Читать книгу They Stooped to Folly - Ellen Glasgow - Страница 10

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With outstretched arms and the smile of an eager but doubtful lover, Mr. Littlepage watched Mary Victoria float toward him on the drifts of rain between the two fire-coloured maples. His first thought was, "She is lovelier than I remember her"; his second, "And happy! I have never seen her so happy." Had he really forgotten the direct carriage, the radiant energy of her figure, the dovelike grace of her small head, with its wings of bright auburn hair, the tranquil beauty of her grey eyes? As she melted into his arms, another idea sprang from confusion into vacancy. "She is her mother all over again, only there's more of her." More of her not only in height and beauty, but in character, in determination, and in moral purpose.

"Dear Father!" She kissed him tenderly before she drew away with a gesture of pride and protection. "This is Martin, my husband. I wanted to bring him to you as a surprise, but Curle insisted upon telephoning Mother this morning."

When she passed on to her mother, Mr. Littlepage reluctantly held out his hand to his son-in-law. Not a bad-looking chap, he repeated to himself, while he struggled in vain to think of some phrase that would sound adequate when spoken aloud. To his dismay, a single rebellious sentence drummed passionately in his mind, and he heard over and over the question, "Why did you betray Milly Burden?" Well, he could scarcely, at the very beginning of their acquaintance, make the single inquiry that he felt to be of vital significance. Men, he reflected, especially men who were Southern gentlemen, had long ago agreed to refrain among themselves from embarrassing questions. Interrogation, like reproach, was one of the minor perquisites attached to the otherwise dubious privilege of being a lady. A little later, upon a more appropriate occasion, the question might proffer itself uninvited. A little later--but not now, not in this first glorious hour of Mary Victoria's return. While these thoughts spun rather than slipped into his mind, he gazed, in a silence that he tried to make hospitable, at the flat dark hair, the pallid and somewhat too pointed features, and the burning hazel eyes of the man whom Mary Victoria had chosen out of a whole world, or at least a whole continent, of scarcely less desirable males. Not bad-looking indeed, he assented almost in spite of himself. Better in appearance anyway than that sanctimonious fellow, the missionary, who had passed straight from world service to one of the more exclusive tribes in the Congo. But there's something wrong, he found himself observing the next instant, with the startling eyes of this chap. Attractive no doubt to a woman; but, in the judgment of a father-in-law, they appeared too bright and inscrutable, as if they had come suddenly upon something that nobody ought to have seen. Then Martin smiled at him; and this smile, very slow, very winning, explained, he felt, the dangerous infatuation of Milly Burden, but not of Mary Victoria.

"Well, this is a surprise--a surprise indeed," repeated Mr. Littlepage, with an animation which, he felt, was excessive in buoyancy. "You must give us a little time before we are expected to call it a pleasure."

"Oh, I shall never expect that of you, Mr. Littlepage," Martin replied slowly; and his voice, smoothed down by a foreign accent, was agreeable in quality.

The pause might have been awkward if Curle had not plunged, with his sanguine courage, into the break. "Why shouldn't we decide to take no chances, Father, and call the marriage a success from the beginning?"

"Where is Louisa?" Mr. Littlepage inquired, glancing over the mountain of luggage. There was something wanting, he told himself, in a family crisis that failed to embrace Louisa.

"She stopped on the way. Aren't you going to ask us into the house?"

"I beg your pardon, my boy. Come in, come in." Glancing up the staircase, he saw Mary Victoria and her mother ascending, with arms interlocked, to the floor above. "Perhaps you'd like to stop for a moment in my library," he added, as cordially as the circumstances permitted. "Mary Victoria must want a talk with her mother."

