Read Ebook: Harriet and the Piper by Norris Kathleen Thompson

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Ebook has 1905 lines and 89447 words, and 39 pages

She looked obliquely at his set face, and what she saw there made her feel ashamed.

On the bright level of the upper terrace tea was merrily in progress. In the streaming afternoon light the scene was strikingly cheerful and pretty: the wide wicker chairs with their gay cretonne cushions, the over-shadowing green trees in heavy leaf, the women's many-coloured gowns and the men's cool whites and grays. On the broad white balustrade Isabelle's great peacock was standing, with his tail fanned to its amazing breadth; two maids, in their crisp black and white, were coming and going with silver and china on their trays.

Miss Field had duly come down to preside, and all was well. Isabelle, as she dropped into a chair, gave a sigh of relief; everyone was amused and absorbed and happy. Everyone, that is, except the magnificent and sharp-eyed old lady who sat, regally throned, near her, and favoured her immediately with a dissatisfied look. Old Madame Carter had her own good reasons for being angry, and she never spared any one available from a participation in her mood.

She was remarkably handsome, even at seventy-five; with a crown of puffed white hair, gold-rimmed eyeglasses, and an erect and finely preserved figure. Her silk gown flowed over her knees, and formed a rich fold about her shining slippers; a wide lace scarf was about her shoulders, and she wore an old-fashioned watchchain of heavy braided gold, and a great many handsome pins and rings. Her voice was theatrically deep and clear, and her manner vigorous and impressive.

"Well, my dear, your friends were naturally wondering what important matter kept their hostess away from her guests," she began. Isabelle had not been her daughter-in-law for more than twenty years for nothing. She shrugged and smiled carelessly, with an indifferent glance at the group. Ward's friends, the tennis-players, and old Doctor and Mrs. Potter and their niece, from next door. Nobody here of any especial importance!

"Harriet is managing very nicely," Isabelle said, contentedly, as Tony, with a sombre face and averted eyes, brought her her tea.

"So Ward seems to think," observed Ward's grandmother with acidity. Isabelle laughed indifferently. Her son, slender and tall, and with something of her own eagerness and fire in his sunburned young face, was beside Miss Field, who talked to him in a quiet aside while she busied herself with cups and spoons.

"Perfectly safe there!" Isabelle said.

"I should hope so!" old Madame Carter remarked, pointedly. "At least if there's any of OUR blood in his veins--but of course he's all Slocum. They used to say of my Aunt Georgina that she never married because the only man she ever loved was beneath her socially--"

Isabelle knew all about Aunt Georgina, and she looked wearily away. Tony, sighing elaborately, drew upon himself the old lady's fire.

"Why don't you go over and join the young people, Mr. Pope?" she asked, pleasantly. "Isabelle and I can manage very well without a cavalier. You're tired, Isabelle--I can always tell it. Be glad that you're too young to know what that means, Mr. Pope. Go over there--there's a chair next to Nina. What shall we suspect him of, Isabelle--a quarrel with pretty Miss Allen?--if he avoids the young people, and looks like such a thunder-cloud."

Isabelle sighed patiently.

"The Bellamys are coming in for awhile," she observed, with deliberate irrelevance, "and I hope they'll bring their Swami--or whatever he is, with them. He must be a queer creature."

"He's not a Swami, he's an artist," Tony said, drawn into a casual conversation much against his will. "Blondin--I've met him. He has a studio up on Fifty-ninth Street--goes in for poetry and musical interpretations and I don't know what else. Now I believe it's Indian philosophies--I can't bear him, he makes me sick!"

He relapsed into gloomy silence, and Isabelle put into her laugh something affectionate and soothing.

"He evidently lives by his wits," she suggested, "which is something you have never had to do!"

Tony scowled again. It was part of his charm for her that he was the spoiled darling of fortune. Handsome and young, and with no family ties to restrain him, he had recently come into his own enormous fortune. Isabelle knew that his New York apartment was fit for a prince, that his man servant was perfection, that he had his own pet affectations in the matter of monogrammed linen, Italian stationery, and specially designed speed cars. His manner with servants, his ready check book, his easy French, and his unruffled self-confidence in any imaginable contingency, coupled with his youth, had strong attraction for a woman conscious of the financial restrictions of her own early years and the limitations of her public school education.

