X Eileen Seeks Counsel
I
Mrs. Ascott went out into the garden after breakfast to watch the transfer of tomato plants from the cold frames beside the garage to the loamy bed that bordered the west wall. Dutton had explained to her that nothing would thrive against the high board fence that shut the grounds from the street, at the east side of the garden—on account of the afternoon sun—and that these tomatoes would grow six feet high and would disport their fruit above the stone wall ... if the suckers were kept picked off. She wondered what suckers were, and how the afternoon sun had acquired such a sinister reputation.
She had not slept, and the April air was cool and refreshing. Mamma and the boys were safely installed in a Paris apartment. Papa had closed the big house at Pelham, taking two of the best trained servants with him to the city establishment on Riverside Drive, and was happily engrossed in the Wall Street fight for further millions—secure from the annoyance of family intrusion. She had several letters and one cablegram. How remote it all seemed, how like the hazy memory of another existence! Two months ago she was trying to forget Raoul, his amiable as well as his maddeningly offensive side. Now she seldom thought of him at all. His personality had lost its definite line and mass. Even his form was growing nebulous. She could not remember what it was that he particularly disliked for breakfast ... and whether he was growing alarmingly stout or thin when he went away to Egypt with Hilda Travers.
It was strange that she should have forgotten. Her life with him had been made up of just such things as these. She searched herself for an explanation, as the gardener rambled on, his words scarce reaching her consciousness. Slowly the imponderable thoughts assembled themselves, fashioning for her a shadow picture of her remote childhood. She was in the old kitchen at Rochester and her grandmother Holden was baking cookies for the slum children. There on the marble slab lay the great mass of yellow dough that so tempted her eager fingers. More than once she had seized a breathless opportunity, while grandma’s back was turned, to thrust an index finger far down into its golden softness. And behold! The mass had come together, leaving scarce a trace of the deep impression she had made.
Was she as plastic as dough, and had her husband gone from her life without leaving an impression? There must be something more ... something that had not worked out with precision in their case. Did not that same yielding substance take on the fairly permanent shapes of lions and camels, dancing girls and roosters with arching tails? Perhaps Raoul had neglected to bake the dough. Was she still an impressionable girl, for all her tragic experience?
II
The wicket gate opened and Eileen came towards her. The slim shoulders drooped carelessly and there was a sullen look about the too voluptuous mouth. Mrs. Ascott noticed for the first time that Eileen’s mouth was like her mother’s. All the rest of her was, as Theodora put it, “pure, unadulterated Trench” ... excepting, of course, the eyes, which were amber or vicious yellow, according to her mood. Lary had his father’s mouth; but had compromised with his mother on the question of eyes. Lavinia abhorred compromises, albeit she had learned to accept them as if they had been of her own choosing.
The girl stood in rebellious indecision, a few feet from the tomato bed. Then, as if she had made up her mind to do the thing ... and take the consequences, she came swiftly forward, put an arm around Judith’s waist and kissed her full on the mouth. It had been so long since any one had kissed her! The lips were speaking now, the tone low and vibrant with pleading.
“You don’t mind, do you? If you only knew how I adore you! I have sat at my window and watched you—and wondered about you—and wanted to kiss you, till my mouth ached.”
A thrill went through the woman’s usually tranquil body. Here was passion, susceptibility, imagination. She had not dreamed of such intensity in a girl so young. And this was the girl Larimore Trench had begged her to influence, to mould into some shape of his choosing—a shape that would be utterly displeasing to her mother.
“Can you come into the house with me? It’s only a little after eight. You won’t be late for chapel if you start at half-past.”
“I’m in no hurry. Hal’s coming by for me with the car. He’ll be on the campus five minutes before he started, if our old moth-eaten policeman happens to be looking the other way. I framed up the best looking excuse for a morning call ... and now I don’t need it. You invited me in—just like that! It’s always the way. If I have my gun loaded, there isn’t any bear.”
“Did you think you needed a pretext?”
“I couldn’t be sure. And with you ... it’s too important to take chances. I’ve been feeling my way, ever since you came. I can’t go dancing in, as Theo does. She is like mamma. You simply can’t snub that kid.”
The pretext was the revelation of the mystery-house across the way. Hal had told her all about it, after they left Ina and Kitten and their escorts. The owner of the carved dragon was Hal’s sister, Adelaide Nims. There had been a former marriage, about the time of Hal’s birth, a most unsavoury affair. Adelaide was seventeen at the time, and the reluctant husband was the divorced partner of one of Henry Marksley’s affinities. The Marksleys, père and mère, had been separated three times. Eileen and Hal agreed that it was indecent for people who despised each other to live together. Still, if his parents had not made up that last time, there would have been no Hal. This would have been calamity for Eileen.
