CHAPTER IV INTERLUDE

Previous

On a bright afternoon in early December a number of carriages and motor cars that usually entered Central Park via the Plaza promptly at four, continued to the right instead, and in impromptu procession slowed down before the entrance of a new house in the Park Lane section of the avenue.

The house belonged to Senator Parks, and on this day it was to be thrown open to that portion of the public selected by the social sponsors of his new wife. This wife, being a rather handsome California widow on the agreeable side of thirty-five, had acquired enough knowledge of the world during a three years’ residence abroad to bend the knee gracefully, if not quite sincerely, to the powers that make or mar the fate of newcomers, at the same time always, so to speak, carelessly twisting in plain sight between her slender fingers the strings of a full purse.

The conventional “At Home from 4 to 7 o’clock,” therefore, had more than the usual significance, for it was known to imply a concert in the superbly appointed music hall, by singers from the opera, and an exhibition of paintings in the new gallery, so spacious that it ran from block to block, such a one as had never before been seen in any private dwelling in Manhattan. Then, too, there had been whispers of a chef of Gallic renown who had served two emperors and a prince, and altogether society, whose appetite is rather keen at the beginning of the season, expecting novelty or at least to be amused, was beginning to sally forth. It did not commit itself by so doing, and it assumed no responsibility other than leaving a card, by footman or otherwise, at the door, in due course; it merely gave itself the opportunity to pass judgment. But as the new hostess understood this perfectly well, and only desired the chance of playing her trump card to win the lead, it was a beautifully frank arrangement on both sides, in which no one was deceived.

As the hour passed the stream of carriages became continuous, the cavernous awning that swallowed the people as soon as they alighted being the centre of that strange mob, usually composed of fairly well-dressed women, who appear spontaneously wherever the carpet-covered steps and striped awning tell of an entertainment to be. No buzzard hovering in air drops to his prey more quickly than does the average idle woman catch sight of this emblem of hospitality.

Two young women, walking with easy, rapid gait up the avenue, paused on the outskirts of the throng, uncertain as to the best point for breaking through. At least the shorter of the two hesitated, while the taller, after a swift survey, put her white-gloved hands firmly on the shoulders of a gaping dressmaker’s apprentice, turned her about, saying, as she did so, “Let us pass, please,” and instantly a way was opened.

These young women were simply dressed for the street, with no obtrusive fuss and feathers, yet each had an unmistakable air of individuality and distinction. They were both of the same age, twenty-four, yet the difference in colouring and poise made the taller appear fully two years older. She had glossy black hair, tucked up under a three-cornered hat, heavy eyebrows, from under which she looked one straight in the face with a half-defiant look in the steel-gray eyes. Her nose was aquiline, and her lips rather thin, but curled in a humorous way when she spoke. She was broad of shoulder and small of waist and hips; and it was only a shy curve of neck and bust that, judging from poise alone, prevented one from thinking Lucy Dean a young athlete masquerading in his sister’s black velvet fur-trimmed frock with its scarlet-slashed sleeves.

Brooke Lawton, her companion, looked little more than twenty, was formed in a more feminine mould, and though half a head shorter, was still of medium height. Her hair, of the peculiar shade of ash brown with chestnut glints that artists love, was worn rather loose at the sides and gathered into a curly knot at the back of the neck, under a wide brown beaver hat that was tied below the chin with a large bow and ends after the fashion of our grandmothers. Her eyes were dark brown, and yet a shade lighter than the brows and lashes. Her nose was not of classic proportions, being rather too broad at the base and inclined to be tip-tilted, but her mouth had a generous fulness that softened a resolute chin, albeit it was cleft by a dimple. Her long coat was of brown, so that the only bright colour about her was the vivid glow that the crisp air and walking had brought to her cheeks.

She also looked one straight in the eyes when she spoke, but with an entire lack of self-consciousness wholly at variance with the attitude of her friend. Brooke might be typified as a joyous yet shy thrush; Lucy, as a splendid but vociferous red-winged blackbird!

“Is your mother coming?” asked Lucy, as they went up the steps together.

“Later, perhaps; she has not been feeling very festive these few days past. In fact, she has been strangely spiritless of late; living in a hotel disagrees with her ideas of home hospitality. Father seems worried and has not been sleeping,—has a bit of a cough, and anything like that always upsets dear little Mummy; she doesn’t realize that he is made of steel springs just as I am. I’m sure she will try to come, if only for a minute, for Mrs. Parks asked her to receive with her. She didn’t care to do that because, though we met the Parkses very often in Paris, they were never more than acquaintances, not real friends; but to stay away might hurt her feelings, and of course that must not be.”

