第32章

AFTER EIGHT YEARS.

While Scarborough was serving his clerkship at Indianapolis, Dumont was engaging in ever larger and more daring speculations with New York as his base.Thus it came about that when Scarborough established himself at Saint X, Dumont and Pauline were living in New York, in a big house in East Sixty-first Street.

And Pauline had welcomed the change.In Saint X she was constantly on guard, always afraid her father and mother would see below that smiling surface of her domestic life which made them happy.In New York she was free from the crushing sense of peril and restraint, as their delusions about her were secure.

There, after she and he found their living basis of "let alone," they got on smoothly, rarely meeting except in the presence of servants or guests, never inquiring either into the other's life, carrying on all negotiations about money and other household matters through their secretaries.He thought her cold by nature--therefore absolutely to be trusted.And what other man with the pomp and circumstance of a great and growing fortune to maintain had so admirable an instrument? "An ideal wife," he often said to himself.And he was not the man to speculate as to what was going on in her head.He had no interest in what others thought; how they were filling the places he had assigned them--that was his only concern.

In one of those days of pause which come now and then in the busiest lives she chanced upon his letters from Europe in her winter at Battle Field.She took one of them from its envelope and began to read--carelessly, with a languid curiosity to measure thus exactly the change in herself.But soon she was absorbed, her mind groping through letter after letter for the clue to a mystery.The Dumont she now knew stood out so plainly in those letters that she could not understand how she, inexperienced and infatuated though she then was, had failed to see the perfect full-length portrait.How had she read romance and high-mindedness and intellect into the personality so frankly flaunting itself in all its narrow sordidness, in all its poverty of real thought and real feeling?

And there was Hampden Scarborough to contrast him with.With this thought the truth suddenly stared at her, made her drop the letter and visibly shrink.It was just because Scarborough was there that she had been tricked.The slight surface resemblance between the two men, hardly more than the "favor" found in all men of the family of strong and tenacious will, had led her on to deck the absent Dumont with the manhood of the present Scarborough.She had read Scarborough into Dumont's letters.

Yes, and--the answers she addressed and mailed to Dumont had really been written to Scarborough.

She tossed the letters back into the box from which they had reappeared after four long years.She seated herself on the white bear-skin before the open fire; and with hands clasped round her knees she rocked herself slowly to and fro like one trying to ease an intolerable pain.

Until custom dulled the edge of that pain, the days and the nights were the cruelest in her apprenticeship up to that time.

When her boy, Gardiner, was five years old, she got her father and mother to keep him at Saint X with them.

"New York's no place, I think, to bring up and educate a boy in the right way," she explained.And it was the truth, though not the whole truth.The concealed part was that she would have made an open break with her husband had there been no other way of safeguarding their all-seeing, all-noting boy from his example.

Before Gardiner went to live with his grandparents she stayed in the East, making six or eight brief visits "home" each year.

When he went she resolved to divide her year between her pleasure as a mother and her obligation to her son's father, to her parents' son-in-law--her devotions at the shrine of Appearances.

It was in the fall of the year she was twenty-five--eight years and a half after she left Battle Field--that Hampden Scarborough reappeared upon the surface of her life.

On a September afternoon in that year Olivia, descending from the train at Saint X, was almost as much embarrassed as pleased by her changed young cousin rushing at her with great energy--"Dear, dear Olivia! And hardly any different--how's the baby? No--not Fred, but Fred Junior, I mean.In some ways you positively look younger.You know, you were SO serious at college!""But you--I don't quite understand how any one can be so changed, yet--recognizable.I guess it's the plumage.You're in a new edition--an edition deluxe."Pauline's dressmakers were bringing out the full value of her height and slender, graceful strength.Her eyes, full of the same old frankness and courage, now had experience in them, too.

She was wearing her hair so that it fell from her brow in two sweeping curves reflecting the light in sparkles and flashes.

Her manner was still simple and genuine--the simplicity and genuineness of knowledge now, not of innocence.Extremes meet--but they remain extremes.Her "plumage" was a fashionable dress of pale blue cloth, a big beplumed hat to match, a chiffon parasol like an azure cloud, at her throat a sapphire pendant, about her neck and swinging far below her waist a chain of sapphires.

"And the plumage just suits her," thought Olivia.For it seemed to her that her cousin had more than ever the quality she most admired--the quality of individuality, of distinction.Even in her way of looking clean and fresh she was different, as if those prime feminine essentials were in her not matters of frequent reacquirement but inherent and inalienable, like her brilliance of eyes and smoothness of skin.