The present Mrs. Nims was little known in Springdale, having lived abroad for almost twenty years. Her first husband, in Eileen’s piquant phrase, “had chucked her” after a few months—as a man usually does when he is dragooned into a distasteful marriage. There had been other marriages, “without benefit of clergy,” the details of which were suppressed in Springdale. Indeed coming to light only in connection with a divorce or two wherein Adelaide had figured as the reprehensible other woman. She had hair like polished mahogany and melting brown eyes, a skin like the petals of a Victoria Regia, at dawn of the morning after the lily’s opening, before the sun has tinged its creamy white with the faint rose that is destined to run the colour gamut to rich purplish red. She and Syd Schubert vied with each other in the number of instruments they could play; but she had made her great success with the ’cello, an instrument whose playing revealed to the best possible advantage the slim sensual grace of her body.
It was in a London music hall that Reginald Nims, younger son of a peer, had fallen beneath the weight of her manifold charms and had married her—to the dismay of his family. Eileen knew what she looked like. Not from Hal’s description, but because Springdale had seen her portrait. Just before she and her husband left England for China, they had sent it home for safe keeping ... the magnificent portrait that Sargent had painted. Mrs. Henderson gave a talk on it, in the reading room of the college library. Red hair, coppery in the high lights, eyes that would turn an anchorite from the path of duty, skin texture that was unsurpassed in the far reach of Sargent’s marvellous texture painting, a chiffon gown that reminded you of a cloud of flame-shot smoke, and a bit of still-life that was definitely, though not insistently, turquoise.
“Mrs. Henderson said that when she read a description of the picture, she supposed it was going to look like a Henner; but it was nothing of the sort. I had to go on the Q. T. to hear her talk. Of course you know, mamma belongs to the Art Study Club; but she was scandalized at Mrs. Henderson getting up there and talking about Adelaide Marksley. Lary tried to make her see that it was Sargent ... but what’s the use? You can’t get that kind of an idea into my mother’s head.”
The Browning Club had long since gone the way of Browning. But Mrs. Henderson, after the death of her husband, was constrained to seek new means of holding her grip on the social and intellectual leadership of the town. Fortunately Mrs. Clarkson, wife of the new Dean, was not aggressive. She was glad to be enrolled, along with Mrs. David Trench, as a member of the Art Study Club. Being a late comer in the town, she knew no reason why she should withdraw her moral support from the club, after its shocking display of the Sargent picture.
“But I hope the poor girl is at last happily married,” Mrs. Ascott hastened to say. She wondered if Eileen was always quite fair to her mother.
“That’s just what she isn’t. And thereby hangs the tale of their coming here to live for a couple of years. Hal said his father wanted to rent Vine Cottage for them—and in that case they wouldn’t have brought their furniture. But your Mr. Ramsay got ahead of him. I’m glad he did. But mamma would have turned them out, lease or no lease, if she ever got her eyes on an English paper published in Hong Kong, that Hal showed me, last night. It was the rippingest account you ever read, of Adelaide’s elopement with a member of the military band. It started in a sort of musical flirtation ... and ended in a miserable little hotel in Fu Chau. The writer said your sympathy would be with Mrs. Nims if you looked at the shape of Reginald Nims, and remembered that his wife was fond of dancing. Hal doesn’t know what that means—because he never saw his brother-in-law. He must be either a cripple or fat. It won’t be long till we know. They sail from Honolulu to-morrow.”
“Then she’s reconciled to her husband?”
“Had to be! She’s trying to make the best of a bad mess. The musician soured on his bargain....” The amber eyes flamed yellow. “Left her in the room at the hotel, and gave her husband the key. How did he know Nims wouldn’t kill her? I should think he would—if he had any spirit. They’re coming here till the scandal blows over and they can go back to London. Adelaide loathes China, and adores England. Hal said he guessed that Nims couldn’t bear to part with a wife who had red hair, even if he had to do the reversed Mormon stunt once in a while.”
Mrs. Ascott experienced a swift revulsion—not at the story Eileen was telling. She had heard many such. But in the bald discussion of sex encounters there lurked a definite element of danger. For another, and less serious reason, Hal Marksley ought not to be telling this story in Springdale, where his sister expected to live. But Eileen hastened to explain that she alone was in the secret, and she ... “was part of the family.”
“Really, my dear? I hadn’t suspected.”
“Yes, Lady Judith, and if you’ll let me, I’m coming back after school to tell you what I actually came to tell you this morning. May I? I’ll have to chase home and get my books. Hal’s honking for me, this minute.”
III
It was three o’clock when Eileen came home from school, tossed her things on the settee in the living-room and curled herself up contentedly on a hassock at Mrs. Ascott’s feet. Her cheeks were flushed and her low brow was framed in little caressing ringlets. She looked amazingly like Lary. Happiness fairly exuded from her being.
“I can’t beat around the bush, Lady Judith. When I have anything to say ... I have to go to it with both feet. Will you take care of this for me?”
