LAURA, A WOMAN OF THIRTY-FIVE, HAD THE SLENDER YET WELL-ROUNDED STRUCTURAL SINUOSITIES OF A GIRL OF TWENTY.
Mrs. Treharne, four years older than Laura, had the somewhat hollow-eyed plumpness of an indoor woman who wars fiercely but hopelessly and unequally upon ever-threatening embonpoint. Her triumphs over the enemy never were better than drawn battles; she was compelled to devote at least three hours a day to her determined, almost hysterical warfare upon the natural process of accretion, solely that she might not gain; long before she had abandoned hope of achieving the fragility of outline she pined for. The nostrums she employed in this incessant conflict had made her fragile, however, in at least one respect: her health; besides imparting a certain greenish-yellow tint to her skin which made her make-up box almost as necessary a part of her equipment as the hands wherewith she applied the mitigating tints. Five years before she had been a fresh-skinned, clear-eyed, naturally pretty woman of a somewhat inconsequential type; but the necessity—the hideous duty, as she deemed it—of banting without cessation or intermission had left her merely her regular features upon which artificially to create the illusion of a youthfulness she was far from feeling. With the final touch added for an appearance in a company, she still looked dainty, certainly of impeccable grooming. But she had learned to be uneasy under the scrutiny of eyes that she felt to be unfriendly, and she had become exceptionally partial to veils. Her hair, originally a light, unaggressive red, had been "done over" into a sort of vivid, brittle "Titian." There were occasional reddish gleams in her slightly furtive, small eyes of hazel. She had a child's foot, and she was inordinately proud of her tiny, waxy, too-white hands. In a company she smiled continuously in order to display her teeth, which were perfectly assembled and of an almost porcelain whiteness. Mrs. Treharne was called a pretty woman even by those who perhaps entertained unexpressed misgivings as to how she might look at her rising hour.
After Laura had gone Mrs. Treharne tried, before her glass, the effect of a smile—somewhat frozen and quickly obliterated—upon her carefully studied and artfully executed make-up mask; then sighed drearily as she sank into a chair and began polishing her nails upon her palms.
"Of course Laura is right, as usual—it wouldn't help matters particularly if Louise were a boy," she mused with puckered brows. "A boy might be longer in finding out how affairs stood here; but when he did find out—what a storm, what heroics, what juvenile reproaches, what a stagey to-do there would be! Perhaps, after all, it is as well that Louise is—Louise. She can adapt herself to—to things as they are. She must. There's no other way. She can't have lost the tact she possessed as a child. I wish I knew her better, so that I could have some sort of an idea just what to expect from her. I hope she understands the good sense of closing one's eyes to things that can't be improved by looking at them. Perhaps I shall be lucky enough to marry her off quickly. That would be almost too easy a solution for me, with my vile luck, to expect."
She rang for Heloise to have her furs in readiness.
"It was thoroughly decent of Laura," she thought on, finger at lip, "to advise me to bolt all this and take refuge with her. But I haven't the nerve—that's the plain truth of it. How could I ask Treharne to renew the allowance? What a triumph it would be for him if I were to do that! He would be too Quixotic to view it as a triumph, but that wouldn't alleviate my humiliation in asking him. And what would the three or four thousand a year be in comparison with—"
"The car is at the door, Madame," announced Heloise, appearing with the sables. Mrs. Treharne smiled at herself before the glass to smooth out the wrinkles of her musing, tripped lightly down the stairs, and was humming blithely when she nodded indulgently at the ponderous, shaggy-furred man who was waiting to help her into the huge, over-lavish, pulsing car.
"You take your time, don't you?" grumbled Judd, his breath vaporing into broken clouds in the raw December air. "Does that monkey-chattering maid of yours sleep all the time, or has she a case on with the butler? I've been tooting here for ten minutes."
His tone was snarling, and his thin lips were drawn away from gnarled teeth. Judd was one of those physical anomalies, a man of Falstaffian girth with sharp, peaked, predatory features. He pulled off his fur cap to readjust it before stepping into the car, showing a head wholly bald except for crinkly wisps of mixed red and gray hair at the sides and back. There was a deep crease at the back of his neck where the scant hair left off, and his deep-set, red-rimmed little watery-blue eyes were alert and suspicious.
Mrs. Treharne laughed so carelessly that it almost seemed as if she deliberately sought to intensify his irritation.
"Still in your villanous humor?" she asked him, a taunt in her tone. "I believe this is one of the days—they grow rather frequent—when you should be allowed—required, I should say—to ride alone."
"Well, that's easy enough to do," grumbled Judd in a voice curiously high-pitched for so vast a man. "See here, perhaps you are conceited enough to think—"
Very deliberately, and still smiling, Mrs. Treharne rose to leave the car. Judd looked blankly nonplussed.
"Oh, stop this infernal nonsense, Tony," he said in a tone tinged with alarm. Then his ruddy face expanded into a grin behind which there seemed to be little mirth. "D'ye know, I believe you would be cat enough to step out, before we start, and—"
"No names, if you please," Mrs. Treharne interrupted, choppily. "Decidedly I shall leave the car if you feel that it is impossible for you to behave yourself like a human being. I have ceased to extract enjoyment from your growling humors."
It was a tone she might have taken in addressing a menial. Obviously, however, it was the tone required for the proper subjugation of Judd. He exuded a falsetto laugh and patted her hand, at the same time motioning the chauffeur to start.
"I don't complain of your hellish moods, do I, Tony?" he asked her, still chuckling unpleasantly. "In fact, I believe I rather like the feel of your claws. All the same, there may come a day when—"
"When I shall enjoy the sight of your back," calmly interrupted the apparently complaisant woman at his side. "Speed the day!"
Judd's face took on a half-chagrined, half-worried look. It generally did when Mrs. Treharne was operating upon him what she privately called her "system." This "system," in essence, consisted in her invariable habit of quarreling with him and reducing him to abjectness by more or less veiled threats of abandoning him to a lonesome fate whenever she had something to ask of him, or to tell him, that she knew quite well would arouse his surliness. It was a neatly-devised balancing method, and Mrs. Treharne as well understood the vital advantage of striking the first blow as she apprehended the extent of her power over him.
"I say, Tony," said Judd, patting her gloved hands again, "you wouldn't really cut and run just because—"
"Spare me your elephantine sentimentalities, please," she put in, a little less indifferently. "You were never ordained for that sort of thing. Anyhow, I would like a sane word or two with you. I've something to tell you."
"It's money, of course," said Judd, sulkily, leaving off patting her hands with ludicrous suddenness. "More damned extravagance, eh?"
"No, it's neither money nor extravagance, beautifully as those two words trot in tandem," she said, airily, yet with a new soothing note in her tone. "It is this: Louise is coming home. At once. Tonight."
"The devil she is!" blurted Judd. "What for? Who sent for her? How long is she going to stay? What's it all about?"
"One question at a time, please," Mrs. Treharne replied, looking indifferently out toward the bleak river as they shot by Claremont. It was a palpably assumed air of indifference; but Judd, unskilled at penetrating feminine subtlety, did not discern the nervousness underlying her careless manner. "My daughter is coming home because she wants to. Nobody sent for her. She is not going back to school. She announces that in her letter to me; and she is old enough to know her mind and to be entitled to freedom of action. She is remaining permanently with me."
She had expected him to storm upon hearing the news in full. Judd, however, was an individual who owed a considerable part of his immense success as a man of affairs to his studied and carefully-elaborated habit of never doing the obvious.
He leaned back in the car and half-screened his turkey-like eyes with their small, veinous lids. Mrs. Treharne, surprised at his silence, went on hastily:
"I am wretchedly disturbed over it. I know that I have no fit home to offer her. I know that I have completely undermined her chance in life. But what can I do? She can't live alone. And she merely brings the difficulty to a head by coming now. She must come home some time, of course. The child has not spent her holidays or her summer vacations with me for four years. Always she has been pushed about among school friends, who, glad as they and their people may have been to have her, surely must have wondered why she did not come home."
Judd fluttered his eyelids and leaned forward in his seat.
"I understand perfectly, of course," he said with a sort of leer. "I understand, you understand, we understand, they understand, everybody understands. Then what are you making such a devil of a rumpus about it for?"
"Well," said Mrs. Treharne, making the mistake, in dealing with Judd, of falling into a slightly apologetic tone, "I thought that perhaps you might——"
"Wait a minute, Antoinette," interrupted Judd with suave brutality, leaning back again among the cushions and once more half-closing his eyes. "It doesn't matter a damn what I think. I can stand it if you can. She isn't my daughter, you know. She's your daughter. I suppose she has been taught to mind her own business? Very well. I can stand the situation if you can."
The slur cut like a rattan, as Judd, perceiving a rare advantage, thoroughly intended that it should. He made it worse by patting her hands as he spoke. She hated him with an almost virtuous intensity as he uttered the sneer. But she said no more about her daughter's impending arrival during the remainder of the ride.
CHAPTER II
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."
CHAPTER III
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.
CHAPTER IV
By mid-January Louise had completed her inventory of the situation. She faced her position without flinching and with no visible sign of the distress the gradually unfolding picture caused her, save a certain silent preoccupation from which Laura vainly sought to rouse her by taking her on incessant rounds of the theatres, whisking her off on short up-State and Long Island motor tours, and providing other means of distraction and excitement. Laura's heart ached for Louise. Her own girlhood had been clouded by trouble. Orphaned at sixteen, an heiress with no disinterested advisors save those who were the legal guardians of her person and estate, she had yielded shortly after leaving school to a girlish infatuation and entered upon a surreptitious marriage with a man who, with his child-wife's large wealth at his disposal, had surrendered to one dissipation after another until, eventually becoming a drug fiend, he had, in his treatment of her, developed into such an utterly savage and irresponsible brute that she was compelled to divorce him, after which he had been put under permanent restraint. It had taken Laura long years to recover her natural equipoise after her bitter disillusionment. Louise's trouble, Laura could not help apprehending, was even more grievous than her own had been, intensified as she knew it must be by the girl's carefully-screened feeling of humiliation.
Laura admired Louise beyond words for her uncomplaining acceptance of her bitter bolus.
"I never saw such pluck," she told John Blythe time and again. "It is the pluck of a thoroughbred. I believe she thoroughly understands everything now, except that she is in Judd's debt for her education. Her loyalty to her mother is wonderful, beautiful; far greater than Antoinette really deserves. I don't remember ever meeting a girl or woman whom I admired so much as I do Louise Treharne."
Laura could not fail to note how Blythe's clear grey eyes would glisten when thus she praised the girl.
"Louise is like her father," he would say in reply to Laura's enthusiasm. "You know what a fine, game man George Treharne was and is. I'll never forget how generous he was in his treatment of me—and he tried to prevent me from knowing it, too—when, as a cub lawyer, I was first starting out on my own hook; and there wasn't the least reason in life why he should have been so decent to me, either. You remember how he never whimpered when Antoinette dragged his—Oh, well, no use in referring to that. But, when I first met the grown-up Louise on the train—after I accidentally discovered her identity, I mean—I couldn't help but observe how her resemblance to her father—"
"To whom," Laura watched him with twinkling eyes, "your sense of responsibility is so great that—er—that—"
Whereupon Blythe would flush hotly and proceed to shrivel Laura with whatever in the way of polite invective occurred to him in his confusion.
The thought of leaving her mother for the sake of extricating herself from a difficult and taxing situation never entered Louise's mind. Her mother, she felt, needed her. It was not, she considered, a problem for her interposition; she shrank from the thought of even mentioning it. She knew that it was an utterly impossible situation; she had a profound belief that it was not, from its very nature, destined to last; but she preferred that her mother should take the initiative in casting off the evil. She clearly saw how, from day to day, her mother was becoming increasingly conscious of the grave trouble she was heaping upon her daughter's young shoulders; she perceived how her mother, not inherently vicious, simply was in the bondage of an ingrained, luxury-loving selfishness, and that, having been cast out of the social realm in which she formerly had moved, she was now possessed by a sort of despair which, more than anything else, prevented her from making the attempt to extricate herself from the slough.
Louise, then, schooled herself to wait. It was a sort of waiting that drew heavily upon her natural store of equanimity. But she could see no other course, and hopefulness is the tandem mate of youth.
"I have lived long enough," Laura said to her one afternoon, when they were driving, during this trying period when Louise was testing her adaptability to the utmost, "to have discovered that nothing matters very much except one's own peace of mind. If one have that, the rest is all a mirage. I don't mean the peace of mind that proceeds from a priggish sense of superiority to human weaknesses. That, I am pleased to say, is a sort of mental peace that I haven't yet experienced, and I hope I never shall. But when one's hands are just decently clean, and one at least has tried to shake off the shackles forged by one's own little meannesses, a sort of satisfying mental quiet ensues that is worth, I think, more than anything else one finds in life."
"But one's worry for others?" quietly suggested Louise, putting it in the form of a question.
Laura pressed the girl's hands between her own.
"All of us, dear, must know the meaning of solicitude—often painful solicitude—for others at some period of our lives," she said, tenderly. "I know what you mean. You are carrying yourself nobly through a difficult ordeal. Let that consciousness suffice. You will have the right to feel proud, in the coming time, to remember that you stood the test—as we are proud of you now."
"'We?'" said Louise, puzzling.
"We," repeated Laura, steadfastly. "I think you scarcely understand, dear, how profoundly interested—yes, and chivalrously interested, too—John Blythe is in your—your problem."
Louise felt the blood rushing to her face.
"Does Mr. Blythe know?" she asked, her cheeks tingling.
"How could he avoid knowing, dear?" rejoined Laura, gently. "He is your father's lawyer. He is an occasional visitor at your—" she hesitated; "—visitor on Riverside Drive," she resumed. "And so of course he knows—everything. You may be glad of that, dear. There is no man in the world whose friendship I value more highly than that of John Blythe. I think he would like to have you feel—I know, in fact, that he would—that he is interested in your—your concerns; that, indeed, in a way, he is standing guard for you."
Louise studied for a little while.
"I should have understood, of course, that he knew," she said, hesitatingly. "But it did not occur to me. I am afraid that I should have been a little reluctant to meet him on those two or three occasions at your home if I had known that he—" She paused.
"Why, dear child, should you have such a feeling when a man of innate nobility, who knew you when you were a little girl——"
"It is wrong, I know," put in Louise, hastily. "But I find it so hard to regard him as—as just a lawyer, you know, Laura. He is not like a lawyer at all—at least I have not found him so. He is——"
Laura pointed a teasing finger at her, which caused the color to reappear on Louise's face.
"Don't try to tell me what he is, Louise," said Laura, smiling. "Don't you suppose I know? But you don't know how intensely glad I am to hear that you can't regard Mr. Blythe as—as 'just a lawyer.' I shall tell him that you are going about criticizing his professional ability."
