MR. FARLEY BECOMES EXPLICIT
The Farleys had lived for twenty years in an old-fashioned square
brick house surrounded by maples. The lower floor comprised a parlor,
sitting-room, and dining-room, with a library on the side. The
library had been Farley’s den, where he smoked his pipe and read his
newspapers. The bookcases that lined the walls had rarely been opened;
they contained the “Waverley Novels,” Dickens’s “Works” complete, and
a wide range of miscellaneous fiction, including “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”
most of Mark Twain, Tourgée’s novel of Reconstruction, “A Fool’s
Errand,” Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona,” and a number of Mrs. A. D.
T. Whitney’s stories for girls--these latter reminiscent of Nan’s
girlhood. The brown volumes of “Messages and Papers of the Presidents”
were massed on the bottom shelves invincibly with half a dozen
“Reports” of the State Geological Survey. The doors of the black-walnut
bookcases were warped so that the contents were accessible only after
patient tugging. Half the books were upside-down--and had been since
the last house-cleaning. The room presented an inhospitable front to
literature, and the other arts fared no better elsewhere in the house.
A steel engraving of the Parthenon on the dining-room wall confronted
a crude print of the JANE E. NEWCOMB, an Ohio River packet on which
Farley had been second mate--and an efficient one--in ’69-’70.
Mrs. Farley had established in her household the Southwestern custom
of abating the heat by keeping the outer shutters closed through the
middle of the day, and the negro servants who still continued in
charge had not changed her system in this or in any other important
particular. Nan had not lacked instruction in the domestic arts; in
her school vacations she had been thoroughly drilled by Mrs. Farley.
Cleanliness in its traditional relationship to godliness had been
deeply impressed upon her; and she had been taught to sew, knit, and
crochet. She knew how to cook after the plain fashion to which Mrs.
Farley’s tastes and experience limited her; she had belonged to an
embroidery class formed to give occupation to one of Mrs. Farley’s
friends who had fallen upon evil times; and Nan had been the aptest of
pupils.
But Nan had never been equal to the task of initiating changes in the
Farley household, with its regular order of sweepings, scrubbings, and
dustings; its special days for baking, its inexorable rotation in meats
and vegetables for the table. And if she had needed justification she
would have given as her excuse Farley’s long acceptance of his wife’s
domestic routine, and the fear of displeasing him by altering it. The
colored cook’s husband did the heavier indoor cleaning and maintained
the yard; and the dining-room and the upper floor were cared for by a
colored woman. Hardly any one employed a black second girl, and Nan
would have changed the color scheme in this particular and substituted
a neatly capped and aproned white girl of the type that opened the
door of her friends’ houses, but the present incumbent was a niece of
the cook and not to be eliminated without rending the entire domestic
fabric.
Nan reached home a few minutes after five. She ran upstairs and
found Farley in his room, bending over a table by the window playing
solitaire. The trained nurse who had been in the house for a year
appeared at the door and withdrew. Nan crossed the room and laid a hand
on Farley’s shoulder. He had nearly finished the game, and she remained
quietly watching his tremulous hands shifting the cards until he leaned
back with a little grunt of satisfaction at the end. He put up his hand
to hers and drew her round so that he could look at her.
“Still wearing that fool hat! Take it off and sit down here and talk to
me.”
His small, round head was thickly covered with stiff white hair, though
his square-cut beard had whitened unevenly and still showed traces of
brown. While he lay in the chair with a pathetic inertness, his eyes
moved about restlessly, and his bleached, gnarled fingers were never
wholly quiet.
“Let’s see what you’ve been up to to-day?” he asked.
“Mamie Pembroke’s; she was having a luncheon for her cousin.”
“Just girls, I suppose?” he asked indifferently. “You must have had a
lot to eat to be gone all this time.”
“Well, we went for a motor run afterward and stopped at the Country
Club on the way back.”
“More to eat, I suppose. My God! everybody seems able to eat but me!
I told that fool doctor awhile ago I was goin’ to shoot him if he
didn’t cut off this gruel he’s feedin’ me. You can lay in corn’ beef
and cabbage for to-morrow; I’m goin’ to eat a barrel of it, too. If
I can get hold of some real food for a week, I’ll get out of this.
