She lay there a long time after this nervous fit of laughter had stopped, till she heard Paul saying, "There, I've put it on every inch of him." He added with a special intonation, "And now I guess maybe I'd better go in swimming."

At this Marise sat up quickly, with an instant experienced divination of what she would see.

In answer to her appalled look on him, he murmured apologetically, "I didn't know I was getting so _much_ on me. It sort of spattered."

It was, of course, as she led the deplorable object towards the house that they encountered Eugenia under a green-lined white parasol, on the way back from the garden, carrying an armful of sweet-peas.

"I thought I'd fill the vases with fresh flowers before the rain came,"

she murmured, visibly sheering off from Paul.

"Eugenia ought not to carry sweet-peas," thought Marise. "It ought always to be orchids."

In the bath-room as she and Paul took off his oil-soaked clothes, Mark's little voice called to her, "Mother! Mo-o-other!"

"Yes, what is it?" she answered, suspending operations for a moment to hear.

"Mother, if I had to kill all the ants in the world," called Mark, "I'd a great deal rather they were all gathered up together in a heap than running around every-which-way, wouldn't you?"

"For goodness' _sakes,_ what a silly baby thing to say!" commented Paul with energy.

Marise called heartily to Mark, "Yes indeed I would, dear."

Paul asked curiously, "Mother, how can you answer him like that, such a _fool_ thing!"

Marise felt another wave of hysterical laughter mounting, at the idea of the difficulty in perceiving the difference in degree of flatness between Mark's remarks and those of Paul.

But it suddenly occurred to her that this was the time for Elly's hour at the piano, and she heard no sound. She hastily laid out the clean clothes for Paul, saw him started on the scrub in the bath-tub, and ran downstairs to see if she could find Elly, before the storm broke, turning over in her mind Elly's favorite nooks.

The air was as heavy as noxious gas in the breathless pause before the arrival of the rain.

In the darkened, shaded hall stood a man's figure, the face turned up towards her, the look on it meant for her, her only, not the useful house-mother, but that living core of her own self, buried, hidden, put off, choked and starved as she had felt it to be, all that morning. That self rose up now, pa.s.sionately grateful to be recognized, and looked back at him.

Thunder rolled among the distant hills.

She felt her pulse whirling with an excitement that made her lean against the wall, as he took a great stride towards her, crying out, "Oh, make an end ... make an end of this... ."

The door behind him opened, and Elly ran in, red-faced and dusty.

"Mother, Mother, Reddy has come off her nest. And there are twelve hatched out of the fourteen eggs! Mother, they are such darlings! I wish you'd come and see. Mother, if I practise _good_, won't you come afterwards and look at them?"

"You should say 'practise well,' not 'good,'" said Marise, her accent openly ironical.

The wind, precursor of the storm falling suddenly on the valley, shook the trees till they roared.

Over the child's head she exchanged with Vincent Marsh a long reckless look, the meaning of which she made no effort to understand, the abandon of which she made no effort to restrain.

With a dry, clattering, immediate rattle, without distance or dignity, the thunder broke threateningly over the house.

CHAPTER XVI

Ma.s.sAGE-CREAM; THEME AND VARIATIONS

July 20.

The hardest thing for Eugenia about these terribly hard days of suspense was to keep her self-control in her own room. Of course for her as for any civilized being, it was always possible to keep herself in hand with people looking on. But for years she had not had to struggle so when alone, for poise and self-mastery. Her room at the Crittendens', which had been hers so long, and which Marise had let her furnish with her own things, was no longer the haven of refuge it had been from the bitter, raw crudity of the Vermont life. She tried to fill the empty hours of Neale's daily absences from the house with some of the fastidious, delicate occupations of which she had so many, but they seemed brittle in her hot hands, and broke when she tried to lean on them. A dozen times a day she interrupted herself to glance with apprehension at her reflection in the mirror, the Florentine mirror with the frame of brown wood carved, with the light, restrained touch of a good period, into those tasteful slender columns. And every time she looked, she was horrified and alarmed to see deep lines of thought, of hope, of impatience, of emotion, criss-crossing fatally on her face.

