Part 13 (1/2)
Mrs. Marshall-Smith aroused herself to a sudden, low-toned, iron masterfulness of voice and manner which, for all its quietness, had the quality of a pistol shot in the family group. She said only, ”Put away that cigarette”; but by one effort of her will she ma.s.sed against the rebellion of his disorganized adolescence her mature, well-ripened capacity to get her own way. She held him with her eyes as an animal-trainer is supposed to cow his snarling, yellow-fanged captives, and in a moment Arnold, with a pettish gesture, blew out the match and shut the cigarette case with a snap. Mrs. Marshall-Smith forbore to over-emphasize her victory by a feather-weight of gloating, and turned to her sister-in-law with a whimsical remark about the preposterousness of one of the costumes pa.s.sing. Arnold sulked in silence until Judith, emerging from her usual self-contained reticence, made her first advance to him. ”Let's us all go there by the railing where we can look down into the central court,” she suggested, and having a nodded permission from their elders, the three children walked away.
They looked down into the great marble court, far below them, now fairy-like with carefully arranged electric lights, gleaming through the palms. The busily trampling cohorts in sack-coats and derby hats were, from here, subdued by distance to an aesthetic inoffensiveness of mere ant-like comings and goings.
”Not so bad,” said Arnold, with a kindly willingness to be pleased, looking about him discriminatingly at one detail after another of the interior, the heavy velvet and gold bullion of the curtains, the polished marble of the paneling, the silk brocade of the upholstery, the heavy gilding of the chairs.... Everything in sight exhaled an intense consciousness of high cost, which was heavy on the air like a musky odor, suggesting to a sensitive nose, as does the odor of musk, another smell, obscured but rancidly perceptible--the unwashed smell, floating up from the paupers' cellars which support Aladdin's palaces of luxury.
But the three adolescents, hanging over the well-designed solid mahogany railing, had not noses sensitive to this peculiar, very common blending of odors. Judith, in fact, was entirely unconscious even of the more obvious of the two. She was as insensitive to all about her as to the too-abundant pictures of the morning. She might have been leaning over a picket fence. ”I wouldn't give in to Her!”
she said to Arnold, staring squarely at him.
Arnold looked nettled. ”Oh, I don't! I don't pay any attention to what she says, except when she's around where I am, and that's not so often you could notice it much! _Saunders_ isn't that kind! Saunders is a gay old bird, I tell you! We have some times together when we get going!”
It dawned on Sylvia that he was speaking of the man who, five years before, had been their young Professor Saunders. She found that she remembered vividly his keen, handsome face, softened by music to quiet peace. She wondered what Arnold meant by saying he was a gay old bird.
Arnold went on, shaking his head sagely: ”But it's my belief that Saunders is beginning to take to dope ... bad business! Bad business!
He's in love with Madrina, you know, and has to drown his sorrows some way.”
Even Judith, for all her Sioux desire to avoid seeming surprised or impressed, could not restrain a rather startled look at this lordly knowledge of the world. Sylvia, although she had scarcely taken in the significance of Arnold's words, dropped her eyes and blushed. Arnold surveyed them with the indulgent look of a rakish but good-hearted man of the world patting two pretty children on the head.
Judith upset his pose by bringing the talk abruptly back to where she had begun it. ”But you _did_ give in to her! You pretend you didn't because you are ashamed. She just looked you down. I wouldn't let _any_body look me down; I wouldn't give in to anybody!”
Under this attack, the man of the world collapsed into an awkward overgrown boy, ill at ease, with red lids to his eyes and premature yellow stains on two fingers of his left hand. He s.h.i.+fted his feet and said defensively: ”Aw, she's a woman. A fellow can't knock her down. I wouldn't let a man do it.” He retreated still further, through another phase, and became a little boy, heated and recriminatory: ”I'd like to know who _you_ are to talk! You give in to _your_ mother all the time!”
”I don't give in to my mother; I _mind_ her,” said Judith, drawing a distinction which Arnold could not follow but which he was not acute enough to attack other than by a jeering, ”Oh, what a crawl! What's the diff?”
”And I mind her whether she's there or not! _I_ do!” continued Judith, pressing what she seemed, inexplicably to Arnold, to consider her advantage.
Sylvia was vexed with them for talking so loudly and getting so red-faced and being so generally out of key with the booming note of luxury resounding about them. ”Hus.h.!.+ hus.h.!.+” she said; ”don't be so silly. We ought to be going back.”
Arnold took her rebuke without protest. Either something in this pa.s.sage-at-arms had perversely brought a sudden impulse to his mind, or he had all along a purpose in his fantastic trip West. As they reached the two ladies, he burst out, ”Say, Madrina, why couldn't I go on to La Chance and go to school there, and live with the Marshalls?”
Four amazed faces were turned on him. His stepmother evidently thought him stricken with sudden insanity and strove distractedly to select, from the heaped pile of her reasons for so thinking, some few which might be cited without too great offense to her brother's mode of life: ”Why, what a strange idea, Arnold! What ever made you think of such a thing? _You_ wouldn't like it!” She was going on, as in decency bound, to add that it would be also rather a large order for the Marshalls to adopt a notably ”difficult” boy, when Judith broke in with a blunt divination of what was in her aunt's mind. ”You'd have to wash dishes if you came to our house,” she said, ”and help peel potatoes, and weed the celery bed.”
”I'd like it!” declared Arnold. ”We'd have lots of fun.”
”I _bet_ we would!” said Judith, with an unexpected a.s.sent.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith laughed gently. ”You don't know what you're talking about, you silly boy. You never did an hour's work in your life!”
Arnold sat down by Mrs. Marshall. ”I wouldn't be in the way, _would_ I?” he said, with a clumsy pleading. He hesitated obviously over the ”Mother” which had risen to his lips, the name he had had for her during the momentous visit of five years before, and finally, blus.h.i.+ng, could not bring it out. ”I'd like it like anything! _I_ wouldn't be ... I'd be _different_! Sylvie and Judy seem like little sisters to me.” The red on his face deepened. ”It's--it's good for a fellow to have sisters, and a home,” he said in a low tone not audible to his stepmother's ears.
Mrs. Marshall put out a large, strong hand and took his slack, big-knuckled fingers into a tight clasp. Mrs. Marshall-Smith evidently thought a light tone best now, as always, to take. ”I tell you, Barbara”--she suggested laughingly, ”we'll exchange. You give me Sylvia, and take Arnold.”
Mrs. Marshall ignored this as pure facetiousness, and said seriously: ”Why really, Victoria, it might not be a bad thing for Arnold to come to us. I know Elliott would be glad to have him, and so would I.”
For an instant Arnold's life hung in the balance. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, gleaming gold and ivory in her evening-dress of amber satin, sat silent, startled by the suddenness with which the whole astonis.h.i.+ng question had come up. There was in her face more than one hint that the proposition opened a welcome door of escape to her....
And then Arnold himself, with the tragic haste of youth, sent one end of the scales down, weighted so heavily that the sight of his stepmother's eyes and mouth told him it could never rise again. In the little, pregnant pause, he cried out joyfully, ”Oh, Mother! Mother!”
and flung his arms around Mrs. Marshall's neck. It was the only time he had shown the slightest emotion over anything. It burst from him with surprising effect.