"It has good color, don"t you think?" he ventured at last, but even the mention of color could not move Sydenham to speech. He absently consumed the remainder of his food and flicked crumbs from his frayed jacket.
"You look like her," he said at last, with so much the air of speaking to himself that Ewing made no answer. He moved toward the door with bowed head. At the threshold he looked back at Ewing a brief moment, then went out, closing the door softly behind him.
Ewing decided that his neighbor was a curious old man. Recalling other curious people he had met in this strange new world, he was reminded of the lady who had urged him to call on her. He was still ready to believe that anyone might wish to talk to him, or to hear him talk. But in spite of this, the old lady had been queer. From the table he picked up the card she had given him, studying the name and wondering what they might talk about.
He was still feeling this mild wonder when he rang the lady"s bell at five o"clock.
CHAPTER XV
FLESH OF HER FLESH
Two persons had waited for Ewing. Mrs. Lowndes was one of them, sitting forward in her chair and braced on its arms, though her head dropped now and then in forgetfulness. The other was a big, shambling old man, a dark man gone gray, his face needing the kindly, yellowish-brown eyes to save it from sternness. His thickets of eyebrows were joined in a half-humorous scowl of perplexity.
"I had to send for you, Fred. You and Herbert Sydenham are the only two left who were close to me then, and Herbert Sydenham--well--" she laughed a laugh of exquisitely humorous pain--"Herbert would have forgotten me any time these twenty years for a striking color scheme, a streak of unpaintable moonshine. It was you, Fred, or no one, and it hurt me so! All last night I was on the rocks being ground to bits. I knew you would say the wise thing."
The big man had risen to walk the floor, his thick shoulders heaving as if to throw off invisible burdens, his head shaking doggedly.
"Yes, Kitty, yes--" His voice was big but low, the voice of his whole being bent to soothe. He came to her side and reached down to take one of the frail, blue-veined hands between his own two, huge and hairy.
They closed upon hers with a kind of awkward effectiveness.
"Of course you had to come to me, but I"m afraid all I can do is to brace you."
"I wanted you to be with me. I couldn"t have borne it alone, Fred--his being here--Kitty"s child."
"And you say he doesn"t know?"
"I"m certain of it, and Eleanor Laithe doesn"t know; but those are little things when I know."
"We"ll see, Kitty--we"ll see. Perhaps I can help. But I suspect it"s one of those matters where you must be your own guide. You"ll act as you feel; not as I think--not even as you think."
"Ellen is going to the door," she whispered, almost fiercely, bracing herself in the chair.
As the maid held back the curtain at the doorway, Ewing advanced uncertainly, an embarra.s.sed smile on his lips, the look of one who would be agreeable if he knew how. He saw Mrs. Lowndes stiffly fixed in her chair, her white-crowned head thrown back, and he would have taken her hand but she diverted him from this.
"Mr. Ewing, my old friend, Dr. Birley."
Her voice was no longer halting and shallow, as it had been the moment before when her barriers were down. Ewing swiftly confirmed his impression of the previous day: this was a lady of immeasurable pride, a one-time beauty who perhaps treasured the authority her charms had once conferred upon her, wielding it with little old-fashioned graces. She seemed to him at the moment to be an almost excessively mannered person, interesting, but unapproachable.
He stopped on his way to her chair and shook hands with the big man, who had come forward. This person was quite as formidable as the curious old lady, but he was eminently kind of look.
"Sit here, Mr. Ewing." He indicated a chair.
"I asked you to come and see me--" The old lady had begun in low, even tones, but paused, and Ewing was again struck by this seeming of agitation which had made him remark her the day before.
"Mrs. Lowndes was interested to hear of your life in the West," said the big man easily, "and she was good enough to ask me to meet you also. We were both interested in knowing of you from the Bartells."
"There is so much we do not understand here in New York," put in Mrs.
Lowndes, rather vaguely, Ewing thought. He looked from one to the other.
The lady puzzled him, but the big man drew him from his embarra.s.sment, helping him to an ease which he could hardly have achieved with his hostess alone.
Without knowing quite how he began he was presently talking.
Unconsciously he directed his speech to the man, who kept kind eyes on him and led him by questions when he paused. He was aware that the woman listened and that her eyes searched his face, but he divined, without meeting them, that they were more curious than kind, and several times, as she moved in her chair, he seemed to feel sharp little points of hostility radiating toward him.
But the big man drew him more and more from the consciousness of her presence, so that he all but forgot her. It seemed entirely natural to him that he should be telling this friendly inquirer of his early life, the first memories of his father and mother, and of the queer, shifting home they had known. As he told of the death of his mother--both listeners had seemed strangely alert for that--he was startled by a sound from the lady--a catching of breath and a gasp of pain. He turned quickly, but observed only a stiffly courteous gesture bidding him continue.
He stopped in confusion, feeling that a strange quiet had come upon the room. The questions from the big man had ceased, and the woman drooped in her chair until he could no longer distinguish her outline through the deepening dusk. Nor was there any sound when his own voice ceased.
Neither figure stirred. He was oppressed by the awkwardness of it.
"I should have pulled up," he said, with an uneasy laugh. "I forgot I wasn"t on a lone road."
