Edith and Sibyl were radiant: at first they had watched Miss Vertrees with an almost haggard anxiety, wondering what disasterous effect Sheridan’s pastoral gaieties — and other things — would have upon her, but she seemed delighted with everything, and with him most of all. She treated him as if he were some delicious, foolish old joke that she understood perfectly, laughing at him almost violently when he bragged — probably his first experience of that kind in his life. It enchanted him.
As he proclaimed to the table, she had “a way with her.” She had, indeed, as Roscoe Sheridan, upon her right, discovered just after the feast began. Since his marriage three years before, no lady had bestowed upon him so protracted a full view of brilliant eyes; and, with the look, his lovely neighbor said — and it was her first speech to him —
“I hope you’re very susceptible, Mr. Sheridan!”
Honest Roscoe was taken aback, and “Why?” was all he managed to say.
She repeated the look deliberately, which was noted, with a mystification equal to his own, by his sister across the table. No one, reflected Edith, could image Mary Vertrees the sort of girl who would “really flirt” with married men — she was obviously the “opposite of all that.” Edith defined her as a “thoroughbred,” a “nice girl”; and the look given to Roscoe was astounding. Roscoe’s wife saw it, too, and she was another whom it puzzled — though not because its recipient was married.
“Because!” said Mary Vertrees, replying to Roscoe’s monosyllable. “And also because we’re next-door neighbors at table, and it’s dull times ahead for both of us if we don’t get along.”
Roscoe was a literal young man, all stocks and bonds, and he had been brought up to believe that when a man married he “married and settled down.” It was “all right,” he felt, for a man as old as his father to pay florid compliments to as pretty a girl as this Miss Vertrees, but for himself— “a young married man” — it wouldn’t do; and it wouldn’t even be quite moral. He knew that young married people might have friendships, like his wife’s for Lamhorn; but Sibyl and Lamhorn never “flirted” — they were always very matter-of-fact with each other. Roscoe would have been troubled if Sibyl had ever told Lamhorn she hoped he was susceptible.
“Yes — we’re neighbors,” he said, awkwardly.
“Next-door neighbors in houses, too,” she added.
“No, not exactly. I live across the street.”
“Why, no!” she exclaimed, and seemed startled. “Your mother told me this afternoon that you lived at home.”
“Yes, of course I live at home. I built that new house across the street.”
“But you—” she paused, confused, and then slowly a deep color came into her cheek. “But I understood—”
“No,” he said; “my wife and I lived with the old folks the first year, but that’s all. Edith and Jim live with them, of course.”
“I — I see,” she said, the deep color still deepening as she turned from him and saw, written upon a card before the gentleman at her left the name, “Mr. James Sheridan, Jr.” And from that moment Roscoe had little enough cause for wondering what he ought to reply to her disturbing coquetries.
Mr. James Sheridan had been anxiously waiting for the dazzling visitor to “get through with old Roscoe,” as he thought of it, and give a bachelor a chance. “Old Roscoe” was the younger, but he had always been the steady wheel-horse of the family. Jim was “steady” enough, but was considered livelier than Roscoe, which in truth is not saying much for Jim’s liveliness. As their father habitually boasted, both brothers were “capable, hard-working young business men,” and the principal difference between them was merely that which resulted from Jim’s being still a bachelor. Physically they were of the same type: dark of eyes and of hair, fresh-colored and thick-set, and though Roscoe was several inches taller than Jim, neither was of the height, breadth, or depth of the father. Both wore young business men’s mustaches, and either could have sat for the tailor-shop lithographs of young business men wearing “rich suitings in dark mixtures.”
Jim, approving warmly of his neighbor’s profile, perceived her access of color, which increased his approbation. “What’s that old Roscoe saying to you, Miss Vertrees?” he asked. “These young married men are mighty forward nowadays, but you mustn’t let ’em make you blush.”
“Am I blushing?” she said. “Are you sure?” And with that she gave him ample opportunity to make sure, repeating with interest the look wasted upon Roscoe. “I think you must be mistaken,” she continued. “I think it’s your brother who is blushing. I’ve thrown him into confusion.”
