
+the doctors recommended his settling in California.
+
+_Luckily the scandal was hushed up_: the phrase blazed out against
+the dark background of Kate's misery. That was doubtless what most people
+felt--the words represented the consensus of respectable opinion. The best
+way of repairing a fault was to hide it: to tear up the floor and bury the
+victim at night. Above all, no coroner and no autopsy!
+
+She began to feel a strange interest in her distant cousin. "And his
+wife--did she know what he had done?"
+
+Mr. Orme stared. His moral pointed, he had returned to the contemplation of
+his own affairs.
+
+"His wife? Oh, of course not. The secret has been most admirably kept; but
+her property was put in trust, so she's quite safe with him."
+
+Her property! Kate wondered if her faith in her husband had also been
+put in trust, if her sensibilities had been protected from his possible
+inroads.
+
+"Do you think it quite fair to have deceived her in that way?"
+
+Mr. Orme gave her a puzzled glance: he had no taste for the by-paths of
+ethical conjecture.
+
+"His people wanted to give the poor fellow another chance; they did the
+best they could for him."
+
+"And--he has done nothing dishonourable since?"
+
+"Not that I know of: the last I heard was that they had a little boy,
+and that he was quite happy. At that distance he's not likely to bother
+_us_, at all events."
+
+Long after Mr. Orme had left the topic, Kate remained lost in its
+contemplation. She had begun to perceive that the fair surface of life was
+honeycombed by a vast system of moral sewage. Every respectable household
+had its special arrangements for the private disposal of family scandals;
+it was only among the reckless and improvident that such hygienic
+precautions were neglected. Who was she to pass judgment on the merits
+of such a system? The social health must be preserved: the means devised
+were the result of long experience and the collective instinct of
+self-preservation. She had meant to tell her father that evening that her
+marriage had been put off; but she now abstained from doing so, not from
+any doubt of Mr. Orme's acquiescence--he could always be made to feel the
+force of conventional scruples--but because the whole question sank into
+insignificance beside the larger issue which his words had raised.
+
+In her own room, that night, she passed through that travail of the soul
+of which the deeper life is born. Her first sense was of a great moral
+loneliness--an isolation more complete, more impenetrable, than that in
+which the discovery of Denis's act had plunged her. For she had vaguely
+leaned, then, on a collective sense of justice that should respond to
+her own ideas of right and wrong: she still believed in the logical
+correspondence of theory and practice. Now she saw that, among those
+nearest her, there was no one who recognized the moral need of expiation.
+She saw that to take her father or Mrs. Peyton into her confidence would
+be but to widen the circle of sterile misery in which she and Denis moved.
+At first the aspect of life thus revealed to her seemed simply mean
+and base--a world where honour was a pact of silence between adroit
+accomplices. The network of circumstance had tightened round her, and every
+effort to escape drew its meshes closer. But as her struggles subsided she
+felt the spiritual release which comes with acceptance: not connivance in
+dishonour, but recognition of evil. Out of that dark vision light was to
+come, the shaft of cloud turning to the pillar of fire. For here, at last,
+life lay before her as it was: not brave, garlanded and victorious, but
+naked, grovelling and diseased, dragging its maimed limbs through the mud,
+yet lifting piteous hands to the stars. Love itself, once throned aloft
+on an altar of dreams, how it stole to her now, storm-beaten and scarred,
+pleading for the shelter of her breast! Love, indeed, not in the old sense
+in which she had conceived it, but a graver, austerer presence--the charity
+of the mystic three. She thought she had ceased to love Denis--but what had
+she loved in him but her happiness and his? Their affection had been the
+_garden enclosed_ of the Canticles, where they were to walk forever in
+a delicate isolation of bliss. But now love appeared to her as something
+more than this--something wider, deeper, more enduring than the selfish
+passion of a man and a woman. She saw it in all its far-reaching issues,
+till the first meeting of two pairs of young eyes kindled a light which
+might be a high-lifted beacon across dark waters of humanity.
+
+All this did not come to her clearly, consecutively, but in a series of
+blurred and shifting images. Marriage had meant to her, as it means to
+girls brought up in ignorance of life, simply the exquisite prolongation of
+wooing. If she had looked beyond, to the vision of wider ties, it was as
+a traveller gazes over a land veiled in golden haze, and so far distant
+that the imagination delays to explore it. But now through the blur of
+sensations one image strangely persisted--the image of Denis's child. Had
+she ever before thought of their having a child? She could not remember.
+She was like one who wakens from a long fever: she recalled nothing of
+her former self or of her former feelings. She knew only that the vision
+persisted--the vision of the child whose mother she was not to be. It was
+impossible that she should marry Denis--her inmost soul rejected him ...
+but it was just because she was not to be the child's mother that its
+image followed her so pleadingly. For she saw with perfect clearness the
+inevitable course of events. Denis would marry some one else--he was one of
+the men who are fated to marry, and she needed not his mother's reminder
+that her abandonment of him at an emotional crisis would fling him upon the
+first sympathy within reach. He would marry a girl who knew nothing of his
+secret--for Kate was intensely aware that he would never again willingly
+confess himself--he would marry a girl who trusted him and leaned on him,
+as she, Kate Orme--the earlier Kate Orme--had done but two days since! And
+with this deception between them their child would be born: born to an
+inheritance of secret weakness, a vice of the moral fibre, as it might be
+born with some hidden physical taint which would destroy it before the
+cause should be detected.... Well, and what of it? Was she to hold herself
+responsible? Were not thousands of children born with some such unsuspected
+taint?... Ah, but if here was one that she could save? What if she, who had
+had so exquisite a vision of wifehood, should reconstruct from its ruins
+this vision of protecting maternity--if her love for her lover should be,
+not lost, but transformed, enlarged, into this passion of charity for his
+race? If she might expiate and redeem his fault by becoming a refuge from
+its consequences? Before this strange extension of her love all the old
+limitations seemed to fall. Something had cleft the surface of self, and
+there welled up the mysterious primal influences, the sacrificial instinct
+of her sex, a passion of spiritual motherhood that made her long to fling
+herself between the unborn child and its fate....
+
+She never knew, then or after, how she reached this mystic climax of
+effacement; she was only conscious, through her anguish, of that lift of
+the heart which made one of the saints declare that joy was the inmost core
+of sorrow. For it was indeed a kind of joy she felt, if old names must
+serve for such new meanings; a surge of liberating faith in life, the old
+_credo quia absurdum_ which is the secret cry of all supreme
+endeavour.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+I
+
+"Does it look nice, mother?"
+
+Dick Peyton met her with the question on the threshold, drawing her gaily
+into the little square room, and adding, with a laugh with a blush in it:
+"You know she's an uncommonly noticing person, and little things tell with
+her."
+
+He swung round on his heel to follow his mother's smiling inspection of the
+apartment.
+
+"She seems to have _all_ the qualities," Mrs. Denis Peyton remarked,
+as her circuit finally brought her to the prettily appointed tea-table.
+
+"_All_," he declared, taking the sting from her emphasis by his prompt
+adoption of it. Dick had always had a wholesome way of thus appropriating
+to his own use such small shafts of maternal irony as were now and then
+aimed at him.
+
+Kate Peyton laughed and loosened her furs. "It looks charmingly," she
+pronounced, ending her survey by an approach to the window, which gave,
+far below, the oblique perspective of a long side-street leading to Fifth
+Avenue.
