Читать книгу Second Hand Wife - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 5

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“Listen,” said Betty Cavendish, with a warning glance at the auction players. “Don’t talk too loud. Carter’s home.”

“Carter is?” pretty Mab Fulton asked, arching her clipped and molded eyebrows.

“Yes. My dear,” explained Betty, dramatically, shuffling cards busily, with beautifully groomed hands whose slim tips were dyed with vermilion, “he was brought home this morning in a taxi!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Betty,” protested stout Rose Bray, pushing back her chair.

“No, no, no; it’s all right,” the wife hastened to explain, arresting the game by keeping her hand laid on the dealt cards. “He was in a bump, and he didn’t want it to get into the papers. He hurt his ankle, that’s all. Riggs says he’ll have to lay up for a few days.”

“Hurt him?” asked lovely Helen Peabody, sympathetic eyes wide.

“No; he says it doesn’t hurt him at all. We kept Riggs for lunch, and he and Carter were simply killing,” Betty said, now studying her hand. “They told some stories—well! You can imagine. Now Carter’s supposed to be resting. Partner, I’ll start off with two hearts.”

“How long will Carter have to be laid up?” Helen asked, in the next deal.

“Oh, only a few days. I hope only a few days,” Betty amended it, scoring, “for you know what a man is around the house! He wanted to keep Patsy home——”

“Maybe he’d like to cut into the game, Betty?”

“I asked him, scared to death that he would. But he’s working.”

“Poor old Cart in a smash!” Mab mused. “No bid.”

“He was trying to get Pete and Fred Fargo to come over and play to-night.”

“Where is he, Betty?”

“Fixed up in the library, there.” Mrs. Cavendish jerked her pretty head in the direction of the adjoining room. “He had a lot of papers sent up here from the office, and he’s working like mad.”

“Whoever’s dummy—” stout Mrs. Bray murmured—“whoever’s dummy—Is it me? I pass—can go in and see him now and then.”

“He likes to be let alone,” his wife suggested. “Cart’s queer, you know—cool about everything. You know what a fuss most men make about anything; he never does.—Three passes? I pass, too; let’s have a goulash.—That time he was thrown off—no, you on top now, Helen, and then Mab, that’s right!—that time he was thrown,” she continued, now rapidly dealing by fives, “he wouldn’t let me baby him or fuss over him.”

“You’re not much of a fusser or babyer, Betty,” Mab Fulton reminded her.

“Oh, I’m a marvelous nurse!” Betty claimed animatedly. “I adore fussing round a sickroom.”

“Carter’s never been ill, has he?”

“Never but that once, and then he was in a hospital. No,” said Betty, “I don’t mind regular illness. But when it comes to a man’s being round all the time, crabbed and critical—excuse me. When they haven’t anything else to do, they grouch.”

“Will Bray’s got the divinest disposition I ever saw!” Rose Bray said, with the ready tears in her eyes. Rose had inherited the Brink millions; Will Bray had been the adored football player of his senior year; his wife still felt humbly surprised that the penniless stunning young sheik from Stockton had selected her for the honor of being his life partner.

“You couldn’t baby Jud Fulton,” Mrs. Fulton, who was divorced, observed idly.

“There was a man,” she began again presently, for her decree was recent, and she was still in the defensive stage, “there was a man who hadn’t one spark of affection or appreciation in him!”

The women who had been her bridesmaids ten years ago let this pass unchallenged, although more than one of them was fond of Jud Fulton and enjoyed his affectionate friendship in return.

“The ideal relationship between Mother and Dad spoiled me so,” confessed Mab, taking off her eyeglasses, making sudden emotional appeal to the sympathy of her hearers, “that it was simply a revelation to me, the rough way the Fultons talked to each other! I was paralyzed. Why, nobody in our family ever—ever talked like that! We always made so much of each other——”

“It’s your bid, Mab,” Rose said.

“I know it is!” She settled her eyeglasses again. Mab was an assiduous embroiderer, and for reading and fine needlework and cards her eyes had to have help. “You remember the way he acted that day you were at the house last year, Betty?” Mrs. Fulton demanded suddenly, not quite done with the subject.

