Читать книгу The Eddy - Clarence Louis Cullen - Страница 5

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The chair car was well filled when Louise somewhat misty-eyed from parting with the doleful group of school intimates who convoyed her to the little station, walked down the aisle just as the train began to move. Not in the least sorry because she was finally leaving school, she was affected by the glumness of the girls who had insisted upon bidding her goodbye at the train; but she had not actually wept at any stage of the parting. Perhaps the tear-reddened eyes and noses of her school friends had slightly touched her risibles; for her by no means latent sense of humor invariably struggled to the surface when she found herself figuring in anything of the nature of a "scene." She was not lacking in what the iron-jowled dowagers call "becoming sensibilities;" but she was habitually self-contained, and tears were unusual with her. Nevertheless, she found difficulty in properly discerning objects, even at close range, as she searched for her place; and it was due to her filmed vision that she took a chair that did not correspond to the number on her Pullman ticket.

Women as well as men pivoted about in their chairs for a second glance at Louise. Her unusual height was emphasized by the loose-fitting fur-lined cloth coat which fell straight from her shoulders to her skirt's hem. When she removed the coat her simple one-piece gown of blue cloth caused cogitating men in surrounding chairs to marvel as to how she had ever contrived to get into it, and, worse, how she would possibly manage to get out of it. The guimpe of the dress was of a creamy embroidery that dissolved bafflingly into the whiteness of her neck.

Louise might have reminded an imaginative traveler, had there been such in the car, of a freshly-blown, firm-petalled chrysanthemum. There are women in whom you first discern an utter, convincing wholesomeness; later you become aware of their beauty. Their wholesomeness, you think upon your first comprehensive glance, is like that of an early vernal breeze, of dew upon clean grass; then the contributing elements of their beauty emerge upon your consciousness as through a succession of lifted veils. Louise Treharne was of this type. Unusually tall, she had none of the raw-boned angularities of the over-trained young woman who makes a fad of gymnasium or out-of-doors activities and who thoughtlessly sacrifices the beauty of contour on the profitless altar of over-athleticism. Slender, yet well rounded, the fine amplitude of her proportions caused her to look several years older than her age. Her face contributed to this effect. It was a face such as the imaginary imaginative traveller might vaguely have associated with the faces of women stamped upon Roman coins. There is a sort of creamy, vivid pallor that, equally with ruddiness, denotes perfect health and vigor. This was Louise's; and the uncommon regularity of her features was tempered and softened by varying phases of expression that spoke of an habitual serenity and a searching common sense. Her hair, of the darkest shade of lustrous auburn, waved back loosely and often a bit rebelliously to the great knotted coil in which it was caught at the back of her finely-lathed head. Her eyes, the corners of which had an almost indistinguishable slant that only became agreeably noticeable when she smiled, were wide and full, and of so dark a brown that, at night or in shadowed rooms, they were often supposed to be black.

She had barely settled herself, chin in palm, to gaze out of the window at the blurred landscape of ice-crusted snow, before she became somewhat confusedly conscious of a loomful figure standing patiently in the aisle beside her. When she suddenly turned her head and surveyed him with calm, questioning eyes, he pulled off his cap of plaid a bit awkwardly and smiled. She mentally observed that his mouth was a trifle over-large; but his smile, for all of that, she thought, was the smile of a man. With the woman's mystifying ability mentally to absorb innumerable details at a mere glance, she noticed (without in the least seeming to notice) that he was of unusual stature and of the type called by women, in their between-themselves appraisals, "delightfully scrubbed-looking;" that he was perhaps a little above thirty; that he had a closely-shaven rugged jaw and somewhat jutting chin, huge, well-cared-for hands, rather closely-cropped brown hair slightly greying at the sides, candid grey eyes with tiny lines of humor and experience running away from their corners. She noticed, too, that he was not wearing gloves, which was satisfying. All of the other men in the over-warm car were wearing their heavy cold-weather gloves, and she was slightly contemptuous of this as an unmasculine affectation. Finally, in the same single glance, she perceived his visible embarrassment....

