So the summer fled, and before she fairly realized it Norma saw the
leaves colouring behind the little house like a wall of fire, and
rustled them with her feet when she tramped with Wolf's big collie into
the woods. The air grew clearer and thinner, sunset came too soon, and a
delicate beading of dew loitered on the shady side of the house until
almost noon.
One October day, when she had been six months a wife, Norma made her
first call upon Annie von Behrens. Alice she had seen several times,
when she had stopped in, late in the summer mornings, to entertain the
invalid with her first adventures in housekeeping, and chat with Miss
Slater. But Chris she had quite deliberately avoided. He had written her
from Canada a brief and charming note, which she had shown Wolf, and he
and Alice had had their share in the general family gift of silver, the
crates and bags and boxes of spoons and bowls and teapots that had
anticipated every possible table need of the Sheridans for generations
to come. But that was all; she had not seen Chris, and did not want to
see him.
"The whole thing is rather like a sickness, in my mind," she told Wolf,
"and I don't want to see him any more than you would a doctor or a nurse
that was associated with illness. I don't know what we--what I was
thinking about!"
"But you think he really--loved you--Nono?"
"Well--or he thought he did!"
"And did you like him terribly?"
"I think I thought I did, too. It was--of course it was something we
couldn't very well discuss----."
"Well, I'm sorry for him." Wolf had dismissed him easily. On her part,
Norma was conscious of no particular emotion when she thought of Chris.
The suddenness and violence with which she had broken that association
and made its resumption for ever impossible, had carried her safely into
a totally different life. Her marriage, her new husband and new home,
her new title indeed, made her seem another woman, and if she thought of
Chris at all it was to imagine what he would think of these changes, and
to fancy what he would say of them, when they met. No purely visionary
meeting can hold the element of passion, and so it was a remote and
spiritualized Chris of whom Norma came to think, far removed from the
actual man of flesh and blood.
Her call upon Annie she made with a mental reserve of cheerful
explanation and apology ready for Annie's first reproach. Norma never
could quite forget the extraordinary relationship in which she stood to
Annie; and, perhaps half consciously, was influenced by the belief that
some day the brilliant and wonderful Mrs. von Behrens would come to know
of it, too.
But Annie, who happened to be at home, and had other callers, rapidly
dashed Norma's vague and romantic anticipations by showing her only the
brisk and aloof cordiality with which she held at bay nine tenths of her
acquaintance. Annie's old butler showed Norma impassively to the little
drawing-room that was tucked in beyond the big one; two or three
strangers eyed the newcomer cautiously, and Annie merely accorded her a
perfunctory welcome. They were having tea.
"Well, how do you do? How very nice of you, Norma. Do you know Mrs.
Theodore Thayer, and Mrs. Thayer, and Miss Bishop? Katrina, this is--the
name is still Sheridan, isn't it, Norma?--this is Mrs. Sheridan, who was
with Mama and Leslie last summer. You have lots of sugar and cream,
Norma, of course--all youngsters do. And you're near the toast----" And
Annie, dismissing her, leaned back in her chair, and dropped her voice
to the undertone that Norma had evidently interrupted. "Do go on,
Leila," she said, to the older of the three women, "that's quite
delicious! I heard something of it, but I knew of course that there was
more----"
A highly flavoured little scandal was in process of construction. Norma
knew the principals slightly; the divorced woman, and the second husband
from whom she had borrowed money to loan the first. She could join in
the laughter that broke out presently, while she tried to identify her
companions. The younger Mrs. Thayer had been the Miss Katrina Davenport
of last month's brilliant wedding. Pictures of her had filled the
illustrated weeklies, and all the world knew that she and her husband
were preparing to leave for a wonderful home in Hawaii, where the family
sugar interests were based. They were to cross the continent, Norma
knew, in the Davenport private car, to be elaborately entertained in San
Francisco, and to be prominent, naturally, in the island set. Little
Miss Bishop had just announced her engagement to Lord Donnyfare, a
splendid, big, clumsy, and impecunious young Briton who had made himself
very popular with the younger group this winter. They were to be
married in January and her ladyship would shortly afterward be
transferred to London society, presented at court, and placed as
mistress over the old family acres in Devonshire.
