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The Precipice: A Novel, a novel by Elia W. Peattie |
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Chapter 2 |
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_ CHAPTER II What! Silver tree? She hadn't realized how the time had been flying. But there was the sawmill. She could hear the whir and buzz! And there was the old livery-stable, and the place where farm implements were sold, and the little harness shop jammed in between;--and there, to convince her no mistake had been made, was the lozenge of grass with "Silvertree" on it in white stones. Then, in a second, the station appeared with the busses backed up against it, and beyond them the familiar surrey with a woman in it with yearning eyes. Kate, the specialized student of psychology, the graduate with honors, who had learned to note contrasts and weigh values, forgot everything (even her umbrella) and leaped from the train while it was still in motion. Forgotten the honors and degrees; the majors were mere minor affairs; and there remained only the things which were from the beginning. She and her mother sat very close together as they drove through the familiar village streets. When they did speak, it was incoherently. There was an odor of brier roses in the air and the sun was setting in a "bed of daffodil sky." Kate felt waves of beauty and tenderness breaking over her and wanted to cry. Her mother wanted to and did. Neither trusted herself to speak, but when they were in the house Mrs. Barrington pulled the pins out of Kate's hat and then Kate took the faded, gentle woman in her strong arms and crushed her to her. "Your father was afraid he wouldn't be home in time to meet you," said Mrs. Barrington when they were in the parlor, where the Dresden vases stood on the marble mantel and the rose-jar decorated the three-sided table in the corner. "It was just his luck to be called into the country. If it had been a really sick person who wanted him, I wouldn't have minded, but it was only Venie Sampson." "Still having fits?" asked Kate cheerfully, as one glad to recognize even the chronic ailments of a familiar community. "Well, she thinks she has them," said Mrs. Barrington in an easy, gossiping tone; "but my opinion is that she wouldn't be troubled with them if only there were some other way in which she could call attention to herself. You see, Venie was a very pretty girl." "Has that made her an invalid, mummy?" "Well, it's had something to do with it. When she was young she received no end of attention, but some way she went through the woods and didn't even pick up a crooked stick. But she got so used to being the center of interest that when she found herself growing old and plain, she couldn't think of any way to keep attention fixed on her except by having these collapses. You know you mustn't call the attacks 'fits.' Venie's far too refined for that." Kate smiled broadly at her mother's distinctive brand of humor. She loved it all--Miss Sampson's fits, her mother's jokes; even the fact that when they went out to supper she sat where she used in the old days when she had worn a bib beneath her chin. "Oh, the plates, the cups, the everything!" cried Kate, ridiculously lifting a piece of the "best china" to her lips and kissing it. "Absurdity!" reproved her mother, but she adored the girl's extravagances just the same. "Everything's glorious," Kate insisted. "Cream cheese and parsley! Did you make it, mummy? Currant rolls--oh, the wonders! Martha Underwood, don't dare to die without showing me how to make those currant rolls. Veal loaf--now, what do you think of that? Why, at Foster we went hungry sometimes--not for lack of quantity, of course, but because of the quality. I used to be dreadfully ashamed of the fact that there we were, dozens of us women in that fine hall, and not one of us with enough domestic initiative to secure a really good table. I tried to head an insurrection and to have now one girl and now another supervise the table, but the girls said they hadn't come to college to keep house." "Yes, yes," chimed in her mother excitedly; "that's where the whole trouble with college for women comes in. They not only don't go to college to keep house, but most of them mean not to keep it when they come out. We allowed you to go merely because you overbore us. You used to be a terrible little tyrant, Katie,--almost as bad as--" She brought herself up suddenly. "As bad as whom, mummy?" There was a step on the front porch and Mrs. Barrington was spared the need for answering. "There's your father," she said, signaling Kate to meet him. * * * * * Dr. Barrington was tall, spare, and grizzled. The torpor of the little town had taken the light from his eyes and reduced the tempo of his movements, but, in spite of all, he had preserved certain vivid features of his personality. He had the long, educated hands of the surgeon and the tyrannical aspect of the physician who has struggled all his life with disobedience and perversity. He returned Kate's ardent little storm of kisses with some embarrassment, but he was unfeignedly pleased at her appearance, and as the three of them sat about the table in their old juxtaposition, his face relaxed. However, Kate had seen her mother look up wistfully as her husband passed her, as if she longed for some affectionate recognition of the occasion, but the man missed his opportunity and let it sink into the limbo of unimproved moments. "Well, father, we have our girl home again," Mrs. Barrington said with pardonable sentiment. "Well, we've been expecting her, haven't we?" Dr. Barrington replied, not ill-naturedly but with a marked determination to make the episode matter-of-fact. "Indeed we have," smiled Mrs. Barrington. "But of course it couldn't mean to you, Frederick, what it does to me. A mother's--" Dr. Barrington raised his hand. "Never mind about a mother's love," he said decisively. "If you had seen it fail as often as I have, you'd think the less said on the subject the better. Women are mammal, I admit; maternal they are not, save in a proportion of