BASIL Gregory’s wedding day was warm and clear. June and England were at their best.
It was a sweetly pretty wedding. Every one said so.
And the girlish bride was prettier than her wedding—prettier than any mere picture could be; as pretty and as sweet as the June roses she wore, and very like them: pink and white, delicate, fair-haired, violet-eyed Alice Lee, the motherless daughter of the incumbent of the old gray vicarage in which Basil Gregory’s mother had been born.
Homesick for the old days and the old ways, Florence Gregory had gone to Oxfordshire soon after their return to England, hoping to bathe and to heal her stained and torn spirit in the quiet of old places, the ointment of pure memories. She had failed. But she had made fast friends with her dead father’s successor, and had gone back to the cordial hospice of her old home again and again in the three years that had elapsed since she had come from China. A year ago Basil had accompanied her, none too willingly, for a week-end, had stayed a month; hence these wedding bells!
Florence Gregory was an old woman now, old and limp. Robert Gregory was no longer proud of his wife. Her white hair was very beautiful, but he resented it, and it rasped and angered him that she had prematurely aged. He had married her, as he had loved her, for her308 buoyant good looks, and he felt that he was defrauded by the change in her—a change so marked that even his careless and ledger-bound eyes could not fail to see it. And secretly his poor mundane spirit groaned aloud that his missus—the best-dressed woman in Hong Kong three years ago, and every bit as smart as her clothes—had degenerated into a frumpish nobody, looked older than he did, by the Lord Harry, and without an ounce of snap in her or a word to say to any one. Greatly to his credit, he had kept all this to himself loyally. He had never spoken of it, not even hinted at it, to any one, beyond plaintive and repeated entreaties to Hilda to help him find some way to buck Mother up. He had never been unkind to his wife. He still bought flowers for her—the bouquet she carried at their son’s wedding had cost five guineas—and burdened her with gifts of jewelry almost inappropriate to his means. And Mr. Gregory was growing very rich indeed. The wounds that “Mr. Wu” had dealt his fortune had soon healed, and left no scar. He was still a faithful husband. Such pride and consolation as a woman may take from the continence that is chiefly the outcome of a husband’s indifference to her sex and of his absorption in business and in self were Mrs. Gregory’s. And in all their married life they had had but one quarrel—a unique quarrel, as husbands and wives go. It had occurred two years ago, and had been over a dressmaker’s bill.
Such quarrels are common? They are scarcely uncommon—certainly not unique. But this was one with a difference. Mr. Gregory had always seen and paid his wife’s dressmakers’ bills. It had been one of his greatest pleasures. Madame Eloise had taken less pleasure in concocting those princely accounts, and in receipting them, than Robert Gregory had taken in writing309 the cheques that had discharged them. Two years ago a quarterly account had come in in two figures. That was too much. Gregory raged at his wife, and after an impatient word or two, she had bit her lip, smiled and promised reform. And she had kept her word; for she had seen his point of view and the justice of his complaint. But the latest fashions no longer suited her. Still less did she now suit them. Wu Li Chang and Basil Gregory had sapped her of the courage and the carriage to wear smart gowns. Her beauté de diable was quite gone—she had left it in a Chinese K’o-tang; and the finer beauty that had replaced it this husband had no eyes to see.
But Hilda saw, and between the mother and daughter had grown a tenderness and a friendship that had not been theirs before. “Your mouth is the most beautiful thing I ever saw, Mother,” the girl said sometimes. And it was very beautiful, with an exquisite loveliness that only the lips that have been steeped in hyssop can ever show.
Hilda was the only bridesmaid to-day. She had none of the bride’s soft prettiness, and only a fair amount of the splendid good looks that her own mother had lost. But she had gained in charm, in tact, in womanliness, and, too, even in girlishness.
Her engagement to Tom Carruthers was broken. The breaking had grieved her—at the time. The day Carruthers had sailed for England to claim Hilda and to take her back to China, a Chinese girl had thrown herself into Hong Kong harbor. Oddly, the story had reached England—oddly, because such stories are so common. But this one had in some way trickled across the world, and to Hilda. Hilda had probed it, and had given Tom back his ring. It had not been a very black310 case, as such things go. The Chinese girl was nobody’s daughter. Carruthers had never deceived her, and had promised her nothing that he had not given. But she had grown to care for him. O curse of womanhood!
And Hilda had a sturdy, wholesome instinct of virtue, a matter-of-course as towards herself, relentless towards others, that she had inherited from her mother, but not from her mother alone; and she also had a quick, curt, businesslike method of dealing with the facts and incidents of life that she had inherited solely from Robert Gregory. She considered her engagement to Tom Carruthers a bad debt; and she wrote it off with a steady hand. Basil was angry with her, and had upbraided her. “Girls don’t understand such things!” he told her petulantly. “But I thought you had more sense.”
“I understand myself,” she had retorted haughtily.
Needless to say, Carruthers also was angry, and shared his anger with generous, masculine impartiality between Hilda Gregory and I Matt So. Mrs. Gregory was glad. And it was she who mentioned the news (but not its circumstance) in her next letter to Hong Kong. Hilda’s father was indifferent. There was time enough for so rich a man’s daughter, and the finest girl in England, by the Lord Harry, any day; and as for Tom, she might do worse, of course, but, on the other hand, she might do a long sight better.
It was not Basil’s old misdemeanor that had so broken his mother, nor was it her experience in the K’o-tang of Wu Li Chang. It was the estrangement that had grown between her and her son—an estrangement that had become almost a bitterness. At times it was a bitterness.
A great secret shared between two, and inviolably kept by both, must be either a great bond or a great311 alienation. The terrific secret shared by Florence Gregory and her boy proved both. They never spoke of it. But, for that, it burdened and haunted them the more.
So far as she blamed him for his old fault his mother had quite forgiven Basil.
But he could not forgive her.
It cut her to the quick. But she could not blame Basil for it. And she sorrowed for him, more than she did for herself, that she was powerless to give him conviction of the good truth that her forgiveness was “perfect and entire, wanting nothing,” her love unchanged.
And sometimes when the soul-poison scummed thickest in him, because of it, Basil Gregory loved his mother a little less. The high place to which sons in their souls set mothers carries a great price.
But this was not the worst between them. At times—and these were his blackest—Basil Gregory wondered if, at the absolute last, his mother would have failed him, would have refused to spare, at her supremest cost, the life she had given him. Would she at the last hideous resort have grudged him her all? Sometimes he thought that she would. And when he thought so he blamed her. And for that blame, his mother, who read his very soul, a little despised him, and she could not forgive it.
Wu Li Chang had wreaked a vengeance more terrible than he had planned. For when in a mother’s soul there is something that she cannot forgive the son she has borne and nursed and still loves, human tragedy has reached its depth.
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