"Pray don't disturb yourself," he said, fumbling his cap with both hands. ("Why don't all men talk basso?" thought Louise.) "I can reach it without your moving at all, if you will permit me. My bag, you know. There are some papers in it that I want to go over, and——"

He stopped dead and looked quite wretched when Louise came to her feet.

"I am in your chair," she said, as he stooped to pick up a bag that, she now noticed for the first time, was wedged by the seat she had unwittingly taken. She was about to remove her coat to the back of the chair in front—her rightful place, as she quickly remembered when she saw the number on the panel—when he put out a determinedly detaining hand.

"Don't make me feel such a disgraceful nuisance, I beg of you," he said with an earnestness that was out of keeping with his twinkling eyes. "One chair is as good as another—better, in fact, when one already has possession of it. This bag is my only gear. You'll keep the seat, won't you? That's immensely kind of you," as Louise resumed the chair. "I wouldn't have had you move for——"

"Of course," she interrupted him with a quietly frank laugh, "I hadn't the slightest intention of moving. It is more than good of you to suppose that I meant to be so agreeable."

"That," he pronounced, again with his liberal smile, "is probably a neat, quickly-conceived way of letting me down easily, for which I am nevertheless grateful;" and, bowing, he took the chair in front of her, dug into his bag and quickly became immersed in a batch of formidable looking documents. Louise, again leaning back in her chair, decided that the rear of his head was decidedly shapely.

The excessive warmth of the car was making her sleepy, and she closed her eyes and surrendered herself to dozing reflections. She was dubious as to the reception her mother would give her. She had not heard from her mother since writing the letter in which she had calmly announced, as something settled and therefore not open to debate, that she was through with school and would not return to Miss Mayhew's after the holidays. Laura had been only partly right as to Louise's reason for quitting school. Louise, it was true, was glad enough to escape the nightmare of "commencement exercises" by leaving half a year in advance of her graduation. But she had a far deeper reason for quitting the school without consultation with her mother. She wanted to be at home; any sort of a home. She had no very pleasurable recollections of the places—there had been many of them, and they had not been homes—in which she had lived with her mother before being sent to the finishing school in central New York. Her young girlhood had been a period of aimless drifting, at seashore and mountain resorts in summer, and in tiny but by no means snug apartments in New York in the winter; her mother's restlessness and her frequently expressed dislike of "smug domesticity" had combined against her ever establishing anything even approximating a genuine home for herself and her daughter. Louise only vaguely remembered her father; the separation, followed by a divorce, had taken place when she was only nine years old. At fifteen she had been trundled off to the up-State finishing school; and the school had been the only home she had known for close upon four years. Her mother had visited her twice a year, taking her to the seaside for a week or so during the summer vacation and to Lakewood for a brief stay during the holidays. Her mother had always been provided with some sort of an excuse for not taking Louise to her home—Louise knew that she must have some sort of a home—in New York. The place was being overhauled, guests had unexpectedly swooped upon her, she was about to start upon a journey; Louise had listened, mystified, so often to these reasons her mother gave for not having her daughter with her in the city at times when nearly all the other girls were leaving the school for home visits that she at length came to believe that her mother was treating her with somewhat humiliating disingenuousness. This feeling, however, aroused less resentment in the girl than it did a feeling of distress; she could not avoid, as she grew older, the conviction that she was being neglected. The feeling became intensified when, year after year, she was shunted, as she considered, on visits to the homes of her schoolgirl friends. It was natural enough, when she observed how cherished the other girls were in their homes, how the arms of strong affection constantly were thrown around them, that she should compare her own thrust-aside state with theirs and that she should develop the intense longing of a normal, affectionate young woman for similar love and protection.

She had no sense of resentment against her mother; it was rather a feeling of regret that the curious aloofness between them, which she had no possible way of understanding, had ever risen. She hoped that perhaps, after all, her mother might really need her as sorely as she felt that she herself needed a mother and a home. She was returning to her mother with an open mind; no longer a child to be shunted and evaded, but a woman to be treated with frankness. There were some points in connection with her mother's affairs that she did not understand but as to which she had no undue curiosity. But she was intensely glad to be at least on her way home—on her way to her mother, at any rate—for good and all; and she formed plans for drawing nearer to her mother, wistfully hoping that the plans would have the fruition she longed for.

