Jewel Weed Part 19

Lena looked with interest toward the door. Frank Lenox was great in St.

Etienne, first because he was the son-in-law of old Nicholas Windsor, a potentate of the first local magnitude, and second, because he was pushing to still greater success the enterprises that the elder man had begun. So people talked about him in the street-cars by his first name.

Lena felt that it was a privilege to look at him, big, clean, with that mingling of alertness with power which is the characteristic of the American business man. It was an experience of absorbing interest to see the half underhand caress he gave his wife in pa.s.sing, and to find herself actually shaking hands with him. He seemed imposing and friendly and yet quite like other people, as he looked around for a capacious chair and his wife handed him a cup of tea. She was conscious that he looked at her with great interest. She recognized the expression in masculine eyes and it soothed her ruffled spirit. It was the constant affirmation of her beauty, a beauty which had in it something dream-like that made men's eyes dream. After all, she could always get along with men.

"If you'd know what brought me home before my time, it was not your charms, my dear, but a mad desire to get away from Harris, who cornered me and opened up the negro question. I saw nothing for it but to take to the woods."

"It makes my traditional abolition blood boil to see how public opinion seems to be settling down and dallying with heresy and injustice again," Madeline exclaimed. She looked flushed and vigorous, and Lena stared at her and wondered how she could care for such things. Was it pure affectation?

"Oh, you're young, my dear," said Mrs. Lenox laughingly. "You must hold all your opinions violently. And you haven't been South. Things can't help looking different down there."

"Vera!" cried Miss Elton so explosively that Lena sat up straighter than ever, "you're not really a renegade yourself, are you?" and she spoke as though her life depended on the answer.

"Certainly not," Mrs. Lenox answered. "But I'm growing tolerant toward the poor old world as it is. I'm willing to let it grow slowly instead of insisting that it shall all be immediately as good and wise as I am.

I'm learning to respect other people's point of view and to suspect that my mind is not such an ingenious mechanism as I once supposed it to be."

"Moreover, since she has married, she has contracted a habit of taking the opposite point of view," said her husband.

"Oh, that's one of the jokes that has successfully withstood the ravages of time," said Mrs. Lenox scornfully.

"Very well, then, I'll say that you are getting on toward middle life and have had your enthusiasms corrupted by a worldly-wise father and husband. But I dare say that Miss Quincy, being young, is quite as explosive as you are, Madeline. So we shall be two against two."

He looked with a challenge toward the girl, and perhaps Lena might have managed the expected saucy answer if she had not suddenly remembered that her shoes were shabby and she had meant to keep them hidden under her skirts. This memory destroyed her new-found equilibrium, so she blurted out a weak, "I really don't know anything about it," and then blushed hotly at her own awkwardness.

"It's a stupid subject, anyway," said Mr. Lenox. "I fled from town to avoid it. Let's not talk about negroes."

"Tell us what has happened in the great world," said Mrs. Lenox, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and chin in hands.

"Another j.a.p victory," he said. "And I'll take a second one of those little cakes please, if Miss Quincy will leave one for me. It cuts me to the heart to see how the young girls of our generation stuff on little cakes. If they'd only take example by these same j.a.panese, who develop strategy and patriotism on rice, cherry blossoms and gymnastics, there'd be some hopes for us as a people."

He glanced again at Lena in a very amiable manner, as though he expected her to be saucy in return, but she blushed with mystification and mortification. She had felt doubtful as to whether she ought to take another of the little cakes, but they were very good, and she was young enough to love goodies, without many chances at anything so delectable as these particular bits. And now to be detected and made fun of! She began to question if she should be able to get along with these men, after all.

"Thank you," he went on after a pause. "And now that I'm comforted with cake, another cup of tea, Vera; and then, if you would complete my happiness, just give me a posy out of that bouquet for my b.u.t.tonhole."

His wife rose, pulled a flower from a vase and pinned it to his coat.

"Here's mignonette! That's for dividends," she said, and she put her fingers in his hair and gave his head a little shake.

