The Gay Cockade
everything except the joy she felt at having his smooth gray head so
close to her own.
When he had her safely beside him in his big car he asked, "What made
you run away from me in Chicago?"
"My daughter came home from Europe."
"I can't quite think of you with a grown daughter."
"Cecily's a darling." Mrs. Beale's voice held no enthusiasm.
Landry, noting her tone, looked faintly surprised. "You and she must
have great good times together."
"Oh, yes--"
Mrs. Beale wished that he wouldn't talk about Cecily. Cecily had married
before good times were possible. They had never played together--she and
the little daughter for whom she had toiled and sacrificed.
Landry's voice broke in upon her meditations: "I should like to meet
Cecily."
Mrs. Beale switched him away from the topic expeditiously. He should not
see her as yet in the bosom of her family. _He should not_. He should
not see Cecily with her air of mature motherliness. He should not see
Victor, Cecily's husband, who was ten years older than Cecily and only
ten years younger than herself. He should not hear her big son Bob call
her "Grandma." He should not gaze upon the pretty deference of Bob's
little wife toward the queen-dowager!
Dining later opposite Landry in a great golden palace, Cissy seemed like
some gay tropical bird. In her new and lovely clothes she was very
pretty, very witty, almost girlishly charming. Yet Landry was conscious
of a vague feeling of disappointment. She had been more serenely
satisfying in Chicago--not so brilliantly hard, not so persistently
vivacious. How could he know that the change was one of desperation?
Cissy, as grandmother, felt that she must prove, even to herself, that
she was not yet a back number.
With this rift in the lute of their budding romance, they ate and drank
and went to the play and had what might otherwise have been an
enchanted ride home in the moonlight. But when Landry said "Good-night"
Cissy felt the loss of something in his manner. His greeting that
afternoon had had in it something almost of tenderness; his farewell was
commonplace and slightly constrained.
As Mrs. Beale went through the dimly lighted hall to her room, she met
Cecily in a flowing garment, pacing back and forth with the baby in her
arms.
"She isn't well," Cecily whispered, as the little lady in the lace frock
questioned her. "I don't know whether I ought to call a doctor or not."
Mrs. Beale poked the tiny mite with an expert finger. "I'll give her a
drink of hot water with a drop of peppermint in it," she said, "as soon
as I get my hat off, and you'd better go back to bed, Cecily; you aren't
well enough to worry with her."
Cecily looked relieved. "I was worried," she confessed. "It's nurse's
night out and Victor had to go to a board meeting unexpectedly--and with
you away--I lost my nerve. It seemed dreadful to be alone, mother."
Mrs. Beale knew how dreadful it was. She had carried the wailing Cecily
in her arms night after night in the weeks which followed the crushing
knowledge of her husband's infidelity. But she had carried a heavier
burden than the child--the burden of poverty, of desertion, of an
unknown future.
But these things were not to be voiced. "You go to bed, Cecily," she
said. "I'll look after her."
Walking the floor later with the baby in her arms, Mrs. Beale's mind was
on Landry. "Heavens! if he could see me now!" was her shocked thought,
as she stopped in front of a mirror to survey the picture she made.
Her hair was down and the grayest lock of all showed plainly. She had
discarded frills and furbelows and wore a warm gray wrapper. She looked
nice and middle-aged, yet carried, withal, a subtle air of
girlishness--would carry it, in spite of storm or stress, until the end,
as the sign and seal of her undaunted spirit.
The baby stirred in her arms, and again Mrs. Beale went back and forth,
crooning the lullaby with which she had once put her own babies to bed.
In the morning the baby was much better, but Mrs. Beale was haggard. She
stayed in bed until eleven o'clock, however. Cecily, coming in at
twelve, found her ready to go out. In response to an inquiry, Mrs. Beale
spoke of a luncheon engagement with Valentine Landry.
"Mother--are you going to marry him?"
Cissy, studying the adjustment of her veil, confessed, "He hasn't asked
me."
"But he will--"
Mrs. Beale shrugged her shoulders. "Who knows?"
In the weeks which followed, the little lady was conscious that things
were not drawing to a comfortable climax. By all the rules of the game,
Landry should long ago have declared himself. But he seemed to be
slipping more and more into the fatal role of good friend and comrade.
Cissy's pride would not let her admit, even to herself, that she had
failed to attract at the final moment. But there was something deeper
than her pride involved, and she found her days restless and her nights
sleepless. One night in the dense darkness she faced the truth
relentlessly. "You're in love, Cissy Beale," she told herself,
scornfully. "You're in love for the first time in your life--and you
a--grandmother!"
Then she turned over on her pillow, hid her face in its white warmth,
and cried as if her heart would break.
In the meantime the baby drooped. Cecily, worried, consulted her mother
continually. Thus it came about that Mrs. Beale lived a double life.
From noon until midnight she was of to-day--smartly gowned, girlish;
from midnight until dawn she was of yesterday--waking from her fitful
slumbers at the first wailing note, presiding in gray gown and slippers
over strange brews of catnip and of elderflower.
Cecily's doctor, being up-to-date, remonstrated at this return to the
primitive, but was forced to admit, after the baby had come triumphantly
through a half-dozen critical attacks, that Cissy's back-to-grandma
methods were effective.
