Читать книгу Red of the Redfields - Grace S. Richmond - Страница 6

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Mrs. Tracy Rowe scanned her son's plate anxiously.

"Felix, you haven't eaten a thing!"

"Eaten all I want, thank you."

"Why don't you have an egg, if you don't care for the cereal or the waffles? Eggs are so strengthening. Nora, bring Mr. Felix——"

Felix Rowe lifted a languid, thin hand. "No eggs, please."

"A glass of milk, then. Felie, if you knew how you worry me——"

"I detest milk, and you know it, Mother. Why can't you stop worrying about my breakfast? The coffee's all I want. Another cup, Nora, please."

"No, but you oughtn't to drink so much coffee, Felie. Don't bring it to him, Nora."

Felix turned in his chair and glanced at Nora, who was staring uncertainly at the autocratic young man, so much more forceful in his weakness than his mother in her attempted authority. "Bring me the coffee, please," he said.

"Oh, Felie!"

At the other side of the table Tracy Rowe lifted a bothered glance from the voluminous sheets of the morning paper which he was hurriedly scanning. "For the Lord's sake, Bessie, why can't you let him alone?" he growled. "If he can't eat he can't, and that's all there is of it."

"But that's just why he's so nervous. His nerves need feeding—that's what Doctor Leaver said. But no stimulants."

"Bother Doctor Leaver. Coffee's not a stimulant—not what you can call one. Take your coffee, Felix. And then come on down to the office with me. That'll give you something to think of till train time, anyhow."

"Thanks, Father. I think I'll stay quiet till train time—if I go at all."

"Well, don't go if you don't want to." Mr. Rowe put down his paper and looked as anxiously at his son as his wife had done, though he didn't mean to let it show. His face was fat where hers was thin, therefore he couldn't look as harried as she, in any case, which was a blessing. "I haven't thought much of the plan, any of the time. I paid Leaver to treat you himself—and a good price he'll ask, too—not to send you off to some country doctor, which is all this Brown is, as I understand it."

"Burns," his wife corrected him. "He told us some queer thing about the man's having red hair—they call him 'Red Pepper Burns.' That doesn't sound to me like any first-class man—a nickname like that. What I really think is that Doctor Leaver is hopeless of doing anything for Felix, so he sends him off to this man——"

"Oh, I've no doubt this Burns is a good man," her husband interposed hastily. "Only I'd rather have Felix around here. My idea is if he'd just forget his nerves he'd be all right. If you don't want to go off up there, Felix, suppose you come down to the office with me, and we'll see if we can't find something to interest you. There's a deal on to-day and some big men coming. You could sit in a corner; it'd take your mind off yourself. That's all you need—get your mind off yourself. You brood too much. A fellow can't brood, and there isn't any need of it, either, in a busy world. If you'd just——"

It was the thousandth time Tracy Rowe had said it. It was the ten thousandth time Bessie Rowe had said the sort of thing she had to say. If Felix would eat—would feed his nerves—would think of something besides himself—would go down to the office and take an interest——

That was all they could do for him. Felix got up abruptly from the table with the idea that if he had to hear it again he should go to pieces utterly and finally. But he managed to keep hold of himself long enough to say, with some degree of steadiness in his tone, "I'm going. I promised Leaver I'd try this Doctor Burns. If you'd stop fussing about me there'd be more chance——"

And then he went out and closed the door behind him, and somehow kept himself from slamming it violently in their anxious, stupid faces. For they were, both of them, just plain stupid; and he knew it. Why they couldn't understand that everything they did and said was the worst possible thing to do and say to a chap in his condition was more than he could tell. He had little doubt that Dr. John Leaver was sending him off as much as anything to get him away from these devoted, unintelligent parents.

The moment the door closed behind her son Mrs. Rowe began to cry.

"I don't know what we're g-going to do with him," she sobbed into her handkerchief. "He isn't f-fit to go 'way up there alone. I don't know b-but I ought to go with him."

Her husband, looking as disturbed as a man with a face like a full moon may, got up and came around to her side of the table. He saw that she had eaten no more than Felix; she had been watching her son too closely to think of her own plate.

"There, there, Bessie—don't give way," he said, patting her shoulder with his plump hand. "I s'pose I could go with him myself; maybe I ought to. But I've got this deal on—'twould be hard to get away. I don't know's he'd want you to go with him—and then again maybe he might. He's awful nervous wherever he is, that's sure. 'Tisn't such a very long trip up there, though. He'll get on the sleeper to-night and he'll be there to-morrow afternoon. They'll meet him, I presume—this Doctor Brown——"

"Burns, Tracy. Oh, I don't like this doctor's having such a nickname; it doesn't seem dignified. Red Pepper Burns! I'm afraid he's some sort of a quack doctor."

