Читать книгу The Carter Girls of Carter House - Emma Speed Sampson - Страница 4

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“Oh dear, but it is good to be in our own house again! I had begun to fear that we would never live here any more,” and Mrs. Carter sighed a fluttering little sigh, settled herself luxuriously on her chaise-longue and glanced contentedly around her charmingly appointed old rose and gray bedroom. Mr. Carter had given especial attention to his wife’s room when he had drawn up the plans for Carter House, sparing neither time nor money to make it perfect, and indeed it was an attractive setting for the exquisite little creature.

“Mummie dear, I am glad you are happy once more, though I am afraid you will find the life we will lead here now very different to what it used to be,” and Douglas bent over her mother and kissed her affectionately.

“It won’t take us long to get back into the old way of living. I will give a series of little dinner parties next week to some of our oldest friends. I want to remind Hiram G. Parker of what an attractive girl you are. Then, too, we must have Jeffrey Tucker and his twins,” and Mrs. Carter began to write a list of names busily.

A sudden wave of fatigue swept over Douglas. Was she to be forced day after day to explain the situation to her mother? At first she had had both Helen and her mother to deal with, but at last Helen had grasped the state of affairs and realized that economy was demanded. With tears of vexation and despair forcing their way to Douglas’ eyes, she said wearily, “Oh, Mummie, Mummie, will you never learn that we aren’t rich still? How can you give a series of little dinner parties with no one to prepare them or to serve them? Have you forgotten that we are to have no servants? As for Hiram G. Parker I hate him and all he stands for. I don’t care if I never see his foolish face again,” and the usually gentle, courteous Douglas fled weeping from her mother.

In her own room, she flung herself face down across the bed and gave way to sobbing, hating herself all the time for her weakness. Nan, who was in her own room across the hall writing, put down her pen and shoved the loose sheets of paper into the desk and came quickly to her sister.

“You poor Douglas, what is it? Mummie again? What does she want this time? A limousine for the cook we haven’t got, or is she planning a year abroad to polish up the completely uncultured Lucy? Whatever it is, don’t you mind, Doug; she is obliged to come to her senses again some time or other,” soothed Nan. “I will just get you a wet wash cloth from your bathroom and then we will powder you up and get you ready, because while you were downtown Lewis Somerville ’phoned and said he would be around about four-thirty. I did not hear you when you came home or I would have told you before.”

With this startling news, Douglas sat up. “Why, Nan, I just had a letter from him yesterday from the Walter Reed Hospital saying that he didn’t know when they would let him out! His arm is allright now but the ill effects of the gas are still present in his lungs, and he gets tired awfully easily.”

“He called up about two o’clock and said he was crazy to see us all, which I don’t believe was strictly true, for when he found that ‘us all’ was down town, he said he would be around about four-thirty, as that is the time ‘us all’ expected to return,” and Nan gave the wet cloth to her sister and watched with interest the transformation the news of Lewis combined with the judicious use of powder wrought.

Douglas had not seen her cousin since his return, wounded and gassed, from France several months after the armistice, but she had had frequent letters from him. She had often regretted the fact that she had not allowed herself to become engaged to him when he had asked her at camp, as she knew now that the feeling of affection she had for him was not only cousinly. This had been brought home to her when she had received the news that Lewis was seriously wounded and had promptly fainted. His last letters had been so unhappy and depressed that she longed to see him and try to cheer him up as she believed she could. Lewis was a favorite of them all and held a place in Bobby’s heart second only to George Wright.

There was a sound of much stamping on the front porch and the bang of the door announced Bobby’s arrival.

“Doug, Doug,” he shrieked. “What you reckon? Lewis is done come home from the wars, but he ain’t got his arm in no sling like me an’ Josh hoped for. But he is all wound stripes up one arm and serious stripes down the other. He is got on bone glasses and looks mighty funny and gant. I told him he looked most as bony as Josephus and then he said he wished he was half as useful,” and the delighted Bobby paused, entirely out of breath.

“Come on with me, Bobby,” said the tactful Nan, confident that Douglas would welcome a few minutes in which to compose herself after Bobby’s terrible though unwitting picture of Lewis, “and let’s go get an ice cream soda.”

“‘Half as useful as Josephus,’” Douglas repeated under her breath as Nan and Bobby went down stairs. For the life of her she could not think of Lewis as being useless nor of his regarding himself in such a light. She remembered what a pillar of physical and moral strength he had been for them all that first summer at camp. She dreaded the change in his appearance that her little brother had described as ‘gant’. Above all she wished that he had come at another time, for how was she to give him the encouragement she knew he needed when she herself felt that the struggle was too great for her?

