The Second Generation Part 40

His mother had been writing him her discoveries that his father, in wretched health and goaded by physical torment to furious play at the green tables of "high finance," was losing steadily, swiftly, heavily.

But Ross read her letters as indifferently as he read Theresa's appeals to him to come to Windrift. It took a telegram--"Matters much worse than I thought. You must be here to talk with him before he begins business to-morrow"--to shock him into the realization that he had been imperiling the future he was dreaming of and planning--his and Del's future.

On the way to the train he stopped at the Villa d'Orsay, saw her and Henrietta at the far end of Mrs. Dorsey's famed white-and-gold garden.

Henrietta was in the pavilion reading. A few yards away Adelaide, head bent and blue sunshade slowly turning as it rested on her shoulder, was strolling round the great flower-rimmed, lily-strewn outer basin of Mrs.

Dorsey's famed fountain, the school of crimson fish, like a streak of fire in the water, following her. When she saw him coming toward them in traveling suit, instead of the white serge he always wore on such days as was that, she knew he was going away--a fortunate forewarning, for she thus had time to force a less telltale expression before he announced the reason for his call. "But," he added, "I'll be back in a few days--a very few."

"Oh!" was all Del said; but her tone of relief, her sudden brightening, were more significant than any words could have been.

Henrietta now joined them. "You take the afternoon express?" said she.

Ross could not conceal how severe a test of his civility this interruption was. "Yes," said he. "My trap is in front of the house."

There he colored before Henrietta's expression, a mingling of amus.e.m.e.nt, indignation, and contempt, a caustic comment upon his disregard of the effect of such indiscretion upon a Saint X young married woman's reputation. "Then," said she, looking straight and significantly at him, "you'll be able to drop me at my house on the way."

"Certainly," was his prompt a.s.sent. When Saint X's morality police should see him leaving the grounds with her, they would be silenced as to this particular occurrence at least. After a few minutes of awkward commonplaces, he and Henrietta went up the lawns, leaving Del there. At the last point from which the end of the garden could be seen, he dropped behind, turned, saw her in exactly the same position, the fountain and the water lilies before her, the center and climax of those stretches of white-and-gold blossoms. The sunshade rested lightly upon her shoulder, and its azure concave made a harmonious background for her small, graceful head with the airily plumed hat set so becomingly upon those waves of dead-gold hair. He waved to her; but she made no sign of having seen.

When Henrietta returned, Adelaide had resumed her reverie and her slow march round the fountain. Henrietta watched with a quizzical expression for some time before saying: "If I hadn't discouraged him, I believe he'd have blurted it all out to me--all he came to say to you."

Del was still absent-minded as she answered: "It's too absurd. People are so censorious, so low-minded."

"They are," rejoined Mrs. Hastings. "And, I'm sorry to say, as a rule they're right."

The curve of Del's delicate eyebrows and of her lips straightened.

"All the trouble comes through our having nothing to do," pursued Henrietta, disregarding those signs that her "meddling" was unwelcome.

"The idle women! We ought to be busy at something useful--you and I and the rest of 'em. Then we'd not be tempted to kill time doing things that cause gossip, and may cause scandal." Seeing that Adelaide was about to make some curt retort, she added: "Now, don't pretend, Del. You know, yourself, that they're always getting into mischief and getting the men into mischief."

"Don't you ever feel, Henrietta, that we're simply straws in the strong wind?"

"Fate sometimes does force mischief on men and women," was Henrietta's retort, "and it ceases to be mischief--becomes something else, I'm not sure just what. But usually fate has nothing to do with the matter. It's we ourselves that course for mischief, like a dog for rabbits."

Del, in sudden disdain of evasion, faced her with, "Well, Henrietta, what of it?"

Mrs. Hastings elevated and lowered her shoulders. "Simply that you're seeing too much of Ross--too much for his good, if not for your own."

Del's sunshade was revolving impatiently.

"It's as plain as black on white," continued Mrs. Hastings, "that he's madly in love with you--in love as only an experienced man can be with an experienced and developed woman."

"Well, what of it?" Del's tone was hostile, defiant.

"You can't abruptly stop seeing him. Everyone'd say you and he were meeting secretly."

"Really!"

"But you can be careful how you treat him. You can show him, and everybody, that there's nothing in it. You must--" Henrietta hesitated, dared; "you must be just friendly, as you are with Arden and the rest of the men."

Hiram's daughter was scarlet. Full a minute, and a very full minute, of silence. Then Adelaide said coldly: "Thank you. And now that you've freed your mind I hope you'll keep it free for your own affairs."

"Ouch!" cried Henrietta, making a wry face. And she devoted the rest of the afternoon to what she realized, at the parting, was the vain task of mollifying Del. She knew that thenceforth she and Adelaide would drift apart; and she was sorry, for she liked her--liked to talk with her, liked to go about with her. Adelaide's beauty attracted the men, and a male audience was essential to Henrietta's happiness; she found the conversation of women--the women she felt socially at ease with--tedious, and their rather problematic power of appreciation limited to what came from men. As she grew older, and less and less pleasing to the eye, the men showed more and more clearly how they had deceived themselves in thinking it was her brains that had made them like her. As Henrietta, with mournful cynicism, put it: "Men the world over care little about women beyond their physical charm. To realize it, look at us American women, who can do nothing toward furthering men's ambitions. We've only our physical charms to offer; we fall when we lose them. And so our old women and our homely women, except those that work or that have big houses and social power, have no life of their own, live on sufferance, alone or the slaves of their daughters or of some pretty young woman to whom they attach themselves."

