Читать книгу Butterfly - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 4

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The room was lighted; but the stove was cold and empty, and Dora was not in sight. Hilary felt a moment’s check, then she crossed the floor, and looked into the larger room that was used as a sitting room. There was darkness here, but she heard through it a sound that troubled her. She touched a light.

Yes, it was one of Butterfly’s bad days; she was crying. Hilary instantly experienced a change of mood. All her serenity, all her cheerful anticipation, vanished; Dora was blue. The older sister must rally herself, as she had done a thousand times before in the child’s stormy life, to meet this demand. She must soothe and comfort the little Butterfly, broken on the wheel of her own temperament; Kronski must not be introduced now.

Flinging aside her hat and coat, she sank to her knees, and gathered the little form close in her embrace. The light shone brightly upon Dora’s dishevelled golden hair, but the rest of the room showed only a highlight here and there in the soft gloom: the surface of the old piano, the red geranium blooms, the tarnished gilt frame of an oval-framed picture. In the small, steel-rodded grate the last of a small coal fire was sucking busily and smokily on one great lump of coal.

“Butterfly, dearest! What is it?”

Dora sat up, revealed a tear-wet face, raised shamed brown eyes to her sister, breathed deeply, and recovered something of her self-control.

“I didn’t hear you! Is it five o’clock?” she faltered.

“It’s after five. But, darling, what is it?”

Dora’s eyes watered again; she attempted carelessness.

“Oh, nothing!” she answered, hardily.

“But, sweetheart, it’s something!”

“No—nothing.” Dora smoothed the little lace collar on Hilary’s velvet gown, gulped, and smiled shakily. She kept her eyes on her own fingers. “You—you won’t get your dinner until late, poor Hilary!” she said, thickly.

“Oh, as if that mattered! But tell me why you were crying, Butterfly?”

Dora sniffed, laid one arm about her sister’s neck, and answered with a great weariness and filling eyes:

“Oh, I don’t know. I get lonely!”

“Did you practise?”

“Yes, four hours. And all on that one passage!”

Hilary’s eyes grew enlightened.

“Not that one cadenza?”

Dora nodded seriously.

“But—my darling!” Hilary cried, in deep relief, “no wonder that made you blue! A cold, bleak day like this, shut up in the house, struggling with that thing! I begged you at lunch-time to get out and walk—I thought you’d go out the Rancocas road, and perhaps see Miss Latimer! You poor little thing——”

“I don’t know—I got thinking, Hilary,” Dora said, in a quiet, rain-washed voice, her exquisite cheek against her sister’s, their arms locked, “I got thinking how dull it is here in this little place. We never have any fun, you and I, we’re always planning what we mean to do—but I’m eighteen now, and you’re twenty-three, and here we are, stuck, just like poor old Miss Latimer or the Ertzes—nothing ever happens to us! I don’t want to go abroad—when I’m old! I saw Gertrude Morrill go by to-day—she’s too good to speak to me, of course, because my sister works in her grandfather’s factory! But—I don’t know,” faltered Dora, with signs of breaking again, “I don’t know, but she had on a big white woolly fur, and one of those big belted coats——”

“My darling, but you know that in a few years all this will seem the littlest place in the world to you,” Hilary began, patiently. “You’ll know Paris, Butterfly, and Italy! You’ll give concerts in London——”

Hilary’s voice was eager, confident. The burden of such hours as ever came to them of depression and doubt she must carry alone. She could spare Dora, but Dora never spared her. Now she experienced the only real fright she ever knew: when the actual plan itself seemed to fail Dora. With poverty, work, illness, with any obstacle to her scheme, Hilary could, and she did constantly, cope. But when Butterfly took this tone of indifference to the all-but-achieved design, then Hilary was frightened.

“You want to go with me to Paris, dear,” she murmured now, soothingly. “Think of the big ship, Dora, and of going into some studio with your violin——” Suddenly she brightened, her tone grew secure. “And oh, Dora, wait until you hear the news! They were putting the posters up this afternoon. Kronski is coming! And you and I are going to meet him!”

Dora’s beautiful sulky eyes brightened eagerly.

“Mother’s Kronski?”

“Yes, Konrad Kronski. He gives a violin concert in Philadelphia next month!”

“Oh, Hilary—and shall you write him?”

“I have,” Hilary answered, magnificently. Dora was obviously impressed. This was a high-handed way of dealing with the great.

“Hilary! But don’t thousands of people write him?”

“Thousands may,” Hilary said, serenely, getting to her feet and hanging up her hat and coat. She buttoned a big apron over her office dress, an unusual concession to fatigue. “But do you suppose that there is any one else in America who can say that his mother was her mother’s intimate friend?” she asked, splendidly. “You see, Butterfly,” Hilary went on, in the kitchen now, and inspecting a soup-pan containing cold, frozen thick soup that gave off a somewhat daunting odour of carrots and onions, “you see, dear, we have never taken any particular part in the social life of this town, first because we couldn’t afford it, and secondly, because we were too busy. But this Kronski is our kind, Butterfly. If Mother and Dad were here, I don’t doubt but that he’d come and stay with us!”

