Lucy was more astute, and kinder. She detested Frey heartily, but she loved her uncle, and her placating of him was much less hypocritical than Elsa’s.
“Frey will make us all feel like country dolts one of these days,” she said. May, surprised at this unexpected appreciation of her darling, stared at her in surprise. Off guard like this, the smiles gone, one saw the bitter lines of sadness in her plump face.
“Thank you, dear,” she said gently.
Ernest smiled, pulled one of Lucy’s curls from its coil. Restored to good humor, he looked up at Elsa.
“Paul says to tell your mother he will be a little late tonight, Elsa. He is going over some books; we are not yet certain that young Reynolds is entirely straight.” He became animated in his turn. “You may also tell mother, my dears, that Paul is doing splendidly at the bank, and if he continues so, which he will, there is no knowing how far he will go. The President was just saying this morning that he is one of the most efficient and capable young men he has ever seen. A natural-born banker.”
The gray web was over May’s face now.
“How nice,” she murmured. She surreptitiously fingered the letter in her pocket.
Ernest spoke to his daughter. “Oh yes. Paul wishes me to ask you what flowers you prefer for the Stantons’ party, Trudie.”
A pinched, slightly blue look appeared about Gertrude’s mouth.
“I don’t care,” she answered indifferently. (How she hated the thought of going to another party with Paul! During the last six months, some diabolical scheme seemed to have been afoot to couple her with her cousin. All her other beaus had drifted away; sometimes a sick and terrified thought assailed her that her father had let loose a subtle rumor that there was an “understanding” between his daughter and his nephew. She worshipped her father, but she was aware of his relentless power. But oh, please God! he shall not do this thing to me! I will not have Paul, even though Papa pushes me right into his arms. I’ll get away somehow! Mama will help me! Mama hates him, too!) Thinking this, she turned eyes wide and dark with fright upon her mother, and May looked back at her with a sharp steady gaze.
“How can you be so indifferent?” demanded Elsa incredulously. “The Stantons’ lawn fête is going to be the event of the summer season. Sometimes I think you are quite bloodless, Gertrude. Why, Lucy and I just can’t sleep nights trying to decide what we’ll wear.” She was suddenly diverted. “What are you going to wear, Trudie?”
“I hope, her new white satin from New York,” smiled Ernest. His eyes were pointed a little, as he fixed them on his daughter’s face. “I confess I know very little about ladies’ gowns, but this one is something special. I could not help noticing it particularly when she showed it to me. And the pearls your Mama and I gave you on your birthday, darling. You will be quite the belle of the ball.”
“Gertrude!” Elsa’s and Lucy’s voices blended together in a faint shriek of indignation. “You never told us of your white satin! You must show it to us at once!”
“I don’t like it,” said Gertrude, forcing a thin smile. (How could she like it, after her father had said, only a few days ago, that Paul would be completely enslaved when he saw her in it. Oh, I loathe him! I detest him! I wish he’d die!) The terrible, sick trapped feeling assailed her again like a real hand upon her mouth.
“I think it a little mature for Gertrude,” said May. “I would prefer she would not wear it just yet. Her pink-sprigged muslin, perhaps—”
“It would make an excellent wedding dress,” said Ernest casually.
Elsa clapped her hands delightedly. “Then, of course, Paul mustn’t see it, yet,” she said, with an arch and teasing glance at her cousin.
Gertrude stood up. A cold sheath was over all her slight body. “It doesn’t matter if Paul sees it or not,” she remarked in a preoccupied voice. “Mama, shall I see if Guy and Reggie are preparing for dinner? And look in at the nursery at Joey?”
May regarded her gravely. “Yes, my love,” she answered in the gentlest and saddest of voices. I’ve escaped Ernest, she thought mournfully. Will Gertrude escape him?
She thinks she’s too good for Paul, thought Elsa, with hatred. With her hoity-toity ways! And her pale dead face, and that dull hair! How can he possibly look at her? It isn’t just the money she’ll have; he really wants her. He’s wanted her since we were all children. I can’t understand dear Paul at all.
