Part 8 (1/2)

”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.”

d.i.c.k 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 tune. 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 a.s.surance that she should see the two designs if she wished it, Mrs. Peyton knew they would not be shown to her.

d.i.c.k, 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 d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k 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 circ.u.mstances 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 d.i.c.k'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 a.s.sistant in working out his plans for the compet.i.tion, and his secluded life made it almost certain that he had not shown them to any one, and that she and d.i.c.k alone knew them to have been completed. Moreover, it was a part of d.i.c.k'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 d.i.c.k 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 la.s.situde 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 surpa.s.sed him.