Louise's reflections gradually, with the purring movement of the train, became merged into dreams. She awoke with a start when the train came to a grinding stop at a station. She began cutting the pages of a magazine when, glancing up, she saw the man with whom she had held the little colloquy a while before striding down the aisle of the car. In his hand was an unopened telegram. She noticed that he was looking at her as he approached her seat, and that he was knitting his brow in a puzzled, serious sort of way.

He stopped when he came to her chair and held out the telegram.

"The boy paged the dining car, where I happened to be," he said to her, "and, thinking that you might still be asleep, I took the liberty of signing for your telegram."

The telegram was addressed to "Miss Louise Treharne." It was from one of Louise's girl friends at the school, telling her that a piece of hand-baggage that Louise had absent-mindedly left at the station was being forwarded.

Louise scarcely glanced at the contents of the telegram, so great was her astonishment over its method of reaching her.

"You grant, of course, that I have reason to be puzzled," she said to him, unconstrainedly but entirely in earnest. She noticed that he was far from being unconstrained, and that a certain seriousness sat upon his strong features which she had not before observed. "It is plain that you knew this telegram was for me."

"Otherwise, of course," he replied, a little huskily, "I should not have presumed to sign for it. I should not have signed for it in any case had I not supposed you to be asleep. I feared, you see, that you might miss it."

"But you do not in the least appease my curiosity," said Louise, smiling somewhat nervously. "If you knew me—as it seems of course you do—I cannot understand why you did not reveal yourself when we had our little conversation a while ago."

"But I did not know—I should say I did not recall you then," he said, plainly flustered.

"You only add to the mystery," said Louise. "You will enlighten me, of course?"

He whirled his chair about so that, sitting back on the arm of it, he could face her.

"It is simple enough," he explained, with a hesitancy which Louise did not fail to note. "When the lad with the telegram came through the dining car, calling out your name, I could not fail, with that startling reminder, to remember——" He broke off as if reluctant to proceed.

"Yes?" put in Louise, a bit proddingly.

"Well, I could not fail to remember your father's daughter," he said in a low tone, obviously striving to regain some ease of manner.

"You know my father?" said Louise, her sense of the mystery of it all increasing rather than abating.

"Yes," he replied, still struggling, as Louise could see, to conquer a trouble that was visible on his features. "I am your father's attorney. I know your mother quite well, too. But this is the first time I have seen you since you were a little girl in pigtails and highly-starched skirts." He strove to make his laugh sound natural and easy, but it was a failure. Some worry, as to the nature of which Louise could of course not even guess, was in his voice as well as on his face.

Louise impulsively held out her hand.

"The mystery is cleared," she said, brightly, "and it is delightful to meet so old a friend, no matter how oddly. Won't you sit down and tell me all about my father and my mother and myself and yourself and—and everybody? Or is it permissible for one to cross-examine so solemn and cautious a person as an attorney?"

He sat down in the chair facing hers and studied, constrainedly, the pattern of the cap which he held out before him. Then he glanced at his watch.

"I am leaving the train at Peekskill," he said, "so there is not much time. You are to be home for the holidays?"

"For the holidays and for all time," she replied with a certain eagerness. "You have visited my mother's home? Because, you know, I never have." She had not meant to say that so baldly, and she was sorry for the slip as soon as the words were out. "It is on Riverside Drive. Therefore it must be lovely; the view, at any rate. It is lovely, isn't it?"

He deliberately evaded the question.

"You are not returning to school at all?" he pointedly counter-questioned her instead. "Does your mother know this? I hope I don't seem inquisitive. But I am really interested in knowing."

"You trap me into a confession," replied Louise, smiling. "I simply announced to my mother that I was through with school, and here I am on my way home. I am hoping that she will not be excessively angry with me. Do you think she will be?"

Louise was finding him decidedly difficult, in spite of her efforts to put him at his ease. He became so immersed in cogitations which Louise could see were of the troubled sort that he seemed scarcely to listen to what she was saying.

"You have not answered my question, you know, Mr.—Mr.—you see I do not even know your name," said Louise, after a pause, pretending to be aggrieved.

