Linda Condon Part 10

Mrs. Feldt's face suddenly had no need for the color she held poised on a cloth. Her voice, sharp at the beginning, rose to a shrill unrestrained wrath.

"I wonder at the bra.s.s of her speaking to you at all let alone writing here. Just you give me the letter and I'll shut her up. The idea! I hope you were cool to her, the way they treated us. Stay with them--I guess not!"

"But I thought of going," Linda replied. "It's only natural. After all, you must see that he was my father."

"A pretty father he was, too good for the girl he married. It's my fault I didn't tell you long ago, but I just couldn't abide the mention of him. He deserted me, no, us, cold, without a word--walked out of the door one noon, taking his hat as quiet as natural, and never came back.

I never saw him again nor heard except through lawyers. That was the kind of heart he had, and his sisters are worse. I hadn't a decent speech of any kind out of them. The Lowries," she managed to inject a surprising amount of contempt into her p.r.o.nouncement of that name. "What it was all about you nor any sensible person would never believe:

"The house smelled a little of boiled cabbage. That's why he left me, and you expected in a matter of a few months. He said in his dam' frigid way that it had become quite impossible and took down his hat."

"There must have been more," Linda protested, suppressing a mad desire to laugh.

"Not an inch," her mother a.s.serted. "Nothing, after a little, suited him. He'd sit up like a poker, just as I've seen you, with his lips tight together in the Lowrie manner. It didn't please him no matter what you'd do. He wouldn't blow out at you like a Christian and I never knew where I was at. I'd come down in a matinee, the prettiest I could buy, and then see he didn't like it. He would expect you to be dressed in the morning like it was afternoon and you going out. And as for loosening your corsets for a little comfort about the house, you might as well have slapped him direct.

"That wasn't the worst, though; but his going away without as much as a flicker of his hand; and with me like I was. n.o.body on earth but would blame him for that. I only got what was allowed me after we had changed back to my old name, me and you. He never asked one single question about you nor tried to see or serve you a sc.r.a.p. For all he knew, at a place called Santa Margharita in Italy, you might have been born dead."

She was unable, Linda recognized, to defend him in any way; he had acted frightfully. She acknowledged this logically with her power of reason, but somehow it didn't touch her as it had her mother, and as, evidently, the latter expected. She was absorbed in the vision of her father sitting, in the Lowrie manner, rigid as a poker; she saw him quietly take up his hat and go away forever. Linda understood his process completely; she was capable of doing precisely the same thing. Whatever was the matter with her--in the heartlessness so often laid to her account--had been equally true of her father.

"You ought to know what to say to them," Mrs. Moses Feldt cried, "or I'll do it for you! If only I had seen her she would have heard a thing or two not easy forgotten."

Linda's determination to go to Philadelphia had not been shaken, and she made a vain effort to explain her att.i.tude. "Of course, it was horrid for you," she said. "I can understand how you'd never never forgive him.

But I am different, and, I expect, not at all nice. It's very possible, since he was my father, that we are alike. I wish you had told me this before--it explains so much and would have made things easier for me. I am afraid I must see them."

She was aware of the bitterness and enmity that stiffened her mother into an unaccustomed adequate scorn:

"I might have expected nothing better of you, and me watching it coming all these years. You can go or stay. I had my life in spite of the both of you, as gay as I pleased and a good husband just the same. I don't care if I never see you again, and if it wasn't for the fuss it would make I'd take care I didn't. You'll have your father's money now I'm married; I wonder you stay around here at all with your airs of being better than the rest. G.o.d's truth is you ain't near as good, even if I did bring you into the world."

"I am willing to agree with you," Linda answered. "No one could be sweeter than the Feldts. I sha'n't do nearly as well. But that isn't it, really. People don't choose themselves; I'm certain father didn't at that lonely Italian place. If you weren't happy laced in the morning it wasn't your fault. You see, I am trying to excuse myself, and that isn't any good, either."

"Unnatural," Mrs. Moses Feldt p.r.o.nounced. And Linda, weary and depressed, allowed her the last word.

XIX

Nothing further during the subsequent brief exchange of notes between Miss Lowrie and Linda was said of the latter's intention to visit her father's family. Mrs. Feldt, however, whose att.i.tude toward Linda had been negatively polite, now displayed an animosity carefully hidden from her husband but evident to the two girls. The elder never neglected an opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishness or make her personality seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored from her wide sense of the inconsequence of most things.

