The chair car was well filled when Louise somewhat misty-eyed from
parting with the doleful group of school intimates who convoyed her to
the little station, walked down the aisle just as the train began to
move. Not in the least sorry because she was finally leaving school, she
was affected by the glumness of the girls who had insisted upon bidding
her goodbye at the train; but she had not actually wept at any stage of
the parting. Perhaps the tear-reddened eyes and noses of her school
friends had slightly touched her risibles; for her by no means latent
sense of humor invariably struggled to the surface when she found
herself figuring in anything of the nature of a "scene." She was not
lacking in what the iron-jowled dowagers call "becoming sensibilities;"
but she was habitually self-contained, and tears were unusual with her.
Nevertheless, she found difficulty in properly discerning objects, even
at close range, as she searched for her place; and it was due to her
filmed vision that she took a chair that did not correspond to the
number on her Pullman ticket.
Women as well as men pivoted about in their chairs for a second glance
at Louise. Her unusual height was emphasized by the loose-fitting
fur-lined cloth coat which fell straight from her shoulders to her
skirt's hem. When she removed the coat her simple one-piece gown of blue
cloth caused cogitating men in surrounding chairs to marvel as to how
she had ever contrived to get into it, and, worse, how she would
possibly manage to get out of it. The guimpe of the dress was of a
creamy embroidery that dissolved bafflingly into the whiteness of her
neck.
Louise might have reminded an imaginative traveler, had there been such
in the car, of a freshly-blown, firm-petalled chrysanthemum. There are
women in whom you first discern an utter, convincing wholesomeness;
later you become aware of their beauty. Their wholesomeness, you think
upon your first comprehensive glance, is like that of an early vernal
breeze, of dew upon clean grass; then the contributing elements of their
beauty emerge upon your consciousness as through a succession of lifted
veils. Louise Treharne was of this type. Unusually tall, she had none of
the raw-boned angularities of the over-trained young woman who makes a
fad of gymnasium or out-of-doors activities and who thoughtlessly
sacrifices the beauty of contour on the profitless altar of
over-athleticism. Slender, yet well rounded, the fine amplitude of her
proportions caused her to look several years older than her age. Her
face contributed to this effect. It was a face such as the imaginary
imaginative traveller might vaguely have associated with the faces of
women stamped upon Roman coins. There is a sort of creamy, vivid pallor
that, equally with ruddiness, denotes perfect health and vigor. This was
Louise's; and the uncommon regularity of her features was tempered and
softened by varying phases of expression that spoke of an habitual
serenity and a searching common sense. Her hair, of the darkest shade of
lustrous auburn, waved back loosely and often a bit rebelliously to the
great knotted coil in which it was caught at the back of her
finely-lathed head. Her eyes, the corners of which had an almost
indistinguishable slant that only became agreeably noticeable when she
smiled, were wide and full, and of so dark a brown that, at night or in
shadowed rooms, they were often supposed to be black.
She had barely settled herself, chin in palm, to gaze out of the window
at the blurred landscape of ice-crusted snow, before she became somewhat
confusedly conscious of a loomful figure standing patiently in the aisle
beside her. When she suddenly turned her head and surveyed him with
calm, questioning eyes, he pulled off his cap of plaid a bit awkwardly
and smiled. She mentally observed that his mouth was a trifle
over-large; but his smile, for all of that, she thought, was the smile
of a man. With the woman's mystifying ability mentally to absorb
innumerable details at a mere glance, she noticed (without in the least
seeming to notice) that he was of unusual stature and of the type called
by women, in their between-themselves appraisals, "delightfully
scrubbed-looking;" that he was perhaps a little above thirty; that he
had a closely-shaven rugged jaw and somewhat jutting chin, huge,
well-cared-for hands, rather closely-cropped brown hair slightly greying
at the sides, candid grey eyes with tiny lines of humor and experience
running away from their corners. She noticed, too, that he was not
wearing gloves, which was satisfying. All of the other men in the
over-warm car were wearing their heavy cold-weather gloves, and she was
slightly contemptuous of this as an unmasculine affectation. Finally, in
the same single glance, she perceived his visible embarrassment....
"Pray don't disturb yourself," he said, fumbling his cap with both
hands. ("Why don't all men talk basso?" thought Louise.) "I can reach it
without your moving at all, if you will permit me. My bag, you know.