"Don't infringe on my head,--it's patented," he said. "Now go and sit down, and I will tell you something really exciting as well as instructive. I know about it because I have the privilege of helping the good work with a few dollars. Professor Gregory has dug up two or three hundred old ma.n.u.scripts somewhere near Thebes, and he cables that they belong to the first century after Christ, that he expects them to illuminate most of the dark recesses of the time, and that I am privileged to share the glory by making an ample contribution. Doesn't that stir your young blood? I never hear of these things without a pa.s.sionate desire to go to some respectably aged land and dig and dig and dig. It's a choice between doing so and making things in this very new land for some other fellow to dig up six thousand years from now.

Which would you choose, Miss Quincy?"

Lena was extraordinarily pretty, and he had a theory that pretty girls were made to be talked to. Lena thought so too, yet all she said was, "I should think the digging would be very dirty work, though."

He glanced at her swiftly, and, though there was nothing unfriendly in the look, she felt an uncomfortable shiver. She fell into a miserable silence which she hardly broke when the others addressed her with a deliberate question or made some manifest effort to include her in topics introduced for her benefit. These attempts were only too apparent to her and rasped her soul the more. These people had such a perplexing way of saying whatever came into their heads. They were serious and frivolous at unexpected places. They were not at all "elegant"; they were natural, but their naturalness was not of Lena's kind. Mr. Lenox rose and smiled at his wife.

"I think I must go and have a look at my latest son," he said. "He is a very interesting person. At present he seems to be composed of two simple but diverse elements, a stomach and a sense of humor." At the door he paused again and said, "Have you seen our new coat of arms, Madeline?--two kids rambunctious?"

He went away and sounds of manifest hilarity floated down the stairs.

And then dinner was announced, and he looked so good-tempered when he returned and gave Lena his arm that her spirits were again lifted up.

She had never before been escorted to a meal as though it were an affair of ceremony.

"I met an old fellow to-day," her host began with persistent attempt to draw her out, "that told me that for two years he had dined on bread and milk. And then I felt that I was a favorite of fortune to be able fearlessly to storm the dining-room. Happy the appendix that has no history."

Lena giggled helplessly. Was it amus.e.m.e.nt that she saw in Mr. Lenox's eyes as he unfolded his napkin and surveyed her?

"It's an awesome thing, isn't it, to be living in a world darkened on one side by the servant question and on the other by the appendix, like Scylla and Charybdis?"

She found herself sitting down to face the mysteries of a meal whose type was different from any hitherto met in her brief experience of life. Her internal summing up was, "Of course I can't make any impression on Mr. Lenox. He likes the other kind of woman."

She looked at Mrs. Lenox, a woman of restraint and dark hair and straight lines, and contrasted her with herself, a thing of curves and sunshine colors. She did not know that a man never cares for a type of woman, but only for woman in the concrete. Poor little Lena! When the evening was over and she found herself at last in her too-splendid bedroom, she put arms and head down on the dressing-table and sobbed.

These people were simple where she was complicated and complicated where she was simple. It was all uncomfortable and different. She thought of Jim Nolan's unfrilled conversation, of his clumsy, rather inane compliments, of his primitive amoeba-like type of humor. She saw the whole course of her life of mean shifts and wranglings with her mother; and though its moral n.i.g.g.ardliness was unappreciated, its physical meagerness sickened her in contrast to the ease and beauty of these newer scenes. She must climb out of that life, somehow, by hook or crook; if this were the alternative, she must grow to its likeness, no matter how the birth-pangs hurt. She would face it. She would even rejoice in the opportunity to study these women and mold herself to their outward form of _bien aise_. She would--she would. Faint and far-away voices came to her, and she wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Lenox were discussing her and laughing, as she would do in their place, at her gaucheries. The meaner you are yourself, the easier it is to believe in the meanness of others. It was the most G.o.dlike of men who taught the G.o.dliness of all men. Lena could not imagine that these people could either like or respect her unless she were molded after their pattern and had as much as they had.

