Again Harriet fled through the quiet house as if pursued by furies, and
again reached her room with white cheeks and a fast-beating heart. Nina
was not there. She crossed to the window, and stood there with her
hands clasped on her chest, and her breath coming and going stormily.
"Oh, he's clever!" she whispered, half aloud. "He's clever! He never
made a threat. He never made a threat of any kind! He knew that he had
me--he knew that he had me just where he wanted me!" And looking down
toward the lane, invisible now behind the trees and stables, in the
gathering dusk, she added scornfully, "You're clever, Roy. I wonder if
there's anything you wouldn't do, if it made for your own comfort or
brought you in money!
"But, at all events," summarized Harriet, quieting a little under the
soothing influence of solitude and safety, "I'm out of it! He won't
touch ME. And what he does here, in making his way with this family,
doesn't concern me! Nina is old enough to decide for herself--I had my
own living to make at her age, and no father to write me checks for my
birthdays, and no Uncle Edward to die and leave me a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars!"
She mused about the little fortune, left most unexpectedly five years
before to Nina and Ward by an uncle of their mother. Edward Potter had
been a bachelor, had been young when an accident flung him out of life,
and made his niece's children, the twelve-year-old Nina, and Ward at
sixteen, his heirs. The expectation had been that he would marry, that
sons and daughters of his own would disinherit the young Carters. But
his affianced wife had married someone else, after awhile, and the
fortune had gone on accumulating for Ward and for the girl whose
eighteenth birthday was only a few months off now. Harriet wondered if
Royal Blondin knew about it. Of course he knew about it! Harriet had
seen a check for one million dollars exhibited, under glass, among the
wedding gifts of one twenty-year-old girl a few months ago. She did not
suppose that Richard Carter would do that for his daughter, even if he
could. But he would probably double Uncle Edward's legacy, and the
bride would begin her new life with a fortune that was no contemptible
fraction of a million.
"And I am worrying about my responsibility to poor, dear little Nina!"
the girl said to herself, with a rather mirthless laugh, as Nina
herself came into the room.
Nina had been experiencing what were among the pleasantest hours of her
life. A school friend, Amy Hawkes, had come back with her from
Francesca Jay's tea, and the two had been prettily invited by Isabelle
to join the family downstairs at dinner. Coming at this particular
moment, it had seemed to Nina that she was emerging from the chrysalis
indeed.
But more than that. Amy, who was romance personified, under a plain and
demure exterior, had observed Nina's long conversation with Royal
Blondin, and had found an arch allusion to it so well received by Nina
that she had followed up that line of conversation, almost without
variation, ever since. By this time the girls had confided to each
other, over a box of chocolates in the deep chairs of the morning room,
everything of a sentimental nature that had ever happened to them in
their lives, and much that had not. Amy was convinced that Mr. Blondin
was just desperately in earnest, and that, for the sake of other
aspirants, Nina ought not to trifle with him, and Nina, with blazing
cheeks and tumbled hair, was assuming rapidly the airs of a sad
coquette.
Amy was to sleep with Nina, and Harriet realized, as she superintended
their fluttered dressing, that she, Harriet, would be obliged to go to
their door five times, between eleven and one o'clock that night, and
tell them that they must stop talking. With the grave manner that
always impressed young girls, and with a somewhat serious face, she was
busying herself with their frills and ribbons, when from the bathroom,
where Amy was drawing on silk stockings, and Nina had her toothbrush in
her mouth, she was electrified by a chance scrap of their conversation.
"If I do mention it to Mother," said Nina, rather thickly, "she will
only scold me! A man of his age--she'd be furious!"
"And don't you think you deserve to be scolded?" said Amy, in a
delightfully rebuking undertone. "My dear--he must be in the thirties!"
"No, I don't, Amy!" Nina protested, in a tone of great honesty and
innocence. "I can't help being like that. If I don't like a man, why, I
have nothing to say to him! If I do, why--his age--NOTHING--matters!"
She hesitated, and laughed a little laugh of pure pleasure.
"You flirt!" Amy said.
"Truly, honestly--" Nina was beginning, when both girls were smitten
into panicky silence by the sound of the slipper Harriet deliberately
dropped on the floor. Nina noiselessly bent her stocky young body far
forward, to look through the crack of the bathroom door. Harriet went
on quietly spreading the youthful dinner dresses on Nina's bed, snapped
up a dressing-table light, went on into her own room. But she had been
taken far more by surprise herself, if they had only known it, than had
Amy and Nina. Could Royal possibly have been the subject of their
confidences? Could he have made such progress in a single afternoon?
Knowing Royal, and knowing Nina, she was obliged to confess it possible.
While she stood pondering, in her own beautiful room, there was a
modest knock at the door, and Rosa came in with a box. She smiled, and
put it on Harriet's desk.
"For me?" the girl said, smiling in answer, and with some surprise.
Rosa nodded, and went her way, and Harriet went to the box. It was not
large, a florist's box of dark green cardboard; Harriet untied the
raffia string, and investigated the mass of silky tissue paper. Inside
was an orchid.
She took it out, a delicate cluster of flaky blossoms, poised
carelessly, like little white hearts, on the limp stem. She opened the
accompanying envelope, and found Ward's card. On the back he had
written,
"Just a little worried because he's afraid you're cross at him!"
Harriet stood perfectly still, the orchid in one hand, the card crushed
in the other. Ward Carter had sent orchids, no doubt, to other girls.
But Harriet Field had never had an orchid before from a man.
She put the card into her little desk, and the orchid into a slender
crystal vase. Then she went back to advise Amy and Nina as to gold
beads and the arrangement of hair. But a little later, when she was in
the big housekeeper's pantry, where several maids were busy with
last-minute manipulations of olives and ice and grapefruit, Ward came
out and found her, soberly busy in her old checked silk.
"Why didn't you wear it?"
"Wear it--you bad, extravagant child! I'll wear it to town to-morrow."
"No; but--" he sank his tone to one of enjoyable confidences--"but WERE
you mad at me?"
"Mad at you? But why should I have been?" Harriet demanded.
"Oh, I don't know! You looked so glum at breakfast."
"Well, you had nothing to do with it!" she assured him, in her
big-sisterly voice. "And it was the first orchid I ever had, and I
loved you for it!"
It was said in just the comradely, half-amused voice with which she had
addressed Ward a hundred times in the past year, but perhaps the boy
had changed. At all events, it was with something like pain and
impatience in his tone that he said gruffly:
"Yes, you do! You like me about as much as you like Nina, or Granny!"
"I like you--sh! just a LITTLE better than I do Granny!" Harriet
confided. "Don't spoil your dinner with olives, Ward! Don't muss
that--there's a dear! Dinner's announced, by the way. It's quarter past
eight."
"I'm going!" he grumbled, discontentedly.
"At any rate, I LOVE the orchid!" Harriet said, soothingly. He was
laughing too, as he disappeared, but something in his face was vaguely
troubling to her none-the-less, and she remembered it now and then with
a little compunction during her quiet evening of reading. She was tired
to-night, excited from the talk with Blondin that afternoon, and by the
general confusion and noise of the household. Ward--Nina--Royal--their
names flitted through her thoughts even when she tried to read; at such
a time as this she felt as if the life at Crownlands was like the
current of a river that moved too swiftly, or more appropriately
perhaps, like some powerful motor-car whose smooth, swift passage gave
its occupants small chance to investigate the country through which
they fled. Well, she would see Linda on Saturday, and have Sunday with
her and the children, and that meant always a complete change and a
shifted viewpoint, even when, as frequently happened, Linda took the
older-sisterly privilege of scolding.