Читать книгу The Dim Lantern - Temple Bailey - Страница 7

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Edith Towne had lived with her Uncle Frederick nearly four years when she became engaged to Delafield Simms. Her mother was dead, as was her father. Frederick was her father’s only brother, and had a big house to himself, after his mother’s death. It seemed the only haven for his niece, so he asked her, and asked also his father’s cousin, Annabel Towne, to keep house for him, and chaperone Edith.

Annabel was over sixty, and rather indefinite, but she served to play propriety, and there was nothing else demanded of her in Frederick’s household of six servants. She was a dried-up and desiccated person, with fixed ideas of what one owed to society. Frederick’s mother had been like that, so he did not mind. He rather liked to think that the woman of his family kept to old ideals. It gave to things an air of dignity.

Edith, when she came, was different. So different that Frederick was glad that she had three more years at college before she would spend the winters with him. The summers were not hard to arrange. Edith and Annabel adjourned to the Towne cottage on an island in Maine—and Frederick went up for week-ends and for the month of August. Edith spent much time out-of-doors with her young friends. She was rather fond of her Uncle Fred, but he did not loom large on the horizon of her youthful occupations.

Then came her winter at home, and her consequent engagement to Delafield Simms. It was because of Uncle Fred that she became engaged. She simply didn’t want to live with him any more. She felt that Uncle Fred would be glad to have her go, and the feeling was mutual. She was an elephant on his hands. Naturally. He was a great old dear, but he was a Turk. He didn’t know it, of course. But his ideas of being master of his own house were perfectly archaic. Cousin Annabel and the servants, and everybody in his office simply hung on his words, and Edith wouldn’t hang. She came into his bachelor Paradise like a rather troublesome Eve, and demanded her share of the universe. He didn’t like it, and there you were.

It was really Uncle Fred who wanted her to marry Delafield Simms. He talked about it a lot. At first Edith wouldn’t listen. But Delafield was persistent and patient. He came gradually to be as much of a part of her everyday life as the meals she ate or the car she drove. Uncle Fred was always inviting him. He was forever on hand, and when he wasn’t she missed him.

They felt for each other, she decided, the thing called “love.” It was not, perhaps, the romance which one found in books. But she had been taught carefully at college to distrust romance. The emphasis had been laid on the transient quality of adolescent emotion. One married for the sake of the race, and one chose, quite logically, with one’s head instead, as in the old days, with the heart.

So there you had it. Delafield was eligible. He was healthy, had brains enough, an acceptable code of morals—and was willing to let her have her own way. If there were moments when Edith wondered if this program was adequate to wedded bliss, she put the thought aside. She and Delafield liked each other no end. Why worry?

And really at times Uncle Fred was impossible. His mother had lived until he was thirty-five, she had adored him, and had passed on to Cousin Annabel and to the old servants in the house the formula by which she had made her son happy. Her one fear had been that he might marry. He was extremely popular, much sought after. But he had kept his heart at home. His sweetheart, he had often said, was silver-haired and over sixty. He basked in her approbation; was soothed and sustained by it.

Then she had died, and Edith had come, and things had been different.

The difference had been demonstrated in a dozen ways. Edith was pleasantly affectionate, but she didn’t yield an inch. “Dear Uncle Fred,” she would ask, when they disagreed on matters of manners or morals, or art or athletics, or religion or the lack of it, “isn’t my opinion as good as yours?”

“Apparently my opinion isn’t worth anything.”

“Oh, yes it is—but you must let me have mine.”

Her independence met his rules and broke them. Her frankness of speech came up against his polite reticences and they both said things.

Frederick, of course, blamed Edith when she made him forget his manners. They had, he held, been considered perfect. Edith retorted that they had, perhaps, never been challenged. “It is easy enough, of course, when everybody gives in to you.”

She had brought into his house an atmosphere of modernity which appalled him. She went and came as she pleased, would not be bound by old standards.

“Oh, Uncle Fred,” she would say when he protested, “the war changed things. Women of to-day aren’t sheep.”

“The women of our family,” her uncle would begin, to be stopped by the scornful retort, “Why do you want the women of your family to be different from the others you go with?”

