This was what Clara had thought, but never said, of her own son.
"I have great hopes of her, but she is very young. One cannot tell yet how she will develop. But she shows signs of——"
"Hush!" Clara interrupted him on the verge of his precious revelation. They heard footsteps. Was it the dark night and the rough road that caused their loud unevenness?
"I think you'd better go to bed now," she said quietly. "Good-night."
"Good-night," he said, and went up the unlighted stairs. As he reached the landing a bedroom door was opened, and Alexander showed himself in his nightshirt.
"Is he back?" he asked.
"He has just come. I think," he whispered—"I think your mother wished us to be quiet."
"Hush!" said Alexander, "he'll hear nothing," and he banged his door.
Downstairs a key was turned in a lock, and the ashes were raked together in the grate. A few indistinguishable words floated up, and after a long pause there came the violent creaking of the stairs. It was a long time before Edward Webb could sleep.
CHAPTER III
Clara outwatched him. She lay in the extraordinary stillness to which she had trained herself, with patiently closed eyes and an untroubled brow, but there was the pain of controlled weeping in her throat. She had taught herself to keep her mind clear of regrets, of anger and scorn, that there might always be room for the flooding brightness of her love, but she had not yet learnt to keep back that hard, constricting hurt that stretched across her throat from ear to ear, and made a raw place in her breast.
At her side Rutherford turned, tossed, and ejaculated between his snatches of sleep.
"Oh, damn the drink! Clara."
"Yes?"
"Did I wake you?"
"No." She smiled at the ceiling.
"I can't sleep."
"You've been to sleep, Jim."
"I tell you I haven't. Clara, are you angry with me? Look here, I hadn't been there for a month, you know I hadn't."
"Yes, I know."
"And I've told you how it comes on me."
"Go to sleep, Jim."
"I can't. Thoughts come crowding like black imps. If you'll forgive me——"
"Oh yes, I'll forgive; how many times does the Bible say? Let me put my arm round you. There." In the dark room the pillars at the foot of the uncurtained four-poster bed seemed to watch and listen.
"Did that chap know where I'd gone?"
"I didn't tell him, but he may have guessed. Very likely, I should think."
"Couldn't you have——"
"No, I couldn't, Jim. If you're going to be proud you must have reason for it. You can tell your own lies, or act a truth you're not ashamed of."
He flung himself out of reach of her arm. "Oh, why can I not have peace? Preaching at me when my nerves are in this state!"
"Did you go to Janet's?"
"No, I didn't. Clara!" She made no answer. "Clara!"
"Well?"
"I'm wretched. I'm afraid of falling out of bed. Why should I feel like this? It makes other people sleepy."
She laughed aloud. "Oh, Jim, Jim, Jim!"
"For God's sake, don't make that noise. It's not canny in the night. What are you laughing at?"
"At you, my dear. Oh me!"
"Will you put your arm round me again? What a devil I've been to you. Don't desert me. I'll start again if you'll help me."
She drew him to her. "There, then. You're just a child, a little child."
As she lay with her lips against his hair, steadying her breath that he might not be disturbed, she felt that he was more her son than Alexander was. Only for a few years had Alexander looked to her for all his needs; he had soon grown strong and self-reliant, and changed from baby to friend almost before she was aware, but this poor Jim, with his head on her breast, might never have known another resting-place, and it was his confidence in her, the demand for the comfort she could give, that satisfied the mother in her, and discounted all his weaknesses. It was perhaps as well that the daughter for whom she had wished had not been given to her, for in that house there was not room for two women, let alone two women of Clara's make, and there would have been contests with no Solomon to give decision, while now, denied a daughter, Clara was both rich and supreme. She had been born to cradle men and children, to caress them and buffet them at her wise will, and with the instinct which makes mothers care most for their feebler children, she loved people in proportion to their need of her. There had never been any danger that Alexander would outstrip his father in her affections, and if Rutherford could have understood her quality, he would have realized that he need not be jealous of his son. But it was more than jealousy that influenced his dealings with Alexander, for the boy had been born in a black hour, and to the father's eyes the shadow lay on him so persistently that at last he seemed to have created it. Of the three, only Clara truly understood its genesis, for the circumstances had permanently affected Rutherford's vision, inclining it to obliqueness, and Alexander could remember no life before this one in the old white house.
When Clara had met James Rutherford she was living as companion—that refuge for the penniless woman of her generation—to three ladies who were all at different stages of elderliness and all exacting, but she had not been one of the typical companions of romance; she was not meek and forbearing and tearful, nor of that defiant nature which, in fiction, wins all hearts. She was her sensible and cheerful self; she was sorry for the old ladies, and she enjoyed being kind to them, for she had very strongly that quality of helpfulness which all women are expected to have, and are blamed for not possessing. The old ladies in all their experience had never before had for companion a nice-looking young woman who considered herself their friend, chose their clothes with as much attention as she gave to her own, and had a fund of interesting things to tell them, including the progress of her love affairs.
"Has he made you an offer yet?" one of them said wistfully, with one eye on Clara as a bride, and the other on a lost companion.
"No," Clara answered demurely, hiding the fact that she had not so much as spoken to the dark-faced young man whom she sometimes met in her walks, and whom in a dull hour she had once described with such vivacity and feeling that her hearers were sure she had lost her heart to him; consequently, that the young man must at least have hinted at his devotion, or she could hardly have condescended to love him.
"You mustn't give up hope, my dear. There may be reasons."
"There are," Clara said darkly, and left her old friend in a flutter.
"There are reasons," she told her sisters. "It will all come right in the end."
Clara noticed, with some amusement, that her meetings with the tall young man were growing more and more frequent. When she set out on her morning errands he would often chance to pass the gate, and she came to look for his long figure on her walks, even to think that day unprofitable on which she did not see him. At length he sat opposite to her at church, gazing at her with unhappy eyes throughout the service, and after that she ceased to talk about him, and the old ladies, thinking she suffered, gave her unexpected little presents of sweetmeats or knitted cuffs.
At last and, it may be supposed, out of her ready pity and desire to help, she contrived as he went by to drop a little packet from her muff. It was a very ancient trick to play, she knew, and merriment