Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox - Mabel Osgood Wright - Страница 8

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With Mrs. Lawton the afternoon of the Park musical had been a time of irresolution. When the man of a family is noted for swift arbitrary decisions and often unexplained action in all domestic affairs, in important matters and petty details alike, his wife is apt, simply by force of reaction, to be driven to the opposite extreme in those things that concern herself alone. Not that Adam Lawton’s wife had ever been lacking in spirit, and when, as Pamela Brooke, a girl of twenty, he had taken her from her southern plantation home, then crippled and impoverished by war, yet where she still held absolute sway, many nodded their heads, and said that the calculating, keen-eyed Yankee would some day be startled by the fire of southern blood.

Not but what his coming, seeing, and conquering had been as swift as the most romantic could desire, one short month compassing it all, for there was a certain magnetism about Adam Lawton that, when he chose to exert it, was irresistible, while to those outside its influence he was doubly a bit of chilling steel.

Nor had his wife ever faltered in her loyalty to him; she would have given much more than he would take, for in the beginning hers had been a nature that sought happiness in pouring out her love freely and enveloping its object in it, at the same time giving the man she had chosen, through imagination, every noble and winning attribute that would increase her passion.

Two sons had been born to her before she had awakened from this ecstatic period and was perforce obliged to separate the real from the ideal. Not that Adam Lawton loved her a degree less strongly than when, calling upon her father on purely business matters, he had first seen her riding up the unkempt avenue of her home, her beauty and bearing lending distinction to the faded habit that she wore. His love was of a strange quality, a sort of transmutation of metals by sudden fire that, having once taken place, must of necessity be welded for all time. In reality an egotist, from his own point of view he was wholly unselfish, for he asked little for what he gave, and would allow none of the little daily services that nourish love, whose best food must have the flavour of mutual dependence.

The two boys died of scarlet fever almost together, before they were well out of babyhood, and after a lapse of many years a daughter, Brooke, had come, then another lapse, and another son, called Adam, now about sixteen; and like many a son of a father who has planned a boy’s career to the minutest detail, he seemed not only bound not to go in the desired way, but to lack the bump of direction, which turns a boy from being merely driftwood and guides him in any sort of way whatsoever.

From habitual restraint of emotions learned in those first ten years, Mrs. Lawton had come to pass for a perfectly bred, though somewhat unsympathetic, woman.

Brooke, whose own heart naturally beat as tumultuously as ever did her mother’s, had learned to feel something of this even in her early childhood, when at her father’s footstep she had been hushed in some wild exhibition of childish enthusiasm; and though she and her mother were the very best of friends, there was a certain quality missing in their intercourse. Perhaps missing is not the word,—a quality not yet developed expresses it more exactly, and this, too, came through the peculiar temperament of Adam Lawton himself. Outside of his business he had but one thought, his family, and to supply their needs as he read them, his selfishness lying in the fact that he asked so little of them, beyond their presence in his house, that it was impossible for him to judge, by intimate contact, what those needs really were, or to realize that confidence and sympathy are better coin than dollars.

Brooke alone had been able to break through this crust of self-sufficiency that he had used as a barrier against the world in his early days of struggle, until it now shut him off from the luxury of everything natural, uncalculated, and spontaneous. Brooke had enough of the enthusiasm of youth not to be chilled by it. She looked forward hopefully to the promised time when he should take a long holiday, and be with them, and, as she explained it, only “think foolishness.” He had never refused her anything that she asked of him, not that her wishes had ever been extravagant. Many a time, as some clever whim of hers brought a rare smile to his keen, thin face, intelligent and alive, if somewhat harshly fined and worn, he almost clinched the hand that he always kept in his left pocket in despair that this child was not the boy who should keep his name alive, instead of that other who now bore it. But in the fact that Brooke was a daughter lay all the charm, for there is no other born relationship so subtle, so potent of good for each, as that between father and daughter.

For many years the Lawtons lived in an ample old-fashioned house in one of the streets converging at Washington Square, where Brooke and young Adam had been born. Here Mrs. Lawton had passed many days of quiet content and social comfort, entertaining in the open-hearted southern way that does not admit of push or hurry. True, the neighbourhood was changing, and others more ambitious were moving away; in fact, Adam Lawton had one day said the time had come when he was ready to build a modern house, in a part of the city where a home more suited to his position and a good investment could be combined, for with him the two propositions always went together.

