Robert Kimberly Part 22

"Yes." Her acuteness divined about what he would reply. "And," she added, "I think, however foolish it may sound, it is enough."

"Don't worry about bridges you will never have to cross. That's the motto I've followed."

"Yes, I know, but----"

"Just a moment. All you have to do is to treat everybody alike."

"But, Walter----"

"You would have to do that anywhere--shouldn't you? Of course. Suppose we should go somewhere else and find a man that threatened to become an admirer----"

"Don't use such a word!"

"Call it what you please--we can't keep moving away from that kind of a possibility, can we?"

"Still, Walter, I feel as if we might get away from here. I have merely told you exactly what I thought."

"We can't get away. This is where everything is done in the sugar business. This is the little world where the big moves are decided upon. If you are not here, you are not in it. We are in the swim now; it took long enough to get in it, G.o.d knows. Now let us stay. You can take care of yourself, can't you?"

"How can you ask me!"

He pursued her with a touch of harshness. "How can I ask you? Aren't you talking about running away from a situation? _I_ don't run away from situations. I call the man or woman that runs away from a situation, a coward. Face it down, work it out--don't dodge it."

MacBirney finished without interruption.

In the living room the telephone bell rang. He went in to answer it and his wife heard him a moment in conversation. Then on the garage wire he called up the chauffeur and ordered a car. Coming out again on the porch he explained: "Lottie wants us to come over."

"Lottie?" There was a shade of resentment, almost of contempt, in Alice's echo and inquiry.

"Lottie Nelson."

"Don't call her Lottie, Walter."

"She calls me Walter."

"She has no business to. What did you tell her? Don't let us go out to-night."

"It is a little celebration of some kind and I told her we would come."

"My head has ached all day."

"It will do your head good. Come on. I told her we were coming."

CHAPTER XV

They found a lively party at the Nelsons'. Guyot was there, with Lambert, thick-lipped and voluble. Dora Morgan with Doane and Cready Hamilton had come, worn and bedraggled, from a New England motoring trip. Dora, still quite hoa.r.s.e, was singing a music-hall song when the MacBirneys entered the room.

She stopped. "My ears are crazy to-night--I can't sing," she complained, responding to Alice's greeting. "I feel as if there were a motor in my head. Tired? Oh, no, not a bit. But the dust!" Her smile died and her brows rose till her pretty eyes shone full. She threw her expiring energy into two husky words: "_Something_ fierce!"

Dolly and her husband with Imogene and Charles had responded to Lottie's invitation, and Robert Kimberly came later with Fritzie Venable. Dolly greeted Alice with apologies. "I am here," she admitted with untroubled contempt, "but not present. I wanted to see what Lambert looks like.

We hear so much about his discoveries. Robert doesn't think much of them."

Mrs. Nelson, languidly composed, led MacBirney to the men who were in an alcove off the music room. Near them sat Robert Kimberly talking to Imogene. Dora could not be coaxed to sing again. But the hostess meant to force the fighting for a good time. Dora joined the men and Guyot, under Nelson's wing, came over to meet Alice, who had taken refuge with Dolly. At a time when the groups were changing, Nelson brought Lambert over. But neither Alice nor Dolly made objection when his host took him away again.

Kimberly came after a while with Fritzie to Alice's divan and, standing behind it, tried by conversation and such attraction of manner as he could offer, to interest Alice. He failed to waken any response. She quite understood a woman's refuge from what she wishes to avoid and persevered in being indifferent to every effort.

Kimberly, not slow to perceive, left presently for the party in the dining-room. But even as he walked away, Alice's att.i.tude toward him called to her mind a saying of Fritzie's, that it is not pleasant to be unpleasant to pleasant people, even if it is unpleasant to be pleasant to unpleasant people.

"Were you tired after yesterday's ride?" asked Dolly of Alice.

"Not too tired."

"Robert told you about Tennie Morgan's death."

Alice looked at her inquiringly. "How did you know?"

"You were in the Morgan chapel together. And you looked upset when you came back. I had promised to tell you the story sometime myself. I know how easy it is to get a false impression concerning family skeletons. So I asked Robert about it the minute you left the car, and I was annoyed beyond everything when he said he had told you the whole story."

"But dear Mrs. De Castro! Why should you be annoyed?"

Dolly answered with decision: "Robert has no business ever to speak of the affair." Alice could not dispute her and Dolly went on: "I know just how he would talk about it. Not that I know what he said to you.

But it would be like him to take very much more of the blame on himself than belongs to him. Men, my dear, look at these things differently from women, and usually make less of them than women do. In this case it is exactly the reverse. Robert has always had an exaggerated idea of his responsibility in the tragedy--that is why it annoys me ever to have him speak about it. I know my brother better, I think, than anybody alive knows him, and I am perfectly familiar with all the circ.u.mstances.

I know what I am talking about."

Very much in earnest Dolly settled back. "To begin with, Tennie was an abnormal boy. He was as delicate in his mental texture as cobweb lace.

His sensitiveness was something incredible and twenty things might have happened to upset his mental balance. No one, my dear, likes to talk state secrets."

"Pray do not, then. It really is not necessary," pleaded Alice.

"Oh, it is," said Dolly decidedly, "I want you to understand. Suicide has been a spectre to the Kimberlys for ages. Two generations ago Schuyler Kimberly committed suicide at sixty-six--think of it! Oh! I could tell you stories. There has been no suicide in this generation.

But the shadow," Dolly's tones were calm but inflected with a burden of what cannot be helped may as well be admitted, "seems only to have pa.s.sed it to fall upon the next in poor Tennie. Two years afterward they found his mother dead one morning in bed. I don't know what the trouble was--it was in Florence. n.o.body knows--there was just a little white froth on her lips. The doctors said heart disease. She was a strange woman, Bertha, strong-willed and self-indulgent--like all the rest of us."

"Don't say that of yourself. You are not self-indulgent, you are generous."

"I am both, dear. But I know the Kimberlys, men and women, first and last, and that is why I do not want you to get wrong impressions of them. My brother Robert isn't a saint, neither is Charles. But compare them with the average men of their own family; compare them with the average men in their own situation in life; compare them with the Nelsons and the Doanes; compare them with that old man that Robert is so patient with! Compare them, my dear, to the men everywhere in the world they move in--I don't think the Kimberly men of this generation need apologize particularly.

"Robert was so completely stunned by Tennie's death that for years I did not know what would happen. Then a great industrial crisis came in our affairs, though afterward it seemed, in a way, providential. Poor old Uncle John got it into his head he could make sugar out of corn and ended by nearly ruining us all. If things had gone on we should all have been living in apartments within another year. When we were so deep in the thing that the end was in sight we went to Robert on our knees, and begged him to take hold of the business and save the family--oh, it had come quite to that. He had been doing absolutely nothing for a year and I feared all sorts of things about him. But he listened and _did_ take hold and made the business so big--well, dear heart, you have some idea what it is now when they can take over a lot of factories, such as those of your husband and his a.s.sociates, on one year's profits. I suppose, of course, these are state secrets--you mustn't repeat them----"

"Certainly not."

"And for years they have been the largest lenders of ready money in the Street. So you can't wonder that we think a great deal of Robert. And he likes you--I can see that. He has been more natural since you came here than for years."

"Surely your brothers never can say they have not a devoted sister."

"I can't account for it," persisted Dolly, continuing. "It is just that your influence is a good one on him; no one can explain those things. I thought for years he would never be influenced by any woman again.