“I should say I do,” Betty responded. “No bid.”

“No bid?” Mrs. Fulton mused, studying her cards. “You—say—no—bid——”

“Hoenig!” Betty called suddenly.

“I always adore that butler’s name,” Mab Fulton murmured, as the man came in. “I’d love to call a servant ‘Honey’!”

“Hoenig, did Mr. Cavendish speak to you about sending to the station when Paul goes to get Miss Patsy after her violin lesson?” the mistress of the house was demanding.

“Yes, madam.”

“Paul knows that Miss Curtis is coming down from the office this afternoon on the four-o’clock?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Well, will you please ask Mr. Cavendish if he’s keeping Miss Curtis for dinner? It’s four o’clock now, and if he does, tell Belle dinner for two.—I have to go to Mrs. Rogers’; Mr. Cavendish sent word he couldn’t come——”

“I really don’t see how you do all you do, Betty,” Rose Bray said admiringly, when the man was gone.

“My dear, I like it! I’m really a tremendously domestic person,” Betty Cavendish reminded them animatedly. “I simply adore to keep Carter and the house and Patsy and Mother and my Junior League work and the Rummage Sale all going like a three-ring circus.”

“Well, you’re marvelous,” Rose persisted. “I have Miss Looly,” she added, her eyes watering as she smiled. “I don’t know what I’d do without her. She talks to the servants, she manages the children, she buys my clothes—underclothes, you know, things like that—she tells me whether I’ll need two trunks or just one and a suitcase; she’s just marvelous.”

The others all knew about Miss Looly, who had a sinecure as Rose’s housekeeper, confidante, and companion. The game went on.

“Who’s Miss Curtis, Betty?” someone asked.

“My dear, she’s that perfectly priceless person who has been Cart’s secretary ever since time began. She adores him, of course,” Betty said, smiling, “and all she asks is that he’ll let her slave along after hours and let him off for tennis and polo. She cries whenever she speaks of him.”

“She’s madly in love with him, of course?” Helen Peabody asked curiously.

“Well, in a perfectly safe, insulated sort of way, she is,” Betty admitted carelessly. “She doesn’t—quite—” the wife went on demurely, “tell me to be very, very tender with him, because he is so rare, but she very nearly does!”

The others were amused; there was a pause in the game.

“Does he like her?” somebody asked.

“Oh, my dear, you know Cart! All women go mad about his black hair and his stutter.”

“He doesn’t stutter!” protested Helen, with a shocked laugh.

“He does when he’s very much interested,” Betty said.

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Rose contributed. “I remember once at a dance—oh, this was years ago, I was about seventeen, home from school in New York—and Carter asked me who sent me some flowers, and I remember he sort of stuttered, and I was thrilled to death!”

“Look here, Rose, you never told me you and Carter had had intimate love scenes before!”

“Oh, now, listen, Betty,” Mrs. Bray stammered, delighted at the implication, and almost stuttering herself in her confusion, “this was years ago!”

“I’ll keep an eye on you nevertheless,” Mrs. Cavendish warned her guest.

“Is Miss Curtis pretty, Betty?”

“No-o-o!” There was utter indifference in the wife’s voice. “No. She’s nice-looking, spectacled, older than Cart. Quite a lady, but not thrilling, do you see? Not exciting.”

“That’s what he tells you,” hinted Mab. “But they get an awful stranglehold on the men, these office wives. It’s propinquity. It was his office nurse who got Fred Terry away from Leila, you know, and she was a fright. He just saw her every day and talked over his business with her and everything, until he thought she was the Venus de Milo.”

“Propinquity’s a terrible thing,” Betty admitted. “Once Mother had a man come in to teach me riding,” she began suddenly, “when I was about sixteen. I’d had curvature or spine infection or something, and I never had ridden. Well, this instructor was a Frenchman, a peasant, sweaty and red-faced, and with the brain of an infant, mind you, but he had that Frenchy eye, you know, sizing you up, saying ‘Mademoiselle, you are onlee a woman, aftaire all, and I am a man!’ I don’t mean he said it—he looked it. Well, after about three days, when he helped me off, he’d give my knee——”

“Betty, shut up!” protested her hearers, laughing.

