Heloise's intentional noisiness in rearranging the toilet articles on
the dressing table aroused Louise. The brilliant sunlight of a sparkling
winter morning was pouring into the room. Half-awake and the brightness
of the room filtering through her still-closed eyelids, she was obsessed
for an instant with the fear that, over-sleeping, she was late for the
exercises attending the beginning of a day at Miss Mayhew's school. She
smiled at the thought, in spite of a brooding, indefinable trouble that
had burdened her sleep, when, with wide eyes, she quickly sensed the
lavishness of the room and saw the invincibly trig Heloise moving about.
"Mademoiselle is awake at last?" said Heloise in French, a trace of
irritation in her tone. "One considered that Mademoiselle contemplated
sleeping until the end of time."
Louise disarmed her with a laugh.
"Perhaps I should have," she said, lightly, but on her guard with her
French in the presence of so meticulous a critic, "had I not just this
moment dreamt of coffee. Am I too late for breakfast?"
Of course Mademoiselle should have her coffee instantly, said the
appeased Heloise, ringing. The maid mentally pronounced that Louise's
finishing-school French was almost intelligible to one understanding
that language.
Mrs. Treharne had sent Heloise to look after Louise until a maid should
be obtained for her. Louise, sitting up in bed, her fresh, clear-colored
face aureoled by her agreeably awry mass of bronzed hair, the nocturnal
braids of which she already had begun to unplait, laughed again at the
thought of being attended by a maid.
"I shall have to be trained for that," she said to the mollified
Heloise. "I never had a maid. I doubt if I should know how to behave
with a maid doing my hair. I think I should find myself tempted to do
the maid's instead; especially if her hair were as pretty as yours."
Heloise was Louise's sworn, voluble, tooth-and-nail, right-or-wrong,
everlasting friend from that moment. She 'phoned to the butler,
demanding to know why Mademoiselle's coffee had not been sent, although
she had only called for it three minutes before, and she buzzed about
the tractable Louise, arranging her hair with expert fingers, cheerful
and chirpful, nothing whatever like the austere, croaking Heloise who
scowled so threateningly over the slightest unruliness of her actual
mistress. Heloise was prepared to give an enthusiastic recommendation of
Louise to the maid who should be engaged to attend her mistress's
daughter. And she began already to be envious of Louise's unobtained
maid.
When Heloise had finished with her Louise, inspecting herself in the
glass with frank approval, decided that never before had she looked so
astonishingly well at that hour of the morning. But, when the garrulous
maid had gone, Louise, sipping her coffee, sat in the streaming sunlight
of the bowed window, watching the sparkling ice floes drift down the
bleak Hudson, and the trouble that had weighted her sleep returned upon
her, slowly taking shape with her consciousness. She had been too tired
the night before to engage in much reflection, before losing herself in
sleep, upon the incidents--one incident particularly--of the previous
night. Now she was face to face with the gravamen of her depression,
with an alert morning mind to sift over its elements. It was
characteristic of her that she did not seek to thrust aside her
consciousness of conditions which she imperfectly understood. She
understood them, however, sufficiently to grasp at least the essentials
of the situation.
Louise, whose native shrewdness was tempered by an innate and
unconquerable tendency to look upon the bright side of the world and of
such of the world's people as she came into contact with, was far better
acquainted with her mother than her mother was with her; which was
natural enough, considering that she had the receptive mind of youth,
and that her mother's major trait was a sort of all-inclusive
indifference. Many things in connection with her mother's manner of
life, her almost hysterical love of admiration, her restlessness and her
habitual secretiveness with Louise during the girl's early girlhood
years, had become all too plain to the daughter as she developed into
womanhood at the finishing school. Perhaps it may be added that a
twentieth century finishing school for young women commonly is an
institution wherein all of the pupils' deductions are not made from
their text books nor from the eminently safe premises laid down by their
instructors. The young woman who has spent four years at such a school
does not step through a nimbus of juvenile dreams when she enters into
the world that is waiting for her. It is true that, when she takes her
place in the uncloistered world, she has a great deal to unlearn; but
this is balanced by the indubitable fact she has not very much to learn.
