“No gloom now!” said Bibbs.
“This statue in the corner is pretty, too,” she remarked. “Mamma and I bought that.” And Bibbs turned at her direction to behold, amid a grove of tubbed palms, a “life-size,” black-bearded Moor, of a plastic composition painted with unappeasable gloss and brilliancy. Upon his chocolate head he wore a gold turban; in his hand he held a gold-tipped spear; and for the rest, he was red and yellow and black and silver.
“Hallelujah!” was the sole comment of the returned wanderer, and Edith, saying she would “find mamma,” left him blinking at the Moor. Presently, after she had disappeared, he turned to the colored man who stood waiting, Bibbs’s traveling-bag in his hand. “What do YOU think of it?” Bibbs asked, solemnly.
“Gran’!” replied the servitor. “She mighty hard to dus’. Dus’ git in all ’em wrinkles. Yessuh, she mighty hard to dus’.”
“I expect she must be,” said Bibbs, his glance returning reflectively to the black bull beard for a moment. “Is there a place anywhere I could lie down?”
“Yessuh. We got one nem spare rooms all fix up fo’ you, suh. Right up staihs, suh. Nice room.”
He led the way, and Bibbs followed slowly, stopping at intervals to rest, and noting a heavy increase in the staff of service since the exodus from the “old” house. Maids and scrubwomen were at work under the patently nominal direction of another Pullman porter, who was profoundly enjoying his own affectation of being harassed with care.
“Ev’ything got look spick an’ span fo’ the big doin’s to-night,” Bibbs’s guide explained, chuckling. “Yessuh, we got big doin’s to-night! Big doin’s!”
The room to which he conducted his lagging charge was furnished in every particular like a room in a new hotel; and Bibbs found it pleasant — though, indeed, any room with a good bed would have seemed pleasant to him after his journey. He stretched himself flat immediately, and having replied “Not now” to the attendant’s offer to unpack the bag, closed his eyes wearily.
White-jacket, racially sympathetic, lowered the window-shades and made an exit on tiptoe, encountering the other white-jacket — the harassed overseer — in the hall without. Said the emerging one: “He mighty shaky, Mist’ Jackson. Drop right down an’ shet his eyes. Eyelids all black. Rich folks gotta go same as anybody else. Anybody ast me if I change ‘ith ‘at ole boy — No, suh! Le’m keep ’is money; I keep my black skin an’ keep out the ground!”
Mr. Jackson expressed the same preference. “Yessuh, he look tuh me like somebody awready laid out,” he concluded. And upon the stairway landing, near by, two old women, on all-fours at their work, were likewise pessimistic.
“Hech!” said one, lamenting in a whisper. “It give me a turn to see him go by — white as wax an’ bony as a dead fish! Mrs. Cronin, tell me: d’it make ye kind o’ sick to look at um?”
“Sick? No more than the face of a blessed angel already in heaven!”
“Well,” said the other, “I’d a b’y o’ me own come home t’ die once—” She fell silent at a rustling of skirts in the corridor above them.
It was Mrs. Sheridan hurrying to greet her son.
She was one of those fat, pink people who fade and contract with age like drying fruit; and her outside was a true portrait of her. Her husband and her daughter had long ago absorbed her. What intelligence she had was given almost wholly to comprehending and serving those two, and except in the presence of one of them she was nearly always absent-minded. Edith lived all day with her mother, as daughters do; and Sheridan so held his wife to her unity with him that she had long ago become unconscious of her existence as a thing separate from his. She invariably perceived his moods, and nursed him through them when she did not share them; and she gave him a profound sympathy with the inmost spirit and purpose of his being, even though she did not comprehend it and partook of it only as a spectator. They had known but one actual altercation in their lives, and that was thirty years past, in the early days of Sheridan’s struggle, when, in order to enhance the favorable impression he believed himself to be making upon some capitalists, he had thought it necessary to accompany them to a performance of “The Black Crook.” But she had not once referred to this during the last ten years.
