_ CHAPTER VII
More than two decades had passed since Preston Cheney followed the dictates of his ambition and married Mabel Lawrence.
Many of his early hopes and desires had been realised during these years. He had attained to high political positions; and honour and wealth were his to enjoy. Yet Senator Cheney, as he was now known, was far from a happy man. Disappointment was written in every lineament of his face, restlessness and discontent spoke in his every movement, and at times the spirit of despair seemed to look from the depths of his eyes.
To a man of any nobility of nature, there can be small satisfaction in honours which he knows are bought with money and bribes; and to the proud young American there was the additional sting of knowing that even the money by which his honours were purchased was not his own.
It was the second Mrs Lawrence (still designated as the "Baroness" by her stepdaughter and by old acquaintances) to whom Preston owed the constant reminder of his dependence upon the purse of his father-in- law. In those subtle, occult ways known only to a jealous and designing nature, the Baroness found it possible to make Preston's life a torture, without revealing her weapons of warfare to her husband; indeed, without allowing him to even smell the powder, while she still kept up a constant small fire upon the helpless enemy.
Owing to the fact that Mabel had come as completely under the hypnotic influence of the Baroness as the first Mrs Lawrence had been during her lifetime, Preston was subjected to a great deal more of her persecutions than would otherwise have been possible. Mabel was never happier than when enjoying the companionship of her new mother; a condition of things which pleased the Judge as much as it made his son-in-law miserable.
With a malicious adroitness possible only to such a woman as the second Mrs Lawrence, she endeared herself to Mrs Cheney, by a thousand flattering and caressing ways, and by a constant exhibition of sympathy, which to a weak and selfish nature is as pleasing as it is distasteful to the proud and strong. And by this inexhaustible flow of sympathetic feeling, she caused the wife to drift farther and farther away from her husband's influence, and to accuse him of all manner of shortcomings and faults which had not suggested themselves to her own mind.
Mabel had not given or demanded a devoted love when she married Preston Cheney. She was quite satisfied to bear his name, and do the honours of his house, and to be let alone as much as possible. It was the name, not the estate, of wifehood she desired; and motherhood she had accepted with reluctance and distaste.
Never was a more undesired or unwelcome child born than her daughter Alice, and the helpless infant shared with its father the resentful anger which dominated her unwilling mother the wretched months before its advent into earth life.
To be let alone and allowed to follow her own whims and desires, and never to be crossed in any wish, was all Mrs Cheney asked of her husband.
This role was one he had very willingly permitted her to pursue, since with every passing week and month he found less and less to win or bind him to his wife. Wretched as this condition of life was, it might at least have settled into a monotonous calm, undisturbed by strife, but for the molesting "sympathy" of the Baroness.
"Poor thing, here you are alone again," she would say on entering the house where Mabel lounged or lolled, quite content with her situation until the tone and words of her stepmother aroused a resentful consciousness of being neglected. Again the Baroness would say:
"I do think you are such a brave little darling to carry so smiling a face about with all you have to endure." Or, "Very few wives would bear what you bear and hide every vestige of unhappiness from the world. You are a wonderful and admirable character in my eyes." Or, "It seems so strange that your husband does not adore you--but men are blind to the best qualities in women like you. I never hear Mr Cheney praising other women without a sad and almost resentful feeling in my heart, realising how superior you are to all of his favourites." It was the insidious effect of poisoned flattery like this, which made the Baroness a ruling power in the Cheney household, and at the same time turned an already cold and unloving wife into a jealous and nagging tyrant who rendered the young statesman's home the most dreaded place on earth to him, and caused him to live away from it as much as possible.
His only child, Alice, a frail, hysterical girl, devoid of beauty or grace, gave him but little comfort or satisfaction. Indeed she was but an added disappointment and pain in his life. Indulged in every selfish thought by her mother and the Baroness, peevish and petulant, always ailing, complaining and discontented, and still a victim to the nervous disorders inherited from her mother, it was small wonder that Senator Cheney took no more delight in the role of father than he had found in the role of husband.
