When you are in love, everything is important and everything is secret. You become a consummate actor and liar in vain, because the whole world knows your secret almost as soon as you do. That evening at the dinner table, George was so gay, so full of himself, so ready to laugh and make a joke that Mrs. Cutter was beside herself with pride and happiness.
“He is such a good boy, so unconscious of his good looks and his intellect,” she told Mr. Cutter when they were alone together after dinner.
“Intellect!” said Mr. Cutter in that tone of voice.
“Yes; you know how smart he is; but he is not the least conceited, just light-hearted and happy as he should be at his age. I say it shows he is a good boy.”
“Where is he now?” Mr. Cutter wanted to know.
The question appeared to Mrs. Cutter to be irrelevant. She said she did not know; why?
“Nothing,” answered her husband.
[32]She said he was around somewhere, probably in his room. She went to the bottom of the stairs. “Georgie!” she called.
No answer. Well, then he must be out front somewhere, and went to prove that he was. But she could not find him. Then she came back and wanted to know of Mr. Cutter what difference did it make, if they did not know where he was? George was no longer a child. Couldn’t he trust his own son?
Oh, yes; in reason he could and did trust him. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Maggie,” he added, laying aside his paper and looking her squarely in the face, “George should get married.”
“Married; just as he is ready to enjoy his youth and not even out of the university yet—and only twenty-one. What do you mean?” she demanded indignantly.
“That a blaze-faced horse and a red-headed man are both vain things for safety,” he retorted.
“Do you know anything wrong about George?” she demanded, after a gasping pause.
“No.”
“A single thing?”
“Not a single thing. I was merely stating a natural fact.”
She had risen, a little, slim, fiery-eyed woman.[33] She drew herself up. He watched her ascend. He refused to quail beneath the spark in her eye.
“Mr. Cutter,” she began ominously, because she gave him this title only when she was ominous, “when you married me I had red hair. My hair is still red.”
“Yes, my dear; but you were a girl. I said a man. I meant a young man with red hair. There is all the latitudes and longitudes in life between the one and the other. If you were a red-haired young man, I should think twice before I’d give a daughter of mine in marriage to you. But you will recall that I had black hair,” he concluded, laughing.
A father who would traduce his own son for inheriting hair the color of his mother’s and without cause—well, she could not understand such a father. Whereupon she left the room in high dudgeon, but really to go and look for this son. Her confidence in him had not been shaken, but she was anxious without reason, which is the keenest anxiety from which women suffer.
She found him pacing back and forth in the vegetable garden, arms folded, face lifted like a yowling puppy’s to the moon; not that this simile occurred to her. He appeared to her a potentially[34] great man, breathing his thoughts in this quiet place.
He was annoyed at this interruption. Was he never to have a moment alone to think this thing out! He really thought he was thinking, you understand, when he was only visualizing a girl in a white dress, with a blue sash, blue eyes and blue cornflowers on her hat; blue was the most entrancing color in the world, and so on and so forth. He was trying to imagine what she would say if she said anything, when he saw his mother approaching. He repressed his impatience. They walked together between the bald-headed cabbage and the young, curled-up, green lettuce. She thought she was sharing his thoughts. Something had been said about his experiences in the bank. Many a mother and some fathers would leap with amazement, if they really knew the thoughts they do not share with their sons and daughters at such times.
Still this was an innocent young man, as men go, a good son, as sons are reckoned. He was well within his rights to be pursuing his love fancies. And for a long period of this time he remained in a state of legal innocence of which any man or husband might boast. Mrs. Cutter was entirely justified in despising the opinion Mr.[35] Cutter had given that night of this excellent young man. Sometimes more than twenty years are required to fulfill a paternal prophecy.
Mrs. Adams remained seated on the porch. She supposed Helen had gone to her room to take off her hat and would return presently. It was much cooler out here, and the street was interesting at this hour of the late afternoon, like watching a very good human play, where all the characters are decent.
She saw Mrs. Shaw bustling in and out, herding her numerous family. This meant that they were having early supper, probably cold supper, and that they would go to the band concert afterwards. The Shaws spent a good deal on amusements. She hoped they could afford it.
There was Mr. Flitch sitting alone on his front porch, with his heels cocked up on the banister. This meant that he was in a state of rebellion, because he never stuck his feet on to this immaculately white banister if he was in a proper frame of mind. It also meant that Mrs. Flitch had her feelings hurt again and was probably in her room suffering from this ailment. She had heard that the Flitches did not get on well together. In her opinion this was Ella Flitch’s fault. You could not live diagonally across the street from a waspish[36] woman and belong to the same missionary society without knowing that she was waspish.
