The Breaking Point
by Mary Roberts Rinehart
I
"Heaven and earth," sang the tenor, Mr. Henry Wallace, owner of the
Wallace garage. His larynx, which gave him somewhat the effect of
having swallowed a crab-apple and got it only part way down,
protruded above his low collar.
"Heaven and earth," sang the bass, Mr. Edwin Goodno, of the meat
market and the Boy Scouts. "Heaven and earth, are full - " His
chin, large and fleshy, buried itself deep; his eyes were glued on
the music sheet in his hand.
"Are full, are full, are full," sang the soprano, Clare Rossiter,
of the yellow colonial house on the Ridgely Road. She sang with
her eyes turned up, and as she reached G flat she lifted herself
on her toes. "Of the majesty, of Thy glory."
"Ready," barked the choir master. "Full now, and all together."
The choir room in the parish house resounded to the twenty voices
of the choir. The choir master at the piano kept time with his
head. Earnest and intent, they filled the building with the
Festival Te Deum of Dudley Buck, Opus 63, No.1.
Elizabeth Wheeler liked choir practice. She liked the way in
which, after the different parts had been run through, the voices
finally blended into harmony and beauty. She liked the small
sense of achievement it gave her, and of being a part, on Sundays,
of the service. She liked the feeling, when she put on the black
cassock and white surplice and the small round velvet cap of
having placed in her locker the things of this world, such as a
rose-colored hat and a blue georgette frock, and of being stripped,
as it were, for aspirations.
At such times she had vague dreams of renunciation. She saw
herself cloistered in some quiet spot, withdrawn from the world; a
place where there were long vistas of pillars and Gothic arches,
after a photograph in the living room at home, and a great organ
somewhere, playing.
She would go home from church, however, clad in the rose-colored
hat and the blue georgette frock, and eat a healthy Sunday luncheon;
and by two o'clock in the afternoon, when the family slept and Jim
had gone to the country club, her dreams were quite likely to be
entirely different. Generally speaking, they had to do with love.
Romantic, unclouded young love dramatic only because it was love,
and very happy.
Sometime, perhaps, some one would come and say he loved her. That
was all. That was at once the beginning and the end. Her dreams
led up to that and stopped. Not by so much as a hand clasp did
they pass that wall.
So she sat in the choir room and awaited her turn.
"Altos a little stronger, please."
"Of the majesty, of the majesty, of the majesty, of Thy gl-o-o-ry,"
sang Elizabeth. And was at once a nun and a principal in a
sentimental dream of two.
What appeared to the eye was a small and rather ethereal figure
with sleek brown hair and wistful eyes; nice eyes, of no particular
color. Pretty with the beauty of youth, sensitive and thoughtful,
infinitely loyal and capable of suffering and not otherwise
extraordinary was Elizabeth Wheeler in her plain wooden chair. A
figure suggestive of no drama and certainly of no tragedy, its
attitude expectant and waiting, with that alternate hope and fear
which is youth at twenty, when all of life lies ahead and every
to-morrow may hold some great adventure.
Clare Rossiter walked home that night with Elizabeth. She was a
tall blonde girl, lithe and graceful, and with a calculated coquetry
in her clothes.
"Do you mind going around the block?" she asked. "By Station
Street?" There was something furtive and yet candid in her voice,
and Elizabeth glanced at her.
"All right. But it's out of your way, isn't it?"
"Yes. I - You're so funny, Elizabeth. It's hard to talk to you.
But I've got to talk to somebody. I go around by Station Street
every chance I get."
"By Station Street? Why?"
"I should think you could guess why."
She saw that Clare desired to be questioned, and at the same time
she felt a great distaste for the threatened confidence. She
loathed arm-in-arm confidences, the indecency of dragging up and
exposing, in whispers, things that should have been buried deep
in reticence. She hesitated, and Clare slipped an arm through hers.
"You don't know, then, do you? Sometimes I think every one must
know. And I don't care. I've reached that point."
Her confession, naive and shameless, and yet somehow not without a
certain dignity, flowed on. She was mad about Doctor Dick
Livingstone. Goodness knew why, for he never looked at her. She
might be the dirt under his feet for all he knew. She trembled
when she met him in the street, and sometimes he looked past her
and never saw her. She didn't sleep well any more.
