Part 13 (1/2)
”Oh, that's it?”
”That's it, and all of it.”
Mrs. Bates's function came off on the appointed afternoon, and was so limited in size and so simple in character that Eliza Marshall would have reproached herself for slighting her own child, had not Susan Bates, before her early departure, whispered in the old lady's ear a word of complete approbation.
Rosy herself flashed and sparkled in the dim and depressing old parlor like a garnet set in dull gold. Indeed, it must be confessed that she showed some of the hard glitter of such a jewelled fabrication, as well as its splendor. Cecilia Ingles, who could not but admire her beauty and her readiness, thought that her tone was a little too hard, and that in her excess of aplomb she pushed self-possession to the verge of self-a.s.sertion. Rosy, in fact, entered society not with the tentative step and slow advance of one who cautiously feels an unaccustomed way, but by a single confident and intuitive leap. As she stood there beside her mother, dressed in a pale yellow gown and playing carelessly with her bunch of red roses, she s.h.i.+fted any embarra.s.sment incident to the occasion from her own shoulders to those of her mother's friends--two or three of whom, retired and aging persons, withdrew feeling their own social rustiness quite keenly.
Jane, who had no definite role to play, but who did general utility all over the house, was enabled to observe various episodes from various points of view. When the actual test came she had little more apt.i.tude for the social graces than her mother had, and she imitated her mother's own cautious reserve. She did not meet Mrs. Ingles at all, but she witnessed from a distant doorway the conjunction which Mrs. Bates effected between the leading luminary of the day and the newly-discovered asteroid. Jane ungrudgingly acknowledged Cecilia Ingles to be magnificently beautiful, and her dress to be a miracle of taste, and her advances to be most winningly gracious. ”And she's just about my own age, too,” thought poor Jane, in half-unconscious comparison. ”And the way that little chit stands up there and talks to her! I couldn't, for a hundred worlds. Rosy acts as if she was just as pretty herself--well, I suppose she is; and of just as good position--h'm, _that's_ all right enough, I'm sure; and just as used to the ways of the world--well, so she will be, fast enough.” And the dear girl gave a long slow sigh--partly that the family had at last such a champion, partly that she herself should have been doomed to such complete uselessness in so high a cause. She quite failed to realize that she alone and no other was the real motive-power of her family's tardy spurt.
As for Mrs. Bates, Jane caught quite another side of her. She showed herself profoundly formal and punctilious. She seemed to have dilated for the occasion, with the express determination of dominating it. ”She acts mighty queer,” said honest Jane, who was the same to one and all, to-day and tomorrow; ”but I suppose she knows what tone to take. If she acts like that, though, the next time I see her, I shall want to stop knowing her. She calls it a 'function,' and I suppose she's trying to make it like one. But one's enough.”
Jane observed, furthermore, that her aunt Lydia was inclined to neglect her own part in the ceremony in order to perform pirouettes and pigeon-wings (so to speak) before the backgammon-player of the tropics.
”If Aunt Lyddy forgets, after all,” said Jane, anxiously, ”and _does_ mention Florida, why, I've told a fib for nothing.” Jane had informed Mrs. Rhodes that the Bateses had lost their youngest child at Jacksonville, and so could not bear the slightest mention of the South; though she knew perfectly well that the youngest child of the Bateses was a l.u.s.ty youth of eighteen, with strong hopes of becoming one of the Yale football team next season.
In the midst of the ceremonial Truesdale sauntered in and pa.s.sed through the rooms with a graceful indifference; he was the last to be disconcerted by an a.s.semblage purely feminine. He had doffed for the hour most of his imported eccentricities in the way of dress, and had consented to appear, properly enough, in a double-breasted black frock-coat with extremely long skirts. He had an orchid in his b.u.t.ton-hole--a large one, very vivid and flamboyant. Jane had looked, rather, for a chrysanthemum--one of those immeasurable blooms worn by the young men in _Life_. ”But d.i.c.k _will_ be individual,” she acknowledged.
”Thank goodness it wasn't a peony, or worse. He _does_ look nice, if he is my brother; and he's the only young man I know with violet eyes.”
