Part 26 (1/2)

”How constantly you are thinking of this! I think of it only when I am with you. As if a woman like your mother, who has done _one thing_, should be all that thing, and nothing more to us, her children!”

Moya was giving herself up, almost immorally, Paul sometimes thought, to the fascination Mrs. Bogardus's personality had for her. In a keenly susceptible state herself, at that time, there was something calming and strengthening in the older woman's perfected beauty, her physical poise, and the fitness of everything she did and said and wore to the given occasion. As a dark woman she was particularly striking in summer clothing. Her white effects were tremendous. She did not pretend to study these matters herself, but in years of experience, with money to spend, she had learned well in whom to confide. When women are shut up together in country houses for the summer, they can irritate each other in the most foolish ways. Mrs. Bogardus never got upon your nerves.

But, for Paul, there was a poison in his mother's beauty, a dread in her influence over his impressionable young wife, thrilled with the awakening forces of her consonant being. Moya would drink deep of every cup that life presented. Motherhood was her lesson for the day. ”She is a queen of mothers!” she would exclaim with an abandon that was painful to Paul; he saw deformity where Moya was ready to kneel. ”I love her perfect love for you--for me, even! She is above all jealousy. She doesn't even ask to be understood.”

Paul was silent.

”And oh, she knows, she knows! She has been through it all--in such despair and misery--all that is before me, with everything in the world to make it easy and all the beautiful care she gives me. She is the supreme mother. And I never had a mother to speak to before. Don't, don't, please, keep putting that dreadful thing between us now!”

So Paul took the dreadful thing away with him and was alone with it, and knew that his mother saw it in his eyes when their eyes met and avoided.

When, after a brief household absence, he would see her again he wondered, ”Has she been alone with it? Has it pa.s.sed into another phase?”--as of an incurable disease that must take its time and course.

Mrs. Bogardus did not spare her conscience in social ways all this time.

It was a part of her life to remember that she had neighbors--certain neighbors. She included Paul without particularly consulting him whenever it was proper for him to support her in her introduction of his wife to the country-house folk, many of whom they knew in town.

All his mother's friends liked Paul and supposed him to be very clever, but they had never taken him seriously. ”Now, at last,” they said, ”he has done something like other people. He is coming out.” Experienced matrons were pleased to flatter him on his choice of a bride. The daughters studied Moya, and decided that she was ”different,” but ”all right.” She had a careless distinction of her own. Some of her ”things”

were surprisingly lovely--probably heirlooms; and army women are so clever about clothes.

Would they spend the winter in town?

Paul replied absently: they had not decided. Probably they would not go down till after the holidays.

What an attractive plan? What an ideal family Christmas they would have all together in the country! Christine had not been up all summer, had she? Here Moya came to her husband's relief, through a wife's dual consciousness in company, and covered his want of spirits with a flood of foolish chatter.

The smiling way in which women the most sincere can posture and prance on the brink of dissimulation was particularly sickening to Paul at this time. Why need they put themselves in situations where it was required?

The situations were of his mother's creation. He imagined she must suffer, but had little sympathy with that side of her martyrdom. Moya seemed a trifle feverish in her acceptance of these affairs of which she was naturally the life and centre. A day of entertaining often faded into an evening of subtle sadness.

Paul would take her out into the moonlight of that deep inland country.

The trees were dark with leaves and brooded close above them; old water-fences and milldams cast inky shadows on the still, shallow ponds clasped in wooded hills. No region could have offered a more striking contrast to the empty plains. Moya felt shut in with old histories. The very ground was but moulding sand in which generations of human lives had been poured, and the sand swept over to be reshaped for them.

”We are not living our own life yet,” Paul would say; not adding, ”We are protecting her.” Here was the beginning of punishment helplessly meted out to this proud woman whose sole desire was towards her children--to give, and not to receive.

”But this is our Garden?” Moya would muse. ”We are as nearly two alone as any two could be.”

”If you include the Snake. We can't leave out the Snake, you know.”

”Snake or Seraph--I don't believe I know the difference. Paul, I cannot have you thinking things.”

”I?--what do I think?”

”You are thinking it is bad for me to be so much with her. You, as a man and a husband, resent what she, as a woman and a wife, has dared to do.

And I, as another woman and wife, I say she could do nothing else and be true. For, don't you see? She never loved him. The wifehood in her has never been reached. She was a girl, then a mother, then a widow. How could she”--

”Do you think he would have claimed her as his wife? Oh, you do not know him;--she has never known him. If we could be brave and face our duty to the whole truth, and leave the rest to those sequences, never dreamed of, that wait upon great acts. Such surprises come straight from G.o.d.

Now we can never know how he would have risen to meet a n.o.bler choice in her. He had not far to rise! Well, we have our share of blessings, including piazza teas; but as a family we have missed one of the greatest spiritual opportunities,--such as come but once in a lifetime.”