+
+The high-perched room was Dick Peyton's private office, a retreat
+partitioned off from the larger enclosure in which, under a north light
+and on a range of deal tables, three or four young draughtsmen were busily
+engaged in elaborating his architectural projects. The outer door of the
+office bore the sign: _Peyton and Gill, Architects_; but Gill was
+an utilitarian person, as unobtrusive as his name, who contented himself
+with a desk in the workroom, and left Dick to lord it alone in the small
+apartment to which clients were introduced, and where the social part of
+the business was carried on.
+
+It was to serve, on this occasion, as the scene of a tea designed, as Kate
+Peyton was vividly aware, to introduce a certain young lady to the scene of
+her son's labours. Mrs. Peyton had been hearing a great deal lately about
+Clemence Verney. Dick was naturally expansive, and his close intimacy with
+his mother--an intimacy fostered by his father's early death--if it had
+suffered some natural impairment in his school and college days, had of
+late been revived by four years of comradeship in Paris, where Mrs. Peyton,
+in a tiny apartment of the Rue de Varennes, had kept house for him during
+his course of studies at the Beaux Arts. There were indeed not lacking
+critics of her own sex who accused Kate Peyton of having figured too
+largely in her son's life; of having failed to efface herself at a period
+when it is agreed that young men are best left free to try conclusions with
+the world. Mrs. Peyton, had she cared to defend herself, might have said
+that Dick, if communicative, was not impressionable, and that the closeness
+of texture which enabled him to throw off her sarcasms preserved him also
+from the infiltration of her prejudices. He was certainly no knight of the
+apron-string, but a seemingly resolute and self-sufficient young man, whose
+romantic friendship with his mother had merely served to throw a veil of
+suavity over the hard angles of youth.
+
+But Mrs. Peyton's real excuse was after all one which she would never have
+given. It was because her intimacy with her son was the one need of her
+life that she had, with infinite tact and discretion, but with equal
+persistency, clung to every step of his growth, dissembling herself,
+adapting herself, rejuvenating herself in the passionate effort to be
+always within reach, but never in the way.
+
+Denis Peyton had died after seven years of marriage, when his boy was
+barely six. During those seven years he had managed to squander the best
+part of the fortune he had inherited from his step-brother; so that, at his
+death, his widow and son were left with a scant competence. Mrs. Peyton,
+during her husband's life, had apparently made no effort to restrain his
+expenditure. She had even been accused by those judicious persons who are
+always ready with an estimate of their neighbours' motives, of having
+encouraged poor Denis's improvidence for the gratification of her own
+ambition. She had in fact, in the early days of their marriage, tried to
+launch him in politics, and had perhaps drawn somewhat heavily on his funds
+in the first heat of the contest; but the experiment ending in failure, as
+Denis Peyton's experiments were apt to end, she had made no farther demands
+on his exchequer. Her personal tastes were in fact unusually simple, but
+her outspoken indifference to money was not, in the opinion of her critics,
+designed to act as a check upon her husband; and it resulted in leaving
+her, at his death, in straits from which it was impossible not to deduce a
+moral.
+
+Her small means, and the care of the boy's education, served the widow as
+a pretext for secluding herself in a socially remote suburb, where it was
+inferred that she was expiating, on queer food and in ready-made boots, her
+rash defiance of fortune. Whether or not Mrs. Peyton's penance took this
+form, she hoarded her substance to such good purpose that she was not only
+able to give Dick the best of schooling, but to propose, on his leaving
+Harvard, that he should prolong his studies by another four years at the
+Beaux Arts. It had been the joy of her life that her boy had early shown
+a marked bent for a special line of work. She could not have borne to see
+him reduced to a mere money-getter, yet she was not sorry that their small
+means forbade the cultivation of an ornamental leisure. In his college days
+Dick had troubled her by a superabundance of tastes, a restless flitting
+from one form of artistic expression to another. Whatever art he enjoyed
+he wished to practise, and he passed from music to painting, from painting
+to architecture, with an ease which seemed to his mother to indicate lack
+of purpose rather than excess of talent. She had observed that these
+changes were usually due, not to self-criticism, but to some external
+discouragement. Any depreciation of his work was enough to convince him
+of the uselessness of pursuing that special form of art, and the reaction
+produced the immediate conviction that he was really destined to shine in
+some other line of work. He had thus swung from one calling to another
+till, at the end of his college career, his mother took the decisive step
+of transplanting him to the Beaux Arts, in the hope that a definite course
+of study, combined with the stimulus of competition, might fix his wavering
+aptitudes. The result justified her expectation, and their four years in
+the Rue de Varennes yielded the happiest confirmation of her belief in
+him. Dick's ability was recognized not only by his mother, but by his
+professors. He was engrossed in his work, and his first successes developed
+his capacity for application. His mother's only fear was that praise was
+still too necessary to him. She was uncertain how long his ambition would
+sustain him in the face of failure. He gave lavishly where he was sure
+of a return; but it remained to be seen if he were capable of production
+without recognition. She had brought him up in a wholesome scorn of
+material rewards, and nature seemed, in this direction, to have seconded
+her training. He was genuinely indifferent to money, and his enjoyment
+of beauty was of that happy sort which does not generate the wish for
+possession. As long as the inner eye had food for contemplation, he cared
+very little for the deficiencies in his surroundings; or, it might rather
+be said, he felt, in the sum-total of beauty about him, an ownership of
+appreciation that left him free from the fret of personal desire. Mrs.
+Peyton had cultivated to excess this disregard of material conditions; but
+she now began to ask herself whether, in so doing, she had not laid too
+great a strain on a temperament naturally exalted. In guarding against
+other tendencies she had perhaps fostered in him too exclusively those
+qualities which circumstances had brought to an unusual development in
+herself. His enthusiasms and his disdains were alike too unqualified
+for that happy mean of character which is the best defence against the
+surprises of fortune. If she had taught him to set an exaggerated value on
+ideal rewards, was not that but a shifting of the danger-point on which her
+fears had always hung? She trembled sometimes to think how little love and
+a lifelong vigilance had availed in the deflecting of inherited tendencies.
+
+Her fears were in a measure confirmed by the first two years of their life
+in New York, and the opening of his career as a professional architect.
+Close on the easy triumphs of his studentships there came the chilling
+reaction of public indifference. Dick, on his return from Paris, had formed
+a partnership with an architect who had had several years of practical
+training in a New York office; but the quiet and industrious Gill, though
+he attracted to the new firm a few small jobs which overflowed from the
+business of his former employer, was not able to infect the public with
+his own faith in Peyton's talents, and it was trying to a genius who felt
+himself capable of creating palaces to have to restrict his efforts to
+the building of suburban cottages or the planning of cheap alterations in
+private houses.
+
+Mrs. Peyton expended all the ingenuities of tenderness in keeping up
+her son's courage; and she was seconded in the task by a friend whose
+acquaintance Dick had made at the Beaux Arts, and who, two years before
+the Peytons, had returned to New York to start on his own career as an
+architect. Paul Darrow was a young man full of crude seriousness, who,
+after a youth of struggling work and study in his native northwestern
+state, had won a scholarship which sent him abroad for a course at the
+Beaux Arts. His two years there coincided with the first part of Dick's
+residence, and Darrow's gifts had at once attracted the younger student.
