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.'