Читать книгу The Lords of High Decision - Meredith Nicholson - Страница 10

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“MY promptness deserves a better cause!” exclaimed Mrs. Blair as she stepped from her motor at the entrance to the railway station, where Wayne in his father’s car had arrived but a moment earlier. Mrs. Blair had brought down her two children, and these in their smart fall coats were still protesting against the haste with which they had been snatched from their beds and dressed in their Sunday clothes; but their faces brightened at the sight of their uncle, upon whom they fell clamorously with a demand to be taken into the train sheds to see the locomotives. Wayne was more amiable than his sister had seen him since their father gave the first warning of his marriage. He chaffed the children and promised to take them to a football game the next Saturday if they would let him off as to the engines; and when they were appeased he held up for his sister’s inspection the morning papers, with their first-page account of the marriage in New York the preceding day.

“‘Simplicity marked all the arrangements,’” he read. “‘Only the bride’s mother and the necessary witnesses were present—dined very quietly at Sherry’s—scarce noted in the fashionable throng of the great dining room—Colonel Craighill’s private car attached to the Pittsburg Flyer’—and so on,” and Wayne shook out the paper to display the portraits of Colonel and Mrs. Craighill and a view of the Craighill home.

The picture of the house evoked an exclamation of disgust from Mrs. Blair.

“Oh, Wayne, they might have spared us that! The house—it hurts worse than anything else. It’s sacrilege—it isn’t fair.”

Wayne folded the paper and thrust it into his pocket to get it out of her sight.

“Now, Sis, you’ve got to cheer up. You’re looking bullier than ever this morning. Those clothes must have eaten a hole in John’s check-book. It’s rather nasty of John not to come down and face the music with you.”

“John couldn’t; he simply couldn’t,” she declared defensively.

“Wouldn’t, you mean! John Blair is not a man to get up to meet his wife’s relations on an early train if he can duck it. But the kids help out a lot. They’re a charming feature of the morning. You ought to have taught them to sing a carol and scatter flowers as grandpapa comes through the gates leading their new grandmama by the hand. It would have been nuts for those reporters over there with the camera men.”

“No; you don’t mean that they are here!” she gasped.

He indicated with a nod several men and two women waiting near the news-stand. They carried cameras and were watching Wayne and his sister with interest.

“The women are the society reporters; they’re going to do this thing right. Mrs. Craighill’s coming-home gown will be described in proper dry-goods language; no blundering male eye for this job!”

“How perfectly horrible! I wish I hadn’t brought the children if we’re all to get into the papers.”

“Brace up! You can’t flinch now. Besides, there’s the train!”

He led the way out of the waiting room and into the train-shed as the New York express rolled heavily in.

The private car was at the end of the train and before they reached it Colonel Craighill’s children saw his tall figure in the vestibule. Their eyes were, however, upon the lady behind him, whose hat and coat had already been appraised by Mrs. Blair in that sharp coup d’œil by which one woman dissects the garb of another. The porter jumped out with his arms filled with hand baggage, and as Colonel Craighill stepped sedately forth, Mrs. Blair’s arms were at once about her father’s neck. For an instant there was a sob in her throat, but she stifled it and her hands were immediately extended to her father’s wife, who hesitated upon the car steps.

“Fanny, this is my wife, Adelaide. Good morning, Wayne!”

“Welcome home!” cried Mrs. Blair bravely, and seized the lady’s hands nervously in her own. Then with a sudden impulse, as though to complete, beyond any criticism, her acceptance of the newcomer, she kissed her stepmother on the cheek.

“You are just my height, aren’t you!” she exclaimed, stepping back.

Wayne waited hat in hand, smiling.

“Adelaide, this is my son, Wayne!”

“Good morning! I am glad to see you,” said Wayne, bowing over Mrs. Craighill’s hand; and as he raised his head their eyes met with, it seemed, a particular inquiry and plea in hers.

“I’ll attend to the baggage. Give me your checks, father.”

It was over, this first meeting between Colonel Craighill’s wife and her husband’s children. As they walked through the waiting room there was a click of cameras. Other eyes than Mrs. Blair’s had already noted the new Mrs. Craighill’s outlines, and the films in the newspaper cameras had recorded a trim, graceful figure of medium height, a well-set head, crowned with a pretty toque, and a light travelling coat of unimpeachable cut.

In the waiting room the Blair boys were presented, while their mother watched the meeting critically. A slight to her children, an indifference to their charm would have been fatal; but Mrs. Craighill bent to them graciously. She had even remembered their names, and applied them correctly. The lads suffered themselves to be kissed and were thereupon sent home in the Blair motor.

Colonel Craighill had asked Mrs. Blair to come to his house for breakfast, and they were all soon seated in his car, which the chauffeur drove slowly, so that Colonel Craighill might point out to his wife features of the urban landscape that struck him as particularly interesting. As the rise of the boulevard lifted them out of the commercial district, the dark cloud that brooded above the rivers gave Colonel Craighill an opportunity to introduce his wife, with a wave of the hand, to the prodigious industries which thus advertised themselves upon the very sky. He was at the point of quoting the enormous tonnages to which the ironmongery of the region ran; but Mrs. Blair thwarted him.