+Dick was unstinted in his admiration of rival talent, and Mrs. Peyton,
+who was romantically given to the cultivation of such generosities, had
+seconded his enthusiasm by the kindest offers of hospitality to the young
+student. Darrow thus became the grateful frequenter of their little
+_salon_; and after their return to New York the intimacy between
+the young men was renewed, though Mrs. Peyton found it more difficult
+to coax Dick's friend to her New York drawing-room than to the informal
+surroundings of the Rue de Varennes. There, no doubt, secluded and absorbed
+in her son's work, she had seemed to Darrow almost a fellow-student; but
+seen among her own associates she became once more the woman of fashion,
+divided from him by the whole breadth of her ease and his awkwardness.
+Mrs. Peyton, whose tact had divined the cause of his estrangement, would
+not for an instant let it affect the friendship of the two young men. She
+encouraged Dick to frequent Darrow, in whom she divined a persistency of
+effort, an artistic self-confidence, in curious contrast to his social
+hesitancies. The example of his obstinate capacity for work was just the
+influence her son needed, and if Darrow would not come to them she insisted
+that Dick must seek him out, must never let him think that any social
+discrepancy could affect a friendship based on deeper things. Dick, who had
+all the loyalties, and who took an honest pride in his friend's growing
+success, needed no urging to maintain the intimacy; and his copious reports
+of midnight colloquies in Darrow's lodgings showed Mrs. Peyton that she had
+a strong ally in her invisible friend.
+
+It had been, therefore, somewhat of a shock to learn in the course of time
+that Darrow's influence was being shared, if not counteracted, by that of a
+young lady in whose honour Dick was now giving his first professional tea.
+Mrs. Peyton had heard a great deal about Miss Clemence Verney, first from
+the usual purveyors of such information, and more recently from her son,
+who, probably divining that rumour had been before him, adopted his usual
+method of disarming his mother by taking her into his confidence. But,
+ample as her information was, it remained perplexing and contradictory, and
+even her own few meetings with the girl had not helped her to a definite
+opinion. Miss Verney, in conduct and ideas, was patently of the "new
+school": a young woman of feverish activities and broad-cast judgments,
+whose very versatility made her hard to define. Mrs. Peyton was shrewd
+enough to allow for the accidents of environment; what she wished to get
+at was the residuum of character beneath Miss Verney's shifting surface.
+
+"It looks charmingly," Mrs. Peyton repeated, giving a loosening touch to
+the chrysanthemums in a tall vase on her son's desk.
+
+Dick laughed, and glanced at his watch.
+
+"They won't be here for another quarter of an hour. I think I'll tell Gill
+to clean out the work-room before they come."
+
+"Are we to see the drawings for the competition?" his mother asked.
+
+He shook his head smilingly. "Can't--I've asked one or two of the Beaux
+Arts fellows, you know; and besides, old Darrow's actually coming."
+
+"Impossible!" Mrs. Peyton exclaimed.
+
+"He swore he would last night." Dick laughed again, with a tinge of
+self-satisfaction. "I've an idea he wants to see Miss Verney."
+
+"Ah," his mother murmured. There was a pause before she added: "Has Darrow
+really gone in for this competition?"
+
+"Rather! I should say so! He's simply working himself to the bone."
+
+Mrs. Peyton sat revolving her muff on a meditative hand; at length she
+said: "I'm not sure I think it quite nice of him."
+
+Her son halted before her with an incredulous stare. "_Mother_!" he
+exclaimed.
+
+The rebuke sent a blush to her forehead. "Well--considering your
+friendship--and everything."
+
+"Everything? What do you mean by everything? The fact that he had more
+ability than I have and is therefore more likely to succeed? The fact that
+he needs the money and the success a deuced sight more than any of us? Is
+that the reason you think he oughtn't to have entered? Mother! I never
+heard you say an ungenerous thing before."
+
+The blush deepened to crimson, and she rose with a nervous laugh. "It
+_was_ ungenerous," she conceded. "I suppose I'm jealous for you. I
+hate these competitions!"
+
+Her son smiled reassuringly. "You needn't. I'm not afraid: I think I shall
+pull it off this time. In fact, Paul's the only man I'm afraid of--I'm
+always afraid of Paul--but the mere fact that he's in the thing is a
+tremendous stimulus."
+
+His mother continued to study him with an anxious tenderness. "Have you
+worked out the whole scheme? Do you _see_ it yet?"
+
+"Oh, broadly, yes. There's a gap here and there--a hazy bit, rather--it's
+the hardest problem I've ever had to tackle; but then it's my biggest
+opportunity, and I've simply _got_ to pull it off!"
+
+Mrs. Peyton sat silent, considering his flushed face and illumined eye,
+which were rather those of the victor nearing the goal than of the runner
+just beginning the race. She remembered something that Darrow had once said
+of him: "Dick always sees the end too soon."
+
+"You haven't too much time left," she murmured.
+
+"Just a week. But I shan't go anywhere after this. I shall renounce the
+world." He glanced smilingly at the festal tea-table and the embowered
+desk. "When I next appear, it will either be with my heel on Paul's
+neck--poor old Paul--or else--or else--being dragged lifeless from the
+arena!"
+
+His mother nervously took up the laugh with which he ended. "Oh, not
+lifeless," she said.
+
+His face clouded. "Well, maimed for life, then," he muttered.
+
+Mrs. Peyton made no answer. She knew how much hung on the possibility of
+his winning the competition which for weeks past had engrossed him. It was
+a design for the new museum of sculpture, for which the city had recently
+voted half a million. Dick's taste ran naturally to the grandiose, and the
+erection of public buildings had always been the object of his ambition.
+Here was an unmatched opportunity, and he knew that, in a competition of
+the kind, the newest man had as much chance of success as the firm of most
+established reputation, since every competitor entered on his own merits,
+the designs being submitted to a jury of architects who voted on them
+without knowing the names of the contestants. Dick, characteristically,
+was not afraid of the older firms; indeed, as he had told his mother, Paul
+Darrow was the only rival he feared. Mrs. Peyton knew that, to a certain
+point, self-confidence was a good sign; but somehow her son's did not
+strike her as being of the right substance--it seemed to have no dimension
+but extent. Her fears were complicated by a suspicion that, under his
+professional eagerness for success, lay the knowledge that Miss Verney's
+favour hung on the victory. It was that, perhaps, which gave a feverish
+touch to his ambition; and Mrs. Peyton, surveying the future from the
+height of her material apprehensions, divined that the situation depended
+mainly on the girl's view of it. She would have given a great deal to know
+Clemence Verney's conception of success.
+
+
+II
+
+Miss Verney, when she presently appeared, in the wake of the impersonal
+and exclamatory young married woman who served as a background to her
+vivid outline, seemed competent to impart at short notice any information
+required of her. She had never struck Mrs. Peyton as more alert and
+efficient. A melting grace of line and colour tempered her edges with the
+charming haze of youth; but it occurred to her critic that she might emerge
+from this morning mist as a dry and metallic old woman.
+
+If Miss Verney suspected a personal application in Dick's hospitality, it
+did not call forth in her the usual tokens of self-consciousness. Her
+manner may have been a shade more vivid than usual, but she preserved all
+her bright composure of glance and speech, so that one guessed, under the
+rapid dispersal of words, an undisturbed steadiness of perception. She
+was lavishly but not indiscriminately interested in the evidences of her
+host's industry, and as the other guests assembled, straying with vague
+ejaculations through the labyrinth of scale drawings and blue prints, Mrs.
+Peyton noted that Miss Verney alone knew what these symbols stood for.
