The Bent Twig Part 3

She replied with a smile, "That rather depends, doesn't it, Elliott, upon one's idea of what const.i.tutes a human being?"

Something in her sweet voice roused Judith to an ugly wrath. She came forward and took her place protectingly beside her new playmate, scowling at her aunt. "We were having a _lovely_ time!" she said challengingly.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked down at the grotesque little figure and touched the brown cheek indulgently with her forefinger. "That too rather depends upon one's definition of a lovely time," she replied, turning away, leaving with the indifference of long practice the unfortunate Mr. Rollins to the task of converting Arnold into a product possible to transport through the streets of a civilized town.

Before they went away that day, Arnold managed to seek Judith out alone, and with shamefaced clumsiness to slip his knife, quite new and three-bladed, into her hand. She looked at it uncomprehendingly. "For you--to keep," he said, flus.h.i.+ng again, and looking hard into her dark eyes, which in return lightened suddenly from their usual rather somber seriousness into a smile, a real smile. Judith's smiles were far from frequent, but the recipient of one did not forget it.

CHAPTER IV

EVERY ONE'S OPINION OF EVERY ONE ELSE

In this way, almost from the first, several distinct lines of cleavage were established in the family party during the next fortnight. Arnold imperiously demanded a complete vacation from "lessons," and when, it was indolently granted, he spent it incessantly with Judith, the two being always out of doors and usually joyously concocting what in any but the easy-going, rustic plainness of the Marshall mode of life would have been called mischief. Mrs. Marshall, aided by the others in turn, toiled vigorously between the long rows of vegetables and a little open shack near by, where, on a superannuated but still serviceable cook-stove, she "put up," for winter use, an endless supply of the golden abundance which, Ceres-like, she poured out every year from the Horn of Plenty of her garden. Sylvia, in a state of hypnotized enchantment, dogged her Aunt Victoria's graceful footsteps and still more graceful, leisurely halts; Lawrence bustled about on his own mysterious business in a solitary and apparently exciting world of his own which was anywhere but in La Chance; and Professor Marshall, in the intervals of committee work at the University, now about to open, alternated between helping his wife, playing a great deal of very noisy and very brilliant music on the piano, and conversing in an unpleasant voice with his sister.

Mr. Rollins, for whom, naturally, Arnold's revolt meant unwonted freedom, was for the most part invisible, "seeing the sights of La Chance, I suppose," conjectured Aunt Victoria indifferently, in her deliciously modulated voice, when asked what had become of the sandy-haired tutor. And because, in the intense retirement and rustication of this period, Mrs. Marshall-Smith needed little attention paid to her toilets, Pauline also was apparently enjoying an unusual vacation. A short time after making the conjecture about her stepson's tutor, Aunt Victoria had added the suggestion, level-browed, and serene as always, "Perhaps he and Pauline are seeing the sights together."

Sylvia, curled on a little stool at her aunt's feet, turned an artless, inquiring face up to her. "What _are_ the 'sights' of La Chance, Auntie?" she asked.

Her father, who was sitting at the piano, his long fingers raised as though about to play, whirled about and cut in quickly with an unintelligible answer, "Your Aunt Victoria refers to non-existent phenomena, my dear, in order to bring home to us the uncouth provinciality in which we live."

Aunt Victoria, leaning back, exquisitely pa.s.sive, in one of the big, shabby arm-chairs, raised a protesting hand. "My dear Elliott, you don't do your chosen abiding-place justice. There is the new Court-House. n.o.body can deny that that is a sight. I spent a long time the other day contemplating it. That and the Masonic Building are a _pair_ of sights. I conceive Rollins, who professes to be interested in architecture, as constantly vibrating between the two."

To which handsome tribute to La Chance's high-lights, Professor Marshall returned with bitterness, "Good Lord, Vic, why do you come, then?"

She answered pleasantly, "I might ask in my turn why you stay." She went on, "I might also remind you that you and your children are the only human ties I have." She slipped a soft arm about Sylvia as she spoke, and turned the vivid, flower-like little face to be kissed.

When Aunt Victoria kissed her, Sylvia always felt that she had, like Diana in the story-book, stooped radiant from a s.h.i.+ning cloud.

There was a pause in the conversation. Professor Marshall faced the piano again and precipitated himself headlong into the diabolic accelerandos of "The Hall of the Mountain-King." His sister listened with extreme and admiring appreciation of his talent. "Upon my word, Elliott," she said heartily, "under the circ.u.mstances it's incredible, but it's true--your touch positively improves."

He stopped short, and addressed the air above the piano with pa.s.sionate conviction. "I stay because, thanks to my wife, I've savored here fourteen years of more complete reconciliation with life--I've been vouchsafed more usefulness--I've discovered more substantial reasons for existing than I ever dreamed possible in the old life--than any one in that world can conceive!"

