Sanctuary: Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The funeral took place the next morning, and on the return from the
cemetery Dick told his mother that he must go and look over things at
Darrow's office. He had heard the day before from his friend's aunt, a
helpless person to whom telegraphy was difficult and travel inconceivable,
and who, in eight pages of unpunctuated eloquence, made over to Dick what
she called the melancholy privilege of winding up her nephew's affairs.

Mrs. Peyton looked anxiously at her son. "Is there no one who can do this
for you? He must have had a clerk or some one who knows about his work."

Dick shook his head. "Not lately. He hasn't had much to do this winter, and
these last months he had chucked everything to work alone over his plans."

The word brought a faint colour to Mrs. Peyton's cheek. It was the first
allusion that either of them had made to Darrow's bequest.

"Oh, of course you must do all you can," she murmured, turning alone into
the house.

The emotions of the morning had stirred her deeply, and she sat at home
during the day, letting her mind dwell, in a kind of retrospective piety,
on the thought of poor Darrow's devotion. She had given him too little
time while he lived, had acquiesced too easily in his growing habits of
seclusion; and she felt it as a proof of insensibility that she had not
been more closely drawn to the one person who had loved Dick as she loved
him. The evidence of that love, as shown in Darrow's letter, filled her
with a vain compunction. The very extravagance of his offer lent it a
deeper pathos. It was wonderful that, even in the urgency of affection, a
man of his almost morbid rectitude should have overlooked the restrictions
of professional honour, should have implied the possibility of his friend's
overlooking them. It seemed to make his sacrifice the more complete that it
had, unconsciously, taken the form of a subtle temptation.

The last word arrested Mrs. Peyton's thoughts. A temptation? To whom? Not,
surely, to one capable, as her son was capable, of rising to the height
of his friend's devotion. The offer, to Dick, would mean simply, as it
meant to her, the last touching expression of an inarticulate fidelity:
the utterance of a love which at last had found its formula. Mrs. Peyton
dismissed as morbid any other view of the case. She was annoyed with
herself for supposing that Dick could be ever so remotely affected by the
possibility at which poor Darrow's renunciation hinted. The nature of
the offer removed it from practical issues to the idealizing region of
sentiment.

Mrs. Peyton had been sitting alone with these thoughts for the greater part
of the afternoon, and dusk was falling when Dick entered the drawing-room.
In the dim light, with his pallour heightened by the sombre effect of
his mourning, he came upon her almost startlingly, with a revival of
some long-effaced impression which, for a moment, gave her the sense of
struggling among shadows. She did not, at first, know what had produced the
effect; then she saw that it was his likeness to his father.

"Well--is it over?" she asked, as he threw himself into a chair without
speaking.

"Yes: I've looked through everything." He leaned back, crossing his hands
behind his head, and gazing past her with a look of utter lassitude.

She paused a moment, and then said tentatively: "Tomorrow you will be able
to go back to your work."

"Oh--my work," he exclaimed, as if to brush aside an ill-timed pleasantry.

"Are you too tired?"

"No." He rose and began to wander up and down the room. "I'm not
tired.--Give me some tea, will you?" He paused before her while she poured
the cup, and then, without taking it, turned away to light a cigarette.

"Surely there is still time?" she suggested, with her eyes on him.

"Time? To finish my plans? Oh, yes--there's time. But they're not worth
it."

"Not worth it?" She started up, and then dropped back into her seat,
ashamed of having betrayed her anxiety. "They are worth as much as they
were last week," she said with an attempt at cheerfulness.

"Not to me," he returned. "I hadn't seen Darrow's then."

There was a long silence. Mrs. Peyton sat with her eyes fixed on her
clasped hands, and her son paced the room restlessly.

"Are they so wonderful?" she asked at length.

"Yes."

She paused again, and then said, lifting a tremulous glance to his face:
"That makes his offer all the more beautiful."

Dick was lighting another cigarette, and his face was turned from her.
"Yes--I suppose so," he said in a low tone.

"They were quite finished, he told me," she continued, unconsciously
dropping her voice to the pitch of his.

"Yes."

"Then they will be entered, I suppose?"

"Of course--why not?" he answered almost sharply.

"Shall you have time to attend to all that and to finish yours too?"

"Oh, I suppose so. I've told you it isn't a question of tune. I see now
that mine are not worth bothering with."

She rose and approached him, laying her hands on his shoulders. "You are
tired and unstrung; how can you judge? Why not let me look at both designs
to-morrow?"

Under her gaze he flushed abruptly and drew back with a half-impatient
gesture.