+
+To his visitors' requests to be shown his plans for the competition,
+Peyton had opposed a laughing refusal, enforced by the presence of two
+fellow-architects, young men with lingering traces of the Beaux Arts in
+their costume and vocabulary, who stood about in Gavarni attitudes and
+dazzled the ladies by allusions to fenestration and entasis. The party had
+already drifted back to the tea-table when a hesitating knock announced
+Darrow's approach. He entered with his usual air of having blundered in
+by mistake, embarrassed by his hat and great-coat, and thrown into deeper
+confusion by the necessity of being introduced to the ladies grouped about
+the urn. To the men he threw a gruff nod of fellowship, and Dick having
+relieved him of his encumbrances, he retreated behind the shelter of Mrs.
+Peyton's welcome. The latter judiciously gave him time to recover, and when
+she turned to him he was engaged in a surreptitious inspection of Miss
+Verney, whose dusky slenderness, relieved against the bare walls of the
+office, made her look like a young St. John of Donatello's. The girl
+returned his look with one of her clear glances, and the group having
+presently broken up again, Mrs. Peyton saw that she had drifted to Darrow's
+side. The visitors at length wandered back to the work-room to see a
+portfolio of Dick's water-colours; but Mrs. Peyton remained seated behind
+the urn, listening to the interchange of talk through the open door while
+she tried to coordinate her impressions.
+
+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 to-night 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 papers. 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.
+
+Mrs. Peyton looked anxiously at her son. "Is there no one who can do this
+for you? He must have had a clerk or some one who knows about his work."
+
+Dick shook his head. "Not lately. He hasn't had much to do this winter, and
+these last months he had chucked everything to work alone over his plans."
+
+The word brought a faint colour to Mrs. Peyton's cheek. It was the first
+allusion that either of them had made to Darrow's bequest.
+
+"Oh, of course you must do all you can," she murmured, turning alone into
+the house.
+
+The emotions of the morning had stirred her deeply, and she sat at home
+during the day, letting her mind dwell, in a kind of retrospective piety,
+on the thought of poor Darrow's devotion. She had given him too little
+time while he lived, had acquiesced too easily in his growing habits of
+seclusion; and she felt it as a proof of insensibility that she had not
+been more closely drawn to the one person who had loved Dick as she loved
+him. The evidence of that love, as shown in Darrow's letter, filled her
+with a vain compunction. The very extravagance of his offer lent it a
+deeper pathos. It was wonderful that, even in the urgency of affection, a
+man of his almost morbid rectitude should have overlooked the restrictions
+of professional honour, should have implied the possibility of his friend's
+overlooking them. It seemed to make his sacrifice the more complete that it
+had, unconsciously, taken the form of a subtle temptation.
+
+The last word arrested Mrs. Peyton's thoughts. A temptation? To whom? Not,
+surely, to one capable, as her son was capable, of rising to the height
+of his friend's devotion. The offer, to Dick, would mean simply, as it
+meant to her, the last touching expression of an inarticulate fidelity:
+the utterance of a love which at last had found its formula. Mrs. Peyton
+dismissed as morbid any other view of the case. She was annoyed with
+herself for supposing that Dick could be ever so remotely affected by the
+possibility at which poor Darrow's renunciation hinted. The nature of
+the offer removed it from practical issues to the idealizing region of
+sentiment.
+
+Mrs. Peyton had been sitting alone with these thoughts for the greater part
+of the afternoon, and dusk was falling when Dick entered the drawing-room.
+In the dim light, with his pallour heightened by the sombre effect of
+his mourning, he came upon her almost startlingly, with a revival of
+some long-effaced impression which, for a moment, gave her the sense of
+struggling among shadows. She did not, at first, know what had produced the
+effect; then she saw that it was his likeness to his father.
+
+"Well--is it over?" she asked, as he threw himself into a chair without
+speaking.
+
+"Yes: I've looked through everything." He leaned back, crossing his hands
+behind his head, and gazing past her with a look of utter lassitude.
+
+She paused a moment, and then said tentatively: "to-morrow you will be able
+to go back to your work."
+
+"Oh--my work," he exclaimed, as if to brush aside an ill-timed pleasantry.
+
+"Are you too tired?"
+
+"No." He rose and began to wander up and down the room. "I'm not
+tired.--Give me some tea, will you?" He paused before her while she poured
+the cup, and then, without taking it, turned away to light a cigarette.
+
+"Surely there is still time?" she suggested, with her eyes on him.
+
+"Time? To finish my plans? Oh, yes--there's time. But they're not worth
+it."
+
+"Not worth it?" She started up, and then dropped back into her seat,
+ashamed of having betrayed her anxiety. "They are worth as much as they
+were last week," she said with an attempt at cheerfulness.
+
+"Not to me," he returned. "I hadn't seen Darrow's then."
+
+There was a long silence. Mrs. Peyton sat with her eyes fixed on her
+clasped hands, and her son paced the room restlessly.
+
+"Are they so wonderful?" she asked at length.
+
+"Yes."
+
+She paused again, and then said, lifting a tremulous glance to his face:
+"That makes his offer all the more beautiful."
+
+Dick was lighting another cigarette, and his face was turned from her.
+"Yes--I suppose so," he said in a low tone.
+
+"They were quite finished, he told me," she continued, unconsciously
+dropping her voice to the pitch of his.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then they will be entered, I suppose?"
+
+"Of course--why not?" he answered almost sharply.
+
+"Shall you have time to attend to all that and to finish yours too?"
+
+"Oh, I suppose so. I've told you it isn't a question of time. I see now
+that mine are not worth bothering with."
+
+She rose and approached him, laying her hands on his shoulders. "You are
+tired and unstrung; how can you judge? Why not let me look at both designs
+to-morrow?"
+
+Under her gaze he flushed abruptly and drew back with a half-impatient
+gesture.
+
+"Oh, I'm afraid that wouldn't help me; you'd be sure to think mine best,"
+he said with a laugh.
+
+"But if I could give you good reasons?" she pressed him.
+
+He took her hand, as if ashamed of his impatience. "Dear mother, if you had
+any reasons their mere existence would prove that they were bad."
+
+His mother did not return his smile. "You won't let me see the two designs
+then?" she said with a faint tinge of insistence.
+
+"Oh, of course--if you want to--if you only won't talk about it now! Can't
+you see that I'm pretty nearly dead-beat?" he burst out uncontrollably; and
+as she stood silent, he added with a weary fall in his voice, "I think I'll
+go upstairs and see if I can't get a nap before dinner."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though they had separated upon the assurance that she should see the two
+designs if she wished it, Mrs. Peyton knew they would not be shown to her.
+Dick, indeed, would not again deny her request; but had he not reckoned on
+the improbability of her renewing it? All night she lay confronted by that
+question. The situation shaped itself before her with that hallucinating
+distinctness which belongs to the midnight vision. She knew now why Dick
+had suddenly reminded her of his father: had she not once before seen the
+same thought moving behind the same eyes? She was sure it had occurred to
+Dick to use Darrow's drawings. As she lay awake in the darkness she could
+hear him, long after midnight, pacing the floor overhead: she held her
+breath, listening to the recurring beat of his foot, which seemed that of
+an imprisoned spirit revolving wearily in the cage of the same thought. She
+felt in every fibre that a crisis in her son's life had been reached, that
+the act now before him would have a determining effect on his whole future.
+The circumstances of her past had raised to clairvoyance her natural
+insight into human motive, had made of her a moral barometer responding to
+the faintest fluctuations of atmosphere, and years of anxious meditation
+had familiarized her with the form which her son's temptations were likely
+to take. The peculiar misery of her situation was that she could not,
+except indirectly, put this intuition, this foresight, at his service.