Elizabeth listened in great discomfort. She did not see in Clare's
hopeless passion the joy of the flagellant, or the self-dramatization
of a neurotic girl. She saw herself unwillingly forced to peer into
the sentimental windows of Clare's soul, and there to see Doctor
Dick Livingstone, an unconscious occupant. But she had a certain
fugitive sense of guilt, also. Formless as her dreams had been,
vague and shy, they had nevertheless centered about some one who
should be tall, like Dick Livingstone, and alternately grave, which
was his professional manner, and gay, which was his manner when it
turned out to be only a cold, and he could take a few minutes to be
himself. Generally speaking, they centered about some one who
resembled Dick Livingstone, but who did not, as did Doctor
Livingstone, assume at times an air of frightful maturity and
pretend that in years gone by he had dandled her on his knee.
"Sometimes I think he positively avoids me," Clare wailed. "There's
the house, Elizabeth. Do you mind stopping a moment? He must be
in his office now. The light's burning."
"I wish you wouldn't, Clare. He'd hate it if he knew."
She moved on and Clare slowly followed her. The Rossiter girl's
flow of talk had suddenly stopped. She was thoughtful and
impulsively suspicious.
"Look here, Elizabeth, I believe you care for him yourself."
"I? What is the matter with you to-night, Clare?"
"I'm just thinking. Your voice was so queer."
They walked on in silence. The flow of Clare's confidences had
ceased, and her eyes were calculating and a trifle hard.
"There's a good bit of talk about him," she jerked out finally.
"I suppose you've heard it."
"What sort of talk?"
"Oh, gossip. You'll hear it. Everybody's talking about it. It's
doing him a lot of harm."
"I don't believe it," Elizabeth flared. "This town hasn't anything
else to do, and so it talks. It makes me sick."
She did not attempt to analyze the twisted motives that made Clare
belittle what she professed to love. And she did not ask what the
gossip was. Half way up Palmer Lane she turned in at the cement
path between borders of early perennials which led to the white
Wheeler house. She was flushed and angry, hating Clare for her
unsolicited confidence and her malice, hating even Haverly, that
smiling, tree-shaded suburb which "talked."
She opened the door quietly and went in. Micky, the Irish terrier,
lay asleep at the foot of the stairs, and her father's voice,
reading aloud, came pleasantly from the living room. Suddenly her
sense of resentment died. With the closing of the front door the
peace of the house enveloped her. What did it matter if, beyond
that door, there were unrequited love and petty gossip, and even
tragedy? Not that she put all that into conscious thought; she had
merely a sensation of sanctuary and peace. Here, within these four
walls, were all that one should need, love and security and quiet
happiness. Walter Wheeler, pausing to turn a page, heard her singing
as she went up the stairs. In the moment of the turning he too had
a flash of content. Twenty-five years of married life and all well;
Nina married, Jim out of college, Elizabeth singing her way up the
stairs, and here by the lamp his wife quietly knitting while he read
to her. He was reading Paradise Lost: "The mind is its own place,
and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."
He did a certain amount of serious reading every year.
On Sunday mornings, during the service, Elizabeth earnestly tried
to banish all worldly thoughts. In spite of this resolve, however,
she was always conscious of a certain regret that the choir seats
necessitated turning her profile to the congregation. At the age
of twelve she had decided that her nose was too short, and nothing
had happened since to change her conviction. She seldom so much
as glanced at the congregation. During her slow progress up and
down the main aisle behind the Courtney boy, who was still a
soprano and who carried the great gold cross, she always looked
straight ahead. Or rather, although she was unconscious of this,
slightly up. She always looked up when she sang, for she had
commenced to take singing lessons when the piano music rack was
high above her head.
So she still lifted her eyes as she went up the aisle, and was
extremely serious over the whole thing. Because it is a solemn
matter to take a number of people who have been up to that moment
engrossed in thoughts of food or golf or servants or business, and
in the twinkling of an eye, as the prayer book said about death,
turn their minds to worship.
Nevertheless, although she never looked at the pews, she was always
conscious of two of them. The one near the pulpit was the Sayres'
and it was the social calendar of the town. When Mrs. Sayre was in
it, it was the social season. One never knew when Mrs. Sayre's
butler would call up and say:
"I am speaking for Mrs. Sayre. Mrs. Sayre would like to have the
pleasure of Miss Wheeler's company on Thursday to luncheon, at
one-thirty."