“How?”
She laughed, and then, leaning to him a little, said in a tone as confidential as she could make it, under cover of the uproar. “By trying to begin with him a courtship I meant for YOU!”
This might well be a style new to Jim; and it was. He supposed it a nonsensical form of badinage, and yet it took his breath. He realized that he wished what she said to be the literal truth, and he was instantly snared by that realization.
“By George!” he said. “I guess you’re the kind of girl that can say anything — yes, and get away with it, too!”
She laughed again — in her way, so that he could not tell whether she was laughing at him or at herself or at the nonsense she was talking; and she said: “But you see I don’t care whether I get away with it or not. I wish you’d tell me frankly if you think I’ve got a change to get away with YOU?”
“More like if you’ve got a chance to get away FROM me!” Jim was inspired to reply. “Not one in the world, especially after beginning by making fun of me like that.”
“I mightn’t be so much in fun as you think,” she said, regarding him with sudden gravity.
“Well,” said Jim, in simple honesty, “you’re a funny girl!”
Her gravity continued an instant longer. “I may not turn out to be funny for YOU.”
“So long as you turn out to be anything at all for me, I expect I can manage to be satisfied.” And with that, to his own surprise, it was his turn to blush, whereupon she laughed again.
“Yes,” he said, plaintively, not wholly lacking intuition, “I can see you’re the sort of girl that would laugh the minute you see a man really means anything!”
“‘Laugh’!” she cried, gaily. “Why, it might be a matter of life and death! But if you want tragedy, I’d better put the question at once, considering the mistake I made with your brother.”
Jim was dazed. She seemed to be playing a little game of mockery and nonsense with him, but he had glimpses of a flashing danger in it; he was but too sensible of being outclassed, and had somewhere a consciousness that he could never quite know this giddy and alluring lady, no matter how long it pleased her to play with him. But he mightily wanted her to keep on playing with him.
“Put what question?” he said, breathlessly.
“As you are a new neighbor of mine and of my family,” she returned, speaking slowly and with a cross-examiner’s severity, “I think it would be well for me to know at once whether you are already walking out with any young lady or not. Mr. Sheridan, think well! Are you spoken for?”
“Not yet,” he gasped. “Are you?”
“NO!” she cried, and with that they both laughed again; and the pastime proceeded, increasing both in its gaiety and in its gravity.
Observing its continuance, Mr. Robert Lamhorn, opposite, turned from a lively conversation with Edith and remarked covertly to Sibyl that Miss Vertrees was “starting rather picturesquely with Jim.” And he added, languidly, “Do you suppose she WOULD?”
For the moment Sibyl gave no sign of having heard him, but seemed interested in the clasp of a long “rope” of pearls, a loop of which she was allowing to swing from her fingers, resting her elbow upon the table and following with her eyes the twinkle of diamonds and platinum in the clasp at the end of the loop. She wore many jewels. She was pretty, but hers was not the kind of prettiness to be loaded with too sumptuous
accessories, and jeweled head-dresses are dangerous — they may emphasize the wrongness of the wearer.
“I said Miss Vertrees seems to be starting pretty strong with Jim,” repeated Mr. Lamhorn.
“I heard you.” There was a latent discontent always somewhere in her eyes, no matter what she threw upon the surface of cover it, and just now she did not care to cover it; she looked sullen. “Starting any stronger than you did with Edith?” she inquired.
“Oh, keep the peace!” he said, crossly. “That’s off, of course.”
“You haven’t been making her see it this evening — precisely,” said Sibyl, looking at him steadily. “You’ve talked to her for—”
“For Heaven’s sake,” he begged, “keep the peace!”
“Well, what have you just been doing?”
“SH!” he said. “Listen to your father-in-law.”
Sheridan was booming and braying louder than ever, the orchestra having begun to play “The Rosary,” to his vast content.