There are some papers in it that I want to go over, and----"
He stopped dead and looked quite wretched when Louise came to her feet.
"I am in your chair," she said, as he stooped to pick up a bag that,
she now noticed for the first time, was wedged by the seat she had
unwittingly taken. She was about to remove her coat to the back of the
chair in front--her rightful place, as she quickly remembered when she
saw the number on the panel--when he put out a determinedly detaining
hand.
"Don't make me feel such a disgraceful nuisance, I beg of you," he said
with an earnestness that was out of keeping with his twinkling eyes.
"One chair is as good as another--better, in fact, when one already has
possession of it. This bag is my only gear. You'll keep the seat, won't
you? That's immensely kind of you," as Louise resumed the chair. "I
wouldn't have had you move for----"
"Of course," she interrupted him with a quietly frank laugh, "I hadn't
the slightest intention of moving. It is more than good of you to
suppose that I meant to be so agreeable."
"That," he pronounced, again with his liberal smile, "is probably a
neat, quickly-conceived way of letting me down easily, for which I am
nevertheless grateful;" and, bowing, he took the chair in front of her,
dug into his bag and quickly became immersed in a batch of formidable
looking documents. Louise, again leaning back in her chair, decided that
the rear of his head was decidedly shapely.
The excessive warmth of the car was making her sleepy, and she closed
her eyes and surrendered herself to dozing reflections. She was dubious
as to the reception her mother would give her. She had not heard from
her mother since writing the letter in which she had calmly announced,
as something settled and therefore not open to debate, that she was
through with school and would not return to Miss Mayhew's after the
holidays. Laura had been only partly right as to Louise's reason for
quitting school. Louise, it was true, was glad enough to escape the
nightmare of "commencement exercises" by leaving half a year in advance
of her graduation. But she had a far deeper reason for quitting the
school without consultation with her mother. She wanted to be at home;
any sort of a home. She had no very pleasurable recollections of the
places--there had been many of them, and they had not been homes--in
which she had lived with her mother before being sent to the finishing
school in central New York. Her young girlhood had been a period of
aimless drifting, at seashore and mountain resorts in summer, and in
tiny but by no means snug apartments in New York in the winter; her
mother's restlessness and her frequently expressed dislike of "smug
domesticity" had combined against her ever establishing anything even
approximating a genuine home for herself and her daughter. Louise only
vaguely remembered her father; the separation, followed by a divorce,
had taken place when she was only nine years old. At fifteen she had
been trundled off to the up-State finishing school; and the school had
been the only home she had known for close upon four years. Her mother
had visited her twice a year, taking her to the seaside for a week or so
during the summer vacation and to Lakewood for a brief stay during the
holidays. Her mother had always been provided with some sort of an
excuse for not taking Louise to her home--Louise knew that she must have
some sort of a home--in New York. The place was being overhauled, guests
had unexpectedly swooped upon her, she was about to start upon a
journey; Louise had listened, mystified, so often to these reasons her
mother gave for not having her daughter with her in the city at times
when nearly all the other girls were leaving the school for home visits
that she at length came to believe that her mother was treating her with
somewhat humiliating disingenuousness. This feeling, however, aroused
less resentment in the girl than it did a feeling of distress; she could
not avoid, as she grew older, the conviction that she was being
neglected. The feeling became intensified when, year after year, she was
shunted, as she considered, on visits to the homes of her schoolgirl
friends. It was natural enough, when she observed how cherished the
other girls were in their homes, how the arms of strong affection
constantly were thrown around them, that she should compare her own
thrust-aside state with theirs and that she should develop the intense
longing of a normal, affectionate young woman for similar love and
protection.
She had no sense of resentment against her mother; it was rather a
feeling of regret that the curious aloofness between them, which she had
no possible way of understanding, had ever risen. She hoped that
perhaps, after all, her mother might really need her as sorely as she
felt that she herself needed a mother and a home. She was returning to
her mother with an open mind; no longer a child to be shunted and
evaded, but a woman to be treated with frankness. There were some points
in connection with her mother's affairs that she did not understand but
as to which she had no undue curiosity. But she was intensely glad to be
at least on her way home--on her way to her mother, at any rate--for
good and all; and she formed plans for drawing nearer to her mother,
wistfully hoping that the plans would have the fruition she longed for.