Gertrude moved toward the door. She heard the quick rat-tat of hoofs in the driveway; she stopped dead, halfway to the door. A shaft of sunlight blazed into the hallway, blinding her, but she stood still, hardly breathing, her heart rioting in pain to her throat. She put her hand to it.
“What’s the matter, dear?” asked May. The girl turned slowly; a radiance stood upon her face, in which her eyes swooned and her lips parted.
“I—I think it’s Philippe,” she murmured chokingly. She looked about her, dazed, then was out in the hall with the swift movement of a bird. A very young man was crossing the threshold into the hall, a tall, exceedingly thin, dark young man, with thick, longish black hair and black eyes that began to burn when he saw his cousin. All his movements were rapid and jerky, full of nervousness and angry vitality, and his face, thin almost to gauntness, and brown, had an Indian look about it.
“Trudie!” he cried, and seized her hands. He stared down at her, smiling a little wildly, and breathing as though he had been running.
May appeared in the hallway from the library. “Philippe! How nice! You are just in time for dinner. How is your Mama?” She advanced upon him, smiling cordially. She almost loved him at times; Florabelle’s son reminded her in many ways of Godfrey. Philippe had emerged from a pale and colorless childhood into this sudden dark restlessness that was beginning to disturb the Barbour household.
“Mama is very well, thank you, Aunt May,” replied the youth, struggling for formality, and succeeding only in looking as radiantly dazed as Trudie. “She sent me to ask if you and Uncle Ernest would dine with us on Sunday. Grandmother, Mama says, is becoming impossible,” he grinned, showing blazing white teeth, “and Mama thinks Uncle Ernest might be able to control her.”
“Dear, dear,” said May, smiling. Old Hilda was becoming very obstreperous with age. Her new son-in-law, Major Norwood, had the soldier’s heavy lack of imagination and stubborn stolidity, and these were like a thick wall in the flood of Hilda’s frequent furies and increasing petulance. Meeting this wall, catapulted against it violently, they frothed and foamed, became turgid and uncontrollable. Ernest was frequently called upon to restore peace to a harassed household.
Philippe, becoming aware that he was still holding Gertrude’s hand, dropped it as though it had begun to burn him. A pulse was beating visibly in the girl’s slender throat; the beauty was still out on her face, like a spring morning. They all went into the library. Eugene, who had spied his landau coming up the drive, was standing up, making his good-bys, and Renee was bounding about him, her hair flying. She looked very much like her cousin, Philippe Bouchard, and perhaps this fact had endeared her to Gertrude. The youth greeted his relatives with nervous formality.
Eugene smiled at Raoul’s son. “Bon jour, Philippe,” he said, and shook his hand. He liked his nephew very much.
Ernest smiled also, but with a bleakness. “How is your Mama, Philippe?”
More nervous than ever, he stammered out his mother’s message. Ernest laughed shortly. “We’ll be there,” he said. He glanced at May, shook his head humorously. “Ma still has a lot of fight in her. She makes Florrie miserable.”
Elsa stared at her cousin with open derision and dislike. How could Trudie like this dark-skinned, skinny, piddling boy, younger than herself! A jumping-jack if there ever was one, always reading and writing poetry, or running to his awful Catholic Church! Wasn’t there something said once about him becoming a priest, or something equally dreadful? Then why doesn’t he go off, and do it, whatever they did in such a case? To be sure, her Papa had been a Catholic to
o, but he had been a convert, and no one had really taken it seriously. And she and Paul and the others had been baptized in the Catholic Church, but Mama never urged them to go to Mass, or anything, and the priest was scared of her and let them all be. No, no one in her home took this business seriously, but the French were so odd, and so intense about everything. Really, she quite disliked the French. Lucy, who thought Philippe an ugly brat, had not replied to his greeting. They were practically the same age, but she was an engaged girl, and therefore, by that right, and the right of her mature femininity, was really older, she thought.
“Mama Barbour is quite old, you must remember, Ernest,” said May, absently pulling and twisting Renee into shape again. “Must you really go, Eugene? Renee, my pet, give your Aunt May a kiss. Tell your Mama that you must remain to dinner the next time you come. Tomorrow night? Capital!”