"Don't do that—please!" said Louise in such an obvious panic that Laura pinched her cheek reassuringly.
The meetings with Blythe to which Louise referred were casual ones in Laura's apartment. Blythe was in the habit of dropping in occasionally for coffee—he abominated tea—and a chat at Laura's tea hour in the late afternoon; and Laura duly noted, not without slyly chaffing him over it, that he had made this an almost daily habit since his discovery that he stood a pretty fair gambling chance of finding Louise there almost any afternoon. Once, when Laura and Louise came in from a drive which had been prolonged rather later than usual, they entered the library quietly, to find Blythe, looking decidedly glum, browsing among the books without the least seeming of being interested in any of them, for his hands were thrust deep into his pockets and they caught him yawning most deplorably. But at sight of the two women—one woman, Laura said, accusingly, to him after Louise had gone home in Laura's car—he had brightened so suddenly and visibly that Laura had to profess that her rippling laugh was occasioned by something she had seen during her drive.
On these occasions Laura had found it imperatively necessary to leave them together in order to confer with her servants. Louise and Blythe had talked easily on detached, somewhat light matters, finding an agreeable mutual plane without effort. Louise, remembering his somewhat sober preoccupation on the train, had been surprised and pleased—though she could not have told why—to note his possession of a rather unusual social charm. She was pleased, too, that, except in the matter of a remarkable physique, he was not to be rated as a handsome man. His features were too rugged for that. Strength, keenness and kindliness shone from his masterful countenance; but he was anything but handsome judged from the magazine-cover standard. Louise had amused Laura one day by saying that she found Blythe's face "restful." She had not the least partiality for men of the generally-accepted straightout handsome type of features; she was, in truth, a little inclined to be contemptuous of an excessive facial pulchritude in men. But—again for a reason which she could scarcely have explained—she was glad that Blythe was perhaps two inches more than six feet in height, that he was as straight as a lance, and that he found it necessary to walk sidewise in order to get his shoulders through some of Laura's lesser doors.
On her last meeting with Blythe Louise had asked him, with a certain hesitancy which he noticed, if he had written to her father.
"Yes," Blythe had replied, simply, "and I sent him your love." He had not offered to become more communicative; and Louise, concluding that his reticence on the subject might be based on a considerateness for her which it might be unfair for her to seek to fathom, did not mention the matter to him again. She had an oddly resolute confidence in him, considering how short the time had been since he had come into her life; and she felt that, if he now exhibited a taciturnity which puzzled her, it would be explained in due time.
Louise Treharne belonged to that rare (and therefore radiant) type of women who know how to wait.
Louise's life at the house on the Drive quickly resolved itself into a daily programme tinctured with a monotony that could not but wear upon the spirits of a young woman of a naturally cheerful and gregarious temperament.
Her mother, generally in a state of feverish unrest that marked her strained incertitude over a situation which, in a way, was more intolerable to her than to her daughter because she was guiltily conscious that she was the maker of it, usually dropped into Louise's room for an hour's chat during the forenoon. She was alternately affectionate, stilted, indifferent and petulant in her attitude toward her daughter. She did not seek, in her brooding self-communings, to thrust aside the keen consciousness that she was utterly and hopelessly in the wrong; but this consciousness did not serve to allay her irritation, even if it was directed against herself. Like most women, she hated to be in the wrong; and she particularly loathed the thought of confessing herself in the wrong. She was less immoral than unmoral; her descent had been due to a sort of warped view as to forbidden relationships, nourished by an inborn and intense dislike for the sovereignty of convention—"the tyranny of the smug," she habitually called it—and based essentially upon her love of luxurious and extravagant living. But a consciousness of these facts only made her self-contempt the more keen. She measured and despised her sordidness. She was not, she fell into the habit of reflecting after her daughter's return, the victim of anybody but herself; her days of ardor had slipped away; she well knew that she had not even the excuse of a fondness for the man who had made her a social pariah. If she had ever experienced any such a fondness that fact might have mitigated, at least in her own self-view, the rawness of her course. But she cared nothing for Judd, which made her case abominable, and she knew it.
Yet her weakened will, her character rendered flaccid by years of careless self-indulgence, made it acutely difficult for her to contemplate the thought of abandoning her way of living, even for the sake of her daughter. Her prettiness was now purely a matter of meretricious building up; she would soon be forty; she fumed inwardly at the thought of middle age, which now, for her, was only around the corner, so to speak; she had been cast off by her own kind; and the terminal idea of her self-communings always was that, since there was no hope for her in any event, no matter what she might do, she might as well finish the scroll. She pushed aside Louise's involvement in the difficulty as something that would—that would have to—adjust itself. A way out for Louise must present itself sooner or later; but the way out for her daughter must be one that would not demand too great a sacrifice—if any sacrifice at all—on her own part. Perhaps a good marriage could be contrived for Louise; that would be the easiest and most natural solution; and she would cast about in her mind for eligibles on whose sensitive social concepts perhaps her own method of life would not grate. Her dreary meditations usually terminated with futilities of this sort.
Louise, fighting back the oppressiveness that had clutched her ever since her return from school, was cheerful and sunny when her mother was with her. She made no allusion of any sort to the conditions of her environment. Her mother, noticing this, was grateful for it, and she was conscious of a genuine and growing admiration for the mingled dignity and delicacy of her daughter's behavior. On one of her forenoon visits to Louise's dressing room the mother herself, swept by a feeling of remorse in the contemplation of the girl's fragrant, pure-eyed beauty, could not refrain from touching impulsively upon the nub of her own unrest.
"My dear," she said to Louise, passing a white and still prettily rounded arm around her daughter, "do you hate your little mother?"
Louise fought back the tears that suffused her eyes.
"Why do you ask such a thing, dear?" she asked in a voice the hoarseness of which she strove to disguise.
Her mother did not reply to the question, but went on, turning her head away:
"Because there are circumstances, conditions that you can't have failed to notice here that maybe—" She struggled for words. "It has never been in my heart to do anything except what was right and fair by you, child, but one drifts, drifts, always drifts——"
She could not proceed.
Louise wrapped her arms about her mother. Neither spoke for a space.
"Nothing can ever change me, dear," said Louise then in her quiet tone. "It is not for me to judge or condemn. I can—wait. We shall not speak of it again, shall we, mother?"
Her mother, haggard and with pain-drawn features, smoothed Louise's face with her hand for a little while and went away without another word. The girl's eyes were swollen when Laura came for her in her car an hour later. But Laura did not ask her why.
Louise went nowhere with her mother. Mrs. Treharne made it plain from the beginning that this was her intention. Louise, for her part, required no reason. She understood. Nor did Louise seek to re-establish the friendships she had formed with girls at Miss Mayhew's school, many of whom now were living in New York or visiting their homes there during the holiday vacation.
One afternoon, at an opera matinée, Louise, strolling out the entr'acte in the foyer with Laura, came face to face with Bella Peyton, a girl who had been graduated from the finishing school with the class ahead of Louise's. Miss Peyton was with her mother, a stony-eyed, granite-featured dowager who had often met Louise on her frequent visits at the school; for her daughter and Louise had been school inseparables.
Bella rushed up cordially to Louise and kissed her enthusiastically.
"You darling!" she exclaimed in the abandonment of her delight at coming upon the chum of her school days so unexpectedly. "When did you reach town? And why didn't you come to see me the very instant you returned?"
Mrs. Peyton, who, at sight of Louise, had purposely lagged in the rear, and whose adamantine countenance reflected intensifying degrees of frozenness with each word that her daughter was saying to Louise, drew her adipose person into a posture of icy rigidity, and croaked:
"Bella!"
Mrs. Peyton had not so much as nodded to Louise.
"Why, mamma," Bella broke out, "don't you remember Louise Treharne, my sworn and subscribed and vowed and vummed chum at Miss Mayhew's?"
"Bella!"
This time it was not merely an adjuration, it was a command.
Bella, perceiving then that something was wrong, flushed. But she was loyal to her friend.
"You are coming to see me immediately, dear?" she said, hurriedly shaking hands with Louise in order to obey her mother's command.
"Bella! Come to me at once!" Mrs. Peyton croaked with cutting, unconscionable rudeness, seizing her daughter by the arm and incontinently marching her off.
Louise, crimsoning, took the stab without a word.
"The tabby!" broke out Laura, her eyes flashing with indignation. "Gracious heaven, is it any wonder that men privately sneer at the way women treat each other? Don't you mind the shocking old cat, Louise; she'll tear herself to pieces with her own claws some day;" and Laura was unusually tender and kind in her treatment of Louise for the remainder of the afternoon. But, after that encounter, Louise learned to avoid meeting her school friends when, as occasionally happened, she saw them before they caught sight of her. She felt that they all "knew" or "would know," and she did not elect to take chances on additional snubs.
Her first formal meeting with Judd had been a trial. It had been an accidental encounter, happening about a week after Louise's return from school, and at a time when Mrs. Treharne was in more than one mind as to whether she would permit Louise to meet Judd at all. Mrs. Treharne and Judd were stepping out of the huge yellow car at the close of their late afternoon ride just at the moment when Louise, alone, was returning in Laura's car. Their meeting on the pavement was inevitable. For a moment Louise hoped that her mother would permit her to lag behind on pretense of returning to Laura's car to find some imaginary forgotten article; but Mrs. Treharne, suddenly deciding that the meeting had best be over with, since no way of avoiding it, sooner or later, had suggested itself, called to her; and Louise, very beautiful with her cold-ruddied cheeks nimbussed by her breeze-blown hair of bronze, walked erect to where her mother stood with the bulky, red-eyed Judd, who regarded Louise with a stare of disconcerting admiration.
"My dear Louise," said Mrs. Treharne, obviously quelling a certain tremulousness in her tone, "permit me to present Mr. Judd; Mr. Judd, my daughter Louise."
Judd, his mouth still unpleasantly agape, started the preliminary gesture toward extending his hand. But he made no further progress with the hand, for he was quick to notice that Louise, at that very instant, was inserting her loose right hand in her muff. Louise bowed and then returned to Laura's car in quest of the imaginary article; she desired to give Judd time to resume his place in his car before she joined her mother on the steps.
"Demmed handsome, that daughter of yours," Judd commented on Louise to Mrs. Treharne when he saw her the next afternoon, "but—er—uppish, what?"
"I can dispense with your generalities on that subject," Mrs. Treharne had replied.
After that Louise had met Judd casually in the wide, fire-lit down-stairs hall on two or three occasions, and once at the only one of her mother's extraordinary Sunday night receptions—the "salon" which at once provoked and amused Laura—which she attended; but she had exchanged no word with him. She was not lacking in diplomacy, but there were some stultifications that she found to be wholly beyond her; and she was conscious of a certain previously unexperienced difficulty with her neck when she even inclined her head to Judd.
"Would you care to meet some of my Sunday night people, Louise?" her mother had asked her. "I dare say Laura has told you they are freaks. Perhaps some of them are. But there are clever ones among them, and one must take the gifted with the mediocre. It would not harm you to meet a few of them. They are not wicked. They only think they are; some of them, that is. Their wickedness is an amiable abstraction. Shall you be down?"
It was on a Sunday morning, in Louise's apartments, that Mrs. Treharne made the suggestion. Louise was conscious of the need of a laugh, even if it were a politely smothered one; and Laura had comically depicted her mother's "salon" to her. She told her mother that she had been waiting for that invitation, which caused Mrs. Treharne to glance sharply at her to ascertain if Louise already had adopted Laura's point of view as to the Sunday evening gatherings.
"Do you entertain your people yourself, mother, or is there a—" Louise stumbled on the word "host."
But her mother was quick to catch her meaning.
"I should not ask you down, else, my dear—you should credit me that far," she had replied, a tinge of reproach in her tone. And so, an hour or so after dinner on Sunday night, Louise, willowy yet full-blossomed and splendid in a simple princesse dress of white broadcloth, a gardenia nestling in an embrasure of her velvety auburn hair, and a tiny-linked chain of gold, with aquamarine pendants—a gift from Laura—around her firm white neck, went, for the first time since she had been in the house, to the already crowded main floor.
Louise, in her inexperience, could not know that the gathering really was little less than an apotheosis of the declasée; she merely found some of the people agreeable, others of them unconsciously naïve in their ebullient enthusiasm over their imaginary achievements or accomplishments, still others frankly laughable for their indurated habit of self laudation.
It was in the main, so far as its social side went, an assemblage of persons, men and women, who, thrust outside the genuine social breastworks for various and more or less highly-tinctured lapses, thus foregathered in response to an instinct of gregariousness—an instinct around which the "birds of a feather" aphorism no doubt was framed. Having no choice in the matter, these persons were willing to accept the shadow for the reality. It might almost be said that on every uptown square of New York there is at least one common meeting point for similar assemblages of social exiles. Nearly all of the figurantes in Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening affairs were divorcées of more or less note; the "cases" of some of whom had been blazoned in huge red block type in the yellow newspapers, and "illustrated," in default of genuine portraits, with blurred "cuts" of no less benevolent or redoubtable females than the late Mrs. Pinkham or Carrie Nation. The men in the company who had not already rocketed through the divorce court were willing, it appeared from their frank method of expressing themselves, to make that by no means perilous passage; though there was a sprinkling of younger men, still factors in a social world from which there are no voluntary expatriates, who attended Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening affairs in a spirit of larkishness and glad of the chance to forsake, for a little while, regions more austere and still under the domination of at least a tacit repression.
For the rest, there were poetasters who fidgetted until they were called upon, out of pure sympathy, to read their own verse—some of the latter obviously "lifted;" temperamental musicians, male and female, who preferred to sway at or with their instruments with the rooms darkened while they performed; manufacturers and proselytizers of personally-conducted and generally quite unintelligible cults, physical, moral or ethical, all of the cults extending a maximum of "freedom of action" to the individual; devisers of impromptu or extemporaneous religions or near-religions, none of which boasted so inconvenient a restriction as a Decalogue; fashionable or striving-to-be-fashionable palmists and chiromancers, "swamis," "yogis;" burnoosed, sullen, white-robed exploiters, from the Near or Far East, of women who mistook their advanced symptoms of neuresthenia for a hankering for the occult; and the other unclassified, sycophantic factors of a "Bohemianism" whose seams were perfectly visible to the naked eye and whose sawdust was only held in place with the all-together co-operation of the whole artificial assemblage.
Louise's entrance upon the scene created a stir which caused her to feel distinctly uncomfortable. She longed for Laura; but Laura had "sworn off" attending Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening parties; not from any selfish motives of caution—for Laura was in keen demand in the social circle in which she had been born and reared; but simply because she had at length ceased to extract amusement from the self-idolizing vagaries of Mrs. Treharne's crew; more briefly still, because they bored her to extinction.
