“You think he wouldn’t?” said Cicily anxiously.
Jane did not stoop to reply. She walked in silence to the door. She could hear Cicily scrambling to her feet behind her.
“It would fix up everything,” said Cicily, “if he would. I know lots of girls would just take that alimony and think nothing of it, but I couldn’t do it. And Albert feels just that way. We wouldn’t want Belle to give up anything. I couldn’t bear it if she had to go back with the children and live with Aunt Isabel—” Strolling down the hall, she slipped her hand confidingly through Jane’s elbow.
“Cicily,” said Jane with dignity, “I’m not going to discuss it. If you don’t see that this talk is shocking—”
“All right, Mumsy,” said Cicily cheerfully. “I told you you hadn’t better. But you would and you did and I’ve been perfectly frank with you.” Jane opened the front door. “See here, darling, you can’t walk home in this weather. I’ll order the car.”
“I don’t want the car,” said Jane pettishly. “I prefer to walk.” Her pettishness was that of an irritated old lady. It reminded her of her own mother. The storm had turned into a blizzard. Small, icy flakes were driving horizontally across the darkness in the shaft of light that shone from the front door. She could not walk, of course. Cicily had already rung for Ella. She gave her order tranquilly. Then turned to smile mischievously at Jane’s sombre face.
“It’s a compliment, Mumsy,” she said, “when your children are perfectly frank with you. But you won’t face facts. Your generation believes in fairies!” The hall was growing cold. Cicily closed the door. “I’m going to talk to Dad, myself, I think,” she said slowly.
Jane did not reply. She still had the sense of nightmare. This—this would devastate Stephen. She would have to tell him. Tell Stephen—who adored Cicily. Mother and daughter stood in silence until the headlights of the motor, wheeling in the darkness, were visible through the glass panel of the door.
“Good night,” said Cicily. Jane, still, did not reply. “Mumsy, don’t be an ass!” cried Cicily brightly. She kissed Jane very warmly. Jane clung to her for a moment in silence. “Button up your coat, dear! Don’t slip on the steps!”
Jane did not look back. She did not dare to, on the icy path. The wind was very strong. But Cicily’s voice floated out to her in the darkness.
“Don’t worry, Mumsy!”
The friendly chauffeur met her halfway to the car. He took her arm to steady her. Jane was suddenly reminded again of her mother. She was an old lady. Or about to become one. Useless to try to understand the younger generation. But she would have to tell Stephen. She would have to tell Stephen that night.
VI
Jane did not tell Stephen that night, however. When she rang her front doorbell, Stephen, himself, opened the door. His face looked strangely shocked and very, very serious.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said simply.
“Stephen!” cried Jane. “Stephen, what’s happened?”
“I’ve had a wire from Alden,” he answered. “Father died of heart failure at his desk in the bank, at half-past three this afternoon.”
V
I
Jane sat, relaxed and weary, in the arms of a wing chair in the front parlour of the Carvers’ house on Beacon Street, thinking soberly of the perfect end of her father-in-law’s life. Sudden death, at eighty-eight, in his office chair. No pain, no partings, no illness nor foreboding. It was hard on the family, however. It had been a great shock to Stephen. It had been a shock to the children, curiously enough, for they had never seemed to care much for their grandfather. In latter years he had been a very irascible old gentleman.
Across the room, uncomfortably erect, Cicily and Jenny were perched on the slippery black horsehair upholstery of a mahogany sofa. Their bright young blondness was accentuated by their sombre mourning. They looked subdued and preternaturally grave, however. Stephen, who seemed, Jane thought, unspeakably tired, was sitting in a stiff-backed Sheraton chair in the middle of the room, absently staring over his daughters’ heads at a large steel engraving, The Return of the Mayflower, that hung over the mahogany sofa. Young Steve was standing by the white marble mantelpiece. His eyes were wandering, with a faint twinkle of amusement, from the glass dome of wax flowers on top of it to the great jar of dried grasses, combined with peacock feathers, that adorned the hearth at his feet. Mrs. Carver never had a fire in the front parlour. Jane knew he was longing for a cigarette and hoped he would refrain from lighting one. Old Mr. Carver had ne’er held with cigarettes—“coffin nails,” he had called them—and Mrs. Carver only allowed Alden to smoke his in the big brown library that overlooked the river.
Alden himself was pacing up and down the room, skirting the old mahogany rockers and marble-topped tables and plush-covered footstools with care. The furniture in the Carvers’ front parlour was oddly assorted. The Colonial period rubbed elbows with the Victorian age. There were several good eighteenth-century pieces that had been in the family for generations and, mingled with them, were the rosewood parlour suite that Mrs. Carver had bought in the first year of her marriage, and a triple-tiered black walnut whatnot that had been left to Mr. Carver in the will of a favourite sister, and an old cerise plush armchair, with a fringe of braided tassels, where Mr. Carver always used to sit, and a large glass cabinet of Chinese Chippendale design, in which were displayed a collection of curios assembled by long-dead Carvers in the course of their voyages on the whale-ships and merchantmen that had carried them over the seven seas—ivory pie-cutters and paper-knives and bodkins, a set of Chinese beads which included a jade necklace that Cicily had always
