Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

“New York,” said Babs. “It’s Stacy’s idea. Christmas is on Monday. If we don’t get in today, there’ll be no presents for our darling father and you.”

Norma refused to be piqued by Babs’s tone. “Why not Hartford, if you simply must? It’s not so far away.”

“Stacy has something special picked out for Thad—and Cheli Scott too, I suppose. Leave it to my fifteen-year-old brother.” Babs spoke with all the languid disparagement of an eighteen-year-old for one three years her junior. “It’s New York, I’m afraid.” She started down the stairs.

Inwardly, Norma sighed. Another conversation with Babs was ending in the usual way, bright and friendly up to a point. Beyond that they never seemed to go.

“Run along if you’ve a train to catch,” said Norma. “Are you taking the coupé?”

Babs turned on the stairs and nodded absently. “Stacy’s driving us into Hartford. We’ll leave it at a garage near the station. We’re going to spend the night in New York with the Ritters and be back tomorrow. I don’t think this snow can last another day.”

Norma watched Babs descend the stairs. The girl’s youthful beauty was almost too perfect, like a picture done in tints too bright,—gold and white, rose and blue,—which time might fade. Such coloring needed vivacity behind it, but Babs smoldered almost sulkily.

“The Tredwill men have all the temperament,” Norma thought. Thad’s two sons, Gilbert, twenty-eight, and Stacy, fifteen, though separated widely in years, were much alike. They were quick to laugh, constantly enthusiastic about something, although their cause might change in a day. Thaddeus himself had all the ingrained egoism of a genius. He ruled his house and his family capriciously, and sometimes noisily, but back of his heated displays of temper he looked at life with a humorous glint in his eye.

Norma heard Cheli Scott greet Babs downstairs. Cheli was a playwright, and Thad’s protégée. She was working on a new play which Thad wanted to try out in his own small theater, an integral part of The Crags. The house always seemed more pleasant and alive when Cheli was a visitor. Norma liked gaiety and laughter, and Cheli was friendly and amusing—a delightful, considerate girl.

For a moment Norma listened, then she left her post at the head of the stairs and started slowly toward her own apartment at the end of the hall. In front of Babs’s open door, she paused and stood indecisively looking in upon the disordered scene.

Babs depended on servants to keep the material articles of living in their proper places. Fastidious about her own appearance, she left behind her a limp trail of dresses, underwear, and stockings. The three-mirror dressing table was a jumble of make-up jars and glittering crystal bottles. Norma stepped inside and closed the door with a feeling of guilty intrusion.

At the back of the dressing table was a crystal bottle of unusual design. It was larger than the rest, and obviously new. The stopper of black, cunningly wrought glass was so skillfully made that it gave an illusion of an exotic black flower, slightly evil, thrust into the bottle by its stem. Colored cellophane had been rolled down to encircle the base of the bottle. The slim flacon rose out of it with an appearance of naked beauty, as though it were some tiny woman of glass who had dropped her dress to the floor.

Norma felt a slight touch of faintness, and sat down on the rose-cushioned bench in front of the dressing table. The triple mirror showed her piquant face pale above the blue satin of her house coat. The tiny freckle over the dimple in her left cheek glowed brightly, as it always did when she was perturbed.

Automatically she took her vanity case from the pocket of her house coat and touched her cheeks with rouge. She snapped the jeweled case shut and returned it to her pocket. The perfume bottle was possessed with magnetism of memories. Twice she reached out to touch it, but forced herself to keep her hands away.

She suddenly knew what had brought Paul Gerente back to mind. Ten minutes earlier, on her interrupted trip to breakfast, she had glimpsed that seventy-five-dollar bottle of Black Orchid through Babs’s partly opened door.

That single glimpse had swept ten years away. The gift of a similar bottle had begun Paul’s courtship. Norma smiled a trifle bitterly. A bottle of the same Black Orchid had ended her marriage to Paul. She had seen it in the bedroom of another woman, and there had been others, too. Paul Gerente had distributed his Black Orchid tokens of affection as liberally as his charm.

Norma made a slight moue of distaste at her reflection in the mirror, then stood up and left the room. She did not intend to allow a fantastically incredible idea to run away with her natural good judgment. Paul Gerente, once a famous stage name, had dropped out of sight after she divorced him. There had been various unsubstantiated rumors that he had lost his money in the market and taken to drink. Past association was flimsy evidence on which to base an assumption; just because Babs had an unusual bottle of expensive perfume was no indication that she was seeing Paul.

The house was very silent. Norma stopped again at the top of the stairway. From below she heard Cheli Scott say good-bye. Cheli’s words were followed by the opening and closing of the front door and the whine of the starter as Stacy started the coupé. Norma waited until the clank of chains in gravel and snow told her that the car was gone before she went downstairs.

Cheli, brilliant in a suit of red velvet pajamas, was curled up in the depths of a great armchair in front of the blazing log fire in the living room. She looked up from the pages of a manuscript, brushed back thick brown curls to disclose a smile in her blue-gray eyes, and said, “Cheerio, sleepy-head! How do you like the snow?”

“I think it makes me