The Flower Brides (49 page)

“You don’t say!” said the young man, dropping his fork suddenly and then recovering it again and taking a long time to cut the next translucent bite of pastry.

“Yes,” said his mother sympathetically as she poured another cup of coffee for Gordon. “I feel sorry for her. Maggie says she’s a wonderful girl and that this new stepmother is a perfect tartar, really malicious, you know, doing mean things just for the sake of doing them and then laughing at her victim.”

“Still,” said the young man thoughtfully while taking a slow bite of cheese, “you can’t always tell about a servant’s gossip, you know. She is probably prejudiced.”

“Well,” said the mother, lifting her brows meditatively, “she doesn’t just seem to be the ordinary servant. She’s a Christian woman, I should say, and she loved her former mistress a great deal. She’s been telling me about how lovely she was, and it does seem strange that a man who had such a lovely wife should have no better judgment—”

“That’s it, Mother, he probably has, and this is just prejudice—”

“But, Gordon, listen, if she speaks the truth—and I think she does, she seems like an honest woman—this new mistress is something of a freak, rather young, you know, and exercising her wiles over an older man, flattering him and torturing his daughter behind his back, yet making it appear that the girl has done it all!”

Gordon frowned. Then after a moment’s thought he said, as if he was thinking it out, arguing with himself, “But this woman shouldn’t have told you these things, of course! We’re practically strangers, and a really loyal servant wouldn’t have told the troubles of her master’s home. If she isn’t loyal, she probably isn’t true.”

“No,” said the mother thoughtfully, “I don’t believe that is the case with this woman. She didn’t mean to tell me anything. She was quite proper when she came in with the recipe and told me most formally that she wouldn’t be here again and that the young lady had sent word she couldn’t make the promised call after all, as she had been obliged to go away in a hurry. But when I said it would be all right for her to come when she returned and that I would be looking forward to it, the woman turned sharply as if she were going away. And then I saw that she was crying, and I said: ‘Why, is anything the matter, my dear? Isn’t she coming back?’ and she just stood there and sobbed silently into her handkerchief for a full minute. And then she got out the words: ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

“I didn’t quite know what to say, and I didn’t like to ask any more questions, but in a minute she wiped her eyes and turned around and said in quite a dignified tone: ‘You see, ma’am, the master is marryin’ again, and my little lady feels she can’t bide in the house.’

“‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that’s too bad! But maybe she’ll change her mind and come back later. Those things are hard to bear when they first happen, you know, but time heals almost everything. Maybe something will happen that they’ll get to know one another better, and then perhaps she’ll be glad to come back to her lovely home.’ But the woman shook her head. ‘No,’ she said most decidedly, ‘she’ll not come. It was that hard for her to go, but she’ll not return. She knows the woman full well already. She’s her cousin three times removed, and many’s the time she’s suffered under a visit from her. She’s a hussy, and that’s true as truth! I am that shamed to be sayin’ it, but it’s true! It’s why I’m not stayin’ myself. Nobody could bide in the same house with her. She’s a trollop! A wicked trollop! And I couldn’t blame the poor wee bairn for leavin’.’”

The young man listened with growing sympathy.

“But doesn’t her father do anything about it?” he asked sharply. “Or didn’t she say anything about him?”

“Oh yes,” laughed the mother, “she said plenty after she got warmed up and started. And yet you could see she was trying to be loyal to him, too. She said he was ‘that fey about the hussy that he couldn’t see straight.’ She said he was ‘a good man but blind as a bat,’ and she went on to include all mankind in a general statement that all men were more or less ‘feckless when it came to judgment about lassies.’”

“But what about his own daughter? Isn’t she a lassie?” said Gordon, and there was a sharpness in his tone as if he were arguing with the father in question. His mother looked up with surprise in her eyes then laughed again.

“Oh, she says the father is sure the daughter will come around by and by and be as much in love with her new stepmother as he is.” But Gordon did not smile. Instead, he ate his last bite of pie thoughtfully, almost seriously.