She had him there. His sophistication matched that of the others of his set. Socially he was neither a Puritan nor a Pharisee. It was only under his own roof that he became patriarchal.

Yet, as time went on, he learned that Edith’s faults were tempered by her fastidiousness. She did not confuse liberty and license. She neither smoked nor drank. There was about her dancing a fine and stately quality which saved it from sensuousness. Yet when he told her things, there was always that irritating shrug of the shoulders. “Oh, well, I’m not a rowdy—you know that. But I like to play around.”

His pride in her grew—in her burnished hair, the burning blue of her eyes, her great beauty, the fineness of her spirit, the integrity of her character.

Yet he sighed with relief when she told him of her engagement to Delafield Simms. He loved her, but none the less he felt the strain of her presence in his establishment. It would be like sinking back into the luxury of a feather bed, to take up the old life where she had entered it.

And Edith, too, welcomed her emancipation. “When I marry you,” she told Delafield, “I am going to break all the rules. In Uncle Fred’s house everything runs by clockwork, and it is he who winds the clock.”

Delafield laughed and kissed her. He was like the rest of the men of his generation, apparently acquiescent. Yet the chances were that when Edith was his wife, he, too, would wind the clock!

Their engagement was one of mutual freedom. Edith did as she pleased, Delafield did as he pleased. They rarely clashed. And as the wedding day approached, they were pleasantly complacent.

Delafield, dictating a letter one day to Frederick Towne’s stenographer, spoke of his complacency. He was writing to Bob Sterling, who was to be his best man, and who shared his apartment in New York. Delafield was an orphan, and had big money interests. He felt that Washington was tame compared to the metropolis. He and Edith were to live one block east of Fifth Avenue, in a house that he had bought for her.

When he was in Washington he occupied a desk in Frederick’s office. Lucy Logan took his dictation. She had been for several years with Towne. She was twenty-three, well-groomed, and self-possessed. She had slender, flexible fingers, and Delafield liked to look at them. She had soft brown hair, and her profile, as she bent over her book, was clear-cut and composed.

“Edith and I are great pals,” he dictated. “I rather think we are going to hit it off famously. I’d hate to have a woman hang around my neck. And I want you for my best man. I know it is asking a lot, but it’s just once in a lifetime, old chap.”

Lucy wrote that and waited with her pencil poised.

“That’s about all,” said Delafield.

Lucy shut up her book and rose.

“Wait a minute,” Delafield decided. “I want to add a postscript.”

Lucy sat down.

“By the way,” Delafield dictated, “I wish you’d order the flowers at Tolley’s. White orchids for Edith of course. He’ll know the right thing for the bridesmaids—I’ll get Edith to send him the color scheme——”

Lucy’s pencil dashed and dotted. She looked up, hesitated. “Miss Towne doesn’t care for orchids.”

“How do you know?” he demanded.

She fluttered the leaves of her notebook and found an order from Towne to a local florist. “He says here, ‘Anything but orchids—she doesn’t like them.’ ”

“But I’ve been sending her orchids every week.”

“Perhaps she didn’t want to tell you——”

“And you think I should have something else for the wedding bouquet?”

“I think she might like it better.” There was a faint flush on her cheek.

“What would you suggest?”

“I can’t be sure what Miss Towne would like.”

“What would you like?” intently.

She considered it seriously—her slender fingers clasped on her book. “I think,” she told him, finally, “that if I were going to marry a man I should want what he wanted.”

He laughed and leaned forward. “Good heavens, are there any women like that left in the world?”

Her flush deepened, she rose and went towards the door. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.”

His voice changed. “Indeed, I am glad you did.” He had risen and now held the door open for her. “We men are stupid creatures. I should never have found it out for myself.”

She went away, and he sat there thinking about her. Her impersonal manner had always been perfect, and he had found her little flush charming.

It was because of Lucy Logan, therefore, that Edith had white violets instead of orchids in her wedding bouquet. And it was because, too, of Lucy Logan, that other things happened. Three of Edith’s bridesmaids were house-guests. Their names were Rosalind, Helen and Margaret. They had, of course, last names, but these have nothing to do with the story. They had been Edith’s classmates at college, and she had been somewhat democratic in her selection of them.