When the Sayre pew was empty, the town knew, if it happened to be
winter, that the Florida or Santa Barbara season was on; or in
summer the Maine coast.
The other pew was at the back of the church. Always it had one
occupant; sometimes it had three. But the behavior of this pew
was very erratic. Sometimes an elderly and portly gentleman with
white hair and fierce eyebrows would come in when the sermon was
almost over. Again, a hand would reach through the grill behind
it, and a tall young man who had had his eyes fixed in the proper
direction, but not always on the rector, would reach for his hat,
get up and slip out. On these occasions, however, he would first
identify the owner of the hand and then bend over the one permanent
occupant of the pew, a little old lady. His speech was as Yea, yea,
or Nay, nay, for he either said, "I'll be back for dinner," or "Don't
look for me until you see me."
And Mrs. Crosby, without taking her eyes from the sermon, would
nod.
Of late years, Doctor David Livingstone had been taking less and
less of the "Don't-look-for-me-until-you-see-me" cases, and Doctor
Dick had acquired a car, which would not freeze when left outside
all night like a forgotten dog, and a sense of philosophy about
sleep. That is, that eleven o'clock P.M. was bed-time to some
people, but was just eleven o'clock for him.
When he went to church he listened to the sermon, but rather often
he looked at Elizabeth Wheeler. When his eyes wandered, as the most
faithful eyes will now and then, they were apt to rest on the flag
that had hung, ever since the war, beside the altar. He had fought
for his country in a sea of mud, never nearer than two hundred miles
to the battle line, fought with a surgical kit instead of a gun, but
he was content. Not to all the high adventure.
Had he been asked, suddenly, the name of the tall blonde girl who
sang among the sopranos, he could not have told it.
The Sunday morning following Clare Rossiter's sentimental confession,
Elizabeth tried very hard to banish all worldly thoughts, as usual,
and to see the kneeling, rising and sitting congregation as there
for worship. But for the first time she wondered. Some of the faces
were blank, as though behind the steady gaze the mind had wandered
far afield, or slept. Some were intent, some even devout. But for
the first time she began to feel that people in the mass might be
cruel, too. How many of them, for instance, would sometime during
the day pass on, behind their hands, the gossip Clare had mentioned?
She changed her position, and glanced quickly over the church. The
Livingstone pew was fully occupied, and well up toward the front,
Wallie Sayre was steadfastly regarding her. She looked away quickly.
Came the end of the service. Came down the aisle the Courtney boy,
clean and shining and carrying high his glowing symbol. Came the
choir, two by two, the women first, sopranos, altos and Elizabeth.
Came the men, bass and tenor, neatly shaved for Sunday morning.
Came the rector, Mr. Oglethorpe, a trifle wistful, because always
he fell so far below the mark he had set. Came the benediction.
Came the slow rising from its knees of the congregation and its
cheerful bustle of dispersal.
Doctor Dick Livingstone stood up and helped Doctor David into his
new spring overcoat. He was very content. It was May, and the sun
was shining. It was Sunday, and he would have an hour or two of
leisure. And he had made a resolution about a matter that had been
in his mind for some time. He was very content.
He looked around the church with what was almost a possessive eye.
These people were his friends. He knew them all, and they knew him.
They had, against his protest, put his name on the bronze tablet set
in the wall on the roll of honor. Small as it was, this was his
world.
Half smiling, he glanced about. He did not realize that behind
their bows and greetings there was something new that day, something
not so much unkind as questioning.
Outside in the street he tucked his aunt, Mrs. Crosby, against the
spring wind, and waited at the wheel of the car while David entered
with the deliberation of a man accustomed to the sagging of his old
side-bar buggy under his weight. Long ago Dick had dropped the
titular "uncle," and as David he now addressed him.
"You're going to play some golf this afternoon, David," he said
firmly. "Mike had me out this morning to look at your buggy springs."
David chuckled. He still stuck to his old horse, and to the ancient
vehicle which had been the signal of distress before so many doors
for forty years. "I can trust old Nettie," he would say. "She
doesn't freeze her radiator on cold nights, she doesn't skid, and
if I drop asleep she'll take me home and into my own barn, which is
more than any automobile would do."
