The Happy Man/Chapter 2
II
“I haven't the slightest idea of the time,” remarked Mrs. Vernon, pausing with buffer in hand to examine the effect of her labors on five pink finger-nails. She had very pretty hands, knew it, and was proud of it, just as she was proud of the fact that at forty-three her hair held no tell-tale strands of white, that her figure was still young and graceful, and that, in short, she was scarcely less attractive than at the age of the girl of twenty who, stretched at length in the willow chaise-longue across the porch, was idly glancing at the watch on her wrist.
“It is twenty-two minutes past twelve,” said Beryl Vernon. She slowly dropped the magazine she had been reading in her lap, and watched her mother as, flanked by bowls and jars and all the paraphernalia of the manicure, she industriously flourished the buffer. “I don't see, Mamma,” she added presently, “why you don't let Jennie do your nails for you.”
“Because I like to do them myself, Beryl.” Mrs. Vernon held a hand to the light, caught sight of a flaw in the perfection of the work, frowned slightly, and seized an orange-stick. “One must do something to lighten the monotony of life in—in a house of mourning.”
It was the girl's turn to frown. “I don't think you need to talk that way, Mamma,” she replied, mildly resentful.
“It's the way I feel,” said Mrs. Vernon cheerfully. “With your father chained in Washington to a Bill, and no one in sight from one day's end to another, my dear”—she shrugged a pair of slimly graceful shoulders—“I think 'house of mourning' just describes it.”
“What—what do you want me to do?” asked Beryl.
Mrs. Vernon polished silently for a minute. “Well, even if you don't care to encourage callers, you might at least not bite their heads off when they do come, which, goodness knows, is seldom enough!”
“Mamma! 'Bite their heads off'!”
“Metaphorically speaking, my dear.”
“Please, whose head have I bit—bitten”
“Bitten, I think,” said her mother helpfully.
“Bitten off, then?” persisted Beryl, with some spirit.
“Well, still speaking in metaphors, you quite decapitated that Russell boy, and at least partially beheaded George Smith.”
“Tiresome, smirky old thing,” murmured Beryl.
“He is tiresome, my dear. No one knows it better than I do, since on the occasion of his last call I had to entertain him for nearly an hour while you coddled an imaginary headache upstairs.”
“It would have been real enough if I'd stayed down here,” replied Beryl with a smile, closely followed by a sigh.
Mrs. Vernon looked slightly aggrieved. “Oh, it's all very well for you, Beryl. You are old and past the taste for frivolities, but I am young and pine for the pleasure of occasional discourse with some one besides Perkins or Jennie or, if you will forgive me, you. I pine, too, for a rubber of auction—or even whist would be wildly exciting. I am heartily sick of Canfield. I've played it so much that I awake in the night to find myself putting imaginary red deuces on black trays. I even had the nightmare once when I dreamed that all four aces were buried under the seventh pile, and that a miserable red queen without an affinity in the pack was holding them down!”
Beryl laughed amusedly. “Poor Mamma! Did her hard-hearted daughter scare all the mens away from her?”
“I could do without men, my dear, if there was even a woman in sight, and you know there isn't. I've used up most of the paper in the house writing invitations to folks, and not a single victim have I caught. Everybody has a son graduating somewhere, it seems. Next month they'll be simply delighted to visit us, but just at present” Mrs. Vernon gazed startledly at her daughter. “My dear, it just occurs to me that if I don't do something to head them off, at least a dozen women and two dozen wardrobe trunks will descend on us in July!”
“Horrors! Please do something!”
“Of course I'm very fond of Alderbury,” mused Mrs. Vernon, attaching lids to various jars and boxes, “and I love this place, but I do think it's a mistake to come here out of the season. Except for the Norrises and ourselves and a man or two at the Country Club, there isn't a human being in miles.”
“I'm sorry you find it so dull, dear,” responded Beryl. “After this, I'll be as nice as pie to every one—even Mr. Smith.”
“Well, as for Mr. Smith”
“Since I dragged you out here so early, I suppose I must provide amusement for you. Mamma. Shall we give a dinner for the Norrises and a few of the men—including Mr. Smith?”
“Hardly a dinner just yet, I think. But I do think you might take a little more interest in things—and people, Beryl. Your attitude is absurd for a girl of your age.”
“It's a very comfortable attitude,” murmured Beryl.
“You know what I mean,” responded her mother, trying to look severe. When she made such attempts she lowered her head a little and seemed to be looking over a pair of imaginary glasses, which led one to suspect that, possibly, in the seclusion of her room, when the print was very fine—but I may be doing the lady an injustice. “You've had a—an unpleasant experience, my dear, but it happened a whole year ago—very nearly—and it is wrong deliberately to let it sour you, and that's just what you are doing, or trying to do. Instead”
“An unpleasant experience!” repeated Beryl bitterly. “You speak very moderately, Mamma. When a girl has given her whole heart to a man, only to find him worthless—”
“Fiddlesticks! No man is worthless, and certainly not Kenneth Leeds. There's a great deal that's admirable in him. Certainly no man could have behaved in a nicer, more manly way when you broke the engagement. It was a mistake”
“I'd rather not talk about it, please,” begged her daughter.
