Читать книгу Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel - Van Vorst Marie - Страница 12

The odours of strange meats and sauces were wafted throughout the house. Little troublesome feet pattered up and down the dingy back stairs, and whenever Bella and Gardiner were laid hold upon they were banished. They were inoculated with excitement and their nostrils pricked with the delicious smells of flowers and smilax and feast meats.

Mr. Carew annually gave a banquet to some twenty New Yorkers, who he was so generous as to think were nearly as great as himself. The household was not constructed or run on a hospitable basis and nothing was in tune for entertaining. Sympathetic Bella, thrilling with liveliest interest, assisted at the preparations, and to her bright cheeks and eyes her mother bewailed —

"Only twenty glasses, Bella, of the fine engraved deer and pheasant pattern, and we shall be twenty-four."

"Mother, give me one in a paper and I'll take it down town and match it."

Her mother laughed. "Match it, why they were made by hand years ago, and are worth ten dollars apiece."

"Oh, dear," breathed the little girl, and multiplied: "Two hundred dollars for twenty. Mother!"

The child stole silently out from the glistening array. Ten dollars apiece. And she and Gardiner at their last nursery tea-party… Through the door, as she slipped away, she looked back at her mother, standing thoughtful over the rows of crystal. In the great mahogany cage which, like a small dark château, surmounted the pedestal of carved wood, the blackbird Jetty huddled on his perch. He was a superb specimen, black as jet, whence his name, a free woodland spirit, with a yellow bill like a crocus flower, and piercing eyes. Bella passed under the cage and called up to him, "Sing, Jetty, sing."

The child crooned to the bird her schoolroom poem. In return, Jetty sang a short, brilliant little roulade, his one trained tune, which Bella had vainly tried to pick out on the piano. She never heard half so sweet a song from any bird.

"Jetty is my favourite singer," she had said to Antony. But as she lingered now under his cage in order to lengthen out the time, which, because of her aching conscience, was hanging heavy, Jetty blinked down at her as she stood with her hands behind her back, her face uplifted; he peered at her like a weird familiar spirit. "Listen, Jetty. Gardiner and I took those perfectly beautiful, expensive glasses for our tea party. He smashed all three of them. There was a glass for Gardiner, a glass for me and one for the uninvited guest – no, I mean the unexpected guest. Gardiner sat down on the glasses where I had put them out to wash them. He would have been awfully cut only he had father's overcoat on (one of father's old coats, we got it out of the camphor chest)." She ceased, for Jetty, in the midst of the confession, hopped down to take a valetudinarian peck at his yellow seeds.

"Now," murmured Bella, "the question is, shall I tell mother on an exciting day like this when she is worried and nervous, and, if I do tell her, wouldn't it be carrying tales on poor little Gardiner?"

Jetty, by his food cup, disheartened and discouraged and apparently in a profound melancholy, depressed Bella; she left him, turned and fled.

Bella picked a forbidden way up the freshly oiled stairs and joined her little brother. There she listened to tales, danced on tiptoe to peer through the stair rails, and hung with Gardiner over the balustrade and watched and listened. The children flew to the window to see the cabs and carriages drive up, fascinated by the clicking of the doors, finding magic in the awning and the carpeting that stretched down the stoop to the curb; found music in the voices below in the hallway as the guests arrived. Bella could hardly eat the flat and unpalatable supper prepared for her on the tray, and, finally, she seized her little brother.

"Come, let's go down and see the party, Gardiner."

She dragged him after her, half-reluctant and wholly timid. On the middle of the stairway she paused. The house below was transformed, hot and perfumed with flowers, the very atmosphere was strange. Along the balustrade, their hands touched smilax garlands. The blaze of light dazzled them, the sweet odours, the gaiety and the spirit of cheer and life and good-fellowship came up on fragrant wings. The little brother and sister stood entranced. The sound of laughter and men's agreeable voices came soaring in, the gaiety of guests at a feast, and, over all rose a sound most heavenly, a low, thrilling, thrilling sound.

Jetty was singing.

The children knew the blackbird's idyl well, but it was different this night. They heard the first notes rise softly, half stifled in his throat, where Jetty caressed his tune, soothed it, crooned with it, and then, preluded by a burst all his own of a few adorable silver notes, the trained melody came forth.