"I'm going to sleep," he said comfortably. "Get Wallie Sayre - I
see he's back from some place again - or ask a nice girl. Ask
Elizabeth Wheeler. I don't think Lucy here expects to be the only
woman in your life."
Dick stared into the windshield.
"I've been wondering about that, David," he said, "just how much
right - "
"Balderdash!" David snorted. "Don't get any fool notion in your
head."
Followed a short silence with Dick driving automatically and
thinking. Finally he drew a long breath.
"All right," he said, "how about that golf - you need exercise.
You're putting on weight, and you know it. And you smoke too much.
It's either less tobacco or more walking, and you ought to know it."
David grunted, but he turned to Lucy Crosby, in the rear seat:
"Lucy, d'you know where my clubs are?"
"You loaned them to Jim Wheeler last fall. If you get three of
them back you're lucky." Mrs. Crosby's voice was faintly tart.
Long ago she had learned that her brother's belongings were his
only by right of purchase, and were by way of being community
property. When, early in her widowhood and her return to his home,
she had found that her protests resulted only in a sort of
clandestine giving or lending, she had exacted a promise from him.
"I ask only one thing, David," she had said. "Tell me where the
things go. There wasn't a blanket for the guest-room bed at the
time of the Diocesan Convention."
"I'll run around to the Wheelers' and get them," Dick observed, in
a carefully casual voice. "I'll see the Carter baby, too, David,
and that clears the afternoon. Any message?"
Lucy glanced at him, but David moved toward the house.
"Give Elizabeth a kiss for me," he called over his shoulder, and
went chuckling up the path.
II
Mrs. Crosby stood on the pavement, gazing after the car as it moved
off. She had not her brother's simplicity nor his optimism. Her
married years had taken her away from the environment which had
enabled him to live his busy, uncomplicated life; where, the only
medical man in a growing community, he had learned to form his own
sturdy decisions and then to abide by them.
Black and white, right and wrong, the proper course and the improper
course - he lived in a sort of two-dimensional ethical world. But
to Lucy Crosby, between black and white there was a gray no-man's
land of doubt and indecision; a half-way house of compromise, and
sometimes David frightened her. He was so sure.
She passed the open door into the waiting-room, where sat two or
three patient and silent figures, and went back to the kitchen.
Minnie, the elderly servant, sat by the table reading, amid the odor
of roasting chicken; outside the door on the kitchen porch was the
freezer containing the dinner ice-cream. An orderly Sunday peace
was in the air, a gesture of homely comfort, order and security.
Minnie got up.
"I'll unpin your veil for you," she offered, obligingly. "You've
got time to lie down about ten minutes. Mrs. Morgan said she's got
to have her ears treated."
"I hope she doesn't sit and talk for an hour."
"She'll talk, all right," Minnie observed, her mouth full of pins.
"She'd be talking to me yet if I'd stood there. She's got her nerve,
too, that woman."
"I don't like to hear you speak so of the patients who come to the
house, Minnie."
"Well, I don't like their asking me questions about the family
either," said Minnie, truculently. "She wanted to know who was
Doctor Dick's mother. Said she had had a woman here from Wyoming,
and she thought she'd known his people."
Mrs. Crosby stood very still.
"I think she should bring her questions to the family," she said,
after a silence. "Thank you, Minnie."
Bonnet in hand, she moved toward the stairs, climbed them and went
into her room. Recently life had been growing increasingly calm
and less beset with doubts. For the first time, with Dick's coming
to live with them ten years before, a boy of twenty-two, she had
found a vicarious maternity and gloried in it. Recently she had
been very happy. The war was over and he was safely back; again
she could sew on his buttons and darn his socks, and turn down his
bed at night. He filled the old house with cheer and with vitality.
And, as David gave up more and more of the work, he took it on his
broad shoulders, efficient, tireless, and increasingly popular.
She put her bonnet away in its box, and suddenly there rose in her
frail old body a fierce and unexpected resentment against David.
He had chosen a course and abided by it. He had even now no doubt
or falterings. Just as in the first anxious days there had been
no doubt in him as to the essential rightness of what he was doing.
And now - This was what came of taking a life and moulding it in
accordance with a predetermined plan. That was for God to do, not
man.
She sat down near her window and rocked slowly, to calm herself.
