Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

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 anæsthetic 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