Chapter 32

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_ CHAPTER XXXII

Moving automatically through the solemn scenes of the next two days, that, mused Norma, must be the solution. Wolf must go alone to California. Not because she did not love him--who could help loving him indeed?--but because she loved Chris more--or differently, at least, and she belonged to Chris's world now, by every right of birth, wealth, and position.

"Of course you must stay here," Chris said, positively, on the one occasion when they spoke of her plans. "In the first place, there is the estate to settle, we shall need you. Then there are books--pictures--all that sort of thing to manage, the old servants to dispose of, and probably this house to sell--but we can discuss that. Judge Lee has felt for a long time that this is the right site for a big apartment house, especially if we can get hold of Boyer's plot. You had better take a suite at one of the hotels, and later we can look up the right sort of an apartment for you."

Not a word of his personal hopes; missing them she felt oddly cheated.

"Wolf goes to California next month," she said. Christopher gave her a sharp, quizzing look.

"But I think you had decided, weeks ago, that you were not going?"

"Yes--I've told him so!" she faltered. She felt strangely lost and forlorn, releasing her hold on Wolf, and yet not able to claim Christopher's support. It was contemptible--it was weak in her, she felt, but she could not quite choke down her hunger for one reassuring word from Chris. "I feel so--lonely, Chris," she said.

He gave a quick, uneasy glance about the breakfast-room, where they were having a hasty three-o'clock luncheon. No one was within hearing.

"You understand my position now," he said.

"Oh, of course!" But she felt oddly chilled. Chris as the bereaved husband and son-in-law was perfect, of course, almost too perfect. If Wolf loved a woman----

But then the fancy of Wolf, married, and confessedly loving a woman who was another man's wife, was absurd, anyway. Wolf did not belong to the world where such things were common, it was utterly foreign to his nature, with all the rest. Wolf did not go to operas and picture galleries and polo matches; he did not know how to comport himself at afternoon teas or summer lunches at the country club.

And Norma's life would be spent in this atmosphere now. She would get her frocks from Madame Modiste, and her hats from the Avenue specialists; she would be a smart and a conspicuous little figure at Lenox and Bar Harbour and Newport; she would spend her days with masseuses and dressmakers, and with French and Italian teachers. She could travel, some day--but here the thought of Chris crept in, and she was a little hurt at Chris. His exquisite poise, his sureness of being absolutely correct, was one of his charms. But it was a little hard not to have the depth of his present feeling for her sweep him off his feet just occasionally. He had, indeed, shown her far more daring favour when Alice was alive--meeting Norma down town, driving her about, walking with her where they might reasonably fear to be seen now and then.

It came to her painfully that, even there, Chris's respect for the conventions of his world was not at fault. Flirtations, "crushes," "cases," and "suitors" were entirely acceptable in the circle that Chris so conspicuously ornamented. To pay desperate attentions to a pretty young married woman was quite excusable; it would have been universally understood.

But to show the faintest trace of interest in her while his wife lay dead, and while his house was plunged into mourning, no--Chris would not do that. That would not be good form, it would be censured as not being compatible with the standard of a gentleman. His conduct now must be beyond criticism, he was the domestic dictator in this, as in every emergency. Norma listened while he and Hendrick and Annie discussed the funeral.

They were in the big upstairs bedroom that Annie had appropriated to herself during these days. Annie was resting on a couch in a nest of little pillows, her long bare hands very white against the blackness of her gown. Hendrick did most of the talking, Chris listening thoughtfully, accepting, rejecting, Norma a mere spectator. She decided that Annie was playing her part with a stimulating consciousness of its dignity, and that Chris was not much better. Honest, red-faced Hendrick was only genuinely anxious to arrange these details without a scene.

"I take Annie up the aisle," Chris said, "you'll be a pall-bearer, Hendrick. Mrs. Lee says that the Judge feels he is too old to serve, so he will follow me, with Leslie. She gets here this afternoon. Then Acton brings Norma, and that fills the family pew. Now, in the next pew----"

It reminded Norma of something, she could not for a moment remember what. Then it came to her. Of course!--Leslie's wedding. They had discussed precedence and pews just that way. Music, too. Hendrick was making a note of music--Alice's favourite dirge was to be played, and "Come Ye Disconsolate" which had been sung at Theodore's funeral, thirteen years ago, and at his father's, seven years before that, was to be sung by the famous church choir.

The church was unfortunately small, so cards were to be given to the few hundreds that it would accommodate. Hendrick suggested a larger church, but Annie shut her eyes, leaning back, and faintly shaking her head.

"Please--Hendrick--_please_!" she articulated, wearily. "Mama loved that church--and there's so little that we can do now--so little that she ever wanted, dear old saint!"

