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Empty Sack

<h2>CHAPTER V</h2> No difference of standard in the Collingham household was so obvious as that between Dauphin, the Irish setter, and Max, the police dog. The situation was specially hard on Dauphin. To have owned Collingham Lodge and its occupants during all his conscious life, and then one day to find himself obliged to share this dominion with a stranger had given him in his declining years a pessimistic point of view. It had made him proud, cold, withdrawn, like a crusty old aristocrat forced in among base company. To the best of his ability he ignored the police dog, though it was difficult not to be aware of the presence of a being too exuberant to appreciate disdain. For Dauphin, the most beastly experience of the day began about four each afternoon, at the minute when the dog-clock told him that his master might be expected home. That was the hour at which from time immemorial he had taken possession of the great front portico where the distant burr of the motor-car first reached him. When the burr became a throb he knew it was passing the oak that marked the Collingham boundary; and, since it had arrived on his own ground, he could run down the driveway to meet it. This had been his exclusive right. To be joined daily now by a frisky, irrepressible pup made him feel like an old man tied to an insupportable young wife from whom his own death will be the sole deliverance. Life to Dauphin had thus become a mingling of impatience and anguish, poorly masked beneath an air of dignity. And as far as he could judge, his master's wife, of whom he had no great opinion, had begun to share these emotions. Anguish and impatience had become of late the chief elements in the aura she threw out, and by which dogs take their sense of men. It was not that her words or expressions betrayed her. It was only that when she came within his sphere of perception he was aware that she felt the kind of passion the police dog roused in himself. He was aware of it on this May afternoon, more than six months after she had first learned of Bob's infatuation for the Follett girl, when she came out on the portico to listen for the expected car. She would come out, listen, and go in. Each time she came out, each time she listened, each time she retired, he felt the sweeping to and fro of an imperious will worried or frustrated, though he sat on his haunches and gave no sign. He couldn't give a sign, because Max would misunderstand it. There he was, down on the lawn before the portico, grinning, prancing, joking, calling names—names quite audible in dog intercourse, though a human being couldn't catch them—and the least little movement Dauphin made would be taken as concession. The old setter was sorry. He would have liked showing his master's wife—he didn't consider her his mistress—that he understood her distress; but he was nailed to the doorstep by force majeure. And the woman envied him. He was perfectly aware of that. She assumed that dogs had no social problems. All he had to do, she thought, was to sit and blink at the magnolias, hawthorns, and lilacs pursuing one another into bloom. All he had to think of was the up hill and down dale of the view before him, a haze of blue and green and rose melting to the mauve of hills. As a matter of fact, this was something like what was passing through her mind. A masterful woman, she was nevertheless reaching that point of self-pity where she envied the untroubled dogs. While she carried the cares of so many others, no one else carried hers. All through the winter she had had Edith and Bob on her mind, and now she had Bradley. On leaving for the bank that morning, he had been so terribly upset that she couldn't rest till knowing how he had got through his day. She was the more worried because of being entirely alone and thus thrown in on herself. Edith had gone to stay with people in the Berkshires. Of that her mother was glad. She meant for the present to keep her there. With her queer ideas, she would only make her brother the more difficult to deal with, though she had not been difficult herself. Nearly seven months had passed, and yet her affair with Ayling was exactly where it had been in the previous October. That was the advantage of a girl; you could always tell where she stood. Edith was tenacious, but not defiant. Though capable of engaging herself to this young man, she would hardly marry him in face of her father's opposition. Bob, on the other hand, was not only head-strong, but unreasonable. He would marry the Follett girl if she would marry him, whatever might be the consequences. She, his mother, had it "out" with him, and he had said so. It was a terrible thing to have their whole domestic happiness hang on the whim of a creature like the Follett girl; but apparently it did. She had not spoken to Bob till Hubert Wray had surrendered all he had to tell. He had done this through a process of "pumping" of which he himself had hardly been aware. Having ascertained that his New England connections were unexceptional, Junia had been attentive to him through the winter, making him feel that Collingham Lodge was a second home. What he didn't tell to her he told to Edith, and what Edith knew the mother had no great difficulty in finding out. Thus when, on the previous Saturday, Bob was about to leave for a party on Long Island, they had had the plain talk which could no longer be deferred. They