It was on a morning following one of these struggles that Cissy said to
her daughter, wearily, "I can't escape it--"
"Escape what?" demanded Cecily, who, in the pale-gray bedroom was
endeavoring to observe the doctor's injunction to let the wailing baby
stay in her bassinet, instead of walking the floor with her.
"The black-silk-and-mitt destiny," said the depressed lady.
"What has happened?" Cecily demanded.
"Nothing has happened," responded her weary little mother, and refused
to discuss the matter further.
But to herself she was beginning to admit that she had lost Landry. An
hour later she had a telephone message from him.
"I want you to go with me for a last ride together," he said. "I leave
to-morrow."
"To-morrow!" Her voice showed her dismay.
"But why this sudden decision--"
"I have played long enough," he said; "business calls--"
As Mrs. Beale made ready for the ride she surveyed herself wistfully in
her mirror. There were shadows under her eyes, and faint little lines
toward the corners of her lips--it even seemed to her that her chin
sagged. She had a sudden sense of revolt. "If I were young, _really_
young," she thought, "he would not be going away--"
With this idea firmly fixed in her mind, she exerted herself to please
him; and her little laugh made artificial music in his ears, her fixed
smile wore upon his nerves, her staccato questions irritated him.
Again they had dinner together, and as she sat opposite him, gorgeous
and gay in her gown of geranium red, he began to talk with her of her
daughter.
"I've never met her. It has seemed to me that you might have let me see
her--"
Cissy flushed. "She's such a great grown-up," she said. "Somehow when
I'm with her I feel--old--"
"You will never seem old," he said, with the nearest approach to
tenderness that had softened his voice for days. "You have in you the
spirit of eternal youth--"
Then he floundered on. "But a mother and a daughter--when you used to
speak of her in Chicago, it seemed to me that I could see you together,
and I liked the sweetness and womanliness of the thought; but I have
never seen you together."
With a sense of recklessness upon her, Cissy suddenly determined to tell
him the truth. "Cecily hasn't been going out much. You see, there's the
baby--"
He stared. "The baby--?"
"Her baby--Cecily's--"
"_Then you're a grandmother_?"
It seemed to Cissy that the whole restaurant rang with the emphasis of
the words. Yet he had not spoken loudly; not a head was turned in their
direction; even the waiter stood unmoved.
When she came to herself Landry was laughing softly. "When are you going
to let me see--the baby--?"
"Never--"
"Why not?"
Cissy went on to her doom. "Because you'll want to put me on the shelf
like all the rest of them. You'll want to see me with--my
hair--parted--and spectacles. And my eyes are perfectly good--and my
hair is my own--"
She stopped. Landry was surveying her with hard eyes.
"Don't you love--the baby--?"
Cissy shrugged. "Perhaps. I don't know yet. Some day I may when I
haven't anything to do but sit in a chimney-corner."
Thus spoke Cissy Beale, making of herself a heartless creature, flinging
back into the face of Valentine Landry his most cherished ideals.
But what did it matter? She had known from the moment of her confession
that he would be repelled. What man could stand up in the face of the
world and marry a grandmother!--the idea was preposterous.
She finished dinner with her head in the air; she was hypocritically
lively during the drive home; she said "Good-night" and "Good-bye"
without feeling, and went up-stairs with her heart like lead to find the
nurse weeping wildly on the first landing.
The baby, it appeared, was very ill. And the baby's father and mother,
having left the little cherub sleeping peacefully, were motoring
somewhere in the wide spaces of the world. The family doctor was out.
She had called up another doctor, and he would come as soon as he could.
But in the meantime the baby was dying--
"Nonsense, Kate," said Cissy Beale, and pulling off her gloves as she
ran, she made for the pale-gray room.
Now, as it happened, Valentine Landry, driving away in a priggish state
of mind, was suddenly overwhelmed by miserable remorse. Reviewing the
evening, he seemed to see, for the first time, the unhappiness in the
eyes of the little woman who had borne herself so bravely. In a sudden
moment of illumination he realized all that she must have been feeling.
Perhaps it had not been heartlessness; perhaps it had been--heart
hunger.
Leaning forward, he spoke to his chauffeur. They stopped at the first
drug-store, and Landry called up Cissy. Her voice from the other end
answered, sharply, then broke as he gave his name.
"I thought it was the doctor," she said. "Can you come back, please? The
baby, oh, the baby is very ill!"
Five minutes later the nurse let him into the house. He followed her up
the stairs and into the nursery. Cissy sat with the baby in her arms.
The baby was in a blanket and Cissy was in her gray wrapper. She had
donned it while the nurse held the baby in the hot bath which saved its
life. Cissy's hair was out of curl and the color was out of her cheeks.
But to Valentine Landry she was beautiful.
"It was a convulsion," she told him, simply. "I am afraid she will have
another. We haven't been able to get a doctor--will you get one for us?"
Out he went on his mission for the lady of his heart, and the lady of
his heart, sitting wet and worried in the pale-gray bedroom, was saying
to herself, monotonously, "It's all over now--no man could see me like
this and love me--"
Cecily and her husband and the doctor and Landry came in out of the
darkness together. They went up-stairs together, then stopped on the
threshold as Cissy held up a warning hand.