“I COUNT THEM OVER, LA-LA-TUM-TEE-DUM,” he roared, beating the measures with his fork. “EACH HOUR A PEARL, EACH PEARL TEE-DUM-TUM-DUM — What’s the matter with all you folks? Why’n’t you SING? Miss Vertrees, I bet a thousand dollars YOU sing! Why’n’t—”
“Mr. Sheridan,” she said, turning cheerfully from the ardent Jim, “you don’t know what you interrupted! Your son isn’t used to my rough ways, and my soldier’s wooing frightens him, but I think he was about to say something important.”
“I’ll say something important to him if he doesn’t!” the father threatened, more delighted with her than ever. “By gosh! if I was his age — or a widower right NOW—”
“Oh, wait!” cried Mary. “If they’d only make less noise! I want Mrs. Sheridan to hear.”
“She’d say the same,” he shouted. “She’d tell me I was mighty slow if I couldn’t get ahead o’ Jim. Why, when I was his age—”
“You must listen to your father,” Mary interrupted, turning to Jim, who had grown red again. “He’s going to tell us how, when he was your age, he made those two blades of grass grow out of a teacup — and you could see for yourself he didn’t get them out of his sleeve!”
At that Sheridan pounded the table till it jumped. “Look here, young lady!” he roared. “Some o’ these days I’m either goin’ to slap you — or I’m goin’ to kiss you!”
Edith looked aghast; she was afraid this was indeed “too awful,” but Mary Vertrees burst into ringing laughter.
“Both!” she cried. “Both! The one to make me forget the other!”
“But which—” he began, and then suddenly gave forth such stentorian trumpetings of mirth that for once the whole table stopped to listen. “Jim,” he roared, “if you don’t propose to that girl to-night I’ll send you back to the machine-shop with Bibbs!”
And Bibbs — down among the retainers by the sugar Pump Works, and watching Mary Vertrees as a ragged boy in the street might watch a rich little girl in a garden — Bibbs heard. He heard — and he knew what his father’s plans were now.
CHAPTER VII
MRS. VERTREES “SAT up” for her daughter, Mr. Vertrees having retired after a restless evening, not much soothed by the society of his Landseers. Mary had taken a key, insisting that he should not come for her and seeming confident that she would not lack for escort; nor did the sequel prove her confidence unwarranted. But Mrs. Vertrees had a long vigil of it.
She was not the woman to make herself easy — no servant had ever seen her in a wrapper — and with her hair and dress and her shoes just what they had been when she returned from the afternoon’s call, she sat through the slow night hours in a stiff little chair under the gaslight in her own room, which was directly over the “front hall.” There, book in hand, she employed the time in her own reminiscences, though it was her belief that she was reading Madame de Remusat’s.
Her thoughts went backward into her life and into her husband’s; and the deeper into the past they went, the brighter the pictures they brought her — and there is tragedy. Like her husband, she thought backward because she did not dare think forward definitely. What thinking forward this troubled couple ventured took the form of a slender hope which neither of them could have borne to hear put in words, and yet they had talked it over, day after day, from the very hour when they heard Sheridan was to build his New House next door. For — so quickly does any ideal of human behavior become an antique — their youth was of the innocent old days, so dead! of “breeding” and “gentility,” and no craft had been more straitly trained upon them than that of talking about things without mentioning them. Herein was marked the most vital difference between Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees and their big new neighbor. Sheridan, though his youth was of the same epoch, knew nothing of such matters. He had been chopping wood for the morning fire in the country grocery while they were still dancing.
It was after one o’clock when Mrs. Vertrees heard steps and the delicate clinking of the key in the lock, and then, with the opening of the door, Mary’s laugh, and “Yes — if you aren’t afraid — to-morrow!”
The door closed, and she rushed up-stairs, bringing with her a breath of cold and bracing air into her mother’s room. “Yes,” she said, before Mrs. Vertrees could speak, “he brought me home!”
She let her cloak fall upon the bed, and, drawing an old red-velvet rocking-chair forward, sat beside her mother after giving her a light pat upon the shoulder and a hearty kiss upon the cheek.
“Mamma!” Mary exclaimed, when Mrs. Vertrees had expressed a hope that she had enjoyed the evening and had not caught cold. “Why don’t you ask me?”