"Oh, pardon the rudeness, won't you?" he said, hastily. "Blythe is my name—John Blythe. And forgive me for not having caught your question, Miss Treharne. You don't mind asking it again?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Louise, appeased, but still curious as to the cause of the perturbation he had exhibited ever since he had brought her the telegram, and which had become more pronounced since she had told him that she was on her way to her mother's home to remain there. She had not failed to notice his quite manifest unwillingness to speak of her mother. Not of a prying nature, she concluded, without framing the thought in words, that, if he had a reason for that unwillingness, it was decidedly his privilege to keep the reason to himself. But her curiosity as to her father was not so easily repressed. She had not heard him spoken of—her mother forbade the subject—for many years, nor had he ever communicated with her directly; but her childish recollections of him were very sweet. She could not resist the temptation to speak of him to this newly-revealed friend. Why should she not, she thought, since he seemed to be so well acquainted with her parents—and was her father's attorney besides?

"Mr. Blythe," she found herself saying in a tone of unusual hesitation for her, a young woman of perfect frankness, "I feel that I may ask you about my father, seeing that you know—well, everything concerning him and my mother and—myself. It has been so many, many years since I have even heard him mentioned. Where is he? When did you see him last?"

"He lives in Hawaii, Miss Treharne—I saw him in Honolulu a few years ago," replied Blythe, promptly enough.

Louise pondered. There was nothing specific she wanted to ask about her father. But she considered that Blythe had not told her very much.

"Is he—well, nice?" she asked him.

Blythe, disturbed as he was, could not help but smile at the naïve question. But he sobered before he replied.

"He is almost, if not quite, the finest man I ever knew," he said. "I hope to be allowed to tell you all about him some time. I shall be writing to him presently. Tut! Here is Peekskill. I am dropping off here for a few hours," and he thrust his arms into his overcoat.

"You will send my love to my father in your letter?" said Louise, her eyes slightly filmed, touching him upon the sleeve. He looked gravely down upon her; her words touched him keenly.

"I am glad you have asked me to do that, Miss Treharne," he said. "And he will be more than glad—depend upon that. Goodbye—not for very long, I hope. I am overjoyed to have come upon you again—especially at this time," and he took her two hands in his huge palms for an instant and was gone.

"'Especially at this time'—I wonder what he meant by that?" thought Louise. He waved at her as he passed beneath her car window. She was conscious that his smile in doing so was slightly forced; an instant before he caught sight of her through the window she had noticed that his face was clouded with worry.

An hour later Louise was weaving her way through the rushing, holiday-chattering crowd toward the exit gate at the Grand Central station. Peering toward the gate, and able, with her unusual height, to see over the heads of the hurrying women and most of the men, she espied her mother, looking somewhat petitely stodgy beside the stately Laura, gazing rather wearily through the iron lattice. "I think I see myself being sent to bed without any supper," whimsically thought Louise, considering, as she drew nearer, her mother's bored expression. Louise was glad Laura was with her mother; when a mere growing girl she had become gratefully familiar with Laura's self-styled "ameliorating knack." She had become very fond of her mother's handsome, superbly-capricious but sunny-natured friend before being packed off to school; and now her eyes became slightly blurred at the thought that Laura had remembered her and had thought enough of her to be with her mother at her home-coming.

"Here is our blossomy, bronze-haired Boadicea!" Louise heard Laura say as she was taken into the older woman's arms and heartily kissed. Then Laura thrust her away with assumed annoyance. "But, minx, you are taller than I am; a full inch, maybe two, taller! How do you ever expect me to forgive you that, child?" and she smiled, drawing Louise toward her again, and hugged her once more.

Louise's mother brushed the girl's cheek with her lips, her daughter bending toward her.

"You are grotesquely tall, aren't you, dear?" said Mrs. Treharne, not very good-naturedly. Her petulance over Louise's return was by no means allayed; and her masseuse had told her that evening that she had gained two pounds in a week! "You will have to get clothes that will reduce your shocking stature." Then, swept by a momentary compunction, "You are well, dear? You are looking excessively well."