When the word was buzzed around among the slowly-moving, chattering assemblage to whom the entire lower floor of the house, including the conservatory, had been thrown open—that "the tall girl with the air and the hair" was Mrs. Treharne's daughter—the more privileged ones adverted to their hostess as Tony—there was a sudden cluttering of the passageways leading to the room in which Louise was standing with her mother. In their keenness to catch a glimpse of the "just-bloomed daughter of Tony" many of them even forsook the long and generously-provided buffet, than which no greater sign of a consuming interest or curiosity could be given; for not a few of the raffish guests appeared to be so patently in need of nourishment—and stimulant—that they spent the major portion of the evening at the buffet.
A woman whose vision seemed to be slightly filmed from her inordinate devotion to the punch lifted her glass, after studying Louise in a sort of open-mouthed daze for a moment or so, and sang out, in a tone that she apparently had some difficulty in controlling:
"To Tony's daughter—the Empress Louise!"
The men and women in her neighborhood grabbed for glasses to fill from the punchbowls and took up the refrain:
"The Empress Louise!"
Louise felt the blood swirling to her head, but she braced herself to stand the volleying of eyes. Her mother was intensely annoyed and made not the least effort to conceal her annoyance. When the incident had been merged in a diversion afforded by a recitation of a Portuguese madrigal in another room by a man with unkempt hair and untidy fingernails, Mrs. Treharne glided away from Louise's side for a moment and found the woman who had proposed the toast. She was still absorbedly busy at the buffet.
"You are to leave at once, Ethel," she said in a low but determined tone to the toast-proposer, a woman whose divorce story in the newspapers had been remarkable for the detailed account of liquid refreshments she had consumed up and down the world, at foreign hotels and on board yachts, for a number of years at a stretch. "I shall never forgive you if you make another scene here."
"All right, Tony," the woman replied, with a vacuous smile. "Not angry at me, are you, for wishing luck to your little girl—your big girl, I mean; she is an empress, you know, and—"
Mrs. Treharne guided her to the cloak room and stayed by her side until she bade her goodnight at the door.
Louise, in the meantime, had been approached by a man whose eyes, she had noticed with a certain vague disquietude, had been following her about since her entrance upon the scene.
He was a handsome man of the florid type, with a sweeping blonde mustache and oddly-restless light brown eyes in which Louise, catching him devouring her with his gaze at frequent intervals, nervously thought that she detected certain felinely-topaz glints. He was tall and a trifle over-heavy; but there was a certain slow-moving, easy air of adventitious distinction about him which might have been in part lent by the immaculateness of his evening clothes and his facile way of disposing of his hands without requiring any article to give them employment; an art in which even practiced courtiers and carpet knights occasionally are deficient. Louise did not like his face; she observed, when she saw, not without a certain vague trepidation, that he was approaching her, that his over-red and over-full lips, from which the sweeping mustache was brushed away, were curved in a sort of habitual sneer which by no stretch of charity could be called a smile; though that, no doubt, was the desired intent of it.
He bowed low, keeping his eyes upraised on Louise's face, when he reached her side, and said:
"Miss Treharne?"
Louise, used to more formal methods of meeting new men, inclined her head.
"You will condone, I hope, Miss Treharne, my seeming breach of formality in presuming to address you without a presentation," he said, even his intensified smile failing to efface the sneering curve from his too visible lips. "But your mother is generous enough to permit her guests at times—on such occasions as these, for example—to forego formality. I have been ineffectually trying to reach her for an hour in order to—"
"In order to ask me to do that which you have already done," said Mrs. Treharne, with quite unusual affability, coming up at that moment and catching his final words. "Louise, dear, permit me—Mr. Langdon Jesse. Don't expect her to know, Mr. Jesse, that you are a cotton king. I doubt if her routine at school permitted her to read the newspapers, even if they interested her; which I sincerely hope they did not and will not."
Louise had not often seen her mother in so gracious a humor toward any man; but this fact did not in any sense serve to quell the instinctive dislike which she immediately felt for Jesse, the "cotton king" of her mother's somewhat too purposely-significant introduction. She noticed that his hands were small and obtrusively white; that there was a wave in his burnished blonde hair; that his large clear-cut features were of a chiselled regularity; and her natural aversion to the merely handsome man promptly asserted itself. The sneer of his mouth, and his fixed way of gazing squarely into her eyes as if his own eyes were forming a question, disquieted her. She replied in purposed monosyllables to his rather trivial yet studied questions about her school life. She knew perfectly well that he was in no wise interested in her school life, but that he merely was seeking what he considered might be the most engaging method of capturing her attention. Five minutes after his meeting with her she devised an excuse and went to her apartments. She threw her windows wide and let the wintry air bulge the curtains when she reached her sleeping room; perhaps it was her subconsciousness that told her that she needed some such a bath of purifying air to obliterate what intangible traces there might remain of her brief contact with Langdon Jesse. That night she dreamt persistently of a leopard with large, blazing eyes of topaz; and an hour after she awoke a large basket of superb orchids, with Langdon Jesse's card attached, was brought to her. Laura was with her at the time.
"From Langdon Jesse?" said Laura, knitting her brow. "Did you meet him last night, Louise?"
"Yes. I disliked him intensely."
"If I were you, dear," suggested Laura, "I should send these orchids to a hospital. They can of course have no sinister effect upon those who have not met their donor. But I should be afraid to have you keep any flowers sent you by Langdon Jesse. They might poison the air. The bald impudence of him in sending you flowers at all!"
A footman was carrying the orchids to a nearby hospital five minutes later.
CHAPTER V
Langdon Jesse and his one-time associate and co-partner in lamb-shearing "deals," Frederick Judd, met at luncheon in a restaurant in the financial district a few days later.
Judd, one of the powers of "the Street," was past fifty-five, and he had no great toleration for the vacuities of young men. This fact, however, placed no inhibition on the admiration—it could scarcely be called a liking—which he felt for Langdon Jesse; for Jesse, whatever else he may have been, certainly was not vacuous in the matter of business; and it was from the angle of their success in business that Judd exclusively judged men. Jesse, well under forty, already was a veteran of the stock market; and on at least one occasion he had deftly "trimmed" no less a person than his former associate, Mr. Judd; wherefore Judd, with the breadth of vision of the financial general in considering the strategy of the general who has beaten him, admired Jesse, who had been virtually his pupil, all the more; resolving, at the same time, not to permit his quondam pupil to "trim" him again.
Jesse, accepting the nodded invitation, took a seat at the table at which Judd, alone, was eating his heavy luncheon. They exchanged market talk in brief, brittle phrases, for a while. Then Jesse, his too-prominent lips curving, and seeming to be gazing over the top of Judd's bare poll, said:
"Sumptious, isn't she?"
Judd, used to Jesse's adversions to the sumptuosity of women—many women—went on doggedly eating. After a space he replied with a monosyllable:
"Who?"
Jesse did not answer for a moment; nor did Judd seem to be particularly worried over that fact.
"I dropped into your—er—your place on the Drive on Sunday night," said Jesse, fastening an abnormally long cigarette into a remarkably long cigarette holder of amber and gold.
Judd, his fork poised in the air, looked up at Jesse. There was a question in his red-rimmed eyes; but Judd made it a point not to submit questions of any consequence until he had turned them over in his mind several times.
"So I heard," said Judd, with no obvious interest, pronging away again with his fork.
"Who told you," asked Jesse, with a sharp glance at Judd. "Not——"
"How the devil should I remember who told me?" replied Judd in a matter-of-fact tone. "What's the difference who told me, anyhow?"
But it made considerable difference, as a matter of fact, to Jesse; his self-satisfaction and his serene belief in his ability to make an immediate "impression" were very great; and when Judd told him he had "heard" he had been at the Riverside Drive house he took it for granted that Judd had "heard" it from the person on whom his thoughts were dwelling; Louise Treharne, that is to say.
"Oh, no particular difference," said Jesse, blowing a cloud of acrid Turkish cigarette smoke at Judd, which caused Judd to scowl. "I thought perhaps——"
Judd knew perfectly well what he thought; but Judd often failed even to mention things that he knew perfectly well.
"You take in those bear-garden affairs at Tony's—at Mrs. Treharne's," catching himself, "right along, don't you?" said Judd. "How the devil you can endure that pack of imbecile, loquacious what-are-theys is more than I can make out. One of those Sundays nights cured me."
Jesse, however, had not the least intention of being side-tracked.
"Well, she is—er—well, ripping; isn't she?" he said, after a pause.
Judd, perceiving the futility of evasion, gave way.
"Yes—if that's what you want me to say—and all ice, besides," said Judd. "You're up against it there, son," he went on, judicially. "Or are you looking for a death by freezing? Why, I'm afraid that she's going to fracture one of her upper vertebrae even when she nods to me! And that's all the recognition she ever gives me—a nod."
"She doesn't strike me as being so hopelessly Arctic as all that," said Jesse, inordinately proud of what he considered his keen judgment of women. "Did you ever happen to meet a woman with auburn hair who possessed a—er—a frozen or freezing temperament? And, by the way, why do you dwell upon her rigidity, so to speak, when she nods 'even to you?' Why 'even to you?'"
Judd, a little choler showing in his purpling face, broke out:
"Because a man naturally expects a little manners, a little common politeness, from people he's taking care of, doesn't he? She's living in my house, by God!"
"That," said Jesse, quietly, "is precisely what I am getting at: since she is living in your house—if she knows it is your house—she can't be so—er—well, stupendously straight-laced, can she? And, by frozen, of course you meant straight-laced."
"I meant exactly what I said," replied Judd, sulkily. "Stop twisting my words around, will you? I said that she was ice, and that is what I meant to say. You're on a blind trail, Jesse, if that's what you're getting at. Take it from me. You're a hit with 'em, I know, and all that sort of rot. But this one is more than your match. She'll shrivel you good and plenty if you try anything on with her. At that, why can't you let her alone? There are plenty of the other kind—your kind. What's the matter, anyhow? Have all the show girls moved out of New York?"
Jesse didn't relish the slap. It was not exactly a truthful slap, moreover. Jesse had withdrawn his devotions to "show girls" several years before; since doing which he had quarried in entirely different quarters.
"Let the girl alone—that's my advice," went on Judd, seized for the moment by a flickering sense of fairness. "I don't fancy her particularly—because she's so damned haughty with me, I suppose, and looks down upon me from a mountain. But she's all right. I know that, and I'm telling it to you for your information. Better forget it. There isn't a chance on earth for you, anyhow."
Jesse didn't appear to be in the least thrown off the quest by the advice.
"Are you sure," he inquired of Judd after a short silence, "that she knows just where you figure in the Riverside Drive establishment?"
"Well, you could see for yourself that she is more than seven years of age, couldn't you?" briefly replied Judd.
"But," observed Jesse, obviously seeking to get hold of all of the threads of the situation, "she is only recently out of school, I understand, and perhaps she hasn't yet fully grasped——"
"I don't know what she has grasped, and I don't care a damn," thrust in Judd, tired of the colloquy. "She must know a good deal about the way things stand or she wouldn't treat me as if I were rubbish. I can see how I stick in her throat. When it comes to that, why shouldn't I? She's only a schoolgirl, if she is a head taller than I am. Her mother made an idiotic mistake in having the girl around the place. But that's none of my affair. I take the game as it stands. Only I advise you to stand clear. You might as well be decent for once in your life. Unless, of course," and Judd shot a glance of inquiry at Jesse, "you mean to turn respectable—it's about time—and go in for the marrying idea?"
Jesse's somewhat waxy, excessively smooth face flushed at Judd's afterthought.
"I marry?" he said, with a distinctly disagreeable laugh. "Well, it may come to that, some day or other. But can you see me marrying the daughter of your acknowledged——" He fumbled for the word; "mistress" was what he wanted to say, but he discarded it out of sheer timidity; "—your acknowledged companion?" he finished.
"Be good enough to keep out of my personal affairs, Jesse," said Judd, coldly. "I don't dip into your private concerns. You may take my advice or leave it. But you want to go pretty slow, if you're asking me. Nobody has yet forgotten that West Indian affair of yours; just remember that."
With Judd, one shot called for another. Jesse gave a start and paled slightly at Judd's allusion to "the West Indian affair." Judd waited only long enough to see that the shot found its mark; then, with an amused leer, he rose from the table, his luncheon finished, and lumbered away with a nod.
Jesse, discarding his cigarette, bit off the end of a cigar and fumed. The "West Indian affair" was a sore subject with him solely because the world knew all about it. He had not the least feeling of self-condemnation over it; it was the thought that, for once, he had been found out that caused him to rage internally when the matter was adverted to; for the newspapers had been full of it at the time of the occurrence.
"The West Indian affair," Jesse well knew, had not been forgotten, as Judd had said, nor was it likely to be forgotten. It threw a raking light upon his general attitude toward and his treatment of women. A year before, after one of his periodical triumphs in the cotton market, in which, to quote the newspapers' way of putting it, he had "cleaned up millions," Jesse had made a midwinter cruise of the West Indies on his yacht. A girl of unusual beauty, whom he had met by accident on an automobile tour on Long Island, had been his companion on the cruise. She was inexperienced, of humble parentage, and he had overborne her objections by vaguely intimating something as to a marriage when they should arrive in the West Indies. She had protested when, upon the yacht's touching at many ports, he had of course shown not the least inclination to make good his merely intimated promise; and, in his wrath over her attitude, he had not only committed the indefensible crime, but he had made the stupendous mistake, viewed from the politic point of view, of deserting the girl in a West Indian city, without money or resources, without even her clothing, and sailing back to New York alone.
The girl, thus stranded amid new and unfriendly surroundings, had but one resource—the American consul. The consul provided for her passage back to New York. The correspondents of the New York newspapers in the West Indian city had got hold of the details, adding a few neatly whimsical touches of their own, and for days the newspapers had reeked with the story. There had been talk of prosecuting Jesse for abduction, but he had employed the underground method, rendered easily available to him owing to his wealth, to smother that suggestion. But the grisly affair had thrown a cloud over Jesse from which he knew, raging as he knew it, there was no emerging. Several of his clubs—the good ones—had dropped him; men and women of the world to which he aspired, and in which he had been making progress, cut him right and left; his name had been erased from most of the worth-while invitation lists; and the hole in his armor was wide open to the shafts of the kind Judd had just discharged at him.
Jesse sat at the table and gnawed angrily at his unlighted cigar for a long time after Judd had gone; it was characteristic of him that his compunction was all for himself. He had been found out and pilloried. That was what cut him. He never gave a thought to the young woman whose life he had destroyed.