Louise's reflections gradually, with the purring movement of the train,
became merged into dreams. She awoke with a start when the train came to
a grinding stop at a station. She began cutting the pages of a magazine
when, glancing up, she saw the man with whom she had held the little
colloquy a while before striding down the aisle of the car. In his hand
was an unopened telegram. She noticed that he was looking at her as he
approached her seat, and that he was knitting his brow in a puzzled,
serious sort of way.
He stopped when he came to her chair and held out the telegram.
"The boy paged the dining car, where I happened to be," he said to her,
"and, thinking that you might still be asleep, I took the liberty of
signing for your telegram."
The telegram was addressed to "Miss Louise Treharne." It was from one of
Louise's girl friends at the school, telling her that a piece of
hand-baggage that Louise had absent-mindedly left at the station was
being forwarded.
Louise scarcely glanced at the contents of the telegram, so great was
her astonishment over its method of reaching her.
"You grant, of course, that I have reason to be puzzled," she said to
him, unconstrainedly but entirely in earnest. She noticed that he was
far from being unconstrained, and that a certain seriousness sat upon
his strong features which she had not before observed. "It is plain that
you knew this telegram was for me."
"Otherwise, of course," he replied, a little huskily, "I should not
have presumed to sign for it. I should not have signed for it in any
case had I not supposed you to be asleep. I feared, you see, that you
might miss it."
"But you do not in the least appease my curiosity," said Louise, smiling
somewhat nervously. "If you knew me--as it seems of course you do--I
cannot understand why you did not reveal yourself when we had our little
conversation a while ago."
"But I did not know--I should say I did not recall you then," he said,
plainly flustered.
"You only add to the mystery," said Louise. "You will enlighten me, of
course?"
He whirled his chair about so that, sitting back on the arm of it, he
could face her.
"It is simple enough," he explained, with a hesitancy which Louise did
not fail to note. "When the lad with the telegram came through the
dining car, calling out your name, I could not fail, with that startling
reminder, to remember----" He broke off as if reluctant to proceed.
"Yes?" put in Louise, a bit proddingly.
"Well, I could not fail to remember your father's daughter," he said in
a low tone, obviously striving to regain some ease of manner.
"You know my father?" said Louise, her sense of the mystery of it all
increasing rather than abating.
"Yes," he replied, still struggling, as Louise could see, to conquer a
trouble that was visible on his features. "I am your father's attorney.
I know your mother quite well, too. But this is the first time I have
seen you since you were a little girl in pigtails and highly-starched
skirts." He strove to make his laugh sound natural and easy, but it was
a failure. Some worry, as to the nature of which Louise could of course
not even guess, was in his voice as well as on his face.
Louise impulsively held out her hand.
"The mystery is cleared," she said, brightly, "and it is delightful to
meet so old a friend, no matter how oddly. Won't you sit down and tell
me all about my father and my mother and myself and yourself and--and
everybody? Or is it permissible for one to cross-examine so solemn and
cautious a person as an attorney?"
He sat down in the chair facing hers and studied, constrainedly, the
pattern of the cap which he held out before him. Then he glanced at his
watch.
"I am leaving the train at Peekskill," he said, "so there is not much
time. You are to be home for the holidays?"
"For the holidays and for all time," she replied with a certain
eagerness. "You have visited my mother's home? Because, you know, I
never have." She had not meant to say that so baldly, and she was sorry
for the slip as soon as the words were out. "It is on Riverside Drive.
Therefore it must be lovely; the view, at any rate. It is lovely, isn't
it?"
He deliberately evaded the question.
"You are not returning to school at all?" he pointedly
counter-questioned her instead. "Does your mother know this? I hope I
don't seem inquisitive. But I am really interested in knowing."
"You trap me into a confession," replied Louise, smiling. "I simply
announced to my mother that I was through with school, and here I am on
my way home. I am hoping that she will not be excessively angry with me.
Do you think she will be?"
Louise was finding him decidedly difficult, in spite of her efforts to
put him at his ease. He became so immersed in cogitations which Louise
could see were of the troubled sort that he seemed scarcely to listen to
what she was saying.
"You have not answered my question, you know, Mr.--Mr.--you see I do not
even know your name," said Louise, after a pause, pretending to be
aggrieved.