had had it after lunch, seated on a bench overlooking the tennis court. They had come out ostensibly to talk over the sacrifice of the pink-and-white hawthorn in the shade of which they sat in favor of extending the court so that Bob and Edith could both have parties simultaneously. While the new court would be an improvement, they would regret the celestial flowering of the hawthorn whenever, as at present, it was May. "Not that it would make so very much difference to your father and me," Junia began, in a quavering tone, "if things we're afraid of were to happen." So the subject was opened up. Bob could only ask, "What things?" and his mother could only tell him. "It's quite true, old lady," he confessed. "You might as well know it first as last." Junia had not brought up her children without having learned that, while Edith could be controlled, Bob could only be managed. With Edith, she could say, "I forbid," with Bob, it had to be, "I suffer." "Of course, dear," she said now, "I'm your mother, and whatever you do I shall try to accept. It will be hard, naturally—it's hard already—but you can count on me." He took her hand and squeezed it. "Thanks, old lady." "Of course I can't answer for your father. You know for yourself how stern and unyielding he is." "Oh, I'm not so sure about that. It's always seemed to me that he'd give in to a lot of things, if you'd only let him." This perspicacity being dangerous, she glided to another aspect of her theme. "What I don't understand is why, if you've been in love with her for seven or eight months, and you mean to marry her, you haven't done it already." He took two or three puffs at his cigarette before tossing off: "I'd do it like a shot, if she would." "And she won't?" "Not yet." "And you think she will?" "I'm sure she will." "What makes you so certain?" "Nothing. I just know." Having had her fears verified, Junia had no object in pushing the inquiry further. Her duty in life was to take events as they touched her family and mold them for the best. When she called it "the best" she meant it as the best. She was not a worldly woman with mere fashionable ends in view. Eager for the good of her children, she was conscientious in pursuit of the things she truly believed to be worthiest. All through Sunday she took counsel with herself, going to communion at the restful little Marillo church, and putting new intensity into her devotion. She had guests at lunch and went out to dinner, and, though equal to all the social demands, her mind did not relinquish the purpose she had in view. Could she have accomplished it without her husband's aid, she would probably not have taken him into her confidence. It being her special task to deal with the children, the less he knew of their mistakes and escapades the simpler it was for them all. It may be an illuminating digression here to say that there had been a time, some fifteen years earlier, when Junia had had an experience as difficult as the one she was facing now. Nothing but a trained subconsciousness had carried her through that, and she looked for the same mainstay of the self to come to her aid again. One of the lessons she had learned at that time was the value of quietude, of reserve in "giving herself away." She was not one to whom this restraint came natural; but for the very reason that it was acquired, it had the intenser force. It was at a time when they had lived in the Marillo house only a little while, and the Bradley of that day was not the portly, domesticated bigwig of the present. He was a tempestuous sea of passions right at the dangerous flood-tide, the middle forties. The first ardor of married life was at an end for both of them; but while, for her, existence was running more and more into one quiet purposeful stream, for him it was raging off in new directions. Whatever Junia suspected she was too wise to know it as a certainty. Knowing, she argued, would probably weaken her and do nothing to strengthen him. Already she was more intensely a mother than she was a wife, living in the amazing careers she was planning for her children. Edith would marry an English peer, while Bob would take a brilliant place in his own country. Their victories would be her victories, till, in some far-distant, beatified old age, she would be translated to the stars. And then one afternoon, when the flagged pavement had only recently been laid and they were drinking tea on it, Bradley had said, right out of a clear sky: "Junia I don't know whether you've suspected it or not, but for some time past I've had a mistress." That was the instant when she first learned the value of a schooled subconsciousness. It seemed to her that she had been slain; and yet, with a nerve little less than miraculous, she went on with her tasks among the tea things. "If you've done it so far without telling me, Bradley," she said, at last, with only the slightest tremor in her tone, "why shouldn't you let me remain ignorant?" "Does that mean that you don't care if I go on?" "I think you can answer that as well as I. What I don't care for is to be drawn into an affair from which your own good taste—merely to put it on that ground—should be anxious to leave me out." He looked at her savagely. "Don't you resent it any more than that?" "Is that why you're giving me the information—to see how much I resent it?" "Partly." "Then I'm afraid you will have your labor for your pains. You'll never see more than you're seeing