It was not hypocrisy, Norma thought. Annie had been a good daughter. Indeed she had been unusually loyal, as the daughters of Annie's set saw their filial duties. But something in this overwhelming, becoming grief, combined with so lively a sense of what was socially correct, jarred unpleasantly on the younger woman. Of course, funerals had to have management, like everything else. And it was only part of Annie's code to believe that an awkwardness now, a social error ever so faint, an opportunity given the world for amusement or criticism, would reflect upon the family and upon the dead.

Norma carried on long mental conversations with Wolf, criticizing or defending the Melroses. She imagined herself telling him of the shock it had given her to realize that her grandmother's body was barely cold before an autocratic and noisy French hairdresser had arrived, demanding electric heat and hand-glasses as casually as if his customer had been the bustling, vain old lady of a week ago. She laughed secretly whenever she recalled the solemn undertaker who had solicited her own aid in filling out a blank. His first melancholy question, "And thud dame of the father----" Norma had momentarily supposed to be the beginning of a prayer, and it had been with an almost hysterical revulsion of feeling that she had said: "Oh, her father's name? Oh, Francis Dabney Murison."

Wolf, who would not laugh at one tenth of the things that amused Chris, or that Annie found richly funny, would laugh at these little glimpses of a formal funeral, Norma knew, and he would remember other odd bits of reading that were in the same key--from Macaulay, or Henry George, or a scrap of newspaper that had chanced to be pasted upon an engine-house wall.

Leslie came into the house late on the afternoon of Friday, and there was much fresh crying between her and Annie. Leslie had on new black, too, "just what I could grab down there," she explained--and was pettish and weary with fatigue and the nervous shock. She gave only the side of her cheek to Acton's dutiful kiss, and answered his question about the baby with an impatient, "Oh, heavens, she's all _right_! What could be the matter with her? She did have a cold, but now she's all right--and when I'm half-crazy about Grandma and poor Aunt Alice, I do _wish_ you wouldn't take me up so quickly. I've been travelling all night, and my head is splitting! If it was _I_ that had the cold, I don't believe you'd be so fussy!"

"Poor little girl, it's hard for you not to have seen them once more," Christopher said, tenderly, failing to meet the half-amused and half-indignant glance that Norma sent him. Leslie burst into self-pitying tears, and held tight to his hand, as they all sat down in Annie's room.

"I believe I feel it most for you, Uncle Chris," she sobbed.

"It changes my life--ends it as surely as it did hers," Chris said, quietly. "Just now--well, I don't see ahead--just now. After awhile I believe she'll come back to me--her sweetness and goodness and bigness--for Alice was the biggest woman, and the finest, that I ever knew; and then I'll try to live again--just as she would have had me. And meanwhile, I try to comfort myself that I tried to show her, in whatever clumsy way I could, that I appreciated her!"

"You not only showed her, you showed all the world, Chris," Annie said, stretching a hand toward him. Norma felt a sudden uprising of some emotion singularly akin to contempt.

A maid signalled her, and she stepped to the dressing-room door. A special delivery letter had come from Wolf. The maid went away again, but Norma stood where she was, reading it. Wolf had written:

DEAR NORMA,

Mother wrote me of all that you have been going through, and I am as sorry as I can be for all their trouble, and glad that they have you to help them through. Mother also told me of the change in your position there; I had always known vaguely that we didn't understand it all. I remember now your coming to us in Brooklyn, and your mother crying when she went away. I know this will make a difference to you, and be one more reason for your not coming West with me. You must use your own judgment, but the longer I think of it, the meaner it seems to me for me to take advantage of your coming to me, last spring, and our getting married. I've thought about it a great deal. Nothing will ever make me like, or respect, the man you say you care for. I don't believe you do care for him. And I would rather see you dead than married to him. But it isn't for me to say, of course. If you like him, that's enough. If you ever stop liking him, and will come back to me, I'll meet you anywhere, or take you anywhere--it won't make any difference what Mother thinks, or Rose thinks, or any one else. I've written and destroyed this letter about six times. I just want you to know that if you think I am standing in the way of your happiness, I won't stand there, even though I believe you are making an awful mistake about that particular man. And I want to thank you for the happiest eight months that any man ever had.

Yours always,
WOLF.

Norma stood perfectly still, after she read the letter through, with the clutch of vague pain and shame at her heart. The stiff, stilted words did not seem like Wolf, and the definite casting-off hurt her. Why couldn't they be friends, at least? Granted that their marriage was a mistake, it had never had anything but harmony in it, companionship, mutual respect and understanding, and a happy intimacy as clean and natural as the meeting of flowers.

She was standing, motionless and silent, when Leslie's voice came clearly to her ears. Evidently Acton, Annie, and Leslie were alone, in Annie's room, out of sight, but not a dozen feet away from where she stood. Norma did not catch the exact words, but she caught her name, and her heart stood still with the instinctive terror of the trapped. Annie had not heard either evidently; she said "What, dear?" sympathetically.

"I asked what's Norma doing here--isn't she overdoing her relationship a little?" Leslie said, languidly.