They were both nice girls, pretty, beautifully groomed and dressed, and
far from unintelligent as they discussed their plans; how their
favourite horses and dogs would be moved, and what instructions had been
given the maids who had preceded them to their respective homes. Katrina
Thayer was just twenty, Mary Bishop a year younger; Norma knew that the
former was perhaps the richest girl in America, and the latter was also
an heiress, the society papers having already hinted that among the
wedding gifts shortly to be displayed would be an uncle's casual check
for one million dollars.
"And of course it'll be charming for Chris, Mary," Annie presently said,
"if he's really sent to Saint James's."
Norma felt her throat thicken.
"Chris--to England--as Ambassador?" she said.
"Well, there's just a possibility--no, there's more than that!" Annie
told her. "I believe he'll take it, if it is offered. Of course, he's
supremely well fitted for it. There's even"--Annie threw out to the
company at large, with that air of being specially informed in which she
delighted--"there's even very good reason to suppose that influence has
been brought to bear by----But I don't dare go into that. However, we
feel that it will be offered. And the one serious drawback is naturally
my sister. Alice--poor child! And yet, of us all, Alice is most
desperately eager for Chris to take it."
"I should think," Norma said, "that Aunt Alice could almost be
moved----?"
"Oh, she would be!" Annie agreed, with her quick, superior definiteness.
"That's the very question. Whether the north Atlantic passage, say in
May, when it oughtn't to be so hard, would be too much for her. Of
course it would tire her and shake her cruelly, no doubt of that. But
Hendrick even talks of some sort of balanced bed--on the hammock
idea--and Miss Slater would see that everything that was humanly
possible was done. I believe it could be managed. Then she would be met
by one of those big, comfortable English ambulances, at Southampton, and
taken right to her apartment, or hotel, or whatever Chris arranges."
"Not so much harder," Norma ventured, "than the trip to Newport, after
all."
"Well, she didn't go to Newport last summer," Annie said, "but she is
certainly better now than she was then, and I believe it could be done;
I really do. We're not talking a great deal about it, because nothing is
settled, but if it becomes definite, I shall certainly advise it."
Norma drank her tea, and listened, and threw in an occasional word. When
the other women rose to go, she rose, too, perhaps half-hoping that
Annie would hold her for a more intimate word. But Annie quite suavely
and indifferently included her in her general farewells, and Norma had
cordial good-byes from the two young women, and even a vague invitation
from the older Mrs. Thayer to come and see her, when Katrina was gone.
Then she was walking down the Avenue, with her head and heart in a
confused whirl of bitterness and disappointment. The three quarters of
an hour in Aunt Annie's big, dim, luxurious palace had been like a dose
of some insidious poison.
The very atmosphere of richness and service and idleness, the beauty of
wide spaces and rich tones, the massed blossoms and dimmed lights,
struck sharply upon senses attuned to Aunt Kate's quick voice, Rose's
little house with its poverty and utility, and Wolf's frank enjoyment of
his late and simple dinner. The conversation, with its pleasant
assumption of untold wealth of power and travel and regal luxuriousness,
burned its memory across Norma's mind like a corroding acid. They were
not contemptible, they were not robbers or brutes or hideous old
plutocrats who had grown wealthy upon the wrongs of the poor. No, they
were normal pleasant girls whose code it was to be generous to maids and
underlings, to speak well of their neighbours, to pay their bills and
keep their promises.
"They make me _tired_!" she tried to tell herself, walking briskly, and
filling her lungs with the sweet fresh air. It was twilight, and the
north-bound tide of traffic was halting and rushing, halting and
rushing, up the Avenue; now held motionless at a crossing, now flowing
on in mad haste, the lumbering omnibuses passing each other, little
hansoms threading the mass, and foot passengers scampering and
withdrawing, and risking all sorts of passages between. The distance was
luminous and blue, and lights pricked against it as against a scarf of
gauze.
Oh, it was sickening--it was sickening--to think that life was so grim
and hard for the thousands, and so unnecessarily, so superlatively
beautiful for the few! What had Mary Bishop and Katrina ever done, that
they should travel in private cars, fling aside furs that had cost as
much as many a man's yearly salary, chatter of the plantation near the
beach at Hawaii, or of reaching Saint James's for the January
Drawing-Room!
Norma stopped to give twenty-five cents to an old Italian organ grinder,
and worked him into her theme as she went on. Why _should_ he look so
grateful for her casual charity, he, seventy years old, Katrina and Mary
averaging less than twenty!