Mrs. Sheridan’s manner was hurried and inconsequent; her clothes rustled more than other women’s clothes; she seemed to wear too many at a time and to be vaguely troubled by them, and she was patting a skirt down over some unruly internal dissension at the moment she opened Bibbs’s door.
At sight of the recumbent figure she began to close the door softly, withdrawing, but the young man had heard the turning of the knob and the rustling of skirts, and he opened his eyes.
“Don’t go, mother,” he said. “I’m not asleep.” He swung his long legs over the side of the bed to rise, but she set a hand on his shoulder, restraining him; and he lay flat again.
“No,” she said, bending over to kiss his cheek, “I just come for a minute, but I want to see how you seem. Edith said—”
“Poor Edith!” he murmured. “She couldn’t look at me. She—”
“Nonsense!” Mrs. Sheridan, having let in the light at a window, came back to the bedside. “You look a great deal better than what you did before you went to the sanitarium, anyway. It’s done you good; a body can see that right away. You need fatting up, of course, and you haven’t got much color—”
“No,” he said, “I haven’t much color.”
“But you will have when you get your strength back.”
“Oh yes!” he responded, cheerfully. “THEN I will.”
“You look a great deal better than what I expected.”
“Edith must have a great vocabulary!” he chuckled.
“She’s too sensitive,” said Mrs. Sheridan, “and it makes her exaggerate a little. What about your diet?”
“That’s all right. They told me to eat anything.”
“Anything at all?”
“Well — anything I could.”
“That’s good,” she said, nodding. “They mean for you just to build up your strength. That’s what they told me the last time I went to see you at the sanitarium. You look better than what you did then, and that’s only a little time ago. How long was it?”
“Eight months, I think.”
“No, it couldn’t be. I know it ain’t THAT long, but maybe it was longer’n I thought. And this last month or so I haven’t had scarcely even time to write more than just a line to ask how you were gettin’ along, but I told Edith to write, the weeks I couldn’t, and I asked Jim to, too, and they both said they would, so I suppose you’ve kept up pretty well on the home news.”
“Oh yes.”
“What I think you need,” said the mother, gravely, “is to liven up a little and take an interest in things. That’s what papa was sayin’ this morning, after we got your telegram; and that’s what’ll stimilate your appetite, too. He was talkin’ over his plans for you—”
“Plans?” Bibbs, turning on his side, shielded his eyes from the light with his hand, so that he might see her better. “What—” He paused. “What plans is he making for me, mother?”
She turned away, going back to the window to draw down the shade. “Well, you better talk it over with HIM,” she said, with perceptible nervousness. “He better tell you himself. I don’t feel as if I had any call, exactly, to go into it; and you better get to sleep now, anyway.” She came and stood by the bedside once more. “But you must remember, Bibbs, whatever papa does is for the best. He loves his chuldern and wants to do what’s right by ALL of ’em — and you’ll always find he’s right in the end.”
He made a little gesture of assent, which seemed to content her; and she rustled to the door, turning to speak again after she had opened it. “You get a good nap, now, so as to be all rested up for to-night.”
“You — you mean — he—” Bibbs stammered, having begun to speak too quickly. Checking himself, he drew a long breath, then asked, quietly, “Does father expect
me to come down-stairs this evening?”
“Well, I think he does,” she answered. “You see, it’s the ‘house-warming,’ as he calls it, and he said he thinks all our chuldern ought to be around us, as well as the old friends and other folks. It’s just what he thinks you need — to take an interest and liven up. You don’t feel too bad to come down, do you?”
“Mother?”
“Well?”
“Take a good look at me,” he said.
“Oh, see here!” she cried, with brusque cheerfulness. “You’re not so bad off as you think you are, Bibbs. You’re on the mend; and it won’t do you any harm to please your—”
“It isn’t that,” he interrupted. “Honestly, I’m only afraid it might spoil somebody’s appetite. Edith—”
“I told you the child was too sensitive,” she interrupted, in turn. “You’re a plenty good-lookin’ enough young man for anybody! You look like you been through a long spell and begun to get well, and that’s all there is to it.”
“All right. I’ll come to the party. If the rest of you can stand it, I can!”