I understand they’ve got Bill Harrington playin’ golf. My God! he’s
two years older than I am and sits on his job every day. If I’d never
knuckled under to the doctors, I’d be a well man!” The wind rustling
the maple by the nearest window attracted his attention. “Open that
blind, and let the air in. Things have come to a nice pass when a man
with my constitution can be shut up in a dark room without air enough
to keep him alive.”
It was necessary to lift the wire screen before the shutters could
be opened, and he watched her intently as she obeyed him quickly and
quietly.
“Been to luncheon, have you?” he remarked as she sat down. “Well,
eatin’ your meals outside doesn’t save me any money. Those damned
niggers cook just as much as if they had a regiment in the house.
What did they give you to eat at the Pembrokes’--the usual bird-food
rubbish?”
Before his illness he had scrupulously reserved his profanity for
business uses; and it was only when his pain grew intolerable or the
slow action of his doctor’s remedies roused him to fury that he had
recourse to strong language. He allowed her to change the position
of his footstool, which had slipped away from him, and grunted his
appreciation as he stretched his long, bony figure more comfortably.
“Well, go on and tell me what you had to eat.”
It seemed best to meet this demand in a spirit of lightness. Having
lied once, it might be well to vary her recital by resorting to the
truth, and she counted off on her fingers, with the mockery that he had
always seemed to like, the items of food that had really constituted
Mrs. Kinney’s luncheon.
“Grape-fruit, broiled chicken, asparagus, potatoes baked in their
jackets and sprinkled with red pepper, the way you like them; romaine
salad, ice-cream and cake--just plain sponge cake--coffee. Nothing so
very sumptuous about that, papa.”
It had always been “papa” and “mamma” since her adoption. When she came
home from a boarding-school near Philadelphia where she had spent two
years, her attempts to change the provincial “poppa” and “momma” to the
French pronunciation had been promptly thwarted. Farley hated anything
that seemed “high-falutin’”; and having grown used to being called
“poppa,” his heart was as flint against the impious substitution.
“Of course there were no cocktails or champagne. Not at the Pembrokes’!
If all the women around here were like Mrs. Pembroke, we wouldn’t have
nice little girls like you swillin’ liquor; nor these sap-headed boys
that trot with you girls stewin’ their worthless little brains in gin.
What do you think these cigarette-smokin’ swine are goin’ to do! Do you
hear of ’em doin’ any work? Is there one of ’em that’s worth a dollar
a week? My God! between you girls runnin’ around half-naked and these
worthless young cubs plantin’ their weak, wobbly little chins against
cocktails all night, things have come to a nice pass. Well, why don’t
you go on and tell me who was at your party? Here I am, lyin’ here
waitin’ for the pallbearers to carry me out, and never hearin’ a thing,
and you sit there deaf and dumb! Who was at that party?”
“Well, poppa, there were just seven girls, counting me: Mary Waterman,
Minnie Briskett, Marian Doane, and Libby Davis, and Mamie and her
guest--a cousin from Louisville. Of course, there was nothing to drink
but claret cup, with sprigs of mint in the glasses.”
[Illustration: “OH, I HAD ONE GLASS; NOBODY HAD MORE, I THINK; THERE
WAS SOME KIND OF MINERAL WATER BESIDES. IT WAS ALL VERY SIMPLE”]
[Illustration]
“So the Pembrokes are comin’ to it, are they? They’ve got to have
something that looks like liquor--well, they’ll be passin’ the
cocktails before long. Claret cup dressed up like juleps; and how much
did you get of it?”
“Oh, I had one glass; nobody had more, I think; there was some kind of
mineral water besides. It was all very simple.”
“Just a simple little luncheon, was it? Well, I suppose it’s not too
simple to get into the newspapers. Nobody can put an extra plate on the
table now without the papers have to print it.”
He had never quizzed her like this, and his reference to the newspaper
alarmed her. His usual custom was to ask her what she had been doing
and whom she had seen and then change the subject in the midst of
her answer. If he had laid a trap for her she had gone too far to
retreat; and while she had lied to him before, she had managed it more
discreetly. She had escaped detection so long that she believed herself
immune from discovery.
He began tugging at a newspaper that had been hidden under his wrapper,
and her heart throbbed violently as he opened it and thrust it toward
her. It was the afternoon paper, folded back to the personal and
society items.
“Just read that aloud to me, will you? I may have been mistaken. Maybe
I didn’t get it straight. Go ahead, now, and read it--read it slow.”
