2
A uniformed butler showed Henry into the room that he would have called the front parlour. Though there was another much like it across the wide hall. There was a 'back parlour,' with portières between. Out there, he knew, between centre table and fireplace, the Senator and Madame might even now be sitting.
He listened, on the edge of a huge plush and walnut chair, for the rustle of the Senator's paper, or Madame's deep, always startling voice.
There was no sound. Save that somewhere upstairs, far off, a door opened; then footsteps very faint. And silence again.
Henry looked, fighting down misgivings, at the heavily framed oil paintings on the wall. One, of a life-boat going out through mountainous waves to a wreck, he had always heard was remarkably fine. Fastened over the bow of the boat was a bit of real rope that had provoked critical controversy when the picture was first exhibited in Chicago.
He glanced down, discovered the box of chocolates on his knees, and hurriedly placed it on the corner of the inevitable centre table. Then he fussed nervously with his moustache; adjusted his tie, wondering if the stick pin should be higher; pulled down his cuffs; and sat up stiffly again.
'Maybe she ain't home,' he thought weakly. 'That fella said he'd see.'
'Maybe I oughta've asked if she'd be in.'
The silence deepened, spread, settled about him. He wished she would come down. There was danger, he knew, that his few painfully thought-out conversational openings would leave him. He would be an embarrassed, quite speechless young man. For he was as capable, even now, at twenty, almost at twenty-one, of speechlessness as of volubility. Either might happen to him, at any moment, from the smallest, least foreseeable of causes.
And there was something oppressive about the stillness of this cavernous old house with its sound-proof partitions and its distances. And that silent machine of a butler. It wasn't like calling at Martha Caldwell's, in the old days, where you could hear the Swedish cook crashing around in the kitchen and Martha moving around upstairs before she came down. Here you wouldn't so much as know there was a kitchen.
Then, suddenly, sharp as a blow out of the stillness came a series of sounds that froze the marrow in his bones, made him rigid on the edge of that plush chair, his lips parted, his eyes staring, wrestling with an impulse to dash out of the house; with another impulse to cough, or shout, or play the piano, in some mad way to announce himself, yet continuing to sit like a carved idol, in the grip of a paralysis of the faculties.
There is nothing more painful to the young than the occasional discovery, through the mask of social reticence, that the old have their weak or violent moments.
Gossip, yes! But gossip rests lightly and briefly in young ears. Henry had heard the Watts slyly ridiculed. There were whispers, of course. Madame's career as a French countess—well, naturally Sunbury wondered. And the long obscurity from which she had rescued Senator Watt raised questions about that very quiet little man. So often men in political life were tempted off the primly beaten track. And Henry, like the other young people, had grinned in awed delight over the tale that Madame swore at her servants. That was before he had so much as spoken to her niece. And it had little or no effect on his attitude toward Madame herself when he met her. She had at once taken her place in the compartment of his thoughts reserved from earliest memory for his elders, whose word was (at least in honest theory) law and to whom one looked up with diffidence and a genuine if somewhat automatic respect.
The first of the disturbing sounds was Madame's voice, far-off but ringing strong. Then a door opened—it must have been the dining-room door; not the wide one that opened into the great front hall, but the other, at the farther end of the 'back parlour.'
There was a brief lull. A voice could be heard, though—a man's voice, low-pitched, deprecatory.
Then Madame's again. And stranger noises. The man's voice cried out in quick protest; there was a rustle and then a crash like breaking china.
The Senator, hurrying a little, yet with a sort of dignity, walked out into the hall. Henry could see him, first between the portières as he left the room, then as he passed the hall door.
There was a rush and a torrent of passionately angry words from the other room. An object—it appeared to be a paper weight or ornament—came hurtling out into the hall. The Senator, who had apparently gone to the closet by the door for his hat and stick—for he came back into the hall with them—stepped back just in time to avoid being struck. The object fell on the stair, landing with the sound of solid metal.
'You come back here!' Madame's voice.
'I will not come back until you have had time to return to your senses,' replied the Senator. He looked very small. He was always stilted in speech; Humphrey had said that he talked like the Congressional Record. 'This is a disgraceful scene. If you have the slightest regard for my good name or your own you will at least make an effort to compose yourself. Some one might be at the door at this moment. You are a violent, ungoverned woman, and I am ashamed of you.'
'And you'—she was almost screaming now—'are the man who was glad to marry me.'
He ignored this. 'If any one asks for me, I shall be at the Sunbury Club.'
'Going to drink again, are you?'
'I think not.'
'If you do, you needn't come back. Do you hear? You needn't come back!'
He turned, and with a sort of strut went out the front door.
She started to follow. She did come as far as the portières. Henry had a glimpse of her, her face red and distorted.
She turned back then, and seemed to be picking up the room. He could hear sniffing and actually snorting as she moved about. There was a brief silence. Then she crossed the hall, a big imposing person—even in her tantrums she had presence—and went up the stairs, pausing on the landing to pick up the object she had thrown. Her solid footfalls died out on the thick carpets of the upper hall. A door opened, and slammed faintly shut.
Silence again.
Henry found that he was clutching the arms of the chair.
'I must relax,' he thought vacantly; and drew a slow deep breath, as he had been taught in a gymnasium class at the Y.M.C.A.
He brushed a hand across his eyes. Now that it was over, his temples were pounding hotly, his nerves aquiver.
It was incredible. Yet it had happened. Before his eyes. A vulgar brawl; a woman with a red face throwing things. And he was here in the house with her. He might have to try to talk with her.
He considered again the possibility of slipping out. But that butler had taken his name up. Cicely would be coming down any moment. Unless she knew.
Did she know? Had she heard? Possibly not.
Henry got slowly, indecisively up and wandered to the piano; stood leaning on it.
His eyes filled. All at once, in his mind's eye, he could see Cicely. Particularly the sensitive mouth. And the alert brown eyes. And the pretty way her eyebrows moved when she spoke or smiled or listened—always with a flattering attention—to what you were saying.
He brought a clenched fist down softly on the piano.