+It was a part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real
+counsellor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not
+become a part of the moral tissues. Love such as hers had a great office,
+the office of preparation and direction; but it must know how to hold its
+hand and keep its counsel, how to attend upon its object as an invisible
+influence rather than as an active interference.
+
+All this Kate Peyton had told herself again and again, during those hours
+of anxious calculation in which she had tried to cast Dick's horoscope; but
+not in her moments of most fantastic foreboding had she figured so cruel a
+test of her courage. If her prayers for him had taken precise shape, she
+might have asked that he should be spared the spectacular, the dramatic
+appeal to his will-power: that his temptations should slip by him in a dull
+disguise. She had secured him against all ordinary forms of baseness; the
+vulnerable point lay higher, in that region of idealizing egotism which is
+the seat of life in such natures.
+
+Years of solitary foresight gave her mind a singular alertness in dealing
+with such possibilities. She saw at once that the peril of the situation
+lay in the minimum of risk it involved. Darrow had employed no assistant in
+working out his plans for the competition, and his secluded life made it
+almost certain that he had not shown them to any one, and that she and Dick
+alone knew them to have been completed. Moreover, it was a part of Dick's
+duty to examine the contents of his friend's office, and in doing this
+nothing would be easier than to possess himself of the drawings and make
+use of any part of them that might serve his purpose. He had Darrow's
+authority for doing so; and though the act involved a slight breach of
+professional probity, might not his friend's wishes be invoked as a secret
+justification? Mrs. Peyton found herself almost hating poor Darrow for
+having been the unconscious instrument of her son's temptation. But what
+right had she, after all, to suspect Dick of considering, even for a
+moment, the act of which she was so ready to accuse him? His unwillingness
+to let her see the drawings might have been the accidental result of
+lassitude and discouragement. He was tired and troubled, and she had chosen
+the wrong moment to make the request. His want of readiness might even be
+due to the wish to conceal from her how far his friend had surpassed him.
+She knew his sensitiveness on this point, and reproached herself for not
+having foreseen it. But her own arguments failed to convince her. Deep
+beneath her love for her boy and her faith in him there lurked a nameless
+doubt. She could hardly now, in looking back, define the impulse upon which
+she had married Denis Peyton: she knew only that the deeps of her nature
+had been loosened, and that she had been borne forward on their current
+to the very fate from which her heart recoiled. But if in one sense her
+marriage remained a problem, there was another in which her motherhood
+seemed to solve it. She had never lost the sense of having snatched her
+child from some dim peril which still lurked and hovered; and he became
+more closely hers with every effort of her vigilant love. For the act
+of rescue had not been accomplished once and for all in the moment
+of immolation: it had not been by a sudden stroke of heroism, but by
+ever-renewed and indefatigable effort, that she had built up for him the
+miraculous shelter of her love. And now that it stood there, a hallowed
+refuge against failure, she could not even set a light in the pane, but
+must let him grope his way to it unaided.
+
+
+V
+
+Mrs. Peyton's midnight musings summed themselves up in the conclusion that
+the next few hours would end her uncertainty. She felt the day to be
+decisive. If Dick offered to show her the drawings, her fears would be
+proved groundless; if he avoided the subject, they were justified.
+
+She dressed early in order not to miss him at breakfast; but as she entered
+the dining-room the parlour-maid told her that Mr. Peyton had overslept
+himself, and had rung to have his breakfast sent upstairs. Was it a pretext
+to avoid her? She was vexed at her own readiness to see a portent in the
+simplest incident; but while she blushed at her doubts she let them govern
+her. She left the dining-room door open, determined not to miss him if
+he came downstairs while she was at breakfast; then she went back to the
+drawing-room and sat down at her writing-table, trying to busy herself with
+some accounts while she listened for his step. Here too she had left the
+door open; but presently even this slight departure from her daily usage
+seemed a deviation from the passive attitude she had adopted, and she rose
+and shut the door. She knew that she could still hear his step on the
+stairs--he had his father's quick swinging gait--but as she sat listening,
+and vainly trying to write, the closed door seemed to symbolize a refusal
+to share in his trial, a hardening of herself against his need of her. What
+if he should come down intending to speak, and should be turned from his
+purpose? Slighter obstacles have deflected the course of events in those
+indeterminate moments when the soul floats between two tides. She sprang
+up quickly, and as her hand touched the latch she heard his step on the
+stairs.
+
+When he entered the drawing-room she had regained the writing-table and
+could lift a composed face to his. He came in hurriedly, yet with a kind of
+reluctance beneath his haste: again it was his father's step. She smiled,
+but looked away from him as he approached her; she seemed to be re-living
+her own past as one re-lives things in the distortion of fever.
+
+"Are you off already?" she asked, glancing at the hat in his hand.
+
+"Yes; I'm late as it is. I overslept myself." He paused and looked vaguely
+about the room. "Don't expect me till late--don't wait dinner for me."
+
+She stirred impulsively. "Dick, you're overworking--you'll make yourself
+ill."
+
+"Nonsense. I'm as fit as ever this morning. Don't be imagining things."
+
+He dropped his habitual kiss on her forehead, and turned to go. On the
+threshold he paused, and she felt that something in him sought her and then
+drew back. "Good-bye," he called to her as the door closed on him.
+
+She sat down and tried to survey the situation divested of her midnight
+fears. He had not referred to her wish to see the drawings: but what did
+the omission signify? Might he not have forgotten her request? Was she
+not forcing the most trivial details to fit in with her apprehensions?
+Unfortunately for her own reassurance, she knew that her familiarity with
+Dick's processes was based on such minute observation, and that, to such
+intimacy as theirs, no indications were trivial. She was as certain as if
+he had spoken, that when he had left the house that morning he was weighing
+the possibility of using Darrow's drawings, of supplementing his own
+incomplete design from the fulness of his friend's invention. And with a
+bitter pang she divined that he was sorry he had shown her Darrow's letter.
+
+It was impossible to remain face to face with such conjectures, and though
+she had given up all her engagements during the few days since Darrow's
+death, she now took refuge in the thought of a concert which was to take
+place at a friend's house that morning. The music-room, when she entered,
+was thronged with acquaintances, and she found transient relief in that
+dispersal of attention which makes society an anesthetic for some forms
+of wretchedness. Contact with the pressure of busy indifferent life often
+gives remoteness to questions which have clung as close as the flesh to the
+bone; and if Mrs. Peyton did not find such complete release, she at least
+interposed between herself and her anxiety the obligation to dissemble it.
+But the relief was only momentary, and when the first bars of the overture
+turned from her the smiles of recognition among which she had tried to lose
+herself, she felt a deeper sense of isolation. The music, which at another
+time would have swept her away on some rich current of emotion, now seemed
+to island her in her own thoughts, to create an artificial solitude in
+which she found herself more immitigably face to face with her fears. The
+silence, the _recueillement_, about her gave resonance to the inner
+voices, lucidity to the inner vision, till she seemed enclosed in a
+luminous empty horizon against which every possibility took the sharp edge
+of accomplished fact. With relentless precision the course of events was
+unrolled before her: she saw Dick yielding to his opportunity, snatching
+victory from dishonour, winning love, happiness and success in the act by
+which he lost himself. It was all so simple, so easy, so inevitable, that
+she felt the futility of struggling or hoping against it. He would win the
+competition, would marry Miss Verney, would press on to achievement through
+the opening which the first success had made for him.
