Читать книгу Mrs. Balfame - Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton - Страница 4

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The meeting of the Friday Club had been held in the Auditorium, a hall which accommodated moving pictures, an occasional vaudeville performance, political orators, and subscription balls of more than one social stratum. It was particularly adapted to the growing needs of the Friday Club, as it impressed visitors favorably, and there was a small room in the rear where tea could be served.

It was a crisp autumn evening when the President and her committee sped the parting guest of this fateful day and walked briskly homeward, either to cook supper themselves or to prod the languid "hired girl." Starting in groups, they parted at successive corners, and finally Mrs. Balfame and Dr. Anna were alone in the old street. The doctor's offices were in Main Street under the Auditorium, between the Elsinore Bank and the Emporium drug store, but she too had inherited a cottage in what was now known as Elsinore Avenue, and almost at the opposite end from the "Old Balfame Place."

"Come in," she said hospitably, as she opened a gate set superfluously into the low boxwood hedge. "You can 'phone to the Elks' and tell Dave to try the new hotel. It's ages since I've seen you."

"I will!" Mrs. Balfame's prompt reply was accompanied by what was known in Elsinore as her inscrutable smile. "It is kind of you," she added politely, for even with old friends she never forgot her manners. "I long for a cup of your tea—if you will make it yourself. I really could eat nothing after those sandwiches."

"I'll make it myself, all right. First because it wouldn't be fit to drink if I didn't, and second because it's Cassie's night out."

She took the key from beneath the door-mat, and pressed an electric button in the hall and another in a comfortable untidy sitting-room. In her parents' day the sitting-room had been the front parlour, with an atmosphere as rigid as the horsehair furniture, but in this era of more elastic morals it was full of shabby comfortable furniture, a davenport was close to the radiator, the desk and tables were littered with magazines, medical reviews, and text books.

"How warm and delicious," said Mrs. Balfame brightly, removing her hat and wraps and laying them smoothly on a chair. "I'll telephone and then close my eyes and think of nothing until tea is ready—I know you won't have me in the kitchen. What a blessed relief it will be to hear you sing in your funny old voice after that woman's strident tones."

She made short work of telephoning. Mr. Balfame, having "just stepped across the street," she merely left a message for him. Dr. Anna, out in the kitchen, lighted the gas stove, rattled the aluminum ware, and sang in a booming contralto.

Mrs. Balfame went through no stage formalities; she neither tiptoed to the door nor listened intently. From the telephone, which was on the desk, she walked over to the strongest looking chair, carried it to the discarded fireplace, mounted and peered into the little cupboard the canny doctor had had built into the old chimney after the furnace was installed. There Dr. Anna kept her experimental drugs, her mother's seed pearls and diamond brooch, and a roll of what she called emergency bills.

The vial was almost in the middle of a row of bottles. Mrs. Balfame recognised it at once. She secreted it in the little bag that still hung on her arm, replaced it with another small bottle that had stood nearer the end of the row, closed the door and restored the chair to its proper place. Could anything be more simple?

She was too careful of her best tailored suit to lie down, but she arranged herself comfortably in a corner of the davenport and closed her eyes. Soothed by the warmth of the room and the organ tones in the kitchen she drifted into a happy state of somnolence, from which she was aroused by the entrance of her hostess with a tray. She sprang up guiltily.

"I had no intention of falling asleep—I meant to set the table at least—"

"Those cat naps are what has kept you young and beautiful, while the rest of us have traded complexions for hides."

Mrs. Balfame gracefully insisted upon clearing and laying a corner of the table, and the two friends sat down and chatted gaily over their tea and toast and preserves. Dr. Anna's face—a square face with a snub nose and kindly twinkling eyes—beamed as her friend complimented her upon the erudition she had displayed in her reply to the Club guest and added wistfully:

"I feel as if I didn't know a thing about this war. Everybody contradicts everybody else, and sometimes they contradict themselves. I'm going over to-morrow" ("going over" meant New York in the Elsinore tongue) "and get all the books that have been printed on the subject, and read up. I do feel so ignorant."

"That's a large order. When you've dug through them you'll know less than you could get from the headlines of the 'anti' evening papers. I'll hunt up a list that was given me by a patient who claims to be neutral, if you really want it, and leave it at your house in the morning. It's at the office."

"Oh, please do!" Mrs. Balfame leaned eagerly across the table. "You know, it is my turn to read a paper Friday week, and literally I can think of nothing else except this terrible but most interesting war. Of course, I must display some real knowledge and not deal merely in adjectives and generalities. I'll read night and day—I suppose I can get all those books from two or three New York libraries?"

"Enid Balfame, you are a wonder! When you buckle down to a thing! Who but you would take hold of a subject like that with the idea of mastering it in two weeks—Oh, bother!"

The telephone was ringing. Dr. Anna tilted back her chair and lifted the receiver from the desk to her ear. She put it down almost immediately. "Hurry call," she said briefly, an intense professional concentration banishing the pleasant relaxation of a moment before. "Baby. Sorry. Leave the key under the door mat. Don't hurry." She was putting on her wraps in the hall as she called back her last words. The front door banged simultaneously.

