Читать книгу Barberry Bush - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Barbara would have slept less soundly, perhaps, had she been able to hear another conversation, again between two girls, only a few blocks away.

Inez Wilson, the town’s richest girl, slender, sallow, fair, and not without a sort of lifeless beauty, was seated on the foot of her visitor’s bed. Marianne Scott, twenty-six, dark, strikingly handsome, sat up in her pillows and hugged her knees, and occasionally looked self-consciously at herself in the mirror, far across the darkened room. The girls talked in cautious undertones; the household was long asleep.

“No, not the pretty, neat-looking one. The tall one, with the reddish hair.”

“That’s Barbara Atherton. They’re sisters. The Englishman you liked was with them.”

“Fox—what’s his name? Yes, he was rather amusing,” Marianne said, in her cool, sophisticated tones.

“Fox Madison. He’s a younger son—we all think he got into some trouble at home. Anyway, his family in England send him about five hundred a quarter to stay away.”

“Exactly! He looks the part. But to go back to the red-headed girls—who are they?”

“The Athertons? Well, they were the big people of the place a few years ago. Their grandmother was old Mrs. Bush—their grandfather was an Englishman who came out here in ’49, or something, and practically owned the whole place. But their mother died when Barbara was about three, and their father was a professor at some college, and he retired, or something, and they sold the old Bush place and bought a little Spanish bungalow, here, and they live there.”

“Not rich?” Marianne questioned, raising the fine, plucked line of beautifully groomed eyebrows.

“Oh, no—not now. But everyone likes them. Barbara is one of the most popular girls in town!”

“That’s the neat little one?”

“No. That’s Amy. She’s terribly nice, too. She was in my grade all through school. She has a job in the Post Office, and Barbara teaches in the Montessori School.”

The visitor smiled cryptically, narrowed her long, sloe-black eyes, and bit her brilliant, scarlet-dyed lower lip.

“And the young Greek god?”

“That’s Barry du Spain. He is handsome, isn’t he?” Inez agreed interestedly.

“Handsome! He’s the most heavenly looking thing I ever laid my eyes upon. That ivory skin, and those eyes, and that mass of black hair. He looks like—well, who was it wrote ‘The Raven’?—he looks like Poe,” said Marianne Scott.

“But, remember, you said you were going after Link Mackenzie,” Inez said, laughing.

“I said so, perhaps,” admitted the other girl, “when we were just talking about these boys—before I came here. But I hadn’t seen—what’s his name?—du Spain, then. Mr. Mackenzie, after all, is rather—isn’t he?—vin ordinaire?”

Inez had studied French for some years, and she instantly recognized the last word. But the first rather puzzled her, and checked a reply.

“Mr. Mackenzie is rich, is he?”

“Oh, yes. Besides the hardware business, his father practically owned the whole Westview Shores development, and they made a mint out of Las Haciendas. Link is with him, and the sister’s husband, too, Otis Barnard. But they were rich anyway. They live—” Inez jerked her head backward, toward the dark window behind her—“they live right next door here, in an immense place—the mother’s dead. There isn’t a family thought more of here than they are,” she ended, in a complicated phrase that was yet perfectly clear to her hearer.

“And this Barbara Atherton, I take it,” Marianne summarized it, still smiling mysteriously into space, and biting her lower lip, “has both Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. du Spain on her string?”

“Well, in a way. Link likes her a lot; he has always been a sort of beau of hers. And Barry du Spain is a dreamy sort of poet, you know, he has no money—he just has an old ranch, down the coast, that his mother left him. But—for what it’s worth, he is crazy about Barbara, too. Only in a sort of poetic, silly way,” elucidated Inez. “He just about lives at the Athertons’; their father likes him because he’s a bookworm.”

“I could get him away from her like that,” Marianne said, smiling a faint, malicious smile, and snapping her slim fingers.

Inez’s rather uninteresting eyes lighted suddenly.

“You cat!” she commented admiringly.

“Well, but I could, my dear,” repeated the other girl seriously.

“Oh, I don’t doubt it. And I’d like—” Inez admitted—“I’d like to see you do it. Only—only, if you’re going after anyone, Marianne, why not Link Mackenzie? He’s really worth while,” she added, with a little giggle of excitement.

“I might take the Adonis first and wind up with the millionaire,” Marianne suggested, with her confident laugh.

Inez laughed, too, but she was profoundly impressed. She had never, in all her twenty-four years as the daughter of one of the town’s rich men, been able to take this magnificent attitude toward the attentions of young men. Inez was haughty and vain in manner, but in her soul she was a timid wallflower of a girl who suffered agonies of apprehension before every picnic, and telephoned all the boys she dared, to arrange for dances, before she would go to a dance.

