Читать книгу The Inner Flame (Clara Louise Burnham) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - Clara Louise Burnham, Burnham Clara Louise - Страница 8

Kathleen Fabian sat at her desk, deeply engrossed in the theme she was writing, when her brother's name was brought to her.

The expression of her face as she took the card did not indicate that the surprise was wholly joyous. She frowned and bit her lip, and an anxious look grew in her eyes as she went out into the hall to meet the visitor, who advanced with bounds, and grasped her in one arm, giving her cheek a brotherly peck.

"What has happened, Edgar?" she asked as he led her back into her room.

"I've come to see you, that's all," was the rejoinder.

Edgar Fabian was an airy youth, carefully arrayed in the height of fashion. His fair hair was brushed until it reflected the light, and his jaunty assurance was wont to carry all before it.

"Is anything wrong at home?" insisted his sister.

"Certainly not."

They were now inside the room and the young man closed the door.

"Well, I haven't any money," said Kathleen bluntly, – "at least, not for you!"

Edgar was but little taller than she, and, as she looked at him now, her serious slender face opposed to his boyish one, her peculiar slow speech, in which her teeth scarcely closed, sounding lazy beside his crispness, she seemed the elder of the two.

"This leaping at conclusions is too feminine a weakness for you to indulge in, Kath," was the rejoinder as the visitor slid out of a silk-lined overcoat; but he rested his gaze upon his sister's dark hair rather than the eyes beneath. "I like your hospitality," he added. "I hope it isn't presumption for me to remove my coat. Try to control your joy when your brother comes up from New York to see you."

"Of course I should always be glad to see you if – if you'd let me," was the reply.

"What's to prevent?" inquired the visitor cheerfully.

"My diary," was the laconic response.

"Oh, you make me tired," said Edgar, taking out a cigarette-case. "May I?"

"No," returned Kathleen, speaking with her characteristic deliberation.

"You may have one, too"; he offered his case, still standing, since she did not sit. He smiled as he said it; the evenness of his teeth and the glee of his smile had melted much ice before now.

"No, thanks," she answered coldly.

He gave an exclamation.

"Oh, your grave and reverend senior airs won't go down with me, you know." He sniffed suspiciously. "Some one has been having a whiff here this morning."

"It wasn't I."

"Well, it was somebody; and some one more critical than I is liable to drop in here and notice it. Just to save you trouble, I'll light up. Better take one. It's your golden opportunity."

Again he offered the case, and now Kathleen took a cigarette mechanically. She still questioned her brother's debonair countenance.

"Well," he said impatiently, after a moment of silence, "are we going to stand here until dinner-time like two tenpins?"

"Are you going to stay until dinner-time?"

"Why," with another effort at gayety, "if you go on like this and positively won't take no for an answer, perhaps I shall be obliged to. Say, Kath, what's the matter with you? You used to be a good fellow. College has ruined you. I didn't treat you like this when you came to see me."

"Forgive me, Edgar," Kathleen's drawl became very nearly an exclamation. "I was thinking so hard."

She dropped into a chair and he lighted his cigarette, and bending forward allowed her to draw the flame into her own.

"Now, this is something like it," remarked the young man, sinking upon a leather-covered divan. He picked up a guitar that lay at its head, and strummed lightly upon it. "Think of your giving house-room to anything so light-minded as a guitar!" he added, his disapproving eyes roving about the entire apartment. "This room looks more like a hermit's cell every time I come."

"No," rejoined Kathleen, with her soft laziness of speech, and blowing a ring of smoke upon the air, "it is only that you have time to forget between your visits."

Edgar removed his cigarette and began to murmur "The Owl and the Pussy Cat," in a tenor voice calculated to pour oil on troubled waters, while he struck the accompanying chords with a sure touch.

"They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five-pound note!"

he sang. "Think of it!" he groaned, pausing to save the life of his cigarette; "plenty of money! Who wouldn't be an owl or a pussy-cat!"

Kathleen's eyes narrowed.

"You speak of the rarity of my visits," he went on. "I suppose you think it is nothing to take a few hours out of a business day to run up here."

Kathleen smiled. "On the contrary, I think it so much of a thing that it always startles me to get your card on a week day, and you seem to have other uses for your Sundays."