Norma's face burned, she could hardly breathe as she waited.

"Mama sent for her, for some reason," Annie answered, with a little drawl.

"After all, she's a sort of cousin, isn't she?" Acton added.

"Oh, don't jump on me for _everything_ I say, Acton," Leslie said, angrily. "My _goodness_----!"

"Chris says that Mama left her the Melrose Building--and I don't know what besides!" Annie said. There was a moment of silence.

"I don't believe it! What for!" Leslie exclaimed, then, incredulously. And after another silence she added, in a puzzled tone, "Do _you_ understand it, Aunt Annie?"

Evidently Annie answered with a glance or a shrug, for there was another pause before Annie said:

"What I don't like about it, and what I do wish Mama had thought of, is the way that people comment on a thing like that. It's not as if Norma needed it; she has a husband to take care of her, now, and it makes us a little ridiculous! One likes to feel that, at a time like this, everything is to be done decently, at least--not enormous legacies to comparative strangers----"

"I like Norma, we've all been kind to her," Leslie contributed, as Annie's voice died listlessly away. "I've always made allowances for her. But I confess that it was rather a surprise to find her here, one of the family----! After all, we Melroses have always rather prided ourselves on standing together, haven't we? If she wants to wear black for Grandma, why, it makes no difference to _me_----"

"I suppose the will could be broken without any notoriety, Chris?" Annie asked, in an undertone. Norma's heart turned sick. She had not supposed that Chris was listening without protest to this conversation.

"No," she heard him say, briefly and definitely, "that's impossible!"

"It isn't the money----" Annie began. But Leslie interrupted with a bitter little laugh.

"It may not be with you, Aunt Annie, but I assure you I wouldn't mind a few extra thousands," she said.

"I think you get the Newport house, Leslie," Chris said, in a tone whose dubiety only Norma could understand.

"The Newport house!" Leslie exclaimed. "Why, but don't I own _this_, now? I thought----"

"I don't really know," Chris answered. "We'll open the will next week, and then we'll straighten everything out."

"In the meanwhile," Annie said, lazily, "if she suggests going back to her own family, for Heaven's sake don't stop her! I like Norma--always have. But after all, there are times when _any_ outsider--no matter how agreeable she is----"

"I think she'll go immediately after the funeral," Chris said, constrainedly and uncertainly.

Norma, suddenly roused both to a realization of the utter impropriety of her overhearing all this, and the danger of detection, slipped from the dressing-room by the hall door, and so escaped to her own room.

She shut the door behind her, walked irresolutely to the bed, stood there for a moment, with her hands pressed to her cheeks, walked blindly to the window, only to pause again, paced the room mechanically for a few minutes, and finally found herself seated on the broad, old-fashioned sill of the dressing-room window, staring down unseeing at the afternoon traffic in Madison Avenue.

Oh, how she hated them--cruel, selfish, self-satisfied snobs--snobs--snobs that they were! Leslie--Leslie "making allowances for her!" Leslie making allowances for _her_! And Annie--hoping that for Heaven's sake nobody would prevent her from going home after the funeral! The remembered phrases burned and stung like acid upon her soul; she wanted to hurt Annie and Leslie as they had hurt her, she wanted to shame them and anger them.

Yes, and she could do it, too! She could do it! They little knew that within a few days' time utter consternation and upheaval, notoriety and shame, and the pity of their intimates, would disrupt the surface of their lives, that surface that they felt it so important to keep smooth! "People will comment," Norma quoted to herself, with a bitter smile--indeed people would comment, as they had never commented even upon the Melroses before! Leslie would be robbed not only of her inheritance but of her name and of her position. And Annie--even magnificent Aunt Annie must accept, with what surface veneer of cordiality she might affect, the only child of her only brother, the heir to the family estate.

"I believe I'm horribly tired," Norma said to herself, looking out into the dimming winter day, "or else I'm nervous, or something! I wish I could go over to Rose's and help her put the children to bed----! Or I wish Aunt Kate would telephone for me--I'm sick of this place! Or I wish Wolf would come walking around that corner--oh, if he would--if he would----!" Norma said, staring out with an intensity so great that it seemed to her for the moment that Wolf indeed might come. "If only he'd come to take me to dinner, at some little Italian place with a backyard, and skyscrapers all about, so that we could talk!"

Regina, coming in a little later, saw that Mrs. Sheridan had been crying, and reproached her with the affectionate familiarity of an old servitor.

"You that were always so light-hearted, Miss, it don't seem right for you to grieve so!" said Regina, a little tearful herself. Norma smiled, and wiped her eyes.

"This is a nice beginning," the girl told herself, as she bathed and dressed for the evening ordeal of calls, and messages, and solemn visits to the chamber of death, "this is a nice beginning for a woman who knows that the man she loves is free to marry her, and who has just fallen heir to a great fortune!" _

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