“I mean it. Or he’d jam himself up against my arm, and have to grab me to keep me from falling; I tell you we had a grand time, and it was all propinquity! Mother got onto it and she fired him and I felt terribly; really, I mean it. But about a year later I saw him at the Polo Club—I had a crush on Rob Wilson then—and I give you my word that the mere sight of Pierre all but turned my stomach!”

“Betty, you’re a terror!” Rose reproached her fondly.

“You may be sure I’m going to watch Patsy,” Mrs. Cavendish said seriously. “No fooling, propinquity’s the limit!”

“And what would you do if Cart got a stenographer who wasn’t safe and sanitary?” Mab asked, idly, over her cards.

“I don’t know,” said his wife. “I wouldn’t mind a crush. It’d do him good. And anyway, I trust Cart.”

“But just the same,” interpolated the sentimental Mrs. Bray, “Cart’s got that—that——”

“Look at her blush!” smiled Mrs. Peabody, as the speaker floundered.

“Well, I don’t mean that he ever had a case on me,” struggled on Mrs. Bray, laughing self-defensively. “But Cart has got—or at least I think he has, that—that thing you spoke of—that thing the French riding master had, that look—‘you’re a woman’——”

The others laughed. But Helen Peabody said seriously:

“You’re right, Rose. He has.”

“Cart’s divine with women,” Mrs. Fulton said. “You always think he doesn’t know you’re alive. He’s always dragging you round to tennis and golf matches when you’d much rather sit and talk. I think that’s what Rose means; he gets you because he doesn’t care whether he gets you or not.”

“It’s the truth,” Betty Cavendish spoke up suddenly. “You girls think it’s a joke, but Cart doesn’t care much about women. They make a fuss over him; he doesn’t see it. This poor girl in the office, she runs her legs off for him, and I have to remind him to send her a Christmas present!”

“You’re awfully sensible about it, Betty,” one of the other women said. “That’s the way you hold him, by not being jealous.”

“Oh, I’d be jealous fast enough if I had any reason to be!” the hostess assured them laughing. “Come on now, girls,” she interrupted herself, briskly, “are we going to finish this rubber before tea, or aren’t we? It was yours, Helen.”

They were playing in the conservatory porch of the Cavendish home, an old-fashioned, comfortable country manor hidden away among the curving roads, the oaks and eucalyptus trees, the deep gardens of San Mateo’s most aristocratic quarter. Potted begonias and palms lined the pleasant, warm apartment; a heavy rope rug was on the red tiles of the floor; Betty’s magnificent macaw walked and muttered on his gay perch. Through the uncurtained windows that formed three of the walls of the room, the troubled winter sky, red with sunset, and the restlessly moving garden trees could be seen; a blanket of fog was moving slowly down over the range of the southern hills.

The fourth side of the room was merely a wide arch that opened upon one of the comfortable, handsomely furnished drawing rooms; all the rooms in the house were comfortable and richly decorated in the style of a bygone day. At the time of their wedding, eleven years ago, Carter Cavendish and his wife had moved into the place that had been his mother’s and his grandmother’s home. They had done little to change it since; it was not the sort of house that lent itself easily to change. There was an elegant spaciousness about the ceilings, a permanence about the marble fireplaces and heavy balustrades, that did not suggest alteration.

Betty sometimes said that in the event of the death of Carter’s mother and grandmother, keeping house now in San Francisco, eighteen miles away, she, Betty, would have the old Cavendish place made French by the simple addition of plaster and green paint. But for old times’ sake the mansion was perfection in the old ladies’ eyes, and Betty good-naturedly let them think she liked it too. The senior Mrs. Cavendish paid the gardener; her mother, the aged Madame Hough, Carter’s grandmother, paid for Patsy’s violin lessons and her riding horse, paid Betty’s chauffeur, had sent her her town car, and sent Carter at Christmas a check that took care of his duck club and polo expenses. The young Cavendishes considered the first article of their creed the advisability of never offending these important members of the family, and for the rest considered themselves, and were considered by their entire acquaintance, as extremely lucky.