“It ‘ll do you good,” she returned, rustling into the hall. “Now take a nap, and I’ll send one o’ the help to wake you in time for you to get dressed up before dinner. You go to sleep right away, now, Bibbs!”
Bibbs was unable to obey, though he kept his eyes closed. Something she had said kept running in his mind, repeating itself over and over interminably. “His plans for you — his plans for you — his plans for you — his plans for you—” And then, taking the place of “his plans for you,” after what seemed a long, long while, her flurried voice came back to him insistently, seeming to whisper in his ear: “He loves his chuldern — he loves his chuldern — he loves his chuldern”— “you’ll find he’s always right — you’ll find he’s always right—” Until at last, as he drifted into the state of half-dreams and distorted realities, the voice seemed to murmur from beyond a great black wing that came out of the wall and stretched over his bed — it was a black wing within the room, and at the same time it was a black cloud crossing the sky, bridging the whole earth from pole to pole. It was a cloud of black smoke, and out of the heart of it came a flurried voice whispering over and over, “His plans for you — his plans for you — his plans for you—” And then there was nothing.
He woke refreshed, stretched himself gingerly — as one might have a care against too quick or too long a pull upon a frayed elastic — and, getting to his feet, went blinking to the window and touched the shade so that it flew up, letting in a pale sunset.
He looked out into the lemon-colored light and smiled wanly at the next house, as Edith’s grandiose phrase came to mind, “the old Vertrees country mansion.” It stood in a broad lawn which was separated from the Sheridans’ by a young hedge; and it was a big, square, plain old box of a house with a giant salt-cellar atop for a cupola. Paint had been spared for a long time, and no one could have put a name to the color of it, but in spite of that the place had no look of being out at heel, and the sward was as neatly trimmed as the Sheridans’ own.
The separating hedge ran almost beneath Bibbs’s window — for this wing of the New House extended here almost to the edge of the lot — and, directly opposite the window, the Vertreeses’ lawn had been graded so as to make a little knoll upon which stood a small rustic “summer-house.” It was almost on a level with Bibbs’s window and not thirty feet away; and it was easy for him to imagine the present dynasty of Vertreeses in grievous outcry when they had found this retreat ruined by the juxtaposition of the parvenu intruder. Probably the “summer-house” was pleasant and pretty in summer. It had the look of a place wherein little girls had played for a generation or so with dolls and “housekeeping,” or where a lovely old lady might come to read something dull on warm afternoons; but now in the thin light it was desolate, the color of dust, and hung with haggard vines which had lost their leaves.
Bibbs looked at it with grave sympathy, probably feeling some kinship with anything so dismantled; then he turned to a cheval-glass beside the window and paid himself the dubious tribute of a thorough inspection. He looked the mirror up and down, slowly, repeatedly, but came in the end to a long and earnest scrutiny of the face. Throughout this cryptic seance his manner was profoundly impersonal; he had the air of an entomologist intent upon classifying a specimen, but finally he appeared to become pessimistic. He shook his head solemnly; then gazed again and shook his head again, and continued to shake it slowly, in complete disapproval.
“You certainly are one horrible sight!” he said, aloud.
And at that he was instantly aware of an observer. Turning quickly, he was vouchsafed the picture of a charming lady, framed in a rustic aperture of the “summer-house” and staring full into his window — straight into his eyes, too, for the infinitesimal fraction of a second before the flashingly censorious withdrawal of her own. Composedly, she pulled several dead twigs from a vine, the manner of her action conveying a message or proclamation to the effect that she was in the summer-house for the sole purpose of such-like pruning and tending, and that no gentleman could suppose her presence there to be due to any other purpose whatsoever, or that, being there on that account, she had allowed her attention to wander for one instant in the direction of things of which she was in reality unconscious.
Having pulled enough twigs to emphasize her unconsciousness — and at the same time her disapproval — of everything in the nature of a Sheridan or belonging to a Sheridan, she descended the knoll with maintained composure, and sauntered toward a side-door of the country mansion of the Vertreeses. An elderly lady, bonneted and cloaked, opened the door and came to meet her.
