XVI Coming Storm
I
Mrs. Ascott and Theodora were up in the attic searching through trunks and boxes for a fan that would harmonize with Eileen’s graduating dress. Lavinia had made a special trip to St. Louis in quest of accessories, and had returned with a marvel of lacquer sticks and landscape, befitting a mandarin’s banquet board—and Lary had said things that threw the family into a superlative state of stress.
“Mamma and my brother don’t gee worth a cent,” the child lamented, peering with eager eyes into the shadowy recesses of a chest that ought to yield treasure. “For the last month, they’re on each other’s nerves all the time. It’s mostly Lary’s fault ... and ... I believe he does it to save papa. My poor daddy can’t do a blessed thing the way it ought to be. And you know, mamma gets good and mad at only one of us at a time. Eileen says, if she felt that way about her people, she’d clean up the whole bunch at once, and get it out of her ‘cistern.’ But mamma’s just naturally economical, and this way she can make her grouches go farther. We thought Drusilla would quit us, last week, because mamma laid her out so hard—when she scorched the bottom layer of a short cake. So I guess it was a good thing Lary said what he did about the fan.”
“Lightning rod for Drusilla,” Larimore Trench called, from the foot of the narrow stairway. “You don’t mind if I come up? I’d like to see the old attic again.” His face was beaming and his gesture catlike as he mounted the steep stairs. “Bob and Syd and I used to have some wild times up here. I wonder if the ghosts of our youth ever disturb your slumbers, sweet Lady Judith. We were a rough trio, in our day.”
“You and Sydney Schubert rough! I wonder what you would call my two incorrigible brothers.”
“Yes, but they were,” Theo broke in. “Bob could get them to do anything. We got awful quiet at our house after he went away. Come over here, Lary, where you can get the breeze. I’ll let you have half of my box to sit on.” With a wisp of paper she wiped the dust from the top of a packing case that bore in bold black letters the legend: “Books—Keep Dry.”
“Look at this, Lady Judith!” The small frame shook with reminiscent mirth. “It belongs to mamma ... twenty volumes of general information, in doses to match the monthly payments. ‘Keep Dry!’ You couldn’t wet ’em with a fire hose. We had to leave them here, because Lary planned the book-cases, in the other house, so that they wouldn’t quite go in. And mamma had one awful set-to with Professor Ferguson when he had the nerve to use her box of canned culture to lay out his herbarium specimens for mounting. Sylvia said it taught mamma a lesson. If she wanted to rent Vine Cottage, she couldn’t go on deciding how often the silver must be polished, and what the tenant could do with the old plunder she left in the attic. Plunder! Think of it!”
“She has been an exemplary ‘landlord’ since I have been here,” Judith said, ignoring Lary and his too evident embarrassment. “I don’t in the least mind her ordering Dutton around. It saves my humiliating myself in the eyes of my gardener. How was I to know that you can’t grow sweet potatoes from seed, and that Brussels sprouts aren’t good until after frost?”
II
Down on the street there was a harsh grinding of brakes and an excited cry, as Hal Marksley’s car stopped so abruptly as to precipitate Eileen from her seat. Theodora darted to the window, cupped her hands around her mouth, and shouted:
“Come on up. Mrs. Ascott’s got three fans for you to choose from.”
A moment later, two pairs of feet were heard ascending the stairs. A swift sense of impending disaster sent Theo’s glance from the face of her hostess to that of her brother. She wondered how she ought to have worded her invitation so that Hal could not have assumed it to include him. A young man of fine breeding would not need to be told that she was not asking him to Mrs. Ascott’s attic, when Mrs. Ascott had never invited him to her reception room. He just didn’t know how to discriminate. Lately Eileen didn’t seem to discriminate, either. She should have told Hal not to come. He would be terribly embarrassed, meeting Lary. But of course neither of them knew Lary was there.
If young Marksley knew he was not welcome in the sultry store room of Vine cottage, he gave no token. Eileen’s breathless condition, when she reached the top of the steep stair, gave him a momentary conversational advantage.
“I’m going over to my sister’s to dinner, this evening, and the kid and I were wondering how we’d put in the time till the rest of the folks arrive.”
“You don’t mean you’re going to eat again—just coming from Ina’s graduation party!” Theodora gasped. “What did she serve?”
“Oh, the usual sumptuous Stevens spread. What did she have, Eileen? All I can remember is that Kitten said she borrowed the microtome from the lab. to cut the sandwiches. I believe there was an olive apiece, by actual count.”
“Don’t you remember, Hal? The feast began with frappéd essence of rose fragrance, served in cocktail glasses, with hearts of doughnuts. Then there was a salad of last year’s ambitions and next year’s hopes. And something to drink that had a reminiscent flavour of coffee. But her china was lovely. She borrowed most of it from Mrs. Marksley. That’s how Hal came to be invited with the preps. Gee, when I ask a bunch of hungry kids to my house, I feed ’em. But then, I know how to cook. And I don’t have to be so desperately dainty, for fear of blundering in the menu.”
“You might have waited for some one else to say that,” Larimore rebuked.