"Oh, I'm afraid that wouldn't help me; you'd be sure to think mine best,"
he said with a laugh.

"But if I could give you good reasons?" she pressed him.

He took her hand, as if ashamed of his impatience. "Dear mother, if you had
any reasons their mere existence would prove that they were bad."

His mother did not return his smile. "You won't let me see the two designs
then?" she said with a faint tinge of insistence.

"Oh, of course--if you want to--if you only won't talk about it now! Can't
you see that I'm pretty nearly dead-beat?" he burst out uncontrollably; and
as she stood silent, he added with a weary fall in his voice, "I think I'll
go upstairs and see if I can't get a nap before dinner."

* * * * *

Though they had separated upon the assurance that she should see the two
designs if she wished it, Mrs. Peyton knew they would not be shown to her.
Dick, indeed, would not again deny her request; but had he not reckoned on
the improbability of her renewing it? All night she lay confronted by that
question. The situation shaped itself before her with that hallucinating
distinctness which belongs to the midnight vision. She knew now why Dick
had suddenly reminded her of his father: had she not once before seen the
same thought moving behind the same eyes? She was sure it had occurred to
Dick to use Darrow's drawings. As she lay awake in the darkness she could
hear him, long after midnight, pacing the floor overhead: she held her
breath, listening to the recurring beat of his foot, which seemed that of
an imprisoned spirit revolving wearily in the cage of the same thought. She
felt in every fibre that a crisis in her son's life had been reached, that
the act now before him would have a determining effect on his whole future.
The circumstances of her past had raised to clairvoyance her natural
insight into human motive, had made of her a moral barometer responding to
the faintest fluctuations of atmosphere, and years of anxious meditation
had familiarized her with the form which her son's temptations were likely
to take. The peculiar misery of her situation was that she could not,
except indirectly, put this intuition, this foresight, at his service.
It was a part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real
counsellor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not
become a part of the moral tissues. Love such as hers had a great office,
the office of preparation and direction; but it must know how to hold its
hand and keep its counsel, how to attend upon its object as an invisible
influence rather than as an active interference.

All this Kate Peyton had told herself again and again, during those hours
of anxious calculation in which she had tried to cast Dick's horoscope; but
not in her moments of most fantastic foreboding had she figured so cruel a
test of her courage. If her prayers for him had taken precise shape, she
might have asked that he should be spared the spectacular, the dramatic
appeal to his will-power: that his temptations should slip by him in a dull
disguise. She had secured him against all ordinary forms of baseness; the
vulnerable point lay higher, in that region of idealizing egotism which is
the seat of life in such natures.

Years of solitary foresight gave her mind a singular alertness in dealing
with such possibilities. She saw at once that the peril of the situation
lay in the minimum of risk it involved. Darrow had employed no assistant in
working out his plans for the competition, and his secluded life made it
almost certain that he had not shown them to any one, and that she and Dick
alone knew them to have been completed. Moreover, it was a part of Dick's
duty to examine the contents of his friend's office, and in doing this
nothing would be easier than to possess himself of the drawings and make
use of any part of them that might serve his purpose. He had Darrow's
authority for doing so; and though the act involved a slight breach of
professional probity, might not his friend's wishes be invoked as a secret
justification? Mrs. Peyton found herself almost hating poor Darrow for
having been the unconscious instrument of her son's temptation. But what
right had she, after all, to suspect Dick of considering, even for a
moment, the act of which she was so ready to accuse him? His unwillingness
to let her see the drawings might have been the accidental result of
lassitude and discouragement. He was tired and troubled, and she had chosen
the wrong moment to make the request. His want of readiness might even be
due to the wish to conceal from her how far his friend had surpassed him.
She knew his sensitiveness on this point, and reproached herself for not
having foreseen it. But her own arguments failed to convince her. Deep
beneath her love for her boy and her faith in him there lurked a nameless
doubt. She could hardly now, in looking back, define the impulse upon which
she had married Denis Peyton: she knew only that the deeps of her nature
had been loosened, and that she had been borne forward on their current
to the very fate from which her heart recoiled. But if in one sense her
marriage remained a problem, there was another in which her motherhood
seemed to solve it. She had never lost the sense of having snatched her
child from some dim peril which still lurked and hovered; and he became
more closely hers with every effort of her vigilant love. For the act
of rescue had not been accomplished once and for all in the moment
of immolation: it had not been by a sudden stroke of heroism, but by
ever-renewed and indefatigable effort, that she had built up for him the
miraculous shelter of her love. And now that it stood there, a hallowed
refuge against failure, she could not even set a light in the pane, but
must let him grope his way to it unaided.

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