Читать книгу The 13th District - Brand Whitlock - Страница 12

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THE strong-limbed girl who went striding up the walk to the Harkness’s porch was the only intimate of her own sex that Emily had retained; perhaps she retained her because Dade Emerson was away from Grand Prairie so much that custom could not stale this friendship. The girls had been reared side by side, they had gone to the same school and, later, for a while, to the same college; and they had glowed over those secret passions of their young girlhood, just as they had wept when their lengthened petticoats compelled them to give up paper dolls.

Dade Emerson, however, had never shared Emily’s love of study; she conformed more readily to the athletic type at that time coming into vogue. In the second year of Dade’s college course, old Mr. Emerson died, and his widow, under the self-deluding plea that her grief could find solace only in other climes, resolved to spend in traveling the money with which her husband’s death had dowered her. Dade Emerson entered upon the hotel life of the wanderer with an enthusiasm her black gowns could hardly conceal. They tried the south for her mother’s asthma, and the north for her hay-fever; they journeyed to California for the good the climate was sure to do her lungs, and they crossed the Atlantic to take the baths at Wiesbaden for her rheumatism.

While her mother devoted herself to a querulous celebration of her complaints, Dade led what is known as the active outdoor life. She learned to row, and to swim; she won a medal by her tennis playing, and she developed a romping health that showed in the sparkle of her dark eye, in the flush of her brown cheek, in the swing of her full arm or the beautiful play of the muscles in her strong shoulders as she strode in her free and graceful way along the street or across the room. She climbed Mont Blanc; she wished to try the Matterhorn, but the grave secretary of the Alpine Club denied her permission when she dragged her breathless mother one summer up to Zermatt to try for this distinction.

In the summer under notice, her mother had declared that she must see Grand Prairie once more before she died, and they had come home, and thrown open the old house for its first occupancy in two years. When the Emersons arrived at Grand Prairie, Dade had embraced Emily fervidly, and the two girls had vowed that their old intimacy must immediately be reëstablished on its ancient footing. With her objective interest in life, Dade had no difficulty in giving her demeanor towards Emily the spontaneity it is sometimes necessary to feign towards the friends of a by-gone day and stage of development; and so she swung into the wide hall, and fairly grappled Emily, who had come to meet her.

“I’ve bean just dying to see you, dyah,” she said, in the new accent she had acquired while in Europe, which was half Eastern, half English.

She kissed Emily, and flung herself into a chair in the parlor whither Emily was already pointing the way. Her fresh, wholesome personality, her summer garments, the very atmosphere of strength and health she breathed were welcome stimulants to Emily.

“It’s downright hot, I say,” Dade continued, wriggling until her skirts fluffed out all over the front of her chair, and showed the plaid hose above the low, broad-heeled shoes she wore. She glanced around to see if the windows were open.

“Beastly!” she ejaculated. And she took a handkerchief and polished her face until its clean tanned skin shone.

“I say,” she went on, tossing her handkerchief into her lap, “I didn’t sleep a wink thinking about you lahst night. I had to run ovah to see you about it directly I could leave poor mamma. Isn’t it too—”

“It’s awfully good of you to come, dear,” Emily got in. “I’ve been intending to have you over to take dinner and spend the day. But now that you are back for good—”

“Back for good!” said Dade, “Mais non, not a bit of it. Mamma says she cawn’t enduah this climate, and who could? We’re off directly we can decide wheah to go. She wants to go up into the White Mountains, but I’ve just got to go some place wheah they have golf links, don’t you know? The truth is, Em, its impossible in this stupid, provincial old hole—I’ll be every bit as fat as mamma if I stay hyah a minute longah—”

“You miss your exercise?” said Emily, lolling back on the cushions of her divan in an indolence of manner that told how remote exercise was from her wish at that moment.

“Don’t speak the word!” cried Dade, pushing out one of her strong hands repellently. “I positively cawn’t find a thing to do. I tried for a cross-country walk yesterday, and got chased by a stupid fahmah, and nearly hooked by a cow—to say nothing of this rich Illinois mud. Mamma owns a few hundred acres of it, Dieu merci, so we don’t have to live hyah on it, though if the—what do you say?—les paysans—keep on crying for a decrease in rent I fawncy you’ll see me back hyah actually digging in it.”

The picture of the Emerson’s tenants which Dade drew struck a pang in Emily’s sociological conscience. She pitied the girl more for her inability to estimate the evils of a system which left her free to wander over the earth seeking that exercise which her clamoring muscles demanded, while those upon whose labors she lived had to exercise more than their overwrought muscles required than she did for the remote prospect of her being doomed to labor on the corn lands of Polk County.

“I’d go down to Zimmerman’s saloon and bowl, if it wouldn’t shock you all to death. But tell me, how do you feel about it?”

“About what—your need of exercise?”

“Mon Dieu, no—about the terrible exposé of that interesting protégé of yours? On ne pourrait le croire—c’est affreux!”

“Well, no,” Emily said, with a woeful laugh, “if I understand your French.”

“What!” exclaimed the girl. “I thought you were so deeply interested in him. Haven’t you worked hard to give him some sort of social form, getting him to dawnces and all that sort of thing?”

“No, not to dances, Dade. He doesn’t dance.”

“Oh, to be suah. I heahd that—and I heahd—” she gave a ringing laugh—“I heahd that he was downright jealous when you went to visit Sallie Van Stohn in St. Louis and dawnced with all those men theah. And I didn’t blame him—those St. Louis men are raeally lovely dawncers, bettah than the Chicago men—they have the mesure but not the grâce—though the St. Louis men are nothing at all to the German officers we met at Berlin. Why, my dyah, those fellows can waltz across a ball room with a glass of wine on each hand—raeally!” She stretched out her well-turned arms and held their pink palms up, to picture the corseted terpsichorean. “But why didn’t you teach him to dawnce?”

