CHAPTER II
THE LADY OF DIFFICULT OCCASIONS
THE Lady of Difficult Occasions—such was the title conferred upon Mrs. John McCandless Blair by Dick Wingfield—looked less than her thirty-two years. A slender, nervous woman, Mrs. Blair had contributed from early girlhood to the picturesqueness of life in her city. Her interests were many and varied; she did what she liked and was supremely indifferent to criticism. She wore colours that no other woman would have dared; for colour, she maintained, possesses the strongest psychical significance, and to keep in tune with things infinite one’s wardrobe must reflect the rainbow. She had tried all extant religions and had revived a number long considered obsolete; her garret was a valhalla of discarded gods. One day the scent of joss-sticks clung to the draperies of her library, the next she dipped her finger boldly in the holy water font at the door of the Catholic cathedral and sent a subscription to the Little Sisters of the Poor.
She appeared fitfully in the Blair pew at Memorial Presbyterian Church, where her father was ruling elder and her husband passed the plate; and Memorial, we may say, was the most fashionable house of prayer and worship in town, frowning down severely upon the Allequippa Club over the way. “Fanny Blair is sure of heaven,” Dick Wingfield said, “for she has tickets to all the gates.” Mrs. Blair was generous in her quixotic fashion; her husband had inherited wealth, and he was, moreover, a successful lawyer, who admired her immensely and encouraged her foibles. She dressed her twin boys after portraits of the Stuart princes, and their velvet and long curls caused many riots at the public school they attended—sent there, she said, that they might grow up strong in the democratic spirit.
When they had adjourned to the library Mrs. Blair spoke in practical ways of the new wife’s home-coming. She tendered her own services in any changes her father wished in the house. Some of her mother’s personal belongings she frankly stated her purpose to remove. They were things that did not, to Colonel Craighill’s masculine mind, seem particularly interesting or valuable. Wayne grew restless as his father and sister considered these matters. He moved about idly, throwing in a word now and then when Mrs. Blair appealed to him directly. Evenings at home had become unusual events, and domestic affairs bored him. Mrs. Blair was, however, sensitive to his moods and she continued her efforts to hold him within the circle of their talk.
“Don’t you think a reception—something large and general—would be a good thing at the start, Wayne?”
“Yes; oh, yes, by all means,” he replied, looking up from a publisher’s advertisement that he had been reading.
He left the room unnoticed a few minutes later and wandered into the wide hall, feeling the atmosphere of the house flow around him. It was the local custom, in our ready American fashion of conferring antiquity, to speak of the mansion as the old Craighill place. The house, built originally in the early seventies, had recently been remodelled and enlarged. It occupied half a block, and the grounds were beautifully kept, faithful to traditions of Mrs. Craighill’s taste. The full force of the impending change in his father’s life now struck Wayne for the first time. There is no eloquence like that of absence. He stood by the open drawing room door with his childhood and youth calling to all his senses. The thought of his mother stole across his memory—a gentle, bright, smiling spirit. The pictures on the walls; the familiar furniture; the broad fireplace; the tall bronze vases that guarded the glass doors of the conservatory, whose greenery showed at the end of the long room—those things cried to him now with a new appeal. A great bowl of yellow chrysanthemums, glowing in a far corner, struck upon his sight like flame. He walked the length of the room and gazed up at a portrait of his mother, painted in Paris by a famous artist. Its vitality had in some way vanished; the figure no longer seemed poised, ready to step down into the room. The luminous quality of the face was gone; the eyes were not so brightly responsive as of old—he was so sure of these differences that he flashed off the frame lights with a half-conscious feeling that a shadow had fallen upon the spirit represented there, and that it was kinder to leave it in darkness.
His sister called him on some pretext—he was very dear to her and the fact that he and his father were so utterly unsympathetic increased her tenderness—and repeated the programme of entertainments which she had proposed.
“It’s quite ample. There’s never any question about your doing enough, Fanny,” he remarked indifferently.
Colonel Craighill announced that he must go down to the Club to a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Greater City Improvement League, in which his son-in-law was interested.
