WINTER’S swoop upon Stoughton that year was early and savage. In her desperate loneliness and boredom Emily began occasionally to indulge in the main distraction of Stoughton—church. On a Sunday late in March she went for the first time since Christmas. Her mother had succumbed to the drugs and had been really ill, so ill that Emily did not dare let herself admit the dread of desolation which menaced. But, the crisis past, Mrs. Bromfield had rapidly returned to her normal state. The peril of death cowed or dignified her into silence. When she again took up her complainings, her daughter was reassured.
As she walked the half mile to the little church, Emily was in better spirits than at any time since she had come to Stoughton. The reaction from her fears had given her natural spirits of youth their first chance to assert themselves. She found herself hopeful for no reason, cheerful not because of benefits received or expected, but because of calamities averted. “I might be so much worse off,” she was thinking. “There is mother, and there is the income. I feel almost rich—and a little ungrateful. I’m in quite a church-going mood.”
The walk through the cold air did her good, and as she went up the aisle her usually pale face was delicately flushed and she was carrying her slender but very womanly figure with that erectness and elasticity which made its charm in the days when people were in the habit of discussing her prospects as based upon her title to beauty. Her black dress and small black hat brought out the finest effects of her red-brown hair and violet eyes and rosy white skin. She was, above all, most distinguished looking—in strong contrast to the stupid faces and ill-carried forms in “Sunday best.”
Her coming caused a stir—that rustling and creaking of garments feminine and starched, which in the small town church always arouses the dozers for something uncommon. She faintly smiled a greeting to Mrs. Cockburn as she entered the pew where that old lady was sitting. She had just raised her head from the appearance of prayer, when Mrs. Cockburn whispered:
“Have you seen young Mr. Wayland?”
Emily could not remember that she had heard of him. But Mrs. Cockburn’s agitation demanded a show of interest, so she whispered:
“No—where is he?”
She would have said, “Who is he?” but that would have called for a long explanation. And, as Mrs. Cockburn had a wide space between her upper front teeth, every time she whispered the letter s the congregation rustled and the minister was disconcerted.
“There,” whispered Mrs. Cockburn. “Straight across—don’t look now, for he’s looking at us—straight across to the other side two pews forward.”
When they rose for the hymn, Emily glanced and straightway saw the cause of Mrs. Cockburn’s excitement. He was a commonplace-looking young man with a heavy moustache. His hair was parted in the middle and brushed back carefully and smoothly. He was dressed like a city man, as distinguished from the Stoughton man who, little as he owed to nature, owed even less to art as exploited by the Stoughton tailors.
Young Mr. Wayland would not have attracted Emily’s attention in a city because he was in no way remarkable. But in Stoughton he seemed to her somewhat as an angel might seem to a Peri wandering in outer darkness. When she discovered him looking at her a few moments later, and looking with polite but interested directness, she felt herself colouring. She also felt pleased—and hopeful in that fantastic way in which the desperate dream of desperate chances.
After the service she stood talking to Mrs. Cockburn, affecting an unprecedented interest in a woman whom she liked as little—if as much—as any in Stoughton. Her back was toward the aisle but she felt her “sail-ho,” coming.
“He’s on his way to us,” said Mrs. Cockburn hoarsely—she had been paying no attention to what Emily had been saying to her, or to her own answers. She now pushed eagerly past Emily to greet the young man at the door of the pew.
“Why, I’m so glad to see you again, Mr. Wayland,” she said with a cordiality that verged on hysteria. “It has been a long time. I’m afraid you’ve forgotten an old woman like me.”
“No, indeed, Mrs. Cockburn,” replied Wayland, who had just provided himself with her name. “It’s been only four years, and you’ve not changed.”
Mrs. Cockburn saw his eyes turn toward Emily and introduced him. Emily was not blushing now, or apparently interested. She seemed to be simply waiting for her path to be cleared.
“I felt certain it was you,” began young Wayland, a little embarrassed. He made a gesture as if to unbutton his long coat and take something from his inside pocket, then seemed to change his mind. “I’ve a note of introduction to you, that is to your mother—Mrs. Ainslie, you know. But I heard that your mother was ill. And I hesitated about coming.”