And Miss Elton! She hated Miss Elton for that irritating calmness, for that easy appropriation of the good things of life. She hated with a hate that tingled her spine and shook her small body. The tragedy of littleness made her grit her teeth as she thought of the unconscious girl now going to bed in the next room.

"I'll get even with her somehow," was Miss Lena's resolve. "Just let me get the hang of things a little, and I'll show her!" Miss Quincy was conscious that though she as yet lacked knowledge of their world, she had the advantage of the inheritance of guile.

But things! things! things! Lena thought a little of the irony of it--that all her life she had pined to be set in luxury, and yet now and here the very rugs and chairs and soft lights, the pictures of unrecognized subjects, the unfamiliar delicacies before her at the table, all seemed to loom up and crush her into insignificance by their importance and expensiveness. They were her masters still.

But it was not Lena's way to waste her time on abstractions. While she sat and watched her fire crumble away into ashes, she was chiefly occupied with the concrete, and there entered into her soul and took possession of its empty chambers and began to mold her to her own purposes the demon of social ambition, which is not the desire to do or to be, but rather the longing to appear to be and to seem to do--to take the chaff and leave the wheat.

Mastered by this powerful spirit, Lena actually did make great strides in the next few days. She learned to lounge quite comfortably, to pretend with verisimilitude, even to chatter a little, helped chiefly by a certain persistent light-weight on the part of Mr. Lenox; but the life was hard and the rewards meager. All the time she suspected Miss Elton and Mrs. Lenox of despising her, because she had so much less than they.

Their kindliness was but an added insult.

CHAPTER XI

POLITICS AND PLAY

It was with joy that Lena stood, on Sat.u.r.day night, with Mrs. Lenox and Miss Elton on the veranda, and hailed the advent of a large red automobile, which disgorged, besides Mr. Lenox, two dress-suit cases and two young men. Mr. Percival had liked her in her natural state and with him she would not need to "put on style". He was to her the shadow of a great rock in a desperately thirsty land. The only kind of pretense that he demanded was that she should be a dear innocent little girl, and that role came easily. She smiled and blushed and saw that there was a difference in his eyes when he greeted her from the look he bent on the other two ladies. It was balm to her spirit to think that this man, who admired her, was himself admired by the people whom she suspected of despising her; and that they did admire him was evident. They were hardly seated at dinner before Mrs. Lenox began:

"d.i.c.k, I have just been reading your last night's speech at the Munic.i.p.al Club and I'm quite effervescing with it. I want to put you up on a pedestal and call the attention of Mr. Frank Lenox to you. He is one of the innumerable excellent gentlemen, over the length and breadth of the land, who are so busy running everything else that they let city politics go to the place that I'm not allowed to mention. It does my heart good to see you taking it up in earnest."

"It was a good speech, all right. I've read it, too," said Mr. Lenox.

"And I'm all the wretch my wife calls me. I wish I'd heard you in your frenzy, Percival, though I have less faith in speeches and principles than she has. Reform is only a seed, you know, and most seeds never come to maturity or bear fruit. So most people justly doubt the reformer."

"Do you think we're thin sound-waves who do nothing but vibrate?" said d.i.c.k.

"Not at all; but I mean there are no such things in the world as abstractions. There are only men and women. Thoughts don't seethe; men and women seethe. Principles don't reform or corrupt; men and women do the reforming and corrupting. If you want to do things, don't begin by making the air resound with denunciations of wickedness; but make people believe in you and despise the other fellow. When they like you they'll begin to think about your ideas."

"I don't know any better way to make people believe in me than to stand up for what I think to be right," said d.i.c.k sharply.

"Stand up all you like," Lenox answered. "But the trouble with most good people is that they are contented to stand up. To arrive anywhere you've got to get right down and sc.r.a.p."

"Oh, I'm only trying my muscle a bit," d.i.c.k answered laughingly. "I do not intend to do much generalizing except in the way of advertis.e.m.e.nt.

I'm planning to put a spoke in the wheels of a few particular wrongs."

"That's what I hope. It's easier to fulminate than to fight."