Part 18 (1/2)
And graciously she added, as he backed awkwardly away: ”Remember, you must let me know when Miss Todd comes. I shall call.”
CHAPTER XVIII
I dined with the Blights. It had been a month since the afternoon when I talked with Penelope, and this evening in December I went to the house with hope high that in seeing her again I might have an opportunity of regaining a little of our lost friends.h.i.+p. The invitation had come from her, over the telephone, to dine with them most informally, and though she cleared herself of any charge of interest in the matter by adding that Mr. Blight wished to see me, I flattered myself with the hope that she might be speaking more personally than she cared to admit. How soon was that illusion wrecked! I entered the great library. Mrs. Bannister was standing by the fireplace, her eyes fixed on the opposite wall, her mind occupied with a struggle to suppress a yawn of boredom. Rufus Blight was reading a newspaper, but when I was announced he came forward and greeted me cordially. With his arm in mine he led me to Mrs.
Bannister, and she allowed me to raise her hand and drop it. She said something, made some conventional remark on the great pleasure it gave her to see me; the yawn almost forced itself into view, but she set her lips firmly and drove it back. As I made my response to these friendly expressions of welcome my eyes swept the room and rested at last on the door through which I had come. There they held expectantly.
Mrs. Bannister read my thoughts. ”Penelope is so distressed that she cannot see you to-night,” she said, drawing her scarf across her bared and ma.s.sive shoulders, so that I wondered if my entrance had suddenly chilled the air. ”She had expected to be here, but this afternoon the Ruyters called up and insisted that she dine with them and go to the opera. It's 'Tristan.' She is mad about 'Tristan.'”
So faded the last vain hope! Had Penelope spent hours in devising a way of making it plain to me that the link between the past and the present was broken, she could not have been more adroit. Had David Malcolm, the boy, been coming to dine that night I know that she would have been standing there at Mrs. Bannister's side, her own eyes fixed expectantly on the door. But between the company of such excellent folk as these Ruyters, with the glorious music of ”Tristan,” and this awkward man whose people were not her people, who found content in the lodges of the Todds and Bundys, there could be but one choice. I was humiliated. The good-natured grace with which I expressed my disappointment to Mrs. Bannister belied my angry mind, and as we moved toward the dining-room, she chattering incessantly, she must have believed that I was entirely satisfied with just her company.
Fortunately I had only to smile my responses, while my thoughts were busy with the cavalier way in which I had been treated. I was incensed at Penelope, but had it been any balm to my wounds to make her feel the weight of my anger, I knew well enough that she was far beyond the reach of my reproaches. But hopelessly I repeated over and over to myself that I never could forgive her. Then, by a sudden weak reversal, I did forgive her and let my anger evaporate into a silent protest against the unkind fate which had decreed that her people should no longer be my people.
It was when I saw her that I forgave her. As we three sat at dinner, Mrs. Bannister chattering on, Rufus Blight meditative but offering a mono-syllable now and then as evidence that he listened, I smiling responsively, Penelope came in. How could I not forgive her when I saw her thus, gowned in the daintiest art of the Rue de la Paix, cloaked in soft white fur, capped with a scarf of filmy lace, and one small hand held out to mine.
The fault, I said, was my own, mine and the Fates which had ordered that the orbits in which we moved should meet but rarely. The fault, too, lay with my forebears, who, had they considered me, would have settled on the sh.o.r.es of the Hudson instead of pus.h.i.+ng westward so recklessly. Then I might now be going to the Ruyters', to sit at dinner at her side, to sit behind her in the shadow of an opera-box and whisper in her ear the ten thousand things which I had to say. I forgave Penelope. I called down maledictions on the robust Malcolms and McLaurins who had carried me out of her world and abandoned me to the garrulous Mrs. Bannister and the taciturn Rufus Blight.
Penelope was exceedingly sorry to be going out, but she knew that David would understand and would come some other night. David understood thoroughly; there was no reason for her to apologize, and, of course, he would come again. Penelope was immensely relieved to find him so complacent; she even wished he were to be of the company to which she was going. She had just come in to have a glimpse of him, and now she must be hurrying. And so she went away to take her bright place in that social firmament of which the abandoned Mr. Malcolm thought with so much envy and longing while he dallied again with sweetbreads and peas.