Outside the Sunday movement of the little suburban town went by:
the older Wheeler girl, Nina, who had recently married Leslie Ward,
in her smart little car; Harrison Miller, the cynical bachelor who
lived next door, on his way to the station news stand for the New
York papers; young couples taking small babies for the air in a
perambulator; younger couples, their eyes on each other and on the
future.
That, too, she reflected bitterly! Dick was in love. She had not
watched him for that very thing for so long without being fairly
sure now. She had caught, as simple David with his celibate heart
could never have caught, the tone in Dick's voice when he mentioned
the Wheelers. She had watched him for the past few months in
church on Sunday mornings, and she knew that as she watched him,
so he looked at Elizabeth.
And David was so sure! So sure.
The office door closed and Mrs. Morgan went out, a knitted scarf
wrapping her ears against the wind, and following her exit came the
slow ascent of David as he climbed the stairs to wash for dinner.
She stopped rocking.
"David!" she called sharply.
He opened the door and came in, a bulky figure, still faintly
aromatic of drugs, cheerful and serene.
"D'you call me?" he inquired.
"Yes. Shut the door and come in. I want to talk to you." He
closed the door and went to the hearth-rug. There was a photograph
of Dick on the mantel, taken in his uniform, and he looked at it
for a moment. Then he turned. "All right, my dear. Let's have it."
"Did Mrs. Morgan have anything to say?" He stared at her.
"She usually has," he said. "I never knew you considered it worth
repeating. No. Nothing in particular."
The very fact that Mrs. Morgan had limited her inquiry to Minnie
confirmed her suspicions. But somehow, face to face with David,
she could not see his contentment turned to anxiety.
"I want to talk to you about Dick."
"Yes?"
"I think he's in love, David."
David's heavy body straightened, but his face remained serene.
"We had to expect that, Lucy. Is it Elizabeth Wheeler, do you
think?"
"Yes."
For a moment there was silence. The canary in its cage hopped
about, a beady inquisitive eye now on one, now on the other of them.
"She's a good girl, Lucy."
"That's not the point, is it?"
"Do you think she cares for him?"
"I don't know. There's some talk of Wallie Sayre. He's there a
good bit."
"Wallie Sayre!" snorted David. "He's never done a day's work in
his life and never will." He reflected on that with growing
indignation. "He doesn't hold a candle to Dick. Of course, if
the girl's a fool - "
Hands thrust deep into his pockets David took a turn about the room.
Lucy watched him. At last:
"You're evading the real issue, David, aren't you?"
"Perhaps I am," he admitted. "I'd better talk to him. I think he's
got an idea he shouldn't marry. That's nonsense."
"I don't mean that, exactly," Lucy persisted. "I mean, won't he
want a good many things cleared up before he marries? Isn't he
likely to want to go back to Norada?"
Some of the ruddy color left David's face. He stood still, staring
at her and silent.
"You know he meant to go three years ago, but the war came, and - "
Her voice trailed off. She could not even now easily recall those
days when Dick was drilling on the golf links, and that later
period of separation.
"If he does go back - "
"Donaldson is dead," David broke in, almost roughly.
"Maggie Donaldson is still living."
"What if she is? She's loyal to the core, in the first place. In
the second, she's criminally liable. As liable as I am."
"There is one thing, David, I ought to know. What has become of
the Carlysle girl?"
"She left the stage. There was a sort of general conviction she
was implicated and - I don't know, Lucy. Sometimes I think she was."
He sighed. "I read something about her coming back, some months ago,
in 'The Valley.' That was the thing she was playing the spring
before it happened." He turned on her. "Don't get that in your
head with the rest."
"I wonder, sometimes."
"I know it."
Outside the slamming of an automobile door announced Dick's return,
and almost immediately Minnie rang the old fashioned gong which
hung in the lower hall. Mrs. Crosby got up and placed a leaf of
lettuce between the bars of the bird cage.
"Dinner time, Caruso," she said absently. Caruso was the name Dick
had given the bird. And to David: "She must be in her thirties now."
"Probably." Then his anger and anxiety burst out. "What difference
can it make about her? About Donaldson's wife? About any hang-over
from that rotten time? They're gone, all of them. He's here. He's
safe and happy. He's strong and fine. That's gone."
In the lower hall Dick was taking off his overcoat.
