“When he turned you out, like any drab of the
streets!” bellowed old Anthony. “He
never cared for you. He married you to revenge
himself on me. He sent you back here for the
same reason. He’ll take your child, and
break its spirit and ruin its body, for the same reason.
The man’s a maniac.”
But again, as on the night she came, he found himself
helpless against Elinor’s quiet impassivity.
He knew that, let Jim Doyle so much as raise a beckoning
finger, and she would go to him. He did not
realize that Elinor had inherited from her quiet mother
the dog-like quality of love in spite of cruelty.
To Howard he stormed. He considered Elinor’s
infatuation indecent. She was not a Cardew.
The Cardew women had some pride. And Howard,
his handsome figure draped negligently against the
library mantel, would puzzle over it, too.
“I’m blessed if I understand it,”
he would say.
Elinor’s child had been a boy, and old Anthony
found some balm in Gilead. Jim Doyle had not
raised a finger to beckon, and if he knew of his son,
he made no sign. Anthony still ignored Elinor,
but he saw in her child the third generation of Cardews.
Lily he had never counted. He took steps to
give the child the Cardew name, and the fact was announced
in the newspapers. Then one day Elinor went out,
and did not come back. It was something Anthony
Cardew had not counted on, that a woman could love
a man more than her child.
“I simply had to do it, father,” she wrote.
“You won’t understand, of course.
I love him, father. Terribly. And he loves
me in his way, even when he is unfaithful to me.
I know he has been that. Perhaps if you had
wanted me at home it would have been different.
But it kills me to leave the baby. The only reason
I can bring myself to do it is that, the way things
are, I cannot give him the things he ought to have.
And Jim does not seem to want him. He has never
seen him, for one thing. Besides—I
am being honest— I don’t think the
atmosphere of the way we live would be good for a
boy.”
There was a letter to Grace, too, a wild hysterical
document, filled with instructions for the baby’s
care. A wet nurse, for one thing. Grace
read it with tears in her eyes, but Anthony saw in
it only the ravings of a weak and unbalanced woman.
He never forgave Elinor, and once more the little
grocer’s curse thwarted his ambitions.
For, deprived of its mother’s milk, the baby
died. Old Anthony sometimes wondered if that,
too, had been calculated, a part of the Doyle revenge.