“Are you ready, Mary? I’ve been looking for you. What were you doing?”
“Nothing. Just looking into one of Sheridans’ windows,” said Mary Vertrees. “I got caught at it.”
“Mary!” cried her mother. “Just as we were going to call! Good heavens!”
“We’ll go, just the same,” the daughter returned. “I suppose those women would be glad to have us if we’d burned their house to the ground.”
“But WHO saw you?” insisted Mrs. Vertrees.
“One of the sons, I suppose he was. I believe he’s insane, or something. At least I hear they keep him in a sanitarium somewhere, and never talk about him. He was staring at himself in a mirror and talking to himself. Then he looked out and caught me.”
“What did he—”
“Nothing, of course.”
“How did he look?”
“Like a ghost in a blue suit,” said Miss Vertrees, moving toward the street and waving a white-gloved hand in farewell to her father, who was observing them from the window of his library. “Rather tragic and altogether impossible. Do come on, mother, and let’s get it over!”
And Mrs. Vertrees, with many misgivings, set forth with her daughter for their gracious assault upon the New House next door.
CHAPTER V
MR. VERTREES, HAVING watched their departure with the air of a man who had something at hazard upon the expedition, turned from the window and began to pace the library thoughtfully, pending their return. He was about sixty; a small man, withered and dry and fine, a trim little sketch of an elderly dandy. His lambrequin mustache — relic of a forgotten Anglomania — had been profoundly black, but now, like his smooth hair, it was approaching an equally sheer whiteness; and though his clothes were old, they had shapeliness and a flavor of mode. And for greater spruceness there were some jaunty touches; gray spats, a narrow black ribbon across the gray waistcoat to the eye-glasses in a pocket, a fleck of color from a button in the lapel of the black coat, labeling him the descendant of patriot warriors.
The room was not like him, being cheerful and hideous, whereas Mr. Vertrees was anxious and decorative. Under a mantel of imitation black marble a merry little coal-fire beamed forth upon high and narrow “Eastlake” bookcases with long glass doors, and upon comfortable, incongruous furniture, and upon meaning
less “woodwork” everywhere, and upon half a dozen Landseer engravings which Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees sometimes mentioned to each other, after thirty years of possession, as “very fine things.” They had been the first people in town to possess Landseer engravings, and there, in art, they had rested, but they still had a feeling that in all such matters they were in the van; and when Mr. Vertrees discovered Landseers upon the walls of other people’s houses he thawed, as a chieftain to a trusted follower; and if he found an edition of Bulwer Lytton accompanying the Landseers as a final corroboration of culture, he would say, inevitably, “Those people know good pictures and they know good books.”
The growth of the city, which might easily have made him a millionaire, had ruined him because he had failed to understand it. When towns begin to grow they have whims, and the whims of a town always ruin somebody. Mr. Vertrees had been most strikingly the somebody in this case. At about the time he bought the Landseers, he owned, through inheritance, an office-building and a large house not far from it, where he spent the winter; and he had a country place — a farm of four hundred acres — where he went for the summers to the comfortable, ugly old house that was his home now, perforce, all the year round. If he had known how to sit still and let things happen he would have prospered miraculously; but, strangely enough, the dainty little man was one of the first to fall down and worship Bigness, the which proceeded straightway to enact the role of Juggernaut for his better education. He was a true prophet of the prodigious growth, but he had a fatal gift for selling good and buying bad. He should have stayed at home and looked at his Landseers and read his Bulwer, but he took his cow to market, and the trained milkers milked her dry and then ate her. He sold the office-building and the house in town to buy a great tract of lots in a new suburb; then he sold the farm, except the house and the ground about it, to pay the taxes on the suburban lots and to “keep them up.” The lots refused to stay up; but he had to do something to keep himself and his family up, so in despair he sold the lots (which went up beautifully the next year) for “traction stock” that was paying dividends; and thereafter he ceased to buy and sell. Thus he disappeared altogether from the commercial surface at about the time James Sheridan came out securely on top; and Sheridan, until Mrs. Vertrees called upon him with her “anti-smoke” committee, had never heard the name.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 161