“Huh! it’s a poor dog that can’t wag its own tail. Besides, I can’t remember when you or any of my family made me duck to keep from being pelted with praise. That poor boy is almost starved. He pretended he didn’t like olives, so that I could have two. And he was about to smuggle another sandwich when Mrs. Stevens told what they charge for a beef tongue, and how it shrinks in cooking.”
“Yes,” the youth roared, “when you go to Ina’s for a meal, your œsophagus rings a bell every time you swallow. Her mother makes you feel as if you were eating the grocery bill. We eat like pigs at our house—all but sister, and she’s sure no recommendation for the æsthetic diet. She’d be a stunner, with a little more meat on her bones.”
Eileen flushed and changed the subject. A few minutes later, Hal lounged across the room to where Lary and Theo sat silently side by side. He began, in a tone that sought to be intimate:
“I say, old man, it was a rotten shame about those plans. I was just as sorry as could be. But my mother—”
“One doesn’t speak of such things,” Larimore said curtly.
Judith saved the situation by the timely intervention of the fan—a woman’s device that evoked from Lary gratitude, from Theo worship. An exclamation of delight, a moment’s perplexed comparison, a hasty choice, and Eileen and her uncouth cavalier were gone.
III
When Theodora looked from the window, some minutes later, the two were crossing the street in the direction of the Nims’ house. A full minute she stood, perplexed. Then her chest heaved with futile indignation. In that minute, the scattered troubles of the past six weeks had danced into form, like iron filings on the glass disc, when Sydney drew his violin bow across its vibrating edge. She understood. Mamma had given permission for Eileen to go with Hal to Mrs. Nims’—to dinner. After all she had said about Mrs. Nims! A quarrel with papa was inevitable. Mamma wanted to provoke a quarrel with papa. There was no other explanation. Things had gone from bad to worse, with only an occasional rift in her mother’s lowering sky. Whatever the cause of her displeasure, it had reached a climax. Something must be done to protect papa—done quickly. Lary was not always tactful—when people acted that way. And mamma always took it out on papa, when Lary got the best of her.
“Lady Judith, couldn’t you call her to come right back here ... eat dinner with you?” The plea tumbled from the inchoate depth of her distress. Mrs. Ascott and Lary interrupted a flow of intimate talk, to look at the pale face and the preternaturally bright eyes.
“What, darling?”
“Eileen! I think my mother has gone crazy. First she says Mrs. Nims isn’t fit for a decent woman to speak to—when papa talked about Christian charity—and now she lets Eileen go over there to dinner.”
“How do you know that, baby?”
“Well, Lary Trench, look for yourself. I guess I can put two and two together. If I didn’t want papa to think Mrs. Nims was a dangerous woman—I wouldn’t tell him that Christ himself couldn’t save her. Either my mother hasn’t got any system at all ... or ... she wants to have one awful row with my father.”
“We might as well face a sickeningly unpleasant situation,” Larimore said to Judith. “You are seeing my mother at her absolute worst. Something has occurred to annoy her, desperately. And we can’t even surmise what it is. The baby and I have laid plots to trap her into betraying the cause of her hurt. But only last night we acknowledged ourselves beaten.”
“May I confess that I have been trying, too, at Dr. Schubert’s suggestion? He tells me that this state of her mind may lead to serious consequences. Some obscure liver trouble, I believe.”
“Not obscure,” Lary amended. “Dr. Schubert understands its pathological aspect. It is the mental cause that baffles all of us. Gall stones are not uncommon in women of my mother’s temperament. She has too much energy for the small engine she has to operate. Her physician has tried to impress on her the need for keeping herself tranquil. He might as well advise a tornado to be calm and rational.”
“Yet she does take advice from him—if he makes it specific and definite.”
“You have the index to my mother’s mind—that cost me years of search. She learns one thing at a time. She has no faculty for making logical deductions. When she tries to apply a known principle to a new set of conditions the chances are nine to one that she will go wrong.”
As he spoke, the woman’s eyes turned to Theodora ... impelled by some unrecognized attraction. The little head was nodding in sage approval. She was only half conscious of what those two were saying. The fact that it was intimate—confidential—sufficed. Things were coming on, entirely to her liking. It was almost the end of June, and she wanted to be sure there would be no backslidings, while she and her mother were in Minneapolis, the following month. She had never been anywhere—excepting the week in St. Louis for the Exposition, when she was seven—and a trip up the river on a steamer had been particularly alluring. Now she would almost rather not go. She might be needed. Oh, not to patch up a quarrel! Lary and Lady Judith were too wellbred for that. But Lary did need to have his courage bucked up, now and then.
She was only a child, she reflected, but she knew that when people were in love, they had no business mooning around in the dark—in separate yards. She could go over the wall without touching anything but her hands. And Lary was much more athletic than she. Besides, the gate was there—even if mamma did padlock it, one morning. What if Lady Judith should try to go through that gate—and have her feelings hurt!