“Adelaide!” she cried. “There! Did you see how naturally I spoke your name the first time! I may call you that, mayn’t I?”

The two ladies clasped hands, while Colonel Craighill smiled upon them in benignant approval.

“I was going to call attention to that speck of soot that has just settled on your nose—your first!” Mrs. Blair continued. “Ah! there you have it now!” she concluded as Mrs. Craighill found the offender with her handkerchief.

“That, we may say, marks your baptism into full citizenship,” beamed Colonel Craighill.

As the residential area unfolded itself, he named the owners of many of the houses they were passing, while Mrs. Blair summarized their history in short, amusing phrases. Wayne, sitting on the front seat, turned his head to throw in a word now and then; but for the greater part he kept his own counsel. He overheard his sister’s rapid survey of the social geography of the Greater City. She declared that there was no debating the claims of the East End to social supremacy, though there were what she called “nice people” in the red brick homes of transpontine Allegheny. “Dick Wingfield,” she quoted, “always says that in crossing the river, Charon and not the bridge company gets the fee. Dick calls the river the Stygian wave.” Mrs. Blair was not sure that Mrs. Craighill quite took this in, but it did not matter in one who smiled responsively at everything and appeared anxious to please.

There was the usual difficulty in explaining to a stranger the triangular shape of the city clasped by its two rivers that so quickly flow as one, and the fact that you may, if you like, take a boat here for New Orleans if you are bent upon adventure. “Are there suburbs?” Mrs. Craighill asked; and rising to this prompting Mrs. Blair flashed an illuminating glance upon Stanwixley, where, she conceded, there were delightful people, but why they should live where they did was beyond her powers of understanding. Colonel Craighill protested now and then, but smilingly, as one who would, at the fitting moment, pronounce the final word in all such matters. Greater philosophers than Fanny Blair have found it difficult to hit off in a few phrases the social alignments of the Greater City. Where there is no centre, no common and unifying social expression, it is not easy to find a point of departure. Even the terra sancta of the East End presents no stern walls to the newcomer who can provide himself with a house and a chef. And it is not correct to speak of social strata in the City of the Iron Heart, for the term implies depth, and the life here at this period was wholly superficial, a thing of geography and cliques, the one fairly rigid, the other unstable and shifting. But these were the Years of the Great Prosperity, a time of broad social readjustments and generous inclusion. Poverty alone, we may say, enforces the rules of exact social differentiation; there has never been in America any society so scrupulous, proud and sensitive as that of the Southern cavaliers when they threw off their armour and returned to their despoiled estates.

It did not seem possible during these bountiful years that the wolf would ever yelp in the steep cañons of the Greater City, or that steel, iron and coal could ever less magically change to gold. It was, indeed, inconceivable that the prosperous citizens would not forever disport themselves in the glittering hotels of New York and go on discovering, like so many Columbuses, the delights of London and Paris. Nowhere were these Midases more in evidence than on the transatlantic steamers, where their millions were computed in awed whispers by less favoured travellers and the stewards danced with unwonted alacrity in the confident hope of largess.

“It’s our American habit”—Colonel Craighill was saying—“and not a bad trait, to believe our own state and our own city and our own quarter of the block where we live the most ideal place in the world. And this, Adelaide, is home!”

Mrs. Blair flung off her wraps in the hall and went to the dining room to interview the maid about breakfast. She arranged with her own hands the roses she had sent for this first table, and, this accomplished to her satisfaction, she peered into the cabinet that held the best of her mother’s Sevres with a lingering regret that she had not made way with it while there was yet time; for Mrs. Blair was eminently human, and women are never so weak as before the temptation to loot. She heard her father’s voice above, describing to his wife the character of the upper chambers and she joined Wayne in the library where he stood in the bay window looking out upon the thinning boughs of the maples.

“Well,” she exclaimed with a half sigh, “the worst is over.”

“You’ve done bully, Fanny. You’ve risen to the occasion!”

“Oh, it might be worse! It might be infinitely worse. What do you think of her?”

“Oh, she’s not bad! I should call her a pretty woman.”

“Well, she doesn’t seem to have much to say!”

“No one can, Sis, when you get going. She remarked quite distinctly that she liked summer better than winter, and I thought she did well to get that in.”

“Well, she was nice to the children, anyhow,” sighed Mrs. Blair, not heeding him.

Steps were heard on the stair and in a moment Mrs. Craighill entered at her husband’s side.

“I hope we haven’t kept you waiting. It’s so good of you to stop.”

“Breakfast is served always at eight o’clock,” Mrs. Blair explained as they moved toward the dining room. “I was driven from my home by that rule. Father would never yield fifteen minutes even when I had been dancing all night.”

