Читать книгу Franklin Kane - Anne Douglas Sedgwick - Страница 6

Table of Contents

When Althea went in to lunch next day, after an arduous morning of shopping, she observed, with mingled relief and disappointment, that the young lady in black was not in her place. She might very probably have gone away, and it was odd to think that an impression so strong was probably to remain an impression merely. On the whole, she was sorry to think that it might be so, though the impression had not been altogether happy.

After lunch she lay down and read reviews for a lazy hour, and then dressed to receive Miss Harriet Robinson, who, voluble and beaming, arrived punctually at four.

Miss Robinson looked almost exactly as she had looked for the last ten years. She changed as little as the hotel drawing-room, but that the pictures on the wall, the vases on the shelf of her mental decoration varied with every season. She was always passionately interested in something, and it was surprising to note how completely in the new she forgot last year's passion. This year it was eugenics and Strauss; the welfare of the race had suddenly engaged her attention, and the menaced future of music. She was slender, erect, and beautifully dressed. Her hands were small, and she constantly but inexpressively gesticulated with them; her elaborately undulated hair looked like polished, fluted silver; her eyes were small, dark, and intent; she smiled as constantly and as inexpressively as she gesticulated.

'And so you really think of going back for the winter?' she asked Althea finally, when the responsibilities of parenthood and the impermanency of modern musical artifices had been demonstrated. 'Why, my dear? You see everybody here. Everybody comes here, sooner or later.'

'I don't like getting out of touch with home,' said Althea.

'I confess that I feel this home,' said Miss Robinson. 'America is so horribly changed, so vulgarised. The people they accept socially! And the cost of things! My dear, the last time I went to the States I had to pay five hundred francs—one hundred dollars—for my winter hat! Je vous demande! If they will drive us out they must take the consequences.'

Althea felt tempted to inquire what these might be. Miss Robinson sometimes roused a slight irony in her; but she received the expostulation with a dim smile.

'Why won't you settle here?' Miss Robinson continued, 'or in Rome—there is quite a delightful society in Rome—or Florence, or London. Not that I could endure the English winter.'

'I've sometimes thought of England,' said Althea.

'Well, do think of it. I'm perfectly disinterested. Rather than have you unsettled, I would like to have you settled there. You have interesting friends, I know.'

'Yes, very interesting,' said Althea, with some satisfaction.

'You would probably make quite a place for yourself in London, if you went at it carefully and consideringly, and didn't allow the wrong sort of people to accaparer you. We always count, when we want to, we American women of the good type,' said Miss Robinson, with frank complacency; 'and I don't see why, with your gifts and charm, you shouldn't have a salon, political or artistic.'

Althea was again tempted to wonder what it was Miss Robinson counted for; but since she had often been told that her gifts and charm demanded a salon, she was inclined to believe it. 'It's only,' she demurred, 'that I have so many friends, in so many places; it is hard to decide on settling.'

'One never does make a real life for oneself until one does settle. I've found that out for myself,' said Miss Robinson.

It did not enter into her mind that Althea might still settle, in a different sense. She was of that vast army of rootless Europeanised Americans, who may almost be said to belong to a celibate order, so little does the question of matrimony and family life affect their existence. For a younger, more frivolous type, Europe might have a merely matrimonial significance; but to Miss Robinson, and to thousands of her kind, it meant an escape from displeasing circumstance and a preoccupation almost monastic with the abstract and the æsthetic. To Althea it had never meant merely that. Her own people in America were fastidious and exclusive; from choice, they considered, but, in reality, partly from necessity; they had never been rich enough or fashionable enough to be exposed to the temptation of great European alliances. Althea would have scorned such ambitions as basely vulgar; she had never thought of Europe as an arena for social triumphs; but it had assuredly been coloured for her with the colour of romance. It was in Europe, rather than in America, that she expected to find, if ever, her ardent, compelling wooer. And it irritated her a little that Miss Robinson should not seem to consider such a possibility for her.

She did not accept her friend's invitation to go with her to the Français that evening; the weariness of the morning of shopping was her excuse. She wanted to study a little; she never neglected to keep her mind in training; and after dinner she sat down with a stout tome on political economy. She had only got through half a chapter when Amélie came to her and asked her if she could suggest a remedy for a young lady next door who, the femme de chambre said, was quite alone, and had evidently succumbed to a violent attack of influenza.

'C'est une dame anglaise,' said Amélie, 'et une bien gentille.'

Althea sprang up, strangely excited. Was it the lady in black? Had she then not gone yet? 'Next door, you say?' she asked. Yes; the stranger's bedroom was next her own, and she had no salon.

'I will go in myself and see her,' said Althea, after a moment of reflection.

She was not at all given to such impulses, and, under any other circumstances, would have sent Amélie with the offer of assistance. But she suddenly felt it an opportunity, for what she could not have said. It was like seeing a curious-looking book opened before one; one wanted to read in it, if only a snatched paragraph here and there.

Amélie protested as to infection, but Althea was a resourceful traveller and had disinfectants for every occasion. She drenched her handkerchief, gargled her throat, and, armed with her little case of remedies, knocked at the door near by. A languid voice answered her and she entered.