She had often thought of herself as taking love affairs carelessly for granted, as the Atherton girls did; of saying casually: “I’ve nothing but an extra, Ward,” when men asked her to dance; of refusing invitations to ride or walk, rather than angling for them. But the proud moment had never come. Never until now, when she began to hope that vicariously, through her dashing cousin, Marianne, she might taste of this heady wine for the first time, and see the Athertons routed from their own field.

“I don’t think you’d have much trouble,” she said now. “She’s an awful prude, you know—Barbara Atherton.”

“Prude, is she?” echoed Marianne, with gleaming eyes.

“Well, yes. Their father won’t let them go off on motor parties, and they wouldn’t think of letting any boy kiss them!”

“Nonsense!” Marianne said incredulously, after a moment of staring. “All girls do, now.”

“Well, Barbara doesn’t. Amy isn’t so bad. Frank told me so—said they were the straightest girls in town. He used to admire Barbara terribly, you know, before he was married.”

“Your brother Frank? But he’s years older than she,” Marianne protested, finding the information distasteful.

“Oh, this was years ago, when she was about sixteen and Frank was about twenty-five. He likes her still, and so does his wife. He says she’s the finest girl in Cottonwood.”

“You mean that a professor’s daughter, who hasn’t a penny, refused your brother, who is one of the prominent men in town?” Marianne asked, arching her brows.

“I don’t say she refused him—exactly. But I know that he had a terrible case on her—everyone knew that. You’ll understand it when you know her better, Marianne. Barbara Atherton isn’t a bit mercenary, really. She’s—they’re all different. They stay at home evenings and play writing games and poetry games with their father.”

“Oh, good Lord!” Marianne ejaculated scornfully, amusedly. “It’s about time someone came along and wakened you web-foots up,” she added, laughing. “I don’t see anything so remarkable about this Barbara Atherton. You and I’ll get together, Inez, and give some parties, and we’ll see what we can do!” she finished, on a significant note.

“I’d love it!” Inez consented, excited. “Mother would, too. You see, we’ve been very quiet since my father died.”

“But, goodness gracious, didn’t he die more than three years ago?”

“Ye—es,” Inez admitted reluctantly. Her father’s death had had nothing to do with her unpopularity, after all, but she hated to admit it, even to herself.

To have herself captured Link Mackenzie or Fatto Roach would have been a wholly satisfying triumph. But, since there seemed no possibility of her doing either, it would surely be the next best thing to see her cousin snare these eligibles; to have them swarming about Marianne would mean that Inez came in for a sort of overflow popularity. Inez’s somewhat expressionless face flushed and her eyes shone.

“You’d like to have me marry your friend Link some day, and settle down here for life, wouldn’t you?” Marianne asked.

“It would be piles of fun! But I thought you were more taken with Barry?”

“Barry? He’s the sheik. He’s lovely,” Marianne said, “but I don’t imagine myself marrying him!”

Inez fell into a dream in which she, Inez, was given the sweet task of consoling Barry for Marianne’s heartlessness. She heard herself saying: “Some day you’ll care for someone else, Barry, and love will be all the deeper and truer because of this blow.”

“What did you say?” she asked her cousin, rousing.

“Has this Barry du Spain any family?”

“None, only himself.”

“And the other—the Mackenzie boy?”

“He has a father and a sister at home, and a married sister, Lucy Barnard. Marianne——?” Inez said, struck by a sudden thought, and stopped. “Marianne, if you really should fall in love with either of them, would you tell him?”

Marianne’s expression clouded a little, and she flushed.

“Would I what?”

“Would you tell him? You know—about——”

“Oh!” said Marianne then, with a proud smile. “I might. And I might not! It would all depend upon how much—how much he cared for me!”

Inez said nothing. The surety of it, the insolent, easy assurance, quite took away her breath.

“Real men,” said Marianne, “don’t like stand-offish girls, and the proof of it is that the popular girls are the ones who are not—blue-nosed. This Mackenzie boy strikes me as just like all the rest, and—now that I come to think of it!—I’ll bet he was talking about this very Atherton girl, when he said, to-night at dinner, that he thought there were lots of girls, nowadays, who were as particular as their mothers had been. He got quite red in the face about it. I said,” Marianne went on, smiling mysteriously, “that I was afraid he was trying his arts on the wrong girl, because I didn’t know any girl, in these days, who wouldn’t let a boy kiss her if she liked him enough!”

She paused, thinking. Then she flung herself back in the pillows, yawning, and stretched a slim hand for her watch, on the little table beside her bed.

“Half-past one!” she said. “Good-night, Inez. Ask Aunt Madge to let me sleep in the morning. I’m sunk. And don’t worry about Mr. Mackenzie; I’ve got his number. He’ll not give me any trouble. I’m no prude!”