A Modern Madonna. Caroline Abbot Stanley
her tongue or else made her say things she did not mean to say, how—greatest indignity of all—he had even looked askance at him, her "pe'cious lamb," and almost turned him upside down! but how he had left them Mammy Cely, and so they would forgive him, if only he would never come again.
And Baby Philip smiled a smile cherubic and murmured "Goo-o! ah-goo-o! for the first time, and Margaret almost smothered him with kisses, and was sure that never did mother have a comforter so sweet, a confidant so safe and yet so sympathetic.
Where does a baby get its balm? In that Gilead whence it came? From the skilful physician who knows all needs and uses tiniest instruments sometimes to reach hidden wounds? Who knows? At any rate into Margaret's sore heart was coming day by day the healing that proceeds only from time and the touch of little hands. More and more, by her own volition, her world was coming to be bounded by the walls of her baby's room. Here at least she was safe from the thrusts of meddlesome gossip and the pin pricks of Gossip's handmaid—Curiosity. Here she could live the simple satisfying life that "maketh rich," and "addeth no sorrow" that she was not willing to bear.
CHAPTER VIII
A NEW RÔLE FOR RICHARD
In all these months Margaret had not once heard from her husband. Rumors had come to her that he had not gone alone, but even this she could not verify, for she had ended the subject peremptorily with the informant who brought the story—but the thorn implanted that day rankled. Her judgment and her knowledge of him told her it was true.
The fiction of her husband's call abroad on urgent business served its purpose as a nominal explanation, but it deceived nobody. Every one knew that Victor De Jarnette had no large business interests in Europe, or anywhere else, and that he was not the man to make any great sacrifice for them if he had had, being a man of pleasure more than of affairs. The knowing raised their brows and smiled. The sympathetic said, "Poor Margaret!"
She asked Richard De Jarnette only once if he had ever heard. No, he said, he had not. He had written and would let her know when the answer came. He did not tell her that his letter had been a bitter arraignment of Victor for his want of manliness in deserting his wife as he had done, and a stern demand that he should, for the sake of the De Jarnette name, if for no better reason, return or give some adequate explanation of his conduct—there could be no excuse. He had not spared him.
Failing to hear from this, he wrote again, this time adding the virile argument that in case of Victor's failure to explain his conduct, he should at once revise his will and name his (Victor's) apparently forgotten child as his heir, instead of himself. He felt that he had an elder brother's prerogative to counsel, and also the right of an outraged De Jarnette to protest against the dishonoring of his name. As child and man, Richard De Jarnette had been slow to wrath, but, once roused, there was a bull-dog tenacity about him that was hard to shake off. Perhaps that last clause was the most powerful argument he used. The younger De Jarnette had a great abundance of money of his own, but Richard had more, and Victor had always expected to inherit it. Moreover, he knew that his brother never made an idle threat. So he wrote.
When this answer to his peremptory letter was read by Richard De Jarnette, it put a somewhat different face upon the matter. He had been forced to this, Victor said, by Margaret's action. It was virtually she that had deserted him. She had laid upon him such restrictions as no man would for a moment submit to. She had been unreasonable, exacting, and jealous to a degree that was intolerable. "If you only knew all, you would retract your harsh words," Victor wrote. "I have always found you just, and certainly now that the greatest trouble of my life has overtaken me, I cannot believe that I will find you lacking in either sympathy or understanding," and thus and thus and thus. Victor was always a ready letter writer.
Richard De Jarnette read this letter very thoroughly. And as he read, a wave of pity swept over him for the misguided boy—he was little more than a boy—always impulsive, passionate, and full-blooded, but to the brother who was his judge to-day always warm-hearted and affectionate. The letter had its effect. The world had judged Victor harshly, Richard thought, he with the rest, he more than all the rest perhaps. It might be, as he said, that had they known—But then the damning fact remained that he had deserted her, his young wife, in her time of need. No! Nothing could palliate that—nothing!
He took up the letter at that, and read further. Margaret had virtually driven him forth, Victor went on, and Richard remembered that the house was hers, built by money her father had left in trust for this very purpose. He had warned Victor that trouble would come from that some day. Women could not be trusted to refrain from taunting their husbands with "mine" and "thine," when the test came, he said, contemptuously. They were all alike. And where was the man that would stand humiliation like that? Certainly his name was not De Jarnette. This doubtless lay at the root of the matter, and was perhaps the reason that Margaret was so reticent about the cause of the trouble.
Perhaps—oh, curse the thing! It wasn't a matter for him to meddle with—of course not. But it needed somebody—and whom else did they have? It ended in his reaching the deliberate and most unwelcome conclusion, after much struggle with himself, that it was his duty to go to his sister-in-law's house and enter upon the delicate and perilous office of peacemaker. Which he did.
Margaret met him distantly. They froze each other.
He had heard from Victor, he told her bluntly, feeling his poverty of phrases suited to womankind.
Her lips straightened. She held out her hand. Could she see the letter?
He reflected a moment. The letter as he thought of it did not seem particularly pacific, viewed from the stand-point of a deserted wife, so he answered no. Then he began awkwardly and without preliminaries to explain. He had come to see if things could not be arranged between them—patched up for a while with the hope that time would bring them right. They were both young, and doubtless both had been somewhat in fault.
She interrupted him here to ask pointedly, "Has your brother told you anything about the point at issue?"
He was forced to answer that he had not.
"Then you are not competent to arbitrate," she said, quietly, and the subject was not easy to re-open after that. He went away baffled in his endeavors, berating himself for a blundering fool, but strengthened in the belief that the blame was not all on one side. The girl was ice.
As he thought it over that night, one thing came back to him again and again. She had said, "This is a thing that must be settled without a go-between, and some day it will be." What did she mean by that? How would it be settled? She had looked uncompromising as she said it. What did she intend to do—get a divorce? Of course she could get it—on the palpable ground of desertion. He could see a difference in her attitude toward Victor as the months went by. At first there had been a reserve, a suspension of judgment, then apathy, and of late growing resentment. He had correctly interpreted her states of mind, though he did not appreciate the cause. As the months went by and Victor did not come, did not write, did not once even ask about his child, her heart hardened against him. This ignoring of Philip seemed worse to her almost than his treatment of herself. How could he stay away from his child? How could he be false to a helpless little thing like this that he had brought into the world? How could he—Then she would snatch little Philip up in a passion of tenderness and cry in her heart, "I will be father and mother both to you, my baby, my poor little forsaken baby!"
As the months went by the chances seemed slighter that this thing would ever be "patched up," as Richard De Jarnette had said. She asked Judge Kirtley one day if a man had any claim upon a child he had deserted. Yes, he told her without comment, unless the mother was divorced from him. She closed her lips suddenly and said no more. She had read in the paper one day about a man's taking his child away from its mother, who had left him. The woman was a Catholic and could not have recourse to divorce to protect herself. Margaret thought a good deal about this incident. She had always been opposed to divorce.
Richard De Jarnette came to her again one day. He had had another letter