“They are perfect dears, Uncle Fred. I’ll have three cave-dwellers to balance them. Socially, I suppose, it will be a case of sheep and goats, but the goats are—darling.”

They were, however, the six of them, what Delafield called a bunch of beauties. Their bridesmaid gowns were exquisite—but unobtrusive. The color scheme was blue and silver—and the flowers, forget-me-nots and sweet peas. “It’s a bit old-fashioned,” Edith said, “but I hate sensational effects.”

Neither the sheep nor the goats agreed with her. Their ideas were different—the goats holding out for something impressionistic, the sheep for ceremonial splendor.

There was to be a wedding breakfast at the house. Things were therefore given over early to the decorators and caterers, and coffee and rolls were served in everybody’s room. Belated wedding presents kept coming, and Edith and her bridal attendants might be seen at all times on the stairs or in the hall in silken morning coats and delicious caps.

When the wedding bouquet arrived Edith sought out her uncle in his study on the second floor.

“Look at this,” she said; “how in the world did it happen that he sent white violets? Did you tell him, Uncle Fred?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Cross my heart.”

They had had their joke about Del’s orchids. “If he knew how I hated them,” Edith would say, and Uncle Fred would answer, “Why don’t you tell him?”

But she had never told, because after all it didn’t much matter, and if Delafield felt that orchids were the proper thing, why muddle up his mind with her preferences?

“Anyhow,” she said now, “I am glad my wedding bouquet is different.” As she stood there, lovely in her sheer draperies, the fragrant mass of flowers in her arms, her eyes looked at him over the top, wistfully. “Uncle Fred,” she asked, unexpectedly, “do you love me?”

“Of course——”

“Please don’t say it that way——” Her voice caught.

“How shall I say it?”

“As if you—cared.”

He stood up and put his hands on her shoulders. “My dear child,” he said, “I do.”

“You’ve been no end good to me,” she said, and dropped the bouquet on a chair and clung to him, sobbing.

He held her in his arms and soothed her. “Being a bride is a bit nerve-racking.”

She nodded. “And I mustn’t let my eyes get red.”

She kissed him shyly on the cheek. They had never indulged much in kisses. He felt if she had always been as sweetly feminine, he should have been sorry to have her marry.

He did not see her again until she was in her wedding gown, composed and smiling.

“Has Del called you up?” he asked her.

“No, why should he?”

He laughed. “Oh, well, you’ll have plenty to say to each other afterward.” But the thought intruded that with such a bride a man might show himself, on this day of days, ardent and eager.

Rosalind and Helen and Margaret, shimmering, opalescent, their young eyes radiant under their wide hats, joined the other bridesmaids in the great limousine which was to take them to the church. Cousin Annabel went with other cousins. Edith and her uncle were alone in their car. Frederick’s man, Briggs, who had been the family coachman in the days of horses, drove them.

Washington was shining under the winter sun as they whirled through the streets to the old church. “Happy is the bride the sun shines on,” said Frederick, feeling rather foolish. It was somewhat difficult to talk naturally to this smiling beauty in her bridal white. She seemed miles removed from the aggressive maiden with whom he had fought and made up and fought again.

The wedding party was assembled in one of the side rooms. Belated guests trickled in a thin stream towards the great doors that opened and shut to admit them to the main auditorium. A group of servants, laden with wraps, stood at the foot of the stairs. As soon as the procession started they would go up into the gallery to view the ceremony.

In the small room was almost overpowering fragrance. The bridesmaids, in the filtered light, were a blur of rose and blue and white. There was much laughter, the sound of the organ through the thick walls.

Then the ushers came in.

“Where’s Del?”

The bridegroom was, it seemed, delayed. They waited.

“Shall we telephone, Mr. Towne?” someone asked at last.

Frederick nodded. He and his niece stood apart from the rest. Edith was smiling but had little to say. She seemed separated from the others by the fact of the approaching mystery.

