The Happiest Time of Their Lives Part 28

Mr. Lanley looked at him as if he hadn't heard, and frowned.

"I don't know what you mean," he said.

"Don't you think there's a look of my mother about it?"

"No," said Mr. Lanley, rather loudly, and then added, "Well, I see what you mean, though I shouldn't--" He stopped and turning to them with some sternness, he asked them how they accounted for their presence in the museum at such an hour and alone.

There was nothing to do but to tell him the truth. And when Wayne had finished, Mathilde was surprised at her grandfather's question. She thought he would ask what her mother thought of it. If they had been alone, she would have told him that Adelaide thought Wayne a commonplace young man with stubby hands; but as it was, she had resolved to put her mother's opposition on a more dignified plane. Only Mr. Lanley did not ask the question of her. It was to Wayne he was speaking, when he said:

"What does your mother think of it?"

"Oh, my mother," answered Pete. "Well, she thinks that if she were a girl she'd like to go to China."

Mr. Lanley looked up, and they both smiled with the most perfect understanding.

"She would," said the older man, and then he became intensely serious.

"It's quite out of the question," he said.

"O Grandfather," Mathilde exclaimed, clasping her hands about his arm, "don't talk like that! It wouldn't be possible for me to let him go without me. O Grandfather, can't you remember what it was like to be in love?"

A complete silence followed this little speech--a silence that went on and on and seemed to be stronger than human power. Perhaps for the first time in his life Lanley felt hostile toward the girl beside him. "Oh, dear," Mathilde was thinking, "I suppose I've made him remember my grandmother and his youth!" "Can love be remembered," Pete was saying to himself, "or is it like a perfume that can be recognized, but not recalled?"

Lanley turned at last to Wayne.

"It's out of the question," he said, "that you should take this child to China at two weeks' notice. You must see that."

"I see perfectly that many people will think it so. But you must see that to us it is the inevitable thing to do."

"If every one else agreed, I should oppose it."

"O Grandfather!" wailed Mathilde. "And you were our great hope--you and Mrs. Wayne!"

"In a matter like this I shall stand by your mother, Mathilde," he said, and Mathilde imagined he meant as opposed to herself. But he was making an even greater renunciation.

Adelaide was surprised and not pleased when Mathilde came home late for lunch, bringing the Wayne boy with her. It was not that she had expected her one little phrase about Wayne's hands to change her daughter's love into repugnance,--that sentence had been only the first drop in a distillation that would do its poisonous work gradually,--but she had supposed that Mathilde would be too sensitive to expose Pete to further criticism. Indeed, there seemed something obtuse, if not actually indelicate, in being willing to create a situation in which every one was bound to suffer. Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had much patience.

Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family slang was called "grand." The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention; it went with a soft voice and immobile expression. In this mood Adelaide answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a more congenial ether. She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like a flash of lightning.

Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself as to ignore them. She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the menace was beyond her. She couldn't think of anything to say.

Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced--and she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points--into a state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask recklessly, "Have you been to the theater lately?" and she would question gently, "The theater?" as much as to say, "I've heard that word somewhere before," until the conscientious conversationalist, rus.h.i.+ng from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning ba.n.a.lity and sink out of sight forever.

But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it. He had the courage to be unafraid of silences, and he ate his luncheon and thought about the pictures he had been seeing, and at last began to talk to Mathilde about them, while Adelaide made it clear that she was not listening, until she caught a phrase that drove her grandeur away.

"Near where we met my grandfather?" Mathilde asked.

By this time Adelaide had gathered that the two had been in the museum, and the knowledge annoyed her not only as a mother, but as an aristocrat. Without being clear about it, she regarded the love of beauty--artificial beauty, that is--as a cla.s.s distinction. It seemed to her possible enough that the ma.s.ses should love mountains and moonlight and the sea and sunsets; but it struck her as unfitting that any one but the people she knew, and only a few of them, should really care for porcelains and pictures. As she held herself aloof from the conversation she was annoyed at noticing that Wayne was showing a more discriminating taste than her own carefully nurtured child. But all such considerations were driven away by the mention of her father, for Mr.

Lanley had been in her mind ever since Mrs. Baxter had taken her unimpeded departure just before luncheon.

"Your grandfather?" she said, coming out of the clouds. "Was he in the Metropolitan?"

"Yes," said Mathilde, thankful to be directly addressed. "Wasn't it queer? Pete was taking me to see a picture that looks exactly like Mrs.

Wayne, only Mrs. Wayne hasn't such a round face, and there in front of it was grandpapa."

Adelaide rose very slowly from table, lunch being fortunately over. She felt as if she could have borne almost anything but this--the idea of her father vaporing before a picture of the Madonna. Phrases came into her head: silly old man, the time has come to protect him against himself; the Wayne family must be suppressed.

Her silence in the drawing-room was of a more concentrated sort, and when she had taken her coffee and cigarette she said to Mathilde:

"My dear, I promised to go back to Vincent at this time. Will you go instead? I want to have a word with Mr. Wayne."

Adelaide had never entered any contest in her life, whether it was a dispute with a dressmaker or a quarrel with her husband, without remembering the comfortable fact that she was a beauty. With men she did not neglect the advantage that being a woman gave her, and with the particular man now before her she had, she knew, a third line of defense; she was the mother of his love, and she thought she detected in him a special weakness for mothers. But it would have been better if he had respected women and mothers less, for he thought so highly of them that he believed they ought to play fair.

Sitting in a very low chair, she looked up at him.

"Mathilde has been telling me something about a plan of yours to take her to China with you. We could not consent to that, you know."

"I'm sorry," said Pete. The tone was pleasant. That was the trouble; it was too pleasant a tone for a man relinquis.h.i.+ng a cherished hope.

It sounded almost as if he regretted the inevitable disappointment of the family.

Adelaide tried a new attack.

"Your mother--have you consulted her?"

"Yes, I've told her our plans."

"And she approves?"

Wayne might choose to betray his mother in the full irresponsibility of her att.i.tude to so sympathetic a listener as Mr. Lanley, but he had no intention of giving Mrs. Farron such a weapon. At the same time he did not intend to be untruthful. His answer was this:

"My mother," he said, "is not like most women of her age. She believes in love."

"In all love, quite indiscriminately?"

He hesitated an instant.

"I put it wrong," he answered. "I meant that she believes in the importance of real love."

"And has she a spell by which she tells real love?"

"She believes mine to be real."

"Oh, yours! Very likely. Perhaps it's maternal vanity on my part, Mr.

Wayne, but I must own I can imagine a man's contriving to love my daughter, so gentle, so intelligent, and so extraordinarily lovely to look at. I was not thinking of your feelings, but of hers."

"You can see no reason why she should love me?"

Adelaide moved her shoulders about.

"Well, I want it explained, that's all, from your own point of view. I see my daughter as an unusual person, ignorant of life, to whom it seems to me all things are possible. And I see you, a very nice young man. But what else? I ask to be told why you fulfil all possibilities. Don't misunderstand me. I am not mercenary. Mathilde will have plenty of money of her own some day. I don't want a millionaire. I want a _person_."