Mrs. Lawton had sighed, but said nothing. She loved the wide, sunny house, with its colonial mantels and irregular staircase, and secretly she hoped that no one would buy it. Faint hope, for in a week from the day the matter was broached, Adam Lawton announced that the house was sold. A business building had purchased the adjoining property and virtually gave him his price. They could live in an apartment hotel pending the building of the new house. It would give his wife a rest, for he was beginning to notice that she was looking rather worn, and did not attribute it to the real cause or the flight of years, but to some extraneous reason that that most dubious of all acts, “a change,” might overcome. So Mrs. Lawton was spending her second winter at the St. Hilaire, living apart from her own life, as it were. True, she had been listless and not very well of late, but it was more from inertia than any constitutional weakness. No one could expect to keep for thirty years the radiant type of blonde beauty with which Pamela Brooke had glowed at twenty. Mrs. Lawton was still in a sense a beautiful woman, but the vivacity that often outlives freshness of tint and distinctiveness of feature had died first of all. Her charm lay in a certain refinement of outline; colour and features had grown dim as the reflection of a face in a mirror blurred by dust, and her mass of waving golden brown hair, that in its lights and shades had once surpassed even Brooke’s, was of a clear white, as of the days of powder, and gave the delicate features an almost dramatic setting.

As Adam Lawton grew more and more absorbed in finance, he was the more exacting of her presence during the evening hours, when, too absorbed to either go out or bid friends come to him, he sat in his simply furnished den, for all luxury stopped at his door, and pored over papers, letters, and maps, scarcely glancing up or speaking to his wife twice in the evening, yet expecting her presence and conscious if she left him for a moment.

When Brooke had started on this particular winter afternoon for the Parkses’ musicale, in company with her friend, Lucy Dean, Mrs. Lawton had quite decided not to go. Her husband had been unusually silent for the few days past, and had said something about possibly coming home in time to drive up to the new house, which was yet uncompleted, owing to the building strike of the past summer.

But as the early twilight came on and he did not appear, she grew restless, and knowing that it was too late for the proposed drive, quickly determined to go to the Parkses’ for a little while and return with Brooke. Going to her lounging room to call the carriage by telephone, for she had an entirely separate wire from the private service at her husband’s desk, she found several letters lying upon the table. Exclaiming at the carelessness of the maids, of whom two were kept for service of meals, etc., in the apartment, she looked at the addresses, and the handwriting on the last put the thought of going out from her mind.

Four were in the handwriting of private secretaries, and promised social invitations; the fifth, addressed in the shaded pin-point writing of the seminary of thirty years ago, was postmarked Gilead; while the sixth was in the rough and painfully unformed hand of Adam, “the Cub,” as his friends called him, her only living son, now at a military school some sixty miles away.

It was impossible to deny that the Cub was behind-hand in his work, and that, instead of being within two years of college, according to his father’s schedule, he was little more than in sight of it; but her mother’s heart told her that the rigidity of his father’s methods was quite as much to blame as her son’s stupidity. Coming of ancestors whose training on both sides had been for and of the out-of-door life, the forcing system of surveillance under which he had lived, summer and winter alike, since his eleventh year, had developed only the evil in him.

Vainly she had suggested, nay almost fought, to have him sent to a famous ranch school, where the sons of several of her friends had learned self-reliance and books at one and the same time. Adam Lawton would not hear of it, saying the dangers of the life and the distance were too great.

In Brooke his measure of fatherly affection was complete and satisfied, and that she should never put her hand in an empty pocket his chief desire; but still all his hopes of the future of his race theoretically centred in this only son, as in an asset of both flesh and money, and every hair of his tawny head and freckle on his face was more precious than his own life-blood; yet he had the narrowness of the self-made man, the financier in particular, and he could see honour and success in one path only—that in which he himself had trodden.