The front door bell rang and with a heavy heart Douglas went slowly down the stairs to answer it. She saw through the glass panel that it was Lewis. He was standing with the erectness West Point gives to its men and of which no amount of illness can rob them. It seemed to Douglas that his thinness merely accentuated his splendid carriage. He was looking out towards the street but turned as the door opened, and as his eyes met Douglas’ she realized for the hundredth time all the horror of war. She rushed into his outstretched arms, sobbing her joy to see him again.

“Oh, my dear, my dear, it is good to see you again,” she said, as still clutching his hand she led him into the long low library.

Allready some of the misery seemed to have departed from Lewis’ deep-set gray eyes. “You do care for me, then, Doug, the way I wanted you to at camp, don’t you?” he asked.

“Can you doubt it, Lewis, after the unmaidenly and uncousinly way I threw myself at you the moment I saw you?”

“Until I saw you, as one of the men in my company say, ‘I felt so low I would have had to have a step ladder to climb up as far as Hell,’ but now I feel like I am sitting on the world.”

Douglas laughed at the young officer’s unconscious use of the very descriptive army slang. This meeting with Lewis had been easier than she had dared hope for and she felt as if she too were ‘sitting on the world.’

“That is, I feel like I am sitting on the world now that I am with you, but when I leave I’ll get all nervous and restless; and I know it is because I haven’t anything definite to do,” Lewis said. “I am one of those poor unfortunates who has to be busy. Of course, you know, Mother left me enough money for you and me to live very comfortably on, but I can’t seem to see that sort of existence for me, and I know you wouldn’t want it either. On the other hand, a West Point education hardly fits you for business and I have no intention of continuing in the army. Doug, the situation is this: I have ignorance and capital to start in business with. You don’t mind my talking like this to you, do you?”

Douglas assured him satisfactorily that what affected him affected her, and then said suddenly, “Why, you have more than capital and ignorance! You have capital and an immense amount of knowledge. There is nobody in the world who knows more about the innermost secrets of automobiles than you do, unless perhaps Bill Tinsley.”

“What do you want me to do, be a jitney driver, a mechanician, or shall I aspire to chauffeurdom?” Lewis asked with the amused scorn men always have when a woman dares give the business advice they sometimes ask.

“No, nut! That is where your capital comes in. I don’t see why you and Bill, who has capital, too, as far as that goes, don’t get the agency for several automobiles.”

“I swear you are a wonder, Doug, I would have moped a million years and never seen what was right at my door. Bill will be keen about it, I know. It will be a wonderful arrangement all around. He is around at Tillie Wingo’s now. I will call him up and make him drop by here and we’ll all talk it over.” Douglas could but be amused at Lewis’s quick change from amused scorn to sincere admiration of her advice.

She found it hard to believe that this was the same man she had let in the front door a scant half hour ago, as she watched his new alert figure cross the room to the phone. He sat on the desk, swinging his long legs and whistling while he waited for the operator to get his number just as she had seen him do so many times before.

“Hello, this is Lewis Somerville speaking. Why, is that you, Tillie?” By the interruption and the animated buzz-buzz that began in the receiver immediately, he knew that it was indeed Tillie Wingo. He knew by experience that it was useless to try to stem the overpowering flow of Tillie’s conversation, so he wisely waited till she stopped a moment to get her breath before he asked to speak to Bill. The buzzing suddenly commenced again and an expression of amused despair spread across Lewis’ face. Covering the mouthpiece with his hand, he said to Douglas, “Come here, for the love of Allah, and see if you can make this woman shut up long enough for me to get it over that it is Bill I want to speak to. Tillie is a darling but she is such a rattler,” and Lewis withdrew in favor of Douglas.

Laughing at Lewis’ hopeless face, Douglas took the phone and said, “Tillie, I dare you to stop talking a minute, just a little minute, I only want to whisper a few sweet nothings to your Bill and then I’ll talk—I mean listen—to you for hours.”

Lewis gathered from the fact that the buzz-buzz changed to deep rumble in the receiver that Tillie had at last consented to release the phone in favor of Bill.

Douglas told him briefly that Lewis and she wanted to speak to him on his way home from Tillie’s. She sounded so mysterious that it aroused Bill’s curiosity and she had hardly resumed her seat when he bounded into the room.

“What’s up?” he demanded, still pumping Douglas’ hand up and down.

“Nothing but this: while you have been idling at Tillie’s, Douglas and I have been planning your future for you! Tomorrow morning you and I are going down town and see a lawyer and have him draw up a contract for the Tinsley-Somerville Motor Sales Corporation!”