“It seems odd,” he said almost savagely, “that a man who has lived his life up to the time when his daughter is grown up shouldn’t be able to forget himself enough to think of her. It’s selfishness, with a daughter like that. I can’t help thinking he is to blame.”

“But you don’t know either of them,” said his mother, surprised. “You can’t tell what the daughter is, really. She looks very pretty seeing her go by, and very sweet, but you can’t ever be sure.”

“Can’t I? Well, how long is it since you were saying almost the same thing about her, Mother mine?”

“Yes, I know, but still—we don’t really
know
!”

“Well, just in general, then, no man has a right to bring a second mother on the scene unless his children are happy about it.”

“But, Gordon, you know there are some lovely stepmothers…” protested his mother. “There was Aunt Genevieve! And there was Mrs. Stacey. There couldn’t have been happier homes, and those children all adored those stepmothers.”

“Of course there are exceptions,” said Gordon. “I grant that, but they all knew and loved the stepmothers before they became their stepmothers.”

“And there was Mrs. McCorkle and Mrs. Reamer and that dear Mrs. Bowman in Edinburgh.”

“But the children were mere babes in all three of those cases and didn’t know the difference, and besides, Mother, you know every one of those women were saints. This woman, you say, is a hussy!”

“I know”—the mother laughed—“and I can’t help being sorry for the girl, Gordon. She must feel it terribly!”

“I guess they all need sympathy,” said the young man, “and I suppose all the business we have with it is to pray for them.”

“Yes,” said his mother. “I have been praying all day—for the daughter. I can’t get her out of my mind as she went by sobbing yesterday with that flower pressed close to her cheek. I can’t help thinking, what if she were my little girl out in the world alone? And the world is such a very dreadful place in these days, too.”

The young man did not answer. He was carefully gathering a few crumbs from the tablecloth into a neat little heap and then scattering them again. Presently the mother rose and began to gather up the dishes, and Gordon shoved back his chair and helped her. Afterward Gordon went out to the garage and walked around among the trees, thinking, and once he looked belligerently up toward the great house, studying the lit windows. The right-hand front window was all dark tonight.

But back in the library of the great house the master and the new mistress were talking. They had just returned from dinner in town because the bride had declined to prepare dinner at home and the bridegroom had declined to call up an agency in the city and have a cook and butler and a waitress sent out from town. The dishes from the breakfast that the master of the house had made—a breakfast of grapefruit, dry cereal, toast, and coffee, with soft boiled eggs, all on a tray for the bride and carried up to her room dutifully—were still lying stacked in the sink unwashed. Helen said she would ruin her hands if she should attempt to wash them, and besides, the excitement of the night before had “unfitted” her for such strenuous labor. “You wouldn’t want me to wash dishes, would you, not just now when I’m supposed to be at my very best? The first few days I’m a bride? Suppose we have callers and they find me washing the dishes! My first day in the house! You wouldn’t want that, would you, dear?”

She looked at him with that adoring, languishing glance that always thrilled him, the glance that had flattered the wistful growing-old part of him and made him think he was young again, and he smiled sadly, indulgently at her, looked down at the little painted fingernails, and sighed.

“No, I suppose not,” he said.

“We’re going out to lunch and do some shopping in the city, you said. You’re going to buy that diamond clasp for me, you know, and we could just as well stay in the city for dinner and see a play or something, and then you think by that time Maggie will get over her huff, don’t you? You said she was just angry and would be back?”

She lifted her liquid eyes so trustingly to his face, and he passed his hand gently over her head, thinking what a pretty child she was and how sad it was that they should have anything to interfere with the perfect bliss of their homecoming. And then his heart would swell again with anger and indignation at the incredible way in which Diana, his devoted child, had taken all this, when he had really done it for her sake as much as anything else.

