Читать книгу The Professor's House - Уилла Кэсер - Страница 9

On Monday afternoon St. Peter mounted to his study and lay down on the box-couch, tired out with his day at the university. The first few weeks of the year were very fatiguing for him; there were so many exhausting things besides his lectures and all the new students; long faculty meetings in which almost no one was ever frank, and always the old fight to keep up the standard of scholarship, to prevent the younger professors, who had a sharp eye to their own interests, from farming the whole institution out to athletics, and to the agricultural and commercial schools favoured and fostered by the State Legislature.

The September heat, too, was hard on him. He wanted to be out at the lake every day—it was never so fine as in late September. He was lying with closed eyes, resting his mind on the picture of intense autumn-blue water, when he heard a tap at the door and his daughter Rosamond entered, very handsome in a silk suit of a vivid shade of lilac, admirably suited to her complexion and showing that in the colour of her cheeks there was actually a tone of warm lavender. In that low room she seemed very tall indeed, a little out of drawing, as, to her father’s eye, she so often did. Usually, however, people were aware only of her rich complexion, her curving, unresisting mouth and mysterious eyes. Tom Outland had seen nothing else, and he was a young man who saw a great deal.

“Am I interrupting something important, Papa?”

“No, not at all, my dear. Sit down.”

On his writing-table she caught a glimpse of pages in a handwriting not his—a script she knew very well.

“Not much choice of chairs, is there?” she smiled. “Papa, I don’t like to have you working in a place like this. It’s not fitting.”

“Much easier than to break in a new room, Rosie. A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it’s better than a new one.”

“That’s really what I came to see you about.” Rosamond traced the edge of a hole in the matting with the tip of her lilac sunshade. “Won’t you let me build you a little study in the back yard of the new house? I have such good ideas for it, and you would have no bother about it at all.”

“Oh, thank you, Rosamond. It’s most awfully nice of you to think of it. But keep it just an idea—it’s better so. Lots of things are. For the present I’ll plod on here. It’s absurd, but it suits me. Habit is such a big part of work.”

“With Augusta’s old things lying about, and those dusty old forms? Why didn’t she at least get those out of your way?”

“Oh, they have a right here, by long tenure. It’s their room, too. I don’t want to come upon them lying in some dump-heap on the road to the lake. They remind me of the times when you were little girls, and your first party frocks used to hang on them at night, when I worked.”

Rosamond smiled, unconvinced. “Papa, don’t joke with me. I’ve come to talk about something serious, and it’s very difficult. You know I’m a little afraid of you.” She dropped her shadowy, bewitching eyes.

“Afraid of me? Never!”

“Oh, yes, I am when you’re sarcastic. You mustn’t be to-day, please. Louie and I have often talked this over. We feel strongly about it. He’s often been on the point of blurting out with it, but I’ve curbed him. You don’t always approve of Louie and me. Of course it was only Louie’s energy and technical knowledge that ever made Tom’s discovery succeed commercially, but we don’t feel that we ought to have all the returns from it. We think you ought to let us settle an income on you, so that you could give up your university work and devote all your time to writing and research. That is what Tom would have wanted.”

St. Peter rose quickly, with the light, supple spring he had when he was very nervous, crossed to the window, wide on its hook, and half closed it. “My dear daughter,” he said decisively, when he had turned round to her, “I couldn’t possibly take any of Outland’s money.”

“But why not? You were the best friend he had in the world, he owed more to you than to anyone else, and he hated having you hampered by teaching. He admired your mind, and nothing would have pleased him more than helping you to do the work you do better than anyone else. If he were alive, that would be one of the first things he would use this money for.”

“But he is not alive, and there was no word about me in his will, and so there is nothing to build your pretty theory upon. It’s wonderfully nice of you and Louie, and I’m very pleased, you know.”

“But Tom was so impractical, Father. He never thought it would mean more than a liberal dress allowance for me, if he thought at all. I don’t know—he never spoke to me about it.”

St. Peter smiled quizzically. “I’m not so sure about his impracticalness. When he was working on that gas, he once remarked to me that there might be a fortune in it. To be sure he didn’t wait to find out whether there was a fortune, but that had to do with quite another side of him. Yes, I think he knew his idea would make money and he wanted you to have it, with him or without him.”

The young woman’s face grew troubled. “Even if I married?”

“He wanted you to have whatever would make you happy.”

She sighed luxuriously. “Louie has done that. The only thing that troubles me is, I feel you ought to have some of this money, that he would wish it. He was so full of gratitude, felt that he owed you so much.”

