第77章
Maude Hutchins had become,at a stroke,the most desirable of women.Ihave often wondered how I should have felt on that five-hour journey back to the city if she had fallen into my arms!I should have persuaded myself,no doubt,that I had not done a foolish thing in yielding to an impulse and proposing to an inexperienced and provincial young woman,yet there would have been regrets in the background.Too deeply chagrined to see any humour in the situation,I settled down in a Pullman seat and went over and over again the event of that afternoon until the train reached the city.
As the days wore on,and I attended to my cases,I thought of Maude a great deal,and in those moments when the pressure of business was relaxed,she obsessed me.She must love me,--only she did not realize it.That was the secret!Her value had risen amazingly,become supreme;the very act of refusing me had emphasized her qualifications as a wife,and I now desired her with all the intensity of a nature which had been permitted always to achieve its objects.The inevitable process of idealization began.In dusty offices I recalled her freshness as she had sat beside me in the garden,--the freshness of a flower;with Berkeleyan subjectivism I clothed the flower with colour,bestowed it with fragrance.I conferred on Maude all the gifts and graces that woman had possessed since the creation.And I recalled,with mingled bitterness and tenderness,the turn of her head,the down on her neck,the half-revealed curve of her arm....In spite of the growing sordidness of Lyme Street,my mother and I still lived in the old house,for which she very naturally had a sentiment.In vain I had urged her from time to time to move out into a brighter and fresher neighbourhood.It would be time enough,she said,when I was married.
"If you wait for that,mother,"I answered,"we shall spend the rest of our lives here.""I shall spend the rest of my life here,"she would declare."But you--you have your life before you,my dear.You would be so much more contented if--if you could find some nice girl.I think you live--too feverishly."I do not know whether or not she suspected me of being in love,nor indeed how much she read of me in other ways.I did not confide in her,nor did it strike me that she might have yearned for confidences;though sometimes,when I dined at home,I surprised her gentle face--framed now with white hair--lifted wistfully toward me across the table.Our relationship,indeed,was a pathetic projection of that which had existed in my childhood;we had never been confidants then.The world in which Ilived and fought,of great transactions and merciless consequences frightened her;her own world was more limited than ever.She heard disquieting things,I am sure,from Cousin Robert Breck,who had become more and more querulous since the time-honoured firm of Breck and Company had been forced to close its doors and the home at Claremore had been sold.My mother often spent the day in the scrolled suburban cottage with the coloured glass front door where he lived with the Kinleys and Helen....
If my mother suspected that I was anticipating marriage,and said nothing,Nancy Durrett suspected and spoke out.
Life is such a curious succession of contradictions and surprises that Irecord here without comment the fact that I was seeing much more of Nancy since her marriage than I had in the years preceding it.A comradeship existed between us.I often dined at her house and had fallen into the habit of stopping there frequently on my way home in the evening.Ham did not seem to mind.What was clear,at any rate,was that Nancy,before marriage,had exacted some sort of an understanding by which her "freedom"was not to be interfered with.She was the first among us of the "modern wives."Ham,whose heartstrings and purse-strings were oddly intertwined,had stipulated that they were to occupy the old Durrett mansion;but when Nancy had made it "livable,"as she expressed it,he is said to have remarked that he might as well have built a new house and been done with it.Not even old Nathaniel himself would have recognized his home when Nancy finished what she termed furnishing:out went the horsehair,the hideous chandeliers,the stuffy books,the Recamier statuary,and an army of upholsterers,wood-workers,etc.,from Boston and New York invaded the place.The old mahogany doors were spared,but matched now by Chippendale and Sheraton;the new,polished floors were covered with Oriental rugs,the dreary Durrett pictures replaced by good canvases and tapestries.Nancy had what amounted to a genius for interior effects,and she was the first to introduce among us the luxury that was to grow more and more prevalent as our wealth increased by leaps and bounds.
Only Nancy's luxury,though lavish,was never vulgar,and her house when completed had rather marvellously the fine distinction of some old London mansion filled with the best that generations could contribute.It left Mrs.Frederick Grierson--whose residence on the Heights had hitherto been our "grandest"--breathless with despair.
With characteristic audacity Nancy had chosen old Nathaniel's sanctum for her particular salon,into which Ham himself did not dare to venture without invitation.It was hung in Pompeiian red and had a little wrought-iron balcony projecting over the yard,now transformed by an expert into a garden.When I had first entered this room after the metamorphosis had taken place I inquired after the tombstone mantel.
"Oh,I've pulled it up by the roots,"she said.
"Aren't you afraid of ghosts?"I inquired.