Louise was not hurt by the tone of her mother's greeting. She was well acquainted with her parent's irritableness, and even more familiar with her indurated indifference. The main thing was that she was back with her mother, and with a chance to strive for a better understanding.

"But aren't you a mite thinner, mother?" Louise asked, thoroughly meaning it; for there wasn't an ounce of sycophancy in Louise's make-up, and she noticed her mother's hollowness of eye and generally distraught air and so concluded that she was losing in weight.

Mrs. Treharne flared instantly.

"You are not to make game of me, my dear, whatever else you do," she said, icily, to her astonished daughter. Laura laughed outright and caught Louise's arm in her own as they started through the station.

"Don't be absurd, Antoinette—the dear is not making game of you, as you call it," said Laura. "You know she is incapable of that."

"But I am all at sea," said Louise, still mystified over her mother's inexplicable outbreak. "What is it? What did I say that was wrong?"

Her mother looked at her and saw that the girl was wholly innocent of the sarcasm she had hastily attributed to her.

"You know very well, Louise," she said, in a tone meant to be appeasing, "that I am hideously, scandalously, shockingly fat; and you cannot expect me to be cheerful when you begin to taunt me with it before you have had more than one glance at me."

"But you are anything but stout, mother dear, and I really meant what I said," put in Louise. "Why, it perfectly stuns me to think you could suppose that I——"

"Tut-tut—can't we find something more engaging to talk about than what the weighing scales do or do not tell us?" broke in Laura, gaily. "Antoinette, dear, won't you see if you can attract that taxicab man's attention?"

When Mrs. Treharne walked over to the curb to summon the chauffeur of the taxicab Laura seized the moment to say to Louise in a low tone.

"Some things have occurred to disturb your mother, dear; so don't mind if she seems a bit difficile tonight, will you? She is a little annoyed over your intention not to return to the school; but I shall help you out there. I am going home with you now for a little while. You'll depend upon your old friend Laura?"

Louise, watching her mother, furtively pressed Laura's hand.

"You know how I always loved you as a little girl?" she said simply. Laura's eyes became suddenly suffused with tears. She knew the girl's need of affection; and she vowed in her heart, then and there, crowding back the tears when she saw Mrs. Treharne beckoning to them, that she would stand in the place of the girl's mother if the time ever came—and she more than dimly apprehended that come it would—when such a thing need be.

Laura forced the conversation and strove to give to it a note of gayety as the taxicab sped through the icy streets. Once, in addressing her, Louise called her "Mrs. Stedham." Instantly Laura assumed a mighty pretence of annoyed hostility.

"Mrs. Hoity-Toity, child," she said, severely, to Louise. "You are not supposing, I hope, that I shall permit a woman a full two inches taller than I am to call me any such an outlandish name as 'Mrs. Stedham'? Great heaven, am I not old enough as it is? I am Laura to you, dear; flatter me at least, by making me believe that you consider me young enough to be called by my christened name; the aged have so few compensations, you know," and Louise, not without initial difficulty, however—for Laura had always been a woman to her—called her Laura thenceforth and was pleased to imagine that the elder woman was her "big, grown-up" sister.

On the ride to the Riverside Drive house Louise, suddenly remembering, mentioned Blythe. She described the incident through which he had made himself known to her, but forbore, out of a certain diffidence which she always felt in her mother's presence, saying anything about Blythe's allusions to her father. She omitted that part altogether.

"How extraordinary!" commented Laura. "But John Blythe's practice is always sending him prowling about the country on trains. Everybody who knows about such things tells me what an enormously important personage he is becoming in the dry-as-dust legal world. I am sure he does astonishingly well with my hideously complicated affairs—you know he is my legal man, Louise. Isn't it odd that you should have met him in such a way? Didn't you find him rather—well, distingué, we'll say, Louise?"

"I thought him very fine and——" Louise strove for a word haltingly.