“Yes, I think—I hope she will be back—” he said then sighed deeply. “She’s very fond of Diana, you know, and I suppose she’s just angry in sympathy with her. I can’t think what has come over Diana to act this way. It isn’t in the least like her. I don’t know but I ought to take the noon train and find her and bring her back. Things won’t go right until we have an understanding. It’s just as I told you, dear; Diana is hurt. I think she was hurt because we didn’t insist on her coming up to the wedding. I felt that all along. You know, we’ve always been so close—!”

“And now you’re thinking that I have come between you!” said the artful Helen, with a quiver of her red lips and a quick brimming of tears into her eyes. “You are sorry you married me! You are! You
a-a-rre
!” And soft gentle sobs and well-trained tears, not so very wet, rolled harmlessly over the smooth cheeks. Those tears and controlled sobs went to his heart like barbed darts as she had meant they should do. He had to take her in his arms then and comfort her, and assure her that he loved her above all things else, and that certainly he was not sorry that he had married her, and surely everything would come out all right as soon as Diana understood.

She let herself be comforted and swept off to the city to get the diamond clasp as a consolation prize. They had gone and stayed as she had planned, and now they had come back to a cheerless dark house, with those dirty dishes still huddled in the sink and not a scrap or sign of a repentant note or telegram from the prodigal daughter, and no Maggie in the kitchen, no prospect of anyone to get the breakfast ready for tomorrow morning. The master of the house was frantic. Nevertheless, his attitude of consolation was still required, and his role for the present was such that he must not let Helen see how frantic he was about his missing daughter.

All day Helen had kept him strained to the utmost to prove to her that she was not
superfluous
. If he sighed so much as a breath or let a distant look come into his tired eyes or let his smile droop on his lips she charged him with having to work so hard to make her think he was happy with her. And then all the day’s work of reassuring her had to be done over again. He felt suddenly old and tired, and somehow condemned.

He had wanted to go and hunt for his child, but Helen had tenderly persuaded him that it was unwise, that she would only think she had the upper hand and there would be no harmony ever if she thought he was wrong and she was right. She had made the argument so plausible and so gentle, so delicately punctuated with tears and regrets that she had married him that he felt his hands utterly tied.

Time and again during the day and evening he had tried to slip away and telephone long distance to the old aunt’s house where she was supposed to have gone, but always he was followed and gently questioned and urged to do the best way, just patiently wait until the prodigal returned repentant. And always he would come back with her to something she wanted to do and sit and look at her and think what a sweet, forgiving, lovely woman he had married and how amazingly wicked Diana had been to take such a silly prejudice against her. Yet underneath all the time his heart was crying out to go after Diana, have a heart-to-heart talk with her, and bring her back into the path of submission and rectitude. Why, Diana had never been like this! He was sure he could bring Diana to her senses if he only had a few minutes’ talk with her.

So the harassed father and husband had gone through the house, until now they were back in the house again, the empty house, with their problems all unsolved before them, and Helen sighing and making him feel like a veritable Blue Beard in his Castle.

It was all wrong, of course. He could see it now. He should have taken Diana into his confidence. He should have had her invite Helen there or sent her to visit Helen. He should have revealed the whole matter more gradually and been near to comfort and sustain her in the first shock. Diana was merely hurt, of course. He could understand it better now since the thing was done. She evidently had had no such thought that he would ever marry again. She was a young girl, and, of course, perhaps it was perfectly natural that she should be shocked. Time did not move so rapidly with young people as it did with older ones. It seemed to him ages since the death of his first wife, and it had been so wonderful that Helen in her youth and beauty had been willing to come in and relieve the terrible loneliness that Marilla’s going had made. He had always thought of it as
their
loneliness, his and Diana’s, not his alone. Diana would, of course, profit by having a mother who was also young enough to be a sort of companion for her. He had deceived himself into thinking, into actually believing that Diana would be glad over the addition to the household. Her attitude had in reality been a great shock to him. Little Di whose utmost delight had always been to do his will, whose most cherished plans were ready to be flung aside for anything he had to propose. It was cataclysmic for her to rebel at anything he did or wanted. Surely this would not last! Surely she would come to herself very soon, as Helen had suggested, and return to her home and be her sweet self.