Jesse had been instantly struck by the beauty of Louise Treharne. He surmised that it was through no complaisance on her part, but purely because she had been helpless in the matter, that she had found herself living with her ostracised mother in the house on the Drive. That situation, he was confident, had been thrust upon her. But this consideration, and the additional one that she was, as he could not have failed to note, nobly undergoing the ordeal, which might have aroused the admiration and excited the sympathy of a man of merely average fairness, had touched no compassionate chord in Langdon Jesse. Adopting the trivial and far-fetched methods of analysis which are employed by men who consider themselves expert in their knowledge of women, he had calmly concluded that in all likelihood Louise Treharne's manner was a skillfully-studied pose. At any rate he meant to find out. He meant to "know her better." It was thus that his determination framed itself in his mind; he would "know her better."
In gaining the attention of women, he believed in the gentle siege and then the grand assault; it was, in truth, the only "system" with which he had any familiarity, and it had generally proved successful.
Jesse returned to his office, summoned his car, went to his suite at the Plaza, gave himself over to the grooming activities of his man for an hour; then, resuming his car, he went to the house on Riverside Drive.
Louise, in brown walking suit and brown turban, her cheeks ruddy from a long and rapid walk from one end of the Park to the other, had just returned when Jesse's card was brought up. She was studying the card, trying to devise an excuse—for she shrank from the thought of seeing him—when her mother, ready for her motor airing, entered the room.
"I just caught sight of Mr. Jesse's car from my window," said Mrs. Treharne to Louise. Louise observed that her mother was in the same fluttered state that she had been in when she had found Jesse talking to her on the previous Sunday night. "He has sent his card to you? Of course you are going to see him?"
"I think I shall not see him, mother," said Louise, ringing for Heloise with the purpose of sending word that she was indisposed, not at home—anything.
Mrs. Treharne looked annoyed and there was irritation in her question:
"Why not, my dear?"
"I don't care for him, mother," said Louise, frankly. "In fact, I believe I rather dislike him. Do you think he is the sort of man I should meet?"
Louise was intensely disappointed that her mother should care to have her meet Jesse. She tried to assure herself that her mother did not know or realize the character of the man as she herself had heard it briefly described by Laura; but she found that a bit difficult to believe.
"Tell me, please, Louise, why you ask me such a question as that," said Mrs. Treharne, irritatedly. "What do you know about Mr. Jesse? Who has been telling you things about him?"
Louise, remaining silent, plainly showed that she did not care to answer her mother's question.
"It was Laura, no doubt," went on Mrs. Treharne. "Laura, I begin to fear, is growing garrulous. You must not permit her to put absurd ideas into your head, my dear. I must speak to her about it."
"Pray do not, mother," said Louise, earnestly. "She is one of the dearest women in the world, and everything that she tells me, I know, is not only perfectly true, but for my good. It is not anything said to me by Laura that makes me dislike the idea of receiving Mr. Jesse. It is simply that I don't like him. There is a boldness, an effrontery, a cynicism, about him that make me distrust him. I don't care for his type of man. That is all."
"You must not fall into the habit of forming sudden prejudices, my dear," said her mother, diplomatically assuming an air of grave persuasiveness. "Mr. Jesse no doubt has had his fling at life. What worth-while man of his age hasn't? But he is a man of mark. He has made his way as few men have. Of course you found him handsome, distingué? Most women do, my dear. And I could see that he was greatly struck with you. You will soon be twenty, Louise; and Mr. Jesse, perhaps I should remind you, is a great parti."
Louise felt herself crimsoning. Her mother did know Jesse's record, then. That was manifest from her words. And yet she was calmly exalting him as an "eligible!"
The girl so shrank from having any further conversation with her mother on the subject just then that she turned to her and said:
"I would not see him of my own volition, mother; but if you very much wish it, I shall see him."
"For heaven's sake, Louise, don't look so terribly austere and crushed over it!" broke out Mrs. Treharne. "The man will not kidnap you! I very much wish that you should be sensible and receive eligible men, of course. Isn't that a perfectly natural wish?"
Louise, without another word, not stopping to remove her turban or even glance in the glass, went down-stairs to receive Jesse. Her mother fluttered past the drawing-room door a moment later, merely stopping for a word of over-effusive greeting to Jesse before joining the waiting Judd in his car. Jesse, whether by accident or from foreknowledge, had timed his visit well. He was quite alone on the floor with Louise Treharne. She caught the gleam of his upraised eyes and noted the bold persistence of the question in them when, still in his fur overcoat, he turned from the contemplation of a picture to greet her.
"Ah," he said with an attempt at airiness, slipping out of the overcoat and extending his hand, "our Empress already has been out?" glancing at her turban and her wind-freshened cheeks. "That is unfortunate. I was about to place my car at her disposal——"
He withdrew his hand, not seeming to notice that Louise had failed to see it.
"Yes, I have been walking," put in Louise, in no wise stiffly, but with an air of preoccupied withdrawal which she genuinely felt. "As to what you call me, I believe I should prefer to be known by my name."
Jesse, remembering what Judd had said as to the likelihood of his being frozen or shrivelled, laughed inwardly. He rather enjoyed being rebuffed by women—at first. It made the game keener. None of them, he remembered now with complaisancy, continued to rebuff him for very long.
"Pardon me, Miss Treharne," he said, with a certain languishing air which Louise found even more offensive than his initial familiarity. "I thought, when the title was so spontaneously applied to you on Sunday night, that perhaps you found it agreeable. But it is difficult to gauge—women." He dwelt upon the word "women," thinking that, considering how recently she had left school, it might flatter her.
Louise chose to talk commonplaces. Her bed-rock genuineness made it impossible for her to affect an interest in a visitor which she did not feel. And her lack of interest in Jesse was complicated by her growing dislike for him.
"I am doubly disappointed," said Jesse after a pause which he did not find embarrassing. Nothing embarrassed Jesse when he had his mind definitely set upon a purpose. "First, I had hoped, as I say, that, not having been out, you would honor me by accepting the use of my car. Second, I am desolated because you are wearing a hat. I had been promising myself another glimpse of your superb hair. Is it banal to put it that way? I am afraid so. But consider the temptation! Was it Aspasia or Cleopatra whose hair was of the glorious shade of yours—or both?"
"Mr. Jesse," said Louise, now quite dégagé, facing him squarely and speaking with the greatest deliberation, "I seem to find, from my two limited conversations with you, that you are suffering under some sort of a misapprehension as to me. You will discover that yourself, I think, if you will take the trouble to recur to several things you already have said to me after an acquaintanceship, all told, of perhaps ten minutes. Suppose we seek a less personal plane? I am too familiar with my hair to care to have it made a subject of extended remarks on the part of men whom I scarcely know. There are less pointed themes. Permit me to suggest that we occupy ourselves in finding them."
"By God, a broadside!" said Jesse to himself, not in the least abashed; his admiration always grew for women who trounced him—at first. "I didn't think she had it in her! And Judd, the fat imbecile, called her an iceberg! She is a volcano!"
Aloud, he said, with a neatly-assumed air of subjection and penitence:
"Well delivered, Miss Treharne. But I merit it. I have made the error of supposing—"
"That my comparatively recent return from school, and the open-mindedness naturally associated with that," Louise quietly interrupted, "made me a fair target for your somewhat labored and not particularly apt compliments. Yes, you erred decisively there."
"Again!" thought Jesse, bubbling with finely-concealed delight. "She is an empress right enough, whether she likes to be called that or not! What a prize!"
Aloud, he said with an air of chastened gravity:
"You do me scant justice there, Miss Treharne, but that is easily passed, seeing how chagrinedly conscious I am that I deserved your rebuke in the first instance. You are fond of motoring?" changing the subject with no great deftness.
"No," replied Louise, sufficiently out of hand. "I don't in the least care for it." The conversation was irksome to her and she would not pretend that it was not.
"I inquired," said Jesse, looking chapfallen though he did not in the least feel so, "because I had been hoping you might do me the honor to accept the use—the steady use—of one of my cars. I have several," this last with an ostentation that rather sickened Louise. But she could not allow the carefully veiled suggestion in his words to pass.
"Mr. Jesse," she said, reverting to her tone of deliberation and again gazing straight at him, "aside from the fact that, as I have told you, I don't in the least care for motoring, will you be good enough to suggest to me just one fairly intelligible reason why I should accept your proffer of the use—'the steady use'—of one of your cars? It may be that you will have some reason to offer for what, otherwise, I should deem a distinct impertinence."
Jesse's eyes gleamed with the joy of it. "What a prize!" he thought again.
"I seem, Miss Treharne," he said with a laugh which he purposely made uneasy, "to be stumbling upon one blunder after another. There is no reason for my having offered you the use of one of my cars—and I hasten to withdraw the offer, since it seems to offend you—other than my friendship of long standing with your mother and my desire—my hope, I was about to say—that you, too, might consider me worthy of your friendship."
It was rather adroitly turned, but it completely missed fire.
"I don't seem to recall that it is necessary for one to adopt one's mother's friends as one's own," said Louise, without the least hesitancy. His assumption of an easily-penetrated ingratiating manner had thoroughly disgusted her; she wanted him to take his departure; and she chose the most straightout means to that end. There was no possible way for her to know that Jesse enjoyed the early taunts of some women much as he relished the cocktails with which he preceded his dinners, and for very much the same reason—they were appetizers.
He rose with an air of irresolution which he was far from feeling.
"I fear," he said, resignedly, "that something has happened—or perhaps that something has been said—to predispose or prejudice you against me, Miss Treharne. It is a conclusion to which I am driven."
He paused, then faced her with an appearance of frankness which he was adept at assuming.
"Miss Treharne," he went on, cleverly adopting a tone with a tremolo note in it, "you will grant, I think, that men—men, that is to say, who cut any sort of figure in affairs"—a flourish here—"often are misjudged. Without in the least desiring to pose as one who has been a victim of such misjudgment, I feel, nevertheless——" Here he stopped, having carefully calculated his stopping point, and, with impulsively extended hands, he went on with a beautifully acted semblance of real feeling: "Miss Treharne, I merely ask you to give me a chance to prove myself; a chance at least to wear the candidate's stripes for your friendship."
Despite her youthfulness and her utter inexperience with men of Jesse's type, Louise, aided by an unusually subtle intuition, and mindful of what she had heard of Jesse, caught the hollow ring in his tone, detected the false shifty light in his now furtive, eager eyes.
She rose.
"You are quite overpoweringly in earnest over what seems to me a very trivial matter, Mr. Jesse," she said with a little laugh that sounded harsh even to her own ears.
"You gravely underestimate the value of your friendship in calling it trivial, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, rising also; for at length he was ready to accept the dismissal which a less thick-skinned man, even of his type, would have taken long before.
"I have not been in the habit of placing any sort of an appraisal upon the value of my friendship," she replied, succinctly.
He thrust his arms into the sleeves of his greatcoat of fur and strolled, with a downcast air, to the drawing-room door.
"This is not your normal mood, Miss Treharne," he said, turning upon her a smile that he meant to be wan. "You see what unresentful justice I do you. There are to be other days. I shall find you in a humor less inclined to magnify my candidly professed demerits. I hope to have an opportunity to prove to you that I have at least a few merits to balance the faults."
The hint was sufficiently broad, but Louise appeared to be momentarily obtuse. At any rate she did not extend the invitation he too patently fished for. Her reticence in that respect, however, did not in the least abash Jesse.
"At least I have the cheering knowledge that this door is open to me," he said, entering the foyer on his way out. "Have I not?"
Unavailingly Louise strove to steady herself in order to thrust back the color which she felt mounting to her face.
"It is not my door," she said in a low tone; and instantly was keenly sorry for having said it.
"Oh, I quite understand that," he said, with an air of lightness, though at the moment he did not dare to turn and look at her. "But it is all the same, since it is your mother's, is it not?"
She made no reply. She felt that she deserved the barb for having given him the opportunity to discharge it. He bowed low, essayed the smile that he considered his most engaging one, and went out to his waiting car.
For the second time after having been in the presence of Langdon Jesse, Louise went to her rooms and threw all the windows wide; then stood in the wintry eddies and permitted the cold, sweet air to enwrap and purify her.
When Mrs. Treharne, after leaving Louise and Jesse together, stepped into the car with Judd, she found that adipose man of finance chuckling softly to himself. She deigned not to inquire of him the reason for his chuckling—knowing, of course, that presently he would be volunteering that information himself.
"That was Jesse's car in front of the house, wasn't it, Tony?" he asked her, still chuckling unpleasantly as the car pulled away from the curb.
"Yes," she replied, alert of a sudden, but disdaining to appear so.
"Jesse is calling to see—er—your daughter, eh?" Judd asked, continuing his rumbling manifestations of joviality.
"He is," replied Mrs. Treharne, carefully screening her impatience to catch Judd's drift. "But I fail to see why that fact should incite you to give vent to such a harrowing series of low comedy chuckles."
"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, soothingly, but not in the least diminishing his choppy cachinnatory performance.
Mrs. Treharne, with an air of disgust which merely screened her worried curiosity, permitted him to continue for a while. Then she said, with an air of gravity intended to drag him back to his naturally sullen state, but assumed also for the purpose of sounding him:
"Jesse was plainly struck with Louise on Sunday night last. Her position now, of course, is hideous. Jesse may be the solution."
Judd straightened himself in his seat and suddenly stopped chuckling. Then he glanced with quizzical keenness out of slitted eyes at his companion.
"Meaning, I suppose," he said, "that you have an idea that Jesse might take it into his head to marry her?"
"What else could I mean?" she asked him huskily.
"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, leaning back in his seat again. "Of course. Certainly. I fully understand you," and he closed his eyes as if about to lapse into a refreshing nap.
Mrs. Treharne, distinctly wrought up, grasped one of the lapels of his seal-lined greatcoat and shook him determinedly.
"Be good enough to explain to me, and at once, precisely what you mean," she said rapidly, a growing hoarseness in her tone.
Judd, for his part, promptly relapsed into his chuckling.
"It is nothing, my dear—nothing at all, I assure you," he said, between wheezes. "Only it strikes me as rather diverting that anybody should consider Jesse in the light of a matrimonial eligible. When, by the way, did you gather the idea that Jesse was a marrying man? Since that—er—somewhat widely-exploited little affair of his in the West Indies last year? Or more recently?"
Judd generally won in the little skirmishes they had in the motor car. The fact that he had won again was plainly indicated by the fact that she remained silent for the remainder of the ride.
CHAPTER VI
Louise, still bound by the discipline of school, was not a late sleeper. As early as seven o'clock on the morning following Langdon Jesse's call she was lying awake, striving to dispel, by the process of optimistic reasoning, the sinister nimbus that seemed to be enshrouding her, when the telephone bell in her dressing room began to ring persistently. Louise sprang up to answer the call.
"I know it is a barbarous hour, dear," Laura's cheerful contralto came over the wire, "but I've just been aroused from my juvenile slumbers by the telephone, and of course I must have revenge upon somebody. Listen, dear: I know that it only takes you about fifteen minutes to dress—of course you are not dressed yet? Well, begin this instant. Put on something for tramping and fussing around in the country. You must be over here by eight o'clock. We are going to have a romping day in the country. Now, hurry, won't you?"