"Very well," returned her brother, strumming the guitar with conscious rectitude; "know then that the Administration sent me up here to-day on business."

"With me?"

"No" (singing) –

'Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge – '"

"Edgar!" protested the girl lazily, "it's too early in the day for that."

"Hello, grave and reverend senior," he retorted. "I didn't know you were so much of a connoisseur."

The girl's reply had a sad note.

"I wish you would do something with that voice," she said.

The singer smiled. He was now smoking again, and strumming the melody of the song. Perhaps he was thinking that he had done a good deal with his voice.

"I don't know that it has been altogether wasted," he replied.

"Carrying off the honors as the singing-girl in a college play isn't what I mean."

"Oh, I'm sure it isn't," scoffed the possessor of the voice. "I'd take long odds that what you mean involves something that would come under the head of work spelled with a capital W – "

"Think of a man butterfly!" ejaculated Kathleen, removing her cigarette and her drawl for an unwonted verbal explosion. "Edgar, I should have been the man, and you the girl in our family."

"I should object," he rejoined calmly, all his attention apparently concentrated on the compassing of some intricate fingering of the guitar strings.

"Think of your rooms at college and this!" went on Kathleen.

"I'd like mighty well to have a squint at the loved and lost to take the taste of this out of my mouth," returned the visitor imperturbably.

"How is father?" asked Kathleen, relapsing into her usual manner.

"Smaht," rejoined Edgar.

At the reminder of Brewster's Island, Kathleen's eyes smiled, then grew grave. "I can't bear to have you call father the Administration," she said.

"Why not? – you didn't want me to call him Governor."

"It sounds so – so disrespectful."

"Not to me. I think it suggests salaams."

"No, Edgar – slams; but I don't want to joke."

"I'm sure of it," interpolated the guitar-playing one.

"Stop that noise a minute, please."

He obeyed.

"I wish you wouldn't speak of father so coldly."

"Then it'll be likely to be hotly, and at that you'd make a fuss," returned the youth doggedly.

"He is a good father," declared the girl, the lingering words coming devoutly.

"Yes," retorted Edgar drily. "Perhaps, if your little day-dream could come true and you be the son, you wouldn't think so."

"I believe it is father's fault largely," said Kathleen. "He began by spoiling you."

"Then, if I'm spoiled, what's the use of kicking? – and if he's done it he must pay for it; but that's just what he won't do – pay for it."

The speaker stubbed the light out of his cigarette and tossed it on the table. He rose and walked the floor.

"He has put you in his office," said Kathleen. "He will give you every chance to rise."

"Yes, and meanwhile pays me a salary smaller than the allowance he gave me at college."

"Because," said the girl, "he found that you couldn't even keep within that. He knew you must wake up."

"What occasion?" demanded Edgar, standing still to gesture. "I'm the only son. Look at the money he has."

"And has worked for; worked for, Edgar. Can't you understand? Supposing you had worked like that, and had a son who dipped into the bag with both hands and threw your money away."

"I don't want to throw it away. I get one hundred cents' worth of fun out of every dollar I spend. What more does he want? I didn't ask to be born, did I? I didn't ask to have expensive tastes. Why should I have to ride in a taxicab?"

"You don't. There are the street cars."

Edgar's blond face turned upon her angrily. "When do you suppose I want a machine? When I'm doddering around with a cane?"

"Earn it, then."

"Yes, I can on a petty few hundreds a year!"

"You drive down with father every morning, don't you?"

"No, I don't. I have to get there before he does."

Kathleen laughed. "What an outrage!"

"I take the car first and then it goes back for him," said Edgar sulkily.

"Oh, the cruelty of some parents!" drawled Kathleen, knocking the ash from her cigarette. "The idea of Peter going back for father. He should stand in Wall Street awaiting your orders."

"No, he shouldn't, but I should have a motor of my own. The Ad. is more old-fashioned than any of the other fathers in our set." The speaker paused and gestured defensively. "You'll get off all that ancient stuff about the new generation wanting to begin where the old left off. Of course we do. Why not? I hope my son will begin where I leave off."