She reached Aunt Kate's flat in a thorough temper, angry, headachy,
almost feverish after the rich scones and the rich tea, and the even
less wholesome talk. The apartment house seemed, as indeed it was, grimy
and odorous almost to squalor, and Aunt Kate almost hateful in her
cheerfulness and energy. This was Wednesday, and on Wednesday evenings
she was always happy, for then Wolf and Norma came to dinner with her.
To-night, busily manipulating pans and pots, she told Norma that she had
rented the two extra bedrooms of the apartment to three young trained
nurses, ideal tenants in every way.
"They'll get their breakfasts here, and--if I'm away--there's no reason
why they shouldn't cook themselves a little dinner now and then," said
Aunt Kate, in her rich, motherly voice. "They were tickled to death to
get the two rooms for twenty dollars, and that makes my own rent only
seventeen more. I asked them if that was too much, and they said, no,
they'd expected to pay at least ten apiece."
Norma listened, unsympathetic and gloomy. It was all so petty and so
poor--trained nurses, and apple pie, and Aunt Kate renting rooms, and
Wolf eager to be promoted to factory manager.
She wanted to go back--back to the life in which Annie really noticed
her, gave her luncheons, included her. She wanted to count for something
with Mary and Katrina and Leslie; she wanted to talk to Chris about his
possible ambassadorship; she wanted them all to agree that Norma's wit
and charm more than made up for Norma's lack of fortune. While she
brushed her hair, in the room that would shortly accommodate two of the
three little nurses, she indulged in an unsatisfying dream in which she
went to London with Alice--and that autocratic little Lady Donnyfare.
Lady Donnyfare! She would be "your ladyship!" Nineteen years old, and
welcomed to the ancestral mansion as her little ladyship!
Norma set the dinner table for three, with jerks and slams that slightly
relieved her boiling heart. She got the napkins from the sideboard
drawer, and reached for the hand-painted china sugar bowl that was part
of a set that Aunt Kate had won at a fair. She set the blue tile that
she had given Aunt Kate on a long-ago Christmas where the brown Rebecca
teapot would stand, and cut a square slice of butter from the end of the
new pound for the blue glass dish. And all the time her heart was
bursting with grief and discontent, and she was beginning to realize for
the first time the irrevocable quality of the step she had taken, and
just how completely it had shut her off from the life for which she
thirsted.
Wolf came in, hungry, dirty, radiantly happy, with a quick kiss for his
mother and an embrace for his wife into which her slender figure and
cloudy brown head almost disappeared. Lord, he was starving; and Lord,
he was dead; and Lord, it was good to get home, said Wolf, his
satisfaction with life too great to leave room for any suspicion of his
wife's entire sympathy.
She told them, over the meal, of Mary and Katrina, in whom their
interest was of a simple and amazed quality that Norma resented, and of
Chris's prospect, which did awaken some comment from Mrs. Sheridan.
They were a clever family, she said.
But now Wolf, bursting with long suppression, suddenly took the floor
with his own great news. Voorhies, the fifty-year-old manager of the
California plant, had been drifting about the Newark factory for several
days, and Wolf had talked with him respectfully, as a man of
twenty-five, whose income is three thousand a year, may talk to a
six-thousand-dollar manager, and to-day Voorhies, and Jim Palmer, the
Newark manager, and Paul Stromberg, the vice-president, had taken Wolf
to lunch with them, apparently casually, apparently from mere
friendliness. But Voorhies had asked him if he had ever seen the West;
and Stromberg had said that he understood Sheridan's family consisted
merely of a young wife, and Palmer had chanced to drop carelessly the
fact that Mr. Voorhies was not going back to California----!
That was all. But it was enough to send Wolf back to his work with his
head spinning. California--and a managership of a mine--and six
thousand! It must be--it must be--that he had been mentioned for it,
that they had him in mind! He wasn't going even to think of it--and
Norma mustn't--but Lord, it meant being picked out of the ranks; it
meant being handed a commission on a silver platter!
Norma tried not to be cold, tried to rise to the little he asked of her,
as audience. And she had the satisfaction of knowing that he noticed
nothing amiss in her manner, and of seeing him go off to sleep, when
they had made the long trip home, with his head in a whirl of glorious
hopes. But Norma, for the first time since her marriage, cried herself
to sleep.