"Now, now—you know Doctor Leaver wouldn't send him to anybody like that. His best friend—that's what he said he was—this Br-Burns. He's all right, Momma, don't you worry."

"You're worrying yourself, Tracy—you know you are. He's our only son, and——" Her thin face, mottled in red spots with her crying, went down into her handkerchief again; she blew her pointed, thin nose violently.

"If he'd just take an interest in something else," Tracy Rowe said once more, in despair. "Everybody has to take an interest in things—they can't keep thinking about themselves all the while. Now this deal I've got on to-day—why, the minute I strike the office I'll be all wrapped up in it——"

"Yes, and you'll forget all about Felix!" she cried. "That's the way with a man—you can be all wrapped up in a deal, and leave me to worry myself sick over Felix. I always have worried about him. When he was over there in France you could get all wrapped up in your business, and I just had to stay home here and think and think. It's just the same now——"

"Well, if I couldn't forget my troubles once in a while I'd go bust like Felix," said he, defiantly. "It's thinking about yourself and your troubles that takes the backbone out of folks. Lord knows I'm worried as you are about the boy, but I've got to keep on sawing wood at the office, to pay for doctors like Leaver and this Brown. But I'll be up this noon, and I'll try to have things fixed so I can stick around till he goes. If you think best to go with him, Bessie—and he wants you to——"

"Oh, he won't want me to." Her tone was despairing. "Seems like I couldn't be a mother to him—he won't let me. I've worried about him all his life, but it seems like he never thinks of that at all. He never wants to be home; he never has wanted to be home since he first went away to that boys' school. And then to college. It was a mistake, Tracy, sending him to college; he's never been the same boy since."

"He would go. He hasn't been a boy you could direct—not since he was a little fellow. He's always had these notions about things, not like ours at all. Well,"—he sighed, and pulling out a big handkerchief of fine linen—he was immaculately dressed as any prosperous business man is in these days—he wiped a broad brow which was beginning to perspire—"I've got to go, Bessie. Derwent and Atwater'll be there. I can't be late or it won't look right to 'em. You buck up and don't let him see you crying—it'll discourage him and make him think we're scared about him. Lord knows we are, but we can't let him see it. I'll be back for lunch—a little late, maybe. Good-bye, Momma. There, there!"

His broad hand patted her cheek, he stooped and kissed it, as well. She burst into a fresh flood of tears, but he had consulted his watch, and he now left her and crossed the room hurriedly, with a glance from the window at the street outside. At the curb a handsome closed car stood waiting. "Haven't got but five minutes," he muttered, and all but ran out into the hall. A moment later the big black-walnut door with its inset of glass in variegated colours closed behind him—a door which of itself, to any beholder who stood regarding it from the outside for the first time, would have betrayed the uneducated tastes of those within.

Upstairs, in his own room, a large, square room with a bathroom adjoining, Felix was beginning to pack the small leather-covered trunk which had come back with him a year before from Paris. It was travel-worn as good leather may be—which renders it more suggestive of worldly adventure—with the remains of many labels still clinging to it here and there. Doctor Leaver had told his patient to go prepared to remain for some months, and had urged his taking whatsoever effects would help to keep him contented. Once such a suggestion would have set Felix taking down books from shelves, opening desk drawers for writing materials in large quantities, even to putting in such comforts as a small electric lamp for his bedside, and fittings for the temporary desk he would need to equip when he reached his destination. Special shaving soap, his bath sponge, tubes of tooth-paste—there were dozens of things that ought to go into that trunk. Yet to-day after he had emptied the contents of two drawers into the tray, folded a couple of suits, and hunted out some gloves and handkerchiefs, he sat staring at the trunk as if he could think of nothing more with which to fill it.

"Felie, want me to help you pack?"

Mrs. Rowe had bathed her eyes and reinforced herself with a fresh handkerchief. Her pointed nose was still red with her weeping, and her hand trembled on the doorknob, but her tone was plaintively cheerful. She came in rather timidly, as if she didn't know how this strange son of hers might meet her advances. He was never anything but polite to her—always had been so since he had first returned from the preparatory school to which he had insisted on going and from which he had brought away new ideals of filial behaviour. But she had never been able to come very near him; he had always reservedly held her off. Often and often he seemed to her not her son at all; and now, since his breakdown after the war, he had retreated an incredible distance not only from her but from his whole environment.