"Why don't you go to the club and dress now, and come back and dine with us?" she said, in an undertone.

"Do you want me?" he asked, sulkily.

"I'm ASKING you!"

For answer he stood up, and smiled wistfully down upon her, with a hesitancy she knew well how to interpret in his eyes. She should not have asked him to dinner; he should not accept her invitation. Yet he had been longing so thirstily for just that permission, and she had been yearning so to give it! Happiness came back into both their hearts as he turned to go, and she gave him just a quick touch of a warm little hand in farewell. At such a moment, when her mood of heroism gave way to melting, Isabelle had a desperate sort of hope that one more concession would not alter the inevitable parting, whenever it came. This time--and this time--and this time--must positively be the last.

Other guests had come in, and Miss Field was extremely busy, and Ward, helping her officially, was busy, too. She had indeed offered her place to Isabelle, but Isabelle, spurred by her mother-in-law's criticism, would not have disturbed her secretary for any consideration now.

"No, no--stay where you are, my dear!" she had said. And Miss Field remained.

"Fun to have you down here!" said Ward, in her ear.

Harriet Field had an aside with a maid regarding hot water. Then she gave Ward an indulgent, an older-sisterly glance. He was in years almost twenty-two, but at twenty-seven the young woman felt him ages her junior. Ward was broad and fair, his light brown hair was somewhat tumbled about from the tennis; his fine, strong young throat showed brown where the loose collar turned back. Even in his flat tennis shoes he stood a clear two inches above Miss Field, although she was not a small woman by any means. He was a joyous, irresponsible boy, and he and his mother's secretary had always been good friends since the day, four years ago now, when the silent, somewhat grave Harriet Field had first made her appearance in the family. Ward was so much a child in those days that Harriet used to go with him to pick out suits and shirts, and to buy matinee seats for him and his school friends, and they laughed now to remember his favourite and invariable luncheon order of potato salad and French pastries. Nina had had a nurse then, and Harriet practised French with both the boy and girl, but now the nurse was gone, and Ward could buy his own clothes, and Nina went to a finishing school. So Miss Field had made herself useful in new ways; she was quite indispensable now. The young people loved her; Richard Carter occasionally said to his wife, "Very clever--very pretty girl!" which was perhaps as close as he ever got to any domestic matter, and Isabelle confided to her almost all her duties and cares. She patronized Harriet prettily, and told her that she was too pretty to be getting up to the thirties without a fiance, but Harriet only smiled her inscrutable smile, and made no confidences on the subject of admirers. Nina, insatiably curious, had gathered no more than that Miss Harriet's father had been a college professor of languages, and that her only relative was a married sister, much older, who had four children, and lived in New Jersey.

She was a master of the art of keeping silent, this young woman, and but for her beauty she might have been as inconspicuous as she sincerely tried to be. But her simple gowns and her plainly massed hair only served to emphasize the extraordinary distinction of her appearance, and her utmost effort to obliterate herself could not quite keep her from notice. Men raised their eyebrows, with a significant puckering of the lips, when she slipped quietly through the halls; and women narrowed their eyes, and looked questioningly at one another. Isabelle, who was far too securely throned to be jealous of any one, sometimes told her that she would make a fortune on the stage, but old Mrs. Carter, who for reasons perfectly comprehensible in an old lady who had once been handsome herself, detested Harriet, and said to her daughter-in-law that in her opinion there was something queer about the girl.

There was nothing queer in her aspect to-day, at all events, as she demurely performed her duties at the tea table. To the occasional pleasant and surprised "Hello, Miss Field!" she returned a composed and unsmiling nod of greeting; for the rest, she poured and sweetened, and conferred with the maids, in a manner entirely businesslike.

She was of that always-arresting type that combines a warm dusky skin with blue eyes and fair hair. The eyes, in her case, were a soft smoky blue, set in thick and inky black lashes, and the hair was brassy gold, banded carelessly but trimly about her rather broad forehead. Her mouth was wide, deep crimson, thin-lipped; it had humorous possibilities all its own, and Nina and Ward thought her never so fascinating as when she developed them; it was a mouth of secrets and of mystery, of character, a mouth that had known the trembling of pain and grief, perhaps, but a firm mouth now, and a beautiful one.