IV
Theodora glanced up from her troubled musings to perceive that she was quite alone in the attic. They had gone and left her. They had forgotten all about her. She sprang from the packing case and danced for joy. It was the first time in all her life that Lary had forgotten her. It was the best omen of all. They were standing at the foot of the stairs—and they weren’t saying a word. She paused, on tiptoe, afraid to breathe lest she break the witching spell. What did people think about, when they were all alone in that kind of heaven? Now she heard their feet on the lower stairs. She hurried to the window to see them go down to the grassy plot before the house, where her father joined them.
The rosy picture was obscured, in an instant, as if she had spilled the ink bottle over it, and daddy’s danger loomed before her. She trudged wearily down to join them on the grass. Things never were what you thought they were going to be. When she reached the edge of the veranda, a pair of strong arms caught her in a yearning embrace.
“Aren’t you going to congratulate your papa?”
“If there’s any reason. Did you get the Marksley contract?”
David’s transparent face darkened.
“Yes ... but that’s not a matter for congratulation. I figured so high that I counted on escaping. I didn’t want it at any price.”
“Then what is it?”
“You know, this was the annual meeting of the college Board—and they elected your papa treasurer. When Dr. Clarkson made his nominating speech, I didn’t dream he was talking about me.”
“Mamma said this morning that they’d shove it off on you—after the way the last two treasurers handled the funds. She couldn’t see why you would want to do all that work, just to be called the most honest man on the Board.”
“Mamma and I don’t always look at things alike. Come, my dears, she is at the door, and dinner may be waiting.”
“Eileen went to a party, over at Ina’s,” Theo cried, mindful of danger. To herself she added: “Well, she did. I didn’t tell him she wasn’t there still.” Daddy must not find out that she was right across the street. There had been too many disagreements, and it never did daddy any good to fight back. He always got the worst of it, and it made him sick. She wanted to ask Mrs. Ascott to come with them, and eat dinner in Eileen’s place. Mamma would hardly raise a scene before company. As the invitation took shape on her lips, it was halted by her mother’s curt voice:
“I suppose you like your victuals cold, the way you stand there and gossip.”
The three Trenches stepped over the wall, which at the front was little more than an ornamental coping, and Judith went in to her lonely meal.
V
Dinner was scarcely over when the room was plunged in a glare of fire, the startling illumination followed almost instantly by thunder that crackled and smote. Then the storm, that had hovered all afternoon in the sultry air, broke with the fury of explosively released wind and rain. Nanny called for help, as the deluge poured through the screens at three sides of the cottage in quick succession. Before the east windows had been closed, the rain was driving straight from the south—and the attic window wide open. Nanny’s bulk halted at the foot of the breath-exhausting stairs, and her mistress ran past her, to make good the publisher’s injunction, “Keep Dry.” When the sash had been lowered, Judith went to the rear of the attic and looked down into the garden, tossing in the summer storm.
Sharp, hissing flames heralded the detonation of thunder such as she had heard nowhere save in the Alps or the tropics. The earth, a moment ago black with the pall of midnight, leaped into the semblance of a stage set with dancing marionets, that vanished in the ensuing darkness to rise again with the next purple flash. Now the wind swooned, lay panting and breathless against the palpitating bosom of the earth. And now it leaped with renewed ardour, gripped the pear tree and shook it as an ill-controlled mother shakes an unruly child. One of the trellises at the east side of the lawn went over with a crash, carrying in its wake a shower of Prairie Queen roses. The Dorothy Perkins looked on with serene security from the shoulder of the garage, her petals draggled, but exultant in the garish light.
The air was clearing now. Gradually the tender green corn slumped down in the softened loam and a disconsolate toad hopped mournfully across the white gravel walk. This was too much even for a toad. With a long, soul-sickening lunge he disappeared in the shrubbery, as the thunder rumbled its retreat behind the western horizon. Out of its dying reverberation, music came floating up through the moist air ... marvellous strains. Judith crossed the attic and threw open the window. Yes, her surmise was right. Eileen and Mrs. Nims were playing Debussy’s matchless tone picture, “Garden in the Rain,” the ’cello blending exquisitely with the piano. Would David hear? Would he recognize his daughter’s touch? But Eileen had never played like this. The tones came, moist and meaningful, lulling the conscious mind to dreams, steeping the senses in the drowsy calm that follows the delirium of summer heat.
Judith Ascott felt her soul at one with the garden ... arid clay, whose thirst had been quenched. She had played Debussy’s imagist arrangement, and had rejected it because it failed to symbolize a prosaic natural phenomenon. Now she knew that it was not the rain, but the garden, which the composer had in mind. She had approached the theme from overhead, just as a moment ago she had looked down on her own garden. With a thrill she perceived Debussy’s thought in all its naked, elemental beauty—the primitive consciousness of maternal Earth, glad and grateful for the benison of summer rain.
Had something new come into Eileen’s playing? Was it Adelaide Marksley’s ’cello that made the elusive thought tangible? Was it, rather, something that had come into her own soul? She had been so long athirst. Must one faint beneath the heat, brave the wind and the lightning’s terror, in order to drink in at last the bountiful rain? Was there any price one would not pay for such peace as had found habitation within her soul?