Then she would sit down before her curving dressing-table, gather the folds of her Persian room-dress about her, lift up her soul and go through those mental and physical relaxing exercises which the wonderful lecturer of last winter had explained. She let her head and shoulders and neck droop like a wilted flower-stem, while she took into her mind the greater beauty of a wilted flower over the cra.s.s rigidity of a growing one; she breathed deeply and slowly and rhythmically, and summoned to her mind far-off and rarely, difficultly, beautiful things; the tranquil resignation of Chinese roofs, tempered with the merry human note of their tilted corners; Arabian traceries; cunningly wrought, depraved wood-carvings in the corners of Gothic cathedrals; the gay and amusing pink rotundities of a Boucher ceiling. When she felt her face calm and unlined again, she put on a little ma.s.sage cream, to make doubly sure, and rubbed it along where the lines of emotion had been.

But half an hour afterwards, as she lay stretched in the chaise-longue by the window, reading Claudel, or Strindberg, or Remy de Gourmont, she would suddenly find that she was not thinking of what was on the page, that she saw there only Marise's troubled eyes while she and Marsh talked about the inevitable and essential indifference of children to their parents and the healthiness of this instinct; about the foolishness of the parents' notion that they would be formative elements in the children's lives; or on the other hand, if the parents did succeed in forcing themselves into the children's lives, the danger of s.e.xual mother-complexes. Eugenia found that instead of thrilling voluptuously, as she knew she ought, to the precious pain and bewilderment of one of the thwarted characters of James Joyce, she was, with a disconcerting and painful eagerness of her own, bringing up to mind the daunted silence Marise kept when they mentioned the fact that of course everybody nowadays knew that children are much better off in a big, numerous, robust group than in the nervous, tight isolation of family life; and that a really trained educator could look out for them much better than any mother, because he could let them alone as a mother never could.

She found that such evocations of facts poignantly vital to her personally, were devastatingly more troubling to her facial calm than any most sickening picture in d'Annunzio's portrayal of small-town humanity in which she was trying to take the proper, shocked interest.

Despite all her effort to remain tranquil she would guess by the stir of her pulses that probably she had lost control of herself again, and going to the mirror would catch her face all strained and tense in a breathless suspense.

But if there was one thing which life had taught her, it was persevering patience. She drew from the enameled bonbonniere one of the curious, hard sweet-meats from Southern China; lifted to her face the spicy-sweet spikes of the swamp-orchid in her Venetian gla.s.s vase; turned her eyes on the reproduction of the Gauguin _Ja Orana Maria_, and began to draw long, rhythmic breaths, calling on all her senses to come to her rescue.

She let her arms and her head and her shoulders go limp again, and fixed her attention on rare and beautiful things of beauty ... abandoning herself to the pictures called up by a volume of translated j.a.panese poems she had recently read ... temples in groves ... bells in the mist ... rain on willow-trees ... snow falling without wind... .

How delicate and suggestive those poems were! How much finer, more subtle than anything in the Aryan languages!

She came to herself cautiously, glanced at her face in the mirror, and reached for the carved ivory pot of ma.s.sage cream.

She decided then she would sew a little, instead of reading. The frill of lace in her net dress needed to be changed ... such a bore having to leave your maid behind. She moved to the small, black-lacquered table where her work-box stood and leaned on it for a moment, watching the dim reflection of her pointed white fingers in the glistening surface of the wood. They did not look like Marise's brown, uncared-for hands. She opened the inlaid box and took from it the thimble which she had bought in Siena, the little antique masterpiece of North Italian gold-work.

What a fulfilment of oneself it was to make life beautiful by beautifying all its implements. What a revelation it might be to Neale, how a woman could make everything she touched exquisite, to Neale who had only known Marise, subdued helplessly to the roughness of the rough things about her, Marise who had capitulated to America and surrendered to the ugliness of American life.

But none of that, none of that! She was near the danger line again. She felt the flesh on her face begin to grow tense, and with her beautiful, delicate fore-fingers she smoothed her eyebrows into relaxed calm again.