Aunt Victoria looked down at her beautiful hands clasped in her lap.

"Yes, quite so," she breathed. "Any one who knows you well must agree that whatever you are, or do, or find, nowadays, is certainly 'thanks to your wife.'"

Her brother flashed a furious look at her, and was about to speak, but catching sight of Sylvia's troubled little face turned to him anxiously, gave only an impatient shake to his ruddy head--now graying slightly. A little later he said: "Oh, we don't speak the same language any more, Victoria. I couldn't make you understand--you don't know--how should you? You can't conceive how, when one is really _living_, nothing of all that matters. What does architecture matter, for instance?"

"Some of it matters very little indeed," concurred his sister blandly.

This stirred him to an ungracious laugh. "As for keeping up only human ties, isn't a fortnight once every five years rather slim rations?"

"Ah, there are difficulties--the Masonic Building--" murmured Aunt Victoria, apparently at random. But then, it seemed to Sylvia that they were always speaking at random. For all she could see, neither of them ever answered what the other had said.

The best times were when she and Aunt Victoria were all alone together--or with only the silent, swift-fingered, Pauline in attendance during the wonderful processes of dressing or undressing her mistress. These occasions seemed to please Aunt Victoria best also. She showed herself then so winning and gracious and altogether magical to the little girl that Sylvia forgot the uncomfortableness which always happened when her aunt and her father were together. As they came to be on more intimate terms, Sylvia was told a great many details about Aunt Victoria's present and past life, in the form of stories, especially about that early part of it which had been spent with her brother. Mrs. Marshall-Smith took pains to talk to Sylvia about her father as he had been when he was a brilliant das.h.i.+ng youth in Paris at school, or as the acknowledged social leader of his cla.s.s in the famous Eastern college. "You see, Sylvia," she explained, "having no father or mother or any near relatives, we saw more of each other than a good many brothers and sisters do. We had n.o.body else--except old Cousin Ellen, who kept house for us in the summers in Lydford and traveled around with us," Lydford was another topic on which, although it was already very familiar to her from her mother's reminiscences of her childhood in Vermont, Aunt Victoria shed much light for Sylvia. Aunt Victoria's Lydford was so different from Mother's, it seemed scarcely possible they could be the same place.

Mother's talk was all about the mountains, the sunny upland pastures, rocky and steep, such a contrast to the rich, level stretches of country about La Chance; about the excursions through these slopes of the mountains every afternoon, accompanied by a marvelously intelligent collie dog, who helped find the cows; about the orchard full of old trees more climbable than any others which have grown since the world began; about the attic full of drying popcorn and old hair-trunks and dusty files of the New York _Tribune_; about the pantry with its cookie-jar, and the "back room" with its churn and cheese-press.

Nothing of all this existed in the Lydford of which Aunt Victoria spoke, although some of her recollections were also of childhood hours. Once Sylvia asked her, "But if you were a little girl there, and Mother was too,--then you and Father and she must have played together sometimes?"

Aunt Victoria had replied with decision, "No, I never saw your mother, and neither did your father--until a few months before they were married."

"Well, wasn't that _queer_?" exclaimed Sylvia--"she _always_ lived in Lydford except when she went away to college."

Aunt Victoria seemed to hesitate for words, something unusual with her, and finally brought out, "Your mother lived on a farm, and we lived in our summer house in the village." She added after a moment's deliberation: "Her uncle, who kept the farm, furnished us with our b.u.t.ter. Sometimes your mother used to deliver it at the kitchen door."

She looked hard at Sylvia as she spoke.

"Well, I should have thought you'd have seen her _there_!" said Sylvia in surprise. Nothing came to the Marshalls' kitchen door which was not in the children's field of consciousness.

"It was, in fact, there that your father met her," stated Aunt Victoria briefly.

"Oh yes, I remember," said Sylvia, quoting fluently from an often heard tale. "I've heard them tell about it lots of times. She was earning money to pay for her last year in college, and dropped a history book out of her basket as she started to get back in the wagon, and Father picked it up and said, 'Why, good Lord! who in Lydford reads Gibbon?' And Mother said it was hers, and they talked a while, and then he got in and rode off with her."

"Yes," said Aunt Victoria, "that was how it happened.... Pauline, get out the ma.s.sage cream and do my face, will you?"