"Just you and I, Laura?" asked Louise, delighted. A day in the country! Open fields to dispel vapors! The thought of it made her eager and excited.
"No, there'll be another," replied Laura. "I disregard the axiom, you know, that 'Three is a crowd.' Three needn't be a crowd if one of the three has a little tact and—and the knack of opportunely vanishing," and Louise heard her soft laughter. "A man I know has what he calls a little tumbledown place, with some ground around it, over in Jersey. He calls it Sullen Manor, because he says he always goes over there, in preference to all other places, when he feels the imperative need to sulk. Now, there is not another moment to be wasted in 'phoning. Start to dress this very instant! Will you solemnly promise me to be here on the stroke of eight? Very well. I shall be waiting. Goodbye."
Louise, "very trig and complete," as Laura remarked, in a suit of grey with a matching fur-trimmed grey toque, was with the astonished Laura a good quarter of an hour before eight.
"Heaven knows how you do it," said Laura, still in the hands of her maid. "Go into the dining-room and have some coffee, dear. I shall be with you directly."
Louise, humming happily at the thought of the care-free day ahead of her, sped into the bright dining room. John Blythe, sipping coffee at the table, rose to meet her. He looked fine and upstanding in his fresh, rough tweeds, his close-shaven face ruddy and his clear grey eyes showing an agate sparkle from the brisk walk to Laura's apartment from his own.
Louise halted abruptly in her astonishment when she saw him. But she was extremely glad to see him and said so frankly, resting her hand in his muscular but gentle clasp for a moment.
"Laura packed me off here to take some coffee," she said. "Does she know you are here? And how early you are abroad in the world. We are stirring about at this sunrise hour because we are going for a day in the country—and I am mad to get there! In my previous incarnation I must have been a milkmaid, for I dearly love the country." Then she added, with a little air of disappointment: "I do wish you were coming with us!"
"That," replied Blythe, smiling his wide smile as he poured coffee for her, "is precisely what I am going to do."
Louise, in the act of taking the cup from him, looked into his face with an expression of pleased mystification on her own.
"Why, what is—how can—" She broke off suddenly and rose from her chair in the intensity of a pleasure which she herself, at that moment, could scarcely have analyzed. "Surely," she went on in a lower tone, her face irradiated by a smile which it thrilled him to observe, "Surely you are not the man who sulks?"
"One of Laura's agreeable fictions," he pronounced. "She calls my little place Sullen Manor, and declares that it is my sulking cave, because I've not had her over there to see it. I've had no chance to ask her until now. Do you mean to say she did not tell you that I was the organizer of this expedition?"
"The secretive creature did not even hint at such a thing," declared Louise, not very successfully pretending to be miffed.
"Now I call that downright neglect of orders," said Blythe, also striving to show a serious face. "I particularly charged Laura to tell you who the party of the third part was to be in order that you might have the privilege of refusing to accompany the expedition in case you so desired. A shocking departure from discipline on Laura's part."
"Then it was you," said Louise, lighter in spirits than she had been for a long time, "who invited me?"
"My dear, don't you know he would say so to you no matter whether it were true or not?" said Laura, who had caught Louise's question, breezing into the dining-room at that moment. "Come on, children. Your antique chaperone is impatient to be on her disregarded way. Louise, have you had your coffee? And some toast? Finish them this instant! Even so ascetic and imaginative a person as Mr. Blythe knows that a girl must have a little breakfast before venturing upon an expedition into the jungles of Jersey."
Laura, perfect in a walking suit of shepherd's plaid and tan walking shoes, had, on this morning, the animation as well as the beauty of a girl. Blythe compared the two as they stood side by side, hastily sipping coffee. Laura, with her Judith-black, glossy hair and fresh, youthful color, and Louise with her thick coils of vivid, velvety auburn and glowing ivory pallor—Blythe thought, studying them for a moment over the rim of his cup, that he had never seen so splendid a contrast.
"Allons!" Laura broke in upon his reflection. "Are we to dawdle here until luncheon time? Already it is," looking at her watch, "twenty-four seconds past eight!"
Blythe, slipping into his greatcoat, turned a solemn face upon Laura when they had reached the hall, outward-bound.
"There is one thing, Laura, in connection with this expedition, that I am keenly sorry for," he said, assuming a sepulchral tone.
"Why, what is that?" asked Laura, a little alarmedly, taken off her guard.
"Well," replied Blythe, still solemn, "you'll only be away from here for about fifteen hours, and how are you possibly going to have your apartment completely redecorated, from forepeak to mizzen, alow and aloft, in that space of time?"
"Tush!" laughed Laura. "There will be plenty of time to have the place done over—and it really does sorely need it, now doesn't it?" this with a wistfulness at which Blythe and Louise laughed, "—when I take Louise to Europe with me in May—less than three months off."
"Am I to go to Europe with you, dear—really?" asked Louise, surprised and pleased; for Laura had said nothing about it before.
"Most assuredly you are," replied Laura, entirely in earnest. "If, that is, you can make up your mind to be burdened by the companionship of one so aged."
The topic was lost in the excitation of their arranging themselves in Laura's car, which was to take them to the ferry. But the thought of it recurred to Louise several times during the ride to the ferry. It was an alluring prospect, barring the obstacles. How could she leave her mother, even for a short time, now that she had rejoined her after a separation of years? Finally she was able to dismiss such cogitations and yield herself to the enjoyment of the day ahead.
It was one of those unseasonably mild days in late February that occasionally "drop in" to point an accusing finger at the harshness of winter. A brilliant sun swam in a cloudless sky, and the soft yet invigorating balminess of late April was, as they noticed when they sped by the Park, deluding the buds of tree and hedge into swelling prematurely and even seducing the willows into a vague, timidly displayed elusive green. Hardy, pioneering robins, advance couriers sent forth to investigate the senile endurance of winter, hopped about the Park sward. School-ward bound boys, out of sight of their homes, were doffing their irksome overcoats, and thrusting them, blanket-wise, at demure little schoolgirls who, in turn, were carrying their stuffy jackets over their arms. Motormen and truckmen were smothering yawns that denoted a premature spring fever. Business-bound men, going more slowly than usual, glancing occasionally at the sky of sapphire, and feeling on their cheeks gusty little zephyrs from the South, thought of fishing "where the wild stream sings." Belated shopgirls, sensing the morning's benign balm as they hurried through crowds, thought of hats and furbelows for the season that, they surmised, was almost upon them.
In the ferry-bound automobile, John Blythe was thinking about a letter hid in the pocket of his coat and wondering how the person whom the letter most concerned would regard its contents. Louise was wondering if her mother would be annoyed over the word she had left with her maid that she would be with Laura for the entire day and part of the evening; occasionally she glanced sidelongwise at John Blythe, when there was no possibility of his catching her at it, and strove vaguely to analyze the sense of power, mingled with kindliness, which his presence diffused. Laura, leaning back, emitting an occasional absurdity, studied them both and wondered, her eyes a little dreamy, if matters ever actually turned out in real life as they did in novels.
They stood on the ferryboat's prow, bathing in the sun's relenting glow and blinking at the gold-tipped river crests; and it was only ten o'clock when, after half an hour's ride on the slam-bang little accommodation train, they debarked at the spick-and-span little station, at the side of which Blythe's care-taker, a grinning but stolid German, had drawn up a fine and comfortable, if old-fashioned, surrey to which was hitched a pair of glossy, mettlesome sorrels.
Louise and Laura felt like clapping their hands when, after the two-mile drive through woodlands and past neat, well-cared-for little farms the clean, sweet-smelling soil of which already was being turned up, they drove on a firm, natural road through a wide wooden gate and came in sight of the pretty Colonial house, with four bright yellow pillars, topped by a balcony of snowy white, with wide-open shutters of an intense green, and a big white double door at the sides of which were little grooved columns surmounted by the inevitable Corinthian capitals. The house, fresh and smart in its old-fashioned way, was roomier than it looked from the front. It was divided by a wide hall which ran its entire length on the ground floor; and a wide stairway ran from the hall in front to the second floor, where, after the Colonial fashion, the balcony gave upon sleeping rooms.
"Sullen Manor," announced Laura, assuming the megaphonic utterance of the sight-seeing car's expounder. "But doesn't it beautifully belie its name and its owner's doldrumish use of it? Why, it is as pretty and cheerful as a pigeon-cote snuggling under sifting cherry blossoms! How much ground is there around the place, John?"
"Twenty acres," replied Blythe, smiling a little gravely. "I suppose I know every foot of the twenty acres, too, though I left here—it is where I was born, you know—when I was seven years old. My father lost the place, you see, through bad investments and what not, when I was at that age. We moved to New Orleans, and a year later both my father and mother were swept off by yellow fever. I only remember them in a shadowy way. Oddly enough, I remember this old place much better than I do my parents; its corners, clumps of trees, and that sort of thing. I had a chance to get the place back a couple of years ago, and I seized it. A good deal of the gear that was here when I was a tyke is still here, stowed in the attic; for the place has not been often occupied since we left it. I've refurnished it in a sort of a way. I hope you'll not find it so bad, Laura; but I'm prepared right now to wilt under your superior, and, I might say, your inveterate knowledge of interior decoration."
Blythe looked a bit self-disdainful over what had been rather a long speech for him, particularly when he observed that Louise had been waiting to ask him something.
"You will not think me inquisitive, Mr. Blythe?" she prefaced. "But what you said about the—the carrying away of your people by yellow fever not only touched me but aroused my curiosity. You were only a child then, of course. What did you do then? Were you taken in hand by relatives? You are not annoyed because I ask?"
"Why should I be?" Blythe laughed. "Particularly when the reply is so simple. I have no relatives—had none then. When my people died I was on the streets. I believe I hold the record yet for the number of New Orleans Picayunes and Times-Democrats sold in a given time. Whatever else I became later, I certainly was a hustling newsboy. Then I came up here and I've been working ever since. My annals, you see, Miss Treharne, are distinctly dry."
"But your education?" Louise asked, her eyes alight with an interest which caused Laura to smile.
"Well," said Blythe, "there are plenty of people living in Princeton yet, I think, who will tell you, if ever you take the pains to inquire, that I was an exceptionally successful furnace-tender, tinker, chore-doer, and all-round roustabout. Oh, yes, I forget. I was a persuasive peddler of soap and starch before the Lord, too. Likewise, I acquired the knack of mending umbrellas. Not to overlook the fact that, odd times, I drove a village hack. At Princeton, in short, I was virtually everything and anything you can think of except a barber and a policeman. I shied at those two occupations."
"And you took your degree?" inquired Louise.
"Just squeezed through," replied Blythe.
"Don't you believe anything of the sort, Louise," put in Laura. "He was valedictorian of his class, and, worse than that, he played full-back with his eleven, and a sensational full-back too. I ought to know. I am old enough, woe is me, to have been a woman grown the year John Blythe contributed a good three-fifths to the Tigers' victory over Yale."
Blythe, flushing embarrassedly, was holding up a protesting hand when the surrey drew up in front of the clean, scrubbed porch and the care-taker's wife, a freshly-ginghamed, bright-eyed German woman of middle age, appeared to receive them. Then, from around the left side of the house, a terrific yipping began. Two hysterically joyous fox terriers, scenting their master, came tearing around the porch and literally leaped upon Blythe. Then they "side-wheeled" in circles over the lawn, first listing precariously over on starboard legs and then on port, whimpering in their sheer delight as they tore around. A huge Angora cat, as they entered the hall, made two bounds of it from the huge fireplace, from which a pair of smouldering logs diffused a red glow that contrasted oddly with the streaming sunlight, to rub her sides, purring almost vociferously as she did so, against Blythe's trousers legs. Later in the day, she was solemnly to conduct Blythe and his guests to the cellar for the purpose of exhibiting a litter which kept the women chained around the basket for nearly an hour.
In the lives of most men and women there are days—usually unanticipated days—so encompassed, aureoled, by a memorable happiness that, ever afterward, in hours of retrospection, they mark the beginning or denote the closing of the eventful periods.
This was such a day for Blythe and Louise and Laura. They rambled through miles of field and forest, chattering and laughing like children a-berrying; the women's hair blowing free or tumbling down altogether, their skirts caught by brambles, their deadliest fears aroused by the inevitable ruminative cow. They climbed fences, while Blythe pretended that something had just dropped out of his pocket back of him. They romped with the dogs, they tossed pebbles at a mark in a garrulous little just-thawed stream, they even sat down on an inviting little mound, beneath an old elm, and played at mumblety-peg with Blythe's jack-knife and quarrelled laughingly over the score of the game.
When they returned to the house in mid-afternoon, they found the German woman preparing a meal for them. Laura and Louise insisted upon helping her. In fact, they banished her from the kitchen altogether and did it all themselves. Louise announced, her features set rather determinedly, that she was going to make some biscuits, whereupon Blythe, asking her if she'd learned that in the cooking class at Miss Mayhew's school, incontinently fled in well-simulated alarm. But he came back to the spotless kitchen to watch the two women, aproned to the neck, and their arms bared to the shoulders, breeze about with their preparations. He was repaid for his inquisitiveness by being swaddled in an apron and set to peel the potatoes.
The meal was an unqualified success, including the biscuits, which, to Louise's intense surprise, were superb, although Blythe impertinently maintained that the German woman really had made them and that Louise had merely heated them over. The light began to fall as they chatted around the table, and Blythe, having no great liking for oil lamps, tossed logs on to the dining-room fireplace for the flickering glow of their light. Blythe lighted a cigar with his coffee and fell into a silence of content when Louise and Laura began to hum, very low, snatches of old songs in unison; Laura in her deep, moving contralto, with an appealing little "break" in it, and Louise in a clear, sweet soprano—she had been the honor girl of her school for her singing.
"More," Blythe would give the repressed command when they ceased; and they would willingly obey. After a while, darkness having quite fallen, Laura went to another part of the house for her after-dinner cigarette. She made it a practice not to take her cigarettes in the presence of quite young women.
Blythe, silent enough now, and his silence tacitly concurred in by Louise, who also had become preoccupied, under the spell of the flickering fire-light and her nearness, alone, to a man who made a strong appeal to her imagination, brought up a deep leather chair before the logs and motioned to Louise to take it. But she pulled an old-fashioned three-legged footstool before the fire, and Blythe himself had to take the chair. Thus they sat silent for a while, listening to the sputtering of the green logs.
"Louise."
It was the first time he had called her that. But she did not even turn her head. She was sitting near him on the low stool, chin in palm, her face illumined by the fire's glow. It was agreeable to hear him call her Louise. He knew her father. She had been thinking of her father while she and Laura were singing softly.