+
+As Mrs. Peyton reached this point in her forecast, she found her outward
+gaze arrested by the face of the young lady who so dominated her inner
+vision. Miss Verney, a few rows distant, sat intent upon the music, in that
+attitude of poised motion which was her nearest approach to repose. Her
+slender brown profile with its breezy hair, her quick eye, and the lips
+which seemed to listen as well as speak, all betokened to Mrs. Peyton a
+nature through which the obvious energies blew free, a bare open stretch
+of consciousness without shelter for tenderer growths. She shivered to
+think of Dick's frail scruples exposed to those rustling airs. And then,
+suddenly, a new thought struck her. What if she might turn this force to
+her own use, make it serve, unconsciously to Dick, as the means of his
+deliverance? Hitherto she had assumed that her son's worst danger lay in
+the chance of his confiding his difficulty to Clemence Verney; and she
+had, in her own past, a precedent which made her think such a confidence
+not unlikely. If he did carry his scruples to the girl, she argued, the
+latter's imperviousness, her frank inability to understand them, would have
+the effect of dispelling them like mist; and he was acute enough to know
+this and profit by it. So she had hitherto reasoned; but now the girl's
+presence seemed to clarify her perceptions, and she told herself that
+something in Dick's nature, something which she herself had put there,
+would resist this short cut to safety, would make him take the more
+tortuous way to his goal rather than gain it through the privacies of the
+heart he loved. For she had lifted him thus far above his father, that it
+would be a disenchantment to him to find that Clemence Verney did not share
+his scruples. On this much, his mother now exultingly felt, she could count
+in her passive struggle for supremacy. No, he would never, never tell
+Clemence Verney--and his one hope, his sure salvation, therefore lay in
+some one else's telling her.
+
+The excitement of this discovery had nearly, in mid-concert, swept Mrs.
+Peyton from her seat to the girl's side. Fearing to miss the latter in
+the throng at the entrance, she slipped out during the last number and,
+lingering in the farther drawing-room, let the dispersing audience drift
+her in Miss Verney's direction. The girl shone sympathetically on her
+approach, and in a moment they had detached themselves from the crowd and
+taken refuge in the perfumed emptiness of the conservatory.
+
+The girl, whose sensations were always easily set in motion, had at first a
+good deal to say of the music, for which she claimed, on her hearer's part,
+an active show of approval or dissent; but this dismissed, she turned a
+melting face on Mrs. Peyton and said with one of her rapid modulations of
+tone: "I was so sorry about poor Mr. Darrow."
+
+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?"
+
+"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.
+
+"Mother! I knew you'd be waiting for me!" He had her on his breast now, and
+his kisses were in her hair. "I've always said you knew everything that was
+happening to me, and now you've guessed that I wanted you to-night."
+
+She was struggling faintly against the dear endearments. "What _has_
+happened?" she murmured, drawing back for a dazzled look at him.
+
+He had drawn her to the sofa, had dropped beside her, regaining his hold of
+her in the boyish need that his happiness should be touched and handled.
+
+"My engagement has happened!" he cried out to her. "You stupid dear, do you
+need to be told?"
+
+
+VII
+
+She had indeed needed to be told: the surprise was complete and
+overwhelming. She sat silent under it, her hands trembling in his, till the
+blood mounted to his face and she felt his confident grasp relax.
+
+"You didn't guess it, then?" he exclaimed, starting up and moving away from
+her.
+
+"No; I didn't guess it," she confessed in a dead-level voice.
+
+He stood above her, half challenging, half defensive. "And you haven't a
+word to say to me? Mother!" he adjured her.
+
+She rose too, putting her arms about him with a kiss. "Dick! Dear Dick!"
+she murmured.
+
+"She imagines you don't like her; she says she's always felt it. And yet
+she owns you've been delightful, that you've tried to make friends with
+her. And I thought you knew how much it would mean to me, just now, to have
+this uncertainty over, and that you'd actually been trying to help me, to
+put in a good word for me. I thought it was you who had made her decide."
+
+"I?"
+
+"By your talk with her the other day. She told me of your talk with her."
+
+His mother's hands slipped from his shoulders and she sank back into her
+seat. She felt the cruelty of her silence, but only an inarticulate murmur
+found a way to her lips. Before speaking she must clear a space in the
+suffocating rush of her sensations. For the moment she could only repeat
+inwardly that Clemence Verney had yielded before the final test, and that
+she herself was somehow responsible for this fresh entanglement of fate.
+For she saw in a flash how the coils of circumstance had tightened; and as
+her mind cleared it was filled with the perception that this, precisely,
+was what the girl intended, that this was why she had conferred the crown
+before the victory. By pledging herself to Dick she had secured his pledge
+in return: had put him on his honour in a cynical inversion of the term.
+Kate saw the succession of events spread out before her like a map, and the
+astuteness of the girl's policy frightened her. Miss Verney had conducted
+the campaign like a strategist. She had frankly owned that her interest in
+Dick's future depended on his capacity for success, and in order to key him
+up to his first achievement she had given him a foretaste of its results.
+
+So much was almost immediately clear to Mrs. Peyton; but in a moment her
+inferences had carried her a point farther. For it was now plain to her
+that Miss Verney had not risked so much without first trying to gain her
+point at less cost: that if she had had to give herself as a prize, it was
+because no other bribe had been sufficient. This then, as the mother saw
+with a throb of hope, meant that Dick, who since Darrow's death had held
+to his purpose unwaveringly, had been deflected from it by the first hint
+of Clemence Verney's connivance. Kate had not miscalculated: things had
+happened as she had foreseen. In the light of the girl's approval his act
+had taken an odious look. He had recoiled from it, and it was to revive his
+flagging courage that she had had to promise herself, to take him in the
+meshes of her surrender.
+
+Kate, looking up, saw above her the young perplexity of her boy's face, the
+suspended happiness waiting to brim over. With a fresh touch of misery she
+said to herself that this was his hour, his one irrecoverable moment, and
+that she was darkening it by her silence. Her memory went back to the same
+hour in her own life: she could feel its heat in her pulses still. What
+right had she to stand in Dick's light? Who was she to decide between his
+code and hers? She put out her hand and drew him down to her.
+
+"She'll be the making of me, you know, mother," he said, as they leaned
+together. "She'll put new life in me--she'll help me get my second wind.
+Her talk is like a fresh breeze blowing away the fog in my head. I never
+knew any one who saw so straight to the heart of things, who had such a
+grip on values. She goes straight up to life and catches hold of it, and
+you simply can't make her let go."
+
+He got up and walked the length of the room; then he came back and stood
+smiling above his mother.
+
+"You know you and I are rather complicated people," he said. "We're always
+walking around things to get new views of them--we're always rearranging
+the furniture. And somehow she simplifies life so tremendously." He dropped
+down beside her with a deprecating laugh. "Not that I mean, dear, that it
+hasn't been good for me to argue things out with myself, as you've taught
+me to--only the man who stops to talk is apt to get shoved aside nowadays,
+and I don't believe Milton's archangels would have had much success in
+active business."
+
+He had begun in a strain of easy confidence, but as he went on she detected
+an effort to hold the note, she felt that his words were being poured out
+in a vain attempt to fill the silence which was deepening between them. She
+longed, in her turn, to pour something into that menacing void, to bridge
+it with a reconciling word or look; but her soul hung back, and she had to
+take refuge in a vague murmur of tenderness.
