“You didn’t guess it, then?” he exclaimed, starting up and moving away from her.
“No; I didn’t guess it,” she confessed in a dead-level voice.
He stood above her, half challenging, half defensive1. “And you haven’t a word to say to me? Mother!” he adjured2 her.
She rose too, putting her arms about him with a kiss. “Dick! Dear Dick!” she murmured.
“She imagines you don’t like her; she says she’s always felt it. And yet she owns you’ve been delightful4, that you’ve tried to make friends with her. And I thought you knew how much it would mean to me, just now, to have this uncertainty5 over, and that you’d actually been trying to help me, to put in a good word for me. I thought it was you who had made her decide.”
“I?”
“By your talk with her the other day. She told me of your talk with her.”
His mother’s hands slipped from his shoulders and she sank back into her seat. She felt the cruelty of her silence, but only an inarticulate murmur3 found a way to her lips. Before speaking she must clear a space in the suffocating6 rush of her sensations. For the moment she could only repeat inwardly that Clemence Verney had yielded before the final test, and that she herself was somehow responsible for this fresh entanglement7 of fate. For she saw in a flash how the coils of circumstance had tightened8; and as her mind cleared it was filled with the perception that this, precisely9, was what the girl intended, that this was why she had conferred the crown before the victory. By pledging herself to Dick she had secured his pledge in return: had put him on his honour in a cynical10 inversion11 of the term. Kate saw the succession of events spread out before her like a map, and the astuteness12 of the girl’s policy frightened her. Miss Verney had conducted the campaign like a strategist. She had frankly13 owned that her interest in Dick’s future depended on his capacity for success, and in order to key him up to his first achievement she had given him a foretaste of its results.
So much was almost immediately clear to Mrs. Peyton; but in a moment her inferences had carried her a point farther. For it was now plain to her that Miss Verney had not risked so much without first trying to gain her point at less cost: that if she had had to give herself as a prize, it was because no other bribe14 had been sufficient. This then, as the mother saw with a throb15 of hope, meant that Dick, who since Darrow’s death had held to his purpose unwaveringly, had been deflected16 from it by the first hint of Clemence Verney’s connivance17. Kate had not miscalculated: things had happened as she had foreseen. In the light of the girl’s approval his act had taken an odious18 look. He had recoiled19 from it, and it was to revive his flagging courage that she had had to promise herself, to take him in the meshes20 of her surrender.
Kate, looking up, saw above her the young perplexity of her boy’s face, the suspended happiness waiting to brim over. With a fresh touch of misery21 she said to herself that this was his hour, his one irrecoverable moment, and that she was darkening it by her silence. Her memory went back to the same hour in her own life: she could feel its heat in her pulses still. What right had she to stand in Dick’s light? Who was she to decide between his code and hers? She put out her hand and drew him down to her.
“She’ll be the making of me, you know, mother,” he said, as they leaned together. “She’ll put new life in me — she’ll help me get my second wind. Her talk is like a fresh breeze blowing away the fog in my head. I never knew any one who saw so straight to the heart of things, who had such a grip on values. She goes straight up to life and catches hold of it, and you simply can’t make her let go.”
He got up and walked the length of the room; then he came back and stood smiling above his mother.
“You know you and I are rather complicated people,” he said. “We’re always walking around things to get new views of them — we’re always rearranging the furniture. And somehow she simplifies life so tremendously.” He dropped down beside her with a deprecating laugh. “Not that I mean, dear, that it hasn’t been good for me to argue things out with myself, as you’ve taught me to — only the man who stops to talk is apt to get shoved aside nowadays, and I don’t believe Milton’s archangels would have had much success in active business.”
He had begun in a strain of easy confidence, but as he went on she detected an effort to hold the note, she felt that his words were being poured out in a vain attempt to fill the silence which was deepening between them. She longed, in her turn, to pour something into that menacing void, to bridge it with a reconciling word or look; but her soul hung back, and she had to take refuge in a vague murmur of tenderness.
“My boy! My boy!” she repeated; and he sat beside her without speaking, their hand-clasp alone spanning the distance which had widened between their thoughts.
The engagement, as Kate subsequently learned, was not to be made known till later. Miss Verney had even stipulated22 that for the present there should be no recognition of it in her own family or in Dick’s. She did not wish to interfere23 with his final work for the competition, and had made him promise, as he laughingly owned, that he would not see her again till the drawings were sent in. His mother noticed that he made no other allusion24 to his work; but when he bade her good-night he added that he might not see her the next morning, as he had to go to the office early. She took this as a hint that he wished to be left alone, and kept her room the next day till the closing door told her that he was out of the house.