Her father again rose, with that guarded, nervous movement. “Once and for all, Rosamond, understand that he owed me no more than I owed him. Nothing hurts me so much as to have any member of my family talk as if we had done something fine for that young man, brought him out, produced him. In a lifetime of teaching, I’ve encountered just one remarkable mind; but for that, I’d consider my good years largely wasted. And there can be no question of money between me and Tom Outland. I can’t explain just how I feel about it, but it would somehow damage my recollections of him, would make that episode in my life commonplace like everything else. And that would be a great loss to me. I’m purely selfish in refusing your offer; my friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar tongue.”

His daughter looked perplexed and a little resentful.

“Sometimes,” she murmured, “I think you feel I oughtn’t to have taken it, either.”

“You had no choice. For you it was settled by his own hand. Your bond with him was social, and it follows the laws of society, and they are based on property. Mine wasn’t, and there was no material clause in it. He empowered you to carry out all his wishes, and I realize that you have responsibilities—but none toward me. There is Rodney Blake, of course, if he should ever turn up. You keep up some search for him?”

“Louie attends to it. He has investigated and rejected several impostors.”

“Then, of course, there are other friends of Tom’s. The Cranes, for instance?”

Rosamond’s face grew hard. “I won’t bother you about the Cranes, Papa. We will attend to them. Mrs. Crane is a common creature, and she is advised by that dreadful shyster brother of hers, Homer Bright. You know what he is.”

“Oh, yes! He was about the greatest bluffer I ever had in my classes.”

Rosamond had risen to go. “I want you to be awfully happy, daughter,” St. Peter went on, “and Tom did. It’s only young people like you and Louie who can get any fun out of money. And there is enough to cover the fine, the almost imaginary obligations. You won’t be sorry if you are generous with people like the Cranes.”

“Thank you, Papa. I shan’t forget.” Rosamond went down the narrow stairway, leaving behind her a faint, fresh odour of lavender and orrisroot, and her father lay down again on the box-couch. “A hint about the Cranes will be enough,” he was thinking.

He didn’t in the least understand his older daughter. Not that he pretended to understand Kathleen, either; but he usually knew how she would feel about things, and she had always seemed to need his protection more than Rosamond. When she was a student at the university, he used sometimes to see her crossing the campus alone, her head and shoulders lowered against the wind, her muff beside her face, her narrow skirt clinging close. There was something too plucky, too “I can-go-it-alone,” about her quick step and jaunty little head; he didn’t like it, it gave him a sudden pang. He would always call to her and catch up with her, and make her take his arm and be docile.

She had been much quicker at her lessons than Rosie, and very clever at water-colour portrait sketches. She had done several really good likenesses of her father—one, at least, was the man himself. With her mother she had no luck. She tried again and again, but the face was always hard, the upper lip longer than it seemed in life, the nose long and severed, and she made something cold and plaster-like of Lillian’s beautiful complexion. “No, I don’t see Mamma like that,” she used to say, throwing out her chin. “Of course I don’t! It just comes like that.” She had done many heads of her sister, all very sentimental and curiously false, though Louie Marsellus protested to them. Her drawing-teacher at the university had urged Kathleen to go to Chicago and study in the life classes at the Art Institute, but she said resolutely: “No, I can’t really do anybody but Papa, and I can’t make a living painting him.”

“The only unusual thing about Kitty,” her father used to tell his friends, “is that she doesn’t think herself a bit unusual. Nowdays the girls in my classes who have a spark of aptitude for anything seem to think themselves remarkable.”

Though wilfulness was implied in the line of her figure, in the way she sometimes threw out her chin, Kathleen had never been deaf to reasoning, deaf to her father, but once; and that was when, shortly after Rosamond’s engagement to Tom, she announced that she was going to marry Scott McGregor. Scott was young, was just getting a start as a journalist, and his salary was not large enough for two people to live upon. That fact, the St. Peters thought, would act as a brake upon the impetuous young couple. But soon after they were engaged Scott began to do his daily prose poem for a newspaper syndicate. It was a success from the start, and increased his earnings enough to enable him to marry. The Professor had expected a better match for Kitty. He was no snob, and he liked Scott and trusted him; but he knew that Scott had a usual sort of mind, and Kitty had flashes of something quite different. Her father thought a more interesting man would make her happier. There was no holding her back, however, and the curious part of it was that, after the very first, her mother supported her. St. Peter had a vague suspicion that this was somehow on Rosamond’s account more than on Kathleen’s; Lillian always worked things out for Rosamond. Yet at the time he couldn’t see how Kathleen’s marriage would benefit Rosie. “Rosie is like your second self,” he once declared to his wife, “but you never pampered yourself at her age as you do her.”