Читать книгу Butterfly - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 9

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But spring began to come to Mount Holly, coquettishly and slowly, as is the fashion of spring in New Jersey; but with an infinite sweetness and graciousness, and with spring several elements as cold as the winter winds, and as hard as the packed snows, began to soften and to melt in several human hearts.

One of these hearts was Violet Vanderwort’s. She drew Craig Spaulding aside, at a certain February dinner, and said to him very softly, with her eyes dropped to the little hand she laid on his forearm:

“Craig. I don’t want to see too much of you now for awhile. You and I have got to go different places, and not even think about each other!”

“What have I done, Vi?” Craig asked, after a pause.

“You?” She flashed him a look, looked down again.

“No,” she said, in a low voice, “but it’s because I don’t want people to say that it’s on your account that I’m leaving Reggy, Craig.”

“You really are, Vi?” he said, distressed. This was his first definite intimation of it.

“Oh, yes, I really am! It can’t be done, Craig,” she said with a long, tired sigh. “And I—I like you too much. I don’t want you mixed into this mess! It’s all so putrid. Time enough for that, later!”

Well, it was acting, of course. Vi was always acting. But to Craig it was decidedly disquieting, nonetheless. He liked Reggy Vanderwort; he always had. He felt that Reggy had been the loser by his marriage; Vi was a beautiful and seductive little thing, of course, but she was a bloodless little thing, too. She had airily told quite a group of them, just before her marriage, that Reggy’s enthusiasm for his sister’s baby annoyed her.

“He can take it out on Kate’s baby!” she had said, laughing. And two years or more after her marriage, when Craig, seriously distressed at the deepening breach between the young Vanderworts, had taken a close friend’s brotherly right to hint to her that Reggy was the sort of man tightest held by nursery claims, Vi had quite good-naturedly repudiated the suggestion again.

“Oh, br-r-r! the whole idea is perfectly repulsive to me!” she had assured him, with a shudder. “You’re quite right, Craig. Reggy would be absolutely nutty with joy. But excuse me. I don’t see that it’s my duty to gratify Reggy to that extent. Some day, maybe.... Of course, he’d like nothing better than five little boys in a row! Men are like that.”

Men are like that. She had said it scornfully, but Craig had thought of it since more than once. Five little boys in a row; but Violet would not bear them for Reggy, nor for any other man. He thought this to-night, even while her fragrant little anemic person was close beside him, and her soft little hand on his arm. Violet, he thought, was about twenty-four; but there was no freshness, no youth and vigour and bloom, left in her. The exquisitely flawless face, under its visible films of powder, rouge, and paste, the lips stiff with brilliant paint, the bright hair scalloped into curves of marble firmness, the eye lashes lightly freighted with some black oil, their surrounding sockets touched with faint lavender shadows—it was all like something machine-made, finished, dressed in laces and gold brocades, hung with sparkling jewels, and sent forth to be admired.

And the woman’s soul within; that was the same. She had all the little tricks of intelligence; quotations, foreign phrases, bored little superiorities, witty little asides. She had a tenacious instinct for her own preservation; anything that would mar that skin, or that metallic hair, or those boneless little hands she could perceive with the lightning swiftness of the tiger. She could avert the menace, whatever it might be, with almost unbelievable ingenuity and skill. She had the knowledge of charm; she could seem sweet, wistful, injured, loving. With a sort of childish directness she could plead with him to “be nice to Vi,” or with an air of pure and deeply wounded womanly goodness she could appeal: “I only want to get out of it, Craig. My God, how all the people I know sicken me with their putrid lies and compliments and extravagances and flattery! I’m not like that, Craig. There’s a real me——”

He knew it all so well! He had played the little game with her gallantly, for years.

But now she was not playing. She would really divorce Reggy, and she was certainly talking to-night as if she meant to put Craig in his place.

Craig recoiled from the prospect, genuinely appalled. He was not in love with Violet, nor with any one. He hated the thought of the sweetness, the gentleness, the cleverness she would show toward him if she had really set her heart upon marrying him. He hated the anticipation of their friends’ hearty coöperation with her in her plan. Their hints, their jokes, their inferences and implications would manage the whole matter as soon as she was free. Vi was infernally clever, there was danger in merely seeing her, and if he went with his own crowd at all, he must inevitably see her.

All this went through his mind as she murmured her little considerate explanation. When he could speak, he said:

“I’ll beat it down to Mount Holly again, and dig in for the rest of the season. My uncle isn’t well, there’s a lot I ought to do there, anyway. Don’t worry, Vi, I don’t think any one is going to talk. But be pretty sure, dear, that you aren’t making a mistake?”

“About—liking you, trusting you, Craig?” she asked, innocently wondering in tone.

“No, old thing. About—well, Reggy’s going to have enough money to burn a wet dog with some day, you know! Can’t stick it? A couple of nice little kids... ?”

“Do I look like the sort of woman who’s willing to put up with everything for the sake of a couple of little crying babies?” she demanded, passionately. “Since that day of the big game, when you played quarter, and I went with Reggy, and he asked me to marry him, I’ve known that it wasn’t Reggy!”

Reggy was the nearest thing to being actually weak-minded that Craig knew among his acquaintances; more than the rest of them Reggy was inane, weak, spoiled, stupid, selfish. Reggy sometimes talked of his horses, but preferred the subject of alcoholic liquors. Craig’s group was lenient and inactive enough, but even in Craig’s group Reggy was regarded with a mixture of contempt and conscious lenience.

“Too bad!” he commented, sighing.

“How you men stick together!” Vi said, sharply.

“Cross even with me?” he asked her, in a tone that brought back her equilibrium. She gave him a penitent smile, and began to tell him of the arrangement between herself and Reggy, and that his sister Kate Pierce had suggested that she, Violet, return to the Vanderwort family some of the portraits that, at marriage, had come to her as Reggy’s wife!

“Let them buy them back if they want them!” Violet said, resentfully. “I don’t want the old things!”

He left her side, later in the evening, profoundly thoughtful. In a few days or weeks the newest fashionable divorce would have its hour of notoriety. At that moment a dozen voices would say in unison: “It’s Craig Spaulding!”

Craig was not conceited; his was an unusually well-balanced head. But he must have been a fool indeed not to know that he was good-looking, rich, conspicuously desirable in every way that would appeal to Violet. She had wanted wealth and a name the first time. Now she wanted a man, a man that other women liked and would envy her, and to whose home other men wanted to come. She wanted to entertain, to draw the interesting people of the great city about her; not to be merely pitied by the world, and coaxed by Reggy’s family into keeping him out of too-notorious escapades.

“Lord—Lord, this is a funny mix-up!” Craig thought, moving through the days in the Mount Holly office, and spending his evenings decorously in his uncle’s library. His aunt would ask him a few meaningless questions at dinner; the salad would be passed, the ice passed, with a few slices already cut, to encourage him. The coffee, in unpleasant little gold cups, was served in the library. The big onyx clock above the heavy streaked marble mantel would strike the half-hour after eight. Craig, in a deep leather chair, read his novel fitfully, looking off it at the fire, and thinking apprehensively of Violet Vanderwort.