Wayne drew back the chair for the new mistress of the house, and then sat down opposite his sister at the round table. All contributed a few commonplaces to the first difficult moments at the table, and Mrs. Blair took advantage of the opportunity to scrutinize the newcomer more closely. Mrs. Craighill was pretty, undeniably that; but it was a prettiness without distinction; it lay in the general effect, and in her ready smile rather than in particular features. Her hands were not to Mrs. Blair’s liking; they were a trifle too broad, but even this was minimized by the woman’s graceful use of them. The appearance of the coffee, which was made in a device that Wayne had set over to domestic use from the Club, brought him into the talk with his personal apologies for the absence of the silver breakfast service.

“That machine isn’t so formidable as it looks. It is warranted not to blow up. But I advise you against its product, Adelaide; the brew is as fierce as lye and will shatter the strongest nerves. Father requires water in his—about one hundred per cent. Please don’t feel obliged to use that trap if you don’t like it.”

He had spoken her name easily, and as he mentioned it she lifted her head from the cups and smiled at him with a little nod. Mrs. Blair, observant of everything, could not, in spite of the smooth-flowing talk, forget the waste areas of her ignorance of this woman, who had slipped unchallenged into her mother’s old place at the table, and whom she and Wayne were endeavouring to please. This last point touched her humour; that they, with their prior claims upon their father and the house, should be trying to impress the new wife favourably was to Fanny Blair’s mind decidedly funny.

“I suppose our severest winter weather will hardly equal the cold you have been used to in Vermont,” she remarked, stirring her cup.

“It gets very cold there, but it is bracing and wholesome,” replied Adelaide, meeting Fanny’s gaze. “But I have hardly been there since I grew up. Mama found she couldn’t stand the climate about the time I needed some schooling, so we went abroad, and you know how easy it is to stay on once you are over there. Our home in Vermont was at Burlington—you know, on the lake?—and the winds do come howling terribly down from Canada! It is lovely in summer, though. I’m going to take your father up there next summer,” she ended, smiling at her husband, who gazed at her fondly.

It had been some time since Mrs. Blair had heard anyone speak of taking her father anywhere. Her memory pricked her at once with the recollection that in her mother’s lifetime her father had yielded reluctantly to all pleas for vacations. The children had usually been taken away by their mother—sometimes to hotels at quiet summer places, at other times to houses rented for the season. Colonel Craighill did not always like the places chosen by his wife, but he had never quarrelled with her plans and decisions in such matters. He liked to travel and fell into the habit of an annual trip abroad, going usually alone, chiefly, he declared, for the sea trip. Now, however, Mrs. Blair reflected, everything would be different.

Breakfast passed smoothly, and they lingered later in the library. Mrs. Craighill seemed in no awe of her elderly husband. She talked more freely now, and mentioned many foreign places where she and her mother had lived at different periods. Most of them were obscure and unfashionable, and some of them were wholly unknown to Mrs. Blair; but she was dimly conscious that there was cleverness behind this careless sketching of the leisurely foreign itinerary pursued by this young woman and her widowed mother. At the same time the background which Mrs. Craighill created for herself was shadowy; against it she and her mother were as unsubstantial as figures on a screen. There was nothing that you could put your hand on. Vermont, to Mrs. Blair, was even more remote and inaccessible than those French and German towns where winters and summers had been spent by the mother and daughter. Mrs. Blair, in her rapid visualization of their flights, saw them huddled where the pension charges were lightest.

Wayne soon called for his runabout and went to the office, as his father had announced that he would remain at home until after luncheon. Wayne had acted becomingly, to his father’s satisfaction and to his sister’s great relief. Mrs. Blair was, in fact, quite proud of him as he said good-bye to her and stood very straight and tall before his stepmother and bade her good morning. He bore the stamp of breeding—she had never felt this more than now—and he could be relied on in emergencies.

“Are you all coming over to-night—the children and everybody?” asked Colonel Craighill.

“No; you must have your first dinner alone,” Mrs. Blair replied; “but to-morrow night you are coming to us.”

“I am dining with Fanny to-night, so you will have a clean sweep,” said Wayne, in conformity with his sister’s earlier instructions.

The sensation of being suddenly established as mistress of a home over which another woman had presided for twenty years, and in which she has borne and reared children and died, was to be Mrs. Craighill’s fully to-day. Mrs. Blair went thoroughly into all the domestic arrangements with the housekeeper attending. She revealed the repositories of linen, the moth-proof lodgments for woollen fabrics, the secret storehouses of fruit and vegetables. On these rounds Mrs. Blair evinced a sincere desire to be of help. She had fortified herself against heartache, but there were things that hurt. The ineffaceable marks of her mother’s forethought and labour were wrought into the deeper history of the house, and could never be understood by this newcomer, who laid ignorant hands upon the ark of the domestic covenant and yet escaped destruction.

Several times, on this tour of inspection, Colonel Craighill spoke his first wife’s name, and his manner and tone gave to his daughter’s sensitive intelligence a completer idea of his perfect detachment from the earlier tie. She felt the tightening of the heart that every woman feels when an illustration of man’s forgetfulness strikes close home. She foresees at once her own replacement by another; fickle flowers of remembrance are rusty patches on her grave where the winds of December moan forever. Fanny Blair, already, by this prevision, saw herself forgotten and her own successor entering her husband’s door, while her children, unkempt and tearful, wailed dolorously before the gates of oblivion.