Mrs. Balfame piled the dishes on the tray, carried them out into the kitchen, washed and put them away. She was a very methodical woman and exquisitely neat. Although she no longer did her own kitchen work, it would have distressed her to leave her friend's little home at "sixes and sevens"; the soiled dishes would have haunted her all night, or at least until she fell asleep.

After she had also arranged the publications on the sitting-room table in neat rows she put on her coat and hat, turned off all the lights, secreted the key as requested and walked briskly down the path. There was a street lamp directly in front of the gate. Its light fell on the face of a man emerging from the heavy shadow of the maple trees that bordered the avenue. She recognised her husband's lawyer, Dwight Rush.

"What luck!" he exclaimed boyishly. "Now I shall talk to you for at least five minutes—ten, if you will walk slowly! What are you doing out so late alone?"

Mrs. Balfame glanced apprehensively up and down the street. All the windows were alight, but it was too late in the season for loitering on verandas; even if they met any one, recognition would hardly be possible unless the encounter took place under a street lamp. Moreover, she was one of those women who while rarely terrified when alone became intensely feminine when a man appeared with his archaic right to shield and protect. She smiled graciously.

"You may see me to my gate," she said.

"I should think I might! A pistol at my head wouldn't keep me from walking these few blessed minutes with you. Seriously, it's not safe for you to be out alone like this. There were three burglaries last week, and you are just the woman to have her bag snatched."

She drew closer to him, a faint accent of alarm in her voice.

"I never thought of that. But Anna was called off in a hurry. I am so glad you happened along. Although," primly, "it wouldn't do, you know, for a woman of my age and position to be seen walking alone with a young man at night."

"What nonsense! You are like Cæsar's wife, I guess. Anything you did in this town would seem about right. You've got them all hypnotised, including myself. It's the ambition of my life to know you better," he added in a more serious tone. "Why won't you let me call?"

"It wouldn't do. If I have a nice position it's because I've always been so particular. If I let young men call on me, people would say that I was no better than that fast bunch that tangoes every night and goes to road houses and things." Her voice trailed off vaguely; she really knew very little of the doings of "gay sets," although much in the abstract of a too temperamental world.

She made up her mind to dispose of this misguided young man once for all. She knew that she looked quite ten years younger than her age, and she was well aware that although man's passion might be business his pastime was the hunt.

"I am thankful that I have no grown daughter to keep from running with that bunch," she said playfully. "Of course I might have. I am quite old enough."

He laughed outright. Then he said the old thing which is ever new to the woman, and with a perceptible softening in his hard energetic voice: "I wonder if you really are as conventional—conventionised—as you perhaps think you are? You always give me the impression of being two women, one fast asleep deep down somewhere, the other not even suspecting her existence."

"How pretty!" She smiled with pleasure, and she felt a faint stirring of coquetry, as if the ghost of her youth were rising—that far-off period when she put on her best ribbons and made her best pies to allure the marriageable swains of Elsinore. But she recalled herself quickly and frowned. "You must not say such things to me," she said coldly.

"But I shall, and I will add that I wish you were a widow, or had never been married. I should propose to you this minute."

"That is equivalent to saying that you wish my husband were dead. And he is your friend, too!"

"Your husband is not my friend; he is my employer—upon occasion. At the moment I did not remember who was your husband. Let it go at that."

"Very well."

It was evident that he belonged to the type that found its amusement in making love to married women; but—they were within the rays of a lamp, and sauntering—she looked up at this pleasant exponent indulgently. She was quite safe, and it was by no means detestable at the age of forty-two to be coveted by the cleverest young man in Brabant County.

The smile left her lips and she experienced a faint vibration of the nerves as she met the unsmiling eyes bent close above her own.

Rush was almost drab in colour, but the bones of his face were large and his eyes were deeply set and well apart, intensely blue and brilliant. It was one of those narrow rigid faces the exigencies of his century and country have bred, the jaw long and almost as salient as that of a consumptive, the brow bold, the mouth hard set, the cheeks lean and cut with deep lines, the whole effect not only keen and clever but stronger than any man has consistently been since the world began. The curious contradiction about this type of American face is that it almost invariably looks younger than the years that have contributed to the modelling of it; such men, particularly if smoothly shaven as they usually are, look thirty at forty; even at fifty, if they retain their hair, appear but little older. When Rush's mouth was relaxed it could smile charmingly, and the eyes fill with playfulness and vivacity, just as his strident American voice could move a jury to tears by the tears that were in it.

At this moment all the intensity of which his striking features were capable was concentrated in his eyes.

"I'm not going to make love to you as matters stand," he said, his voice dry with emotion. "But I want you to divorce Dave Balfame and marry me. Sooner or later you will be driven to it—"

"Never! I'll never be a divorced woman. Never! Never!"

His steady gaze wavered and he sighed. "You said that as if you meant it. You think you are intellectual, and you haven't outgrown one of the prejudices of your Puritan grandmothers—who behaved themselves because women were scarce and even better treated than they are now, and because they would have been too mean to spend money on a divorce suit if divorces had come into fashion elsewhere."