"Yes," she said, quietly.
"I am to be your guardian, Louise. Does that please you?"
Blythe, leaning back in the deep chair, did not take his eyes from the murmuring logs. Louise, chin still in palm, turned to look at him calmly. Then she gazed back into the fire.
"Yes," she replied, no surprise in her tone. Perhaps, she thought whimsically, the dancing, leaping flames had hypnotized her. But she was not surprised. She was, instead, swept by a surge of deep gladness. "You have a letter from my father?"
"Two," said Blythe. "One of them is for you."
She moved her little stool close to his chair and he handed her the packet. The letter for her was under cover of the letter addressed to Blythe. Louise studied, in the fire's glow, the bold, clear address on the envelope. It was the first time she had ever seen her father's handwriting. Her eyes became slightly suffused at that thought. Her letter dropped out of the larger envelope.
"If you care to, read the one addressed to me first, Louise," said Blythe.
Louise, turning a bit the better to catch the fire's glow, read her father's letter addressed to Blythe—as far as she could read it. She was nearly at the end when her unshed tears blinded her. Blythe's hand, which she then felt, without surprise, softly clasping both of her own as they rested in her lap, felt very cool and soothing to her.
After a while, nothing having been said by either, she broke the envelope and read her father's letter to her. It was not a long letter, but it took her a long time to read it; the tears would blot out the words, try as she would to crowd them back.
Her father's letter to Blythe was couched in the tone a man assumes in addressing his lawyer who also is his friend. It bore the postmark of Lahaina, Island of Maui, Hawaii—George Treharne's sugar plantations were on that island of the Hawaiian group. The letter concerned Louise wholly. He was tied to his plantations, owing to labor troubles with the Japanese, and there was no possibility of his visiting the States for some time. He had been surprised to hear that Louise had left school. She was now a woman grown. He had looked forward to the time when, he hoped, she might feel an impulse to come to him. If that time had not yet come he trusted implicitly to Blythe to see that she should be properly bestowed, placed in a fitting environment, and shielded from baneful influences. He knew that Blythe, the young partner of his old lawyer, now dead, would not fail him in this. He desired that Blythe should apply immediately for a court order appointing him his daughter's legal guardian. He inclosed the necessary papers for the accomplishment of that purpose. He was eager to see his daughter, and hoped to see her within a year. In the meantime he confidently committed her to Blythe's watchful guardianship.
His letter to Louise bespoke a deep and solicitous affection. He told her of Blythe, adverting to him in terms of praise as a man of exalted honor ("Poor father! as if I did not know that," thought Louise, when she came to that passage), and beseeching her to follow Blythe's advice in all matters in which his large experience would be invaluable to her. He added that he felt that she would not find Blythe's suggestions irksome. He inclosed a draft on a Honolulu bank for five thousand dollars, which would suffice for her needs until she heard from him again. He hoped to see her within a year. And he was hoping that she would be glad to see her "always-affectionate father, George Treharne."
At length Louise conquered her tears and turned a fire-illumined smile upon Blythe.
"I am glad," she said simply. "Even before you told me, this had been the happiest day of my life. Now it is beautiful. I cannot even begin to tell you how beautiful it is."
"Then I shall apply for the guardianship, Louise," said Blythe. "I wish I could say how it pleases me to know you are willing that I should."
"Willing?" said Louise. "Do you know that, aside from Laura, you are the only—" She had been close to saying "friend;" but she could not leave her mother out in that way;—"the only adviser I have?"
Blythe, glancing from the logs into her eyes as she said that, longed to take her in his arms.
Laura, at the piano in the music room on the other side of the hall, began softly to play the barcarole from "The Tales of Hoffmann." They listened for a little while, and then Blythe said, smiling gravely:
"As your father says, I shall not be, I hope, an exacting guardian. There are many things upon which I shall not touch at all. I shall not affect to believe that you do not know what I mean."
"I know," said Louise.
"Your duty is that to which your heart prompts you—I know that," said Blythe. "It is not for me, nor for anyone else, to seek to alter your conception of your duty. All that I ask is that you call upon me in your time of need, if that time should ever come; and I hope it never shall. For the rest, nothing is to be changed at my suggestion. The scroll is in your hands, Louise. Only when you need me—I shall not fail you then."
"Would it be unworthy," she asked him after a pause, "if I were not to tell my father—just yet—that I am living with my mother?"
Blythe knew what a hard question that had been for her to ask.
"Not unworthy, or anything like it, I think," he replied promptly, "when the motive is so pure and fine."
Impulsively she rose and held out both of her hands and he took them in his.
"Call Laura," she said. "I want to tell her. I want my guardian angel to meet my guardian."
Laura came into the room as she spoke. She walked over to Louise and placed an arm around her.
"I knew it, dear," she said to Louise. "John told me last night. That is why we are over here. He thought, and I agreed with him, that it would be better to tell you at the close of a happy day. And was there ever such a happy day since the world began?"
Blythe looked at his watch and whistled.
"We've half an hour to make the last New York train tonight, and a two-mile drive to the station," he said. "If we miss the train we'll have to stay here all night."
Laura gathered up her skirts and raced for her hat, Louise after her.
"Stay here all night!" gasped Laura. "You are making a glorious beginning as a guardian, aren't you!"
It was past ten o'clock when Louise, in Laura's car, which had been waiting at the ferry, reached the house on the Drive, Laura having been dropped at her apartment. The sheer happiness of the day still absorbed her. Up to the moment when the car pulled up at the curb she had been going over and over, since parting with Blythe and Laura, the incidents of the day that had made it such an oasis of happiness.
But it all disappeared like a suddenly-vanishing mirage when, upon stepping to the pavement, she saw Langdon Jesse's car drawn up at the curb.
CHAPTER VII
Jesse's car looming suddenly upon her, instantly dissolved Louise's happy absorption and aroused within her the foreboding that she was upon the threshold of something sinister; and the premonition caused her to become physically and mentally tense as she ascended the steps.
The impact of the hall's stream of light slightly blinded and confused her as she entered; but she very soon discerned Jesse and Judd standing before the wide, brassy fireplace. Both were in shaggy automobile coats and plainly were about to leave the house. Judd, his burnished bald pate mottledly rosy from the heat of the blazing logs, was standing with his back to the fire, his hands thrust in the greatcoat pockets, his heavy under-shot jaw working upon an imaginary cud. Jesse, towering over the other man, but his own increasing over-bulkiness made more manifest by his bulging coat of fur, was the first to see Louise, who, with an inclination of the head, was for passing them to gain the stairs. Neither Jesse nor Judd intended that this should be. The two had dined together. The blitheness of their humor, therefore, contained also a seasoning of carelessness.
Without the least movement of his grotesquely-paunched body, Judd turned his head sidewise and viewed Louise quizzically through his sharp, red-rimmed, oddly small eyes.
"Evening—er—daughter," he said to her in an experimental but sufficiently matter-of-fact tone.
The greeting sounded so incredible that Louise, coming to a sudden halt, rested her hands on the back of a chair and stared curiously at him without a word. She felt very cold, in spite of the excessive heat of the hall; but she was amazed quite beyond the power of speech. While thus she stood, staring puzzledly at Judd, Jesse faced her, and, bringing his heels together with a click, made her a low bow accompanied by a sweeping cross-wise gesture with his cap of fur. It is a dangerous thing for a man to attempt the grand manner unless he is very sure of his practice or at least of the indulgence of his gallery. Louise, startled as she was, could not fail to notice the inadequacy of his attempt.
"Glad I haven't missed you, after all, Lou—Miss Treharne," said Jesse, catching himself before he had quite finished addressing her by her first name. His tone was grossly familiar; and Louise, merely glancing at him, saw that the question that was always in his eyes when he looked at her now was made more searching and persistent by his potations. "I've been dallying a-purpose. I came to offer you the use of my box for 'Pelleas and Melisande'—it's being done at the Manhattan tonight for the first time here, of course you know. They're repeating it Friday night, though. Mary Garden's a dream in it, they say—she's a dream in any old thing—or hardly anything, when it comes to that," and he laughed boldly at the suggestiveness of the remark. "The box is yours for Friday night. May I hope to join——"
Louise, as he spoke, had been steadying herself to make reply. Now she raised a hand for him to desist. The gesture was simple, but he obeyed the implied command. Perhaps it was the picture that she made in her anger that warned him. She stood straight, shoulders back, head up, eyes gazing unflinchingly into his; a moving figure of womanly dauntlessness, had there been eyes there thus to appraise her attitude.
"Mr. Jesse," she said in a clear tone, picking her words with a cutting deliberation, "you are not, I have heard, deficient in intelligence. A very short time ago you had the hardihood to proffer me the use of one of your cars. I declined for the same reason that I now repeat in refusing your proffer of the use of your opera box. There is no imaginable reason why I should accept such favors at your hands. I told you that before. And you knew it before I told you. My acquaintanceship with you is merely casual. But, since you force me to it by disregarding what I said before, permit me to say now, explicitly and I hope finally, that I am not conscious of the least desire to become further acquainted with you."
Judd choked on a gloatful cough. While Louise had been speaking he had been grinning malevolently at Jesse, the grin saying, as plainly as words: "Well, I was right, wasn't I? You're properly shrivelled, aren't you?"
Jesse smiled chagrinedly and, as he imagined, conciliatingly. But he evaded her direct gaze, and his wholly unconvincing assumption of the grand manner had quite departed. He was not, however, appreciably disturbed. Jesse had a habit of discounting such setbacks in advance. The stock market and women required deft manipulation, he considered, and his fame as a manipulator was established. The citadel, finally scaled, would be the more inviting for the difficulty of the besiegement. He entertained no doubts as to the outcome. In the meantime Louise could enjoy her schoolgirl heroics. He was not unfamiliar with that sort of thing. But in time they all sensed the glamour of the advantages he so well knew how to dangle before them. These thoughts danced agreeably before Jesse's mental vision even at the moment when he felt himself, with no sense of degradation, to be the target of Louise's scorn.
"Well, I am sorry, Miss Treharne, that you still seem to misunderstand me," said Jesse, attempting the tone of one whose sorrow overtops his mortification.
"It is because I do understand you that I speak as I do," replied Louise with perfect self-possession. Judd choked again in the gleefulness of his vindication and Jesse shot him a malignant glance. Then and there Jesse began to outline a little plan whereby, by means of "market" pressure, he calculated that he could promptly and effectually change Judd's attitude.
"I prefer to believe, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, "that you are indisposed and that upon reflection you will be sorry that——"
"I am perfectly well," interposed Louise in a tone of cold finality, "and I shall not be sorry." Then she passed up the stairs to her mother's apartments.
"Now will you be good!" broke out Judd, chuckling vindictively, when she had gone. "Say, Jesse, I wonder if you feel so much like a clipped and trimmed Lothario as you look?"
Jesse, his mask off, growled something inarticulate by way of reply. Then: "Are you for the club?" he asked Judd. He decided that he might as well test the strength of the screws upon Judd at once. They went out together.
Mrs. Treharne, dressed for a restaurant supper party that was to assemble at midnight, was reading, with the wistfulness of one debarred, the "society news" in a chattery and generally wrong weekly publication when Louise entered her sitting room. She was wonderfully coiffured, and encased in a décolletté dress that somewhat too liberately exploited the chisellings of her still milky arms and shoulders. She stiffened slightly in her chair at the sight of Louise; and the dimplings which had been creasing her plastic face in her enjoyment of the publication's malevolent gossip gave way to the expression of peevishness with which her daughter was becoming all too well acquainted.
"Well, my dear," she started to say as Louise, in whose eyes the embers of the wrath Jesse's words had aroused still slumbered, "I must say that you have a cool way of walking off and——"
"No reproaches just now, mother, please," interposed Louise, sinking wearily into a chair. "I never had a happier day until, returning here——"
She paused, passing a hand before her eyes. She was loth to enter upon the topic of Judd and Jesse with her mother. But Mrs. Treharne, looking at her more closely, saw her perturbation.
"Oh, you met Mr. Judd and Mr. Jesse as you came in?" she asked, a note of slightly worried curiosity in her tone. "Were they——?" She broke off. "Men are men, my dear," she resumed, placatingly. "They had been dining—I noticed that. But of course they said nothing to——"
"Your business adviser," said Louise—she could not bring herself to mention Judd's name—"greeted me as 'daughter.' I remember now that I was too much startled to tell him that he must not repeat that."
"Tush, Louise—a slip of the tongue, of course," said Mrs. Treharne, appeasingly. Privately, however, she already began to contrive the things she intended to say to Judd on the morrow. "And Mr. Jesse—did he——"
"Mr. Jesse," interposed Louise, "caught himself as he was about to address me as Louise. He offered me the use of his box at the opera. Several days ago—I was too chagrined to tell you—he insisted upon my accepting the use of one of his automobiles. I hope I made it plain to him tonight—and I tried hard enough to make it plain to him before—that there is not the remotest chance that I shall ever accept his sinister civilities."
"Why 'sinister,' Louise?" put Mrs. Treharne, bridling. "How can you possibly put such a construction upon it when one of my friends generously extends to you courtesies that are commonly and with perfect propriety accepted by——"
Louise sighed wearily and held up a pleading hand.
"Don't ask me such a question—please, mother," she entreated. "You don't know how the subject revolts me."
"But, my dear," her mother persisted, "what is it that you have against Mr. Jesse? I am entitled to know."
"I am not sufficiently interested in the man to have anything against him," replied Louise. "Is it not enough that I loathe him?"
"No, Louise, it is not enough," pronounced her mother, plainly ready for argument on the subject. "You are too young a woman to be forming prejudices or leaping to conclusions. What do you know about Mr. Jesse that has caused you to form such an opinion of him?"
Louise hesitated. Her intimacy with her mother had never been very great. There had never been any plain talk, or even mother-and-daughter confidences, between them. The theme as she had said, was revolting to her. But her mother deliberately chose to remain on that ground. There was no path around the point her mother dwelt upon. Louise entertained no thought of evading it.
"Mother," she said, leaning forward in her earnestness, "it is natural enough, I know, that you still regard me as a child. But, before I answer your question, are you willing to grant, at least for the time, that I am a woman?"
"Don't be so unmitigatedly solemn about it, Louise," demurred her mother, evasively. "My question was simple enough."
"Simple enough to put, but not so simple for me to answer," was Louise's quiet reply. "But I shall answer it nevertheless. The reason, then, why I do not intend to have any further contact with Langdon Jesse is that he is one of the most notorious libertines in New York; a man who regards women from a single angle—as his prey. Everybody seems to know that, mother, except you: and you don't know it, do you?" There was a pathos in the eagerness with which the girl asked the question; it spoke of a dim hope she yet had that perhaps, after all, her mother did not know about Langdon Jesse. Her mother's harsh, dodging reply quickly dashed that hope.