She herself had waked early, and it seemed to her that the day was already old when she came downstairs. Never had the house appeared so empty. Even in Dick’s longest absences something of his presence had always hung about the rooms: a fine dust of memories and associations, which wanted only the evocation25 of her thought to float into a palpable semblance26 of him. But now he seemed to have taken himself quite away, to have broken every fibre by which their lives had hung together. Where the sense of him had been there was only a deeper emptiness: she felt as if a strange man had gone out of her house.
She wandered from room to room, aimlessly, trying to adjust herself to their solitude27. She had known such loneliness before, in the years when most women’s hearts are fullest; but that was long ago, and the solitude had after all been less complete, because of the sense that it might still be filled. Her son had come: her life had brimmed over; but now the tide ebbed28 again, and she was left gazing over a bare stretch of wasted years. Wasted! There was the mortal pang29, the stroke from which there was no healing. Her faith and hope had been marsh-lights luring30 her to the wilderness31, her love a vain edifice32 reared on shifting ground.
In her round of the rooms she came at last to Dick’s study upstairs. It was full of his boyhood: she could trace the history of his past in its quaint33 relics34 and survivals, in the school-books lingering on his crowded shelves, the school-photographs and college-trophies hung among his later treasures. All his successes and failures, his exaltations and inconsistencies, were recorded in the warm huddled35 heterogeneous36 room. Everywhere she saw the touch of her own hand, the vestiges37 of her own steps. It was she alone who held the clue to the labyrinth38, who could thread a way through the confusions and contradictions of his past; and her soul rejected the thought that his future could ever escape from her. She dropped down into his shabby college armchair and hid her face in the papers on his desk.
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1
defensive
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| adj.防御的；防卫的；防守的 | |
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adjured
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| v.（以起誓或诅咒等形式）命令要求( adjure的过去式和过去分词 )；祈求；恳求 | |
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3
murmur
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| n.低语，低声的怨言；v.低语，低声而言 | |
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4
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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5
uncertainty
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| n.易变，靠不住，不确知，不确定的事物 | |
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suffocating
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| a.使人窒息的 | |
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entanglement
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| n.纠缠，牵累 | |
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8
tightened
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| 收紧( tighten的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）变紧； （使）绷紧； 加紧 | |
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9
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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10
cynical
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| adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的，不信世道向善的 | |
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inversion
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| n.反向，倒转，倒置 | |
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12
astuteness
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| n.敏锐；精明；机敏 | |
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13
frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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14
bribe
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| n.贿赂；v.向…行贿，买通 | |
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15
throb
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| v.震颤，颤动；(急速强烈地)跳动，搏动 | |
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16
deflected
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| 偏离的 | |
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17
connivance
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| n.纵容；默许 | |
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18
odious
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| adj.可憎的，讨厌的 | |
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19
recoiled
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| v.畏缩( recoil的过去式和过去分词 )；退缩；报应；返回 | |
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20
meshes
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| 网孔( mesh的名词复数 )； 网状物； 陷阱； 困境 | |
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21
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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22
stipulated
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| vt.& vi.规定；约定adj.[法]合同规定的 | |
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interfere
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| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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24
allusion
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| n.暗示，间接提示 | |
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evocation
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| n. 引起，唤起 n. <古> 召唤，招魂 | |
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26
semblance
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| n.外貌，外表 | |
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solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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28
ebbed
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| （指潮水）退( ebb的过去式和过去分词 )； 落； 减少； 衰落 | |
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29
pang
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| n.剧痛，悲痛，苦闷 | |
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30
luring
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| 吸引，引诱（lure的现在分词形式） | |
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31
wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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32
edifice
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| n.宏伟的建筑物(如宫殿，教室) | |
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33
quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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34
relics
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| [pl.］n.遗物，遗迹，遗产；遗体，尸骸 | |
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35
huddled
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| 挤在一起（huddle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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36
heterogeneous
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| adj.庞杂的；异类的 | |
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37
vestiges
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| 残余部分( vestige的名词复数 )； 遗迹； 痕迹； 毫不 | |
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38
labyrinth
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| n.迷宫；难解的事物；迷路 | |
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