"And you must want one with me." Well, you could pick no flaw, Mr. Littlepage admitted, in Martin's attitude. It was reasonable; it was encouraging; it was even correct. Looking at the young man, while he sank into one of the soft leather chairs, his reluctant father-in-law decided that he might have made a suitable, if not an ideal, husband for Milly Burden. For Milly Burden, but not for Mary Victoria, who, with her conquering loveliness and her secure fortune, had every right to demand the best that nature provided. And, after all, now that he confronted Martin Welding like an embodied retribution, how could he begin? What could he say to a son-in-law who had once been the lover and must remain, in Mr. Littlepage's thoughts, the perpetual seducer of trusting innocence, or--even if girls were no longer as innocent as they used to be--of trusting devotion. For he was one of those unusual men to whom betrayed devotion appears a deeper wrong than damaged innocence. He was fond of Milly, of course, and if he had not been fond of her, he should still have felt that he wanted to tell this attractive rotter with the burning eyes what he thought of him. Well, youth was not like that in the 'nineties. When he was young, a man thought twice before he seduced a woman of good family; and Mrs. Burden might be tiresome, but she came of decent and respectable stock. He had, it was needless to remind himself sadly, known Southern gentlemen who were immoral; but they had been immoral, in the teeth of a severe code of honour, with discrimination. They were held accountable not only by a proper regard for religion and a true reverence for pure womanhood, but later, when all these defences of virtue failed, by the precepts of chivalry and the point of the pistol. When they wished to misconduct themselves, they had, with such notorious exceptions as Colonel Bletheram, stepped down discreetly from their superior station in life; and in the ages of gallantry, which were undaunted by the perils of miscegenation, they had stepped down also from their superior shading in colour. These unpleasant truths, thought Mr. Little page, who had become resigned to the universe, are the facts of life that every man discovers and no man discusses. But in those robust epochs sin was sin, he mused, and not merely an inhibited pleasure.

His eyes roamed over the background of English calf, of red morocco, of beautifully tooled bindings, and finally came to rest, over the mantelpiece, upon the distinguished profiles of the first Littlepage in Virginia. "Before you go upstairs is there anything I can do for you?" he inquired as he drew out his watch. "We dine usually at half-past seven."

The young man brightened into his agreeable smile. "Nothing, unless you can give me a drink. I feel as if I were giving way somewhere inside."

For the first time Mr. Littlepage observed that a royal decanter of old Bourbon still remained on the table. Duncan must have left it there when he fled at their approach.

"I'll take one with you. Only you must give me your word that it isn't a habit."

"It used to be, but Mary Victoria doesn't allow habits in marriage."

While he scrupulously measured out his whisky, Mr. Littlepage glanced at his son-in-law with a stifled feeling of human--or was it merely of masculine?--solidarity. "I ought to know," he thought, without uttering the imprudent confession, "for I married her mother; and Mary Victoria is her mother all over again, only more so." Aloud he remarked lightly, "Anyhow, I promise not to tempt you too often." Holding his own glass to the light, with a sigh of supreme satisfaction, he reflected that only in his diminishing stock of Bourbon or Baumgartner could he still savour the lost bouquet of living.

"Oh, it's safe to tempt me," Martin retorted. "I've already fallen.

"Not too far to enlighten us, I hope, upon the reason--or at least the meaning of this surprise."

Again that wistful and slightly ironic smile. "Mary Victoria can answer that better than I can. I suspect, however, that she married me because she saved my life and didn't know what else to do with it. That is the nuisance of saving people's lives. They are on your hands and you've got to do something about them. I had the kind of claim upon her she couldn't ignore." After a barely perceptible pause, he added in a tone that was half tender and half satirical, "She has been my good angel."

Mr. Littlepage nodded. "I gathered that much from Curle."

"Well, I think it explains everything that Mary Victoria has done."

"Perhaps. And now, if you don't mind my putting the question so soon, what plans have you made for the future?"

"Absolutely none. I've nursed an incurable hope, you know, that I'd be spared any future." Having emptied his glass, he put it down and remarked with a laugh that reminded Mr. Littlepage of his elder and least successful son, "At the moment, however, fortified by this incomparable Bourbon, I am reconciled to the present."

"Am I to understand that you are making no effort to earn a livelihood?"

"It isn't as bad as that. I suppose I'll have to find something to do. I used to work, you see, but this damnable war stopped me. When they told me I was needed for killing, of course work had to go overboard."

An ominous frown gathered upon Mr. Littlepage's benign forehead. Not only did the Great War now occupy a position scarcely less honourable than the pedestal upon which he had placed the war for the Confederacy, but he was naturally suspicious of a husband who was not at the same time a conscientious provider. "What kind of work were you doing?" he asked in a more reserved tone of voice.

"In the beginning it was crockery, but after that I went into a bank. Crockery paid better, but the bank left me more time for writing. You see, I have always wanted to write."

