Читать книгу The Lay Anthony - Joseph Hergesheimer - Страница 6

Table of Contents

HE made his way diffidently through a long window to the lawn; where he saw his sister, a glimmering, whitish shape in the heavily overgrown garden, conversing with a figure without form or detail, by a trellis sagging beneath a verdurous weight.

“Oh, Tony!” she called; “here's Mrs. Dreen.”

He leaned forward awkwardly, and grasped a slim, jewelled hand. “I didn't know you were back from France,” he told the indistinct woman before him.

“But you read that Mr. Dreen had resigned the consulship at Lyons,” a delicate, rounded voice rejoined, “and you should have guessed that we would come home to Ellerton. My dear Ellie,” she turned to the girl, “you have no idea how delighted James is at being here once more. He has given the farmer notice, and insists that he is going to cultivate his own acres. He was up this morning at six; fancy, after France and his late déjeuner. And Eliza adores it; she spends the day with a gardener, planning flowerbeds.”

Anthony slipped into an easy posture on the thick, damp sod. Although he had not seen Mrs. James Dreen since his childhood, when she had accompanied her husband abroad to a consular post, he still retained a pleasant memory of her magnetic and precise charm, the memory of her harmonious personality, the beauty of her apparel and rings.

“How is Eliza?” he asked politely, and with no inward interest; “she must be a regular beauty by now.”

“No,” Mrs. Dreen returned crisply, “she is not particularly goodlooking, but she has always told me the truth. Eliza is a dear.” Anthony lit a cigarette, and flipped the match in a minute gold arc, extinguished in the night.

“I am decidedly uneasy about Eliza though,” she continued to Ellie; “to tell the truth, I am not sure how she will take over here. She is a serious child; I would say temperamental, but that's such an impossible word. She is absolutely and transparently honest and outspoken—it's ghastly at times. The most unworldly person alive; with her thought and action are one, and often as not her thoughts are appalling. All that, you know, doesn't spell wisdom for a girl.”

“Yet James and I couldn't bear to... make her harder. A great deal of care... If she is my daughter, Ellie, she is exquisite—so sensitive, sympathetic...”

Anthony, absorbed in the misfortune that had overtaken the machine shop, the impending, inevitable interview with his father, so justly rigorous, hardly gathered the sense of Mrs. Dreen's discourse. Occasional phrases, familiar and unfamiliar terms, pierced his abstraction.—“Colombin's.” “James' siatica.” “Camille Marchais.” Then her words, centering about a statement that had captured his attention, became coherent, significant.

“Only a small affair,” Mrs. Dreen explained; “to introduce Eliza to Ellerton. Nothing on a large scale until winter.... Dancing, or rather what goes down for dancing to-day. I am asking our old intimates, and have written a few informal cards.”

An automobile drew up smoothly before the Balls; its rear light winked like an angry red eye through the iron fence. Mrs. Dreen rose. In the gloom her face was girlish; there was a blur of lace at her throat, a glimmer of emeralds. “Mind you come,” she commanded Ellie. “And you too, without fail,” to Anthony. “Now that Hydrangea House is open again we must have our friends about us. Heavens! Howard Ball's children and mine grown up!” She moved gracefully across to a garden gate. Anthony assisted her into the motorcar; the door closed with a snap.

Ellie had sunk back into her chair, and was idly twisting her fingers in the grass at her side. At her back the ivied wall of the house beyond stirred faintly with sparrows. A misshapen moon swung apparently up from and through the building frame opposite, and faint shadows unfolded on the grass. Anthony flung himself moodily by his sister.

“Sam's taken his car from us,” he informed her; “that will about shut up the shop.”

“Then perhaps you will bring back the screwdrivers.”

“To-morrow.”

“What are you going to do, Tony?”

“Tell me.”

“A big strong fellow... there mast be something.”

“Mother won't let me play ball in the leagues.”

“Perhaps she will; we'll talk to her; it's better than nothing.”

“I broke a box of rotten perfume at the drugstore, and owe the Doctor four seventy.”

“It's too bad—father is never free from little worries; you are always getting into difficulties. You are different from other boys, Anthony—there don't seem to be any place in life for you; or you don't make a place, I can't tell which. You have no constructive sense, and no feeling of responsibility. What do you want to do with yourself?”

“I don't know, Ellie, honestly,” he confessed. “I try like the devil, make a thousand resolutions, and then—I go off fishing. Or if I don't things go to the rats just the same.”

“Well,” she rose, “I'm going up. Don't bother father about that money, I'll let you have it. It's perfectly useless to tell you to return it.”

“I swear you will get it next week,” he proclaimed gratefully. “The baseball association owes me for two games.”

“Haven't you promised it?”

“That's so!” he exclaimed ruefully. She laughed and disappeared into the house.