She did not talk any more for a time, but when she began, it was again of Lydford that she spoke, running along in a murmured stream of reminiscences breathed faintly between motionless lips that Pauline's reverent ministrations might not be disturbed. Through the veil of these half-understood recollections, Sylvia saw highly inaccurate pictures of great magnificent rooms filled with heavy old mahogany furniture, of riotously colored rose-gardens, terraced and box-edged, inhabited by beautiful ladies always, like Aunt Victoria, "dressed-up," who took tea under brightly striped, paG.o.da-shaped tents, waited upon by slant-eyed j.a.panese (it seemed Aunt Victoria had nothing but j.a.panese servants). The whole picture s.h.i.+mmered in the confused imagination of the listening little girl, till it blended indistinguishably with the enchantment of her fairy-stories. It all seemed a background natural enough for Aunt Victoria, but Sylvia could not fit her father into it.

"Ah, he's changed greatly--he's transformed--he is not the same creature," Aunt Victoria told her gravely, speaking according to her seductive habit with Sylvia, as though to an equal. "The year when we lost our money and he married, altered all the world for us."

She linked the two events together, and was rewarded by seeing the reference slide over Sylvia's head.

"Did you lose _your_ money, too?" asked Sylvia, astounded. It had never occurred to her that Aunt Victoria might have been affected by that event in her father's life, with which she was quite familiar through his careless references to what he seemed to regard as an interesting but negligible incident.

"All but the slightest portion of it, my dear--when I was twenty years old. Your father was twenty-five."

Sylvia looked about her at the cut-gla.s.s and silver utensils on the lace-covered dressing-table, at Aunt Victoria's pale lilac crepe-de-chine negligee, at the neat, pretty young maid deft-handedly rubbing the perfumed cream into the other woman's well-preserved face, impa.s.sive as an idol's. "Why--why, I thought--" she began and stopped, a native delicacy making her hesitate as Judith never did.

Aunt Victoria understood. "Mr. Smith had money," she explained briefly. "I married when I was twenty-one."

"Oh," said Sylvia. It seemed an easy way out of difficulties. She had never before chanced to hear Aunt Victoria mention her long-dead husband.

CHAPTER V

SOMETHING ABOUT HUSBANDS

She did not by any means always sit in the hotel and watch Pauline care for different portions of Aunt Victoria's body. Mrs.

Marshall-Smith took, on principle, a drive every day, and Sylvia was her favorite companion. At first they went generally over the asphalt and in front of the costly and incredibly differing "mansions" of the "residential portion" of town, but later their drives took them princ.i.p.ally along the winding roads and under the thrifty young trees of the State University campus. They often made an excuse of fetching Professor Marshall home from a committee meeting, and as the faculty committees at that time of year were, for the most part, feverishly occupied with the cla.s.sification of the annual flood-tide of Freshmen, he was nearly always late, and they were obliged to wait long half-hours in front of the Main Building.

Sylvia's cup of satisfaction ran over as, dressed in her simple best, which her mother without comment allowed her to put on every day now, she sat in the well-appointed carriage beside her beautiful aunt, at whom every one looked so hard and so admiringly. The University work had not begun, but unresigned and hara.s.sed professors and a.s.sistants, recalled from their vacations for various executive tasks, were present in sufficient numbers to animate the front steps of the Main Building with constantly gathering and dissolving little groups. These called out greetings to each other, and exchanged dolorous mutual condolences on their hard fate; all showing, with a helpless masculine navete, their consciousness of the lovely, observant figure in the carriage below them. Of a different sort were the professors' wives, who occasionally drifted past on the path. Aunt Victoria might have been a blue-uniformed messenger-boy for all that was betrayed by their skilfully casual glance at her and then away, and the subsequent directness of their forward gaze across the campus. Mrs.

Marshall-Smith had for both these manifestations of consciousness of her presence the same imperturbable smile of amus.e.m.e.nt. "They are delightful, these colleagues of your father's!" she told Sylvia.

Sylvia had hoped fervently that the stylish Mrs. Hubert might see her in this brief apotheosis, and one day her prayer was answered.

Straight down the steps of the Main Building they came, Mrs. Hubert glistening in s.h.i.+ny blue silk, extremely unaware of Aunt Victoria, the two little girls looking to Sylvia like fairy princesses, with pink-and-white, lace-trimmed dresses, and big pink hats with rose wreaths. Even the silk laces in their low, white kid shoes were of pink to match the ribbons, which gleamed at waist and throat and elbow. Sylvia watched them in an utter admiration, and was beyond measure shocked when Aunt Victoria said, after they had stepped daintily past, "Heavens! What a horridly over-dressed family! Those poor children look too absurd, tricked out like that. The one nearest me had a sweet, appealing little face, too."

"That is Eleanor," said Sylvia, with a keen, painful recollection of the scene a year ago. She added doubtfully, "Didn't you think their dresses pretty, Aunt Victoria?"