Adam Lawton senior, now halfway between sixty and seventy, though he did not allow it even to himself, often felt the lack of academic knowledge, and therefore Adam junior must undergo a certain polishing system perforce, even if the substance to be polished lost its identity and crumbled to chalk in the process. For only two things had Adam evinced any liking,—for out-of-door life and a horse, while his backwardness with his lessons had cut off these outlets by keeping him at school or under tutelage the entire season through.

If Adam Lawton loved his son as a matter of heredity, Pamela Lawton loved him as a human being, as her baby, and her maternal passion gained fierceness by repression. The letter was an appeal for permission to go home, and contained a doctor’s certificate saying that the boy had, in his opinion, outgrown his strength, and needed several months of outdoor life, etc., etc. Mrs. Lawton crushed the paper in her hand. The last time such a missive had been received it had resulted in the Cub’s being sent to travel with a tutor. One human being the boy did love, and that was herself,—he must have her care now or never!

Without realizing that the hotel was no place for the boy, or what the result might be, she went to her desk, wrote a few emphatic words, enclosed a ten-dollar bill in the envelope (it chanced to be the last money in her purse), and, quickly putting on coat and bonnet, took it herself to the post-box on the street corner, not trusting it to the hotel box; then she returned to her room with flushed cheeks, feeling as guilty as a girl slipping out with a love-letter instead of a mother daring to tell her own son to come home. At that moment she fairly hated the motiveless comfort by which she was surrounded; passivity had become almost a disease, she must shake it off; she would speak that night, and have an understanding about the Cub, no matter how busy her husband might be.

When she had laid aside her things, no maid yet appearing, the Gilead letter claimed her attention, and she was soon absorbed in it. It told of Keith’s resolution to go to Boston, and gave an inventory of the property on the farm that had been bought with Adam Lawton’s money.

She had also, she said, written for instructions as to its future care; would he take charge, or should she look for some suitable person in the neighbourhood? Receiving no answer, and judging that the letter had either been lost, or else that her cousin had been too busy to consider it, Miss Keith had made a second careful copy and enclosed it in a letter to Mrs. Lawton, saying that time pressed, and she must rely upon her to “jog” Cousin Adam’s memory, or perhaps, as the farm at least stood in Brooke’s name, that she might have some wishes in the matter.

Mrs. Lawton had almost finished reading the inventory of simple furnishings, etc., when Brooke entered. Her mother at once noticed a strange expression in her always candid features, and a new light in her wide-open eyes; but the letters in her lap caught Brooke’s attention, and after she had given a brief history of the doings of the afternoon, the two women, seated side by side, bent their heads over the Cub’s epistle, though the elder already knew it by heart, word for word.

“The poor, poor Cub!” ejaculated Brooke at last, half laughing, and then stopping short, for looking up, she saw tears trembling on her mother’s lashes. “If it were only long ago, we would buy him a horse, and spear, and shield, and smuggle him outside the castle walls at night, and let him gallop away to seek his own fortunes. Do you know, little mother, that, in spite of all the liberty I have, and money in my pocket without the asking, I sometimes feel choked and tied down like this bad boy of ours? It was only an hour ago, when I was sitting in that beautiful picture gallery, that it came over me how so many of the things we do every day seem unreal and like a useless dream. We ourselves arrange or else blindly submit to customs that keep us apart instead of bringing those who love each other together, until life gets to be like those stupid gas fire-logs yonder, all for show—a little feverish heat and unwholesomeness as a result instead of the true thing, though to be sure real logs are more trouble and a greater responsibility to tend.

“I want to be something more than furniture in our new home, if it is ever finished, and we succeed in getting out of what Lucy Dean calls this ‘elaborated parlour-car method of living.’ Yes, mother, I’m getting what you call a restless streak again. I think I’m going to pick up my brushes”—and then a serious, almost sad expression crossed her face as she added, “if they will let me.”