Kathleen gave her one-sided smile – her Mona Lisa smile her admirers called it: –

"Where you leave off is not liable to be a bed of roses if you keep on as you've begun." She looked up at her brother gravely as she tapped the end of her cigarette and dropped it in the ash receiver. "Why don't you use your brains?" she asked. "Can't you see that the more father notices that you have no ambition, the tighter he will draw the rein?"

"I have plenty of ambition."

"For work?"

"Oh, you make me tired!"

The young man resumed his impatient walk.

The sister leaned back in her chair, her dark eyes following him, without the hint of a smile.

"I'd like to see you tired," she said seriously.

He turned on her. "Ever see me after a polo game?"

"But life isn't a game, Edgar."

He opened his eyes at her and grimaced scornfully.

"The grave and reverend senior again; nearly ready to graduate, and inform the world that

'Life is real, life is earnest,

And the grave is not its goal!'

Might as well be in the grave at once as dig and grind the days away. Heaven help us when you get home! I suppose you must go through the fine-spun theory stage like the usual attack of measles."

"Measles are catching," remarked Kathleen quietly.

"Exactly! but I'm mighty glad I'm immune from the know-it-all disease."

"That would mean that you'd had it, Edgar, and you never did have it; not even a rash. Open the window, please. We're a little blue in here."

Edgar threw open the unoffending window with a force that threatened the mechanism.

"No doubt," he said, "you'd like to have me live, like that cowboy, in a stable, and get my own meals."

"A garage would suit you better, I suppose," returned Kathleen. "What are you talking about?"

"Hasn't mother written you of the genius who has come out of the wild and woolly to get his Pegasus curried in New York?"

"Has mother taken up a genius? – Mother, of all people!"

"Why, she's had him at the house, and insists on my being civil to him; but I haven't seen him yet. I get enough of him right at the breakfast and dinner table without hunting up the stable. His ambition is at the bottom of my coffee cup, and his genius for hard work is served as an entrée every night."

"Oh," – Kathleen's face gained a ray of interest, – "you mean that cousin of ours."

"He's no cousin," retorted Edgar. "He's one of mother's fifty-seven varieties, a sort of step-neighbor-in-law of ours. When father and mother were out at the mine they met him. I think it was up to him to stay out there and make that mine pay. I think if he'd shown a little genius for hard work right there, it would have been more to the point."

"Yes, mother wrote me." Kathleen's tone was tinged with the interest in her eyes. "What is his name, now?"

"Sidney," responded Edgar with open disgust. "Oh, I'm authority on his name all right, – Philip Sidney; I've had it dinged into my ears faithfully."

"A name to live up to," remarked the girl. "It was interesting, Aunt Mary leaving him her money."

"It would have been more interesting if she'd had anything to leave."

Edgar had thrown himself back on the divan and was watching curtains and smoke draw out the window.

"Do you remember," continued his sister, "what nice cookies Aunt Mary used to give us when we were little? Mother felt sorry not to be here when she died."

"Oh, mother's ripping," declared Edgar, his cheerfulness restored by some inspiriting memory. "She's had a hand-to-hand, knock-down-and-drag-out with the old gargoyle that holds the fort over there at Aunt Mary's."

"What do you mean?" drawled Kathleen with faint disgust.

"Mother gave a graphic account of the fray at dinner one night. I wasn't giving the story my whole attention, but I gathered that she and the doughty Eliza each got hold of one end of Aunt Mary's camel's hair shawl and had a tug of war; and Eliza's cat won the day for her by jumping on mother and nearly clawing her furs off."

"Edgar," protested Kathleen, "your bump of respect is an intaglio!"

"Well, I think I've got it about right. There were diamonds mixed up in it too. I believe Eliza wears a diamond tiara at her work so as to keep it away from mother; while the parent of the worshipful Philip came in for a diamond necklace, and mother was left nothing but cold neglect."

"Absurd!" breathed Kathleen. "Aunt Mary was poor as a church mouse."

"Well, whatever happened, the fur was rising on the back of mother's neck, and I didn't know but there would be a silver lining to the cloud and she'd cut Philip Sidney; but," with a heavy sigh, "no such luck. The cowboy still gallops his Pegasus over my prostrate body every meal."

"What do you mean by a stable?" asked Kathleen.

"Why, Pegasus has to have one, I suppose."

"Is that all? Are you only being witty?"