She must keep herself occupied, incessantly; that was the only thing possible. She had been about to have recourse to the old, old tranquillizer of women, the setting of fine st.i.tches. She would fix her mind on that ... a frill of lace for the net dress ... which lace? She lifted the cover from the long, satin-covered box and fingered over the laces in it, forcing herself to feel the suitable reaction to their differing physiognomies, to admire the robustness of the Carrick-Macross, the boldness of design of the Argentan, the complicated fineness of the English Point. She decided, as harmonizing best with the temperament of the net dress, on Malines, a strip of this perfect, first-Napoleon Malines. What an aristocratic lace it was, with its cobwebby _fond-de-neige_ background and its fourpetaled flowers in the scrolls. Americans were barbarians indeed that Malines was so little known; in fact hardly recognized at all. Most Americans would probably take this priceless creation in her hand for something bought at a ten-cent store, because of its simplicity and cla.s.sic reticence of design. They always wanted, as they would say themselves, something more to show for their money. Their only idea of "real lace," as they vulgarly called it (as if anything could be lace that wasn't real), was that showy, awful Brussels, manufactured for exportation, which was sold in those terrible tourists' shops in Belgium, with the sprawling patterns made out of coa.r.s.e braid and appliqued on, not an organic part of the life of the design.

She stopped her work for a moment to look more closely at the filmy lace in her hand, to note if the mesh of the reseau were circular or hexagonal. She fancied that she was the only American woman of her acquaintance who knew the difference, who had the least culture in the matter of lace ... except Marise, of course, and it was positively worse for Marise to have been initiated and then turn back to commonness, than for those other well-meaning, Philistine American women who were at least innocently ignorant. Having known the exquisite lore of lace, how could Marise have let it and all the rest of the lore of civilization drop for these coa.r.s.e occupations of hers, now? How could she have let life coa.r.s.en her, as it had, how could she have fallen into such common ways, with her sun-browned hair, and her roughened hands, and her inexactly adjusted dresses, and the fatal middle-aged lines beginning to show from the corner of the ear down into the neck, and not an effort made to stop them. But as to wrinkles, of course a woman as unrestrained as Marise was bound to get them early. She had never learned the ABC of woman's wisdom, the steady cult of self-care, self-beautifying, self-refining. How long would it be before Neale ...

No! None of that! She must get back to impersonal thoughts. What was it she had selected as subject for consideration? It had been lace. What about lace? Lace ... ? Her mind balked, openly rebellious. She could not make it think of lace again. She was in a panic, and cast about her for some strong defense ... oh! just the thing ... the new hat.

She would try on the new hat which had just come from New York. She had been waiting for a leisurely moment, really to be able to put her attention on that.

She opened the gaily printed round pasteboard box, and took out the creation. She put it on with care, low over her eyebrows, adjusting it carefully by feel, before she looked at herself to get the first impression. Then, hand-gla.s.s in hand, she began to study it seriously from various angles. When she was convinced that from every view-point her profile had the unlovely and inharmonious silhouette fashionable that summer, she drew a long breath of relief, and took it off gently, looking at it with pleasure. Nothing gives one such self-confidence, she reflected, as the certainty of having the right sort of hat. How much better "chic" was than beauty!

With the hat still in her hand, her very eyes on it, she saw there before her, as plainly as though in a crystal ball, Marise's att.i.tude as she had stood with Marsh that evening before at the far end of the garden. Her body drawn towards his, the poise of her head, all of her listening intently while he talked ... one could see how he was dominating her. A man with such a personality as his, regularly hypnotic when he chose, and practised in handling women, he would be able to do anything he liked with an impressionable creature like Marise, who as a girl was always under the influence of something or other. It was evident that he could put any idea he liked into Marise's head just by looking at her hard enough. She had seen him do it ... helped him do it, for that matter!

And so Neale must have seen. Anybody could! And Neale was not raising a hand, nor so much as lifting an eyebrow, just letting things take their course.