"Smell's like chicken, Minnie," he said, into the dining room.
"Chicken and biscuits, Mr. Dick."
"Hi, up there!" he called lustily. "Come and feed a starving man.
I'm going to muffle the door-bell!"
He stood smiling up at them, very tidy in his Sunday suit, very
boyish, for all his thirty-two years. His face, smilingly tender
as he watched them, was strong rather than handsome, quietly
dependable and faintly humorous.
"In the language of our great ally," he said, "Madame et Monsieur,
le diner est servi."
In his eyes there was not only tenderness but a somewhat emphasized
affection, as though he meant to demonstrate, not only to them but
to himself, that this new thing that had come to him did not touch
their old relationship. For the new thing had come. He was still
slightly dazed with the knowledge of it, and considerably anxious.
Because he had just taken a glance at himself in the mirror of the
walnut hat-rack, and had seen nothing there particularly to inspire
- well, to inspire what he wanted to inspire.
At the foot of the stairs he drew Lucy's arm through his, and held
her hand. She seemed very small and frail beside him.
"Some day," he said, "a strong wind will come along and carry off
Mrs. Lucy Crosby, and the Doctors Livingstone will be obliged
hurriedly to rent aeroplanes, and to search for her at various
elevations!"
David sat down and picked up the old fashioned carving knife.
"Get the clubs?" he inquired.
Dick looked almost stricken.
"I forgot them, David," he said guiltily. "Jim Wheeler went out
to look them up, and I - I'll go back after dinner."
It was sometime later in the meal that Dick looked up from his plate
and said:
"I'd like to cut office hours on Wednesday night, David. I've asked
Elizabeth Wheeler to go into town to the theater."
"What about the baby at the Homer place?"
"Not due until Sunday. I'll leave my seat number at the box office,
anyhow."
"What are you going to see, Dick?" Mrs. Crosby asked. "Will you
have some dumplings?"
"I will, but David shouldn't. Too much starch. Why, it's 'The
Valley,' I think. An actress named Carlysle, Beverly Carlysle, is
starring in it."
He ate on, his mind not on his food, but back in the white house
on Palmer Lane, and a girl. Lucy Crosby, fork in air, stared at
him, and then glanced at David.
But David did not look up from his plate.
III
The Wheeler house was good, modern and commonplace. Walter Wheeler
and his wife were like the house. Just as here and there among the
furniture there was a fine thing, an antique highboy, a Sheraton
sideboard or some old cut glass, so they had, with a certain
mediocrity their own outstanding virtues. They liked music, believed
in the home as the unit of the nation, put happiness before undue
ambition, and had devoted their lives to their children.
For many years their lives had centered about the children. For
years they had held anxious conclave about whooping cough, about
small early disobediences, later about Sunday tennis. They stood
united to protect the children against disease, trouble and eternity.
Now that the children were no longer children, they were sometimes
lonely and still apprehensive. They feared motor car accidents,
and Walter Wheeler had withstood the appeals of Jim for a half dozen
years. They feared trains for them, and journeys, and unhappy
marriages, and hid their fears from each other. Their nightly
prayers were "to keep them safe and happy."
But they saw life reaching out and taking them, one by one. They
saw them still as children, but as children determined to bear their
own burdens. Jim stayed out late sometimes, and considered his
manhood in question if interrogated. Nina was married and out of
the home, but there loomed before them the possibility of maternity
and its dangers for her. There remained only Elizabeth, and on her
they lavished the care formerly divided among the three.
It was their intention and determination that she should never know
trouble. She was tenderer than the others, more docile and gentle.
They saw her, not as a healthy, normal girl, but as something fragile
and very precious.
Nina was different. They had always worried a little about Nina,
although they had never put their anxiety to each other. Nina had
always overrun her dress allowance, although she had never failed
to be sweetly penitent about it, and Nina had always placed an undue
emphasis on things. Her bedroom before her marriage was cluttered
with odds and ends, cotillion favors and photographs, college
pennants and small unwise purchases - trophies of the gayety and
conquest which were her life.