The room was lighted by two candles that stood on the mantelpiece, and the bed in its alcove was dim. Tossed clothes lay on the chairs; a battered box stood open, its tray lying on the floor; the dressing-table was in confusion, and the scent of cigarette smoke mingled with that of a tall white lily that was placed in a vase on a little table beside the bed. To the well-maided Althea the disorder was appalling, yet it expressed, too, something of charm. The invalid lay plunged in her pillows, her dark hair tossed above her head, and, as Althea approached, she did not unclose her eyes.

'Oh, I beg your pardon,' said Althea, feeling some trepidation. 'My maid told me that you were ill—that you had influenza, and I know just what to do for it. May I give you some medicine? I do hope I have not waked you up,' for the invalid was now looking at her with some astonishment.

'No; I wasn't asleep. How very kind of you. I thought it was the chambermaid,' she said. 'Forgive me for seeming so rude.'

Her eyes were more dazed than ever, and she more mysterious, with her unbound hair.

'You oughtn't to lie with your arms outside the covers like that,' said Althea. 'It's most important not to get chilled. I'm afraid you don't know how to take care of yourself.' She smiled a little, gentle and assured, though inwardly with still a tremor; and she drew the clothes about the invalid, who had relapsed passively on to her pillows.

'I'm afraid I don't. How very kind of you!' she murmured again.

Althea brought a glass of water and, selecting her little bottle, poured out the proper number of drops. 'You were feeling ill last night, weren't you?' she said, after the dose had been swallowed. 'I thought that you looked ill.'

'Last night?'

'Yes, don't you remember? I sat next you in the dining-room.'

'Oh yes; of course, of course! I remember now. You had this dress on; I noticed all the little silver tassels. Yes, I've been feeling wretched for several days; I've done hardly anything—no shopping, no sight-seeing, and I ought to be back in London to-morrow; but I suppose I'll have to stay in bed for a week; it's very tiresome.' She spoke wearily, yet in decisive little sentences, and her voice, its hardness and its liquid intonations, made Althea think of wet pebbles softly shaken together.

'You haven't sent for a doctor?' she inquired, while she took out her small clinical thermometer.

'No, indeed; I never send for doctors. Can't afford 'em,' said the young lady, with a wan grimace. 'Must I put that into my mouth?'

'Yes, please; I must take your temperature. I think, if you let me prescribe for you, I can see after you as well as a doctor,' Althea assured her. 'I'm used to taking care of people who are ill. The friend I've just been staying with in Venice had influenza very badly while I was with her.'

She rather hoped, after the thermometer was removed, that the young lady would ask her some question about Venice and her present destination; but, though so amiable and so grateful, she did not seem to feel any curiosity about the good Samaritan who thus succoured her.

Althea found her patient less feverish next morning when she went in early to see her, and though she said that her body felt as though it were being beaten with red-hot hammers, she smiled in saying it, and Althea then, administering her dose, asked her what her name might be.

It was Helen Buchanan, she learned.

'And mine is Althea Jakes. You are English, aren't you?'

'Oh no, I'm Scotch,' said Miss Buchanan.

'And I am American. Do you know any Americans?'

'Oh yes, quite a lot. One of them is a Mrs. Harrison, and lives in Chicago,' said Miss Buchanan, who seemed in a more communicative mood. 'I met her in Nice one winter; a very nice, kind woman, who gives most sumptuous parties. Her husband is a millionaire; one never sees him. Do you come from Chicago? Do you know her?'

Althea, with some emphasis, said that she came from Boston.

'Another,' Miss Buchanan pursued, 'lives in New York, though she is usually over here; she is immensely rich, too. She hunts every winter in England, and is great fun and is frightfully well up in everything—pictures, books, music, you know: Americans usually are well up, aren't they? She wants me to stay with her some day in New York; perhaps I shall, if I can manage to afford the voyage. Her name is Bigham; perhaps you know her.'

'No. I know of her, though; she is very well known,' said Althea rather coldly; for Mrs. Bigham was an excessively fashionable and reputedly reckless lady who had divorced one husband and married another, and whose doings filled more scrupulous circles with indignation and unwilling interest.

'Then I met a dear little woman in Oxford once,' said Miss Buchanan. 'She was studying there—she had come from a college in America. She was so nice and clever, and charming, too; quaint and full of flavour. She was going to teach in a college when she went back. She was very poor, quite different from the others. Her father, she told me, kept a shop, but didn't get on at all; and her brother, to whom she was devoted, sold harmoniums. It was just like an American novel. Wayman was her name—Miss Carrie Wayman; perhaps you know her. I forget the name of the town she came from, but it was somewhere in the western part of America.'

No, Althea said, she did not know Miss Wayman, and she felt some little severity for the confusion that Miss Buchanan's remarks indicated. With greater emphasis than before, she said that she did not know the West at all.

'It must be rather nice—plains and cowboys and Rocky Mountains,' Miss Buchanan said. 'I've a cousin on a ranch in Dakota, and I've often thought I'd like to go out there for a season; he says the riding is wonderful, and the scenery and flowers. Oh, my wretched head; it feels as if it were stuffed with incandescent cotton-wool.'

'You must remember to keep your arms under the covers,' said Althea, as Miss Buchanan lifted her hands and pressed them to her brows. 'And let me plait your hair for you; it must be so hot and uncomfortable.'

And now again, looking up at her while the friendly office was performed, Miss Buchanan said, 'How kind you are! too kind for words. I can't think what I should have done without you.'