“So Cousin Keith’s going away,—going to be married! I wish she could have done the second without the first. I like to think of her at the farm just as she used to be. You know it’s my farm now, and I’ve always planned to go back there some summer, and really work, for if anything could put life in my brush, it would be to live in my ‘River Kingdom.’ I’d much rather do that than have a large country place, such as father plans, though of course Gilead is too quiet and out of touch with things for him, and the farm is too small a bit for his energy to work upon. Cousin Keith has been very thrifty,—‘five cows, a farm horse, chickens, ducks, seed potatoes, cordwood, etc.,’ (all mine, too, because the deed says ‘inclusive of all live stock, and furnishings’). Last of all she lists ‘Tatters, the family dog, whose race has been on the soil as long as we ourselves; if he can’t transfer himself to the newcomers not of the name, Dr. Russell has promised to take him down to Oaklands. Please understand, Cousin Pamela, that Tatters doesn’t rank with live stock,—he is a person, and must be treated as such!’”

“Tatters!” repeated Brooke, looking involuntarily at the artificial fire, so surely does visible heat draw the outward eye when the mind’s eye is a-roving. “That was the name of one of the dogs they had that autumn when I spent that lovely month there, and played at gypsy every day. But he must be very, very old now. Yes, you shall be well treated, old fellow, and not ‘transferred’ to anything or anybody against your will.

“Mother, do you know I think that if only Cousin Keith were not going away, it would be a fine thing to send the Cub to Gilead for a while, until he pulled himself together, and then some not overzealous tutor with a fondness for walking might be found for him.

“What is it?” asked Brooke, reading the confusion in her mother’s face. “You have answered him already and told him that he may come? Good! now we will act together. You take father quite too seriously; if he really understood just what we both wish to do and be, I’m sure that he would be the last one to hinder either, but we haven’t let him see. How can a man who has lived his own life so long possibly understand women unless they give him the clew, and whisper ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ when he gets off the track?

“No one, since ever I can remember, has been allowed to let father even think that he can make a mistake; consequently he really believes he cannot err, and I don’t think that he is wholly to blame for it. I’m going to beg for the Cub’s liberty the minute father comes home, and more than that, I’m going to tell him that we four have been groping round in opposite directions, and that he simply must come into our lives, and let us do for him, or take us into his—that the ‘some day’ when he will have time to listen must begin this very night!”

“Dinner is served!” said the reproving accents of the waiting-maid, letting drop the portière as she spoke, and both women glanced in surprise at the clock that was striking eight.

“Eight o’clock already, and I’m in my street gown,” said Brooke, gathering up her possessions, and making sure that the silk-bound catalogue was in her muff.

“Eight o’clock, and your father has not yet come home!”

“Perhaps he has stopped at the club, and talked longer than usual. I heard to-day through Lucy, to whom her father seems to speak as freely about his business as if she were his partner, that our parents are engaged in some important ‘deal’ together!

“He is probably late for our special benefit,” said Brooke, cheerfully, “so that we may make ourselves just a wee bit pretty,” and putting her arm about her mother, she led her down the corridor to their rooms, which adjoined, and five minutes sufficed for each to slip on the tasteful, yet simple, dinner gown that the lady’s-maid, now at her post, had laid in readiness.

“Ask the page in the outer hall if any note has come for mother,” said Brooke to the woman, as they went to the dining room. “It was only yesterday that I found that two personal notes had been travelling up and down in the elevator for half the morning, in spite of two men at the door, and one posted every ten feet the rest of the way.”

“There is no note come, ma’am,” replied the waiting-maid, a couple of minutes later, “but he says that Mr. Lawton’s been over an hour at home,—at least he came in then, and he’s not seen him go out, that is, not by the lift. He must have let himself in with a key, then, for neither Sellers nor I opened for him.”

“Perhaps he went to the den, thinking we were all out, and does not realize how late it is,” said Brooke, moving swiftly down the hall, followed by her mother. Turning the corner, for her father had located his den, for the sake of quiet, as far as possible from the rest of the apartment, she saw the light that shone above and below the portière, for the door was not wholly closed.

“Yes, he is here after all!” and she threw open the door without knocking, as she alone dared, and entered with some playful words upon her lips, quite prepared to rumple the iron-gray hair, a little thin on top, that partially capped the figure seated at his desk, with his left hand, as usual, in his pocket.

The next moment she stopped, as an undefined feeling of dread held her fast,—the right hand was stiffly extended, as if it had just let go its hold of the movable ’phone that stood on the desk, and knocked it over. The usually alert figure had settled in the chair, the head dropping backward, while, after a single breath, that resounded like a snore, there was no sound.