Truesdale drifted into the tea-room, and Jane presently saw him lounging in a chair alongside Bertie Patterson. The table was officered after the fas.h.i.+on that Mrs. Bates had suggested--by Mrs. Belden, who, in the absence of her own daughter, kept away by illness, had brought, instead, another girl, her daughter's friend, a visitor from New York. Truesdale failed to catch her name.
Mrs. Belden herself was somewhat large and inclined to be a bit high-colored and full-blown. An excess of blond down lined her cheeks just below and before her ears, and her light-colored eyebrows spread themselves rather broadly and dispersedly on her forehead. A superfluity of straw-colored hair, of a shade essentially improbable waved about her ears and temples, and a high gold comb emphasized the loose knot into which it was drawn behind. ”She would do better on the stage,” Truesdale said to himself; ”she has gotten herself up for the photographer. And if all those rings are her own, she has more than any one woman needs.”
The girl with her, whose name presently came to him as Gladys--”Gladys what?” he wondered--let herself loose on him at once with a fusillade of ready familiarities. The field was clear, for Bertie Patterson, at his side, had few words to interpose. Her large brown eyes rested half appealingly upon him in the intervals of her constrained and halting little service, and he readily divined the poor child as in a lonely and uncomfortable minority.
”To-day is only my second time,” she said to him, with a kind of appealing protest; ”you mustn't watch me and criticise me.” She had just finished her ministrations on a pair of old-time family friends whom Rosy, in the fulness of her social efflorescence, had banished for consolation and rea.s.surance to the tea-room. Somehow, the guests that had fallen to her side of the table had all been of this character. ”When was the first?”
”Why, don't you know? The day you--you--”
”Oh, _that_ day!” laughed Truesdale. ”I didn't know you were there, of course. You must have thought me absurd.”
”No; not--not--absurd. But on such a long, wide street, with so many handsome houses all around--”
Truesdale smiled. ”Poor little thing! I believe she admires Michigan Avenue; I believe she's impressed by it.” To him this thoroughfare was not completely innocent of the cheap and vulgar restlessness which is the dominant note of all American street architecture. ”But let her admire it, if she can. Think what I expected to find Piccadilly!”
”I enjoy driving down it so much,” she continued, confidentially, yet with a shy little look as if trying to learn whether her confidence was misplaced. ”Aunt Lydia and I go shopping almost every day.”
”Ten kilometres down and back,” estimated Truesdale; ”ten kilometres of luxury and grandeur--don't let it overpower you. And you are learning where the shops are, I suppose, and the theatres, and the post-office, perhaps, and the hotels, and what all besides.”
”No,” said Bertie Patterson, proudly; ”I knew all that before I came.
There are books, you know--and maps. I studied them at home beforehand.”
Truesdale had never seen any of the books, but he thought their existence probable enough. He remembered, to, his own maps--how he had become familiar with the London clubs long before walking through Pall Mall, and how he knew where to find all the Paris theatres years previous to his first stroll along the Boulevard. ”And you have been to all the high places, I suppose?”
”I've been to the top of the Masonic Temple.”
”And to the places were they have the sun-dials, and the gates ajar, and the American flag made of--of--Heaven knows what?”
”The parks? Yes, we have been to one or two of them, but we were a little late for all those lovely things; most of them had been dug up.”
”Lovely things!” groaned Truesdale. ”Fancy them in the Bois or along the Row--or anywhere but here!” Yet he felt sure that she had his own fondness for pleasure-grounds and points of view. She had doubtless antic.i.p.ated the Masonic Temple and Was.h.i.+ngton Park, just as he had antic.i.p.ated the Pincian and the Tower of the Capitol. His fellow-feeling forgave her this crudity; after all, she was praising what she had never seen.
”I've been to your parks myself,” the other girl broke in, as she glanced round the vase of chrysanthemums from the other side of the table. ”But if you want to see a park, come to New York.” She was rather abrupt and boisterous; Truesdale wondered if she had not at one time been a tomboy.