Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox - Mabel Osgood Wright - Страница 5

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It was while mistress and dog were thus absorbed that Dr. Russell, gun on shoulder, and grouse dangling from his fingers, came up the side road on the south that separated house and garden plot from the barn and outbuildings, that stood close to the lane edge, facing it, like a row of precise soldiers drawn up to give salute.

He expected that at his first footfall on the side porch his coming would be heralded by short, percussive barks,—Tatters’ greeting to his friends. He knocked twice, then tried the yielding door-knob, and entered the kitchen, where various saucepans, boiling over madly and deluging the polished stove with an impromptu pottage, told of some sort of domestic lapse. Crossing the hallway, guided by a light streak toward the first open door, he entered the sitting room at the moment that Miss Keith had raised her wet eyes from Tatters’ head, and was alternately rubbing them with her handkerchief, held in one hand, and looking at her answer to the disturbing letter, held in the other.

“Why, what is the matter, Miss Keith,—bad news or a love letter?” the doctor asked with the easy cheerfulness that showed how little real anxiety lay beneath the question. “The carrier said that you wished to see me to-day, and so I’ve come down, but I’d no idea that it was about a tearful matter, and one in which Tatters was too much involved to ‘watch out’ as usual.”

Taken thus unawares, an aggressive expression crossed Miss Keith’s face for an instant, but immediately disappeared under the influence of the doctor’s smile, and, quickly recovering, she answered, as she gave her hands into his hearty grasp: “It is both bad news and a letter. To-day is my fiftieth birthday,—you see I do not believe in belying the Lord’s work and concealing one’s age as some do,—and I’ve had a letter that I want man’s counsel upon.” Then, as a sound of liquid hissing on a hot stove and the smell of burning food came from the hallway, she remembered the time of day, the dinner in peril, and her duties as housekeeper, at the same moment, and mumbling a hasty apology, fled to the kitchen, followed by the doctor, who, after making the grouse serve as a birthday offering, wisely retired to the sitting room until dinner should be ready.

Once there, he made a few rapid but direct observations, beginning with the First Cause on the mantel-shelf.

Then, as he saw the two letters on the desk, one envelope hastily torn open and bearing the signs of much handling, the other carefully sealed and lying face downward, he chuckled to himself. “Woman all through, Miss Keith, in spite of everything. Ten to one she has made up her mind and answered her letter while she was waiting for me to come and advise with her about it. At the same time, when the dinner is off her mind, she will tell me the whole story, and discuss it from the very beginning, for the mere pleasure of it; but no matter what I may say, she will post the letter already written.” Then, going over to the bookcase that topped the desk, he unlocked the diamond-paned door, and pulling out a book at random, which proved to be a dingy copy of Hogg’s “Shepherd’s Calendar,” he resigned himself to the inevitable drowsiness born of the volume and his long walk, and stretching himself on the wide haircloth sofa, was soon taking the “forty winks” that should sharpen his wits for the coming interview.

Fortunately he awoke before Miss Keith came to call him, for she had scant respect for either man or woman who was caught napping in broad daylight; and together they went out to the wide kitchen that served also as a cheerful dining room, with its long double window filled with plants and beau-pot of gay chrysanthemums on the table, the doctor meanwhile offering Miss Keith his arm, half with natural, courtly deference, half in mischief, a frequent mood of his that old friends understood and loved.

At first Miss Keith, speaking clearly for the sake of breaking silence, appeared nervous. The talk ran lightly in general channels,—the glorious season, the shooting, the way in which the trolley line had turned the horse traffic from the turnpike to the upper road, and how much more life passed the West farm, Miss Keith telling that sometimes of an afternoon a dozen pleasure vehicles on the way from Stonebridge to Gordon, or the reverse, would stop on the plateau under the pines, combining a resting spell for horses with their drivers’ enjoyment of the view.

Next Silent Stead and his bachelor housekeeping on Windy Hill followed in natural sequence. Did the doctor know the real story about Stead’s dead wife, or if it were true that he was going away, back to his work as civil engineer again? Many visitors, men of weight from Gordon, had called on him that season, and the letter carrier said he had many thick letters with great red seals, and it was whispered that he was wanted to direct some new railway enterprise in the far West.

No, Dr. Russell could not answer, other than to wish the gossip that sent his friend back to the world’s work might foreshadow the truth.