And Nina had "come out." It had cost a great deal, and it was not
so much to introduce her to society as to put a family recognition
on a fact already accomplished, for Nina had brought herself out
unofficially at sixteen. There had been the club ballroom, and a
great many flowers which withered before they could be got to the
hospital; and new clothing for all the family, and a caterer and
orchestra. After that, for a cold and tumultuous winter Mrs. Wheeler
had sat up with the dowagers night after night until all hours, and
the next morning had let Nina sleep, while she went about her
household duties. She had aged, rather, and her determined smile
had grown a little fixed.
She was a good woman, and she wanted her children's happiness more
than anything in the world, but she had a faint and sternly repressed
feeling of relief when Nina announced her engagement. Nina did it
with characteristic sangfroid, at dinner one night.
"Don't ring for Annie for a minute, mother," she said. "I want to
tell you all something. I'm going to marry Leslie Ward."
There had been a momentary pause. Then her father said:
"Just a minute. Is that Will Ward's boy?"
"Yes. He's not a boy."
"Well, he'll come around to see me before there's any engagement.
Has that occurred to either of you?"
"Oh, he'll be around. He'd have come to-night, but Howard Moore
is having his bachelor dinner. I hope he doesn't look shot to
pieces to-morrow. These bachelor things - ! We'd better have a
dinner or something, mother, and announce it."
There had been the dinner, with a silver loving cup bought for the
occasion, and thereafter to sit out its useless days on the Sheraton
sideboard. And there had been a trousseau and a wedding so expensive
that a small frown of anxiety had developed between Walter Wheeler's
eyebrows and stayed there.
For Nina's passion for things was inherent, persisting after her
marriage. She discounted her birthday and Christmases in advance,
coming around to his office a couple of months before the winter
holidays and needing something badly.
"It's like this, daddy," she would say. "You're going to give me a
check for Christmas anyhow, aren't you? And it would do me more
good now. I simply can't go to another ball."
"Where's your trousseau?"
"It's worn out-danced to rags. And out of date, too."
"I don't understand it, Nina. You and Leslie have a good income.
Your mother and I - "
"You didn't have any social demands. And wedding presents! If one
more friend of mine is married - "
He would get out his checkbook and write a check slowly and
thoughtfully. And tearing it off would say:
"Now remember, Nina, this is for Christmas. Don't feel aggrieved
when the time comes and you have no gift from us."
But he knew that when the time came Margaret, his wife, would hold
out almost to the end, and then slip into a jeweler's and buy Nina
something she simply couldn't do without.
It wasn't quite fair, he felt. It wasn't fair to Jim or to
Elizabeth. Particularly to Elizabeth.
Sometimes he looked at Elizabeth with a little prayer in his heart,
never articulate, that life would be good to her; that she might
keep her illusions and her dreams; that the soundness and
wholesomeness of her might keep her from unhappiness. Sometimes,
as she sat reading or sewing, with the light behind her shining
through her soft hair, he saw in her a purity that was almost
radiant.
He was in arms at once a night or two before Dick had invited
Elizabeth to go to the theater when Margaret Wheeler said:
"The house was gayer when Nina was at home."
"Yes. And you were pretty sick of it. Full of roistering young
idiots. Piano and phonograph going at once, pairs of gigglers in
the pantry at the refrigerator, pairs on the stairs and on the
verandah, cigar-ashes - my cigars - and cigarettes over everything,
and more infernal spooning going on than I've ever seen in my life."
He had resumed his newspaper, to put it down almost at once.
"What's that Sayre boy hanging around for?"
"I think he's in love with her, Walter."
"Love? Any of the Sayre tribe? Jim Sayre drank himself to death,
and this boy is like him. And Jim Sayre wasn't faithful to his wife.
This boy is - well, he's an heir. That's why he was begotten."
Margaret Wheeler stared at him.
"Why, Walter!" she said. "He's a nice boy, and he's a gentleman."
"Why? Because he gets up when you come into the room? Why in
heaven's name don't you encourage real men to come here? There's
Dick Livingstone. He's a man."
Margaret hesitated.
"Walter, have you ever thought there was anything queer about Dick
Livingstone's coming here?"
"Darned good for the town that he did come."
"But - nobody ever dreamed that David and Lucy had a nephew. Then
he turns up, and they send him to medical college, and all that."
"I've got some relations I haven't notified the town I possess,"
he said grimly.
"Well, there's something odd. I don't believe Henry Livingstone,
the Wyoming brother, ever had a son."
"What possible foundation have you for a statement like that?"
