Black is White 23

Black is White 23

CHAPTER X

 

A fortnight passed. Yvonne held the destiny of three persons in her

hand. They were like figures on a chess-board, and she moved them with

the sureness, the unerring instinct of any skilled disciple of the

philosopher’s game. They were puppets; she ranged them about her stage

in swift-changing pictures, and applauded her own effectiveness. There

were no rehearsals. The play was going on all the time, whether tragedy,

comedy, or chess.

 

Brood’s uneasiness increased. His moody eyes were seldom lifted to meet

the question that he knew lurked in hers. She had given him a tremendous

shock. There was seldom a moment in which he was not making strange

inquiries of himself.

 

Was it possible that she had spoken the truth about him? Could such

a condition of mind exist without his knowledge? Was this love he

professed to feel for her but the flame springing into life from those

despised embers of long ago? Was it true that his inner self, his

subconscious being, recognised no other claim to his love than the one

held so insecurely by its original possessor? Was it true that his soul

went back to her the instant slumber came to close up the gap of years?

 

This strange, new wife of his had uttered amazing words; she had spoken

without rancour; she had called his dreams to life; she had told him how

he lived while asleep!

 

He arose in the mornings, haggard from lack of reposeful sleep. In a

way, he slept with one ear Open, constantly striving to catch himself

with the dream-name on his lips. He would awake with a start many times

in the night, and always there seemed to be the vague, ghostlike

whisper of a name dying away in the stillness that greeted his return to

wakefulness.

 

Now he confessed to himself that his dreams were of Matilde, as they

had been during all the years. Heretofore they had been mere impressions

upon his intelligence, and seldom remembered. They did not represent

pictures or incidents in which she appeared as a potent factor, but

brief monodies, with her name as the single note, her face a passing,

yet impressive, vision. He had not realised how frequent, how real these

dreams were until now.

 

He sometimes lay perfectly still after these awakenings, wondering if

Yvonne was listening at his closed door, straining his ears for the

sound of a creaking board that would betray her presence as she stole

back to her own bed.

 

What surprised and puzzled him most was her serenity in the face of

these involuntary revelations. She did not appear to be disturbed by the

fact that his dreams, his most secret thoughts, were of another woman.

There was nothing in her manner to indicate that she suffered any of the

pangs of jealousy, humiliation, dismay, or doubt that might reasonably

have been expected under the circumstances. She seemed to put the matter

entirely out of her mind as trivial, unimportant, unvexing. He found

himself wondering what his own state of mind would be if the conditions

were reversed and it was she who cried out in her sleep.

 

Frederic was alert, shifty, secretive. He knew himself to be the link in

the chain that would offer the least resistance of any if it came to the

question of endurance. He realised that the slightest tug at the chain

would cause it to snap, and that the break would never be repaired. His

stepmother for the present fortified the weak spot in the chain; but

would her strength be sufficient to support the strain that was to be

imposed upon both links in the end?

 

He watched her like a hawk, ever on the lookout for the slightest

signs of commendation, reproof, warning, encouragement. She alone stood

between him and what appeared to be the inevitable. The truce was a mask

that hid none of the real features of the situation. When would it be

discarded?

 

After that illuminating hour in her boudoir he saw himself in a far from

noble position. The situation was no longer indefinite. He had taken a

step that could not be recalled. His loyalty to Lydia had been tested,

and the sickening truth came out--he was a traitor! He knew in his soul

that he loved the girl. His conscience told him so. But his conscience

suddenly had become an elastic thing that stretched over a pretty wide

scope of emotions. These he tried to analyse and, failing to do so with

credit to himself, settled back into a state of apathy better described

as sullen self-pity. He even went so far as to blame his father for the

new blight that had been put upon him.

 

Of the three, Lydia alone faced the situation with courage. She was

young, she was good, she was inexperienced, but she saw what was

going on beneath the surface with a clarity of vision that would have

surprised an older and more practised person; and, seeing, was favoured

with the strength to endure pain that otherwise would have been

insupportable.

 

She knew that Frederic was infatuated. She did not try to hide the truth

from herself. The boy she loved was slipping away from her, and only

chance could set his feet back in the old path from which he blindly

strayed. Her woman’s heart told her that it was not love he felt for

Yvonne. The strange mentor that guides her sex out of the ignorance of

youth into an understanding of hitherto unpresented questions revealed

to her the nature of his feeling for this woman.