"Who has been telling you such scandalous things, child?" Mrs. Treharne demanded. "Laura Stedham?"
"You must not ask me that question," replied Louise, quietly firm. "But if nobody had told me about Langdon Jesse—and I shall not deny that I was told—I am sure my instinct would have taught me to suspect him of being—precisely what he is."
Mrs. Treharne shook her head dismally.
"It is exactly as I feared it would be, Louise," she said, sighing drearily. "You are narrow, restricted, pent-in; you haven't even a symptom of bigness of view; your horizon is no wider than the room in which you happen to be. I always feared they would make a prude of you. Now I see that my forebodings were right."
Louise, very much wrought upon, rose rather unsteadily and walked over to her mother's chair.
"You repel me a little, mother," she said in a low tone. "It hurts me to say that: but it is the truth. If I am a prude, then I am unconscious of it. It may be that I don't know your definition of the word." She paused and gazed about the room wearily. "If to be a prude," she resumed, "is to be conscious of the desire and the intention to be an honest woman, then, mother, I am a prude," her voice breaking a little. "And if one must be a prude to recoil from the hideous advances of a man like Langdon Jesse, then again I am a prude."
She had been unfairly placed on the defensive. She had not meant to wound. But, while her words cut her mother like the impact of thongs, they did not arouse within her a sense of the humiliation of her position.
"Louise," she asked, hoarsely, moistening her dry lips, "are you saying these—these stinging things with the deliberate purpose of reflecting upon your mother?"
Addressed to anybody else but Louise, the question would have been absurd in the opening it afforded.
"I should hate to have you think that," replied Louise, flushing hotly and taking her mother's hands. "You don't think such a thing, do you?"
"I don't know what to think," said her mother, taking the martyred tone, "when you say such horrid things. I never heard you say such—such flaying things before. I can't think what is coming over you."
"I am very lonesome, for one thing," said Louise, looking at her mother through suffused eyes. "I see so little of you. Perhaps I become moody. But I never mean, never meant, to say anything to hurt you, dear."
"But you see enough, if not too much, of—of others, Louise," put in her mother, slightly mollified. "You have been with Laura ever since early this morning?"
"Yes; with Laura—and another," replied Louise, unfailingly candid.
"Another?" said Mrs. Treharne, querulously. "Whom do you mean?"
"Mr. John Blythe," replied Louise, coloring.
"John Blythe?" said her mother, wonderingly. "You were with Laura and John Blythe? So that is the direction of the wind? Laura is trying to——" She broke off when she saw the expression of pain on her daughter's face.
"Please don't say that," said Louise, her face and forehead a vivid crimson. "I have often met Mr. Blythe at Laura's. I couldn't begin to tell you how I esteem him. And, mother, he is to be my guardian." She had meant to tell her mother that at a more fitting time; but, since Blythe's name had come up, she discerned that there could be no excuse for a postponement of the revelation.
Mrs. Treharne gazed at her daughter with mouth agape. When she finally spoke her words were almost inarticulate.
"Your guardian?" she gasped. "John Blythe is to be your guardian? At whose direction? Upon whose application?"
"My father's, mother."
"But are you sure that you are not being tricked—that——"
"John Blythe is not the man to trick anybody, dear—everybody, of course, knows that," said Louise, very prompt to a defense in that quarter. "Moreover, I saw the letters from my father. One of them is to me. So there is no mistake about it."
"What does your father say in his letter?" asked Mrs. Treharne, suspiciously. "Does he mention me? say anything to my detriment?"
"Nothing of that sort, mother," replied Louise, disliking exceedingly the drift of the conversation. "Mr. Blythe's guardianship is to be largely a matter of form. I—I am glad the arrangement has been made. There are times when I feel that I need guidance. You are so busy and I so much dislike to worry you. Often, since I came home, I've found myself wishing that I had a brother." She stopped, her voice faltering.
Mrs. Treharne started slightly, swept by the thought of how often she had wished that Louise herself had been a son. Now, for the moment, she repented that thought; the dignity and strength of her daughter were making their appeal to her. She had her periods of fairness, and she could not throttle her consciousness of the wretchedness of Louise's position under that roof nor subdue the accusing inner voice that held her solely responsible for it. She trembled with indignation when she remembered that Judd had dared to address Louise as "daughter." She raged at herself for not possessing the strength to cast the Judd incubus from her once and forever. And she ended, as usual, by giving way to an effusion of dismal tears and by promising herself that "some time—some day——"
Louise went to bed with a disturbed mind. She was trying not to face the indubitable fact that her mother was proving herself but a reed to lean upon. Then her drowsy thoughts wandered to the fire-lit dining-room of the serene old house in the country in and around which she had spent a day marked by a sort of placid happiness which she could not quite analyze; and her last thought, before succumbing to unquiet dreams based upon the events at the end of the day, were of a rugged, kindly-faced man quietly watching her as she read her father's letter by the flickering light of the droning logs.
Judd, still chuckling viciously, continued to taunt the rebuked but by no means cast-down Jesse after the two had got into Jesse's car.
"Not saying much, are you, old top?" he gurgled joyously as the car throbbed away from the curb. "Well, I don't blame you. Not, of course, that I didn't give you fair warning. I told you you'd be frozen stiff if you tried on any of your Don Juanish airs and graces in that quarter. But don't take it to heart—don't grieve over it. You'll thaw out again in time. Right now I wouldn't dare take a chance on touching you for fear one of your arms or something'd drop off. But you'll thaw—you'll thaw," and he squirmed and wabbled around in his seat in the excess of his mirth.
Jesse, gnawing on an unlighted cigar as was his wont when temporarily eclipsed or engaged in blocking out a campaign, listened in silence. When it becomes the unfailing habit of a man to enjoy the last laugh he learns to pay little heed to the too-previous chirrupings of those over whom he feels confident of eventually triumphing. So he permitted Judd to enjoy himself. When the chuckles of his companion gradually ceased, however, he said, drily enough:
"To all intents and purposes she's a dependent of yours, isn't she?"
Judd parried the question. He was indifferent enough as to what might happen to Louise Treharne: he regarded her as an interloper, and he was disgruntled over her studiously aloof treatment of him. But it had become a habit with him to parry Jesse's questions since the occasion when his over-expansiveness in replying to a few seemingly innocent and unmeditated questions from Jesse had resulted in the sound "market" trouncing which his one-time pupil had inflicted upon him.
"What the devil difference does it make?" was Judd's reply. "She has your number all right, and that's all you need to know, isn't it?" and he chuckled again.
Jesse waited again until Judd's glee had subsided, then resumed.
"She has to look to you to make provision for her needs—clothes, hats, ribbons, furbelows, that sort of thing—doesn't she?" he inquired with the coolness of one who does not mean to be rebuffed.
"Oh, forget it," said Judd, a little grumpily now. "Don't try to pin me, Jesse. I don't spout about these things. She's living under one of my roofs, is a member of one of my households. And she regards you as—well, as a considerably-drowned water-bug. Why don't you let it go at that? There are more women in the world than there are red ants or railroad ties. Can't you take your medicine—stand for the defeat?"
"Not in this particular case," was Jesse's perfectly frank reply; he could be frank when there was no possibility of a "come-back." "What's more, I don't intend to. Just make up your mind to that, will you?"
"Oho!" said Judd, struck by the intentional rawness which Jesse had put into his last phrase. "That's the tune, is it?"
"That house of yours on the Drive isn't the place for the young woman," said Jesse. Judd knew that he wasn't assuming any virtuous strain, but merely leading up to a point. "You ought to know that—as the father of a family."
"You're becoming confoundedly erect in your ideas, aren't you?" snorted Judd. "And I've told you before that I won't have you dabbling in my private affairs. Just cut out your harpings, in this connection, upon my family and all of that sort of thing, understand?"
"Damn your private affairs," said Jesse, quietly, but with a note of meaningfulness in his tone that caused Judd to sit up and take immediate notice. "I am no more interested in your private affairs than I am in the transactions of the Congo Missionary Society. But I repeat that your—er—that Mrs. Treharne's daughter doesn't belong under that Riverside Drive roof. Do you understand me?"
"No," said Judd, "I don't," nor did he. But he no longer chuckled.
"I think you've told me several times," Jesse went on calmly, "that the young woman flaunts you?"
Judd made some inarticulate reply which Jesse took for an affirmative.
"That being the case," inquired Jesse, "why do you keep her around the place?"
"What's your idea—that I should turn her into the street?" asked Judd, gradually getting a hold on Jesse's thread.
"Oh, she wouldn't be in the street very long," said Jesse with significant emphasis. "But, since on your own say-so she scarcely even nods to you, and you are paying the freight, what's the answer? Doesn't she know that she's dependent upon you?"
"How the devil could she help knowing it?" broke out Judd impatiently. "She has eyes and what belongs to her by way of brains, I suppose."
"Well," said Jesse, "if she cuts in on your—your game, and is such a nuisance to you, why don't you exert your authority—the authority of the provider—and——" He hesitated.
"And what?" inquired Judd, proddingly.
"Make provision for her—not necessarily luxurious provision—under some other roof?" said Jesse. "In a modest little apartment, for example, with just the necessaries and that sort of thing. That would alter her demeanor toward you—and toward others. Once they've enjoyed the gewgaws of life the other thing is a come-down and they feel the sordid misery of it."
Judd studied.
"You're a deep sort of a reprobate, Jesse," he said, musingly, after a pause. "I don't profess to be able to plumb some features of your scoundrelism, and yet I've never been accused of being uncommonly dense. How the devil would my planting the young woman in a miserable little six-by-eight flat help your case?"
"That," coolly replied Jesse, "is my affair; but you exhibit your denseness, at that, in asking such a fool question. It wouldn't take her long to begin to pine for the light and laughter and lavishness of life after she'd had a taste of the miserable little six-by-eight flat as you call it, would it?"
"And when she did begin to pine that's where you'd come in, eh?" said Judd. "Yes, it was pretty thick of me not to catch your drift, I'll admit. But I guess I'll keep out of it. You can conduct your own damned round-ups. You've got your nerve with you to ask me to figure in any such a dirty subtle scheme as that, haven't you?" He spoke more in resentment of Jesse's overbearing tone than from any profound sense of the contemptibleness of Jesse's suggestion.
Jesse lit his cigar and said nothing for a while. Then, puffing hard so that the glow of his cigar lit up his stolid waxy face, he said:
"I hear you're carrying a pretty nifty line of cotton, Judd, and that you're still buying. Waiting for cotton to touch sixteen cents, eh?"
Judd cocked his ears.
"Well," he said, moistening his lips, "I haven't got anything on you. You're carrying ten bales when I'm only carrying one."
"Is that so?" lied Jesse with perfect serenity. "Well, you're entitled to have your dream out, of course. But it so happens that I am not carrying even one bale."
Judd sat up straight in his seat.
"Well?" he asked, huskily.
"Well, what?" asked Jesse.
"What are you shooting at?" inquired Judd. "Do you mean to say you're going to take the bear end of it?"
"I don't mean to say anything of the sort," replied Jesse. "And you don't suppose I'd go around placarding the fact if that was my intention, do you? I'm merely out of the market for the present, that's all. But you're in, eh, and waiting for sixteen cent cotton?"
The screws were working all right. Jesse saw that. It was chilly in the automobile, but Judd was mopping a damp brow.
"If I ever do break into that market," Jesse went on clinchingly but in the same even tone he had been using, "you want to watch my smoke. That's all."
Judd, in a cold tremor, resolved to unload his line of cotton as soon as the market opened on the morrow. Also he decided that it wouldn't be any impolitic thing for him to placate Jesse in the immediate meanwhile.
"Well, if I have been dense, I'm not now," he said, reflectively. "I understand you all right."
"I thought you would," said Jesse, tossing his cigar out of the car window.
Despite her natural reserve and the reticence, born of keen humiliation, which she maintained in respect of her mother's affairs, Louise, feeling the need of an experienced woman's counsel, gave to Laura Stedham, her one woman friend in need, a somewhat guarded account of her meeting with Jesse and Judd upon her return from the day in the country. Laura listened to the story in a sort of silent rage. She was not a woman to rant, and even if she had been, the recital that Louise gave her, with the wretched details which Laura could guess at, of her gradual hemming in at the Riverside Drive house, filled the other woman with a sense of anger and disgust beyond the mere power of words. Louise had not previously told Laura of Langdon's proffering her the use of an automobile; she feared that Laura's wrath and alarm over that would be directed against her mother for having made such a situation possible; and her loyalty to her mother never wavered.
At the close of her story, which she gave to Laura in a quiet, rather hopeless way that the older woman found pathetic to a degree, Louise, in a moment of inadvertence, let fall how Judd had greeted her as "daughter." Laura flared at that. But she held herself in, and she asked Louise, quietly enough:
"My dear, there is one thing that I want to ask you. I hope you won't think me intrusive for asking it. It is this: Just why are you remaining at that house? You know the—the circumstances there. I am not trying to influence you. But I want you to tell me just why, since you cannot change the conditions, you deem it necessary to go on living there?"
Louise replied without hesitation.
"I don't lose hope that I may be able to change the conditions some time, dear," she replied. "There would be no use in my staying with my mother if I did not possess that hope."
"But," asked Laura, not pressingly, but with a grave, interested earnestness, "don't you think your chance to change the conditions is almost negligible? Just how can you possibly expect such a change ever to come about?"
"I am hoping," Louise answered bravely, but coloring, "that, if I stay on with my mother, sooner or later she will become ash——"; she could not finish the word "ashamed;"——"she will come to a realization of herself," she took up the thread, "of what the conditions in which she lives mean; of what, eventually, they must bring her to, and bring me to, also. Often I think that she doesn't view it as I do—as we do. She is drifting. She told me that she was. She has lost her moorings. I want to bring her back. I am the only one who could bring her back, am I not? And I can't leave her as long as there is a chance to do that."
"But your own life, dear?" interposed Laura. "You must consider that, you know. You are a very young woman. There is no reason why you should be dragged down."
"I shall not be," replied Louise. "And, if my mother is to be dragged down, if she is to continue in this way, of what use would my life ever be to me? I never could be happy with her in such surroundings, could I? There is only one thing for me to do, dear; stay with her until she sees it all. I know that she will understand sooner or later. She can't help it. She's bound to—to change. I want to help her. I don't ever say anything to her, of course. It would be impossible for me to do that. But she isn't happy as she is now. My mother and I will have a dear, cosy, happy life together yet, Laura, never fear."
Laura pretended that some pictures on a mantel needed straightening in order to hide her suffused eyes.
"All the same, Louise," she said, resuming her seat after a little while, "Mr. Blythe is entitled to know these things that you have told me. And you should have the benefit of his advice. He not only is your guardian, but he is a man—a regular man—and your—oh, well, I do not need to say that he is your friend, do I?" smiling.