"Oh, pardon the rudeness, won't you?" he said, hastily. "Blythe is my
name--John Blythe. And forgive me for not having caught your question,
Miss Treharne. You don't mind asking it again?"
"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Louise, appeased, but still curious as to
the cause of the perturbation he had exhibited ever since he had brought
her the telegram, and which had become more pronounced since she had
told him that she was on her way to her mother's home to remain there.
She had not failed to notice his quite manifest unwillingness to speak
of her mother. Not of a prying nature, she concluded, without framing
the thought in words, that, if he had a reason for that unwillingness,
it was decidedly his privilege to keep the reason to himself. But her
curiosity as to her father was not so easily repressed. She had not
heard him spoken of--her mother forbade the subject--for many years, nor
had he ever communicated with her directly; but her childish
recollections of him were very sweet. She could not resist the
temptation to speak of him to this newly-revealed friend. Why should she
not, she thought, since he seemed to be so well acquainted with her
parents--and was her father's attorney besides?
"Mr. Blythe," she found herself saying in a tone of unusual hesitation
for her, a young woman of perfect frankness, "I feel that I may ask you
about my father, seeing that you know--well, everything concerning him
and my mother and--myself. It has been so many, many years since I have
even heard him mentioned. Where is he? When did you see him last?"
"He lives in Hawaii, Miss Treharne--I saw him in Honolulu a few years
ago," replied Blythe, promptly enough.
Louise pondered. There was nothing specific she wanted to ask about her
father. But she considered that Blythe had not told her very much.
"Is he--well, nice?" she asked him.
Blythe, disturbed as he was, could not help but smile at the naïve
question. But he sobered before he replied.
"He is almost, if not quite, the finest man I ever knew," he said. "I
hope to be allowed to tell you all about him some time. I shall be
writing to him presently. Tut! Here is Peekskill. I am dropping off here
for a few hours," and he thrust his arms into his overcoat.
"You will send my love to my father in your letter?" said Louise, her
eyes slightly filmed, touching him upon the sleeve. He looked gravely
down upon her; her words touched him keenly.
"I am glad you have asked me to do that, Miss Treharne," he said. "And
he will be more than glad--depend upon that. Goodbye--not for very long,
I hope. I am overjoyed to have come upon you again--especially at this
time," and he took her two hands in his huge palms for an instant and
was gone.
"'Especially at this time'--I wonder what he meant by that?" thought
Louise. He waved at her as he passed beneath her car window. She was
conscious that his smile in doing so was slightly forced; an instant
before he caught sight of her through the window she had noticed that
his face was clouded with worry.
* * * * *
An hour later Louise was weaving her way through the rushing,
holiday-chattering crowd toward the exit gate at the Grand Central
station. Peering toward the gate, and able, with her unusual height, to
see over the heads of the hurrying women and most of the men, she espied
her mother, looking somewhat petitely stodgy beside the stately Laura,
gazing rather wearily through the iron lattice. "I think I see myself
being sent to bed without any supper," whimsically thought Louise,
considering, as she drew nearer, her mother's bored expression. Louise
was glad Laura was with her mother; when a mere growing girl she had
become gratefully familiar with Laura's self-styled "ameliorating
knack." She had become very fond of her mother's handsome,
superbly-capricious but sunny-natured friend before being packed off to
school; and now her eyes became slightly blurred at the thought that
Laura had remembered her and had thought enough of her to be with her
mother at her home-coming.
"Here is our blossomy, bronze-haired Boadicea!" Louise heard Laura say
as she was taken into the older woman's arms and heartily kissed. Then
Laura thrust her away with assumed annoyance. "But, minx, you are taller
than I am; a full inch, maybe two, taller! How do you ever expect me to
forgive you that, child?" and she smiled, drawing Louise toward her
again, and hugged her once more.
Louise's mother brushed the girl's cheek with her lips, her daughter
bending toward her.
"You _are_ grotesquely tall, aren't you, dear?" said Mrs. Treharne, not
very good-naturedly. Her petulance over Louise's return was by no means
allayed; and her masseuse had told her that evening that she had gained
two pounds in a week! "You will have to get clothes that will reduce
your shocking stature." Then, swept by a momentary compunction, "You are
well, dear? You are looking excessively well."