He had been, she thought, a beautiful boy; his features had been uncommonly attractive—once. His face still showed a certain distinction of looks; but his skin was so sallow, his eyes so circled with dark shadows, his mouth set in such a line of unhappy obstinacy, that his whole aspect was still to his mother unfamiliar, even alien. His thin figure, of a medium height, was stooped; his chest was slightly contracted; looking at him one would expect to see him cough hollowly. He didn't cough; the doctors said that with care he would never break down in that way; but to Mrs. Rowe the assurance was of small comfort. She would almost rather, it seemed to her, have him a cheerful consumptive—she had seen some such—than the melancholy, listless, nervous invalid he had become.

Felix barely glanced up as his mother came in. "I'm packed," he stated briefly. "Thank you," he added, remembering. He had risen slowly to his feet. His mother never could get over his showing her this deference; he had done it ever since he had come home on his first vacation from the preparatory school; it had marked for her a new era in her admiration for him.

"Don't stand up, dear," she hastened to say. "You aren't very strong, and you've got quite a journey before you. How'd you like it if—" she hesitated, afraid to suggest her accompanying him, and turned the sentence into something else—"How'd you like it if I just looked over what you've put in, and see if you've left out anything? A man isn't very good at packing—leastways, Poppa isn't."

"Everything I need is in," Felix assured her carelessly. "I'm not taking any more than necessary. I may not stay very long."

"Oh, but you must stay as long as Doctor Burns thinks best," she said, in the same anxious manner with which it seemed to him she said everything, and which irritated him to madness. "It's quite a trip up there, and Poppa and I want you to get the good of it. Whatever the Doctor says for you to do, you want to do—'specially your food. He'll likely tell you to eat special things, to feed your nerves, and it'll be wrong of you, Felix, if just because he isn't there to see that you do it, you don't do it. I don't know where you're going to be, of course, Doctor Leaver said he'd leave that to Doctor Burns, but he said it wouldn't be with him. It'll be some nice place, and I hope the cooking will be good. But even if it isn't as tempting as our home cooking, you want to eat, Felix. And milk you always can drink. People can live on milk, if they take enough, and it's the best thing in the world for nerves. If you——"

Felix had reached the end. He went with a quick stride across the room and took his mother by the arms, not ungently, but with a shaky energy which she understood to be overwrought.

"If you don't stop telling me what to eat, Mother," he said, between his teeth, "I'll go to bed and stay there. I know you mean it for my good, but I simply can't stand another word about it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll lie down till lunch time. If you don't mind I'll have something sent up on a tray. I——"

As he looked at her the weak tears began to flow again from under her reddened lids.

"Oh, Felie!" she breathed. "Your last lunch at home! Up here on a tray! And Poppa's coming home on purpose, when he's got a deal on and ought to be taking the men to luncheon, same as he always does when it's important. Dear boy, couldn't you—just to please Momma——" She choked and laid her head down on his angular shoulder.

Let it be told to Felix Rowe's credit that he bit back the wild words on his tongue—the super-expletives which it would somewhat have relieved his tension to let burst forth. His "last lunch at home!"—Well, he hoped it would be, if he died on the way North in the train—or jumped off it——

"All right," he said, and for the life of him he couldn't do more than put a hand upon her agitated shoulder. "I'll be down—if you'll let me rest now. I—didn't sleep very well last night."

She insisted on seeing him stretch himself upon an over-stuffed couch at the foot of his bed, and tucked a heavy striped-silk blanket about his shoulders. She pulled down the shades without opening the windows, assured herself that the radiator was hot, and tip-toed out, the tears still oozing. When she was gone Felix scrambled off the couch, flung open the windows to the warm October air, and turned off the heat from the radiator. The blanket he kicked across the floor.

Ten hours later, having somehow lived through the day, Felix stood in the lower hall, ready to go. At the moment he was alone, both his father and his mother, who were to go with him to the station, having gone back after something or other of their equipment for the drive. He looked with heavy eyes about the hallway, through the wide open doorways to the rooms on either side, and hated the whole place with the hatred which, as a lad, returning from the great private school where he had had his first sight of beautiful interiors, he had felt when he had begun to realize the garish, expensive commonplaceness of every aspect of his father's house. From the dark, figured paper heavy with gold which covered the walls, to the costly, ugly, flowery rugs which lay upon the waxed yellow-oak floors; from the bizarre electroliers of highly coloured mosaic, to the wide-spreading brilliant red-shaded lamps which to his eyes at night lent the place the look of a house of ill fame, it seemed to him there was not one redeeming line or hue or shape. Bad taste, execrable taste, had selected and assembled every picture, every chair, every abominable gew-gaw with which the rooms were filled. The very hat-rack at the side of the entrance upon which visitors were to perch their headgear was a carven black-walnut figure of a slave girl extending brown arms to receive the offerings of those who were willing to enter—a figure typical of the enjoyment of the owner in choosing always the eccentric and elaborate rather than the simple.

