Читать книгу The Eddy - Clarence Louis Cullen - Страница 4

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Mrs. Treharne, four years older than Laura, had the somewhat hollow-eyed plumpness of an indoor woman who wars fiercely but hopelessly and unequally upon ever-threatening embonpoint. Her triumphs over the enemy never were better than drawn battles; she was compelled to devote at least three hours a day to her determined, almost hysterical warfare upon the natural process of accretion, solely that she might not gain; long before she had abandoned hope of achieving the fragility of outline she pined for. The nostrums she employed in this incessant conflict had made her fragile, however, in at least one respect: her health; besides imparting a certain greenish-yellow tint to her skin which made her make-up box almost as necessary a part of her equipment as the hands wherewith she applied the mitigating tints. Five years before she had been a fresh-skinned, clear-eyed, naturally pretty woman of a somewhat inconsequential type; but the necessity—the hideous duty, as she deemed it—of banting without cessation or intermission had left her merely her regular features upon which artificially to create the illusion of a youthfulness she was far from feeling. With the final touch added for an appearance in a company, she still looked dainty, certainly of impeccable grooming. But she had learned to be uneasy under the scrutiny of eyes that she felt to be unfriendly, and she had become exceptionally partial to veils. Her hair, originally a light, unaggressive red, had been "done over" into a sort of vivid, brittle "Titian." There were occasional reddish gleams in her slightly furtive, small eyes of hazel. She had a child's foot, and she was inordinately proud of her tiny, waxy, too-white hands. In a company she smiled continuously in order to display her teeth, which were perfectly assembled and of an almost porcelain whiteness. Mrs. Treharne was called a pretty woman even by those who perhaps entertained unexpressed misgivings as to how she might look at her rising hour.

After Laura had gone Mrs. Treharne tried, before her glass, the effect of a smile—somewhat frozen and quickly obliterated—upon her carefully studied and artfully executed make-up mask; then sighed drearily as she sank into a chair and began polishing her nails upon her palms.

"Of course Laura is right, as usual—it wouldn't help matters particularly if Louise were a boy," she mused with puckered brows. "A boy might be longer in finding out how affairs stood here; but when he did find out—what a storm, what heroics, what juvenile reproaches, what a stagey to-do there would be! Perhaps, after all, it is as well that Louise is—Louise. She can adapt herself to—to things as they are. She must. There's no other way. She can't have lost the tact she possessed as a child. I wish I knew her better, so that I could have some sort of an idea just what to expect from her. I hope she understands the good sense of closing one's eyes to things that can't be improved by looking at them. Perhaps I shall be lucky enough to marry her off quickly. That would be almost too easy a solution for me, with my vile luck, to expect."

She rang for Heloise to have her furs in readiness.

"It was thoroughly decent of Laura," she thought on, finger at lip, "to advise me to bolt all this and take refuge with her. But I haven't the nerve—that's the plain truth of it. How could I ask Treharne to renew the allowance? What a triumph it would be for him if I were to do that! He would be too Quixotic to view it as a triumph, but that wouldn't alleviate my humiliation in asking him. And what would the three or four thousand a year be in comparison with—"

"The car is at the door, Madame," announced Heloise, appearing with the sables. Mrs. Treharne smiled at herself before the glass to smooth out the wrinkles of her musing, tripped lightly down the stairs, and was humming blithely when she nodded indulgently at the ponderous, shaggy-furred man who was waiting to help her into the huge, over-lavish, pulsing car.

"You take your time, don't you?" grumbled Judd, his breath vaporing into broken clouds in the raw December air. "Does that monkey-chattering maid of yours sleep all the time, or has she a case on with the butler? I've been tooting here for ten minutes."

His tone was snarling, and his thin lips were drawn away from gnarled teeth. Judd was one of those physical anomalies, a man of Falstaffian girth with sharp, peaked, predatory features. He pulled off his fur cap to readjust it before stepping into the car, showing a head wholly bald except for crinkly wisps of mixed red and gray hair at the sides and back. There was a deep crease at the back of his neck where the scant hair left off, and his deep-set, red-rimmed little watery-blue eyes were alert and suspicious.

Mrs. Treharne laughed so carelessly that it almost seemed as if she deliberately sought to intensify his irritation.

"Still in your villanous humor?" she asked him, a taunt in her tone. "I believe this is one of the days—they grow rather frequent—when you should be allowed—required, I should say—to ride alone."