Those who expect her to be utterly surprised over the departures that
she sees from the rules of the social game are merely wasting their
surprise. It is mere futility to suppose that several hundreds of young
women of the highly intelligent and eager type who attend exclusive
schools of the so-termed finishing kind, thrust constantly upon each
other for companionship and the comparison of notes, are going to occupy
all of their leisure in discussing the return of Halley's comet, or the
profounder meaning of Wagner, or even the relative starchiness of their
hair ribbons.
Louise, participating in the whispered precocities of the school, had
often caught herself on the defensive in her mother's behalf. To seek to
brush away imputations that seemed to fit her mother's personality and
way of life had become almost a habit with her.
The habit, however, was availing her little on this her first morning
after leaving school in her mother's sumptuous home--"that is, if it is
mother's home." She flushed when she found herself saying that. But the
doubt propelled itself through her consciousness, and she resolutely
refused to expel it, once it had found lodgment in her mind, merely
because it caused her cheeks to burn. Her mother's favorite word, in
contemptuously denominating people who lived in accordance with
convention, was "smug;" Mrs. Treharne considered that she had pilloried,
for the world's derision, persons to whom she had adverted as "smug." Of
the smugness of the kind Mrs. Treharne meant when she employed the word,
there was not an atom in Louise's composition. Her nature, her
upbringing, were opposed to the thought of a narrow, restrained,
buckram social rule.
But here was a situation--the investiture of almost garish splendor in
which she found her mother living, considered in connection with
subconscious doubts as to certain quite visible flaws in her mother's
character which had been forming themselves in the girl's mind for
years--here, indeed, was a situation with respect to which Louise's
unquietude had no need of being based upon mere smugness.
The girl knew quite well that, up to the time of her going away to
school at any rate, her mother's income had been a limited one--some
three thousand a year voluntarily contributed by the father for his
daughter's support and education. It had not been, in fact, her mother's
income at all, but Louise's; and it had been voluntarily contributed by
the father because, as he had been the plaintiff in the divorce suit,
the decree had not required him to aid his detached wife or his daughter
at all; the court had given him the custody of the child, and he had
surrendered that custody to the mother out of sheer pity for her.
How, then, had her mother provided herself, on an income which, with a
daughter to educate, called for frugality, if not positive scrimping,
with such a sheerly extravagant setting?
And Judd! Louise flushed again when she remembered Judd. She did not
know his name. She had never seen or even heard of him before. She only
remembered him--and the thought caused her to draw her negligée more
closely about her, for she experienced a sudden chill--as the girthy,
red-eyed individual who, with the proprietary arrogance of an
intoxicated man who seemed perfectly to know his position under that
roof, had lurched into her mother's apartments on the previous night
without the least attempt at announcing himself.
How would her mother explain these things? Would she, indeed, explain to
her daughter at all? In any case, Louise formed the resolve not to
question her mother. She possessed, what is unusual in woman, an
instinctive appreciation of the rights of others, even when such rights
are perversely altered to wrongs. She considered that her mother's
affairs were her own, in so far as they did not involve herself, Louise
Treharne, in any tacit copartnership; and as to this point she purposed
ascertaining, before very long, to just what extent she had become or
was expected to become involved. For the rest, she was conscious of a
distinct sympathy for and a yearning toward her mother. In her
reflections she gave her mother the benefit of every mitigating
circumstance.
Turning from the window, Louise saw her mother standing before the
dresser glass studying her haggard morning face, now lacking all of the
sorely-required aids to the merely pretty regularity of her features,
with a head-shaking lugubriousness that might have had its comic appeal
to an unconcerned onlooker. Louise, however, was scarcely in a mood of
mirth.
"I knocked, my dear, but you were too much absorbed," said Mrs.
