Part 25 (1/2)
”And Alfred Branch has gone to tender his services to the family! There is something romantic in his constancy to a memory. From the day of Rosa's death, he has embraced every chance of testifying his respect for and wish to serve her friends. He is a sadder wreck than was Mrs.
Tazewell. You would hardly recognize him, Mabel. His hair and beard are white as those of a man of sixty-five, and his face bloated out of all comeliness.”
”White heat!” interjected Mr. Aylett. ”He can not last much longer.”
”And all because a pretty girl said him 'Nay!'” pursued the wife.
Mr. Aylett and Mr. Dorrance made characteristic responses in a breath.
”The greater blockhead he!” said one.
The other, ”His was never a rightly balanced mind, I suspect. I always thought him weak and impressionable.”
”Are your adjectives synonymous?” asked Mrs. Aylett playfully.
”Generally!”
Her brother had been reading at a distant window, while the daylight sufficed to show him the type of his book. He now laid it by, and came forward into the redder circle of radiance cast by the burning logs. He was in his forty-third year, saturnine of visage, coldly monotonous in accent, a business machine that did its work in good, substantial style, and undertook no ”fancy jobs.” He had ama.s.sed a handsome fortune, built a handsome house, and married a handsome woman, all of which appendages to his consequence he contemplated with grim complacency. As regarded spiritual likeness, mutual affection, and a.s.similation of feeling and opinion, he and his wife had receded, the one from the other, in the fourteen years of their wedded life. There had been no decided rupture.
Both disliked altercations, and where radical opposition of sentiment existed, they avoided the unsafe ground by tacit consent. Mabel's uniform policy was that of outward submission to the mandates of her chief.
”After all, it makes little difference!” she fell into the habit of saying in the earlier years of matronhood, and he interpreted her listless acquiescence in his decrees as faith in the soundness of his judgment, the infallibility of his decisions. No woman of sense and spirit ever becomes an exemplar in unquestioning obedience to a mortal man, unless through apathy--fatal torpor of mind or heart. Of this fact in moral history our respectable barrister was happily ignorant. He was no better versed in the lore of the heart feminine than when he accepted Mabel Aylett's esteem and friendly regard in lieu of the shy, but ardent attachment a betrothed maiden should have for the one she means to make her husband.
He respected her thoroughly, and loved her better than he did anybody else. She was the one woman he recognized as his sister's superior--supremacy due to the influence of single-minded integrity and modest dignity. What Mabel said, he believed without gainsaying; while Clara's clever dicta required winnowing to separate the probably spurious from the possibly true. If his tone, in addressing his wife, was seldom affectionate, it was never careless, as that which replied to his sister's raillery.
”Generally,” he said in his metallic, unmodulated voice. ”The man who would cast away health, usefulness, and fortune in his chagrin at not winning the hand of a shallow-pated, volatile flirt, must be both silly and susceptible.”
”Rosa Tazewell may have been shallow of heart, but she was not of pate,”
answered Mr. Aylett, with a cold sneer. ”She was a fair plotter, and not fickle of purpose when she had her desires upon a much-coveted object.
Her marriage proved that. She meant to captivate Chilton before she had known him a month--yes, and to marry him, as she finally did. Her intermediate conquests were but the practice that was to perfect her in her profession. Does anybody know, by the way, if he has ever taken a second wife to his bereaved bosom?”
A brief silence, then Mrs. Aylett said, negligently, ”I think not.
Mrs. Trent, Rosa's sister, was expatiating to me a month since upon the beauty and accomplishments of his daughter, and she said nothing of a step-mother. Father and child live with a married sister of Mrs.
Chilton, I believe.”
”I had not heard that Rosa left a child,” remarked Mabel, interested. ”I understood that two died before the mother.”
”Only one--and that the younger. Miss Florence is now twelve years old, Mrs. Trent says. I saw her at church once, when she was visiting her grandmother and aunts. She is really pa.s.sable--but very unlike her mother.”
Mabel did not join in the desultory talk that engaged the others until supper-time. There was a broken string in her heart, that jangled painfully when touched by an incautious hand.
”Twelve years old!” she was saying, inwardly. ”My darling would have been thirteen, had she lived!”
And then flitted before her fancy a girlish form, with pure, loving eyes, and a voice melodious as a mocking-bird's. Warm arms were about her neck, and a round, soft cheek laid against hers--as no human arms and face would ever caress her--her, the childless, whose had been the hopes, fears, pains--never the recompence of maternity.
She had been to the graveyard that day--secretly, lest her husband should frown, Clara wonder, and Winston sneer at her love for and memory of that which had never existed, according to their rendering of the term. She had trimmed the wire-gra.s.s out of the little hollow, above which the mound had not been renewed since the day of her baby's burial, and, trusting to the infrequency of others' visits to the neglected enclosure, had laid a bunch of white rose-buds over the unmarked dust she accounted still a part of her heart, 'neath which it had lain so long. People said she had never been a mother; never had had a living child; had no hope of seeing it in heaven. G.o.d and she knew better.
”Clara, I wish you to attend Mrs. Tazewell's funeral this afternoon,”
said Mr. Aylett at breakfast the next day but one after this. ”There were invidious remarks made upon your non-appearance at her daughter's, and I do not choose that my family shall furnish food for neighborhood scandal.”