As he turned from this look at the home he was leaving Felix felt the same sense of relief he had long felt whenever he went away. At least he shouldn't have to see it all again for a good while. Anything was better—anything—than that his tortured nerves should have to rebel hourly against living in a place he so detested. As the home of his father and mother he had endured it; it was fortunate now to have a fresh excuse for leaving it, as he had expected to do long ago, for good.

He rode to the train between the two middle-aged people; the chauffeur was shut away by glass from hearing what was said. What was said was a reiteration of all that had been said up to this hour. Felix did his best; he turned his head from his mother to his father, as either spoke to him, and seemed to listen with deference. He saw his mother's pointed nose, powder doing its worst to conceal its redness; her expensive, too-much-befeathered hat slipping back a little upon her scanty hair, as it always did, to her son's annoyance; her white gloves a little soiled; her shoes too narrow upon her badly shaped feet. His father was well dressed; his clothes only a trifle more conspicuous than would have been to Felix's taste; the pin in his scarf only a little too gorgeous. Somehow, Felix considered, no man could err quite so far in his selections of apparel and ornament as a woman—her range of choice was wider—she could do more awful things to herself for the same amount of money. His mother had always had an idea that she owed it to her family to be "dressy"—that was what she called it!

But after all they were his father and mother, and they loved him, and he was not without a certain affection for them, strangers though they had long seemed to him. He appreciated it that they wanted to see him off, that they were solicitous that he should have every comfort. Mr. Rowe had secured a drawing-room for him. On his way through the station the elder man had stopped at a news-stand and bought a sheaf of evening papers. Felix saw him glance at the cigarettes in the case below, and knew his father wanted to equip him with these, too, but was restrained by the knowledge that his mother would certainly protest—they were bad for the invalid's nerves! Felix thought with some amusement of his own well-filled pocket case—of the extra packages in his bag. That was one thing, anyhow, that nobody could do to him, stop his smoking! He'd have to have some means of soothing those jumping nerves, if all the doctors in the country were against him.

The train was called. Mr. Rowe got himself and his wife through the gates with their son, with a fee and a whispered "He's sick—see?" They went down the platform with him, his mother clinging to his arm. When they reached his car Felix turned to her and, stooping, kissed her—as affectionate a kiss as he could make it, for he was suddenly more sorry for her than he had been before. In spite of all her errors of dress and manner, her love for him was very real; he couldn't help seeing that she suffered. He found himself wishing he could care more for her—she deserved it. As for his father, Felix had always understood that he meant to be a good father, and if he wasn't the sort of father his son would have liked to have him, that couldn't be helped. At school and college Felix had sometimes seen the sort of fathers he would have liked—educated, keen-eyed men of affairs, with whom their sons were proud to walk and to whom they were eager to introduce their friends . . . But he looked now at Tracy Rowe and knew that the one biggest thing a father could give his son was his. He shook hands heartily, looking his father in the eyes. At least in the moment of parting it was possible to feel something of that which he knew he ought to feel.

"Take care of yourself, boy," said Rowe, a sudden hoarseness in his voice. "Do what Doctor Brown says. And anything you want, you have it. Momma and I want you to be comfortable, every way."

"And you'll write often, won't you, Felix?" His mother clung again to his arm, her lips shaking. "I'll write every day, if you'd like to have me. Now you'll go to bed right away, won't you, Felie? And let the porter bring you breakfast in your drawing-room—only don't drink a lot of coffee, dear, it's so bad for——"

Disengaging himself, Felix climbed slowly upon the platform, followed by his father.

"I want to see where you are," explained Mr. Rowe.

The coloured porter caught him by the arm. "They won't be time, Mistah," he warned him. "We're late. He got a drawing-room? Yessah, all right—Ah'll see to him."

From the station platform they waved at him, his mother's costly befeathered hat slipping still farther back upon her head in her agitation. She waved her hand in the soiled white glove, and brushed away a tear with it. His father took off his hat and waved it; they were still waving as they passed from Felix's sight.

At midnight, awake in his berth, surreptitiously smoking one cigarette after another, the son still saw them—the good, stupid people who loved him, and from whom he was mightily glad to get away. He wondered if they could possibly guess that he was glad, and decided that they were too stupid even for that.

But in this he was mistaken. Somehow, for all their stupidity, they knew.