Читать книгу The Left Lady - Margaret Turnbull - Страница 6

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The fundamental difference between the sexes is never more clearly shown than when a castle in Spain collapses. The man says: "What's past is past. Let's start anew." But the woman invariably pokes among the ruins, to see if there's any good building material left.

So Tom Hastings, having read the telegram offered him by Mr. Fair, put it on the desk and leaned back in his chair, gazing with a dissatisfied air at the lawyer and the office, while he turned over in his mind a new method of attack.

It was a quaint office, a one-story addition tacked onto the dignified old Fair house. It made a big, comfortable room with two windows. A stove, open bookcases with law books, none of them very new, about the walls, a large table-topped desk, a desk chair, a typewriter on which Mr. Fair himself sometimes tapped out a document, several comfortable wooden armchairs, and a wooden settee completed the furniture—save for three portraits of county judges, a calendar and, inevitably, a brass spittoon.

"What does that telegram mean?" Tom asked finally, having arranged his plan.

John Fair's eyebrows climbed, and his eyes twinkled. "Miss Emmie's inherited some of her father's business sense, I guess. Leastways, that's what it means to me."

He glanced at the other man with a look that showed little of the curiosity that was rampant within him. He was just as much in the dark as to what Emmie Weston and this man had said to each other as the rest of the community, and he wanted to know quite as badly. John Fair's legal training had made him conceal the curiosity that helped make him one of the best lawyers in his county. He might have been one of the best known in his state, had not his wife died leaving him with an only child, a son, who was badly crippled. To shield his boy, to keep him in the country and among friends, had anchored John Fair to East Penniwell for life. The struggle to make enough money to leave his son well cared for, should he die first, had made Fair the cleverest lawyer in the county.

He remembered Tom Hastings eighteen years ago, when Tom had been Eli Weston's ward. He looked at him now, while Tom gazed out of the window, his fingers playing with the telegram, and wondered just what Tom had been doing those eighteen years. The result before him was a man of forty, well built, who had not apparently abused his health and strength, who stood straight and was not in the least flabby. "Fine looking," was Fair's summing up. Tom was also exceedingly prosperous. He was shrewd, too—every move he had made in this brickyard game proved that; but here Fair chuckled to himself. It might be that old Eli's daughter, with Fair as her lawyer, would prove Tom's equal when it came to a deal.

The thought struck Fair that Tom had not been used to being balked by any woman, and that he would not take kindly to any change in his plans, be the cause a woman or a man.

Tom turned from the window. "Can I reach Miss Weston in town?"

John Fair shook his head. "'Fraid not. She doesn't want her address known. She wants to be left alone to rest for a while. Emmie had a long siege of nursing her father and she needs a rest."

Though he spoke calmly, Tom's question had enlightened him on one point. The fellow did not know where Emmie was.

Tom considered a moment. "Is she the only one concerned? How about that aunt of hers? Has the aunt no interest in the property?"

John Fair's jaw dropped. "My Guy!" he exclaimed, relapsing into a common expression in that part of the country. "Don't you know that Emmie's aunt died seventeen years ago?"

"No," Tom replied, "I didn't," and knew at that moment, with a blinding flash of illumination, just what he had done.

"Oh the devil!" he said to himself. "The woman'll never forgive me for thinking she was her aunt." His next thought was that she would queer the deal.

He spoke quickly, before Fair, who was busy putting two and two together, could see the situation clearly:

"Is there any way of getting an answer about this land before Tuesday?"

Fair shook his head. "I don't know of any, except to write again to Emmie, telling her the matter is urgent, and see if she'll either write or see you."

Tom leaned back in the chair and surveyed Fair with a moody eye. "Couldn't she give you a power of attorney and let you act for her now?"

Fair smiled. "She could, but would she? She's a woman and she's Eli Weston's girl. 'Tisn't likely on either ground that she'll give up much authority to any one."

The two men sat silent on that, thinking. Tom stared straight before him out of the window, where he could see a corner of those green fields, with the deep red earth that he coveted beneath the green. Fair gazed at Tom. This was the most interesting human problem that had come his way in some months.

"Well," Tom rose slowly, "it looks as though I must go further in my search."

"Doubt if you'll fare so well," said Fair shortly.

Tom smiled. "Good earth here, and no mistake, but there are other sections of the country, Fair, besides East Penniwell, that would make equally good brick."

"Maybe," admitted Fair slowly, for he hated to see profits slipping between his fingers. "You can try, of course, and meanwhile I'll see what I can do with Miss Weston."

