Читать книгу Indian Summer - Emily Grant Hutchings - Страница 16

In the pigeonholes of her memory, Mrs. Ascott had stowed a collection of unanswered questions, neatly tabulated and reserved for possible solution. Why had her marriage with Raoul been the inevitable failure she knew it must be, almost from the beginning? Would they have found each other if there had been children? Would her own life have been more satisfactory, had her mother married for love and not for social position? And now she added another, trivial as compared with these, yet quite as elusive: Would Mrs. Trench have waited the prescribed two weeks for a first call on a new neighbour, had her small daughter failed to report the broken window—and other things?

Whatever the answer, the stubborn fact remained that Mrs. David Trench did call, on Friday afternoon. She left a correctly engraved card on the vestibule table, and sat erect on the edge of her chair. She wore an austere tailored suit, patent leather boots that called attention to the trim shape of her feet, and a flesh-tinted veil of fine silk net with flossy black dots. In the full light of the south window, she might have passed for thirty-six. Barring a conspicuous hardness of the mouth, her features were excellent. The hair that lay in palpably artificial curls along the line of her velvet hat was as black as it is possible for Caucasian hair to be, and the eyes were coldly piercing—as if appraisal were their chief function. But her speech.... Cloying sweetness trickled through her words, as she assured her tenant that they were destined to be friends. She would come and care for Mrs. Ascott if she should fall ill—so far from home and mother. She was a famous nurse. Dr. Schubert would bear her witness. Her heart ached as she thought how desolate must be the life of a young widow.

“Yet,” she added, “it is an enviable state, after all—when one has passed the first shock of grief. Like everything in life, it has its compensations. You don’t have to bother with a man, and there is no danger of your being an old maid.” She pronounced the last words as if she were referring to the plague or small-pox. “The West must look strange to you,” she hurried on, “a little town, too, after spending all your life in New York and the great cities of Europe.”

“I have spent very little time in New York,” her tenant corrected. “When I was married I went to Philadelphia to live—such time as we were not travelling. And I was scarcely away from Rochester until I was fifteen.”

“Rochester! You don’t tell me! We went to Rochester for shopping and the theatre, as people in Springdale go to St. Louis. What a little world it is, after all. Did you ever hear of a town called Bromfield?”

Judith searched her memory. At last she had it. She had driven to that village more than once with her grandfather, Dr. Holden. She recalled one visit, when the sleigh was insecurely anchored in front of a house on Main Street, while she curled up for a nap in the great fur robes on the seat. The horse, arriving at the mental state which demanded dinner, before the physician was ready to leave the house, had untied the hitching strap and cantered unconcernedly to the livery stable where he was in the habit of being fed.

“You don’t mean that you were the little girl in the sleigh!” Mrs. Trench’s eyes were scintillating with astonished interest. “I’ll show you the account of it—in the Bromfield Sentinel. I have a complete file of the little home paper. And it will surprise you to know that the man your grandfather was calling on was Robert Larimore, my father. He died of brain hemorrhage, that same night. All the Larimores go that way—suddenly. Dr. Holden was called, when my father’s mother died, but it was all over before the telegram reached him. And your grandmother ... she must have been the Mrs. Holden who did so much work among the poor.”

“Yes, my parents left Rochester to escape from her pets. That, of course, is only a family joke. My father spent a good many years in South America, and I was left with my grandparents. One of my brothers was born in Bolivia and the other in the Argentine. I didn’t see them until they were six and ten years old.”

Mrs. Trench was not listening. Should she ... or should she not? In the end, she did. “Mrs. Ascott, I know it sounds like a foolish question—a city the size of Rochester—but you said a moment ago that as a child you knew everybody. Did you ever hear of a family named Fournier?”

“The people who kept the delicatessen, around the corner from my grandfather’s private sanitarium? Yes, I knew them well.”

“Was there a daughter—Lettie or Arletta—some such name? She’d be a woman of about forty-five by this time, I should think.”

“No, she was the niece, a wild, highstrung girl who gave them a good deal of trouble. She ran away and was married, at sixteen—some worthless fellow from up-state, who afterward tried to get out of it.”

“Worthless?” Mrs. Trench bristled unaccountably.

“That was the way Lettie’s people regarded him. Their little boy and I played together, as children. My grandmother took a lively interest in Lettie, as she did in all wayward girls who found no sympathy at home. I remember she devoted a good deal of her time to the patching up of quarrels between Lettie and her husband—and keeping peace in the family, when he was in Rochester with them.”

“Was there anything—peculiar—about their marriage?”

“Lettie was romantic. I believe that was all. It happened before I was born; but I remember that there was always talk. Grandma Holden compelled her to confess her marriage, to save her good name. And the foolish part of it was that she and the youth were married under assumed names—”

“The boy—how old is he?”

“By a very amusing coincidence, I happen to know that, too. I couldn’t tell you the ages of my brothers, with any degree of certainty. But Fournier Stone and I were born the same night, in adjoining rooms of Dr. Holden’s sanitarium. He arrived early in the evening, and I a little before dawn. By that much I escaped the ‘April Fool’ that was so offensive to him. I shall be twenty-seven next Friday.”

Mrs. Trench made swift mental calculation, and her stiffly pursed lips uttered one inexplicable sentence:

“Thank God, my people have always been respectable.”