Louise was not hurt by the tone of her mother's greeting. She was well
acquainted with her parent's irritableness, and even more familiar with
her indurated indifference. The main thing was that she was back with
her mother, and with a chance to strive for a better understanding.
"But aren't you a mite thinner, mother?" Louise asked, thoroughly
meaning it; for there wasn't an ounce of sycophancy in Louise's make-up,
and she noticed her mother's hollowness of eye and generally distraught
air and so concluded that she was losing in weight.
Mrs. Treharne flared instantly.
"You are not to make game of me, my dear, whatever else you do," she
said, icily, to her astonished daughter. Laura laughed outright and
caught Louise's arm in her own as they started through the station.
"Don't be absurd, Antoinette--the dear is not making game of you, as you
call it," said Laura. "You know she is incapable of that."
"But I am all at sea," said Louise, still mystified over her mother's
inexplicable outbreak. "What is it? What did I say that was wrong?"
Her mother looked at her and saw that the girl was wholly innocent of
the sarcasm she had hastily attributed to her.
"You know very well, Louise," she said, in a tone meant to be appeasing,
"that I am hideously, scandalously, shockingly fat; and you cannot
expect me to be cheerful when you begin to taunt me with it before you
have had more than one glance at me."
"But you are anything but stout, mother dear, and I really meant what I
said," put in Louise. "Why, it perfectly stuns me to think you could
suppose that I----"
"Tut-tut--can't we find something more engaging to talk about than what
the weighing scales do or do not tell us?" broke in Laura, gaily.
"Antoinette, dear, won't you see if you can attract that taxicab man's
attention?"
When Mrs. Treharne walked over to the curb to summon the chauffeur of
the taxicab Laura seized the moment to say to Louise in a low tone.
"Some things have occurred to disturb your mother, dear; so don't mind
if she seems a bit _difficile_ tonight, will you? She is a little
annoyed over your intention not to return to the school; but I shall
help you out there. I am going home with you now for a little while.
You'll depend upon your old friend Laura?"
Louise, watching her mother, furtively pressed Laura's hand.
"You know how I always loved you as a little girl?" she said simply.
Laura's eyes became suddenly suffused with tears. She knew the girl's
need of affection; and she vowed in her heart, then and there, crowding
back the tears when she saw Mrs. Treharne beckoning to them, that she
would stand in the place of the girl's mother if the time ever came--and
she more than dimly apprehended that come it would--when such a thing
need be.
Laura forced the conversation and strove to give to it a note of gayety
as the taxicab sped through the icy streets. Once, in addressing her,
Louise called her "Mrs. Stedham." Instantly Laura assumed a mighty
pretence of annoyed hostility.
"Mrs. Hoity-Toity, child," she said, severely, to Louise. "You are not
supposing, I hope, that I shall permit a woman a full two inches taller
than I am to call me any such an outlandish name as 'Mrs. Stedham'?
Great heaven, am I not old enough as it is? I am Laura to you, dear;
flatter me at least, by making me believe that you consider me young
enough to be called by my christened name; the aged have so few
compensations, you know," and Louise, not without initial difficulty,
however--for Laura had always been a woman to her--called her Laura
thenceforth and was pleased to imagine that the elder woman was her
"big, grown-up" sister.
On the ride to the Riverside Drive house Louise, suddenly remembering,
mentioned Blythe. She described the incident through which he had made
himself known to her, but forbore, out of a certain diffidence which she
always felt in her mother's presence, saying anything about Blythe's
allusions to her father. She omitted that part altogether.
"How extraordinary!" commented Laura. "But John Blythe's practice is
always sending him prowling about the country on trains. Everybody who
knows about such things tells me what an enormously important personage
he is becoming in the dry-as-dust legal world. I am sure he does
astonishingly well with my hideously complicated affairs--you know he is
my legal man, Louise. Isn't it odd that you should have met him in such
a way? Didn't you find him rather--well, _distingué_, we'll say,
Louise?"
"I thought him very fine and----" Louise strove for a word haltingly.