Treharne, offering her daughter her cheek. "You were in a veritable
trance. Did you get enough sleep, child? Was Heloise in a scolding
humor? She makes my life a misery to me with her tongue. What beautiful
hair you have! And what a perfect skin! A powder puff would mar that
wonderful pallor. Yet you are not too white. It becomes you, with your
hair. Appreciate these things while you have them, dear; look at your
mother, a hag, a witch, at thirty-nine! But, then, you will keep your
looks longer than I; you pattern after the women of your----"
She came perilously close to saying "your father's family," but adroitly
turned the phrase when she caught herself in time. Louise, putting on a
cheerful mask, replied to her mother's trivialities and devised some of
her own. Her mother had not lost her banting-killed bloom when Louise
had last seen her at such an hour in the morning; and the girl was
inwardly pained to note how all but the mere vestiges of her remembered
prettiness had disappeared. Mrs. Treharne caught her looking at her with
a certain scrutinizing reflectiveness, and she broke out petulantly:
"Don't pick me apart with your eyes in that way, Louise! I know that I
am hideous, but for heaven's sake don't remind me of it with your
criticizing, transfixing gazes!"
She was of the increasing type of women who, long after they have the
natural right to expect adulation on account of their looks, still hate
to surrender. Louise quickly perceived this and provided unguents for
her mother's sensitiveness.
They chatted upon little matters, Mrs. Treharne so ill at ease (yet
striving to hide her restlessness) that she found it impossible to sit
still for more than a minute; she fluttered incessantly about the room,
her wonderful negligée of embroidered turquoise sailing after her like
the outspread wings of a moth. After many pantheress-like rounds of the
room, during which Louise somehow felt her old diffidence in her
mother's presence returning upon her, Mrs. Treharne, after her evident
casting about for an opening, stopped before Louise and pinched her
cheek between dry fingers.
"At any rate, my dear," she said with a trace of her old amiability and
animation, "you are not a frump or a bluestocking! There was a time
when I had two fears: that you would not grow up pretty and that you
would become bookish. And here I find myself towered over by a young
princess, and you don't talk in the least like a girl with crazy notions
of keeping up her inane school studies." Then, after a slight pause:
"Are you religious, my dear, or--er--well, broad-minded?"
Louise smothered her mounting laugh, for fear of offending her mother in
her mood of amiability; but her smile was eloquent enough.
"Is there any incompatibility between those two states of mind, mother?"
she asked.
"Don't dissect my words, child; you quite understand what I mean," said
the mother, with a slight reversion to peevishness. "Your father, you
know, was--no doubt still is--shockingly narrow; he hadn't the slightest
conception of the broad, big view; he belonged in this respect, I think,
in the Middle Ages; and I have been tortured by the fear that you
might--might--"
She hesitated. She had not meant to mention Louise's father, much less
to speak of him even in mild derogation; and she suddenly recalled how,
years before, there had been a tacit agreement between them that
Louise's father was not to be mentioned. The agreement had been entered
into after an occasion when Louise, then a child of eleven, with the
memory of her vanished father still very keen in her mind, had rushed
from the room, in blinding tears, upon hearing her mother speak of him
in terms of dispraise.
"I did not have much time at school for self-analysis, mother," said
Louise, coming to her mother's aid. "I suppose I am normal and neutral
enough. I am not conscious of any particular leaning." She flushed,
swept by a sudden sense of the difficulty, the incongruity, of such a
conversation with her mother amid such surroundings. "Mother," she
resumed, hastily, "I am so keen to see New York again that I am hardly
capable of thinking of anything else just now. Are we to go out?"
"The car is yours when you wish it, Louise," said Mrs. Treharne,
absently. "I rarely go out until late in the afternoon."
"The car?" said Louise. "You have a car, then?"
Her mother glanced at her sharply. It was sufficiently obvious that she
was on the lookout for symptoms of inquisitiveness on Louise's part;
though Louise had not meant her question to be in the least inquisitive.