And in the broad forehead and the cheek-bones, just a shade high, and the clearly pencilled brows and the clean modelling of the straight young chin, there was a certain openness and firmness, a fortuitous blending of form and proportion that would have made the head a perfect model for a coin, a wonderful study in pastels. Looking at her, an artist would have fancied her a bold and charming and boyish-looking little girl, fifteen years ago, with that Greek chin and that tawny mane; would have seen her sexless and splendid in her early teens, with a flat breast and an untamed eye. And a romancer might have wondered what paths had led her, in the superb realization of her beautiful womanhood, at twenty-seven, to this subordinate position in the home of a self-made rich man, and this conventional tea table on a terrace over the Hudson. The smoky blue eyes to-day were full of an idle content; the rounded breast rose and fell quietly under the plain checked gown with its transparent frills at wrists and throat. Harriet may have had her moments of rebellion, but this was not one of them. She had been here for four years; she had held more difficult and less well-paid positions for the four years before that; she had known fatigue and ingratitude, and snubs and injustices, as every business woman, especially in secretarial work, must know them, and she had no quarrel with this particular occasion. Indeed, Nina's open adoration, Ward's pointed attentions, and Isabelle's graciousness were making her feel particularly cheerful, and more than offset the old lady's disapproval, which was always more stimulating than otherwise to Harriet.

"Nearly half-past five, Nina," she said, presently. "Go and change and brush, that's a darling! You look rather tumbled."

Nina, reaching for a marron, obediently wandered away, and immediately the empty chair beside Harriet was taken by a newcomer, Richard Carter himself, the owner of all this smiling estate, who had come up from the little launch at the landing, had changed hastily into white flannels, Harriet saw at a glance, and had unexpectedly joined them for tea. His usual programme was to go off immediately for golf, and to make his first appearance in the family at dinner-time, but perhaps it had been unusually tiring in the city to-day--he looked pale and tired, and as if some of the grime of the sun-baked streets clung about him still.

"Tea, Mr. Carter?" Harriet ventured.

He was watching his wife with a sort of idle interest. She had to repeat her invitation.

"If you please, Miss Field! Tea sounded right, somehow, to me to-day. It's been a terrible day!"

"I can imagine it!" Harriet's voice was pleasantly commonplace. But the moment had its thrill for her. This lean, tall, tired man, with his abstract manner, his perfunctory courtesies, his nervous, clever hands, loomed in oddly heroic proportions in Harriet's life. His face was keen and somewhat lined under a smooth crest of slightly graying hair; he smiled very rarely, but there was a certain kindliness in his gray eyes, when Nina or Ward or his wife turned to him, that Harriet liked. He came and went quietly, absorbed in his business, getting in and out of his cars with a murmur to his chauffeur, disappearing with his golf sticks, presiding almost silently over his own animated dinner table. He was always well groomed, well dressed without being in the least conspicuous; always more or less tired when she saw him. In the evenings he smoked, listened to music, went early to bed. But he never failed to visit his mother, or pay her some little definite attention when she was with them; and when Madame Carter was in her New York apartment he called on her nearly every day.

For Harriet he had hardly a dozen words a year. He merely smiled kindly when she thanked him for the Christmas gift that bore his untouched card; if she went to her sister for a day or two, he gave her only a nod of greeting when she came back. Sometimes he thanked her for a small favour, briefly and indifferently; now and then asked with sharp interest about Nina's teeth or his mother's headache.