Alice was given every advantage which money could purchase. But her delicate health had rendered systematic study of any kind impossible, and her twentieth birthday found her with no education, with no use of her reasoning or will powers, but with a complete and beautiful wardrobe in which to masquerade and air her poor little attempts at music, art, or conversation.
Judge Lawrence died when Alice was fifteen years of age, leaving both his widow and his daughter handsomely provided for.
The Baroness not only possessed the Beryngford homestead, but a house in Washington as well; and both of these were occupied by tenants, for Mabel insisted upon having her stepmother dwell under her own roof. Senator Cheney had purchased a house in New York to gratify his wife and daughter, and it was here the family resided, when not in Washington or at the seaside resorts. Both women wished to forget, and to make others forget, that they had ever lived in Beryngford. They never visited the place and never referred to it. They desired to be considered "New Yorkers" and always spoke of themselves as such.
The Baroness was now hopelessly passee. Yet it was the revealing of the inner woman, rather than the withering of the exterior, which betrayed her years. The woman who understands the art of bodily preservation can, with constant toil and care, retain an appearance of youth and charm into middle life; but she who would pass that dreaded meridian, and still remain a goodly sight for the eyes of men, must possess, in addition to all the secrets of the toilet, those divine elixirs, unselfishness and love for humanity. Faith in divine powers, too, and resignation to earthly ills, must do their part to lend the fading eye lustre and to give a softening glow to the paling cheek. Before middle life, it is the outer woman who is seen; after middle life, skilled as she may be by art and however endowed my nature, yet the inner woman becomes visible to the least discerning eye, and the thoughts and feelings which have dominated her during all the past, are shown upon her face and form like printed words upon the open leaves of a book. That is why so many young beauties become ugly old ladies, and why plain faces sometimes are beautiful in age.
The Baroness had been unremitting in the care of her person, and she had by this toil saved her figure from becoming gross, retaining the upright carriage and the tapering waist of youth, though she was upon the verge of her sixtieth birthday. Her complexion, too, owing to her careful diet, her hours of repose, and her knowledge of skin foods and lotions, remained smooth, fair and unfurrowed. But the long-guarded expression in her blue eyes of childlike innocence had given place to the hard look of a selfish and unhappy nature, and the lines about the small mouth accented the expression of the eyes.
It was, despite its preservation of Nature's gifts, and despite its forced smiles, the face of a selfish, cruel pessimist, disappointed in her past and with no uplifting faith to brighten the future.
The Baroness had been the wife of Judge Lawrence a number of years, before she relinquished her hopes of one day making Preston Cheney respond to the passion which burned unquenched in her breast. It had been with the idea of augmenting the interests of the man whom she believed to be her future lover, that she aided and urged on her husband in his efforts to procure place and honour for his son-in- law.
It was this idea which caused her to widen the breach between wife and husband by every subtle means in her power; and it was when this idea began to lose colour and substance and drop away among the wreckage of past hopes, that the Baroness ceased to compliment and began to taunt Preston Cheney with his dependence upon his father-in- law, and to otherwise goad and torment the unhappy man. And Preston Cheney grew into the habit of staying anywhere longer than at home.
During the last ten years the Baroness had seemed to abandon all thoughts of gallant adventure. When the woman who has found life and pleasures only in coquetry and conquest is forced to relinquish these delights, she becomes either very devout or very malicious.
The Baroness was devoid of religious feelings, and she became, therefore, the most bitter and caustic of cynical critics at heart, though she guarded her expression of these sentiments from policy.
Yet to Mabel she expressed herself freely, knowing that her listener enjoyed no conversation so much as that of gossip and criticism. A beautiful or attractive woman was the target for her most cruel shafts of sarcasm, and indeed no woman was safe from her secret malice save Mabel and Alice, over whom she found it a greater pleasure to exercise her hypnotic control. For Alice, indeed, the Baroness entertained a peculiar affection. The fact that she was the child of the man to whom she had given the strongest passion of her life, and the girl's lack of personal beauty, and her unfortunate physical condition, awoke a medley of love, pity and protection in the heart of this strange woman. _