Part 66 (1/2)
”Oh, j.a.p! Whatever made you do that?”
His thin lips curled.
”Why shouldn't I? d.a.m.n her--I hate her, somehow. The upstart--the gutter-snipe!”
She laid her hand across his mouth.
”You--shock me, j.a.p! I don't understand why you are so--venomous toward Kate. Sometimes,” she looked at him searchingly, ”I've wondered if you've injured her.”
”What do you mean?” He breathed hard, in sudden excitement.
She stood for a moment twisting a b.u.t.ton on his coat--her eyes downcast.
Finally:
”Nothing--much.”
In the office of the Prouty House, redolent of the juniper and spruce boughs which took the bareness from the walls, the guests hungrily watched the hands of the clock creep towards the fas.h.i.+onable hour of eight.
”Among those present” was Mr. Clarence Teeters, circulating freely in a full dress coat and gray trousers--the latter worn over a pair of high-heeled cowboy boots and the former over a negligee s.h.i.+rt, beneath the cuffs of which two leather straps for strengthening the wrists peeped out. Fresh from the hands of the barber, Mr. Teeters' hair, sleek, glossy, fragrant, and brushed straight back, gave him a marked resemblance to a muskrat that has just come up from a dive.
With a sublimated confidence that was sickening to such citizens as had known him when he worked for wages and wore overalls, and particularly to Toomey, who took Teeters' success upon the ranch where he himself had failed as a personal affront, Mr. Teeters flitted among the ladies, as impartial as a bee in a bed of hollyhocks, tossing off compliments with an ease which was a revelation to those who remembered the time when his brain stopped working in the presence of the opposite s.e.x quite as effectually as though he had been hit with an axe.
Toomey not only resented Teeters' presence but the informality of his manner toward Prentiss, which Toomey regarded as his special prerogative. He already had had an argument with Sudds as to the advisability of including Teeters among the guests, and now during a lull his judgment was fully verified.
Mr. Teeters with a proud glance at the gaily draped room and at the table decorated with real carnations and festoons of smilax, which were visible through the double doors opening into the dining room, inquired of Prentiss with hearty friendliness:
”Say, feller, don't this swell lay-out kinda take you back to Chicago or New York?”
What further indiscretions of speech Teeters would have committed only his Maker knows, for at the moment the clerk at the desk called his name in an imperative voice. As the recipient of a telegram, Teeters had the attention of everybody in the room, and none could fail to observe his excitement as he folded the telegram and returned it to its envelope.
”I got me a dude comin' in on the train,” addressing Sudds. ”Could you fix a place for him to eat? The train bein' late like this, he won't git any supper otherwise. I wasn't expectin' of him for a month yet.”
With an invitation thus publicly requisitioned, as it were, there was no alternative but to a.s.sent.
The hands of the office clock were close to eight when, as though on a signal, the hubbub of social intercourse ceased and eyes followed eyes to the top of the stairs where two white-slippered feet showed through the rungs of the bal.u.s.trade and a slim hand sparkling with jewels slipped gracefully along the polished rail. Then she appeared full length, in a white dinner gown--clinging, soft, exquisite in its simplicity and the perfection of its lines. With pearls in her ears and about her throat, her hair drawn back in a simple knot, Kate looked like one of the favorites of fortune of whom the Proutyites read in the ill.u.s.trated magazines and Sunday supplements. The least initiated was conscious of the perfect taste and skilful workmans.h.i.+p which had conspired to produce this result. Kate descended slowly, with neither undue deliberation nor haste, upon her lips the faint one-sided smile which was characteristic.
The moment was as dramatic as if the situation had been planned for the effect, since there were few present to whose minds did not leap to the picture of that other girl who had come bounding down the stairs, grotesque of dress and as a.s.sured and joyous in her ignorance as a frisky colt.
In a continued silence which no one seemed to have the temerity or the presence of mind to break, the Sheep Queen turned at the foot of the stairway, and the various groups separated on a common impulse to let her pa.s.s. She went straight to Prentiss, whose greeting was a smile of adoring tenderness.
”Am I late, father?”
The sharp intake of breath throughout the room might have come from one pair of lungs. ”Father!” The rumor was true then! Amazement came first, and then uneasiness. What effect would the relations.h.i.+p have upon their personal interests? Had she any feeling which would lead her to use her influence to their detriment?
Kate and her father would have had more than their share of attention anywhere, for they had the same distinction of carriage, the same grave repose. Either one of them would have stood out in a far more brilliant a.s.sembly than that gathered in the Prouty House.
The social training Mrs. Abram Pantin had received at church functions in Keokuk now came to her rescue. Gathering herself, she was able to chirp:
”This _is_ a surprise!”
”You know my daughter, of course?” to Mrs. Sudds, whose jaw had dropped, so that she stood slightly open-mouthed, arrayed in a frock made in the fas.h.i.+on of the Moyen age and recently handed down from a great-uncle's relict who had pa.s.sed on. Since this confection bulged where it should have clung and clung where it should have bulged, it was the general impression that Mrs. Sudds was out in a maternity gown. Mrs. Neifkins in fourteen gores stood beside Mrs. Toomey in a hobble skirt reminiscent of her Chicago trip, while a faint odor of moth b.a.l.l.s, cedar chips and gasolene permeated the atmosphere in the immediate vicinity of all this ancient elegance.