She knew without looking what it was; the reading was exacted merely to
add to her discomfiture. The newspaper was delivered punctually at four
o’clock every afternoon, so that before she left the Country Club he
had known just where she had been and the names of her companions. She
read in a low, monotonous tone:--
“‘Mrs. Robert Smiley Kinney entertained at luncheon at the Country Club
to-day for Mrs. Ridgeley P. Farwell, of Pittsburg, who is her house
guest. The decorations were in pink. Those who enjoyed Mrs. Kinney’s
hospitality were Mr. and Mrs. Frederic Towlesley, Miss Nancy Farley,
Miss Edith Saxby, Mr. George K. Pickard, and Mr. William B. Copeland.’”
She refolded the paper and placed it on the table beside him. Instead
of the violent lashing for which she had steeled herself, he spoke her
name very kindly and gently, with even a lingering caress.
“I lied to you papa,” she faltered; “but I didn’t mean to see him
again. I--”
“Let’s be square about this,” he said, bending forward and clasping
his fingers over his knees. “You promised me a year ago that you’d not
meet or see Copeland; I didn’t ask you to drop Mrs. Kinney, for I don’t
think she’s a particularly bad woman; she’s only a fool, and we’ve got
to be charitable in dealin’ with fools. You can’t ever tell when you’re
not one yourself; that means me as well as you, Nan. Now, about that
worthless whelp, Copeland! I want the whole truth--no more little lies
or big ones. You know that piece of carrion wouldn’t dare come to this
house, and yet you sneak away and meet him and leave me to find it out
by accident! Now, I want the God’s truth; just what does all this mean?”
His quiet tone was weighted with the dignity, the simple righteousness,
that lay in him. She could have met more courageously a violent tirade
than his subdued demand. She was conscious that he had controlled
himself with difficulty; throughout the interview his wrath had flashed
like heat-lightning on far horizons, but he had kept himself well in
hand. He was outraged, but he was hurt, troubled, perplexed by her
conduct. The adoption of Nan had marked a high altitude in the married
life of the Farleys, and they had lavished upon her the pent love of
their childlessness. The very manner in which she had been flung upon
their protection made her advent in their household something of an
adventure, broadening their narrowing vistas and bringing a welcome
cheer to their monotonous existence. They had felt it to be a duty, but
one that would repay them a thousand-fold in happiness.
Farley patiently awaited her explanation--an explanation she dared not
make. She must satisfy him, if at all, by evasions and further lies.
“Mrs. Kinney made a point of my coming; she was always very nice to
me, and I haven’t been seeing her,--honestly I haven’t,--and I was
afraid she’d be offended if I refused to go. And I didn’t know Mr.
Copeland would be there. The luncheon was in the big dining-room, where
everybody could see us. I didn’t see any more of him than of anybody
else. In fact, I got tired and ran away--down to the river and was
there by myself for an hour before I came home on the trolley. When I
got back to the clubhouse, they had all gone motoring and I didn’t see
them again.”
“Left you there, did they? Well, Copeland waited for you, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” she admitted quickly. “But I saw him only a minute on the
veranda and told him I was coming home. He understands perfectly that
you don’t want me to see him.”
“H’m! I should hope he did! All that crowd understand it, don’t they?
They’ve been puttin’ you in his way, haven’t they,--tryin’ to fix up
something between you and that loafer! Look here, Nan, I’m not dead
yet! I’m goin’ to live a long time, and if these fool doctors have
been tellin’ you I’m done for, they’ve lied. And if Copeland thinks my
money’s goin’ to drop into his lap, he’s waitin’ under the wrong tree.
Never a cent! What you got to say to that?”
“I don’t think he ever thought of it; it’s only because you don’t like
him that you imagine he wants to marry me. I tell you now that I have
never had any idea of marrying him. And as for your money--it isn’t
my fault that you brought me here! You don’t have to give me a cent;
I don’t want it; I won’t take it! I was only a poor, ignorant little
nobody, anyhow, and you’ve been disappointed in me from the start.
I’ve never pleased you, no matter how hard I’ve tried. But I’ve done
the best I could, and I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you. I never told you an
untruth before,” she ran on glibly; “and I wouldn’t to-day if I hadn’t
guessed that you knew where I’d been and were trying to trick me into
lying. You don’t love me any more, papa; I know that; and I’m going
away--”
Her histrionic talents, employed so successfully in imitating him in
his fury, for the pleasure of Mrs. Kinney’s guests, were diverted now
to self-martyrization to the accompaniment of tears. She had been
closer to him than to his wife: what Mrs. Farley denied in the way of
indulgences he had usually yielded. He had liked her liveliness, her
keen wit, the amusing cajoleries with which she played upon him. The
remote Irish in his blood had been responsive to the fresher strain in
her.
