Читать книгу The Invisible Foe - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 7

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As Helen and Hugh came singing up the path, Bransby was driving Grant from the door. It was no friendliness that had led him to speed his visitor so far, but a desire to see if Helen were not coming. The sun was setting, and the father thought it high time she came indoors.

Grant was in disgrace. He had come unbidden, forbidden, in fact—and so unwelcome.

Advised by Latham (still a youthful, but daily growing famous physician) and enforced by his own judgment, Bransby was taking a short holiday. Thorough in all things, the merchant had abandoned his business affairs and their conduct entirely—for the moment. Grant had been ordered to manage and decide everything unaided until the master’s return, and by no means to intrude by so much as a letter or a telegram.

He had disobeyed.

That it was the first turpitude of thirty years of implicit, almost craven, fealty in no way tempered its enormity. “Preposterous!” had been Bransby’s greeting. “Preposterous,” was his good-by.

Something had gone wrong at the office, or threatened to go wrong, so important that the faithful old dog had felt obliged to come for his master’s personal and immediate decision. But he had come trembling. For his pains he had had abuse and reprimand. But he had gained his point. He had got his message through, and learned Bransby’s will. And he was going away—back to his loved drudgery, not trembling, but alert and reassured.

And though Bransby abused, secretly he approved. The link was strengthened.

Bransby was angry—but also he was flattered. He was not, concerning his business at least, and a few other things, altogether above flattery. Who is? Are you?

In his quaint way he had some interior warm liking for his commonplace factotum. He trusted him unreservedly; and trust begets liking more surely and more quickly than pity begets love. After Horace Latham, Morton Grant stood to Bransby for all of human friendship and of living comradeship.

Bransby had adopted Violet’s boys, out of love for her and out of a nepotism that was conscience rather than instinct—and, too, it was pride.

They had been with him nearly a year now, and because he counted them as one of his assets, possible appanages of his great business—and because of their daily companionship with Helen—he watched them keenly. He did not suspect it, as yet, but both little fellows were creeping slowly into a corner of the heart that still beat true enough and human under his surface of granite and steel. And Stephen began to interest him much. Indisputably Stephen Pryde was interesting. He had personality beyond Nature’s average dole to each individual of that priceless though dangerous quality. And the personality of the boy, in its young way, had no slight resemblance to that of the uncle. Stephen was an eccentric in-the-making, Richard an eccentric made and polished. Each hid his eccentricity under intense reserve and a steely suavity of bearing. That this should be so in the experienced man of fifty, disciplined by time, by experience and by personal intention, was natural, and not unusual in such types. That it was so in the small boy untried and untutored was extraordinary—it spoke much of force and presaged of his future large things good or bad, whichever might eventuate, and one probably as apt to eventuate as the other, and, whichever came, to come in no small degree. And truly the lad had force even now: perhaps it was his most salient quality, and stood to him for that useful gift—magnetism—which he somewhat lacked.

As Grant went out the two children came in. Helen took her father’s hand, and led him back to the room he had just left—and Hugh followed her doglike. The word is used in no abject sense, but in its noblest.

“Ring the bell,” Richard said to the boy, sitting down in the big chair to which his tiny mistress had propelled him. She climbed into her father’s lap and snuggled her radiant head against his arm.

“Light the fire,” Bransby ordered the maid who answered the bell almost as it rang. Bells always were answered promptly in Richard Bransby’s house. In some ways Deep Dale was more of the office or counting-house type than of the home-type, and had been so, at least, since Alice Bransby’s death.

But it was a pleasant place for all that, if somewhat a stiff, formal casket for so dainty a jewel as the red-headed child who reigned there, and life ran smoothly rather than harshly in its walls and its gates.

Certainly this was a pleasant room; and it was the master’s own room.

The fire took but an instant to catch. It was well and truly laid, and scientifically nice in its proportions and arrangement of paper, anthracite and ship’s-logs.

If the novels of Charles Dickens had pride of place as Bransby’s one fad, as they certainly had pride of place on his room’s book-full shelves, open fires came near to being a minor fad. He was inclined to be cold.

But the late afternoon was growing chilly, and little Helen watched the red and orange flames approvingly as they licked and leapt through the chinks of the fuel.