"I have the use of a car," said Mrs. Treharne, a little frigidly. "It
belongs to Mr. Judd."
Instinctively Louise felt that "Mr. Judd" was the sealskinned Falstaff
whose unceremonious appearance the night before had startled her. But
she remained silent. Nothing could have induced her to ask her mother
about Mr. Judd. Her mother did not fail to notice her silence, which of
course put her on the defensive.
"Mr. Judd," she said, "is--a--" she hesitated painfully--"my business
adviser. He has been very good and kind in making some investments
in--in mining stocks for me; investments that have proved very
profitable. He is alert in my interest. It was Mr. Judd, my dear, whom
you saw last night. He was not quite himself, I fear, or he would not
have made his appearance as he did. He has helped me so much that of
course it would be ungrateful of me not to permit him the run of the
place." She rambled on, as persons will who feel themselves to be on the
defensive. "In fact, he--he--But of course, if you have formed a
prejudice against him on account of last night, there will be no
occasion for you to meet him except occasionally."
Louise caught the hollowness, the evasiveness, of the explanation. Not
one word of it had rung true. Louise had never felt sorrier for her
mother than she did at that moment. She noticed a certain hunted
expression in her mother's face, and it cut her to the quick. She placed
a long, finely-chiselled arm, from which the sleeve of the negligée had
slipped back to the shoulder, around her mother's neck.
"But I haven't the least use for a car, dearie," she said. It was not
with deliberation that she ignored altogether what her mother had been
saying as to Judd; it was simply that she could not bring herself to
offer any comment on that subject. "I am a walker; every day at Miss
Mayhew's I did ten miles--even in rain and snow, and it is clouding for
snow now, I think. You will not mind my going out for a long walk? I am
wild for air and exercise."
Mrs. Treharne was grateful to the girl for turning it off in that way
even if, by so doing, Louise indicated that she was of more than one
mind with respect to what had been told her regarding Judd. And Mrs.
Treharne, careless and indifferent as she was, could not visualize her
daughter in the gigantic yellow-bodied Judd car without being swept by a
feeling that was distinctly to her credit.
* * * * *
Laura Stedham, over her cocoa, was weaving with careless rapidity
through her morning mail when John Blythe arrived shortly before noon.
Laura's apartment overlooked the west side of the Park. Its dominant
color scheme now was based upon a robin's egg blue; but there was a jest
among Laura's friends that they never had seen her apartment look the
same on two visits running; they declared that every time Laura left the
city for as long a period as a fortnight, she left orders with her
decorator to have her apartment completely done over so that even she
herself quite failed to recognize it when she returned.
Blythe, throwing his snow-sprinkled stormcoat over the extended arm of
Laura's brisk maid, strolled over to a window and watched the still,
unflurried flakes sift through the bare branches of the Park trees. His
hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his eyes were so unusually
meditative that Laura, used to his absorption as she was, laughed
quietly as she turned from her escritoire.
"Yes, John, it is snowing," she said, thrusting away a heap of
still-unopened letters.
Blythe turned to her with a twinkling look of inquiry.
"I thought perhaps you might not have noticed it," chaffed Laura,
"seeing that you were looking right at it. You require an excessive
amount of forgiveness from your friends. I believe you have not even
seen me yet, although I've employed a good hour that I might have spent
in bed in devising additional fascinations in anticipation of your
coming."
"Meaning, for one thing, I suppose," said Blythe with rather an absorbed
smile, "that--that--"
"Don't you dare call it a kimono," interrupted Laura. "It's a mandarin's
coat--a part of the Peking loot. Of course you are crazy over it?"
It was a magnificent pale blue, ermine-padded garment, with a dragon of
heavy gold embroidery extending from nape to hem down the loose back.
Blythe studied it for a moment and then glanced significantly at the
faint-blue walls and ceiling of the room.
"I presume," he said, solemnly, "you had your rooms done this last time
to match the Mother Hub--I mean the mandarin's coat?"