“For God’s sake, stop bawlin’!” he growled. “So you admit you lied, do
you? Thought I had laid a trap for you, eh?”
It was difficult for him to realize that she was twenty-two and quite
old enough to be held accountable for her sins. Her appeal to tears
had always found him weak, but her declaration that she had suspected
a trap when he began to quiz her was a trifle too daring to pass
unchallenged. He repeated his demand that she sit up and stop crying.
“We may as well go through with this, Nan. I want to know what kind
of an arrangement you have with Copeland. Are you in love with that
fellow?”
“No!”
“Have you promised to marry him?”
“No!”
“Then why are you goin’ places where you expect to see him?”
“I’ve explained that, papa,” she replied with more assurance, finding
that he did not debate her answers. “I didn’t like to refuse Mrs.
Kinney when I’d been refusing so many of her invitations. She asked me
a while ago to come to her house to spend a week; and a little before
that she wanted me to go on a trip with them, but you were sick and I
knew you didn’t like her, anyhow, so I refused. You’ve got the wrong
idea about her, papa,” she continued ingratiatingly. “She’s really very
nice. The fact that she hasn’t been here long is against her with some
of the older women, but that’s just snobbishness. I always thought you
hated the snobbishness of some of these people who have lived here
always and are snippy to anybody else.”
He was conscious that she was eluding him, and he gripped his hands
with a sudden resolution not to be thwarted.
“I don’t care a damn about the Kinneys; I’m talkin’ about you and
Copeland,” he rasped impatiently.
“Very well, papa; I’ve told you all there is to know about that--”
“I don’t care what you say ‘about that,’” he mocked; “that worthless
scoundrel seems to have an evil fascination for you. I don’t understand
it; a decent young girl like you and a whiskey-soaked, loafin’,
gamblin’ degenerate, who shook his wife--a fine woman--to be free to
trail after you! That slimy wharf-rat has the fool idea that I took
advantage of him when I sold him my interest in the store--and just to
show you what a fool he is I’ll tell you that I sold him my interest
at a tenth less than I could have got from three other people--did it,
so help me God, out of sheer good feelin’, because he’s the son of a
father who’d given me a hand up, and I thought because he was a fool
I wouldn’t be just fair with him--I’d be generous! I did that for Sam
Copeland’s sake.
“That was four years ago, and I hadn’t much idea then that he’d make
good. He’s already cashed in everything Sam left him but the store. And
I’ve still got his notes for twenty-five thousand dollars--twenty-five
thousand, mind you!--that he’d like damned well to cancel by marryin’
you. A man nearly forty years old, who gambles and soaks himself in
cocktails and runs after a feather-head like you while the business his
father and I made the best in the State goes plumb to hell! Now, you
listen to what I’m sayin’: if you want to marry him, you do it,--you
go ahead and do it now, for if you wait for me to die, you’ll find he
won’t be so anxious; there ain’t goin’ to be anything to marry you
_for_!”
His voice that had been firm and strong at the beginning of this long
speech sank to a hoarse whisper, but he cleared his throat and uttered
his last words with sharp distinctness.
“I never meant to; I never had any idea of marrying him,” she said.
“And I’ve never thought of the money. You can do what you like with it.”
“Well, a man can’t take his money with him to the graveyard, but he can
tie a pretty long string to it; and it’s my duty to protect you as long
as I can. I’d hoped you’d be married and settled before I went. Your
mamma and I used to talk of that; you’d got a pretty tight grip on us;
it couldn’t have been stronger if you’d been our own; and I don’t want
anything to spoil this, Nan. I want you to be a good woman--not one of
these high-flyin’, drinkin’ kind, that heads for the divorce court, but
decent and steady. Now, I guess that’s about all.”
She stood beside him for a moment, smoothing his hair. Then she knelt,
as though from an accession of feeling, and took his hands.
“I’m so sorry, papa! I never mean to hurt you; but I know I do; I know
I must have troubled mamma, too, a very great deal. And you’ve both
been so good to me! And I want to show you I appreciate it. And please
don’t talk of the money any more or of my marrying anybody. I don’t
want the money; I’m not going to marry: I want us to live on just as
we have been. You’ve been cooped up too long, but you’re so much better
now you’ll soon be able to travel.”
