Читать книгу The Turn of the Balance - Brand Whitlock - Страница 4

His house was all illumined; the light streaming from its windows glistened on the polished crust of the frozen snow, and as Stephen Ward drove up that evening, he sighed, remembering the dinner. He sprang out, slammed the door of his brougham and dashed indoors, the wheels of his retreating carriage giving out again their frosty falsetto. The breath of cold air Ward inhaled as he ran into the house was grateful to him, and he would have liked more of it; it would have refreshed and calmed him after his hard day on the Board.

As he entered the wide hall, Elizabeth was just descending the stairs. She came fresh from her toilet, clothed in a dinner gown of white, her round arms bare to the elbow, her young throat just revealed, her dark hair done low on her neck, and the smile that lighted her gray eyes pleased Ward.

As she went for her father's kiss Elizabeth noted the cool outdoor atmosphere, and the odor of cigar smoke and Russia leather that always hung about his person.

"You are refreshing!" she said. "The frost clings to you."

He smiled as she helped him with his overcoat, and then he backed up to the great fire, and stood there shrugging his shoulders and rubbing his hands in the warmth. His face was fresh and ruddy, his white hair was rumpled, his stubbed mustache, which ordinarily gave an effect of saving his youth in his middle years, seemed to bristle aggressively, and his eyes still burned from the excitement of the day.

"What have you been doing all day?" Elizabeth asked, standing before him, her hands on his shoulders. "Battling hard for life in the wheat pit?" Her eyes sparkled with good humor.

Ward took Elizabeth's face between his palms as he said jubilantly:

"No, but I've been making old Macey battle for his life–and I've won."

His gray eyes flashed with the sense of victory, he drew himself erect, tilted back on his heels. He did not often speak of his business affairs at home, and when he did, no one understood him. During the weeks indeed, in which the soft moist weather and constant rains had prevented the rise in the wheat market on which he had so confidently gambled, he had resolutely and unselfishly kept his fear and his suspense to himself, and now even though at last he could indulge his exultation, he drew a long, deep breath.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "The snow came just in the nick of time for me!"

"Well, you march right up-stairs and get your clothes on," said Elizabeth as she took her father by the arm, gathering up the train of her white gown, heavy with its sequins and gracefully impeding her progress, and led him to the stairs. She smiled up into his face as she did so, and, as he turned the corner of the wide staircase, he bent and kissed her again.

Though the guests whom Mrs. Ward had asked to her dinner that night all came in closed carriages, bundled in warm and elegant furs, and though they stepped from their own doors into their carriages and then alighted from them at the door of the Wards', they all, when they arrived, talked excitedly of the storm and adjured one another to confess that they had never known such cold. The women, who came down from the dressing-room in bare arms and bare shoulders, seemed to think less of the cold than the men, who were, doubtless, not so inured to exposure; but they were more excited over it and looked on the phenomenon in its romantic light, and began to celebrate the poetic aspects of the winter scene. But the men laughed at this.

"There isn't much poetry about it down town," said Dick Ward. "No poet would have called that snow beautiful if he'd seen it piled so high as to blockade the street-cars and interrupt business generally." He spoke with the young pride he was finding in himself as a business man, though it would have been hard to tell just what his business was.

"Oh, but Dick," said Miss Bonnell, her dark face lighting with a fine smile, "the poet wouldn't have thought of business!"

"No, I suppose not," admitted Dick with the contempt a business man should feel for a poet.

"He might have found a theme in the immense damage the storm has done–telegraph wires all down, trains all late, the whole country in the grip of the blizzard, and a cold wave sweeping down from Medicine Hat."

The slender young man who spoke was Gordon Marriott, and he made his observation in a way that was almost too serious to be conventional or even desirable in a society where seriousness was not encouraged. He looked dreamily into the fire, as if he had merely spoken a thought aloud rather than addressed any one; but the company standing about the fireplace, trying to make the talk last for the few moments before dinner was announced, looked up suddenly, and seemed to be puzzled by the expression on his smooth-shaven delicate face.

"Oh, a theme for an epic!" exclaimed Mrs. Modderwell, the wife of the rector. Her pale face was glowing with unusual color, and her great dark eyes were lighting with enthusiasm. As she spoke, she glanced at her husband, and seemed to shrink in her black gown.