"Yes, do," but Tom said it without much hope in his voice, "and if she comes down here, let me know. Surely, as an old friend, she'll be willing to talk it over."

"Ought to, ought to; but women are women, Hastings. She may not want the place messed up that way, and a brick plant sure does mess things up."

As though such sentimental reasons were utterly foolish, Tom said shortly, "The plant would be two miles out, and wouldn't change things near East Penniwell or the Weston house." With that, he swung himself out of the office and into his car, and the car went up the New York road at tremendous speed.

Tom was furious. By his own blunder, it was just possible he had placed this splendid land outside of the company's grasp forever. "Damn women!" he muttered.

Left to himself, John Fair leaned back in his chair, and thought hard. Here was a pretty puzzle for a man to solve! Emmie Weston had for years been considered the town's greatest romance, because her father had driven young Tom Hastings from the house and town. Now Eli was dead and Tom Hastings had come back, but interested only, it seemed, in acquiring some of the Weston land for a brickyard. Emmie Weston had fled the town and remained away, refusing to return, even when the man who implored her to see him was Tom Hastings.

Fair shook his head and took up his pipe. The puzzle was beyond him yet, but he would telephone and see if Emmie didn't want to sell the fields. They were two miles and more up the road, right away from the village and off toward the creek. It wouldn't hurt the town's looks if they planted a brickyard there, and when one considered that for more years than Fair liked to remember forty dollars an acre had been the highest price for farming land near East Penniwell, and one hundred dollars a lot in the village, Tom's offer of three hundred an acre, first bid, seemed to him a miracle. If he offered three hundred, there was every chance they could get more. It could make Emmie an even richer woman than she was, if she listened to Fair and sold it; but if she didn't want to, she still had enough.

Fair sighed, but it was not entirely with envy. He sighed for Emmie, the girl he once knew, who had turned into a faded woman. If Eli had only let the girl have some of the money while she was young!

From her fifteenth story hotel-window, Emmie Weston looked down on a crowded street, not knowing that she was looking on Tom Hastings, who, with wrath in his heart, was hurrying home. He must send out scouts looking for other fields, in case he should be permanently blocked from the East Penniwell proposition by this woman. Without Emmie's consent he could do nothing in East Penniwell. She either owned the land he wanted outright, or had mortgages on it.

Tom had made an exhaustive search that day, and this was the result. He was hurrying back now to the city, resolved to think out his problem. He meant to evolve some plan to approach this woman that would wipe out, if it were possible to wipe out, the fatal beginning he had made.

"I did think she was the aunt," he assured himself, "and Lord knows she looked it! I wonder if there's any way to make a woman forget a thing like that?"

He turned his car over to his chauffeur, who was waiting for him at the entrance to the apartment house. Tom went up to the roof of the building. There he entered an apartment that seemed to be on the top of the world, and from which the view of the city and harbor was famous. Its beauty and its luxury were lost on Tom to-day, though it had both in no small degree, having been built especially for a Western millionaire, who had loaned it to Tom, before going on a European trip.

"I'll have to get another woman in on this to help me out," said Tom to himself, and went rapidly over his feminine acquaintances. In this great Eastern city, where he himself had been domiciled only a few months, the list was not as great as he meant it to be. He thought of Lee Lansing. She was a clever girl; she might help him out.

At her window, Emmie was thinking of the same woman, only she did not know her name was Lee Lansing. She was speculating on the woman who interested Tom Hastings now.

Lib called shrilly, "Miss Emmie, you're wanted on long distance 'foam. I think it's Lawyer Fair."

Emmie turned from her window and went to the telephone, wondering what had happened. Lib, moving about the room, pretending to be occupied in hanging up Emmie's clothes, tried to patch up, from what she heard, the substance of the conversation.

"Yes, I hear you," Emmie said. "Yes, I remember Father bought Ben Harris' eighty acres and there's a heavy mortgage on Jim Cortright's ninety acres. Oh, you think it a good offer? H'mm, we can do better. Oh, I see. Well, then of course we can get more. Let Tom Hastings alone for two or three days and then call him up and say I want to know what he offers. And, oh, John, did he say anything—about anything else? Yes, I know that isn't very definite, but did he? No—all right, go ahead. Don't promise anything. I'm not sure yet whether I'll sell. I may open the house presently. I'll let you know in time. Good-bye."

Lib could wait no longer. "Miss Emmie, you going back?"

Emmie shook her head. "Not yet." But she was evidently troubled and as evidently did not wish Lib's advice.