“Oh, no, a Brooke of Virginia would never do that; she would be hospitable to a burglar, even while waiting for the police to come for him, and when he left, handcuffed, regret that uncontrollable circumstances prevented his spending the night!” said Lucy, mimicking the tone and manner of an old great-aunt of Brooke’s so thoroughly that she was forced to laugh.

“But thou, O most transparent of all the Brookes, even if you have Scotch granite and American steel concealed in your depths, you very well know that Madame Parks would have given many shekels of gold to have had your mother standing on her right this afternoon. Do you realize that she even asked me to sing to-day? Of course I wouldn’t.”

“That surely was a compliment to your voice that you can hardly find fault with,” said Brooke, pausing on the threshold to gather together the requisite number of cards.

“My voice! That had nothing whatever to do with it My voice might be like a jay’s with its crop full of popcorn, for all she knows about it. No, it was all on account of daddy; this affair has been well thought out. She has been careful to have a representative bidden from every department of the society trust,—clergy, laity, art, music, science. Daddy represents up-to-date financiering,—there is no Mrs. Dean, hence me! She wandered a bit, though, in asking me to sing on the same afternoon with paid professionals. If it had been a very select and spirituelle affair, with Maud Knowles at the harp and Dick Fenton with his Boulevard imitations and songs, followed by bouquets of orchids concealing bijouterie for the performers, I might have yielded.

“Yes,” Lucy chattered on, “let us go upstairs; we had better drop our wraps, as we expect to make an afternoon of it. What an apartment! Madame’s, of course. Look at that bed on the dais and a boudoir and breakfast room beyond! Eight maids! Why didn’t she have four and twenty to match the pie blackbirds? Look at the way in which their skirts stay in place behind when they wiggle them. Never saw such a thing off the stage; one straight line from belt to hem, just the stunning way Hilda Spong wears hers in ‘Lady Huntworth’s Experiment’! What is the exhibit in that room across the hall, with the walls draped with white over sky-blue? Everybody is going that way; let us also flock!

“As I live, it’s the baby lying in state—no, holding a levÉe, I mean. What an odd-shaped cradle! Isn’t he a fright, but look at his robe—Irish point all made in one piece—and his gold toilet things on that tray! Well, after all, there must be something novel to the Parkses about this. Papa has been married three times and mamma twice, and this Chinese Joss is all there is to show for it! I wonder if her craze for collecting bric-a-brac can possibly account for his looks? If there isn’t the Senator himself, hovering around to show off his little son. I wonder if Madame knows papa is on the premises? Gracious, he’s taking the baby out of the Easter egg! Hear the lace tear, and that monumental English head nurse doesn’t move a muscle!

“Don’t look distressed and blush so, Brooke; facts are facts, and then besides, nobody can hear me in this babel. Now, let’s agree where we shall meet, for we shall be duly torn asunder directly we go downstairs. Come in here a second, my head feathers are awry. What a mercy it is to have hair like yours, that the more it is let alone, the better it behaves!

“No, don’t touch the strings of your poke, and leave your bodice alone. That creamy lace simply looks confidential and clinging, and not a bit mussy like mine.”

“I think I will go to the picture gallery as soon as we have made our bows to Mrs. Parks, and settle there,” said Brooke, “so that I can see everything before the concert is over. Then you will know where to find me. To-day I feel more like looking than listening,” she added, when Lucy was silenced a moment by holding half a dozen jewelled stick pins between her lips, as she rearranged the folds of an expensive draped lace bodice that, in spite of the beauty of the fabric, seemed out of key and mussy, the severe and tailor-made being better adapted to her.

For a few moments the two lingered in one of the alcoves of the dressing room, looking for familiar faces among the arrivals.

“By the way, I suppose Mr. Fenton is coming in later with the other down-town men?” said Brooke. “If so, you needn’t look me up at all.”

“Dick may be coming, though I doubt it, but it will not be to meet me. See here, goosie,” said Lucy, half avoiding her friend’s eyes, “I might as well tell you now as any other time. Dick and I have agreed to disagree. It happened last Sunday, and I’d have told you before, only you take all such things so seriously.”

“What is the matter; has he changed?”