"Mrs. Cook Morgan's sister-in-law has been visiting her lately.
She says she knew Henry Livingstone well years ago in the West, and
she never heard he was married. She says positively he was not
married."
"And trust the Morgan woman to spread the good news," he said with
angry sarcasm. "Well, suppose that's true? Suppose Dick is an
illegitimate child? That's the worst that's implied, I daresay.
That's nothing against Dick himself. I'll tell the world there's
good blood on the Livingstone side, anyhow."
"You were very particular about Wallie Sayre's heredity, Walter."
"That's different," he retorted, and retired into gloomy silence
behind his newspaper. Drat these women anyhow. It was like some
fool female to come there and rake up some old and defunct scandal.
He'd stand up for Dick, if it ever came to a show-down. He liked
Dick. What the devil did his mother matter, anyhow? If this town
hadn't had enough evidence of Dick Livingstone's quality the last
few years he'd better go elsewhere. He -
He got up and whistled for the dog.
"I'm going to take a walk," he said briefly, and went out. He
always took a walk when things disturbed him.
On the Sunday afternoon after Dick had gone Elizabeth was alone in
her room upstairs. On the bed lay the sort of gown Nina would have
called a dinner dress, and to which Elizabeth referred as her dark
blue. Seen thus, in the room which was her own expression, there
was a certain nobility about her very simplicity, a steadiness about
her eyes that was almost disconcerting.
"She's the saintly-looking sort that would go on the rocks for some
man," Nina had said once, rather flippantly, "and never know she
was shipwrecked. No man in the world could do that to me."
But just then Elizabeth looked totally unlike shipwreck. Nothing
seemed more like a safe harbor than the Wheeler house that afternoon,
or all the afternoons. Life went on, the comfortable life of an
upper middle-class household. Candles and flowers on the table and
a neat waitress to serve; little carefully planned shopping
expeditions; fine hand-sewing on dainty undergarments for rainy days;
small tributes of books and candy; invitations and consultations as
to what to wear; choir practice, a class in the Sunday school, a
little work among the poor; the volcano which had been Nina
overflowing elsewhere in a smart little house with a butler out on
the Ridgely Road.
She looked what she was, faithful and quietly loyal, steady - and
serene; not asking greatly but hoping much; full of small
unvisualized dreams and little inarticulate prayers; waiting, without
knowing that she was waiting.
Sometimes she worried. She thought she ought to "do something." A
good many of the girls she knew wanted to do something, but they were
vague as to what. She felt at those times that she was not being
very useful, and she had gone so far as to lay the matter before her
father a couple of years before, when she was just eighteen.
"Just what do you think of doing?" he had inquired.
"That's it," she had said despondently. "I don't know. I haven't
any particular talent, you know. But I don't think I ought to go on
having you support me in idleness all my life."
"Well, I don't think it likely that I'll have to," he had observed,
dryly. "But here's the point, and I think it's important. I don't
intend to work without some compensation, and my family is my
compensation. You just hang around and make me happy, as you do,
and you're fulfilling your economic place in the nation. Don't you
forget it, either."
That had comforted her. She had determined then never to marry but
to hang around, as he suggested, for the rest of her life. She was
quite earnest about it, and resolved.
She picked up the blue dress and standing before her mirror, held
it up before her. It looked rather shabby, she thought, but the
theater was not like a dance, and anyhow it would look better at
night. She had been thinking about next Wednesday evening ever
since Dick Livingstone had gone. It seemed, better somehow,
frightfully important. It was frightfully important. For the first
time she acknowledged to herself that she had been fond of him, as
she put it, for a long time. She had an odd sense, too, of being
young and immature, and as though he had stooped to her from some
height: such as thirty-two years and being in the war, and having
to decide about life and death, and so on.
She hoped he did not think she was only a child.
She heard Nina coming up the stairs. At the click of her high heels
on the hard wood she placed the dress on the bed again, and went to
the window. Her father was on the path below, clearly headed for a
walk. She knew then that Nina had been asking for something.
Nina came in and closed the door. She was smaller than Elizabeth
and very pretty. Her eyebrows had been drawn to a tidy line, and
from the top of her shining head to her brown suede pumps she was
exquisite with the hours of careful tending and careful dressing
she gave her young body. Exquisitely pretty, too.