第98章

To Martin the threat of this conflict with his father over Maggie was the one crisis that he had wished to avoid.But his character, which was naturally easy and friendly and unsuspicious, had confused him.Those three weeks with Maggie had been so happy, so free from all morbidity and complication, that he had forgotten the world outside.For a moment when Maggie had told him that she had given her note to Caroline he had been afraid, but he had been lulled as the days passed and nothing interfered with their security.Now he was suddenly plunged into the middle of a confusion that was all the more complicated because he could not tell what his mother and his, sister were thinking.He knew that Amy had disliked him ever since his return, and that that dislike had been changed into something fiercer since his declared opposition to Thurston.His mother he simply did not understand at all.She spoke to him still with the same affection and tenderness, but behind the words he felt a hard purpose and a mysterious aloofness.

She was not like his mother at all; it was as though some spy had been introduced into the house in his mother's clothing.

But for them he did not care; it was his father of whom he must think.Here, too, there was a mystery from which he was deliberately kept.He knew, of course, that they were all expecting some crisis;as the days advanced he could feel that the excitement increased.He knew that his father had declared that he had visions and that there was to be a revelation very shortly; but of these visions and this revelation he heard only indirectly from others.His father said nothing to him of these things, and at the ordinary Chapel services on Sunday there was no allusion to them.He knew that the Inside Saints had a society and rules of their own inside the larger body, and from that inner society he was quite definitely excluded.Of that exclusion he would have been only too glad had it not been for his father, but now when he saw him growing from day to day more haggard and worn, more aloof from all human society, when lie saw him wrapped further and further into some strange and as it seemed to him insane absorption, he was determined to fight his way into the heart of it.His growing intimacy with Maggie had relieved him, for a moment, of the intensity of this other anxiety.Now suddenly he was flung back into the very thick of it.His earlier plan of forcing his father out of all this network of chicanery and charlatanism now returned.He felt that if he could only seize his father and forcibly abduct him and take him away from Amy and Thurston and the rest, and all the associations of the Chapel, he might cure him and lead him back to health and happiness again.

And yet he did not know.He had not himself escaped from it all by leaving it, and then that undermining bewildering suspicion that perhaps after all there was something in all of this, that it was not only charlatanism, confused and disconcerted him.He was like a man who hears sounds and faint cries behind a thick wall, and there are no doors and windows, and the bricks are too stout to be torn apart.

He had been behind that wall all his life...

Amy's allusion to Maggie in the morning had been very slight, but had shown quite clearly that she had heard all, and probably more, than the truth.When he returned that morning he found his mother alone, knitting a pink woollen comforter, her gold spectacles on the end of her nose, her fresh lace cap crisp and dainty on her white hair--the very picture of the dearest old lady in the world.

"Mother," he began at once, "what did Amy mean this morning about myself and Maggie Cardinal?""Maggie who, dear?" his mother asked.

"Maggie Cardinal--the Cardinal niece, you know," he said impatiently.

"Did she say anything? I don't remember.""Yes, mother.You remember perfectly well.She said that they were all talking about me and Maggie.""Did she?" The old lady slowly counted her stitches."Well, dear, Ishouldn't worry about what they all say--whoever 'they' may be.""Oh, I don't care for that," he answered contemptuously, "although all the same I'm not going to have Amy running that girl down.She's been against her from the first.What I want to know is has Amy been to father with this? Because if she has I'm going to stop it.I'm not going to have her bothering father with bits of gossip that she's picked up by listening behind other peoples' key-holes."Amy, meanwhile, had come in and heard this last sentence.

"Thank you, Martin," she said quietly.

He turned to her with fury."What did you mean at breakfast," he asked, "by what you said about myself and Maggie Cardinal?"She looked at him with contempt but no very active hostility.

"I was simply telling you something that I thought you ought to know," she said."It is what everybody is saying--that you and she have been meeting every day for weeks, sitting in the Park after dark together, going to the theatre.People draw their own conclusions, I suppose.""How much have you told father of this?" he demanded.

"I don't know at all what father has heard," she answered.

"You've been that girl's enemy since the first moment that she came here," he continued, growing angrier and angrier at her quiet indifference."Now you're trying to damage her character.""On the contrary," she answered, "I told you because I thought you ought to know what people were saying.The girl doesn't matter to me one way or another--but I'm sorry for her if she thinks she cares for you.That won't bring her much happiness."Then suddenly her impassivity had a strange effect upon him.He could not answer her.He left them both, and went up to his room.