They did not need thus to spar, for they were (what, unhappily, is so
unusual between men and women in a world devoid of mid-paths) close
friends; even comrades, in so far as Blythe's hard work permitted him to
assume his share of such a relationship; and they understood each other
thoroughly, with no complication differing from a genuine mutual esteem
to mar their understanding. Nevertheless, both of them found it a trifle
difficult to undertake the lead on the subject that was uppermost in
their minds and the occasion of Blythe's forenoon visit.
Laura with her customary helpfulness, finally gave him an opening.
"She told us of having met you on the train," said Laura, as if in
continuation of a conversation already begun on the theme. "An odd
chance, wasn't it? I wonder if you were so enormously struck with her as
I was?"
"You met her at the station, did you not?" said Blythe, quietly. "That
was like you; like your all-around fineness."
"Thanks," said Laura, appreciatively. "But you evade my question. Isn't
she a perfect apparition of loveliness?"
"I wish she were less so," said Blythe, not convincingly.
"No, you don't wish that," said Laura. "I know what you wish; but it is
not that."
Blythe was silent for a space and then he fell to striding up and down
the room.
"Did you ever come upon such an unspeakable situation, Laura?" he broke
out, stopping to face her. "What is Antoinette Treharne thinking of? Is
she utterly lost to any sense of--"
"I wouldn't say that, John," put in Laura, holding up a staying hand.
"It is natural enough, I know, for you to reach such a conclusion; on a
cursory view the case seems to be against her; but you must remember
that Louise came home without warning. Antoinette had no opportunity to
devise a plan. She is horribly humiliated. I know that."
"Your usual method of defending everybody--and you know how I like you
for that as for so many other things," said Blythe. "But, Laura,
Louise's mother knew that the girl must leave school in half a year at
all events. She must have considered some way out of the hideous mess?"
"None that she ever mentioned to me," said Laura. "You know her habit of
procrastination. I grazed the subject two or three times in talking with
her. She dodged, or was downright brusque. She has no plan, I am sure.
But she is sorely distressed over it all, now that the situation has
come to a head. I am very sorry for her."
"But the girl?" said Blythe, a slight note of irritation in his tone.
"How about her?"
"I should be more worried if I were not so entirely confident that
Louise is amply competent to take care of herself," said Laura. "She is
no longer a girl, John. She is a woman, and a woman with more than her
share of plain sense. Her position, of course, is positively outrageous,
heartrending. But I am at a loss to suggest a single thing that her
friends--that you or I, or both of us--could do just now to better it."
"That," said Blythe, a little hoarsely, "is just the devil of it."
"I should like to have Louise with me," Laura went on, "but I doubt if
she would come, although I believe she is fond of me. Not just yet, at
any rate. She would not care to leave her mother after her long
separation from her. Louise will find out the situation herself. No
doubt she already has sensed a part of its sinister aspect. I am
horribly sorry for her. But, as I say, she is a woman of character. She
will know what to do. All that we can do, for the present at any rate,
is to be on guard for her, without seeming to be. Of course she shall
know that we are her friends. She already knows that I am her friend.
Did you, on the train--"
"Yes," put in Blythe, apprehending what Laura was going to ask. "I told
her that I knew her father. The matter came about in an odd way. I wish,
Laura, that you'd make it clear to her, if you have the chance, that
she--that I--"
He halted embarrassedly.
"I quite understand," Laura aided him, smiling. "That you mean to be her
friend, too--of course I shall tell her that," and Laura looked
reflective when she observed how Blythe's face brightened. It soon
clouded again, however, when he broke out:
"She will find out, of course, sooner or later, that she has been taken
care of and educated for the past five years and odd with Judd's money,"
he said, worriedly. "You can imagine how intense her mortification will
be over that discovery. Judd, you know, in contempt of George Treharne,
forced Mrs. Treharne to return to me the quarterly checks that Treharne
sent me from Hawaii for Louise--for of course I sent the checks to
Antoinette. I explained this to Treharne when I saw him in Honolulu a
few years ago. He was badly cut up over it But of course he was
powerless to do anything about it. He refused to take the checks back,
though, and directed me to deposit the money to Louise's account. I have
nearly fifteen thousand dollars--five years' accrued checks, for
Treharne has never stopped sending them--on deposit for Louise now.