"And with an air about him--of course you did, my dear; everybody does,"
Laura aided her. "If he wasn't such a perfectly wrong-headed,
wrapped-up-in-the-law sort of a person he would have fallen in love with
me long ago, even if I am old enough to be his grandmother; he is
thirty-two, I believe, and I am bordering upon thirty-six; but he barely
notices me in that way," with an acute emphasis on the "that," "though
we are no end of first-rate friends; pals, I was going to say; for I've
known him ever since----"
Laura came to a sudden stop. She had been upon the brink of saying "ever
since Blythe had helped her to get her divorce from Rodney Stedham;" but
she recollected in time that that was not exactly the sort of a
chronological milestone that should be reverted to in the presence of a
girl just that day out of school.
"Louise, did you tell Mr. Blythe that you were to remain with
me--permanently?" asked Mrs. Treharne, constrainedly, suddenly joining
in the conversation.
Louise reflected a moment before replying.
"Why, yes, mother, I did; he asked me about it, I recall now," she said.
"Did he have any comment to make?" asked her mother in a reduced tone.
"Why, no, dear," said Louise. "In fact, he appeared to be considerably
worried about something, and so----" Louise felt herself being furtively
prodded by Laura, and she left off suddenly.
Opportunely, the taxicab drew up in front of an ornate house on the
Drive.
"Do you live here, mother?" Louise inquired, innocently. "I wonder how I
managed to form the impression that you were living in an apartment?"
Mrs. Treharne pretended not to have heard her. The door was silently
opened by a man in livery. Laura was watching Louise keenly as the
girl's eyes took in the splendor of the foyer and hall. The magnificence
was of a Pittsburgesque sort, in which beauty is sacrificed to a mere
overwhelming extravagance; but, for its extravagance alone, not less
than for its astonishing ornateness, it had a sort of impressiveness.
"Why, how dazzling!" Louise could not refrain from commenting. "How
delightfully different from what I expected! I am so glad that I am
home--home!" She lingered lovingly upon the word.
It was a difficult moment for Laura. But she was prepared for it. In
addition to the "ameliorating knack" she had a way of being ready for
contingencies.
"Antoinette," she said, mainly to stop Louise, "I have one of my
headaches coming on. Can't we have some tea in your rooms?"
"I was just about to suggest that," said Mrs. Treharne, drily, and
presently the three women were in her sumptuous sitting room,
overlooking the twinkling lights of the Hudson. A butler spread the
cloth and brought a fowl and salad and jams, while Louise roamed about
exclaiming over the beauty of the rooms, and Laura fought desperately
against her inclination to brood.
Laura contributed whatever of merriness there was to the home-coming
feast. Mrs. Treharne confined herself to occasional questions directed
at Louise, and the girl saw that her mother was tired and out of sorts;
she remembered what Laura had told her at the station of her mother's
state of mind "over matters," and she made the allowances that she had
been accustomed to make for her mother since her earliest years.
The three women were still at the table, beginning to make allusions to
bed--Laura had summoned her car by 'phone, for it was close upon
eleven--when a great-girthed man, in a sealskin coat that fell almost to
his heels, an opera hat set rakishly on one side of his bald head, and
his turkey-like eyes still more reddened with the libations that his
lurching gait made still more obvious, lumbered into the room without
the least attempt at knocking on the door.
"Hay-o, folks--having a little party?" said Judd, lurching toward the
table. "Am I in on it?" and he plumped himself drunkenly into a chair.
Laura rose at the first sight of him. Mrs. Treharne kept her seat but
gazed at him vitriolically. Louise looked at him quietly enough. She was
intensely mystified, but quite willing to wait for any information as to
the intrusion. No information, however, was forthcoming.
"Your mother will show you to your room, dear," said Laura, placing an
arm around Louise's waist and guiding her to the door. Under her breath
she said: "No questions, dear heart. He is an--an adviser of your
mother. We are going to be great cronies, are we not?" She kissed Louise
and went. Her mother conducted Louise to a sleeping room done in white
and silver, and kissed the girl good night with a sort of belated rush
of affection. But she said nothing to her in explanation of Judd.
Toward midnight John Blythe, after striding up and down his solitary
bachelor apartment for two hours in lounging robe and slippers, went to
the telephone in his study and called up Laura.
"Is that you, Laura?" he said, quietly, into the transmitter when she
answered the call. "What time tomorrow forenoon will you be fit to be
seen?"
"By noon," Laura's voice came back to him quietly. "I know what you want
to see me about, John."
"Do you? I doubt that."
"It is about Louise Treharne."
"I'll be there by noon. Goodnight."
"Goodnight."