Part 3 (2/2)

”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?”

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