"Oh, Gardiner," breathed the little girl, "hear Jetty. Isn't it perfectly beautiful?"

They stepped softly on downstairs, hand in hand, into the lower rooms, over to the dining-room where the thick red curtains hung before the doorway. Gardiner wore his play apron and his worsted bed slippers. Bella – neither the little brother nor the old nurse had observed that Bella had made herself a toilette. The dark hair carefully brushed and combed, was tied back with a crimson ribbon, and below her short dress shone out her dancing school blue stockings and her tight blue shoes. Peering through the curtains, the children could see the dinner company to their hearts' content. Bella viewed the great New Yorkers, murmuring under her breath the names and wondering to whom they belonged. Judge Noah Davis, famous for the breaking of the Tweed ring – him, Bella knew, he was a frequent caller. There was a prelate of the Church and there was some one whom Bella wanted especially to see – Cedersholm, Mr. Cedersholm – which could he be? Which might he be? Little Gardiner's hand was hot in hers. He whispered beseechingly —

"Come, Bella, come, I'm afwaid."

"Hear Jetty, Gardiner, be quiet."

And the bird's voice nearly drowned the murmur and the clamour of the dining-room. Mr. Carew, resplendent in evening clothes, displayed upon his shirt front the badge of the Spanish Society (a golden medal hung by a silken band). It was formed and founded by the banker and he was proud of his creation.

"Who would ever suppose that father didn't like company? Whoever would think that you could be afraid of father!"

Suave, eloquent, Carew beamed upon his guests, and his little daughter admired him extravagantly. His hair and beard were beautiful. Touching the medal on his breast, Carew said —

"Carez is the old name, Cedersholm."

Cedersholm! Bella stared and listened.

"Yes, Carez, Andalusian, I believe, to be turned later in England into Carew; and the bas-relief is an excellent bit of sculpturing."

Mr. Carew undid the medal and handed it to the guest on his right.

"Here, Cedersholm, what do you think of the bas-relief?"

Cedersholm, already famous in New York, faced Bella Carew and she saw him plainly. This was the sculptor who could give Cousin Antony his start, "his fair chance." He did not look a great man, as Bella thought geniuses should look; not one of the guests looked as great and beautiful as Cousin Antony. Why didn't they have him to the dinner, she wondered loyally. Hasn't he got money enough? Perhaps because he was lame.

Jetty was lame. He had broken his leg in the bars once upon a time. How he sang! From his throat poured one ecstatic roulade after another, one cascade after another of liquid delicious sweetness. Fields, woods, copses, and dells; sunlight, moonlight, seas and streams, all, all were in Jetty's passion of song.

Gardiner had left his sister's side and stood under the bird-cage gazing up with an enraptured face. He made a pretty, quaint figure in the deserted room, in his gingham apron and his untidy blonde hair.

Bella heard some one say, "What wonderful singing, Mrs. Carew." And she looked at her mother for the first time. The lady was all in white with a bit of old black point crossed at her breast and a red camellia fastened there. Her soft fine hair was unpretentiously drawn away neatly, and her doe-like eyes rested amiably on her guests. She seemed to enjoy her unwonted entertainment.

Still Bella clung to her hiding-place, fascinated by the subdued noise of the service, the clinking of the glasses, listening intelligently to a clever raconteur when he told his anecdote, and clapping her hand on her mouth to keep from joining aloud in the praise that followed, and the bead of excitement mounted to her head like the wine that filled the glasses, the engraved deer and pheasant glasses, three of which had been massacred upstairs. The dinner had nearly reached its end when the children slipped down, and the scraping of chairs and a lull made Bella realize where she was, and when she escaped she found that Gardiner had made his little journey upstairs without her guardianship. Bella's mind was working rapidly, for her heart was on fire with a scheme. In her bright dress she leaned close to the dark wainscoting of the stairway and heard Jetty sing. How he sang! That was music!

"Why do people sing when there are birds!" Bella thought. Low and sweet, high and fine, the running of little country brooks, unattainable as a weather vane in the sun.

Bella was at a pitch of sensitive emotion and she felt her heart swell and her eyes fill. She would have wept ignominiously, but instead shot upstairs, a red bird herself, and rushed to the cabinet where her childish treasures were stored away.