Then the doctor took the lead, asking home questions about Mr. Lawton and the other kin, saying, “I met your Cousin Adam last winter in New York one evening at the Century, where Martin Cortright introduced us. His is a keen and interesting face, though rather nerve-worn. As he stood among a group of financiers, that also deal liberally by the various arts, his eyes roved about, dilating and contracting strangely, as if they followed the workings of a dozen thoughts each minute, though otherwise his face remained unchanged and he never moved a muscle.

“Did I like him? He is not easy to approach, and it was only when I told him that, though living at Oaklands, I go inland every autumn for the hunting, and know Gilead well, also his Cousin Keith and West farm, where I had once seen his daughter Brooke, that his eye brightened and he showed any interest, while at the same moment some one whom he had evidently been watching broke away from a distant group, and, your cousin darting off to join him, our talk ceased.”

“If Adam cares for anything but money-making, which I’ve sometimes doubted, it is for Brooke,” said Miss Keith, quite at her ease again, the coffee that she was pouring being fully up to its reputation. “In fact, he deeded this farm to her on her twenty-first birthday, all on the strength of her girlish whim and talk long ago about the River Kingdom. This also makes me feel uncertain about my stay here. What if Brooke should marry and he should wish her to sell the place? Not that Adam has ever said a word to me about the transfer, and he pays the taxes and what not just the same, but Job Farrish was looking up his boundaries last spring and saw the deed recorded in the Town House. In fact, Adam himself never writes nowadays, his secretary does it all; and even Brooke has only written once this year, and that was when I said the gutter having leaked, the north room needed new paper, and she sent it—pretty it is, too, wild roses running through a rustic lattice—she’s always had an open eye for colour.”

“What! is that gypsy child twenty-one?” exclaimed the doctor in surprise, pushing back his chair so as to pull Tatters’ head between his knees and stroke his ears, at the same time that he drew his coffee cup toward him, sniffing the subtle aroma, only second in his nostrils to that of the fresh earth in spring and his beloved pipe. “It seems but a year or so since she was roving about the lane with her hair flying and Tatters after her,—the two were inseparable.”

“Twenty-one! Why, Dr. Russell, that time was eight years ago, the second autumn you came up to hunt with Silent Stead. She’s turned twenty-four, and that Tatters was this one’s uncle; they say there has been a dog of the name in the family this hundred years and more.

“Yes, Brooke was twenty-four last May, and it seems now that they should call her by her rightful Christian name, Pamela, instead of that absurd one that might as well be stick or stone. You did not know she had any other? Oh, it is her middle name to be sure—Pamela Brooke Lawton. Her mother was one of the proud old Virginia Brookes, and they say, failing of male heirs in the South, they often call a daughter by her mother’s maiden name. Mannish and affected though, I call it, still I must own it did suit her eight years ago, for she had as many ways and turns and deep and shallow places as that little stream on Windy Hill that begins in only a thread that wouldn’t move a fern, and then widens to the Glen Mill-pond, and saws all the wood hereabouts and grinds the flour for Gilead.

“Yes, she has been here several times, though never to stay long; mostly she came with her great friend, Lucy Dean, when they were at school at Farmington. I never liked her though, she had a way of asking point-blank questions and calling a spade a spade that sent a chill through you.”

“And what has Brooke been doing since she’s been a woman grown? What, for the last four years?” asked the doctor, returning to the present with new interest at sound of Brooke’s name.

“Let me see,” and Miss Keith began counting on her fingers; “after Brooke left school, she and her mother and father, with the Dean girl and the Cub, spent one summer travelling in the West,—Adam was nosing out some scheme or other. Then the women folks went to Europe for a year or more, leaving young Adam, the Cub,—that’s what they call the boy, and I must say, poor lad, he does seem a misfit and hard to manage,—at a military boarding-school somewhere.

“The Dean girl had a voice that her people thought worth the training, though I never heard what became of it after, and Brooke wanted to go on with her painting. Oh, yes, she does really paint—doesn’t just dabble colours together like a marble cake, such as most pictures are, and call it Art. Why, she got a prize, they say, in a New York exhibition for a picture of some children eating cherries. I’ve got a photograph of it, that she sent me, on my bureau. It’s fine work, good judges say; all the same, to my eye it lacks one thing—it doesn’t look just quite alive. If she was poor and had to work and kept on, I guess she’d get somewhere; but now she’s at home again, and in society, and not being in need of money, I suppose she’ll let the painting slip, except maybe to make candy boxes for charity fairs and such.