There was still no sign from the woman, shrunk far into her chair, but the doctor rose at his speech with a half-muttered, "We"re obliged to you." Ewing rose at the same time, with an impulse to break some strain that he felt himself sharing. The doctor reached out in the dusk and turned on an electric light that hung above the table, looking quickly at Mrs. Lowndes as he did so, for there had come from her a murmur of protest at the light. Ewing also looked at her from where he stood on the hearth rug. The lighting of the room had intensified some electrical current that pulsed from each to each. The woman returned Ewing"s gaze with the absorption of one moved beyond all arts of convention. Her eyes glistened, ominous of tears, and her small, lean chin trembled as her lips parted. Ewing turned from her distress, appealing by look to the big man, who watched them both, but his gaze was at once drawn back to the woman. She rose from her chair with weak effort and faced him with something like wild impulse rather than intention, a look, a waiting poise, that shook him with fear of the unknown.
Slowly she brought her hands to a wringing clasp at her breast. Her eyes were frankly wet now as she leaned and peered at him, holding him immovable. Twice her lips parted with dry little gasps, her hands working as if to ring the words from her choked throat.
"My boy!" It was so low that without the look of her lips as they shaped the words he could not have been sure.
"My boy--oh, my boy!" This time they were sharper though no louder, and Ewing"s nerves tingled an alarm that ran to the roots of his hair. She came a half step toward him, and he felt that he was drawing her, divined that in another moment she would be throwing herself upon him in surrender to some emotional torrent that raged within her. He was powerless under this sudden, strange a.s.sault. Dumbly he watched her, closer now by another step, the clasped hands, fighting blindly toward him, with little retreats to her breast, her dry lips again shaping the words, "My boy--my boy!"
And then, even as his own arms were half extended with an instinctive saving movement--for the woman seemed about to totter--the stillness was broken by quick steps along the hall, the rattle of curtain rings along a rod, and the voice of the maid:
"Mr. Teevan, ma"am!"
There had been an instinctive wrenching asunder of the three at the first sound of steps. Yet traces of the stress under which they had labored were still evident to Randall Teevan as he entered. Mrs. Lowndes had turned to search among the magazines on the table--not before the little man had swept her with a comprehending eye flash.
Ewing, pleasantly delivered from a situation that had grown irksome, a situation rising from what he considered the too-ready sympathy of an emotional old woman, allowed his relief full play in the heartiness of his response to Teevan"s greeting. The doctor had squared his shoulders to another pacing of the room.
Teevan, missing no item of the drama he had interrupted, chose for himself the role of blind unconsciousness. So well did he enact this that Mrs. Lowndes was convinced, and the belief aided her to recover a proper equanimity. The doctor surveyed the new actor with a skeptic keenness not so readily to be overcome.
One glance at Ewing"s perturbed but mystified face a.s.sured Teevan that the climax of exposure had not been reached. He bustled amiably about the room, kissing the hand of Mrs. Lowndes, shaking the hand of the doctor, straightening a picture on the wall, and, at last, lighting a cigarette as he faced the room from his favorite post on the hearth rug.
"I ran in for a moment to see how my lady prospered," with a graceful wave of the expiring match toward Mrs. Lowndes, "and all is well. I find her holding court to youth and age, to wit and wisdom, all of which she combines graciously in her own person. She is looking weary, perhaps, but rejoiced. Gentlemen, you have served her well. Doubtless our young friend here, Mr.--Ah, yes, Mr. Ewing--has talked enchantingly. I"ve had an art evening with him myself." He bestowed a glance of benevolent approval on Ewing, who smiled in return.
"By the way, my lady, I"ve sent you a brace of birds that lived their little span of woods life between last spring and yesterday. Ah, but they came to a fluent richness of body, brown and plump and tender as first love, and tanged with autumn spices--so blessed be the piece that brought them low. Doctor, you"d dissect them for their nerve centers or the intricacies of their bone structure, but I find them admirable in all aspects. They rejoice my scientific soul even as they lure my carnal man. Isn"t it Duceps, the falconer, friend of old Izaak, who speaks of birds that both feed and refresh man--"feed him with their choice bodies, and refresh him with their heavenly voices"? There was a normal person, now--not one-sided."
The atmosphere cleared of its cloud wrack as his speech flowed, marked by pointings of the small, crisp mustache and gracious little pauses of appeal to each of the listeners in turn.
From edible songsters he progressed to the cooking of these, and thence to speech on the art of cooking at large. There were pessimists, it seemed, to bemoan the day when a _maitre d"hotel_ would die rather than outlive the dishonor of his master"s table, as when Vatel stabbed himself because the fish for one of Conde"s dinners failed to arrive on time--proving, as Savarin observed, that the fanaticism of honor could exist in the kitchen as well as in the camp. But in the opinion of the speaker these were pinchbeck heroics. Vatel would have been the truer Frenchman, certainly the better _chef_, if, instead of wreaking a messy violence on himself in his master"s kitchen, he had contrived an _entree_ to replace the missing fish. And we should remember, too, that the French, good cooks as they are, have but elaborated an art for the germinal princ.i.p.als of which they are indebted to Italian genius. Italy first saw the revival of cookery as she first saw the revival of learning. The land of Savarin lay in darkness until light was brought by those incomparable artists in the train of Catharine de Medicis. One might recall how Montaigne was captivated in the land of Horace by the weighty manner of the _chef_ of Cardinal Caraffa in discoursing upon the occultisms of his art. The Italians even then held the thing hardly second to theology.
The little man here permitted a pause in which he discarded his cigarette and readjusted the carnation in his lapel, with a sniff at its spiciness. Then he turned graciously to Ewing.
"But I must be off--time races so in this little nook! If you"re stepping on, Mr.--Ah, yes--Ewing, to be sure--if you"re leaving, I shall be glad to join you as far as the avenue. My dutiful love, lady, and to you, doctor, that virtue which superst.i.tion ascribes to your pellets.
The word "health" could never have been coined by the healthy, could it?
I dislike to use the word baldly."