“Wayne, you will take Fanny home in your own car, won’t you? Or maybe you’ll wait for John to stop?”
“I must go soon; Wayne will look after me,” she said, and they both went to the door to see their father off.
“It’s like old times,” she sighed, as the motor moved away; “but those times won’t come any more.”
Then with a change of manner she turned upon Wayne and seized his hands.
“Wayne, have you ever seen that woman before?”
He shook himself free with a roughness that was unlike him.
“Don’t be silly: of course not. I never heard of her. How did you get that idea?”
“You looked as though you were seeing a ghost when you looked at her picture.”
“I was thinking of ghosts, Fanny, but I wasn’t seeing one.” He lighted a cigar. “I must say that your tact sometimes leaves you at fatal moments. The Colonel was almost at the point of getting mad. He wanted to be jollied—and you did all you could to irritate him.”
“I had a perfect right to say what I pleased to him. How do you suppose he came to walk into this adventuress’s trap? A girl of twenty-nine! The hunt will be up as soon as he makes the announcement and the whole town will join the pack.”
“The town will have to stand it if we can.”
“It’s the loss of his own dignity, it’s the affront to mother’s memory—this young thing with her pretty marcelled head! There are some things that ought to be sacred in this world, and father ought to remember what our mother was—how noble and beautiful!”
“Well, we know it, Fanny; she’s our memory now—not his,” said Wayne gently; and upon this they were silent for a time, and Fanny wept softly. When Wayne spoke again it was in a different key.
“Well, father has his nerve to be getting married right on the verge of a panic. Perhaps he is doing it merely to reassure the public, to steady the market, so to speak.”
“But papa says there will be no panic. The Star printed a long interview with him only yesterday. He says there must be a readjustment of values, that’s all; he must be right about it.”
“Bless you, yes, Fanny. If father says there won’t be any panic, why, there won’t! What does John say?”
“Well, John is always cautioning me about our expenses,” she admitted ruefully, so that he laughed at her. “But great heavens, Wayne!” she exclaimed.
“Well, what’s the matter now?”
“Why, he never told us a thing about her. Who do you suppose introduced him to her?”
“My dear Fanny,” began Wayne, thrusting his long legs out at comfortable ease, “can you imagine our father dear being worked? He backed off and sparred for time when you wanted to marry John, though John belongs to our old Scotch-Irish Brahmin caste, because a Blair once owned a distillery back in the dark ages, and there was no telling but the sins of the rye juice might be visited on your children to the third and fourth generation if you married John. And if I had craved the Colonel’s permission to marry some girl in another town—some girl, let us say, that I had met on a steamer going to Bermuda—you may be dead sure he would have put detectives on her family and had a careful assay made of her moral character. Trust the Colonel, Fanny, for caution in such matters! Don’t you think for a minute that he hasn’t investigated Miss Adelaide Allen’s family into its most obscure and inaccessible recesses! Our father was not born yesterday; our father is the great Colonel Roger Craighill, a prophet honoured even on his own Monongahela. Father never makes mistakes, Fanny. I’m his only mistake. I’m a great grief to father. He has frequently admitted it. He begs me please not to forget that I am his son. I am beyond any question a bad lot; I have raised no end of hell; I have frequently been drunk—beastly, fighting drunk. And father will go to his dear pastor and ask him to pray for me, and he will admit to old sympathizing friends that I’m an awful disappointment to him. That’s the reason he stopped lecturing me long ago; he doesn’t want me to keep sober; when I get drunk and smash bread wagons in the dewy dawn with my machine after a night among the ungodly he puts on his martyr’s halo and asks his pastor to plead with God for me!”
“Wayne! Wayne! What’s the matter with you?”
He had spoken rapidly and with a bitterness that utterly confounded her; and he laughed now mirthlessly.
“It’s all right, Fanny. I’m a rotten bad lot. No wonder the Colonel has given me up; but I have the advantage of him there: I’ve given myself up! Yes, I’ve given myself up,” he repeated, and nodded his head several times as though he found pleasure in the thought.