Elsa and Lucy exchanged grimaces at this. When Eugene and his daughter had gone, Elsa was loudly shocked at the time. In the midst of flurry, runnings back for a last word, swirling of petticoats and skirts, reddening of cheeks, shouted last good-bys, cries and scoldings, Elsa and Lucy also departed for home. May’s invitation to dinner had been polite, if feeble. (She still remembered Elsa’s face upon receiving the pretended message from Godfrey.) But Elsa, with passionate regret, told her that her mother had expressly asked that the girls return home that night for the evening meal.
A quiet like that following a clap of thunder fell on the house upon their departure. May laughed a little. “What exuberance,” she said mildly.
“I like a little life in young people,” replied Ernest, a trifle ill-naturedly.
May still smiled with a sort of bright determination, but made no reply.
“Gertrude,” Ernest went on sharply, “would be better off for a little of their life.” He turned on the girl. She and Philippe were standing close together, not speaking, but just looking at each other. “Trudie!” said her father, raising his voice.
The girl actually jumped. “Yes, Papa?” she answered, turning to him with a bemused expression. How beautiful she looked, all at once, thought Ernest angrily, with a lowering glance at his nephew.
“Didn’t your Mama ask you to see about the boys, and Joey?” he asked.
Gertrude fled, as though she had been struck. Philippe looked after her for a long moment. His tall, angular young body appeared as though it had been turned, in the midst of tremendous animation, into stone.
“Let us go into the dining room,” said Ernest abruptly.
And stalked out gloomily, leaving his wife to follow if she wished.
CHAPTER LXIV
“There is some brutality, some atavism, in us that makes us hate the old and the sick,” thought Ernest, as he drove alone to his sister’s house to see his mother. “We forget that we have loved them, that they are our flesh, that many of our joys and our sorrows are theirs, also. All we see and remember is the sick face that resents our health, the heavy legs that trip us up, the tedious drag on a sympathy gone sour like a wine that has overfermented. Sometimes the old get our strongest hatred, and we come to wince at the sound of their nagging voices, the sight of their bleared eyes, the presence of their obstinacy and childish obstreperousness. And when they are dead, we hate them worse than ever, these horrible creatures, not sublime, not noble, but just stinking clay, threatening us, gloating over us.”
Suddenly he remembered that his old mother was no fool. Did she know how her children regarded her: as a querulous burden, a bore, a hindrance, a repulsive old beldame, a tiresome responsibility that had once been useful but had now outlived its usefulness? He wondered Perhaps that was what was making her so outrageous these days, the knowledge that the children she had borne, nursed, thrashed, loved, tended, and reared, now hated her for the one crime of not being dead. All at once he seemed to see her, a frightened old woman at bay, unwanted, repellent, strident-voiced and peevishly bewildered. I don’t want to die yet! she seemed to cry out at him in a thin high terror. Why do you push me to my death with your wills and your eyes? “Poor Ma,” he said aloud, with a rueful smile. The coachman turned around enquiringly.
But Ernest’s sympathy had veered again to his favorite sister, Florabelle, by the time he arrived at the big, brightly lit house on Quaker Terrace. (Through intervening trees, across long quiet vistas of damp lamplit lawns and paths, he could see the far distant light of Amy’s house.) Florabelle’s house was always too warm, hotly lit, over-furnished, with its heavy velvet drapes, dripping fringe, cluttered corners, crystal chandeliers, ornate lamps and gilded picture frames. When she had married the solid and unimaginative Major Norwood, the soul of conservative and heavy tastes, she had thrown out all her gay “French” furniture and had gone ponderously Victorian. Pretty still, plump now, as well as small, her cheeks still dimpled and bright, Florabelle lived, as her mother shrewdly said, “in a fluster.” Her flutterings had become flusterings, and even her clothing partook of this confusion, so that her veils were always blowing about her hats, her bangles and chains clashing together, her curls escaping from their blond coif, her petticoat peeping out, gloves dropping, reticule slipping from her hands, furs slipping, ear-rings falling; she was always in a hurry, her pink cheeks glowing warmly and her voice sharp with strain and excited petulance. To be sure, she had six children now, two of them mere babies, Philippe, barely seventeen, being the oldest. She had a swarm of servants, but they had caught her flustery ways, her confusion, her tendency to leave sentences excitedly unfinished, her habit of starting a dozen things at once and finishing none. So the house looked like its mistress, and confusion ran riot in the heat and the brilliantly lit rooms and the stuffy ornate atmosphere, and there seemed always to be a child crying in the upper regions or a quarrel going on downstairs among the servants. Ernest often wondered how Major Norwood stood all this. But the Major seemed utterly unperturbed, sat solidly reading his papers and smoking in the midst of a very mob of noise and runnings to and fro and cries and exclamations, frenzied young wife and romping children.