Yet she was relieved when, finally, she had actually left New York. She looked forward with an unusual hopeful curiosity to the Lowries. To her surprise their house--miles, it appeared, from the center of the city--was directly on a paved street with electric cars, unpretentious stores and very humble dwellings nearby. Back from the thoroughfare, however, there were s.p.a.cious green lawns. The street itself, she saw at once, was old--a highway of gray stone with low aged stone facades, steep eaves and blackened chimney-pots reaching, dusty with years, into the farther hilly country.

A gable of the Lowrie house, with a dignified white door, a fanlight of faintly iridescent gla.s.s and polished bra.s.ses, faced the brick sidewalk, while to the left there was a high board fence and an entrance with a small grille open on a somber reach of garden. A maid in a stiff white cap answered the fall of the knocker; she took Linda's bag; and, in a hall that impressed her by its bareness, Linda was greeted by the Miss Lowrie she had seen.

Her aunt was composed, but there was a perceptible flush on her cheeks, and she said in a rapid voice, after a conventional welcome, "You must meet Elouise at once, before you go up to your room."

Elouise Lowrie was older than Amelia, but she, too, was slender and erect, with black hair startling in its density on her wasted countenance. Linda noticed a fine ruby on a crooked finger and beautiful rose point lace. "It was good of you," the elder proceeded, "to come and see two old women. I don't know whether we have more to say or to keep still about. But I, for one, am going to avoid explanations. You are here, a fool could see that you were Bartram's girl, and that is enough for a Lowrie."

The room was nearly as bare as the hall: in place of the deep carpets of the Feldts' the floor, of dark uneven oak boards, was merely waxed and covered by a rough-looking oval rug. The walls were paneled in white, with white ruffled curtains at small windows; and the furniture, the dull mahogany ranged against the immaculate paint, the rocking-chairs of high slatted walnut and rush bottoms, the slender formality of tables with fluted legs, was dignified but austere. There were some portraits in heavy old gilt--men with florid faces and tied hair, and the delicate replicas of high-breasted women in brocades.

There was, plainly, an air of the exceptional in Amelia Lowrie's conduction of Linda to her room. She waited at the door while the other moved forward to the center of a chamber empty of all the luxury Linda had grown to demand. There was a bed with tall graceful posts supporting a canopy like a frosting of sugar, a solemn set of drawers with a diminutive framed mirror in which she could barely see her shoulders, a small unenclosed bra.s.s clock with long exposed weights, and two uninviting painted wooden chairs. This was not, although very nearly, all. Linda's attention was attracted by a framed and long-faded photograph of a young man, bareheaded, with a loosely knotted scarf, a striped blazer and white flannels. His face was thin and sensitive, his lips level, and his eyes gazed with a steady questioning at the observer.

"That was Bartram," Amelia Lowrie told her; "your father. This was his room."

She went down almost immediately and left Linda, in a maze of dim emotions, seated on one of the uncomfortable painted chairs. Her father!

This was his room; nothing, she realized, had been disturbed. The mirror had held the vaguely unsteady reflection of his face; he had slept under the arched canopy of the bed. She rose and went to a window from which he, too, had looked.

Below her was the garden shut in on its front by the high fence. There was a magnolia-tree, now covered with thick smooth white flowers, and, at the back, low-ma.s.sed rhododendron with fragile lavender blossoms on a dark glossy foliage. But the s.p.a.ce was mainly green and shadowed in tone; while beyond were other gardens, other emerald lawns and magnolia-trees, an ordered succession of tranquillity with separate brick or stone or white dwellings in the lengthening afternoon shadows of vivid maples.

It was as different as possible from all that Linda had known, from the elaborate hotels and gigantic apartment houses, the tropical interiors, of her New York life. She unpacked her bag, putting her gold toilet things on the chest of drawers, precisely arranging in a shallow closet what clothes she had brought, and then, changing, went down to the Lowries.

They surveyed her with eminent approval at a dinner-table lighted only with candles, beside long windows open on a dusk with a glimmer of fireflies. Suddenly Linda felt amazingly at ease; it seemed to her that she had sat here before, with the night flowing gently in over the candle-flames. The conversation, she discovered, never strayed far from the concerns and importance of the Lowrie blood. "My grandmother, Natalie Vigne," Elouise informed her, "came with her father to Philadelphia from France, in eighteen hundred and one, at the invitation of Stephen Girard, who was French as well. She married Hallet Lowrie whose mother was a Bartram.

"That, my dear, explains our black hair and good figgers. There never was a lumpy Lowrie. Well, Hallet built this house, or rather enlarged it, for his wife; and it has never been out of the family. Our nephew, Arnaud Hallet--Arnaud was old Vigne's name--owns it now. Isaac Hallet, you may recall, was suspected of being a Tory; at any rate his brother's descendants, f.a.n.n.y Rodwell is the only one left, won't speak."