The laughter had ceased; above the whispers came the tremulous echo of the organ.

The usher who had gone to the telephone returned and drew Towne aside.

“There’s something queer about it. I can’t get Del or Bob. They may be on the way. But the clerk seemed reticent.”

“I’ll go to the ’phone myself,” said Frederick. “Where is it?”

But he was saved the effort, for someone, watching at the door, said, “Here they come,” and the room seemed to sigh with relief as Bob Sterling entered.

No one was with him, and he wore a worried frown.

“May I speak to you, Mr. Towne?” he asked.

Edith was standing by the window looking out at the old churchyard. The uneasiness which had infected the others had not touched her. Slender and white she stood waiting. In a few minutes Del would walk up the aisle with her and they would be married. In her mind that program was as fixed as the stars.

And now her uncle approached and said something. “Edith, Del isn’t coming——”

“Is he ill?”

“I wish to Heaven he were dead.”

“What do you mean, Uncle Fred?”

“I’ll tell you—presently. But we must get away from this——”

His glance took in the changed scene. A blight had swept over those high young heads. Two of the bridesmaids were crying. The ushers had withdrawn into a huddled group. The servants were staring—uncertain what to do.

Somebody got Briggs and the big car to the door.

Shut into it, Towne told Edith:

“He’s backed out of it. He left—this.” He had a note in his hand. “It was written to Bob Sterling. Bob was with him at breakfast time, and when he came back, this was on Del’s dresser.”

She read it, her blue eyes hot:

“I can’t go through with it, Bob. I know it’s a rotten trick, but time will prove that I am right. And Edith will thank me.

“Del.”

She crushed it in her hand. “Where has he gone?”

“South, probably, on his yacht.”

“Wasn’t there any word for me?”

“No.”

“Is there any other—woman?”

“It looks like it. Bob is utterly at sea. So is everybody else.”

All of her but her eyes seemed frozen. The great bouquet lay at her feet where she had dropped it. Her hands were clenched.

Towne laid his hand on hers. “My dear—it’s dreadful.”

“Don’t——”

“Don’t what?”

“Be sorry.”

“But he’s a cur——”

“It doesn’t do any good to call him names, Uncle Fred.”

“I think you must look upon it as a great escape, Edith.”

“Escape from what?”

“Unhappiness.”

“Do you think I can ever escape from the thought of this?” The strong sweep of her arm seemed to indicate her bridal finery.

He sat in unhappy silence, and suddenly she laughed. “I might have known when he kept sending me orchids. When a man loves a woman he knows the things she likes.”

It was then that Towne made his mistake. “You ought to thank your lucky stars——”

She blazed out at him, “Uncle Fred, if you say anything more like that—it’s utterly idiotic. But you won’t face facts. Your generation never does. I’m not in the least thankful. I’m simply furious.”

There was an hysterical note in her voice, but he was unconscious of the tension. She was not taking it in the least as he wished she might. She should have wept on his shoulder. Melted to tears he might have soothed her. But there were no tears in those blue eyes.

She trod on her flowers as she left the car. Looking straight ahead of her she ascended the steps. Within everything was in readiness for the wedding festivities. The stairway was terraced with hydrangeas, pink and white and blue. In the drawing-room were rose garlands with floating ribbons. And there was a vista of the dining-room—with the caterer’s men already at their posts.

Except for these men, a maid or two—and a detective to keep his eye on things, the house was empty. Everybody had gone to the wedding, and presently everybody would come back. The house would be stripped, the flowers would fade, the caterers would carry away the wasted food.

Edith stopped at the foot of the stairs. “How did they announce it at the church?”

“That it had been postponed. It was the only thing to do at the moment. Of course there will be newspaper men. We’ll have to make up a story——”

“We’ll do nothing of the kind. Tell them the truth, Uncle Fred. That I’m not—wanted. That I was kept—waiting—at the church. Like the heroine in a movie.”

She stood on the steps above him, looking down. She was as white as her dress.

“I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t mind losing Del. He doesn’t count. He isn’t worth it. But can you imagine that any man—any man, Uncle Fred, could have kept me—waiting?”