Though the candour of the young man was disarming, it seemed incredible to Mr. Littlepage that Mary Victoria could have stooped to the obscure, if blameless, business of crockery. And worse even than the business of crockery, which, though inelegant in sound, retained its decent status in society, was the confession that his daughter's husband had been seriously "trying to write." For Mr. Littlepage was an ornament of that exclusive sphere in which literature, like sin, is respected only when it enlivens the worm-eaten pages of history.

"Well, I don't imagine there's much in that," he observed, and inquired immediately, "By the way, what first took you into the crockery business?"

"I had an uncle who kept a store on Broad Street. It seemed the easiest way to keep from starving while I learned to write. Then I went into the Metropolitan Bank. I was doing better with my writing when the war came. After it was over they put me in a hospital for a while, and as soon as I was out and free again, I went back to France. That was where I finally broke down and Mary Victoria found me in time to save my life."

This, even if one failed to consider the ironic tone, was far from what the most generous father-in-law could call promising. More and more, as the conversation followed its deplorable course, Mr. Littlepage wondered if Victoria would be able to take a cheerful view of the bare prospect. "You don't imagine, do you, that crockery and writing together would be sufficient to provide for a girl like Mary Victoria?"

Martin shook his head, and it occurred to Mr. Littlepage that he had never entirely collected his faculties since the surprise of his marriage. "Well, you see, Mary Victoria seemed to think we needn't worry. She didn't like the crockery business; but she had some idea of speaking to her cousin Daniel Woolley. He is president of a bank, isn't he?"

"And you think you're fitted for that kind of work?"

"I didn't think so even when I was doing it. But Mary Victoria has settled it in her mind. She has been, as I told you, my good angel, and I have a dread of disappointing her."

"I know," Mr. Littlepage assented. "But you must remember that Mary Victoria is an idealist. It is in the nature of an idealist to expect a great deal of other people."

Martin sighed, while his thin, pale hand groped nervously toward the decanter and drew back without touching it. "That makes it all the worse to be obliged to disappoint her. She feels things so deeply. And do you know," he concluded, with a rush of confidence that the older man found both imprudent and appealing, "I have a fear of not measuring up to her standard. I know, of course, that I'm not half as big as I look to her. She insists on seeing me not as the utterly inadequate fellow I am in reality, but as a kind of fallen archangel. It isn't my fault, though nobody, least of all her father, will ever believe it. I never even in the beginning, tried wilfully to deceive her. I've told her again and again that I am not worth half that she has done for me. But it isn't any use telling her. She is still convinced that she is right and I am wrong in my estimate."

All this was imprudent, reflected Mr. Littlepage; but it was as familiar and almost as stale as a sermon. For Victoria also had had her aspirations. No sooner had she fallen in love than she had tried, though with the gentlest touch imaginable, to make him into the sort of man he had never been and never could hope to become. He had suffered the painful process of being moulded into an ideal, as well as the far sharper pang of realizing the disappointment that must have attended her efforts. Too sincere for dissimulation, too magnanimous for resentment, Victoria had steadfastly ignored her failure, and had persevered, with unaltered sweetness, in the pretence that Virginius and marriage and human nature in general were all exactly what she wished them to be. "As noble as she is herself," Mr. Littlepage thought with tenderness. For never, since that memorable evening in the Browning class, had he felt the faintest disposition to deny that Victoria was noble in character. Her goodness, so far from being academic or acquired, was as natural as her simple faith in the perfectibility of husbands. All her life she had diffused love as other persons diffuse selfishness; and even in those frequent moments when he had felt that the sweetness of marriage cloyed his spirit, he had never forgotten that he owed more to her generosity than he could ever repay. Watching Martin's way with the decanter, Mr. Littlepage told himself disconsolately that only the substance was different, not the situation. To his veracious mind, which prided itself, however inaccurately, upon facing the facts of life, it was evident that Victoria had had more plastic material to work upon than the character of this inadequate young man afforded. Yet, with this finer clay and ampler measure to her hand, all that Victoria had achieved was the pattern of a contented citizen and a successful attorney. Beyond this, he could discern no more exalted stature than that of a presentable member of Queenborough society, in which the custom of dining out with a limited number of one's least interesting acquaintances moved in a monotonous circle from October to June. Into this circle, which grew duller as time and tide encrusted the conversational platitudes, there entered occasionally a new member, whose prerogative of wealth only those too poor to profit by it had ever disputed. Yet the only person who might have irradiated the lustre of pleasure, for him at least, had long ago ceased to appear in the sluggish air of these gatherings. Not that Mrs. Dalrymple was excluded by her station in life from what was now an affluent and had been once an aristocratic society. Even her fall, had it been as ladylike as poor Aunt Agatha's, might have been forgotten by everybody except a few crystallized virgins and old Colonel Bletheram. But her imprudent behaviour in the divorce court, combined with the well-founded suspicion that she had committed other pleasures abroad, had debarred her, in the opinion of the best judges, from the privileges to which she was entitled by birth. Regrettable. Almost deplorable. For in the stiff and slightly pompous dignity of his middle years, only the ardent memory of Amy Dalrymple had fanned to life the flickering embers of youth. Nothing since his first love affair, not material prosperity, not communion beneath the stained-glass memorial windows in Saint Luke's Episcopal Church, not even the contagious idealism with which armies are mobilized, had ever exalted him to this starry altitude of the spirit. While the echo of this lost but unforgotten ecstasy awoke in his mind, he asked in a tone of sympathy rather than rebuke:

"May I inquire, without seeming impertinent, where your education began?"

"Exactly where it ended, in a public school. If you ever attended one, you know that the word 'education' is a euphemism of modern democracy. But I got a good deal out of books. I think I may say I got as much as any man could out of books."

Again Mr. Littlepage frowned while he studied his son-in-law. The reply, he told himself, left much to be desired; for literature as a pursuit was even less profitable, and scarcely more distinguished, than crockery as a business. The young man's tone, with its curling irony at the end of a sentence, reminded him of the disreputable way Marmaduke talked in his attic, and he sighed to think that Mary Victoria might have introduced a second artist into the family.

"Well, I shouldn't put too much faith in literature, if I were you," he said presently. "Without posing as an authority, I may express the opinion that there isn't much material in Virginia history that hasn't been already exhausted."

For a moment there was silence, and in the flatness of this silence, Mr. Littlepage had a queer sensation that Martin was smiling within. Then, with an air of incredible patience, the young man answered slowly, as if he were speaking to a foreigner in words of one syllable. "But historical novels are all tosh, you know. I am interested in life, not in costume and scenery. I want to get at grips with reality."

"Well, I shouldn't build my hopes on that kind of stuff," Mr. Littlepage remarked mildly but firmly; for the word "reality" startled him whenever it was divorced from philosophy and dragged into literature. In that uncomfortable moment, he was visited by the fear lest Mary Victoria's husband should be afflicted with Marmaduke's foreign taste for indecent psychology. Then remembering that he himself had acquired, since the Great War, a cosmopolitan attitude towards Mrs. Dalrymple, he observed simply, "I'm afraid there isn't much to be got out of literature as a profession."

"Not in Queenborough. Why, you haven't even a library, yet you people pretend to be civilized."

For the first time Mr. Littlepage allowed his exasperation to ooze into his tone. It annoyed him profoundly that this young man of ignoble antecedents should belittle the ancient and honourable culture of Queenborough. All the learning required to make a Southern gentleman was comprised, as every Littlepage knew without being told, in the calf-bound rows of classic authors and the Prayer-Book of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

"Those of us who have leisure to read are able to provide our own libraries," he rejoined, with dignity. "Or if we are too impoverished for that, we may always borrow with credit from our friends who are better off." Glancing up at the volumes he had inherited from his father, he congratulated himself upon the ease with which his declaration had been justified by his surroundings.

"Yes, I see, of course. But you must remember that I could neither buy nor borrow when I lived here. However, I shan't be able to do much reading until I have proved to Mary Victoria that you can make your way in the world without being a mutton head. Do you know, by the way, what has become of her?"

While he looked at his son-in-law, Mr. Littlepage's liquid brown eyes became opaque with a frozen reserve. "She went upstairs with her mother. They have probably stopped to speak to poor Aunt Agatha."

"Poor Aunt Agatha? Is she an invalid?"

"Oh, no. That's merely a habit that we fell into a generation ago. Her life was wrecked in early youth by an unfortunate love affair from which she never recovered."

"Good God!" exclaimed Martin Welding, while a startled horror swept over his thin face. "I remember now. Mary Victoria told me about her."