Part 6 (1/2)
”Oh, I should always keep an eye on them; young wives have so many distractions. If I had to give them up--yes, of course it would mean a vacancy in my collection of habits; one side of me clings strongly to traditions and duty. The other--well, I'd like to be a free-lance in the world for a while--although,” she added, with a sharp intonation, ”I don't suppose I should stay away from Jack very long. It is a great relief to have a vital interest in life outside one's self. You, of course, are not old enough to have discovered that; and, indeed, I am not always so sure that it is possible.”
Isabel did not ask her if she would not be jealous of the wife who must, if he loved her, take the greater part of all that her ”Jack” had to give; she divined in this many-sided woman a quality in her att.i.tude towards her son with which ordinary maternal affection had little in common. Her fine eyes flashed with pride at the mention of his name, and it was more than evident that he was her deep and abiding interest; but this keen and curious young student of life had never seen any one less maternal. Lady Victoria's att.i.tude, indeed, might as reasonably be that of a proud sister or wife. When he was beside her she looked almost commonplace in her content. The moment he pa.s.sed out of her sight some phase of individuality promptly lit its torch. Last night Isabel had seen her stand for half an hour as motionless as some ivory female Colossus, only her eyes burning down with slow voluptuous fire upon an adoring little Frenchman. She had looked like a Messalina petrified with the complications and commonness of the modern world; possibly with the burden of years, Isabel had added, in girlish intolerance of the wiles of which youth is independent. She had been far from falling under her spell, although not wholly repelled by the glimpse of this worst side of a woman far too complex to be judged off-hand. This morning she liked her suddenly and warmly, and, with the lightning of instinct, divined why she wors.h.i.+pped her son and still was willing to have him marry and swing aside into an orbit of his own. All she needed was a certain amount of his society, opportunities to work for him, the a.s.surance of his success and happiness. He was a refuge from herself; in his imperious demands her memory slept, her depths were stagnant. But Isabel was still too young, in spite of her own experience, more than dimly to apprehend the older woman's att.i.tude, and the innumerable and various acts and sufferings, disenchantments and contacts that had led up to it.
Victoria seemed to her the most rounded mortal she had met, and yet with an insistent terror in the depths of her riven and courageous soul, the terror of the complete, the final disillusion. Between that moment and her too exhaustive knowledge of life stood the magnetic figure of her son, safeguarding, almost hypnotizing her. She was as incapable of jealousy as of aching vanity in the fact of a son whom the world was never permitted to forget. She had done with little things, and Isabel, with young curiosity, wondered in what convulsion the last of them had gone down.
Lady Victoria, unconscious of the a.n.a.lytical mind groping to conclusions beside her, was revolving the midnight comments of Flora Thangue, and her own impressions of this American relative whose sudden advent, taken in connection with her eighteenth century beauty and undecipherable quality, wrought the impression of a symbolic figure swimming out of s.p.a.ce. Lady Victoria was far too indifferent to a.n.a.lyze the problems of any woman's soul, but she was keenly alive to the vital suggestion of power in the girl, and of the strong will and intellect, the command over every faculty, evidenced in the strong line of the jaw, the stern n.o.ble profile, the calm searching gaze so difficult to sustain. None knew better than Victoria the value and rarity of a free and courageous soul. Such a woman must, when more fully developed, throw the whole weight of her character into the scales balancing for the few whom she recognized as equals and accepted as friends. If she had had ”some smas.h.i.+ng love affair,” as the more romantic Flora suggested, so much the better.
She said, with a perfectly simulated impulsiveness:
”Of course you understand that I meant what I said last evening. And not merely a week; you must pay us a long visit, if it won't bore you. But the house will rarely be empty now that the shooting has begun, and there is always something going on in the neighborhood. Later comes the hunting, and I am sure you ride.”
”Oh yes, I ride! I have spent about half my life on a horse. I want to stay more than I can tell you, but before long I must go home. The same safe old bank that has charge of your ranches looks after my small affairs, and I have a man on the farm that has been in the family for forty years; otherwise I should never have dared to leave my precious chickens; but Mr. Colton writes me that Mac is failing, and before the rainy season commences I must look into things myself.”
”Chickens?” said Lady Victoria, much amused. ”Do you raise chickens?”
”Rather; and not in the back yard, neither. I have about a thousand of the most beautiful snow-white Leghorns with blood-red combs you ever saw; and I have incubators, runs, colony-houses, and all the rest of it.
They are raised on the strictest scientific principles and yield me the greater part of my income. That is the reason I feel obliged to return--if Mac is no longer able--or willing--to get up at night. One must not neglect the chicks--the little ones. I doubt if real babies are more trouble. I don't mind telling you that I have resolved to make a fortune out of chickens, if only that I may be able to live as I should in San Francisco. But I must go back and do the greater part of the work myself.”
”Make a fortune--out of chickens! How odd that sounds! Not in the least romantic, but rather the more interesting for that. But why don't you let your ranch for dairy and grazing purposes, as we do? They bring us in a very good income--have done, so far.”
”There are about nineteen thousand acres in Lumalitas, and some forty thousand in the southern ranch. I possess exactly three hundred and thirty-two, forty-five of which are marsh. You have now nearly the whole of the original grants, for as my father and uncle sold or mortgaged portions--and could not pay--your agents bought in. You may remember.”