"You'd best stay home this afternoon, Lib," Emmie said finally, "to answer the telephone in case Tom Hastings finds out where I am. If he does, I am out, and you don't know when I'll be back."

"Yes'm, Miss Emmie," Lib answered, evidently not at all satisfied but as evidently aware that just now she would get nothing more.

Emmie, her mind in a curious maze, went to Calla Lilley. She admitted to herself that she was afraid to go back to East Penniwell. Tom Hastings seemed bent on making life harder than it need be. It was not enough that he should have come back, as he had, but to be so callous, so lost to common decency as to persist in hanging about East Penniwell! If she went back now, the village would know the truth—that not only had Tom Hastings not come back to her, but that he had apparently no earthly idea of doing so. He had forgotten all about her.

Now that she admitted it freely to herself, Emmie breathed more easily. The present gossip that she had sent him away would not hold if Tom hung around the village looking for brick land. Truly, Emmie thought, she had cause to hate the sight of bricks. She had equal cause, she reminded herself, to hate her own silly self. What was it really to her that Tom Hastings had come back as he had? What did it matter to her? Her heart was not broken.

It was now possible for her to leave East Penniwell and Tom Hastings far behind her and seek fresh fields and new faces. But Emmie, like most women, was conservative and with but one idea, when it came to what she wanted of life. She wanted Tom Hastings, changed or unchanged, good, bad, or indifferent, to want her. She wanted her village to admire her. When Emmie was thoroughly honest with herself she admitted that she had more money and, when she chose to use it, wider knowledge of the world than the majority of East Penniwell's inhabitants. She also admitted that she did not care what East Penniwell thought about her, as long as her conscience was clear, except as to this affair with Tom Hastings. It was really, in the country idiom, "very small potatoes" to feel, to act as she did, as she was doing now.

Emmie admitted all this, but also acknowledged sadly that she could not help it. She had received a cruel hurt, because Tom had come back. He had shattered her dream. It was what she had dreamed about Tom and herself that had kept her soul alive, through all the dreary years that lay behind her, through all the long years of her father's iron rule, while her youth had faded from her. It was Tom's return that had shattered her dream.

Emmie shivered as she took the elevator. She gazed in the mirror as the car went up and saw that Calla was living up to her promise. Already Emmie's hair began to look "alive," burnished and soft; already her weathered complexion was beginning to look smoother and clearer, and all this by exercise and massage, without the use of cosmetics, of which Calla did not approve for Emmie, if she could get results without them.

Emmie's wardrobe also was undergoing a complete and pleasing transformation. Calla, after one or two shrewd questions, gathered that Mrs. Kent neither knew nor suspected that her sister was in town and surmised that the country mouse wished to appear as thoroughly sophisticated as her city sister, when she made herself known. Learning this, Calla had guided Emmie in her choice of milliners and modistes. Now, Emmie was beginning to dress as well as other carefully groomed women—better than most. All her starved sense of beauty and color was blossoming forth, for Emmie, like many daughters of Puritans, had a love and a sense of color that made her clothes delightful to the eye.

Calla was well satisfied with the progress of her client. Each visit to Booth 7 was a fresh revelation to her of undeveloped beauties, as far as Emmietta's skin and hair were concerned. Calla was experimenting just now with styles of hairdressing. She felt that this rejuvenated Emmietta could "carry off" a new and effective style and she was bent on evoking it.

Calla received Emmie very quietly this time. There was, Emmie noticed, no announcement of her arrival. She was shown into her booth by the silent but efficient Berry, and Calla appeared without delay. She put Emmietta's hair, after it had been vigorously brushed and rubbed with tonic, into "curlers," gave her a new magazine to read and then, before she left the booth, to allow the curlers to do their work, leaned over and said:

"Does your sister, Mrs. Kent, know you're in town?"

Emmie shook her head.

Calla's eyes twinkled. "I thought not. You want to spring it on her later?"

Again Emmie nodded.

"Well, keep perfectly quiet and you're safe. She's in Booth 4, but she's going in a minute. I've given orders you're not to be mentioned."

When Calla closed the door, Emmie heard May's voice:

"You don't mean to tell me you liked that play?"

"Non, not exact what you call likeed," came the attendant's voice, with a strong French accent, "but awfullee amuse."

"I thought it very, very vulgar," May said virtuously.

"Oh, yes, eet ees vulgaire, bot the vulgaire he often amuse."

