I
In the pigeonholes of her memory, Mrs. Ascott had stowed a collection
of unanswered questions, neatly tabulated and reserved for possible
solution. Why had her marriage with Raoul been the inevitable failure
she knew it must be, almost from the beginning? Would they have found
each other if there had been children? Would her own life have been
more satisfactory, had her mother married for love and not for social
position? And now she added another, trivial as compared with these,
yet quite as elusive: Would Mrs. Trench have waited the prescribed
two weeks for a first call on a new neighbour, had her small daughter
failed to report the broken window--and other things?
Whatever the answer, the stubborn fact remained that Mrs. David
Trench did call, on Friday afternoon. She left a correctly engraved
card on the vestibule table, and sat erect on the edge of her chair.
She wore an austere tailored suit, patent leather boots that called
attention to the trim shape of her feet, and a flesh-tinted veil of
fine silk net with flossy black dots. In the full light of the south
window, she might have passed for thirty-six. Barring a conspicuous
hardness of the mouth, her features were excellent. The hair that lay
in palpably artificial curls along the line of her velvet hat was as
black as it is possible for Caucasian hair to be, and the eyes were
coldly piercing--as if appraisal were their chief function. But her
speech.... Cloying sweetness trickled through her words, as she assured
her tenant that they were destined to be friends. She would come and
care for Mrs. Ascott if she should fall ill--so far from home and
mother. She was a famous nurse. Dr. Schubert would bear her witness.
Her heart ached as she thought how desolate must be the life of a young
widow.
“Yet,” she added, “it is an enviable state, after all--when one has
passed the first shock of grief. Like everything in life, it has its
compensations. You don’t have to bother with a man, and there is no
danger of your being an old maid.” She pronounced the last words as
if she were referring to the plague or small-pox. “The West must look
strange to you,” she hurried on, “a little town, too, after spending
all your life in New York and the great cities of Europe.”
“I have spent very little time in New York,” her tenant corrected.
“When I was married I went to Philadelphia to live--such time as we
were not travelling. And I was scarcely away from Rochester until I was
fifteen.”
“Rochester! You don’t tell me! We went to Rochester for shopping and
the theatre, as people in Springdale go to St. Louis. What a little
world it is, after all. Did you ever hear of a town called Bromfield?”
Judith searched her memory. At last she had it. She had driven to that
village more than once with her grandfather, Dr. Holden. She recalled
one visit, when the sleigh was insecurely anchored in front of a house
on Main Street, while she curled up for a nap in the great fur robes
on the seat. The horse, arriving at the mental state which demanded
dinner, before the physician was ready to leave the house, had untied
the hitching strap and cantered unconcernedly to the livery stable
where he was in the habit of being fed.
“You don’t mean that you were the little girl in the sleigh!” Mrs.
Trench’s eyes were scintillating with astonished interest. “I’ll show
you the account of it--in the Bromfield Sentinel. I have a complete
file of the little home paper. And it will surprise you to know that
the man your grandfather was calling on was Robert Larimore, my father.
He died of brain hemorrhage, that same night. All the Larimores go that
way--suddenly. Dr. Holden was called, when my father’s mother died, but
it was all over before the telegram reached him. And your grandmother
... she must have been the Mrs. Holden who did so much work among the
poor.”
“Yes, my parents left Rochester to escape from her pets. That, of
course, is only a family joke. My father spent a good many years in
South America, and I was left with my grandparents. One of my brothers
was born in Bolivia and the other in the Argentine. I didn’t see them
until they were six and ten years old.”
Mrs. Trench was not listening. Should she ... or should she not? In the
end, she did. “Mrs. Ascott, I know it sounds like a foolish question--a
city the size of Rochester--but you said a moment ago that as a child
you knew everybody. Did you ever hear of a family named Fournier?”
“The people who kept the delicatessen, around the corner from my
grandfather’s private sanitarium? Yes, I knew them well.”
“Was there a daughter--Lettie or Arletta--some such name? She’d be a
woman of about forty-five by this time, I should think.”
“No, she was the niece, a wild, highstrung girl who gave them a good
deal of trouble. She ran away and was married, at sixteen--some
worthless fellow from up-state, who afterward tried to get out of it.”
“Worthless?” Mrs. Trench bristled unaccountably.
“That was the way Lettie’s people regarded him. Their little boy and
I played together, as children. My grandmother took a lively interest
in Lettie, as she did in all wayward girls who found no sympathy at
home. I remember she devoted a good deal of her time to the patching up
of quarrels between Lettie and her husband--and keeping peace in the
family, when he was in Rochester with them.”
“Was there anything--peculiar--about their marriage?”
“Lettie was romantic. I believe that was all. It happened before I
was born; but I remember that there was always talk. Grandma Holden
compelled her to confess her marriage, to save her good name. And
the foolish part of it was that she and the youth were married under
assumed names--”
“The boy--how old is he?”
“By a very amusing coincidence, I happen to know that, too. I couldn’t
tell you the ages of my brothers, with any degree of certainty. But
Fournier Stone and I were born the same night, in adjoining rooms of
Dr. Holden’s sanitarium. He arrived early in the evening, and I a
little before dawn. By that much I escaped the ‘April Fool’ that was so
offensive to him. I shall be twenty-seven next Friday.”
Mrs. Trench made swift mental calculation, and her stiffly pursed lips
uttered one inexplicable sentence:
“Thank God, my people have always been respectable.”