“Adam’s always been too busy ever to have much of a settled home. They travelled about mostly of summers, and since they left the house down town two years ago, where the children were born, they’ve lived in a big sort of apartment arrangement, half flat, half hotel, as near as I can make it out—‘It gives mamma no responsibility,’ Brooke wrote in telling of it. But without some responsibility you can’t get much home comfort, to my thinking.

“Now that Brooke is educated and at home, I hear her father is building a big city house and another down by the sea somewhere, and so perhaps—when he has money enough—he will slow up and take a rest. The Lawtons and Wests are both long-lived, and Adam never drank or dissipated, I guess; but I should think at the pace he’s trotted these thirty years he’d be footsore by this, and like a back-stairs sitting room out of reach, and a loose pair of slippers.”

Miss Keith grew more careless of her speech as she warmed to her subject, and Dr. Russell laughed outright at the idea of the Adam Lawton whom he had met, tall and distinguished, a bundle of steel nerves bound by will power, sitting to rest anywhere, much less in loose slippers out of the sound of the Whirlpool’s eddying.

The fussy little clock in the sitting room, after making many futile remarks, like a choking do-re-mi, landed fairly on do, and struck four! Then Miss Keith, saying casually that she must skim the milk at five, began to unfold her plan matrimonial.

She did not read Mrs. Dow’s letter to the doctor, but spoke from memory, with which an unexpected quality of imagination blended with dangerous frequency.

Alack a day! How often are the overworked three graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, pushed into the place of Truth, Experience, and Common Sense, and forced to bear responsibility not theirs!

When Miss Keith had finished, the good doctor naturally supposed that she had received a direct proposal from an old-time lover who, once rejected, had married some one else in pique. Also that the making of the sister’s home the meeting place was her own idea, born of her maidenly regard of the proprieties, which regard he well knew usually strengthens in inverse proportion to the need for it!

Finally, as he arose to go, she said, hovering tremulously between kitchen and sitting room, “Now that I know that you agree with me, I will ask one favour more. I have a letter that I would like to have posted in Gilead by your hand; these outdoor letter boxes sometimes leak, you know. Then I shall sleep content.”

“Most certainly,” said the doctor, turning back, a smile crossing his face and lurking at his mouth corners at this latest of many vocations given him—that of Cupid’s postman, though he could not but admit that his age made him a peculiarly suitable assistant in such a belated wooing.

As he took the letter, he involuntarily turned it face upward, and glanced at the address, saying in a dubious tone, his eyebrows raised: “Mrs. Dow? Why not James White himself?” Then adding, with a touch of irony in his voice that Miss Keith missed, “Is his sister acting the kindly part of go-between? Ah, so! Well, Miss Keith, no one but yourself can settle so delicate a matter finally, but one thing promise me: go to Boston, if you will; jig and jostle, hear reform lectures and eat health food, and see life if you must; but for God’s sake, woman, don’t commit yourself until you have seen the ‘sweet children’ and the man! Photographs can lie, as well as tongues!” Then, fearing he had been too harsh, he added kindly, “If you find that Tatters can’t transfer himself, as you call it, let me know,—there is always room for one more dog at Oaklands, and Barbara will pamper him.”

That night Miss Keith, buoyed by the doctor’s talk and a man’s recent presence in the house, albeit it was temporary, was in an exalted mood and trod on air. Already she saw visions of the future, and kept saying to herself, “I will do and see so and so when I go to Boston.”

When she lit her candle and went upstairs, she took the First Cause from the mantel and bore him with her. Where should she put him? Her dresser seemed too intimate a place; the spare room album, too remote. Finally she placed the photograph against the puffs and quills of the pillow-shams of the best room bed and then fled to her own chamber, where she blew out the candle and undressed in the dark, or, rather, by the half moonlight, saying aloud, as she got into bed, “Thank fortune for one thing, I’ve kept my own hair and teeth, and such as I am there is nothing of me that takes off.” And though the remark was apropos of nothing in particular, a wave of hot colour covered her face at the words, and she buried her head in her pillow and tried to sleep. This she didn’t do, for Tatters, whom she had utterly forgotten for the first time, and shut out when she closed the door, resented being forced to sleep out on the porch at such a frosty time, and at intervals throughout the night bayed dismally at the moon, thereby calling to her mind an old ballad of chilling and ominous portent.