”It was very late when I got home,” said Mrs. Bannister, taking up the thread of her narrative, ”and who should I find here, as usual, but Herbert Talcott!”
The emphasis which she put on the words ”as usual” aroused Mr. Blight from his placid interest in his gla.s.s of claret. ”And who,” said he, ”is Talcott, anyway? What does he do?”
”Herbert Talcott is a remarkable man,” replied Mrs. Bannister. ”He does nothing.”
It should have mattered little to me that Herbert Talcott refused tea from Penelope's hands every day of the week because he had just come from the club. Had Mrs. Bannister announced that he was calling daily on Gladys Todd, then I should very properly have been startled. Yet I sat up straight now as though she had named an archenemy of my happiness and my ears were keen to hear every word.
”He does absolutely nothing,” she continued. ”He has absolutely nothing, in spite of the reports that he is quite well off. I know positively that his father left him only ten thousand a year, and yet he knows everybody and goes everywhere. He is undeniably clever and was a great favorite at Harvard.”
”Doesn't he work at all?” said Mr. Blight with a rising inflection of astonishment.
”Why, no,” replied Mrs. Bannister. She saw the disapproval in my host's face and was quick to bring herself into sympathy. ”That is what I can't understand. Now, there is Bob Grant, who is very rich in his own right, and yet goes religiously down to the Stock Exchange every day because he feels an obligation to be of some use in the world. But of the two men, Herbert Talcott is the more sought after.”
”Sought after?” said my host inquiringly.
”Yes, sought after,” repeated Mrs. Bannister. ”He is asked everywhere.
I suppose his name has something to do with it, but in these days, when name counts for so little and money for so much, it is remarkable.”
”It is remarkable,” said Rufus Blight, with a return to the spirit of the day when I had known him as a bustling, pompous man. ”It is remarkable that he can be happy doing nothing. Look how restless I am with nothing to do but to play golf and read magazines. I can't understand him. And yet he seems a decent young man.”
”But, you must remember, he is going out all the time,” said Mrs.
Bannister. ”A man simply couldn't go out as he does and do anything.
He is always in demand. Why, I know a dozen families into which he would be heartily welcomed. Last year it was reported that he was engaged to marry Jane Carmody, the mine man's daughter; but she was rather plain--to be truthful, very plain--and I will say for Herbert Talcott that he is not the kind who would marry solely for money.”
Mrs. Bannister went on chattering her praise of Herbert Talcott, with a subtle purpose, I suspected, of impressing on me the utter absurdity of my entering the lists with him and of bringing Rufus Blight to a keener appreciation of the man whom he might be called on any day to welcome into his own family. With me her efforts were quite unneeded. With Rufus Blight the impression which she seemed to create was alone one of astonishment that any man could be happy doing nothing. Again and again he interrupted her to express his doubt on that point, and when dinner was over and Mrs. Bannister had retired, and we were smoking in the room which he called his den, he unmasked to me a mind weary of working over nothing. He should never have sold out to the trust, he said; in the mills he had been happy; every hour had its task and every day its victories in orders for rails and armor-plate. Now in a single day every month he could cut coupons and attend to dividends, and the others he must pa.s.s with golf and magazines.
His den? How quickly does this bourgeois phrase call up before us a hodgepodge room, an atmosphere of stale tobacco smoke, a table covered with pipes, books and magazines, littered with tobacco, walls burdened with hideous prints, a mantel adorned with objects dear to their owner from their a.s.sociations, to the visitor hideous. The alien mind which had conceived the great library had evidently been held at bay when Rufus Blight was fitting himself into this den, his real home.
Over the fireplace was a great steel plate of the regretted mills, a world covered with immaculate smokeless buildings and cut with streets in which women were taking the air in barouches as though in a park; before the fireplace two patent rockers, and behind them a table littered with magazines and novels; in the corners golf sticks of innumerable designs, and wherever the eye turned it met coldly colored prints showing trotting horses in action. I had one of the rocking-chairs and Rufus Blight the other, and he was looking up at the mills when he spoke so regretfully of them. He referred again to Talcott.