Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

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 attaches 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 tonight 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 bent 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;