He was going to the club, a mile away from the Breckenridge house,
but long before the visions born that evening were exhausted, he
saw the familiar lights, and the awninged porches, and heard the
faint echoes of the orchestra. They were dancing.
Warren Gregory turned away again, and plunged into the darkness of
the roadside afresh. "My dear Don Quixote!" With what a look of
motherly amusement and tenderness she had said it. What a woman!
He had never kissed her. He had never even thought of kissing
Clarence Breckenridge's wife.
He thought of his mother, tried to forget her with a philosophical
shrug, and found that the slender, black-clad, quiet-voiced vision
was not to be so easily dismissed. It was said of old Madam
Gregory that she had never been heard to raise her voice in the
course of her sixty honored years. Of the four sons she had borne,
three were dead, and the husband she had loved so faithfully lay
beside them. She was slightly crippled, her outings confined to a
slow drive every day. She was solitary in a retinue of servants.
But that modulated voice and those cool, temperate eyes were still
a power. His mother's displeasure was a very real thing to Warren
Gregory, and the thought of adding another sorrow to the weight on
those thin shoulders was not an easy one for him to entertain.
It would be a sorrow. Mrs. Gregory was a rigid Catholic, her
life's one prayer nowadays was that her beloved son might become
one, too. Her marriage at seventeen to a non-Catholic had been
undertaken in the firm conviction that faith like hers must win
the conversion of her beloved James, the best, the most honorable
of men. When her oldest son was born, and given his father's name,
she saw, in her husband's willingness to further plans for the
baptism, definite cause for hope. Another son was born, there was
another christening; it was the father's own hand that gave the
third baby lay-baptism only a few moments before the tiny life
slipped back into the eternity from which it had so lately come.
A year or two later a fourth son was born. Presently the dignified
Mrs. Gregory was taking a trio of small, sleek-headed boys to
Sunday-school, watching every phase in the development of their
awakening souls with terror and with hope. What fears she suffered
in spirit during those years no one but herself knew. Outwardly,
the hospitable, gracious life of the great house went on; the
Gregorys were prominent in charities, they opened their mountain
camp for the summer, they travelled abroad, they had an audience
with the Pope. Time went on, and the twelve-year-old George was
taken from them, breaking the father's heart, said the watching
world. But there was a strange calm in the mother's eyes as they
rested on the dead child's serene face: Heaven had her free
offering, now she must have her reward.