“No, he has not, that is half the trouble. He has stayed quite too much the same; I only wonder that I could have endured it for the eight months it has lasted. You see, he was perfectly satisfied with himself as he was, and that leaves no room for improvement. Of course everybody knows, at the pace the world’s rolling along, if you don’t go ahead, you slide back! I tend to balk and jump the traces enough myself when it comes to hills, Heaven knows, and if my mate in harness can’t pull true on an up grade, where shall we be at? Dick kept along on the level good naturedly, I’ll say that for him, yet it was because I was my father’s daughter, not because I’m myself. Being a young broker, he thought it a good thing to have a father-in-law with unlimited ‘pointers’ in every wag of his chin (poor chap, he hasn’t yet realized that these things mostly point both ways), and he was serenely content! As for me, I felt as if I should go wild,—no conversation except the eternal money market. I said so,—and more besides!

“He was very nice about it,—daddy really seemed relieved,—and—well, it’s all over, though his mother did glower at me at first when I met her on the avenue yesterday, but she decided to bow.”

“Oh, Lucy, why are you so impetuous? When you told me of the engagement, you said—”

“Now listen, Brooke Lawton, and hear me swear one thing: money in one’s pocket is a blessing, but continually dinned into one’s ears it’s the other thing. If ever I marry any one, he must not be in this sickening money business; he must do something different, if it’s only drawing pictures on the sidewalk with chalk held between his toes, like the armless sailor in Union Square, though, come to think of it, I’d rather he’d have arms!

“By the way, why don’t you ’phone your mother to come? It’s going to be an awfully smart party. There’s a ’phone in the writing room or somewhere near—there always is one now at swell functions for the use of guests, and a young man (not a woman—too dangerous) from central to work it; they say the society reporters fight and bribe to get the job, they hear so much ‘inwardness.’ Your mother needn’t worry and stay at home. I don’t think your father’s sick. I heard daddy say last night that he is in another big deal, with trump cards enough to fill both hands, and he’s holding them so close for fear of dropping any that he’s bound to be preoccupied.”

“It’s time for us to go; I hear the music,” said Brooke, who had been set thinking by her friend’s talk.

“Why not come into the music room for a few numbers and then escape if you wish?” said Lucy, navigating the crowded stairs easily, and pausing on a landing to continue her chatter and glance into the room below. “What, all the chairs taken already? Just look at those orchids, by the dozen, not single, the whole plant hung by gilt chains from the ceiling!

“You won’t come? Well, so be it, if you have the ‘picture hunger’ as badly as you did in Paris. Do you remember the big hybrid French-English-Dutchman who gave that name to the moonstruck turns you used to have over painted ‘masterpieces’ and unpainted landscapes outdoors? Yes, I see you do. Well, I thought at one time he was painfully smitten and would probably lay himself down humbly at your feet, like an inconveniently thick bear rug that, failing to be able to step over, one must tread on, though often to one’s downfall. Still, of course, with artists the meaning of their looks and actions are usually either exaggerated or vague, much like their talk of values and colour schemes and atmosphere. I heard this same Marte Lorenz in a group of ravers standing before a canvas one day at the Mirlitons’ when I called for you, and I rubbered and peeped over their shoulders, expecting to see the portrait of a delicious woman at the very least; and what was the whole row about but an onion on a wooden plate, and they were saying that it was genuine and showed insight!

“It would be such fun to tease you, Brooke, if only you were teasable. Suppose, after all, there should be a real live man behind all this ‘picture hunger.’ I think that there must be from the way you have turned slack and dropped your brush in seeming disdain at your work, even after you won that Baumgarten prize, with the picture of your cousin Helen’s Mellin’s food babies sitting on the ground au naturel, eating cherries (pits and all), bless their poor fat tummies!

“However, there can’t be a man concealed in your mind, you are too transparent,—I should have known it, and helped matters nicely to a focus for you. Yet the copy-books used to say ‘still waters run deep’; who knows, innocent-looking mountain Brooke, but there is a great, deep, still swimming pool somewhere in your mind!”

“Bless me, she is teasable after all!” ejaculated Lucy, for, while she was still gabbling, Brooke had left her, slipped through the portiÈres, held apart by two footmen, given her name to a third, shaken her hostess cordially by the hand, and after carefully giving her mother’s message of regret, melted away in the crowd.

“Charming girl, that Miss Lawton,” was Mrs. Parks’s mental comment. “I guess, after all, there is something in having a well-bred-to-the-bone mother. Three hundred people have squeezed my fingers already this afternoon and murmured all sorts of things, while they either gazed over my head or at my gown. She is the first one that looked at me and as if she meant what she said, or would really do me a good turn if she could.” And the Senator’s ambitious wife gazed after Brooke rather wistfully.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Clyx.com


Top of Page
Top of Page