Betty had always been lucky, she said. Hers was one of the forceful, confident natures that draw what they like from life. Everyone had conspired from the hour of her birth to confirm Betty in the opinion that she was beloved, amusing, delightful to have about, adequate and more than adequate to the demands of the varying rôles of daughter, friend, sweetheart, wife, neighbor, mother. Perhaps Betty’s greatest good fortune lay in the fact that, unlike her circle, she was never bored; everyone who came near her was conscious immediately of her insatiable egotistical zest for life.

Now she had just finished a triumphant rubber, and was about to lead the auction players in to the fire, for tea, when there was an interruption. Patsy came home, and had to be encircled by her mother’s arm and kissed on her little brown ear, even while she shyly greeted Mother’s friends. Patsy was going upstairs to do her homework, and Anne was with her, but Anne didn’t want to come in. And Miss Trumbull had come, Mother.

“Miss Trumbull?”

“From Dad’s office, Mother.”

“Oh? I thought it was Miss Curtis. Well, you run along, honey, and we’ll have our tea. You and Anne can have cocoa or anything you ask Belle for. How was the violin?”

“Oh, he says I have been loafing lately.” Patsy laughed joyously, and showed the space where a baby tooth had been.

“Oh, you mustn’t do that,” her mother smiled.

She turned to her companions.

“The infant’s getting to be quite extraordinary with her music,” she said in a lowered voice. “I want you all to hear her play some time.” To the child she added:

“Well, run along, dear. I’ll be up presently.”

Patsy gave the group a general curtsey, and escaped, leaving a murmur of “Isn’t she adorable?” behind her.

A moment later the four women were settling themselves about a luxuriously furnished tea table, beside the fire, when an unexpected voice spoke somewhat hesitantly from the doorway.

“Mrs. Cavendish?”

The others turned to see a tall girl standing in the glow of the early lamplight; a girl who looked all cream and gold and pale brown, in oatmeal-brown tweeds, brown hat, and trim brown pumps. Her pale brown hair, cream skin, and strange golden eyes repeated the note. Her costume was simplicity’s self; she wore no rings, no earrings; an immaculate plain frill, falling away to show her rounded creamy throat was the only softening touch in blouse, suit, or hat. But there was a suggestion of something individual, something vital, in her appearance, of which all the others were conscious.

“I’m Miss Trumbull from the office,” she said, expectantly, unsmiling. “They told me—your man told me—that Mr. Cavendish was in the library. But I don’t find him there.”

“Oh, yes,” Betty said, getting to her feet. “He expected Miss Curtis,” she added, a little confusedly. “The doctor wants him to keep quiet for a day or two—and I know he telephoned Miss Curtis——”

“She had gone home; we couldn’t locate her,” Sandra explained, with a glimpse of her big white teeth.

Before Mrs. Cavendish could speak again, Carter himself limped in and stood beside the girl in the doorway.

“Hoenig said you were here,” he said. “I was telephoning the office this minute; I was afraid you’d missed your train. We’ll go into the library.”

He nodded easy greetings to his wife’s guests. He and Sandra disappeared together, and Miss Fulton drew a deep breath.

“Do you know, Betty,” she observed dryly, “I didn’t note the eyeglasses and the age. If that girl is a day over twenty I’ll eat——”

“That isn’t Miss Curtis, you goose!” Betty Cavendish said with a laugh, as she poured tea. “That’s just one of the office girls; what did she say the name was? I never happened to see her before.”

“I’ll bet you never happened to see her before!” agreed Mab, significantly.

“She’s gorgeous,” Helen Peabody said, simply.

“Has she got a perfectly safe, sanitary crush on Carter, too?” stout Rose Bray, already devouring caviar sandwiches, asked innocently.

“I don’t know,” Betty laughed. “I’ll have to make it my business to find out.”