at this instant." That stand was a master stroke. It gave her the advantage of being enigmatic. It enabled her to take blows without seeming to have felt them, and to deliver them without betraying the quarter from which the next would come. Right there and then Bradley had been monstrous enough to suggest that, since she liked Collingham Lodge, she should remain there and let him go away. He would make generous provision for her and the children, and in return expect his divorce. But she had taken her stand—the enigmatic. She didn't argue; she didn't plead; she didn't reproach him; she didn't treat him to the scene through which weaker women would have put him. "Bradley, I shall expect you to remain with me," were the only words she used. And he had remained. Less than two years later, it was she who fixed the sum the other woman was to be paid in order to get rid of her. She was sufficiently in sympathy with her sex to insist on the terms being liberal. "I think she should have fifty thousand dollars," she declared, and fifty thousand dollars the woman received. So that, if Bradley had lost the first passion of his love for her, he had gained vastly in respect. Hot-tempered, high-handed, impetuous, imperious, as he knew her to be, he saw her curb and compress these qualities till they became a prodigious motor force. If she had not mastered herself, she had mastered the expression of herself till she was an instrument at her own command. It was as an instrument at her own command that, on the Wednesday morning, before he went to town, she gave her husband as much information as she thought he ought to possess about his son. "Would you mind sitting down for a minute, Bradley? I've something important to say." He had come up to her room, as she took her breakfast in bed, after he had had his own downstairs. Wearing a lace dressing jacket and a boudoir cap, she was propped up with pillows, a wicker tray with legs on the coverlet before her. In the canopied Louis Quinze bed of old rich-grained walnut, raised six inches above the floor, she suggested an eighteenth-century French princess, Madame Sophie or Madame Victoire, receiving a courtier at her levée. Luxurious with a note of chastity was the rest of the chintzy room. The pictures on the walls were sacred ones, copies of old Italian masters. A prie-dieu in a corner supported a bible and a prayer-book in tooled bindings with a coat of arms. The white-paneled wardrobe room seen through a door ajar was as austere as a well-kept sacristy. Perfumed air came in through the open windows, and thrushes were fluting in the trees. Reminding her that Tims, the chauffeur, would soon be at the door to take him to the bank, Collingham sank into the armchair nearest to the bed. His thoughts were on the amount in the proposed issue of Paraguayan bonds the house would be able to carry. "It's about Bob," she began, in a tone little more than casual. "Did you know he was in a scrape?" He started, firing off his brief questions rapidly: "Who? Bob? What kind of scrape? With a girl?" "Exactly. With a girl who may give us a good deal of trouble unless the thing is stopped." If Collingham's heart sank it was not wholly because of the scrape with the girl, but because he was afraid of chickens coming home to roost. Though he had never broached the subject with the boy, he had often wondered as to how he met sexual temptation; and now he was to learn. "Is it anything very wrong?" "Only in intention." She sipped her coffee before letting him have the full force of it. "He wants to marry her." He felt some slight relief. "Oh, then it's not—" "No; not as far as he's concerned. As to her—well I presume that she's the usual type." "Did he tell you himself?" "He told me himself." "His job at the bank pays him only two thousand dollars a year. Did he say what else he expected to marry on?" "We didn't discuss that; but I suppose it would be what he expects you to give him." "And if I don't give him anything?" "That's what I wanted to know. If you didn't—" "He'd call it off?" "No; perhaps not. But she would." "Have you any special reason for thinking so?" "None but my knowledge of—of that kind of woman in general." She went on as quietly as if the incident of fifteen years previously had never occurred. "Men are so guileless about women who have—who have love to sell. They're such simpletons. They so easily think these women like them for themselves when all the while they're only gauging the measure of the pocketbook." Collingham endeavored not to hang his head, but it seemed to go down in spite of him as the placid voice sketched his program for the day. Junia had heard her husband say that Mr. Huntley, his second in command, was to go to South America in connection with the issue of Paraguayan bonds. Why shouldn't Bob be sent with him? It would add to his experience and make him feel important. After he had left Asuncion, reasons could be found for keeping him at Lima, Rio, or Buenos Aires till the whole thing blew over. Having accepted the suggestion gratefully, Collingham came to the question he had up to now repressed. "Who's the girl? I suppose you know." "She's been posing for Hubert Wray. Bob met her at the studio. Her name is—" Grasping the arms of the chair, he strained forward. "Not—not Follett's girl?" "Yes; that is the name. You dismissed her father from the bank last year." Her eyes followed him as he stumbled to his feet. "But what difference does