This inquiry obviously made her mother uncomfortable. “I don’t—” she faltered. “Ask you what, Mary?”
“How I got along and what he’s like.”
“Mary!”
“Oh, it isn’t distressing!” said Mary. “And I got along so fast—” She broke off to laugh; continuing then, “But that’s the way I went at it, of course. We ARE in a hurry, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Mrs. Vertrees insisted, shaking her head plaintively.
“Yes,” said Mary, “I’m going out in his car with him to-morrow afternoon, and to the theater the next night — but I stopped it there. You see, after you give the first push, you must leave it to them while YOU pretend to run away!”
“My dear, I don’t know what to—”
“What to make of anything!” Mary finished for her. “So that’s all right! Now I’ll tell you all about it. It was gorgeous and deafening and tee-total. We could have lived a year on it. I’m not good at figures, but I calculated that if we lived six months on poor old Charlie and Ned and the station-wagon and the Victoria, we could manage at least twice as long on the cost of the ‘house-warming.’ I think the orchids alone would have lasted us a couple of months. There they were, before me, but I couldn’t steal ’em and sell ’em, and so — well, so I did what I could!”
She leaned back and laughed reassuringly to her troubled mother. “It seemed to be a success — what I could,” she said, clasping her hands behind her neck and stirring the rocker to motion as a rhythmic accompaniment to her narrative. “The girl Edith and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan, were too anxious about the effect of things on me. The father’s worth a bushel of both of them, if they knew it. He’s what he is. I like him.” She paused reflectively, continuing, “Edith’s ‘interested’ in that Lamhorn boy; he’s good-looking and not stupid, but I think he’s—” She interrupted herself with a cheery outcry: “Oh! I mustn’t be calling him names! If he’s trying to make Edith like him, I ought to respect him as a colleague.”
“I don’t understand a thing you’re talking about,” Mrs. Vertrees complained.
“All the better! Well, he’s a bad lot, that Lamhorn boy; everybody’s always known that, but the Sheridans don’t know the everybodies that know. He sat between Edith and Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan. SHE’S like those people you wondered about at the theater, the
last time we went — dressed in ball-gowns; bound to show their clothes and jewels SOMEwhere! She flatters the father, and so did I, for that matter — but not that way. I treated him outrageously!”
“Mary!”
“That’s what flattered him. After dinner he made the whole regiment of us follow him all over the house, while he lectured like a guide on the Palatine. He gave dimensions and costs, and the whole b’ilin’ of ’em listened as if they thought he intended to make them a present of the house. What he was proudest of was the plumbing and that Bay of Naples panorama in the hall. He made us look at all the plumbing — bath-rooms and everywhere else — and then he made us look at the Bay of Naples. He said it was a hundred and eleven feet long, but I think it’s more. And he led us all into the ready-made library to see a poem Edith had taken a prize with at school. They’d had it printed in gold letters and framed in mother-of-pearl. But the poem itself was rather simple and wistful and nice — he read it to us, though Edith tried to stop him. She was modest about it, and said she’d never written anything else. And then, after a while, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan asked me to come across the street to her house with them — her husband and Edith and Mr. Lamhorn and Jim Sheridan—”
Mrs. Vertrees was shocked. “‘Jim’!” she exclaimed. “Mary, PLEASE—”
“Of course,” said Mary. “I’ll make it as easy for you as I can, mamma. Mr. James Sheridan, Junior. We went over there, and Mrs. Roscoe explained that ‘the men were all dying for a drink,’ though I noticed that Mr. Lamhorn was the only one near death’s door on that account. Edith and Mrs. Roscoe said they knew I’d been bored at the dinner. They were objectionably apologetic about it, and they seemed to think NOW we were going to have a ‘good time’ to make up for it. But I hadn’t been bored at the dinner, I’d been amused; and the ‘good time’ at Mrs. Roscoe’s was horribly, horribly stupid.”
“But, Mary,” her mother began, “is — is—” And she seemed unable to complete the question.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 163