"I meant to tell him," replied Louise, turning to gaze out of the window.
"Oh, you did, dear?" said Laura, teasingly. "Then my advising you to tell him was superfluous, wasn't it? I wonder why you decided to tell him, Louise?"
"Because——" Louise started to reply. But she did not finish, for at that instant John Blythe, in riding dress, walked into the room.
CHAPTER VIII
Laura glanced wistfully at Blythe's riding clothes.
"I suppose you come here in that apparel to tantalize me, knowing that my odious, ogreish medical man has absolutely forbidden me to ride for the present," she said to him in mock reproach. "There is nothing in the least subtle about that doctor man. He wants to buy my horse. That's why he has forbidden me to ride. But I am going to thwart him by turning Scamp over to Louise. You ride, of course, dear?"
Louise smiled her gratitude. She had become a finished rider as a young girl during the periods when her mother would abandon her improvident life in the city and retire to the country to enable her income partially to catch up with her expenditures.
"I've been trying the most ambitious horse I ever saw," said Blythe, very much the wholesome, out-of-doors looking man, dropping into a chair. "If I buy him—and I'm going to think that over carefully—I think I shall call him The Climber. He was very keen to accompany me up in the elevator, but the man on guard at the door wouldn't have it. Would you have minded my fetching him up, Laura? He has the true artistic sense, too. He tried all he knew to climb that statue of Bobbie Burns in the Park. Wouldn't it have been a victory for Art if he had succeeded in demolishing that bronze libel on Burns? Then he wanted to walk—prance, I mean—into the car of some people I stopped to pass the time of day with. Curious psychological study, that horse. I can't imagine where he acquired his mounting social ambition, for he's about one-half wild horse of the pampas and the other half Wyoming cayuse."
"Louise," suggested Laura, who had been meditating during Blythe's raillery, "would you care for a ride now?" Blythe's eyes lighted up at the words. "I must have some excuse, you see, for driving the two of you away, for my dressmaker is moaning piteously over the 'phone for me to try some things on, and I'll have to go. Scamp has been eating his head off for a fortnight, but he'll behave, I'm sure. And my habit, boots, everything, will fit you perfectly."
Before Laura had finished Blythe was at the telephone, directing Laura's stableman to send Scamp around and Laura was guiding Louise to her dressing room to put her into the hands of her maid for the change into Laura's riding things. Half an hour later Louise, well-mounted on the breedy-looking, over-rested but tractable enough Scamp, was on the Park bridle-path alongside Blythe, who rode the mettlesome cob he had maligned with the stigma of cayuse.
The two horses, adaptable striders, trotted teamwise for a while, Louise and Blythe silently giving themselves over to the enjoyment of the eager, tingling air and the brilliant sunshine. They reined up to cross the carriage road and for a while after that, by a sort of tacit understanding, they reduced their horses' pace to a brisk walk.
It is a bromidic truism, but it is none the less true, that it is only possible for a woman to be wholly at her ease in the presence of the man in whom she is not "interested." Louise, as she rode at Blythe's side through the bright vistas of bare, interlacing branches, perhaps would have shrunk from being judged by the mildly accusatory terms of such an axiom; nevertheless, alone with this man, she was wonderingly conscious of being possessed by a speech-cancelling diffidence, a restraint not so much superimposed as involuntarily felt, that was wholly unusual with her in the presence of anyone else. She caught herself, not without flushing when she became aware of her own purpose, in the act of permitting her horse to drop a pace behind in order that she might be free to glance at Blythe's rugged profile and the shapeliness of his head for an instant; for she was beginning to discover that it was oddly difficult for her to meet his frank, direct, generally cheerful gaze. This was, of course, from no lack of candor, but, on the contrary, because she was beginning to fear betrayal through her excessive natural candor. It would have been impossible for her to name any other human being with whom she would have preferred to be riding through the sunny Park on this afternoon; yet this knowledge did not efface the other fact that she was not at her ease with him. She endeavored, in vaguely wondering about this, to assure herself that it was because of certain revelations which she intended to make to Blythe concerning happenings to herself since last she had seen him; but her inner frankness informed her that she was merely searching for a pretext for her slightly provoking diffidence.
Blythe was the first to break the silence.
"'On a hazy, brilliant afternoon in February, 1754, a solitary horseman might have been seen—'" he began to quote, smiling, in a sing-song way, as from the inevitable beginning of an antique novel. Louise laughed.
"Do you feel so lonesome as all that?" she asked him.
"Not precisely lonesome," said Blythe, "but—well, a little detached from the picture. Speaking of pictures, please try and steady yourself in the saddle for a moment while I say something pretty. I have been mentally browsing for a word to describe your profile. Now I have it. It is 'intaglio.' The beauty of that word is that I almost think I know what it means; and also it fits. The mountain has labored and brought forth a mouse. I think that is the first compliment I ever made in my life," and his reddening features testified to the truth of it.
"Then I shall not deny that it pleases me," replied Louise, able now to turn her head and look at him without the unwonted stealthiness which had been puzzling her. "It is what numismatists would call a 'first-minted' compliment, is it not?"
"Don't ask me to analyze it, Louise, or it might come apart in my hands and I shouldn't be able to put it together again, being so new at the craft," replied Blythe, whimsically. She found it very natural and agreeable that he should call her Louise; she had been conscious, in truth, of a deep-down little fear, now dissipated, that he might resume calling her Miss Treharne. She felt that she would not have cared for "Miss Treharne" any more—from him.
They fell silent again for a little while, during which Blythe, infected by the furtiveness which had actuated Louise a little while before, once slightly drew rein in order to steal an unobserved oblique glance at Louise's gleaming auburn hair, which refused to be confined under her three-cornered Continental hat of felt, but moved in rebellious, slipping coils under the impact of the occasional gusts of wind; and he wanted, too, to get the effect of her cameo face outlined against a patch of unusually dark shrubbery slightly ahead of them. His plotting, however, was a dead failure. She caught him in the very article of making this cribbed momentary inspection, and she laughed outright.
"Draw alongside, please," she commanded, and he noticed for the first time the all but indistinguishable slant of her full eyes when they were possessed by laughter. "You are not to criticize the fit of Laura's habit on me, as of course you were doing."
"Of course," said Blythe, more or less unconsciously delivering himself of a white one. "Additionally, I was wondering—" He paused a bit abruptly.
"Well?" inquired Louise.
"You won't be annoyed?" said Blythe. "I was wondering just what you used to think and do, and sing, and say, when, in your last-previous incarnation, Titian was spending all of his hours painting your face and hair."
"Now," replied Louise, smiling, "you are showing a suspicious proficiency for one who claims to have uttered his first compliment only three minutes ago. Annoyed? Why should I be? One might even become used, in the course of nineteen years, to the possession of green or blue or purple hair; so that I scarcely ever think of my ensanguined locks unless I am reminded of them."
"I think," said Blythe, musingly, "that you have the gift of cheerfulness."
"Oh," replied Louise, purposely misunderstanding him, "it doesn't take such an inordinate amount of resignation, really, to tolerate one's own red hair."
"I deny that it is red," said Blythe, assuming an impressive judicial air. "In fact, to employ a perfectly useless legal term, I note an exception to that statement. It isn't red. It's—it's the tint of an afterglow; an afterglow that never was on land or sea."
At that instant they emerged upon the open road, and a mounted policeman held up a detaining hand, holding up a huge yellow-bodied car to enable them to cross to where the bridle-path began again. Louise, crimsoning, saw her mother leaning back in the big car, Judd beside her. Blythe, too, saw Mrs. Treharne—and her companion—and lifted his hat. Louise had waved a hand at her mother; but it was a limp hand, and the sun had suddenly darkened for her. Blythe noticed her immediate abstraction. He understood. He rode a trifle closer to her, in silence, for a while. Louise was gazing at the pommel of her saddle, and he observed the tremulousness about her lips.
At a point where the path narrowed in passing a great boulder, Blythe reined yet closer, and, reaching out, pressed for an instant her gloved guiding hand.
"Don't worry, Louise—all of these things come right in time," he said in a subdued tone, and as if they had already been speaking of that which had caused her sudden distress. "Be sustained by that belief. Everything works out right in time. I venture to touch upon that which pains you, not because we are to have a mere legal relationship, but because I am hoping that you view me as a friend. Do you?"
"You must know that I do," said Louise, more moved than he could guess. The touch of his hand had strangely thrilled her. "If it were not for you and Laura—" She paused, turning her head.
"I know," said Blythe. "It is not a matter for volunteered advice. But perhaps you have thought of some way in which I—we—can help you; make the course smoother for you. Have you?"
"No," replied Louise, simply. "There were some occurrences—some things that happened last night—that I meant to tell you about. But I can't now. Laura will tell you. You must not be too angry when she tells you. The happenings were not the fault of my mother's; she——"
"I can easily surmise that," Blythe helped her. "But, Louise, if you had meant to tell me these things yourself, what has altered your determination? Perhaps, though," reflecting, "that isn't a fair question."
"The unfairness—perhaps I should call it weakness—is on my side," replied Louise. "I make very brave resolutions," smiling a little detachedly, "as to the candor I am going to reveal to you when I meet you; but when I am with you—" The sentence required no finishing.
"There is no weakness in that," said Blythe. "Or, if there is, then I think my own weakness must be far greater than yours. There are many things that I want to say to you and that I find it impossible to say when the opportunity comes. Several times, for example, I have fruitlessly struggled to say that I hope my guardianship over you will erect no barrier between us."
"How could it?" asked Louise, meeting his eye.
"It is just that," replied Blythe, "which I find it so difficult to express. I fear to venture too close to the quicksands. But I might as well take the risk. I did not exactly mean to use the word 'barrier.' You make quite another appeal to me than as a ward to a guardian. My imagination is far more involved than that. Perhaps I take a roundabout method, Louise, of saying that, in spite of my approaching guardianship, I sometimes find myself presuming to hope that a time might come when you would be willing to accept my devotion as a man."
"That time," quietly replied Louise, pretending to adjust her hat so as to screen her face with her arm, "has already come." She had no penchant for evasiveness, and coquetry was apart from her; she spoke words that her heart brimmed to her lips.
Blythe, his face transfigured, caught himself reeling a bit in his saddle. Her words, so quietly and frankly spoken, had suddenly cleared what he had not hoped would be anything but a pathway of brambles. He swayed so close to her that their faces almost touched, and for a mere instant he was conscious of the fragrance of her pure breath, aware to the core of him of an intoxicating propinquity of which he had not until that moment dreamed.
"Perhaps I misunderstood you, Louise," he said, hoarse of a sudden, reining out and settling himself sidewise in his saddle so that he could see her. "It is impossible that I did not misunderstand you."
Louise, gazing straight ahead, but with misty eyes, shook her head. She had no more words. And her silent negation told him, better than words, that he had not misunderstood her.
They rode without speaking for the remainder of the way back to Laura's. Just before they drew up to the curb, where he was to assist her to dismount, Blythe broke the long reverie that had pinioned them.
"I only came to know the meaning of what is called 'the joy of living' an hour ago, Louise," Blythe said to her then.
A moment later he was lifting her from her horse, and the sky swirled before his eyes as, for a rocketing instant, he held her in his strong arms and felt her warm breath (as of hyacinths, he thought) upon his face. He rode away leading her horse, and their parting was of the eyes only.
Louise, a happy brooding expression on her face, walked in upon Laura, who was deeply snuggled on a many-pillowed couch, and sat down, pre-occupiedly tapping a gloved palm with her riding-crop, without a word.
"Well, dear?" said Laura, glancing at her.
Louise continued to tap-tap her palm with the crop, but she was devoid of words, it appeared.
"Louise!" Laura suddenly sat up straight on the couch and directed a startled, accusatory, yet puzzledly-smiling gaze at the wistful, unseeing and silent girl in the riding habit.
Louise turned her abstracted gaze upon Laura.
"What is it, dear?" she asked. "You said something, didn't you?"
Laura gazed at her with an absorbed smile for nearly a minute. Then she settled back among the pillows.
"No, sweetheart, I haven't said anything," she replied.
Judd prowled about his club that night in the humor of a savage, barking at the club servants, growling at or turning his back upon cronies who addressed him civilly enough, and almost taking the head off one of them who, noticing the baleful Judd mood, cheerfully inquired: "What is it, old chap—gout, liver, the market, or all three?" The market was in part responsible; the entire "list" had gone against him persistently and diabolically from opening to close. But the raking which Mrs. Treharne had given him during their ride on account of his "daughtering" of Louise on the night before was mainly responsible for the bubbling rage which he was taking no pains to conceal and which he was adding to by extraordinarily short-intervalled stops at the club buffet.
And so he'd been hauled over the coals again on account of that high-and-mighty daughter of Tony's, had he? Judd reflected, his thoughts swirling in an alcoholic seethe of self-sympathy. Well, he was getting tired of that sort of thing—d——d tired of it. He hadn't had a minute's peace of his life on his visits at the house on the Drive since the arrival there of that toploftical, sulky, ridiculously haughty daughter of Tony's. Haughty about what? Haughty for what reason? What license had she to be haughty—especially with him, Judd? Wasn't she living in his house? What the d——, then, did she mean by flouting him? Yes, Jesse had been right; she had flouted him since the first day she'd met him. And that wasn't "coming to him;" he didn't deserve it.
Didn't he fairly shower money upon her mother? Didn't her mother have his signed blank checks to fill out at her own sweet will and option? Didn't he humor all of Tony's extravagances without ever a word of complaint? Well, then! What the devil did Tony mean by snarling at him all the time about this daughter of hers that had come along and messed everything up? Anyhow, why shouldn't he have called the young woman "daughter" if he felt like it? That wasn't going to kill her, was it? He had been drinking a little at the time, anyhow, and it was a slip of the tongue; but even if it hadn't been, what was the difference? What right did she have, anyhow, to look at him as if he were a woodtick? He couldn't understand what Jesse saw in her; she was good-looking, of course, but when that was said all was said; she had an unthawable disposition, hadn't she? And a porpoise's cold-bloodedness?
But Jesse was entitled to his idiotic fancies; he, Judd, wasn't going to interpose any obstacles in Jesse's way. She needed taming, and Jesse's reputation as a tamer was established. Leaving all that aside, though, she wasn't going to stay around his house creating discord and giving her mother cherished opportunities to "open up" on him whenever she felt like it. She would have to go somewhere else. He'd take care of her all right. He had no idea of absolutely turning her out; Tony wouldn't have that, and, besides, there wasn't anything mean about him. But he wasn't going to be flouted any longer; wouldn't have it; wouldn't endure it; wouldn't tolerate it. Fact was, he intended to have it out with Tony that very night. He'd go over to the house on the Drive and get the thing over with. No use in postponing it.