I am writing this into the record—it was no part of Mrs. Adams’ reflections—that if you are a woman you always blame the wife for her marital unhappiness; if you are a man you know, of course, that the husband is at fault, even if you listen cordially to your own wife when she is taking the contrary view.
Mrs. Adams turned her neat, little, gray head slowly, surreptitiously and took a swift glance up the street at the Cutter residence. Then she turned it back again. But she had read all the news up there to be seen with the naked eye, assisted by powerful spectacles. Mr. and Mrs. Cutter were seated comfortably in their respective porch chairs. And George was out in the swing, elegantly folded into a sitting posture where he commanded a view of her front porch. If you are the mother of a daughter, you notice such little circumstances whether they mean anything or not, because they may be very significant.
The sight of this young man sentinel reminded her of something. Where was Helen? What was she doing so long inside? She arose at once and went in to see about this.
“Helen!” she called from the hall.
[37]No answer.
She walked heavily to the closed bedroom door and knocked authoritatively.
No answer. Not a sound.
“Helen, are you in there?”
“Yes, mother,” came the faint reply.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” in a wailing, muffled voice, as if this person who was doing “nothing” was being smothered.
Mrs. Cutter thrust the door open and went in. She was astounded. Her daughter lay face downward across the bed, with her arms wound above her head in two beautifully curved lines of mute despair. Two pretty legs extended stiffly beyond the uttermost that skirts could do to cover them. One slippered foot worked slowly as you move a foot in pain, and at quick intervals the slender form rose and fell convulsively to the passionate rhythm of sobs.
“What on earth is the matter?” the mother exclaimed.
“Nothing.”
“Are you ill?”
“No.”
“Has anything happened?”
“Not a thing.”
[38]“Why are you crying?”
“I don’t know. Oh, mother, I just want to be left alone”—followed by another paroxysm of weeping.
Mrs. Adams waited grimly until the distressing convulsions of the slender young body subsided. Then she began again: “Well, you can’t be left in this fix. Turn over, Helen. You are mussing your dress.”
The girl turned obediently, her face poignantly, sweetly pink, very sad. Her eyes bright with tears like violets after a summer rain. The flush was ominous. Mrs. Adams had never seen Helen this color before, never in her life. She bent and laid a palm on the girl’s brow—warm, but moist; certainly not feverish.
She stood regarding her daughter thoughtfully. Then she sat down on the side of the bed, took one of Helen’s hands in her own harsher, stronger hand, where it lay like a plucked lily, wilted, icy cold. She stroked it gently. Her face softened, her eyes brooded, as if through a mist she beheld a memory of herself long ago, which suddenly freshened and brightened into the figure of the girl she had been.
Mothers are omniscient. They have little paths back and forth through their years by which[39] the ghosts of them can always find you, wherever you are. Not another word was spoken for a long time between these two; the younger, overcome by the future, holding the unsolved, longed-for mystery of love; the other, overcome by the past, which held for her the dreadful reality of love. Neither had or could escape. They accomplished a wordless sympathy on this basis.
Mrs. Adams’ reflections were strangely mixed, what with that sundown feeling she had of her own youth and the anxieties of a mother growing stronger every moment. She would like to know, for example, if Helen had seen George Cutter. Had she gone by the bank for the pass book? But even when she caught sight of this book lying on the dresser, with the ends of many checks sticking out of it, she did not put the question. Love is a wound too painful to be dressed with the tenderest words when it is first made, much less scraped with a question.
She was, over and above her emotions as a woman and a mother, fairly well satisfied with the situation. She inferred that George and Helen had had some sort of passage at arms. And she did not suppose that any man in or out of his senses could actually resist for long a girl of Helen’s soft charm. Mothers have their[40] pride, you understand. This one was shrewd, eminently practical. You must be, to deal with youth at this stage.
The room was flooded with the golden effulgence of a summer twilight when at last she arose, moved gently toward the door, picking up the bank book as she passed the dresser and thrusting it into her pocket. “Helen,” she said from the doorway, “it is the heat. This has been a very warm day. You will be better presently.”
“Yes, mother, I think it was the heat; and I do feel better,” the girl answered faintly.
“There is ice tea and chicken salad for supper,” Mrs. Adams suggested.
“I don’t think I care for anything.”
“Well, later then. I’ll leave the tea and your salad on the ice,” the mother said, going out and closing the door.