Part 8 (2/2)

”Oh, I'll come down,” said Paula, ”and I'll sit. But I don't mean to eat anything. Unless you think that will be too much like a--what is it?--skeleton at the feast.”

”I think it would seem somewhat-exaggerated,” he said.

”Well,” Paula retorted, drawing the rest of the room into it again just as Wallace was making a gallant effort to start a subsidiary conversation to serve as a screen, ”that's because you haven't heard those songs. If there's a singer in the world who'd dare--cut loose with them right after eating the sort of dinner Lucile will have to-night for Mary and Rush, I'd like to see him try it.”

”I didn't mean to imply that they were not difficult. I dare say they are all but impossible. But it does seem to me that you are taking the occasion of singing them--a little too--emotionally.”

The tone he was trying for was meant to have nothing in it--for other ears than hers, at least, beyond mere good-humored remonstrance. But her reply tore all pretense aside. She let him have it straight.

”You're the one who's being emotional about it,” she said.

The blood leaped into his face at that but he did not reply.

”Look here, John,” she went on--and her big voice swept away the polite convention that the others were not listening, ”I've told you that this won't work and you must see now that that's true. There's still time to call up March and tell him that it's to-morrow instead of to-day. Because of Rush and Mary. Won't you let me do that?”

It is just possible that if he had been alone with her, he might have acknowledged the issue, might have admitted that this new composer whose works she had been so absorbed in, frightened him, figured in his mind as the present manifestation of a force that was trying to take her away from him. And having let her see that, he could safely enough have said, ”Have your own way about it. You know what will work and what won't. Only make it as easy for me as you can.” But in the presence of his children--it was they, rather than Wallace, that he minded--he was at once evasive and domineering.

”I thought we'd already disposed of that suggestion,” he said. ”If the situation is as it has been made to appear to me there is not the smallest reason why March should be put off; why Mary and Rush and the friends we have asked in to meet them, shouldn't be permitted to hear his songs; or why I shouldn't myself. I think we'll consider that settled.”

Paula rose all in one piece. ”Very well,” she said--to the audience, ”it is settled. Also it's settled that I shall not come down to dinner. As for what people will think, I'll leave that to you. You can make any explanation you like. But I shall sing those songs to March--and for him--for all they're worth. I don't care who else is there or whether they like it or not.--A lot of patronizing amateurs! Bring them up to the music room about nine o'clock, if you like. I'll be there.”

She left behind her, in that Victorian drawing-room, a silence that tingled.

CHAPTER VI

STRINGENDO

A crisis of this sort was just what the Wollastons needed to tune them up. The four of them, for Lucile had to be counted in, met the enemy--which is to say their arriving guests--with an unbroken front.

They explained Paula's non-appearance with good-humored unconcern. She was afraid if she sat down to Lucile's dinner that she would forget her duty and eat it and find herself fatally incapacitated for cutting loose on Mr. March's songs afterward. They must be rather remarkable songs that required to be approached in so Spartan a manner. Well, Paula a.s.sured us that they were. The family declined all responsibility in the matter, not having themselves heard a note of them, but if you wanted to you might ask Mr. Novelli, over there. He'd been working over them with Paula for days. As for the composer, he was as much a mystery as his songs. He wasn't coming to the dinner but was expected to appear from somewhere afterward.

Novelli, as it happened, was not very productive of information. Half an hour before the dinner, his wife had telephoned Lucile to ask if he might bring a guest of his own, a certain Monsieur LaChaise, who was one of the conductors at the Metropolitan and was to have the direction of the summer opera out here at Ravinia this year. Portia added with the falsely deprecatory air of a mother apologizing for a child's prank, that Pietro had in fact, already invited him to the dinner and had only just informed her of the fact. Lucile had a.s.sured her, of course, that this addition to the company would cause not the slightest inconvenience, served on the contrary to bring it up to the number that had originally been counted upon.

When LaChaise arrived the discovery that he talked no English at all beyond a few rudimentary phrases, a fact which normally would have seemed calamitous, was now merely treated as an added feature of the evening. He and Novelli were in the midst of an animated discussion when they arrived. They stuck together in the drawing-room as if locked in the same pair of handcuffs and seating arrangements were hastily revised so that they might go on talking in untroubled mutual absorption straight through the dinner. Rush being placed handily by, where he could come to the rescue in case of need.

It was only the extremest surface of Mary sitting at the head of the table in Paula's place (which once had been her own) that was engaged with her unforeseen duties as hostess. And yet in a way, the whole of her consciousness had been drawn to the surface. The strong interior excitement that had been burning in her during all this day of her home-coming, the rising conviction that life at home might turn out to be something very different indeed from the thing that it had, down in New York, looked like, the blend of foreboding with antic.i.p.ation that accompanied it, and finally a sense of the imminence of something important, not quite to be accounted for by the quarrel between her father and his wife,--all this emotional reaction found its outlet during the long dinner in a quite unusual vivacity. Her sphere of influence spread down the table until it embraced a full half the length of it on both sides and those just beyond the reach of it, aware that they were missing something, listened but distractedly to the talk of their more remote partners. And while she was doing all this she managed with her left hand, as it were, to, keep going a vivid little confidential flirtation with the Stannard boy, Graham, a neighbor and a contemporary of hers just back from service on a destroyer.

The thing that stimulated her to all this was a consciousness of her father's intense awareness of her. She had been deliberately evasive of him since his quarrel with Paula. What he wanted of her she knew as well as if he had expressed the need of it in so many words. He had turned to her for it as soon as Paula had gone up-stairs and Rush had accompanied the thoroughly demoralized Wallace into the hall. She had found a certain hard satisfaction in denying it to him, in not nestling up into the arms that happened, for the moment, to be vacant of Paula. This was so imperative an instinct that she had not even reproached herself for it, though she supposed she would later.

The sense that something in some way or other decisive was going to happen to-night, quickened her pulse as she mounted, along with the last of their guests to the music room, in response to Paula's message that Mr. March had come and that the ”rehearsal” was about to begin. She looked about eagerly for a man who might be March but could not discover him anywhere. Was he, perhaps, she absurdly wondered, sitting once more under the piano?

Novelli drooped over the keyboard. LaChaise was half hidden in a deep chair in one of the dormers. Paula, her back to the little audience, stood talking to Novelli. Mary allowed herself a faint smile over the expression in those faces that Paula wouldn't look at. The half-concealed impatience, the antic.i.p.atory boredom, showed through so unfaltering a determination to do and express to the end the precisely correct thing.

Even her father's anger looked out through a mask like that.

LaChaise, from his corner said something in French that Mary didn't catch. Novelli straightened his back. And in that instant before a note was sounded, Mary's excitement mounted higher. The absorption of those three musicians, the intensity of their preoccupation, told her that the something she had expected was going to happen--now. But she did not know that it was going to happen to her.

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