+
+"My boy! My boy!" she repeated; and he sat beside her without speaking,
+their hand-clasp alone spanning the distance which had widened between
+their thoughts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The engagement, as Kate subsequently learned, was not to be made known till
+later. Miss Verney had even stipulated that for the present there should
+be no recognition of it in her own family or in Dick's. She did not wish
+to interfere with his final work for the competition, and had made him
+promise, as he laughingly owned, that he would not see her again till the
+drawings were sent in. His mother noticed that he made no other allusion to
+his work; but when he bade her good-night he added that he might not see
+her the next morning, as he had to go to the office early. She took this as
+a hint that he wished to be left alone, and kept her room the next day till
+the closing door told her that he was out of the house.
+
+She herself had waked early, and it seemed to her that the day was already
+old when she came downstairs. Never had the house appeared so empty. Even
+in Dick's longest absences something of his presence had always hung about
+the rooms: a fine dust of memories and associations, which wanted only the
+evocation of her thought to float into a palpable semblance of him. But now
+he seemed to have taken himself quite away, to have broken every fibre by
+which their lives had hung together. Where the sense of him had been there
+was only a deeper emptiness: she felt as if a strange man had gone out of
+her house.
+
+She wandered from room to room, aimlessly, trying to adjust herself to
+their solitude. She had known such loneliness before, in the years when
+most women's hearts are fullest; but that was long ago, and the solitude
+had after all been less complete, because of the sense that it might
+still be filled. Her son had come: her life had brimmed over; but now the
+tide ebbed again, and she was left gazing over a bare stretch of wasted
+years. Wasted! There was the mortal pang, the stroke from which there was
+no healing. Her faith and hope had been marsh-lights luring her to the
+wilderness, her love a vain edifice reared on shifting ground.
+
+In her round of the rooms she came at last to Dick's study upstairs. It was
+full of his boyhood: she could trace the history of his past in its quaint
+relics and survivals, in the school-books lingering on his crowded shelves,
+the school-photographs and college-trophies hung among his later treasures.
+All his successes and failures, his exaltations and inconsistencies, were
+recorded in the warm huddled heterogeneous room. Everywhere she saw the
+touch of her own hand, the vestiges of her own steps. It was she alone
+who held the clue to the labyrinth, who could thread a way through the
+confusions and contradictions of his past; and her soul rejected the
+thought that his future could ever escape from her. She dropped down into
+his shabby college armchair and hid her face in the papers on his desk.
+
+
+VIII
+
+The day dwelt in her memory as a long stretch of aimless hours: blind
+alleys of time that led up to a dead wall of inaction.
+
+Toward afternoon she remembered that she had promised to dine out and go to
+the opera. At first she felt that the contact of life would be unendurable;
+then she shrank from shutting herself up with her misery. In the end she
+let herself drift passively on the current of events, going through the
+mechanical routine of the day without much consciousness of what was
+happening.
+
+At twilight, as she sat in the drawing-room, the evening paper was brought
+in, and in glancing over it her eye fell on a paragraph which seemed
+printed in more vivid type than the rest. It was headed, _The New Museum
+of Sculpture_, and underneath she read: "The artists and architects
+selected to pass on the competitive designs for the new Museum will begin
+their sittings on Monday, and to-morrow is the last day on which designs may
+be sent in to the committee. Great interest is felt in the competition, as
+the conspicuous site chosen for the new building, and the exceptionally
+large sum voted by the city for its erection, offer an unusual field for
+the display of architectural ability."
+
+She leaned back, closing her eyes. It was as though a clock had struck,
+loud and inexorably, marking off some irrecoverable hour. She was seized
+by a sudden longing to seek Dick out, to fall on her knees and plead with
+him: it was one of those physical obsessions against which the body has to
+stiffen its muscles as well as the mind its thoughts. Once she even sprang
+up to ring for a cab; but she sank back again, breathing as if after a
+struggle, and gripping the arms of her chair to keep herself down.
+
+"I can only wait for him--only wait for him--" she heard herself say; and
+the words loosened the sobs in her throat.
+
+At length she went upstairs to dress for dinner. A ghostlike self looked
+back at her from her toilet-glass: she watched it performing the mechanical
+gestures of the toilet, dressing her, as it appeared, without help from
+her actual self. Each little act stood out sharply against the blurred
+background of her brain: when she spoke to her maid her voice sounded
+extraordinarily loud. Never had the house been so silent; or, stay--yes,
+once she had felt the same silence, once when Dick, in his school-days, had
+been ill of a fever, and she had sat up with him on the decisive night.
+The silence had been as deep and as terrible then; and as she dressed she
+had before her the vision of his room, of the cot in which he lay, of his
+restless head working a hole in the pillow, his face so pinched and alien
+under the familiar freckles. It might be his death-watch she was keeping:
+the doctors had warned her to be ready. And in the silence her soul had
+fought for her boy, her love had hung over him like wings, her abundant
+useless hateful life had struggled to force itself into his empty veins.
+And she had succeeded, she had saved him, she had poured her life into him;
+and in place of the strange child she had watched all night, at daylight
+she held her own boy to her breast.
+
+That night had once seemed to her the most dreadful of her life; but she
+knew now that it was one of the agonies which enrich, that the passion thus
+spent grows fourfold from its ashes. She could not have borne to keep this
+new vigil alone. She must escape from its sterile misery, must take refuge
+in other lives till she regained courage to face her own. At the opera,
+in the illumination of the first _entr'acte_, as she gazed about the
+house, wondering through the numb ache of her wretchedness how others could
+talk and smile and be indifferent, it seemed to her that all the jarring
+animation about her was suddenly focussed in the face of Clemence Verney.
+Miss Verney sat opposite, in the front of a crowded box, a box in which,
+continually, the black-coated background shifted and renewed itself.
+Mrs. Peyton felt a throb of anger at the girl's bright air of unconcern.
+She forgot that she too was talking, smiling, holding out her hand to
+newcomers, in a studied mimicry of life, while her real self played out
+its tragedy behind the scenes. Then it occurred to her that, to Clemence
+Verney, there was no tragedy in the situation. According to the girl's
+calculations, Dick was virtually certain of success; and unsuccess was to
+her the only conceivable disaster.
+
+All through the opera the sense of that opposing force, that negation of
+her own beliefs, burned itself into Mrs. Peyton's consciousness. The space
+between herself and the girl seemed to vanish, the throng about them to
+disperse, till they were face to face and alone, enclosed in their mortal
+enmity. At length the feeling of humiliation and defeat grew unbearable to
+Mrs. Peyton. The girl seemed to flout her in the insolence of victory, to
+sit there as the visible symbol of her failure. It was better after all to
+be at home alone with her thoughts.
+
+As she drove away from the opera she thought of that other vigil which,
+only a few streets away, Dick was perhaps still keeping. She wondered if
+his work were over, if the final stroke had been drawn. And as she pictured
+him there, signing his pact with evil in the loneliness of the conniving
+night, an uncontrollable impulse possessed her. She must drive by his
+windows and see if they were still alight. She would not go up to him,--she
+dared not,--but at least she would pass near to him, would invisibly share
+his watch and hover on the edge of his thoughts. She lowered the window and
+called out the address to the coachman.