"And with an air about him—of course you did, my dear; everybody does," Laura aided her. "If he wasn't such a perfectly wrong-headed, wrapped-up-in-the-law sort of a person he would have fallen in love with me long ago, even if I am old enough to be his grandmother; he is thirty-two, I believe, and I am bordering upon thirty-six; but he barely notices me in that way," with an acute emphasis on the "that," "though we are no end of first-rate friends; pals, I was going to say; for I've known him ever since——"

Laura came to a sudden stop. She had been upon the brink of saying "ever since Blythe had helped her to get her divorce from Rodney Stedham;" but she recollected in time that that was not exactly the sort of a chronological milestone that should be reverted to in the presence of a girl just that day out of school.

"Louise, did you tell Mr. Blythe that you were to remain with me—permanently?" asked Mrs. Treharne, constrainedly, suddenly joining in the conversation.

Louise reflected a moment before replying.

"Why, yes, mother, I did; he asked me about it, I recall now," she said.

"Did he have any comment to make?" asked her mother in a reduced tone.

"Why, no, dear," said Louise. "In fact, he appeared to be considerably worried about something, and so——" Louise felt herself being furtively prodded by Laura, and she left off suddenly.

Opportunely, the taxicab drew up in front of an ornate house on the Drive.

"Do you live here, mother?" Louise inquired, innocently. "I wonder how I managed to form the impression that you were living in an apartment?"

Mrs. Treharne pretended not to have heard her. The door was silently opened by a man in livery. Laura was watching Louise keenly as the girl's eyes took in the splendor of the foyer and hall. The magnificence was of a Pittsburgesque sort, in which beauty is sacrificed to a mere overwhelming extravagance; but, for its extravagance alone, not less than for its astonishing ornateness, it had a sort of impressiveness.

"Why, how dazzling!" Louise could not refrain from commenting. "How delightfully different from what I expected! I am so glad that I am home—home!" She lingered lovingly upon the word.

It was a difficult moment for Laura. But she was prepared for it. In addition to the "ameliorating knack" she had a way of being ready for contingencies.

"Antoinette," she said, mainly to stop Louise, "I have one of my headaches coming on. Can't we have some tea in your rooms?"

"I was just about to suggest that," said Mrs. Treharne, drily, and presently the three women were in her sumptuous sitting room, overlooking the twinkling lights of the Hudson. A butler spread the cloth and brought a fowl and salad and jams, while Louise roamed about exclaiming over the beauty of the rooms, and Laura fought desperately against her inclination to brood.

Laura contributed whatever of merriness there was to the home-coming feast. Mrs. Treharne confined herself to occasional questions directed at Louise, and the girl saw that her mother was tired and out of sorts; she remembered what Laura had told her at the station of her mother's state of mind "over matters," and she made the allowances that she had been accustomed to make for her mother since her earliest years.

The three women were still at the table, beginning to make allusions to bed—Laura had summoned her car by 'phone, for it was close upon eleven—when a great-girthed man, in a sealskin coat that fell almost to his heels, an opera hat set rakishly on one side of his bald head, and his turkey-like eyes still more reddened with the libations that his lurching gait made still more obvious, lumbered into the room without the least attempt at knocking on the door.

"Hay-o, folks—having a little party?" said Judd, lurching toward the table. "Am I in on it?" and he plumped himself drunkenly into a chair.

Laura rose at the first sight of him. Mrs. Treharne kept her seat but gazed at him vitriolically. Louise looked at him quietly enough. She was intensely mystified, but quite willing to wait for any information as to the intrusion. No information, however, was forthcoming.

"Your mother will show you to your room, dear," said Laura, placing an arm around Louise's waist and guiding her to the door. Under her breath she said: "No questions, dear heart. He is an—an adviser of your mother. We are going to be great cronies, are we not?" She kissed Louise and went. Her mother conducted Louise to a sleeping room done in white and silver, and kissed the girl good night with a sort of belated rush of affection. But she said nothing to her in explanation of Judd.

Toward midnight John Blythe, after striding up and down his solitary bachelor apartment for two hours in lounging robe and slippers, went to the telephone in his study and called up Laura.

"Is that you, Laura?" he said, quietly, into the transmitter when she answered the call. "What time tomorrow forenoon will you be fit to be seen?"

"By noon," Laura's voice came back to him quietly. "I know what you want to see me about, John."

"Do you? I doubt that."

"It is about Louise Treharne."

"I'll be there by noon. Goodnight."

"Goodnight."