The placid conversation ran on unchanged throughout dinner and the evening. Linda was relieved by the absence of any questioning; indeed nothing contemporary, she realized, was held to be significant. "I thought Arnaud would be in to-night," Elouise Lowrie said; "he knew Linda was expected." No one, however, appeared; and Linda went up early to her room. There, too, were only candles, a pale wavering illumination in which the past, her father, were extraordinarily nearby. A sense of pride was communicated to her by so much that time had been unable to shake. The bed was steeped in the magic of serene traditions.

XX

Arnaud Hallet appeared for dinner the evening after Linda's arrival; a quiet man with his youth lost, slightly stooped shoulders, crumpled shoes and a green cloth bag. But he had a memorable voice and an easy distinction of manner; in addition to these she discovered, at the table, a lighter amusing sense of the absurd. She watched him--as he poured the sherry from a decanter with a silver label hung on a chain--with a feeling of mild approbation. On the whole he was nice but uninteresting. What a different man from Pleydon!

The days pa.s.sed in a pleasant deliberation, with Arnaud Hallet constantly about the house or garden, while Linda's thoughts continually returned to the sculptor. He was clearer than the actuality of her mother and the Feldts or the recreated image of her father. At times she was thrilled by the familiar obscure sense of music, of longing slowly translated into happiness. Then more actual problems would envelop her in doubt. Mostly she was confused--in her cool material necessity for understanding--by the temper of her feeling for Dodge Pleydon. Linda wondered if this were love. Perhaps, when she saw him again, she'd be able to decide. Then she remembered promising to let him know if she changed her address. It was possible that already he had called at the Feldts', or written, and that her mother had refused to inform him where she had gone.

Linda had been at the Lowries' two weeks now, but they were acutely distressed when she suggested that her visit was unreasonably prolonged.

"My dear," they protested together, "we hoped you'd stay the summer.

Bartram's girl! Unless, of course, it is dull with us. Something brighter must be arranged. No doubt we have only thought of our own pleasure in having you."

Linda replied honestly that she enjoyed being with them extremely. Her mother's dislike, the heavy luxury of the Feldt apartment, held little attraction for her. Then, too, losing the sense of the bareness of the house Hallet Lowrie had built for his French wife, she began to find it surprisingly appealing.

Her mind returned to her promise to Pleydon. She told herself that probably he had forgotten her existence, but she had a strong unreasoning conviction that this was not so. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to write him and, almost before she was aware of the intention, she had put "Dear Mr. Pleydon" at the head of a sheet of note-paper.

I promised to let you know in the spring when you came back from South America where I was. I did not think I would have to do it, but here I am in Philadelphia with my father's sisters. I do not know just how long for, but a month, anyhow. It is very quiet, but charming. I have the room that was my father's when he was young, and look out of the window like he must have. If you should come to Philadelphia my aunts ask me to say that they would be glad to have you for dinner. This is how you get here....

Very sincerely,

LINDA CONDON.

She walked to a street crossing, where she dropped the envelope into a letter-box on a lamppost, and returned to find Arnaud Hallet waiting for her. He said:

"Everyone agrees I'm serious, but actually you are worse than the a.s.sembly." They went through the dining-room to the garden, and sat on the stone step of a deep window. It was quite late, perhaps eleven o'clock, and the fireflies, slowly rising into the night, had vanished.

Linda was cool and remote and grave, silently repeating and weighing the phrases of her letter to Pleydon.

She realized that Arnaud Hallet was coming to like her a very great deal; but she gave this only the slightest attention. She liked him, really, and that dismissed him from serious consideration. Anyhow, in spite of the perfection of his manner, Arnaud's careless dress displeased her: his shoes and the shoulders of his coat were perpetually dusty, and his hair, growing scant, was always ruffled. Linda understood that he was highly intellectual, and frequently contributed historical and genealogical papers to societies and bulletins, but compared with Dodge Pleydon's brilliant personality and reputation, Pleydon surrounded by the Susanna Nodas of life, Arnaud was as dingy as his shoes.

She wondered idly when the latter would actually try to love her. He was holding her hand and it might well be to-night. Linda decided that he would do it delicately; and when, almost immediately, he kissed her, she was undisturbed. No, surprisingly, it had been quite pleasant. He hadn't mussed her ribbons, nor her spirit, a particle. In addition he did not at once become impossible and urgently sentimental; there was even a shade of amus.e.m.e.nt on his heavy face.