"Not a bit of it. You know the literal truth is all I'm ever up to. The genius has a room over a stable, and an oil stove!"

"Why a stable?"

"Convenient for Pegasus, I suppose," responded Edgar carelessly. "Beside, doubtless he would feel out of place in any abode more civilized."

"Edgar Fabian, that's nonsense. I remember his mother, when she came East years ago, don't you?"

"They're as poor as Job's turkey," said Edgar with a careless shrug. "That's why he jumped at Aunt Mary's pittance like a trout at a fly."

"Oh, Edgar, what an object-lesson for you!" Kathleen clasped her hands.

"Oh, of course!" ejaculated Edgar, his even teeth very much clenched.

"You ought to go to see him!"

"So I've heard," with intense sarcasm. "Mother has bored the life out of me."

"It isn't civil not to," said Kathleen, relapsing into languor. "He's a sort of a relative."

"Yes. The sort to keep away from. If I went up there, it would be to take his mahl-stick and smash his face."

"Nice, hospitable plan," remarked Kathleen. "Possibly he wouldn't permit it."

"Oh, I've no doubt he'd think it was real mean and pick up a fan and slap me on the wrist. Oh, forget him! Say, Kath," as if with sudden remembrance, "do you know I came off without my purse to-day?"

The girl's eyes gained a curious expression. She was silent a moment, hands clasped around her knee. Under her gaze her brother picked up the guitar again and his nervous fingers swept the strings.

"I thought you said this was a business trip."

"It is. Go down and ask them at the bank if I didn't put a bee in their bonnet this morning."

"Then the house pays your expenses. Your purse didn't have to suffer."

"Oh, well, if you want the literal truth, I'm flat broke."

"You always are flat broke at this time in the month. Why shouldn't I be? – as a matter of fact, I am."

Edgar frowned. "What have you been buying?"

"A new microscope. I've saved for it, Edgar."

The girl cast a warm glance across the room to where, on a table, stood a tall slender object covered with a cloth.

"Saved for it!" was the disgusted response. "Shameful idea when the Ad. could just as well buy you an observatory."

"I don't believe father is nearly as rich as you think he is," said the girl defensively.

"He's the prize tight-wad. That's what he is. Look at our summers! Isn't it enough that instead of Newport the Fabians rusticate on Brewster's Island?"

"He met mother there. He loves it."

"Well, I can tell you, mother would exchange a whole lot of sentiment for one good whirl at Newport or some other place where there are live ones! Say, Kath, be a good fellow. You can spare a dime or so. Ten dollars would be better than nothing. I'll give it back the first of the month, honor bright. Think of my having to depend on taxis! It would make angels weep."

The sister continued to regard him and he reddened under the pensive gaze, and twanged the guitar.

"You never have paid me back the first of the month and I wish you wouldn't promise," she said at last; "but I'll tell you what I'll do. I'm coming home to spend Sunday and I will give you the ten dollars – it's all I have just now – if you will take me to see that cousin of ours."

"What cousin?" asked Edgar.

"Aunt Mary's heir. The artist."

"Why are you determined to stuff him down my throat? He is absolutely no kin to us and has no demand on us. I decline."

"Then I shall go with mother," declared Kathleen, in her laziest drawl. "I'm sure she will take me. I am interested in his determination. I want to see – his oil stove. I want to pat Pegasus."

"Go, then, and much good may it do you!" Edgar put down the guitar and started up. "Where's the ten, Kath? Awful sorry to bother you."

The girl did not rise. She shook her head.

"You haven't earned it. I've decided you must work for this one, before it follows its predecessors to that bourne from which no bank-note returneth."

There was an unusual sparkle in the eyes that met the blue ones.

"You said you could go with mother," protested Edgar.

"I can if I have to, but I prefer to hunt up stables with a man."

"Oh, confound it! you always get your own way. Fork over, then. I'll go with you; but it just means fastening him right on us. We'll be cousins then for sure."

Kathleen went to her closet and reappeared with the ten dollar bill. With a gesture of farewell she touched her finger to her lips and bestowed the kiss on the bank-note.

Her brother looked at his watch.

"Great Scott! I've got to hike for that train," he said; and wriggling into his overcoat he kissed his sister's cheek, and hurried away.