The Desert and the Sown Part 26

"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."

"Ah, if she was not ready for it, it was not _her_ opportunity. G.o.d is very patient with us, I believe."

XXIII

RESTIVENESS

Mothers and sons are rarely very personal in their intimacy after the son has taken to himself a wife. Apart from certain moments not appropriate to piazza teas, Paul and his mother were perhaps as comfortable together as the relation averages. It was much that they never talked emotionally. Private judgments which we have refrained from putting into words may die unfruitful and many a bitter crop be spared.

"This is Paul's apology for being happy in spite of himself--and of us!" Moya teased, as she admired the beautifully drawn plans for the quarrymen's club-house.

"It doesn't need any apology; it's a very good thing," said Mrs.

Bogardus, ignoring double meanings. No caps that were flying around ever fitted her head. Paul's dreams and his mother's practical experience had met once more on a common ground of philanthropy. This time it was a workingmen's club in which the interests of social and mental improvement were conjoined with facilities for outdoor sport. Up to date philanthropy is an expensive toy. Paul, though now a landowner, was far from rich in his own right. His mother financed this as she had many another scheme for him. She was more openhanded than heretofore, but all was done with that ennuyed air which she ever wore as of an older child who has outgrown the game. It was in Moya and Moya's prospective maternity that her pride reinstated itself. Her own history and generation she trod underfoot. Mistakes, humiliations, whichever way she turned. Paul had never satisfied her entirely in anything he did until he chose this girl for the mother of his children. Now their house might come to something. Moya moved before her eyes crowned in the light of the future. And that this n.o.ble and innocent girl, with her perfect intuitions, should turn to _her_ now with such impetuous affection was perhaps the sweetest pain the blighted woman had ever known. She lay awake many a night thinking mute blessings on the mother and the child to be. Yet she resisted that generous initiative so dear to herself, aware with a subtle agony of the pain it gave her son.

One day she said to Paul (they were driving home together through a bit of woodland, the horses stepping softly on the mould of fallen leaves)--"I don't expect you to account for every dollar of mine you spend in helping those who can be helped that way. You have a free hand."

"I understand," said Paul. "I have used your money freely--for a purpose that I never have accounted for."

"Don't you need more?"

"No; there is no need now."

"Why is there not?"

Paul was silent. "I cannot go into particulars. It is a long story."

"Does the purpose still exist?" his mother asked sharply.

"It does; but not as a claim--for that sort of help."

"Let me know if such a claim should ever return."

"I will, mother," said Paul.

There came a day when mother and son reaped the reward of their mutual forbearance. There was a night and a day when Paul became a boy again in his mother's hands, and she took the place that was hers in Nature. She was the priestess acquainted with mysteries. He followed her, and hung upon her words. The expression of her face meant life and death to him.

The dreadful consciousness pa.s.sed out of his eyes; tears washed it out as he rose from his knees by Moya's bed, and his mother kissed him, and laid his son in his arms.

The following summer saw the club-house and all its affiliations in working order. The beneficiaries took to it most kindly, but were disposed to manage it in their own way: not in all respects the way of the founder's intention.

"To make a gift complete, you must keep yourself out of it," Mrs.

Bogardus advised. "You have done your part; now let them have it and run it themselves."

Paul was not hungry for leaders.h.i.+p, but he had hoped that his interest in the men's amus.e.m.e.nts would bring him closer to them and equalize the difference between the Hill and the quarry.

"You have never worked with them; how can you expect to play with them?"

was another of his mother's cool aphorisms. Alas! Paul, the son of the poor man, had no work, and hence no play.