"But we have no poet to do it," said Elizabeth.

"Oh, I say," interrupted Modderwell, speaking in the upper key he employed in addressing women, and then, quickly changing to the deep, almost gruff tone which, with his affected English accent, he used when he spoke to men, "our friend Marriott here could do it; he's dreamer enough for it–eh, Marriott?" He gave his words the effect of a joke, and Marriott smiled at them, while the rest laughed in their readiness to laugh at anything.

"No," said Marriott, "I couldn't do it, though I wish I could. Walt Whitman might have done it; he could have begun with the cattle on the plains, freezing, with their tails to the wind, and catalogued everything on the way till he came to the stock quotations and–"

"The people sleighing on Claybourne Avenue," said Elizabeth, remembering her walk of the afternoon. "And he would have gone on tracing the more subtle and sinister effects–perhaps suggesting something tragic."

"Well, now, really, when I was in Canada, you know–" began Modderwell. Though he had been born in Canada and had lived most of his life there, he always referred to the experience as if it had been a mere visit; he wished every one to consider him an Englishman. And nearly every one did, except Marriott, who looked at Modderwell in his most innocent manner and began:

"Oh, you Canadians–"

But just then dinner was announced, and though Elizabeth smiled at Marriott with sympathy, she was glad to have him interrupted in his philosophizing, or poetizing, or whatever it was, to take her out to the dining-room, where the great round table, with its mound of scarlet roses and tiny glasses of sherry glowing ruddy in the soft light of the shaded candelabra, awaited them. And there they passed through the long courses, at first talking lightly, but excitedly, of the snow, mentioning the pleasure and the new sensations it would afford them; then of their acquaintances; of a new burlesque that had run for a year in a New York theater; then of a new romance in which a great many people were killed and imprisoned, though not in a disagreeable manner, and, in short, talked of a great many unimportant things, but talked of them as if they were, in reality, of the utmost importance.

The butler had taken off the salad; they were waiting for the dessert. Suddenly from the direction of the kitchen came a piercing scream, evidently a woman's scream; all the swinging doors between the dining-room and the distant kitchen could not muffle it. Mrs. Modderwell started nervously, then, at a look from her husband, composed herself and hung her head with embarrassment. The others at the table started, though not so visibly, and then tried to appear as if they had not done so. Mrs. Ward looked up in alarm, first at Ward, who hastily gulped some wine, and then at Elizabeth. Wonder and curiosity were in all the faces about the board–wonder and curiosity that no sophistication could conceal. They waited; the time grew long; Mrs. Ward, who always suffered through her dinners, suffered more than ever now. Her guests tried bravely to sit as if nothing were wrong, but at last their little attempts at conversation failed, and they sat in painful silence. The moments passed; Ward and his wife exchanged glances; Elizabeth looked at her mother sympathetically. At last the door swung and the butler entered; the guests could not help glancing at him. But in his face there was a blank and tutored passivity that was admirable, almost heroic.

When the women were in the drawing-room, Mrs. Ward excused herself for a moment and went to the kitchen. She returned presently, and Elizabeth voiced the question the others were too polite to ask.

"What on earth's the matter?"

"Matter!" exclaimed Mrs. Ward. "Gusta's going, that's all." She said it with the feeling such a calamity merited.

"When?"

"Now."

"But the scream–what was it?"

"Well, word came about her father; he's been hurt, or killed, or something, in the railroad yards."

"Oh, how dreadful!" the women politely chorused.

"Yes, I should think so," said Mrs. Ward. "To be left like this without a moment's warning! And then that awful contretemps at dinner!" Mrs. Ward looked all the anguish and shame she felt.

"But Gusta couldn't help that," said Elizabeth.

"No," said Mrs. Ward, lapsing from her mood of exaggeration, "I know that, of course. The poor girl is quite broken up. I hope it is nothing really serious. And yet," she went on, her mind turning again to her own domestic misfortunes, "people of her class seem to have the most unerring faculty for calamity. They're always getting hurt, or sick, or dying, or something. The servants in my house suffer more bereavement in the course of a month than all the rest of my acquaintance in a lifetime."

And then the ladies took up the servant-girl problem, and canvassed it hopelessly until the men were heard entering the library.