“Oh, Hilary Collier!” Dora exclaimed, in delighted amaze, setting the kitchen table neatly for two, “Kronski! Why, everyone will be after him!”

“That’s exactly what you don’t understand,” Hilary said, sticking cubed bread into a cold oven that smelt faintly of gas, to dry. “In Europe people don’t go by money—the Spauldings and the Underwoods wouldn’t have it all their own way, there. He would come to us, to have Mother talk to him about Warsaw and all their friends there. And Mother would have cooked for him just as she did for us, and they would have kept dashing in to the piano to try this thing and that, as they did when Klingmann was here. You don’t remember that, and he’s dead now, anyway. But he and his wife stayed here three days, when they came to America, and Mother made me play for them!—you were only a few months old, it was the summer after Brother died. And you don’t know what that’s like, Dora—what fun it is!”

The kitchen was warming now, and the heating soup smelled every instant more delicious. Hilary’s face was aglow, and Dora was entirely restored to her usual radiance and happiness. When Hilary talked this way, with all the confidence of the cosmopolitan, Dora felt the premonitory thrill of her great destiny in her veins. Three hundred and sixty-four days a year they were just the Colliers, living in the “Carolan Kitchen” on soups and apples and bowls of chocolate. But there was one day more, now and then, when Kronski came, or when some other chance reminded them that their mother had been Sabine Charpentier, and their father Bronson Collier, the friend of half the musicians of Europe.

They sat down to soup, and yesterday’s macaroni, and baked pears. Hilary had had early training in her mother’s exquisite European thrift; meat seldom came into the Collier house, and there was rare baking of cake. Quite unconscious that she differed from the housekeepers all about her, Hilary had grown to womanhood feeling that a baked, mealy potato with butter, or a menu of graham muffins with chocolate, was a deliciously satisfying meal. All summer long their six little fruit trees supplied Dora and herself with desserts, and all winter long they were drawing upon the housewifely store of dried peaches and apples and vegetables in the cellar. They went over their accounts every month; three dollars to the butcher, seventeen to the grocer, something more than sixty left, when all was paid, for the bank, and felt themselves rich.

“Hilary, would Kronski come and dine with us?” Dora asked.

“He might.” Hilary scraped her bowl, looked thoughtful. “We could have the chowder, and cheese and rye bread from the delicatessen store, and I’ll make the almond cake!” she reflected, hospitably.

“Oh, Hilary!” Dora exclaimed. For the almond cake was always an event; a morning’s careful work with nuts and chocolate and the old mortar and pestle.

“We’ll go to the concert,” Hilary decided, “and see him first. Or perhaps he’ll send us such a nice answer to my letter than we can ask him anyway.”

Dora’s deep eyes were full of content; events were moving at last. It was not until she and Hilary were finished with the few dishes, and the kitchen restored to order, that she came forth from her day-dream.

“Did Craig Spaulding come?”

“Yes,” Hilary began, and stopped. Again that absurd little shudder of reminiscence went over her. Again she saw the big hand with the gloves, and caught the faint fragrance of fine linen and fine soaps that hung about this young man. And again she seemed to hear the deep voice.

“Well, what’s he like?” demanded Dora.

“Oh——” Hilary roused herself. “Just what I remembered. He’s better looking, he looks hard and brown, rather.

“He plays polo,” supplied Dora. “Do you like him?”

“I didn’t think of liking him or not,” Hilary said, sensibly, going out to the ice-box with the soup-kettle. She returned, empty-handed. “The Underwood girls were going over to-night,” she added, conscious again of that faint, surprising pang of envy.

“Leave it to them!” Dora observed, in scorn. The sisters settled down at the table in the sitting room and took up their Italian grammars. An old Italian lady had moved into the neighbourhood some three years ago, and Hilary had thought the opportunity too fine to be lost. She and Dora and Madama Ghecchi could chatter easily now in the new tongue. There was no special need for it, might never be, but Hilary’s zeal knew no bounds where Dora’s education was concerned.

Two or three times she found herself looking dreamily up from her book. This was insanity, she told herself contemptuously. But the warmth of it ran deliciously, weakeningly, in her veins.

“Sis, how old is he?” Dora asked, suddenly, when they were undressing, at half-past nine.

“About thirty, I think!” Hilary answered, unguardedly.

“Konrad Kronski! I thought he was fifty!”

“Oh—oh, I see!” Hilary was utterly confused. “Oh, he’s about twenty-eight,” she amended, hastily. “He was born before Mother was married: she was quite young, studying in Vienna. It was before she met Dad.”

“He’s young,” mused Dora. “Whom did you think I meant?” she asked.

Hilary did not answer. She had washed her face and hands with warm water and soap, braided the thick, mahogany-coloured hair, turned down the two beds, arranged her clothing neatly on a chair. Now she knelt down, and covered her face with her fresh, clean, soap-scented hands. Dora, impressed, followed suit; they always said their prayers aloud, usually locking hands affectionately before the little ceremony was done. She went to sleep wondering why Craig Spaulding had never married ... What sort of women he admired ...