Hugh, a stocky, tweed-clad boy, as apt to be too warm as was his uncle to be too cold, lay down on the floor at a discreet distance from the hearth, but not unsociably far from the armchair.

He did not move when Mrs. Leavitt came in, but he smiled at her confidently, and she smiled back at him.

Stephen, had he been there, would have risen and moved her chair, or brought her a footstool, and she would have thanked him with a smile a little less affectionate than the one she had just given negligent Hugh.

As she sat down she glanced about the large room anxiously. Then she sighed happily and fell to crocheting contentedly. Really the room was quite tidy. One book lay open—face down—on a table, but nothing else was awry, and that she would put in its place presently, when Richard carried Helen up to the nursery, as at bedtime he always did. Two dolls, one very smart, one very shabby, lay in shockingly latitudinarian attitudes on the chesterfield. But those she could not touch: it was forbidden.

Caroline Leavitt was a notable housewife, but sadly fussy. But she curbed her own fussiness considerably in Richard’s presence, and what of it she could not curb he endured with a good humor not commonly characteristic of him, for he appreciated its results of order and comfort. He was an orderly man himself, and it was only by his books that they often annoyed each other. He rarely left anything else about or out of place.

She very much wished that he strewed those on chair and window-seat less often, and he very much wished that she would leave them alone. But they managed this one small discord really quite admirably and amicably. To do him justice he never was reading more than one volume at a time. To do her justice she never moved that one except to put it primly where it belonged on the shelves. And he knew the exact dwelling-spot of every book he owned—and so did she. They were many, but not too many—and he read them all—his favorites again and again. She never opened one of them, but she kept their covers burnished and pleasant to touch and to hold. There were five editions of Dickens, and Bransby was reading for the tenth time his favorite author from the great-hearted wizard-of-pathos-and-humor’s Alpha of “Boz” to his unfinished Omega of “Edwin Drood”—Bransby’s book of the moment was “David Copperfield.” He had been reading a passage that appealed to him particularly when he had been interrupted by Grant’s intrusion. That had not served to soften the acerbity of the employer’s “Preposterous!”

“And what have you been doing?” Richard asked the dainty bundle on his knee.

“Playing.”

“With your cousins?”

She shook an emphatic head, and her curls glowed redder, more golden in the red and gold of the fire’s reflection. “Wiv Gertrude.”

Mrs. Leavitt stirred uncomfortably. But the father laughed tolerantly. He regarded all his daughter’s vagaries (she had several) as part of the fun of the fair, and quite charming. She rarely could be led to speak of her “make-believe” playmates, but he knew that they all had names and individualities, and that “Gertrude” was first favorite. And he knew that many children played so with mates of their own spirit’s finding. Gertrude seemed a virtuous, well-behaved young person, quite a suitable acquaintance for his fastidious daughter.

Servants carried high-tea in just then, and Stephen slipped into the room with it.

Caroline Leavitt rolled up her crocheting disapprovingly. She detested having food carried all over the house and devoured in inappropriate places, and she disliked high-tea. Crumbs got on the Persian carpet and cream on the carved chairs, and once, when the hybrid refection had been served in the drawing-room, jam had encrusted the piano. Caroline had gained a prize for “piano proficiency” in her girlhood’s long-ago. Every day at four-fifteen it was her habit to commemorate that old victory by playing at least a few bars of the Moonlight Sonata. For some time after the episode of the jam, whenever she touched the instrument’s ivory, small bubbles of thickly boiled blackberry and apple billowed up on to her manicured nails and her rings. No—she did not approve of “high-tea”—and such high-tea “all over the house.” But this was the children’s hour at Deep Dale, and the children’s feast—and wherever Helen chanced to be at that hour, there that meal was served. Helen willed it so. Richard Bransby willed it so. Against such an adamant combine of power and of will-force determined and arrogant, Caroline knew herself a mere nothing, and she wisely withheld a protest she realized hopeless.

So now, she laid her lace-work carefully away, and addressed herself to the silver tea-pot. And she did it in a cheerful manner. She was not a profound woman, but she was a wise one. The unprofound are often very wise. And this is especially true of women.