"I can't bear the slightest vulgarity," May solemnly declared. "Mercy, look at my hair, before I put on my hat! Don't you think it's a little too red? Of course, I've got a sister with naturally reddish hair, but—look, isn't there just a little bit of gray showing through there? Oh, dear, I'd never go to all this trouble myself, but my husband just can't stand gray hair."

"Oh, these hoosband! What a trouble he make!"

"I wouldn't care if it went all white at once, you know, but this pepper and salty hair, you just can't do anything with."

Through the attendant's running comment, principally composed of soothing sounds, May continued to talk. Emmie could visualize her at the glass, peering anxiously at her image.

"We haf here a lofely French dye," the attendant began.

May gave a little scream. "Dye! Oh, the idea! Don't speak to me about dyes! No indeed, no dyes for me! All I want, or need, is a little henna rinse. With a little more henna in it, next time remember, Mademoiselle René. But no dye. A rinse is not a dye, you know."

"Oh, non, non, a ranee is—well, he is rancece, that is all he is."

"Precisely. Oh, Mademoiselle René, you have me down for next Tuesday, a facial—and aren't my eyebrows thick, a little? I hate plucked eyebrows, but thick eyebrows don't suit my face at all. It needs thin eyebrows to give it expression. My husband hates thick eyebrows."

The eyebrows lasted all the way down the corridor, as a topic of conversation, or rather as a monologue.

Emmie heard the elevator door slam and drew a breath of relief. Her head was too full of thoughts to admit anyone else's ideas entering it through the medium of the printed word. She dropped the magazine, closed her eyes, and leaned back in the chair.

She could hear plainly now the voices in the other booths, and in Booth 6 especially. Calla was talking. The woman was evidently an old customer, someone whom Calla knew and liked. They talked for a while about face and hair treatments, how tired the woman was, and how much it rested her to come there. All of it amused Emmie. She was beginning to understand that these women came to Calla for rest, counting on Calla's strength, her soothing hands and voice quite as much, if not more, than her toilet preparations.

Emmie looked at herself, and tried to keep a frown from marring the face which Calla declared, and truly, was "smoothing itself out" every day.

Then she heard the woman in Booth 6 say:

"My husband wants me to go abroad this year, and of course, if we go, the place must be closed. And what will my Two Grenadiers do then?"

"They will miss you, won't they?"

"It isn't missing me," the other woman answered with a little sigh, "it's missing their summer together out in the country. I would give them the use of the gardener's cottage, but that won't do. The Second Grenadier isn't very strong just now, and can't have everything to do. They need looking after, and they will not permit me to look after them. If I were there I could do it and they wouldn't notice it. They are such dear fellows. I hate to go abroad and leave them." She laughed. "But equally I would hate to have my husband go without me. It's a puzzle and so far I don't see the solution."

Calla evidently suggested something, which Emmie didn't get, because just then the customer in Booth 5 told some exquisitely merry jest and the sound of laughter drowned everything else.

Then: "You see, the First Grenadier has lost his job. The architects he was with have gone out of business."

Calla's voice was full of sympathy.

"Oh, positively not!" The other voice again. "They are as proud as Lucifer himself. Oh, well, I'll think of something yet. I just won't go abroad unless my Two Grenadiers are comfortable."

Suddenly Emmie sat bolt upright and gazed at herself in the mirror excitedly. She had had a vision of what she might do. Well, it was worth trying. Nothing would so distract the village from gossiping about one man as the appearance of one or two other men. She determined to test it.

When Calla came in to remove the curlers, she said nothing further about May Kent, though her shrewd eyes took in the very silent Emmie who waited for her. Emmie listened to Calla's enthusiastic comments about her hair and the way it curled and the new coiffure she was about to try, and said merely "yes" and "no," as the case required. Finally she interrupted Calla in the middle of a hair rhapsody with:

"I'm wondering whether you could help me with another problem, as well as you have with my clothes."

Calla laughed. "Put your troubles right down on the dressing table, Miss Weston, along with your hairpins. That's what we're here for—mental and physical comfort."

Emmie smiled. "It's not such a terrible trouble. Possibly it would be a joy to some people. You see, I've a nice old house in the country. I want it modernized, without being spoiled, and I want an architect who understands, so that my house won't be pulled about to make it look like something he imagines it ought to look like and not what it is. You understand my trouble, don't you, Mrs. Lilley? I could go to a firm of merely good or merely well-known architects, but how would I know what they would do with it?"

Calla's brows were drawn together in concentration.