The days dragged for Adelaide. "I'm afraid he'll write," said she--meaning that she hoped he would. Indeed, she felt that he had written, but had destroyed the letters. And she was right; almost all the time he could spare from his efforts to save his father from a sick but obstinately active man's bad judgment was given to writing to her--formal letters which he tore up as too formal, pa.s.sionate letters which he destroyed as unwarranted and unwise, when he had not yet, face to face, in words, told her his love and drawn from her what he believed was in her heart. The days dragged; she kept away from Henrietta, from all "our set," lest they should read in her dejected countenance the truth, and more.

CHAPTER XXIV

DR. MADELENE PRESCRIBES

Madelene's anteroom was full of poor people. They flocked to her, though she did not pauperize them by giving her services free. She had got the reputation of miraculous cures, the theory in the tenements being that her father had swindled his satanic "familiar" by teaching his daughter without price what he had had to pay for with his immortal soul. Adelaide refused the chair a sick-looking young artisan awkwardly pressed upon her. Leaning against the window seat, she tried to interest herself in her fellow-invalids. But she had not then the secret which unlocks the mystery of faces; she was still in the darkness in which most of us proudly strut away our lives, deriding as dreamers or cranks those who are in the light and see. With almost all of us the innate sympathies of race, which give even wolves and vultures the sense of fraternal companionship in the storm and stress of the struggle for existence, are deep overlaid with various kinds of that egotistic ignorance called cla.s.s feeling. Adelaide felt sorry for "the poor," but she had yet to learn that she was of them, as poor in other and more important ways as they in money and drawing-room manners. Surfaces and the things of the surface obscured or distorted all the realities for her, as for most of us; and the fact that her intelligence laughed at and scorned her perverted instincts was of as little help to her as it is to most of us.

When Madelene was free she said to her sister-in-law, in mock seriousness, "Well, and what can I do for _you_!" as if she were another patient.

Adelaide's eyes shifted. Clearly Madelene's keen, pretense-scattering gaze was not one to invite to inspect a matter which might not look at all well stripped of its envelopes of phrase and haze. She wished she had not come; indeed, she had been half-wishing it during the whole three-quarters of an hour of watching and thinking on Madelene's wonderful life, so crowded with interest, with achievement, with all that Hiram Ranger's daughter called, and believed, "the real thing."

"Nothing, nothing at all," replied she to Madelene's question. "I just dropped in to annoy you with my idle self--or, maybe, to please you. You know we're taught at church that a large part of the joy of the saved comes from watching the misery of the d.a.m.ned."

But Madelene had the instinct of the physician born. "She has something on her mind and wants me to help her," she thought. Aloud she said: "I feel idle, myself. We'll sit about for an hour, and you'll stay to dinner with Arthur and me--we have it here to-day, as your mother is going out.

Afterwards I must do my round."

A silence, with Adelaide wondering where Ross was and just when he would return. Then Madelene went on: "I've been trying to persuade your mother to give up the house, change it into a hospital."

The impudence of it! _Their_ house, _their_ home; and this newcomer into the family--a newcomer from nowhere--trying to get it away from them!

"Mother said something about it," said Adelaide frostily. "But she didn't say _you_ had been at her. I think she ought to be left alone in her old age."

"The main thing is to keep her interested in life, don't you think?"

suggested Madelene, noting how Adelaide was holding herself in check, but disregarding it. "Your mother's a plain, natural person and never has felt at home in that big house. Indeed, I don't think any human being ever does feel at home in a big house. There was a time when they fitted in with the order of things; but now they've become silly, it seems to me, except for public purposes. When we all get sensible and go in for being somebody instead of for showing off, we'll live in convenient, comfortable, really tasteful and individual houses and have big buildings only for general use."

"I'm afraid the world will never grow up into your ideals, Madelene,"

said Del with restrained irony. "At least not in our day."

"I'm in no hurry," replied Madelene good-naturedly. "The most satisfactory thing about common sense is that one can act on it without waiting for others to get round to it. But we weren't talking of those who would rather be ignorantly envied than intelligently happy. We were talking of your mother."

"Mother was content with her mode of life until you put these 'advanced'

ideas into her head."

"'Advanced' is hardly the word," said Madelene. "They used to be her ideas--always have been, underneath. If it weren't that she is afraid of hurting your feelings, she'd not hesitate an instant. She'd take the small house across the way and give herself the happiness of helping with the hospital she'd install in the big house. You know she always had a pa.s.sion for waiting on people. Here's her chance to gratify it to good purpose. Why should she let the fact that she has money enough not to have to work stand between her and happy usefulness?"

"What does Arthur think?" asked Del. Her resentment was subsiding in spite of her determined efforts to keep it glowing; Madelene knew the secret of manner that enables one to be habitually right without giving others the sense of being put irritatingly in the wrong. "But," smiling, "I needn't inquire. Of course he a.s.sents to whatever _you_ say."

"You know Arthur better than that," replied Madelene, with no trace of resentment. She had realized from the beginning of the conversation that Del's nerves were on edge; her color, alternately rising and fading, and her eyes, now sparkling now dull, could only mean fever from a tempest of secret emotion. "He and I usually agree simply because we see things in about the same light."

"You furnish the light," teased Adelaide.

"That was in part so at first," admitted her sister-in-law. "Arthur had got many foolish notions in his head through accepting thoughtlessly the ideas of the people he traveled with. But, once he let his good sense get the upper hand--He helps me now far more than I help him."