"You are far from complimentary!" Mrs. Balfame raised her head stiffly, not a little indignant at this natural display of sheer masculinity. She would have withdrawn her arm and hastened her steps but he held her back.

"I don't mean to be uncomplimentary. Only, you ought to be so much more advanced than you are. I repeat, I shall not make downright love to you, for I intend to marry you one of these days. But I shall say what I choose. How much longer do you think you can go on living like this?—with a man you must despise and from whom you must suffer indignities—and in this hole—"

"You live here—"

"I came back here because I had a good offer and I like the East better than the West, but I have no intention of staying here. I have reason to believe that I shall get into a New York firm next spring; and once started on that race-course I purpose to come in a winner."

"And you would saddle yourself with a wife many years your senior?" she asked wonderingly.

But she thrilled again, and unconsciously moderated her gait still further; they were but a few steps from her home.

"I am thirty-four. I am sorry that I have impressed you as looking too young to be taken seriously, but you will admit that if a man doesn't know his own mind when he is verging toward middle age, he never will. But if I were only twenty-five, it would make no difference. I would marry you like a shot. I never have given a thought to marrying before. Girls don't interest me. They show their hand too plainly. I've always had a sort of ideal and you fill it."

It was characteristic of Mrs. Balfame's well-ordered mind that her intention to murder her husband did not intrude itself into this unique and provocative hour. She had never indulged in a passing desire to marry again, and hers was not the order of mind that somersaults. But she was willing to "let herself go," for the sake of the experience; for the first time in her twenty odd years of married life to loiter in a leafy shadowy street with a man who loved her and made no secret of it.

"I wonder?" She stared up at him, curiosity in her eyes.

"Wonder what?"

"If it is love?"

He laughed unmusically. "I am not surprised that you ask that question—you, who know no more of love than if you had been a castaway on a desert island since the age of ten. Never mind. I've planted a seed. It will sprout. Think and think again. You owe me that much—and yourself. I know that six months hence you will have divorced Dave Balfame, and that you will marry me as soon as the law allows."

"Never! Never!" She was laughing now, but with all the gay coquetry of youth, not merely the eidola of her own.

They had arrived at the gate of the Balfame Place, which faced the avenue and a large street lamp. She put the gate between them with a quicker movement than she commonly indulged in and held out her hand.

"No more nonsense! If I were young and free—who knows? But—but—forty-two!" She choked but brought it out. "Now go home and think over all the nice girls you know and select one quickly. I will make the wedding cake."

"Did you suppose I didn't know your age? This is Elsinore, and its inhabitants are five thousand. When you and I were born—of respectably eminent parentage—all Brabant County numbered few more."

He made no attempt to open the gate, but he raised her hand to his lips. Even in that rare moment he was conscious of a regret that it was such a large hand, and his head jerked abruptly as he flung out the recreant thought.

"I never shall change," he said. "And you are to think and think. Now go. I'll watch until you are indoors."

"Good night." She ran up the path, wondering if her tall slight figure looked as willowy as it felt. The mirror had often surprised her with the information that she looked quite different from the image in her mind. She also wondered, with some humour, why no one ever had discovered her apparently obvious charms before.

When she was in her bedroom and electricity replaced the mellow rays of street lamps shining through soft and whispering leaves, Mrs. Balfame forgot Dwight Rush and all men save her husband.

She took the vial from her bag and stared at it. In a moment a frown drew her serene brows together, her sweet, shallow, large grey eyes, so consistently admired by her own sex at least, darkened with displeasure. She was a bungler after all. How was the stuff to be administered? She racked her memory, but the casual explanation of Dr. Anna, uttered at least two years ago, had left not an echo. A drop in his eggs or coffee might be too little; more, and he might detect the foreign quantity.

She removed the cork and sniffed. It was odourless, but was it tasteless?

Obviously there was no immediate way of ascertaining save by experiment on Mr. Balfame. And even if it were tasteless, it might cook his blood, congest his face, burst his veins—she recalled snatches of Dr. Anna's dissertations upon "interesting cases." On the other hand, one drop might make him violently ill; the suspicions of any doctor might be aroused.

She must walk warily. Murder was one of the fine arts. Those that cultivated it and failed followed the victim or spent the rest of their lives within prison walls. Thousands, it was estimated, walked the earth unsuspected, unapprehensive, serene and content—contemptuous of failures and bunglers, as are the masters in any art. Mrs. Balfame was proudly aware that her rôle in life was success.

There was nothing to do but wait. She must have another cosy evening with her scientific friend and draw her on to talk of the poison. Ah! that made another precaution imperative.

She went to the cupboard in the bathroom, rinsed a small bottle, transferred the precious colorless fluid, refilled the vial with water and returned it to her bag. To-morrow or next day she would slip into Dr. Anna's house and restore it to its hiding place. The poison she secreted on the top shelf of the bathroom cupboard.

Reluctantly, for she was a prompt and methodical woman, she resigned herself to the prospect of David Balfame's prolonged sojourn upon the planet he had graced so ill. She went to bed, shrinking into the farther corner, but falling asleep almost immediately. Then, her hands having faltered, Fate borrowed the shuttle.