Don't you think she had better be told this?"
"Wait a while," advised Laura. "Wait until she discovers how the land
lies. Then she will be coming to you. If you told her now it would
involve your telling her also that she had been educated with Judd's
money. I think it better that she discover that for herself--if she must
discover it. Then she will know what to do. She will be seeking you out
then," and Laura smiled inwardly when again she noted how Blythe's face
cleared at her last words.
"There is only one thing to do, of course, and that is to follow your
advice and let the matter stand as it is for the present," said Blythe,
preparing to go. "But the thing is going to sit pretty heavily upon me.
I have been Treharne's legal man ever since my senior partner died, as
you know, and, although it isn't of course expected of me, I can't help
but feel a certain responsibility for his daughter when she is thrust
into such a miserable situation as this. I wonder," catching at a new
and disturbing idea, "if her mother will expect Louise to meet
the wretched crew of near-poets, maybe-musicians and other
rag-tag-and-bobtail that assemble at what Antoinette calls her Sunday
evening 'salon?'"
"Antoinette's 'zoo,' I call it," laughed Laura. "What if Louise does
meet them? They can't harm her. They, the unfortunate make-believes,
will only appeal to her risibles, if I mistake not. Louise must have got
her sense of humor from her father. Antoinette hasn't a particle of
humor in her composition. If she had how long do you suppose she would
continue her absurd 'salon?"
Laura, in extending her hand to Blythe, who had resumed his stormcoat,
gazed quizzically into his rugged face.
"John," she said, "is your solicitude for Louise solely on account of
the--er--sense of responsibility you feel toward her father?"
Blythe caught the twinkle in her eyes.
"Humbug!" he ejaculated, striding out to the obligato of Laura's laugh.
* * * * *
When they were settled in the car for their snowy ride that afternoon,
Mrs. Treharne turned in her seat to face Judd.
"You will understand," she said in a tone quite as hard as it was meant
to be, "that I am not wasting words. If you repeat your grossness of
last night in my daughter's presence, our--our friendship is at an end.
That is understood?"
"Now, now, shush, shush, Tony," said the Gargantuan Judd, soothingly,
and resorting to his habit of patting her hands, "not so severe, not so
terrifically severe, you know. How did I know that your daughter would
be there? Didn't know the least thing about it--forgot, I mean, that she
was coming. Got a bit screwed at the club, and--"
"I don't elect to listen to that sort of an explanation," interrupted
Mrs. Treharne, with cold deliberation. "I am unutterably weary of your
porcine manners. It is bad enough that I have permitted myself to endure
them. You are not imbecile enough to suppose that my daughter is to
endure them, too? You are to meet her only when it is absolutely
necessary; be good enough to remember that. While she is with me--I
don't now know how long that is to be--you are to curtail your visits;
and if you come even once again in the sodden condition that you were in
last night, I am done with you from that instant. I make myself plain, I
hope?"
"'Pon honor, Tony, you are horribly severe," blurted Judd, whiningly.
"You know very well that if you were to cut and run I'd blow my head
off." He felt that he meant it, too; for Judd was tremendously fond of
the fading woman seated beside him, as he had been for years. He was
blind to her departing prettiness; to him she was the one woman in the
world--his prim, elderly wife, the mother of his family of grown
children, being utterly negligible in his view; and Mrs. Treharne knew
her complete power over him as well as she knew the lines of her face.
"I wish," she said, with a cutting way of dwelling upon each word, "that
you had blown your head off before ever I met you. I might then have
been able to cling to at least the shreds of self-respect."
Judd had no reply to make to that, and they rode the rest of the way in
silence.