cases. Did you have a pleasant journey down, Kate?" He had the effect of shutting his wife out of the conversation; of definitely snubbing and discountenancing her. Kate knew it had always been like that, though when she had been young and more passionately determined to believe her home the best and dearest in the world, as children will, she had overlooked the fact--had pretended that what was a habit was only a mood, and that if "father was cross" to-day, he would be pleasant to-morrow. Now he began questioning Kate about college, her instructors and her friends. There was conversation enough, but the man's wife sat silent, and she knew that Kate knew that he expected her to do so. Custard was brought on and Mrs. Barrington diffidently served it. Her husband gave one glance at it. "Curdled!" he said succinctly, pushing his plate from him. "It's a pity it couldn't have been right Kate's first night home." Kate thought there had been so much that was not right her first night home, that a spoiled confection was hardly worth comment. "I'm dreadfully sorry," Mrs. Barrington said. "I suppose I should have made it myself, but I went down to the train--" "That didn't take all the afternoon, did it?" the doctor asked. "I was doing things around the house--" "Putting flowers in my room, I know, mummy," broke in Kate, "and polishing up the silver toilet bottles, the beauties. You're one of those women who pet a home, and it shows, I can tell you. You don't see many homes like this, do you, dad,--so ladylike and brier-rosy?" She leaned smilingly across the table as she addressed her father, offering him not the ingratiating and seductive smile which he was accustomed to see women--his wife among the rest--employ when they wished to placate him. Kate's was the bright smile of a comradely fellow creature who asked him to play a straight game. It made him take fresh stock of his girl. He noted her high oval brow around which the dark hair clustered engagingly; her flexible, rather large mouth, with lips well but not seductively arched, and her clear skin with its uniform tinting. Such beauty as she had, and it was far from negligible, would endure. She was quite five feet ten inches, he estimated, with a good chest development and capable shoulders. Her gestures were free and suggestive of strength, and her long body had the grace of flexibility and perfect unconsciousness. All of this was good; but what of the spirit that looked out of her eyes? It was a glance to which the man was not accustomed--feminine yet unafraid, beautiful but not related to sex. The physician was not able to analyze it, though where women were concerned he was a merciless analyst. Gratified, yet unaccountably disturbed, he turned to his wife. "Martha has forgotten to light up the parlor," he said testily. "Can't you impress on her that she's to have the room ready for us when we've finished inhere?" "She's so excited over Kate's coming home," said Mrs. Barrington with a placatory smile. "Perhaps you'll light up to-night, Frederick." "No, I won't. I began work at five this morning and I've been going all day. It's up to you and Martha to run the house." "The truth is," said Mrs. Barrington, "neither Martha nor I can reach the gasolier." Dr. Barrington had the effect of pouncing on this statement. "That's what's the matter, then," he said. "You forgot to get the tapers. I heard Martha telling you last night that they were out." A flush spread over Mrs. Barrington's delicate face as she cast about her for the usual subterfuge and failed to find it. In that moment Kate realized that it had been a long programme of subterfuges with her mother--subterfuges designed to protect her from the onslaughts of the irritable man who dominated her. "I'll light the gas, mummy," she said gently. "Let that be one of my fixed duties from now on." "You'll spoil your mother, Kate," said the doctor with a whimsical intonation. His jesting about what had so marred the hour of reunion brought a surge of anger to Kate's brain. "That's precisely what I came home to do, sir," she said significantly. "What other reason could I have for coming back to Silvertree? The town certainly isn't enticing. You've been doctoring here for forty years, but you havn't been able to cure the local sleeping-sickness yet." It stung and she had meant it to. To insult Silvertree was to hurt the doctor in his most tender vanity. It was one of his most fervid beliefs that he had selected a growing town, conspicuous for its enterprise. In his young manhood he had meant to do fine things. He was public-spirited, charitable, a death-fighter of courage and persistence. Though not a religious man, he had one holy passion, that of the physician. He respected himself and loved his wife, but he had from boyhood confused the ideas of masculinity and tyranny. He believed that women needed discipline, and he had little by little destroyed the integrity of the woman he would have most wished to venerate. That she could, in spite of her manifest cowardice and moral circumventions, still pray nightly and read the book that had been the light to countless faltering feet, furnished him with food for acrid sarcasm. He saw in this only the essential furtiveness, inconsistency, and superstition of the female. The evening dragged. The neighbors who would have liked to visit them refrained from doing so because they thought the reunited family would prefer to be alone that first evening. Kate did her best to preserve some tattered fragments of the amenities. She told college stories, talked of Lena Vroom and of beautiful Honora Fulham,--hinted even at Ray McCrea,--and by dint of much ingenuity wore the evening away. "In the morning," she said to her father as she bade him good-night, "we'll both be rested." She had meant it for an apology, not for herself any more than for him, but he assumed no share in it. Up in her room her mother saw her bedded, and in kissing her whispered,-- "Don't oppose your father, Kate. You'll only make me unhappy. Anything for peace, that's what I say." _ |
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