+
+The tall office-building loomed silent and dark as she approached it; but
+presently, high up, she caught a light in the familiar windows. Her heart
+gave a leap, and the light swam on her through tears. The carriage drew up,
+and for a moment she sat motionless. Then the coachman bent down toward
+her, and she saw that he was asking if he should drive on. She tried to
+shape a yes, but her lips refused it, and she shook her head. He continued
+to lean down perplexedly, and at length, under the interrogation of his
+attitude, it became impossible to sit still, and she opened the door and
+stepped out. It was equally impossible to stand on the sidewalk, and her
+next steps carried her to the door of the building. She groped for the
+bell and rang it, feeling still dimly accountable to the coachman for some
+consecutiveness of action, and after a moment the night watchman opened the
+door, drawing back amazed at the shining apparition which confronted him.
+Recognizing Mrs. Peyton, whom he had seen about the building by day, he
+tried to adapt himself to the situation by a vague stammer of apology.
+
+"I came to see if my son is still here," she faltered.
+
+"Yes, ma'am, he's here. He's been here most nights lately till after
+twelve."
+
+"And is Mr. Gill with him?"
+
+"No: Mr. Gill he went away just after I come on this evening."
+
+She glanced up into the cavernous darkness of the stairs.
+
+"Is he alone up there, do you think?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am, I know he's alone, because I seen his men leaving soon after
+Mr. Gill."
+
+Kate lifted her head quickly. "Then I will go up to him," she said.
+
+The watchman apparently did not think it proper to offer any comment on
+this unusual proceeding, and a moment later she was fluttering and rustling
+up through the darkness, like a night-bird hovering among rafters. There
+were ten flights to climb: at every one her breath failed her, and she had
+to stand still and press her hands against her heart. Then the weight on
+her breast lifted, and she went on again, upward and upward, the great
+dark building dropping away from her, in tier after tier of mute doors and
+mysterious corridors. At last she reached Dick's floor, and saw the light
+shining down the passage from his door. She leaned against the wall, her
+breath coming short, the silence throbbing in her ears. Even now it was not
+too late to turn back. She bent over the stairs, letting her eyes plunge
+into the nether blackness, with the single glimmer of the watchman's lights
+in its depths; then she turned and stole toward her son's door.
+
+There again she paused and listened, trying to catch, through the hum of
+her pulses, any noise that might come to her from within. But the silence
+was unbroken--it seemed as though the office must be empty. She pressed her
+ear to the door, straining for a sound. She knew he never sat long at his
+work, and it seemed unaccountable that she should not hear him moving about
+the drawing-board. For a moment she fancied he might be sleeping; but sleep
+did not come to him readily after prolonged mental effort--she recalled the
+restless straying of his feet above her head for hours after he returned
+from his night work in the office.
+
+She began to fear that he might be ill. A nervous trembling seized her, and
+she laid her hand on the latch, whispering "Dick!"
+
+Her whisper sounded loudly through the silence, but there was no answer,
+and after a pause she called again. With each call the hush seemed to
+deepen: it closed in on her, mysterious and impenetrable. Her heart was
+beating in short frightened leaps: a moment more and she would have cried
+out. She drew a quick breath and turned the door-handle.
+
+The outer room, Dick's private office, with its red carpet and easy-chairs,
+stood in pleasant lamp-lit emptiness. The last time she had entered it,
+Darrow and Clemence Verney had been there, and she had sat behind the
+urn observing them. She paused a moment, struck now by a fault sound
+from beyond; then she slipped noiselessly across the carpet, pushed open
+the swinging door, and stood on the threshold of the work-room. Here
+the gas-lights hung a green-shaded circle of brightness over the great
+draughting-table in the middle of the floor. Table and floor were strewn
+with a confusion of papers--torn blue-prints and tracings, crumpled sheets
+of tracing-paper wrenched from the draughting-boards in a sudden fury of
+destruction; and in the centre of the havoc, his arms stretched across the
+table and his face hidden in them, sat Dick Peyton.
+
+He did not seem to hear his mother's approach, and she stood looking at
+him, her breast tightening with a new fear.
+
+"Dick!" she said, "Dick!--" and he sprang up, staring with dazed eyes. But
+gradually, as his gaze cleared, a light spread in it, a mounting brightness
+of recognition.
+
+"You've come--you've come--" he said, stretching his hands to her; and all
+at once she had him in her breast as in a shelter.
+
+"You wanted me?" she whispered as she held him.
+
+He looked up at her, tired, breathless, with the white radiance of the
+runner near the goal.
+
+"I _had_ you, dear!" he said, smiling strangely on her; and her heart
+gave a great leap of understanding.
+
+Her arms had slipped from his neck, and she stood leaning on him,
+deep-suffused in the shyness of her discovery. For it might still be that
+he did not wish her to know what she had done for him.
+
+But he put his arm about her, boyishly, and drew her toward one of the hard
+seats between the tables; and there, on the bare floor, he knelt before
+her, and hid his face in her lap. She sat motionless, feeling the dear
+warmth of his head against her knees, letting her hands stray in faint
+caresses through his hair.
+
+Neither spoke for awhile; then he raised his head and looked at her. "I
+suppose you know what has been happening to me," he said.
+
+She shrank from seeming to press into his life a hair's-breadth farther
+than he was prepared to have her go. Her eyes turned from him toward the
+scattered drawings on the table.
+
+"You have given up the competition?" she said.
+
+"Yes--and a lot more." He stood up, the wave of emotion ebbing, yet leaving
+him nearer, in his recovered calmness, than in the shock of their first
+moment.
+
+"I didn't know, at first, how much you guessed," he went on quietly. "I was
+sorry I'd shown you Darrow's letter; but it didn't worry me much because I
+didn't suppose you'd think it possible that I should--take advantage of it.
+It's only lately that I've understood that you knew everything." He looked
+at her with a smile. "I don't know yet how I found it out, for you're
+wonderful about keeping things to yourself, and you never made a sign.
+I simply felt it in a kind of nearness--as if I couldn't get away from
+you.--Oh, there were times when I should have preferred not having
+you about--when I tried to turn my back on you, to see things from
+other people's standpoint. But you were always there--you wouldn't be
+discouraged. And I got tired of trying to explain things to you, of trying
+to bring you round to my way of thinking. You wouldn't go away and you
+wouldn't come any nearer--you just stood there and watched everything that
+I was doing."
+
+He broke off, taking one of his restless turns down the long room. Then he
+drew up a chair beside her, and dropped into it with a great sigh.
+
+"At first, you know, I hated it most awfully. I wanted to be let alone and
+to work out my own theory of things. If you'd said a word--if you'd tried
+to influence me--the spell would have been broken. But just because the
+actual _you_ kept apart and didn't meddle or pry, the other, the you
+in my heart, seemed to get a tighter hold on me. I don't know how to tell
+you,--it's all mixed up in my head--but old things you'd said and done kept
+coming back to me, crowding between me and what I was trying for, looking
+at me without speaking, like old friends I'd gone back on, till I simply
+couldn't stand it any longer. I fought it off till to-night, but when I
+came back to finish the work there you were again--and suddenly, I don't
+know how, you weren't an obstacle any longer, but a refuge--and I crawled
+into your arms as I used to when things went against me at school."
+
+His hands stole back into hers, and he leaned his head against her shoulder
+like a boy.
+
+"I'm an abysmally weak fool, you know," he ended; "I'm not worth the fight
+you've put up for me. But I want you to know that it's your doing--that if
+you had let go an instant I should have gone under--and that if I'd gone
+under I should never have come up again alive."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sanctuary, by Edith Wharton
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