it make whether it's she or some one else?" He couldn't tell her. The fear of the vague nemesis he called "chickens coming home to roost" was too obscure. Listening in a daze to the rest of his instructions, he seized them chiefly because they would ease the line he was to take with Bob. He was to give him no hint that he, the father, had heard anything of the Follett girl. The South American mission could stand on its own merits as extremely flattering. Whatever reluctance Bob might feel, he would see the opportunity as too important to forego. All Junia begged of her husband was to know nothing of Bob's love affairs. If Bob himself brought the subject up, it would be enough to remain firm on the question of money. Of the rest, Junia was willing to take charge, as she would explain to him when he came home in the afternoon. These instructions Collingham did his best to carry out. At lunch, in the house's private room at the Bowling Green Club, he approached Mr. Huntley on the subject of being responsible for Bob on the errand to Asuncion, and Mr. Huntley expressed himself as delighted. On returning to the bank, Collingham asked Miss Ruddick to bring the young man to the private office. "Hello, Bob! How are things going?" "So, so, dad," Bob admitted, guardedly. "Sit down. I want to talk to you." Bob sat down gingerly, warily, scenting something in the wind, much like Max or Dauphin from a person's atmosphere. Whatever his mother had been told on Saturday, his father might have learned by Wednesday. Bob would have been sure of this were it not that his mother often had curious reserves. For Collingham there was nothing to do but to plunge on the subject of South America, and he plunged. But, in his dread of the roosting chicken, he plunged nervously, with a tendency to redden, to stammer, and otherwise to betray himself. Before he had finished Bob was saying inwardly: "Mother's put him wise to Jennie and I'm to be packed off. Well, we'll see." "It's thumping good of you and Mr. Huntley, dad," he said, aloud; "and I suppose it would do if I gave you my answer in a day or two." "That's the girl," the father thought; but he obeyed Junia's injunction as to not being explicit when it came to words. "You see, it's this way, Bob: It's not exactly an invitation that I'm giving you; it's—it's a decision of the bank of which you're an employee. We take it for granted that you'll go if we want to send you." "And I take it for granted that you won't send me if I don't want to go." Not to force the issue, Collingham left the matter there, preferring to consult Junia as to what he should do next. To this end, he drove home earlier than usual. It added to Dauphin's irritation that Max should hear the motor first. With ears cocked like a donkey's, how could he help it? There was nothing in the world that Dauphin despised as he despised the police dog's ears. They were forever pointed, alert, inquisitive, ignoble. But there it was! Max was bounding down the driveway, covering yards at a spring, before the setter could drag himself from his haunches. It was Max, too, who, when the motor passed the oak, gave the first yelp of delight. But it was Dauphin who, as his master descended from the car, entered into his depression. It was he, too, who perceived the conflict of auras when wife and husband met. Waves of unreasoned dread on the one side encountered a force of clear-eyed determination on the other as the weltering sea comes up against the steadfast rocks. They began talking as they turned to enter the house, continuing the conversation within the great hall, where only the strip of red carpet running its length and up the fine stairway, two or three bits of old carved English oak, and the brass touches on the wrought-iron baluster, relieved the admirable nudity. "Now come in here," she said, briskly, having heard all that had passed between him and Bob. He followed her into the library, where she led the way to the desk. "Read that." He ran his eye over the lines written in her legible, decorative hand. <blockquote><div> <div class="line-block outermost"> <div class="line">Collingham Lodge,</div> <div class="inner line-block"> <div class="line">Marillo Park.</div> </div></div> <div class="line-block outermost"> <div class="line">Dear Miss Follett:</div> </div> My husband and I would be greatly obliged if you could give us a half hour of your time to talk over matters which may prove as important to you as to us. If you could make it convenient to come here to-morrow, Thursday, afternoon, you would find a very good train at three-twenty-five, and one by which to return at five-forty-seven. I inclose a time-table, and you would be met at Marillo Station. <div class="line-block outermost"> <div class="line">Yours sincerely,</div> <div class="inner line-block"> <div class="line">Junia Collingham.</div> </div></div> </div></blockquote> He looked at her wonderingly. "What's the big idea?" "A very big idea. Don't you see? We can cut the ground right from under his feet without his ever thinking we had anything to do with it. You personally needn't be supposed to know that this nonsense has ever been in the air. It's too late for me, of course, because he and I have already talked of it. But for you—" He tapped the paper in his hand. "But this move I don't understand." "Well, sit down and I'll tell you." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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