“Mother is much better.” Emily was friendly, but not effusive. “I am sure she—both of us—will be glad to see a friend of Mrs. Ainslie.”
She smiled, shook hands with him, gave him a fascinating little nod, submitted to a kiss on the cheek from Mrs. Cockburn and went swiftly and gracefully down the aisle. Wayland looked after her with admiration. He had been in Stoughton three weeks and was profoundly bored.
Mrs. Cockburn was also looking after her, but disapprovingly. “A nice young woman in some ways,” she said. “But she carries her head too high for the plain people here.”
“She’s had a good deal of trouble, I’ve heard,” Wayland answered, not committing himself.
The next morning Mrs. Bromfield got a letter from Mrs. Ainslie. It was of unusual length for Mrs. Ainslie, who was a bird-of-passage that rarely paused long enough for extended communication.
“I never could get used to that big, angular handwriting,” said Mrs. Bromfield to her daughter. “Won’t you read it to me, please?”
Emily began at “My Dear Frances” and read steadily through, finding in the postscript four sentences which should have begun the letter of so worldly-wise a woman: “Don’t on any account let Emily see this. You know how she acted about Bob Fulton. She ought to have learned better by this time, but I don’t trust her. Be careful what you say to her.”
Mrs. Ainslie was urging the opportunity offered by the sojourn of young Wayland in Stoughton. “Emily will have a clear field,” she wrote. “He’s got money in his own right—millions when his father dies—and he’s a good deal of a fool—dissipated, I hear, but in a prudent, business-like way. It’s Emily’s chance for a resurrection.”
Mrs. Bromfield was made speechless by the postscript. Emily sat silent, looking at the letter on the table before her.
“Don’t be prejudiced against him, dear,” pleaded her mother.
“I imagine it doesn’t matter in the least what I think of him,” Emily replied. She rose and left the room, sending back from the doorway a short, queer laugh that made her mother feel how shut out she was from what was going on in her daughter’s mind.
If she could have seen into that small, ethereal-looking head she would have been astounded at the thoughts boiling there. Emily had been bred in an atmosphere of mercenary or, rather, “practical” ideas. But she was also a woman of sound and independent mind, in the habit of thinking for herself, and with strong mental and physical self-respect. She would have hesitated to marry unwisely for love. But she had been far from that state of self-degradation in which a young woman deliberately and consciously closes her heart, locks the door and flings the key away. Now however, the deepest instinct of the human animal—the instinct of self-preservation—was aroused in her. It seemed to her that an imperative command had issued from that instinct—a command at any cost to flee the living death of Stoughton.
That same afternoon Mrs. Bromfield learned—without having to ask a question—all that Stoughton knew about the Waylands: They were the pride of the town and also its chief irritation. It gloried in them because it believed that the report of their millions was as clamourous throughout the nation as in its own ears. It was exasperated against them, because it believed that they ought to live in Stoughton and be content with a life which it thought, or thought it thought, desirable above life in any other place whatsoever.
So as long as Mrs. Wayland lived, the family had spent at least half of each year there; and Stoughton, satisfied on that point, disliked them for other reasons, first of all for being richer than any one else. When Mrs. Wayland died, leaving an almost grown daughter and a son just going into trousers, General Wayland had put the girl in school at Dobbs Ferry-on-the-Hudson, the boy in Groton, had closed the house and made New York his residence. The girl died two years after the death of her mother. The boy went from Groton to Harvard, from Harvard to his father’s business—the Cotton Cloth Trust. The Wayland homestead, the most considerable in Stoughton with its two wings built to the original square house, with its conservatories and its stables, was opened for but a few weeks each winter. And then it was opened only in part—to receive the General on his annual business visit to the factories of the Stoughton Cotton Mills Company, the largest group in the “combine.” Sometimes he brought Edgar. But Edgar gave the young women of Stoughton no opportunities to ensnare him. He kept to his work and departed at the earliest possible moment. This year he had come alone, as his father had now put him in charge of their Stoughton interests.