“No; there’s no more travel for me; I’ll be glad to hang on as I am.
There’s nothing in this change idea. About a year more’s all I count
on, and then you can throw me on the scrap-heap.”
She protested that there were many more comfortable years ahead of him;
the doctors had said so. At the mention of doctors his anger flared
again, but for an instant only. It was a question whether he had been
mollified by her assurances or whether the peace that now reigned was
attributable to his satisfaction with the plans he had devised to
protect her from fortune-hunters.
She hated scenes and trouble of any kind, and peace or even a truce was
worth having at any price. She had grown so accustomed to the bright,
smooth surfaces of life as to be impatient of the rough, unburnished
edges. It was not wholly Nan’s fault that she had reached womanhood
selfish and willful. In their ignorance and anxiety to do as well by
her as their neighbors did by their daughters, there had been no bounds
to the Farleys’ indulgence.
“I’m going to have dinner up here with you,” she said cheerfully, after
an interval. “I’m tired of eating alone downstairs with Miss Rankin;
her white cap gets on my nerves.”
She satisfied herself that this plan pleased him, and ran downstairs
whistling--then was up again in her room, where he heard her quick
step, the opening and closing of drawers.
She faced him across the small table in the plainest of white frocks,
with her hair arranged in a simple fashion he had once commended. She
told stories--anecdotes she had gathered while dressing, from the back
pages of “Life.” He was himself a capital story-teller, though at the
age when a man repeats, and she listened to tales of his steamboating
days that she had heard for years and could have told better herself.
Soon a thunder-shower cooled the air, and made necessary the closing
of windows, with a resulting domestic intimacy. The atmosphere was
redolent of forgiveness on his part, of a wish to please on hers.
At nine o’clock, when she had finished reading some chapters from “Life
on the Mississippi,”--a book that he kept in his room,--and Miss Rankin
appeared to put him to bed, he begged half an hour more. He hadn’t felt
so well for a year, he declared.
“Look here, Nan,” he remarked, when the nurse had retired after a
grudging acquiescence, “I don’t want you to feel I’m hard on you. I
guess I talk pretty rough sometimes, but I don’t mean to. But I worry
about you--what’s goin’ to happen to you after I’m gone. I wish I’d
gone first, so mamma could have looked after you. You know we set a lot
by you. If I’m hard on you, I don’t mean--”
She flung herself down beside him and clasped his face in her hands.
“You dear old fraud!--there can’t be any trouble between you and me,
and as for your leaving me--why, that’s a long, long time ahead.
And you can’t tell! I might go first--I have all kinds of queer
symptoms--honestly, I do! And the doctor made me stop dancing last
winter because my heart was going jigglety. Please let’s be good
friends and cheerful as we always have been, and I’ll never, never tell
you any fibs any more!”
She saw that her nearness, the touch of her hands, her supple young
body pressed against his worn knees, were freeing the remotest springs
of affection in his tired heart.
Nan wanted to be good--“good” in the sense of the word that had
expressed the simple piety of her foster-mother. She had the conscience
of her temperament and from childhood had often been miserable over the
smallest infractions of discipline. Her last words with Copeland on
the club veranda had not left her happy. It had been in her mind for
some time that she must break with Billy. She had never been able to
convince herself that she loved him. She had liked his admiration, and
had over-valued it as coming from a man much older than herself; one
who, moreover, stood to her as a protagonist of the gay world. No one
but Billy Copeland gave suppers for visiting actors and actresses or
chartered a fleet of canoes for a thousand-dollar picnic up the river.
It was because he was different and amusing and made love to her with
an ardor her nature craved that she had so readily lent herself to the
efforts of the Kinneys to throw them together.
Being loved by Copeland, a divorced man rated “fast,” had all the more
piquancy for Nan as affording a relief from the life of the staid,
colorless household in which she had been reared. There were those who,
without being snobs, looked down just a little upon a girl who was
merely an adopted child to whom her foster-parents gave only a shadowy
background. The Farleys were substantial and respectable, but they were
not an “old family.” She was conscious of this, and the knowledge had
made her the least bit rebellious and the more ready to surrender to
the blandishments of the Kinneys, who were even more under the ban.
As she undressed and crept wearily into bed, she pondered these things,
and the thought of them did not increase her happiness.