Emily did not conceal with her little laugh the blush that came at this reminder of her attempts to overcome Garwood’s pride, which had rebelled at the indignity of displaying his lack of grace in efforts at the waltz or the easier two-step.

“He wouldn’t learn.”

“How stupid! But that’s nothing now to this othah thing. Had you evah dreamed of such a thing? I thought from what you wrote me that he was the soul of honah.”

“So he is!” declared Emily, lifting eyes that blazed a defiance.

“But won’t it injure his chawnces of election?”

“No!” Emily fairly cried in her determined opposition to the thought, “no, it won’t.” She sat upright on the divan, and leaned toward her friend with a little gasp.

“You don’t mean to tell me you think it true, Dade?”

Dade ceased to rock. She looked at Emily with her black eyes sparkling through their long lashes, and then she squeezed her wrists between her knees and said:

“Emily Harkness, you’re in love with that man!”

Emily’s gaze fell. She thrust out her lower lip a little, and gave an almost imperceptible toss to her brown head. She stroked a silken pillow at her side. Dade’s eyes continued to sparkle at her through their long lashes, and she felt the conviction of their gaze.

“Well,” she said at last, gently, “I am going to marry him.”

Dade continued to gaze a moment longer, and then she swooped over to the divan. She hugged Emily in her strong young arms, almost squeezing the breath from the girl’s body.

“Bless you, I knew it!” And then she kissed her, but suddenly held her away at arm’s length as if she were a child, and said with the note of reproach that her claim as a life-long intimate gave her voice: “But why didn’t you tell me?”

“You’re the first I’ve told except papa,” said Emily.

“C’est vrai?” said Dade, her jealousy appeased. “Then it’s all right, dyah—and it’s splendid, I think. He’s a typical American, you know, and the very man you ought to marry. Mamma’s been afraid I’d marry one of those foreignehs, and so have I—but it’s splendid. And I tell you—” she settled herself for confidences—“I’ll come back from anywheah to the wedding, to be your maid of honah—just as we used to plan—don’t you know? Oh, I am so glad, and I think it’s noble in you; it’s just like you. It’ll elect him, too, if you announce it right away. I say, I’ll give a luncheon for you, and we can announce it then—no, that wouldn’t be correct, would it? We’d have to have the luncheon hyah—but it’ll elect him. It would in England, where the women go in for politics more than you do, n’est ce pas?”

She always spoke of her own land from the detached standpoint a long residence abroad, and sometimes a short one, gives to expatriates.

“And—let’s plan it all out now, dyah. Will you have it at St. Louis, and Doctah Storey?—why—there—there now——”

Emily had pillowed her head on Dade’s full bosom, and her long-restrained tears had flooded forth. The larger girl, with the motherly instinct that comes with brimming health, wrapped her friend in her arms, and soothed her, though disengaging one hand now and then to wipe the perspiration that bedewed her own brow. The two girls sat there in silence, rocking back and forth among the pillows in the darkened parlor, until Dade suddenly broke the spell by sitting bolt upright and exclaiming:

“Mon Dieu, there comes that big De Freese girl. I’m going.”

And she rose to effect her incontinent desertion at once. Turning in from the street, a large, tranquil blonde, gowned and gloved and bearing a chiffon parasol to keep the sun from her milky complexion, was calmly and coolly crossing the yard.

“She’s got call in her eye!” exclaimed Dade. And then she hurried on, before she fled, to say all she had left unsaid:

“I’ll be ovah this aftahnoon, and we’ll plan it all out—and I’m going to make mamma spend next wintah in Washington. It’ll help some of her diseases—what’s the climate of Washington good for, do you know?”

But Emily had risen to glance out the window, and then, with her hands to her face, had fled from the room. Dade heard the patter of her feet on the stairs as she gathered up her skirts and soared aloft. And then in her surprise she looked out the window again and saw a tall man, with a broad black hat slouched over his eyes, taking long steps across the lawn. He seemed boorishly to be set on beating the mild blonde to the door.

The two callers gained the veranda at the same moment, before the bell could be rung to summon the maid. As she left the parlor Dade snatched her hat from her head and sent it sailing across to the divan, and then, at the door, she smiled and said:

“Good mohning, Miss de Freese. Miss Hawkness? No, she’s ill, and isn’t visible this mohning. I’m staying with heh. She’ll be downright sorry—and Mr. Hawkness, sir,” she turned to Garwood, “left wohd to have you wait. He’ll be hyah directly. Just step into the drawing-room please,” she smiled, but with a little scowl, at the obtuse politician, who seemed disposed to dispute with her, though under the influence of her eyes, he obeyed, and when he had passed in, she continued:

“It’s too bad, Miss de Freese, raeally—and you’ve had such a walk this wahm mohning. Oh, nothing serious at all, just one of heh headaches, you know; I’ll tell heh—she’ll be awfully disappointed.”

She went into the drawing-room.

“Pahdon, sir,” she said, “I left my hat.” And she crossed to the divan.

“Did I understand you to say that Emil—that Miss Harkness was——”

“I’ll tell heh; she’ll come right down.”

“But you said Mister Harkness had left——”

Dade smiled the superior smile of the socially perfect.

“You possibly misundahstood me, sir; I said Miss Harkness would be down.”

She bowed herself out of the room, leaving Garwood with one more perplexity added to those that were already accumulating too rapidly for him.

Dade went up the staircase and to Emily’s room. The girl was standing by her door, her hands clasped and raised in expectation to her freshly powdered face.

“Le voilà!” said Dade, pointing tragically over the balusters, and then she went down the back stairs.