But Harriet had known other types of men, and for his very silences, for his indifference, for his loyalty to his own women, she had begun to admire him long ago. She had not been born in this atmosphere of pleasure and ease and riches; she was not entirely unfitted to judge a man. There was not much to awaken respect in the men she met at Crownlands, still less in the women. She liked Ward for his artless boyishness; forgave Anthony Pope much because he was straight and clean and self-respecting; but there were plenty of other men, spoiled and selfish, weak and stupid; men who amused and flattered Isabelle Carter perhaps, but among whom her husband loomed a very giant. Harriet had watched Richard Carter with a keenness of which she was hardly conscious herself, ready to detect the flaw, the weakness in his character, but she never found it, and after awhile she became his silent champion, his secret ally in all domestic matters, quick to see that his mail and his telephone messages were sacred, that his meals never were late, and that any small request, such as the use of the study for some unexpected conference, or the speedy sending of a telegram, was promptly granted.

Isabelle was always breezily civil to her husband; he had long ago vanished as completely from among the vital elements of her life as if he were dead, perhaps more than if he were dead. She thought--if she thought about him at all--that he never saw her little affairs; she supposed him perfectly satisfied with his home and children and club and business, and incidentally with his beautiful figurehead of a wife. They had quarrelled distressingly, several years ago, when he had bored her with references to her "duty," and her influence over Nina, and her obligations to her true self. But that had all stopped long since, and now Isabelle was free to sleep late, to dress at leisure, to make what engagements she pleased, to see the persons who interested her. Richard never interfered; never was there a more perfectly discreet and generous husband. Half the women Isabelle knew were attempting to live exactly as she did, to cultivate "suitors," and drift about in an atmosphere of new gowns and adulation and orchids and softly lighted drawing rooms, and incessant playing with fire; it was the accepted thing, in Isabelle's circle, and that she was more successful in it than other women was not at all to her discredit.

Even Harriet, who was in her secrets, who saw maid and masseuse and hair-dresser in desperate defence of Isabelle's beauty every morning, who knew just what scenes there were over gowns and cosmetics, and the tilt of hats--even Harriet admired her.

"Why not?" said Harriet sometimes to her sister, when she went to visit Linda, and the subject of the beautiful Mrs. Carter was under discussion. "She has a boy and a girl, her house runs perfectly, her husband adores her--"

"Oh, he CAN'T adore her, Harriet!" Linda would protest. "No man could adore that sort of--of shallowness, and selfishness, and vanity--"

"Well, I assure you he does! I think that sort of thing keeps a man admiring a woman," the younger sister would maintain, airily. "He sees her looking like a picture all the time, he sees other men crazy about her--"

"Too much money!" Linda usually summarized, disapprovingly. But this was always fuel to Harriet's flame.

"Too much money? You CAN'T have too much money! I've seen both sides-don't ever say that to me! There's nothing in this WORLD but money, right down at the bottom. If you haven't any, you can't live, and the more you have the more decently and prettily--yes, and generously, too--you can live! Look at Madame Carter, she was doing her own work when she was my age--not that she ever mentions that, now! Can you tell me that she isn't a thousand times happier now, with her maids and her car and her dresses? And money did it--and if you and Fred had two thousand, or twenty thousand, a month, instead of two hundred, do you mean to tell me your lives wouldn't be fuller, and richer, and happier? You shake your head, Linda, but that's just to make me furious, for you know it's true! I admire Mrs. Carter, and I assure you that if ever I do marry--which as you know I won't--you may be very sure that money is the first thing I shall think about!"

It was their only ground for real dissension. Harriet usually was ready to laugh and forget it almost instantly; but Linda, who was deeply spiritual, never ceased to pray that all the dangers of life at Crownlands would pass safely over the little sister's beloved head, and that some real man, "like Fred," would win Harriet's turbulent and restless heart, after all.

Madame Carter, gathering her draperies about her, was one of the first to leave the terrace. Dressing for dinner was a slow and serious business for her. She gave Harriet a cold, appraising glance as she passed her; Richard Carter had risen to escort his mother, but she delayed him for a moment.

"Miss Nina gone in, Miss Field?"

Harriet, whose manner with all old persons was the essence of scrupulous formality, rose at once to her feet.

"Nina has gone to change her dress, Madame Carter."

"She took it upon herself to ask you to help us out this afternoon?" the old lady added, with the sort of gracious cruelty of which she was mistress. Richard Carter gave his daughter's companion a look that asked indulgence. Harriet coloured brightly, fixing her eyes upon his mother.

"Nina brought me a message from her mother, Madame Carter."

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