She drew a shining gold chain from somewhere within the harbouring crispness of her piqué collar, wound the pliant links around her slender forefinger, and brought to light a ring set with a huge diamond. Hal had given it to her that morning. She had known about it for some time. The stone was one of many that belonged to his father ... and would never be missed. There was a good handful of them in a box in the office safe, and Adelaide would coax them all away from her father. He, Hal, might as well get his—while the getting was good. He had taken this one, and another for a scarf pin for himself, to St. Louis to be mounted the day after he and Eileen became engaged.
“You haven’t told your mother?” Mrs. Ascott interrupted.
“I can’t! I can’t! If you knew mamma better.... It would take all the sacredness—all the meaning out of it ... to have mamma preen herself because her daughter is going to marry the son of the richest man in town.”
“And your father, Eileen?”
The fair face went gray, and pain quivered the sensitive lips. “I can’t make that as clear as the other; but I’m the most unfortunate person in the world. You don’t know how I have dreamt of the time when I could go to my darling old daddy and hide my blushes in his shoulder, while I told him that the greatest thing in life had come to me. And now that it’s come ... he wouldn’t understand ... or approve. And mamma, who hasn’t a mortal bit of use for me, would take it as a personal triumph. Rush off to that silly little Bromfield Sentinel with an announcement of my engagement, and all about who the Marksleys are, and how much money they have. I just can’t give her that gratification. I’d choke.”
Sixteen! and she had life’s irony at her finger ends. The amber eyes filled with tears that glistened a moment on the long lashes and went trickling down the pale checks to make little welts on the stiffly starched piqué collar. Mrs. Ascott felt no impulse to smile. Here was a little hurt child, whose quivering lips might have been pleading for the life of a puppy condemned to be drowned. And it was all so deadly serious to her. Love? She might experience a dozen such heart-burnings before the dawning of the great passion.
“My dear, there is a touchstone given to each one of us, before we reach the years of discretion and judgment. Mine was my grandmother. Yours, I believe, is your father. I hid my engagement to Raoul Ascott from Grandma Holden. Only because I knew she would not approve. And, Eileen, my marriage turned out wretchedly. My husband was much older than I. And, do you know, dear, the immature mind is keenly flattered by the attention of the mature one. Hal is a college senior, almost five years older than you. If you could be sure your vanity isn’t involved—”
“No, that has nothing to do with it. Hal loves me. You can’t understand what that means to me ... because ... you don’t know how my people regard me. The only thing I ever wanted is love. Not the kind that papa gives me. That’s too general. He loves everything and everybody—including my mother, when she treats him like a dog. But I don’t want to think about them, now. It hurts ... to think about my father. I can stand it, because I’m not very lovable. He couldn’t be unkind if he tried. He would go on loving his children, if we did the worst thing in the world. I used to wish Lary would love me ... he’s so much like papa in some ways. But you couldn’t tell anybody that what you wanted was love. They’d think you were stalling—that you were after something else, and used that for a blind. Why, even Bob didn’t really know me—and he was the best friend I ever had. I used to steal matches for him, when he was learning to smoke, and I’ve taken many a lickin’ to keep him out of trouble. I got mean and hateful after he was drowned. Talk about an all-wise Providence! I couldn’t have any respect for a God that would kill Bob and leave me alive.”
“But Dr. Schubert—”
“Yes, he and Syd....” Her lips tightened. “They wouldn’t approve of Hal either. He has a reputation for being ... well, rather loose in his ideas. He isn’t a bit worse than the other boys in college. But he happens not to be the psalm-singing kind. I hate the tight ideas I was brought up on. But that isn’t what makes me love Hal. Lady Judith, if you had been told all your life that you were ugly and cross and good-for-nothing ... and somebody came along who thought you were sweet and clever and beautiful—” She laughed shortly. “Yes, all of that! I know I’m built according to the architecture of an ironing board; but Hal says my form is perfect. He twists my hair around his fingers by the hour, and he just loves to stroke my cheeks, because my skin is soft—like Lary’s, and papa’s. Don’t you see? Being loved like that—”
“Yes, Eileen, I see. How soon are you going to be married?”
“Not for years and years. I persuaded Hal, last night, to go to Pratt Institute, instead of that third rate college where he was going to take finance. I want him to do that—so that Lary’ll respect him. He doesn’t intend to settle down in this dried-up village. He hates it as much as I do.” She fell silent a moment. “There’s only one drawback to living away from Springdale.”
“Leaving your father?”
“No, he wouldn’t mind that, and neither would I—after I had a family of my own. But if one of my children should get sick—very sick—and I couldn’t reach Syd—I’d be frantic! Syd’s the only doctor who knows what’s the matter with a baby.”
“You love children, Eileen?”
“I adore them.” She hugged her breast ecstatically. “I hope I’ll have six. Hal loves them, too. That’s only one of the tastes we have in common. He wants a home ... he’d even be willing to let Lary build it, and select the furniture. And that’s a lot ... the way my brother treats him. I hope you’ll try to see his fine side, to like him ... for my sake. You know what it’s going to mean to me.”