”There is seldom any correspondence. Mr. Colton has always had a free hand--yes--I do recall--vaguely. So I am profiting at your expense. I am afraid that must seem unjust to you.”
”Not in the least. I did not choose my paternal relatives, but I long since accepted them with philosophy. I am thankful to have anything. Why don't you go to California and look at your property?--live on it for a few years? You could make far more out of it if you ran it yourself. The lease of Lumalitas must expire very soon. I do wish you would come and pay me a visit, and--Mr.--what on earth am I to call him?”
”Jack, of course,” said Lady Victoria, warmly, although she would have been swift to resent the liberty had the new relative been so indiscreet.
”I never could manage Jack--never! I can't feel, see him, as Jack. I think Cousin Elton will do.”
”Quite so. I shouldn't wonder at all if we went. Jack is rather keen on American politics, knows his Bryce--I suppose it is in the blood. He even takes in an American Review. I have always rather wanted to visit California, and started for it once upon a time--on my wedding journey.
But we were entertained so delightfully in New York and Was.h.i.+ngton that before we realized what an American summer meant it was too hot to cross the continent, and we accepted an invitation to the Adirondacks, intending to return to England in the course of a month. But Arthur broke his leg, and by the time he was well again it was not safe for me to travel. So we rented a place in Virginia, where there was good sport, and there Jack was born. Here we are. Rest under that tree while I interview the erring maiden.”
VII
Isabel sat on the bench under an ancient oak for half an hour or more, but took no note of the time. In rural America one always seems to hear the whir of distant machinery and responds to its tensity in the depths of some nerve centre; but in England's open the tendency is to dream away the hours, the nerves as blunt as in the tropics; unless, indeed, one happens to be so astir within that one rebels in responding, and conceives of ultimate hatred for this incompa.s.sionate arrogant peace of England.
Isabel had been roused from her mood of unreasoning content by her contact with the older woman, but for a few moments her thoughts waved to and fro in that large tranquillity like pendent moss in a gentle breeze. There was a stir of life in the little village; a window was thrown open; a man came out to the pump and filled a bucket with water; a child cried for its breakfast; the birds were singing in the trees.
But they barely rippled the calm. Isabel's eyes dwelt absently upon a white line along a distant hill-top, made, no doubt, by Caesar's troops; for she had heard that the mosaic floors of Roman houses had been discovered under one of the fields in the neighborhood. This information, imparted by Lord Hexam's cousin, Mrs. Throfton, a lady interested in neither Bridge nor gossip, had not excited her as it might have done before her archaeological experience at headquarters, but she was glad to recall it now, for that white road, sharply insistent in the surrounding green, was one of the perceptible vincula of history.
It was all old--old--old; an illimitable backward vista. And she was as new, as out of tune with it as the motorcar flas.h.i.+ng like a lost and distracted comet along that hill-top in a cloud of historied dust: she with her problems, her egoisms, the fateful independence of the modern girl. In a fas.h.i.+on she was one of the chosen of earth, but she doubted if the women who had toiled in these villages, or in centuries past had lived their lives in the mansions of their indubious lords, had not had greater compensations than she. Unbroken monotony and a saving sense of the inevitable must in time create for the soul something of the illimitable horizon of the vast level s.p.a.ces of the earth.
And she? At twenty-five she had lost her old habit of staring with veiled eyes into some sweet ambiguous future, her girlish intensity of emotion. But her theories, in general, were sound, and she had ticketed even her minor experiences. She knew that character was the most significant of all individual forces, and that if developed in strict adjustment to the highest demands of society, dragging strength out of the powers of the universe, were it not inborn, the book of one's objective future at least need never be closed prematurely by those inexorable social forces, which, whatever the weak spots on the surface of life, invariably place a man in the end according to his deserts. She had seen her father, with all his advantages of birth and talents, and early importance in the community, gradually shunned, shelved, dismissed from the daily life of steadier if less gifted men, almost unknown to the young generation. He had clung to certain strict notions of honor through it all, however, and at his death the county had experienced a spasm of remorse and attended his funeral; the sermon had been eloquent with masterly omissions, and even the newspaper that had vilified him in his days of political influence came out with an obituary, which, when included in some future county history, would give to posterity quite as good an impression of him as he deserved.
And James Otis had had his virtues. One of his claims to redemption survived in his daughter. He had reared her in the strict principles and precepts of his New England ancestors, many of which are generally more useful in the life of a man. This early instillation, taken in connection with himself as a commanding ill.u.s.tration in subcontraries, had given Isabel a directness of vision invaluable to a girl in no haste to place her life in stronger hands. Whatever her dissatisfactions and disillusions, her road lay along the upper reaches; the second rate, the failures from birth, the criminal cla.s.ses, far below. Her start in life was indefectible, and she knew that did the necessity arise to-morrow she could support herself and ask no quarter.
Perhaps, she mused, she would be happier in the necessity, for the problem of roof and bread is an abiding subst.i.tute for the problem of what to do with one's life. But she had never known an anxious moment regarding the bare necessities, and although there was something pleasantly stimulating in the prospect of making a fortune and being able to live as she wished in the city of her birth--the only object for which she retained any pa.s.sion in her affections--she smiled somewhat cynically at the modest outlook.