Brooke touched him quickly; there was still the warmth of life, and the left side of the face twitched frightfully, but no words came; his face, flushed at first, was growing rapidly livid. Instantly she wound her strong young arms about him, and, laying him on the thick rug, his head slightly turned and raised, she motioned to her mother and the maid, who had come at her unconscious call, to loosen collar and clothing, while she sped back to the telephone in her mother’s sitting room to call a doctor who was resident in the hotel, and he was at hand almost before she realized that the call had gone forth.

“Cerebral hemorrhage; has he had bad news or some sudden shock?” was what the physician said a moment after he entered the room where Adam Lawton lay, and saw the litter of papers and the overthrown instrument. But there was no letter or telegram among them that could indicate, and the ominous telephone receiver was mute.

As the men from the house helped move him to his room, Mrs. Lawton and Brooke following silent with the first calmness of a shock, her own words rang in her ears. “He must come into our lives and let us do for him or take us into his life; the ‘some day’ when he will have time to listen must begin to-night!”

The first hour passed, that period of rapid action following a calamity that intervenes before the clutch of the tension of continued strain is felt.

The family physician came and called an expert in counsel, and then Brooke was directed to send for a nurse,—more than one her mother would not have, and as she was intelligently calm, no objection was made to her insistence that she should share both the care and responsibility of the night.

Adam Lawton was unconscious, and life itself must hang in the balance for many hours at best, and the physicians insisted upon the most perfect quiet.

Who can say where the mind is when its physical registry is interrupted? The physician cannot tell you, but at the same time he is very careful to keep injurious impression beyond the range of the seemingly deaf ears. Brooke went to her father’s den and touched the instrument that had so recently fallen from his hand, almost with a shudder. If only it would repeat to her what it had said to him, some light would be shed upon the mystery.

After arranging for the nurse, a desire for companionship during this night of suspense seized her, and she called the number that meant Lucy Dean, thinking as she did so, “I must tell her as quickly as I can, for I cannot bear her usual telephone joking now.”

“Lucy? It is I, Brooke Lawton; can you come down and spend the night with me? Please listen until I finish. Something awful has happened—father—”

Lucy (breaking in with a torrent of words): “Yes, you poor dear, I know all about it; heard it just as soon as I got home, before dinner—dad told me. We would have been down by now, only dad thought, as your father had gone against his advice through all this matter, it might seem pushing in me. Cheer up, it may come out all right yet.”

Brooke: “I don’t understand; how could you have heard before dinner?—it was eight o’clock before we knew ourselves.”

“Dad was worried over the affair and had a special sent him after he came up town.”

“Lucy, what are you talking about?”

“Why, what else but your father’s great deal to buy up the stock control of the T. Y. D. Q. Railroad, and the way those rascally friends of his turned traitor? It isn’t so killing, after all. Dad was down perfectly flat twelve years ago, and now he’s ten times to the good. What dad thought foolish was for him to realize on everything else he had to go into this shaky deal!”

“You mean that my father has failed! Then that accounts, oh, that accounts for it all!”

“You don’t say that you did not know it? What did you mean and what are you talking about? Your father hasn’t—” Fortunately the question that Lucy asked did not reach Brooke’s ears, for, pushing the instrument from her across the desk, she neither cried nor raved nor wrung her hands, but sitting forward in her father’s chair, very much the attitude he took when deep in thought, scarcely stirred for the quarter-hour. The visible signs of the years she lacked of being the age she really was came swiftly, and laid their hands upon hers, not empty hands nor yet filled with the trifles the years sometimes hold. Presently Courage entered her heart, and then its sponsors, Hope and Constancy.

Soon a muffled closing of the door at the lower end of the hall, and the approaching tiptoe tread of two people of uneven weights, brought her to her feet and into the crisis again. It was Lucy, who, with every vestige of flippancy gone, threw her arms around her friend’s neck and burst into tears, while Brooke held out her hand to Mr. Dean, meanwhile, looking him straight in the eyes, saying: “Thank you for coming. Do not trouble to conceal anything, only tell me the truth, and do it quickly,” not realising that in such cases truth-telling is not the simple thing that it is reckoned.