"If I could get some one who was really clever, really good, and yet not too fashionable, so that he would be willing to come down and stay awhile in the house, I could put him up and Lib would look after him wonderfully. He could study out his plan, and how to use the workmen down there, so that my town would reap the benefit of the money I mean to spend. You see, my main difficulty—to find some one with time enough, and talent enough to do this."

Calla's face had cleared. "You wait just one minute," she answered, with suppressed excitement in her air and voice, "until I speak to a customer here of mine. She's just about going, and I want to catch her. I think—but wait till I speak to her." In the doorway of the booth she paused again. "If this man had a—a friend, an assistant he always travels about with, what then?"

"That would be quite all right," Emmie assured her. "There's room for more than one guest." She emphasized the guest, purposely, and felt that Calla got her meaning. Then she leaned back and closed her eyes. She could hear the low conversation, sinking almost to a whisper, between Calla and the woman in the next booth.

Emmie waited, unconsciously praying that what she hoped for might be true. It was a great scheme, and if it worked—that is, if these men were what the woman's estimate of them would lead one to believe—Emmietta thought she saw her chance to go home with honor. Her problem was complicated. She loved East Penniwell, and her own home, but to return to them was impossible just now, with Tom Hastings bent on showing the whole town that he had no thought of Emmie Weston or of anything but brickyards.

Emmie's face burned. She saw how impossible life in East Penniwell would be for her if East Penniwell knew this. That Tom had come and she had gone, she knew had excited the town. Just so long as nobody really knew what had happened, they could put any complexion they chose upon their meeting. Emmie meant they never should know.

It was her own fault, she admitted, as she cooled her burning cheeks with her cold hands. She had let the real world go for a dream. That was understandable, but she had also let the whole world know her dream. That was the dreadful mistake she had made. Tom Hastings had killed the dream. This was a stabbing pain that she could bear, if she bore it alone. To have the whole town know, and eventually, to have Tom himself told it—as a joke—would be a crown of shame and pain that she did not intend to wear publicly.

While she waited for Calla, Emmie analyzed herself, for though she had led a secluded life she had read and thought. She realized now that she had thrown away substance for shadow, and that her father had known it. Emmie shivered. It must have been because Eli Weston had guessed what was in store for her some day, if Tom Hastings ever came back, that he had so often regarded her with shrewd and cynical glances: that he had refrained from mentioning Tom Hastings' name: that he had frequently discussed with her his financial schemes. He had given her the benefit of his biting analysis of human nature, as he saw it, and all the time he had known she had a blind side, and had been laughing at her. Or did she do him an injustice? Had he been sorry for her? Whichever it was, it was painful to remember and Emmie writhed.

There was only one way in which she could face her village again, and face it she meant to. She dared not run away now on the trip to Europe which she had so often promised herself, and had never expected to be able to take. Her father had been so careful of his purse, and so tough of frame and heart, that she had never been able to envisage either his softening to the extent of giving her money to go away, or of his dying and leaving it to her. Even now the trip must wait, for Emmie's fighting blood was up.

She admitted to herself that she cared immensely about public opinion, as it was represented by East Penniwell. Cared for it enough, at least, to fight it out with Tom Hastings. He should not leave her facing the pitying eyes of her neighbors, while he made desolate her lands with his brickmaking. Bricks she might possibly permit him to make, if in the long run it was good for the place and her neighbors, but it would not be immediately. Meanwhile, she would plan and plot to throw dust in the eyes of East Penniwell, until either Tom Hastings was routed from the field, his brickyard scheme wrecked, or she left him in the midst of his bricks, and went to Europe for her trip, banners flying.

Calla came back into Booth 7, her face radiant with the sense of a good deed done.

"Miss Weston, I've got it fixed for you. I've got the very man, I'm sure, and Mrs. Montgomery's going to call him up on the telephone to-night and send him to see you at the hotel to-morrow. Then you can decide for yourself."

Emmie gasped. Things were moving faster than her country mind had expected or hoped.

"Is he—is he a young man?" she asked.

"Young enough," said Calla, regarding her coiffure building, her head on one side. "No baby boy, or lounge lizard, is being sent you, Miss Weston—don't you fret. Mrs. Montgomery knows a man when she sees him. She's married to one of the best, and both she and her husband think an awful lot of these men."

She inserted another hairpin and said with a pleased little murmur of satisfaction:

"Miss Weston, it seems like an act of God, like a miracle, your asking for just such a man this morning."

"It will be a miracle, an act of Providence, for me," and Emmie smiled at her improved image in the glass, "if he is—I mean they are—the men I need."