Читать книгу Indian Summer - Emily Grant Hutchings - Страница 4

II Calvin

Table of Contents

I

While Ted and Ellen strolled down Main Street, oblivious of the rain that swirled upon them, now from the east, now from the south, and while Lavinia plunged with headlong haste into the morning’s housework, a conversation was under way in the dining-room of the Stone mansion. Calvin was late coming down to breakfast and his father had waited for him.

“You have something on your mind, and you might as well out with it,” the elder was saying, as he drew his napkin from his collar and folded it crookedly.

Calvin drummed the table with uneasy fingers.

“Gambling again?”

“No, Sir.”

“Drinking?”

“No, Sir.”

“What then? Look here, Calvin Stone, you can’t fool your mother and me. You act like a sheep-stealing dog. What were you doing in Rochester yesterday?”

“I was married.”

The words fell with the dull impact of a mass of putty. His father’s eyes opened wide, then narrowed, and his huge shoulders bent forward.

“Who did you marry? Vine wasn’t with you.”

“That’s just the trouble, father. I didn’t marry Vine. Fact is, I didn’t intend to get married at all. Lettie took me by surprise when she told me—”

“Lettie who?”

“Arlette Fournier. She’s French—and a stunner. I met her at a dance last winter. Oh, she’s a good fellow. She’ll keep it secret till I get out of this scrape with Vine. She wouldn’t want me to bring her to Bromfield for a year or two.”

Stone brought his fist down on the table with a vehemence that rattled the breakfast china.

“Have you no conscience, no decency? How are you going to square yourself with that girl?”

“I couldn’t square myself with both of them. I’ve been thinking it over, since I got home last night. I thought I’d play on Vine’s pride ... snub her openly, you know, so that she’d get in a huff and throw me over. Then I could afterwards pretend I married the other girl for spite. That would save Vine’s feelings.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort, you miserable coward. You are going to Viny Larimore this very morning, and confess what you’ve done.”

“No. I am not!”

“I say you are.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about. I’d never get out of her house alive. You never saw Vine when she was mad. I’d go back to Rochester—I’d—jump in the river, before I’d face her. I don’t have to stay here. Lettie has money of her own, that we could live off of. She doesn’t want to live in this ugly village, any way.”

“You could take your living from this stranger, this foreigner that nobody ever heard of? You—you say she is rich? Who are her people?”

“Father, won’t you—”

Calvin’s voice, a moment before raucous with assurance and determination, broke into waves of impotent pleading. He had perceived the flaw in his parent’s armour. To press home his advantage was the task of the moment.

“Her uncle is one of the leading business men of Rochester, and she has money in her own right. She’s been an orphan since she was six years old—sent over here from France by herself, after her parents died, and nobody to look after her. Father, won’t you go and straighten it out with Vine? Honest, I can’t.”

The elder Stone spat with disgust.

II

In slicker and high rubber boots Calvin took the long muddy road to the bank. From every rain-drenched shrub along the way Lavinia Larimore’s outraged womanhood glared at him. For an hour he tried to work, conscious of his father’s eyes with their unfeeling condemnation. When the strain became unbearable, he took a silver-mounted pistol from the safe—with surreptitious gesture, yet making sure that the object in his hand did not escape notice—and thrust it into the drawer of his desk. The threat bore fruit.

Mr. Stone took down hat and umbrella and went forth into the abating storm. He was not a man to mince words when he had an unpleasant task before him. Vine greeted him at the door. Her dark cheeks blanched.

“What—where is Calvin? Is he sick? Has anything happened to him?”

“I wish to God he was dead. Viny, I hope you don’t care any too much for that young scoundrel. He isn’t worthy of the love of a decent girl.”

“He hasn’t— You mean, he has embezzled money? Mr. Stone, you won’t let it be found out? I wouldn’t go back on him for—Oh, you won’t....”

“I’d brain him if he ever touched a penny that didn’t belong to him.”

“Then what—what has he done?”

“He was married, yesterday, to a girl in Rochester.”

“Married!” And then, in an incredulous whisper, “married.”

A moment only Lavinia stood numb and baffled. Then the words poured in a rising tide of indignation, rage, fury. Three years she had waited, and for this. She might have had any one of a dozen—the finest young men in Bromfield. Calvin Stone had won her away from them all. He had deprived her of her girlhood, her opportunities—everything but her self-respect. She had known for two years that he was a drunkard and a gambler. She had clung to him, because it was her Christian duty to reform him. His parents would not have her to blame when he reeled into a drunkard’s grave. It was fortunate that some fool woman had taken the burden from her shoulders. She would have stuck to her promise, in the face of certain misery. The Larimores had that kind of honour—such honour as all the Calvin and Stone money could not buy. But now she need no longer keep up the pretense of caring for a man who was not fit to wipe the mud from her shoes. She had tried to hold together what little manhood was in him—to spare his parents the disgrace he was sure to bring upon them.

Once and again the bank president, who was wont to command silence, to be granted a respectful hearing in the highest councils of the town, sought to breast the tide of her anger. His interruptions were swept away like spindrift. He wanted to offer financial restitution, since no other was possible. She met the proposal with scorn. Money could not cover up the disgrace of such a consummation. Calvin might rue his bargain, and come back to plead for forgiveness. The desperately proffered balm brought a more bitter outburst. She would not be any man’s second choice. No, the damage was irreparable. It was done.

III

As the man of finance turned the interview over in his mind, a curious balance was struck—and his heart softened towards his son. There might have been other tongue-lashings. No woman could have achieved such fluency without practice. Before he reached the front door of the little bank, Lavinia was in her own room, her compact figure half submerged in the feather bed, her hot tears of shame and chagrin wetting the scarlet stars of the quilt her own deft fingers had pieced. She had lost her temper—it was easily misplaced—but the scene she had raised had no share in her memory of the encounter. Her humiliation blotted all else from view. It was not only that she had aimed at the highest, and lost. She loved Calvin Stone with all the passion of a fiery nature—loved him with a depth and intensity that might be gauged by the hate that loomed on the surface of her wrath. And there was no one in the whole world to whom she could open her heart.

Mrs. Larimore knew there had been a quarrel, a quarrel that outran the morning’s tempest in violence; but when she ventured to ask what the trouble was, Lavinia told her curtly that it was none of her business. Now she stood outside the door, listening to her daughter’s stormy sobbing. She had never been on intimate terms with her children, and the relationship with her eldest daughter was most casual. A headstrong girl. Where she got her ambition—unless it was a heritage from her Grandmother Larimore—no one could say. The other members of the family were easygoing, content with the day’s pleasure and profit. But Lavinia was avid for work, for praise, for position. She would shine as Mrs. Calvin Stone, if ever.... And then Mrs. Larimore began afresh to wonder.