 

He would come back to her in time she knew, chastened; the same instinct

that revealed his frailties to her also defended his sense of honour.

The unthinkable could never happen!

 

She judged Yvonne, too, in a spirit of fairness that was amazing,

considering the lack of perspective that must have been hers to contend

with. Despite a natural feeling of antagonism, present even before she

saw the new wife of James Brood, and long before her influence affected

Brood’s son, Lydia found herself confronted by a curious faith in

Yvonne’s goodness of heart. It never entered the girl’s mind to question

the honour of this woman--no more than she would have questioned her

own.

 

Vanity, love of admiration, the inherent fear of retrogression, greed

for attention--any one of these might have been responsible for her

conduct covering the past three months. There was certainly a reckless

disregard for consequences on her part so far as others--notably

Frederic--were concerned. She could not be blind to his plight, and

yet it was her pleasure to drag him out beyond his depth where he might

struggle or drown while she, sirenlike, looked on for the moment and

then turned calmly to the more serious business of combing her hair.

 

Her mother saw the suffering in the girl’s eyes, but saw also the proud

spirit that would have resented sympathy from one even so close as she.

Down in the heart of that quiet, reserved mother smouldered a hatred for

Yvonne Brood that would have stopped at nothing had it been in her power

to inflict punishment for the wrong that was being done. She, too, saw

tragedy ahead, but her vision was broader than Lydia’s. It included the

figure of James Brood.

 

Lydia worked steadily, almost doggedly, at the task she had undertaken

to complete for the elder Brood. Every afternoon found her seated at

the desk in the study opposite the stern-faced man who laboured with her

over the seemingly endless story of his life. Something told her that

there were secret chapters which she was not to write. She wrote those

that were to endure; the others were to die with him.

 

He watched her as she wrote, and his eyes were often hard. He saw the

growing haggardness in her gentle, girlish face; the wistful, puzzled

__EXPRESSION__ in her dark eyes. A note of tenderness crept into his voice

and remained there through all the hours they spent together.

The old-time brusqueness disappeared from his speech; the sharp,

authoritative tone was gone. He watched her with pity in his heart, for

he knew it was ordained that one day he, too, was to hurt this loyal,

pure-hearted creature even as the others were wounding her now.

 

He frequently went out of his way to perform quaint little acts of

courtesy and kindness that would have surprised him only a short time

before. He sent theatre and opera tickets to Lydia and her mother. He

placed bouquets of flowers at the girl’s end of the desk, obviously for

her alone. He sent her home--just around the corner--in the automobile

on rainy or blizzardy days.

 

But he never allowed her an instant’s rest when it came to the work in

hand, and therein lay the gentle shrewdness of the man. She was better

off busy. There were times when he studied the face of Lydia’s mother

for signs that might show how her thoughts ran in relation to the

conditions that were confronting all of them. But more often he searched

the features of the boy who called him father.

 

Not one of them knew that there were solemn hours in all the days when

Yvonne sat shivering in her room and stared, dry-eyed and bleak, at the

walls which surrounded her, seeing not them, but something far beyond.

Often she sat before her long cheval-glass, either with lowering eyes

or in a sort of wistful wonder, never removing her steady gaze from the

face reflected there. There were other times when she stood before the

striking photograph of her husband on the dressing-table, studying

the face through narrowed lids, as if she searched for something that

baffled, yet impressed her.

 

Always, always there was music in the house. Behind the closed doors

of his distant study James Brood listened in spite of himself to the

persistent thrumming of the piano downstairs. Always were the airs light

and seductive; the dreamy, plaintive compositions of Strauss, Ziehrer,

and others of their kind and place.

 

Frederic, with uncanny fidelity to the preferences of the mother he had

never seen, but whose influence directed him, affected the same general

class of music that had appealed to her moods and temperament. Times

there were, and often, when he played the very airs that she had loved,

and then, despite his profound antipathy, James Brood’s thoughts leaped

back a quarter of a century and fixed themselves on love-scenes and

love-times that would not be denied.

 

And again there were the wild, riotous airs that she had played with

Feverelli, her soft-eyed music-master! Accursed airs-accursed and

accusing!

 

He gave orders that these airs were not to be played, but failed to make

his command convincing for the reason that he could not bring himself to

the point of explaining why they were distasteful to him. When Frederic

thoughtlessly whistled or hummed fragments of those proscribed airs he

considered himself justified in commanding him to stop on the pretext