He either enjoyed it, or was deaf to it, Ernest thought. Nothing ever excited him. He loved his pretty Florrie, was fond of Raoul’s children, was dutiful toward them, and adored his own babies. He felt that he had much more than an old bachelor deserved; actually, he liked to hear children’s voices, having become sick of the musty silence of bachelor quarters and lonely hotels. Those loud rioting voices, the energy, the spirits, the laughter, the scufflings, the fights, drove out from him the fears that had besieged his middle-age with threats of loneliness, love lessness, and death. He became almost young again, and was grateful both to Florrie and her children.
Florabelle was surprised to see her brother, and before she could recover herself she exclaimed crossly: “But I said Thursday night! Oh, dear, those children again. Do come in, Ernest! Kiss me! I’m glad to see you. Major! Major, love, here’s Ernest; I don’t know what I’m going to do about Mama!”
“How do you do, sir?” said the Major, rising, and allowing a welter of newspapers and cigar ashes to slide to the floor. He was a tall and florid man, with simple clear blue eyes, a military haircut, a clipped gray mustache, and, despite a slight paunchiness, still possessing a soldier’s bearing and erectness. There was about him a freshly scrubbed look, partly due to the bland naïveté of his expression and the crisp neatness of his clothing. Ernest had long ago dismissed him as not being very bright, but he was “harmless,” and so he liked him as he liked all simple people who never interfered with him.
The Major was about to sit down again in his soft leather chair but his wife bustled him hastily out of it, shoved her brother toward it and into it, complaining incessantly as she did so in a high sweet voice. The Major, uprooted, glanced about helplessly, as though he were in a strange house and were wondering if he dared sit down, then, finally deciding he might, he cautiously lowered himself into a horsehair, mahogany rocker. He disliked horsehair; it bit through his trouser legs. He began to-scratch, surrepti
tiously, while he beamed upon his brother-in-law.
Ernest firmly refused tea, wine, cigars and cake. “Dear me,” said Florabelle crossly, “you never want anything when you come here.”
“If you want to, you can send it up to Ma and me after awhile,” he answered, taking her hand and patting it. “Sit down, my love, your face is very red and hot.”
Florabelle plumped herself down with gestures of dainty despair, waving her handkerchief, and raising her pretty blue eyes to the ceiling as if overcome:
“You have no idea what I suffer with Mama!” she exclaimed. “The Major says I am an angel of patience!”
“Where is she now?”
“Locked up in her room, as tight as a drum. Diggs puts her tray on the floor by her door, and after he has gone she deigns to open it, and eats every bite, then puts out the tray again. I knock and knock, and send the children, and I cry and plead, and she sits behind her door like a—like a graven image, and never answers. It’s been almost three days now. She won’t even let the servants in to make her bed or clean up, and with this hot weather and everything, and one has to watch things so for—unpleasant things—things that breed in dust, and you know Mama was never too tidy in her later years—” She stopped abruptly, out of breath. “I don’t know what to do,” she resumed in a burst of emotion. “I can’t stand the strain, with all this house and the children and the servants. After all, I’ve had Mama for seventeen years, and it does seem that I ought to be relieved occasionally. There’s Dorcas, so selfish and secretive, staying away from us in case we ask her for something, or a favor, and Amy, a widow, without any one, and Martin was Mama’s favorite son, and May,” she added spitefully. “I’m really surprised at May! But now she seems so cold to me, when we were so fond of each other once. I can’t see why May—”
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