The Turmoil, Booth Tarkington [best english novels for beginners .txt] 📗

elbow upon the table and following with her eyes the twinkle of diamonds and platinum in the clasp at the end of the loop. She wore many jewels. She was pretty, but hers was not the kind of prettiness to be loaded with too sumptuous accessories, and jeweled headdresses are dangerous⁠—they may emphasize the wrongness of the wearer.

“I said Miss Vertrees seems to be starting pretty strong with Jim,” repeated Mr. Lamhorn.

“I heard you.” There was a latent discontent always somewhere in her eyes, no matter what she threw upon the surface of cover it, and just now she did not care to cover it; she looked sullen. “Starting any stronger than you did with Edith?” she inquired.

“Oh, keep the peace!” he said, crossly. “That’s off, of course.”

“You haven’t been making her see it this evening⁠—precisely,” said Sibyl, looking at him steadily. “You’ve talked to her for⁠—”

“For Heaven’s sake,” he begged, “keep the peace!”

“Well, what have you just been doing?”

“Sh!” he said. “Listen to your father-in-law.”

Sheridan was booming and braying louder than ever, the orchestra having begun to play “The Rosary,” to his vast content.

“I count them over, la-la-tum-tee-dum,” he roared, beating the measures with his fork. “Each hour a pearl, each pearl tee-dum-tum-dum⁠—What’s the matter with all you folks? Why’n’t you sing? Miss Vertrees, I bet a thousand dollars you sing! Why’n’t⁠—”

“Mr. Sheridan,” she said, turning cheerfully from the ardent Jim, “you don’t know what you interrupted! Your son isn’t used to my rough ways, and my soldier’s wooing frightens him, but I think he was about to say something important.”

“I’ll say something important to him if he doesn’t!” the father threatened, more delighted with her than ever. “By gosh! if I was his age⁠—or a widower right now⁠—”

“Oh, wait!” cried Mary. “If they’d only make less noise! I want Mrs. Sheridan to hear.”

“She’d say the same,” he shouted. “She’d tell me I was mighty slow if I couldn’t get ahead o’ Jim. Why, when I was his age⁠—”

“You must listen to your father,” Mary interrupted, turning to Jim, who had grown red again. “He’s going to tell us how, when he was your age, he made those two blades of grass grow out of a teacup⁠—and you could see for yourself he didn’t get them out of his sleeve!”

At that Sheridan pounded the table till it jumped. “Look here, young lady!” he roared. “Some o’ these days I’m either goin’ to slap you⁠—or I’m goin’ to kiss you!”

Edith looked aghast; she was afraid this was indeed “too awful,” but Mary Vertrees burst into ringing laughter.

“Both!” she cried. “Both! The one to make me forget the other!”

“But which⁠—” he began, and then suddenly gave forth such stentorian trumpetings of mirth that for once the whole table stopped to listen. “Jim,” he roared, “if you don’t propose to that girl tonight I’ll send you back to the machine-shop with Bibbs!”

And Bibbs⁠—down among the retainers by the sugar Pump Works, and watching Mary Vertrees as a ragged boy in the street might watch a rich little girl in a garden⁠—Bibbs heard. He heard⁠—and he knew what his father’s plans were now.

VII

Mrs. Vertrees “sat up” for her daughter, Mr. Vertrees having retired after a restless evening, not much soothed by the society of his Landseers. Mary had taken a key, insisting that he should not come for her and seeming confident that she would not lack for escort; nor did the sequel prove her confidence unwarranted. But Mrs. Vertrees had a long vigil of it.

She was not the woman to make herself easy⁠—no servant had ever seen her in a wrapper⁠—and with her hair and dress and her shoes just what they had been when she returned from the afternoon’s call, she sat through the slow night hours in a stiff little chair under the gaslight in her own room, which was directly over the front hall. There, book in hand, she employed the time in her own reminiscences, though it was her belief that she was reading Madame de Remusat’s.

Her thoughts went backward into her life and into her husband’s; and the deeper into the past they went, the brighter the pictures they brought her⁠—and there is tragedy. Like her husband, she thought backward because she did not dare think forward definitely. What thinking forward this troubled couple ventured took the form of a slender hope which neither of them could have borne to hear put in words, and yet they had talked it over, day after day, from the very hour when they heard Sheridan was to build his New House next door. For⁠—so quickly does any ideal of human behavior become an antique⁠—their youth was of the innocent old days, so dead! of “breeding” and “gentility,” and no craft had been more straitly trained upon them than that of talking about things without mentioning them. Herein was marked the most vital difference between Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees and their big new neighbor. Sheridan, though his youth was of the same epoch, knew nothing of such matters. He had been chopping wood for the morning fire in the country grocery while they were still dancing.

It was after one o’clock when Mrs. Vertrees heard steps and the delicate clinking of the key in the lock, and then, with the opening of the door, Mary’s laugh, and “Yes⁠—if you aren’t afraid⁠—tomorrow!”

The door closed, and she rushed upstairs, bringing with her a breath of cold and bracing air into her mother’s room. “Yes,” she said, before Mrs. Vertrees could speak, “he brought me home!”

She let her cloak fall upon the bed, and, drawing an old red-velvet rocking-chair forward, sat beside her mother after giving her a light pat upon the shoulder and a hearty kiss upon the cheek.

“Mamma!” Mary exclaimed, when Mrs. Vertrees had expressed a hope that she had enjoyed the evening and had not caught cold. “Why don’t you ask me?”

This inquiry obviously made her mother uncomfortable. “I don’t⁠—” she faltered. “Ask you what, Mary?”

“How I got along and what he’s like.”

“Mary!”

“Oh, it isn’t distressing!” said