"Well, that's easy enough to do," grumbled Judd in a voice curiously high-pitched for so vast a man. "See here, perhaps you are conceited enough to think—"

Very deliberately, and still smiling, Mrs. Treharne rose to leave the car. Judd looked blankly nonplussed.

"Oh, stop this infernal nonsense, Tony," he said in a tone tinged with alarm. Then his ruddy face expanded into a grin behind which there seemed to be little mirth. "D'ye know, I believe you would be cat enough to step out, before we start, and—"

"No names, if you please," Mrs. Treharne interrupted, choppily. "Decidedly I shall leave the car if you feel that it is impossible for you to behave yourself like a human being. I have ceased to extract enjoyment from your growling humors."

It was a tone she might have taken in addressing a menial. Obviously, however, it was the tone required for the proper subjugation of Judd. He exuded a falsetto laugh and patted her hand, at the same time motioning the chauffeur to start.

"I don't complain of your hellish moods, do I, Tony?" he asked her, still chuckling unpleasantly. "In fact, I believe I rather like the feel of your claws. All the same, there may come a day when—"

"When I shall enjoy the sight of your back," calmly interrupted the apparently complaisant woman at his side. "Speed the day!"

Judd's face took on a half-chagrined, half-worried look. It generally did when Mrs. Treharne was operating upon him what she privately called her "system." This "system," in essence, consisted in her invariable habit of quarreling with him and reducing him to abjectness by more or less veiled threats of abandoning him to a lonesome fate whenever she had something to ask of him, or to tell him, that she knew quite well would arouse his surliness. It was a neatly-devised balancing method, and Mrs. Treharne as well understood the vital advantage of striking the first blow as she apprehended the extent of her power over him.

"I say, Tony," said Judd, patting her gloved hands again, "you wouldn't really cut and run just because—"

"Spare me your elephantine sentimentalities, please," she put in, a little less indifferently. "You were never ordained for that sort of thing. Anyhow, I would like a sane word or two with you. I've something to tell you."

"It's money, of course," said Judd, sulkily, leaving off patting her hands with ludicrous suddenness. "More damned extravagance, eh?"

"No, it's neither money nor extravagance, beautifully as those two words trot in tandem," she said, airily, yet with a new soothing note in her tone. "It is this: Louise is coming home. At once. Tonight."

"The devil she is!" blurted Judd. "What for? Who sent for her? How long is she going to stay? What's it all about?"

"One question at a time, please," Mrs. Treharne replied, looking indifferently out toward the bleak river as they shot by Claremont. It was a palpably assumed air of indifference; but Judd, unskilled at penetrating feminine subtlety, did not discern the nervousness underlying her careless manner. "My daughter is coming home because she wants to. Nobody sent for her. She is not going back to school. She announces that in her letter to me; and she is old enough to know her mind and to be entitled to freedom of action. She is remaining permanently with me."

She had expected him to storm upon hearing the news in full. Judd, however, was an individual who owed a considerable part of his immense success as a man of affairs to his studied and carefully-elaborated habit of never doing the obvious.

He leaned back in the car and half-screened his turkey-like eyes with their small, veinous lids. Mrs. Treharne, surprised at his silence, went on hastily:

"I am wretchedly disturbed over it. I know that I have no fit home to offer her. I know that I have completely undermined her chance in life. But what can I do? She can't live alone. And she merely brings the difficulty to a head by coming now. She must come home some time, of course. The child has not spent her holidays or her summer vacations with me for four years. Always she has been pushed about among school friends, who, glad as they and their people may have been to have her, surely must have wondered why she did not come home."

Judd fluttered his eyelids and leaned forward in his seat.

"I understand perfectly, of course," he said with a sort of leer. "I understand, you understand, we understand, they understand, everybody understands. Then what are you making such a devil of a rumpus about it for?"

"Well," said Mrs. Treharne, making the mistake, in dealing with Judd, of falling into a slightly apologetic tone, "I thought that perhaps you might——"

"Wait a minute, Antoinette," interrupted Judd with suave brutality, leaning back again among the cushions and once more half-closing his eyes. "It doesn't matter a damn what I think. I can stand it if you can. She isn't my daughter, you know. She's your daughter. I suppose she has been taught to mind her own business? Very well. I can stand the situation if you can."

The slur cut like a rattan, as Judd, perceiving a rare advantage, thoroughly intended that it should. He made it worse by patting her hands as he spoke. She hated him with an almost virtuous intensity as he uttered the sneer. But she said no more about her daughter's impending arrival during the remainder of the ride.