“There's no reason why you shouldn't talk about it after a year,” persisted Mrs. Vernon resolutely. “If you'd talked more about it and not just crawled into your shell, like—like one of those things that have shells, you'd have been far more sensible. As for giving your whole heart, you did nothing of the sort. I don't want to hurt you, Beryl, but you are not behaving fairly either to your father or to me in persisting in—in this attitude of yours. It—it's most uncomfortable for every one. Of course I don't say that you didn't care for Mr. Leeds. Had you married him, I've no doubt that you'd have cared a great deal. But it's positively wrong and wicked to insist, to deliberately try to make yourself believe, that your heart is broken and your life wrecked. Good gracious, child, how many women do you suppose there are who are married to their first sweethearts?”
“But the—the ignominy, Mamma, of discovering that—that the man you care for”
“Is very sensibly interested in your dot? My dear, if you had not been blinded by sentiment”
“Why shouldn't I have been? Aren't girls allowed to have sentiment any more? How was I to know that he cared nothing for me, but only for the money Papa was to settle on him?”
“Well, you knew he was English,” murmured Mrs. Vernon.
“And then”—Beryl shuddered— “to have to—to break it off like that at the eleventh hour! To read all the horrid things the newspapers printed and to hear the nasty, mean things that people—yes, and one's very dearest friends—said about it! It—oh, it's enough to make you hate every one! And as for men—no, you are right; my heart is not broken, Mamma. But—but I think my pride is.”
After a moment Mrs. Vernon said gently: “A pride that is broken so easily, dear, is hardly worth having, I think. As for what people said”—she shrugged, her shoulders philosophically—“it was only what people always do say and always will say. It's human nature—not the best part of it, but still human nature, dear. People envied you a brilliant marriage, envied your father's wealth that made such a marriage possible, envied you for your attractions and your youth and your happiness. And when the upset came they were glad of it—for a moment—and didn't hesitate to show it. Now that it is over, they are ready to be as good friends as before.”
“Never!”
“When you are older, Beryl, you'll discover that we have to take our friends as they come, with all their faults, or go without.”
“I prefer to go without.”
“Just now, perhaps,” responded Mrs. Vernon quietly; “but later you will find that friends are very necessary, and you will be ready to accept them as the Lord made them, forgiving them many things for the good that is there, besides. We are all very imperfect, Beryl. I suppose that's the only thing that makes any of us lovable.”
Mrs. Vernon folded her towels thoughtfully and sighed. Beryl gazed into the sun-smitten garden beyond the porch with troubled, mutinous eyes. They were very beautiful eyes, truly violet in color, and they looked out of a warmly-hued, oval face whose loveliness was proof against even the expression of discontent that rested upon it. Beryl Vernon had all the soft and quiet beauty of her mother, plus a certain more stately quality which had been her father's contribution. Senator Whittier Vernon was still, at fifty-five, the handsomest man in the Senate. Without being much above ordinary height, the Senator impressed the world as being a tall man, and this faculty he had passed on to his daughter. Beryl was no more than an inch above her mother in stature, yet looked much taller. But you are not to accept the impression that she was a haughty, imperious beauty. She was too much like the older woman to be that. There was a grace and litheness in the rounded but still slender form that prevailed against any tendency to statuesqueness, while the features, although almost ideally regular, were far from haughty. The face was warm, even vivid, and one would have sworn that the present troubled gloom in the soft eyes and the self-pitying droop of the red lips were far from natural there.
“While we are talking of—of this, Beryl,” Mrs. Vernon continued presently, “I think, perhaps, I might as well tell you of something that Eugenia White wrote me a day or two ago. She says that Mr. Leeds is engaged. Pittsburgh girl—I forget the name—whom he met on the other side.” Mrs. Vernon watched her daughter's face very closely. The expression changed very little, and there was only the barest tinge of bitterness in the voice that responded, after a brief moment:
“I hope he will be happy.”
Mrs. Vernon sighed her relief very gently and went on more cheerfully: “I think the name is Schwartz or—well, it was German, I'm certain. Eugenia says the family has a great deal of money. Steel, I presume. One always associates Pittsburgh with steel, doesn't one? They are to be married on this side in the autumn.”
There was a minute of silence, and then
“Do you suppose,” asked Beryl musingly, “he really cares—this time, Mamma?”
Mrs. Vernon shrugged slightly. The movement was becoming to her, and she often indulged in it. “My dear, Englishmen have extraordinary command over their emotions, and whether he is really in love with the girl or not, no one but he will ever know. Surely it must be almost, time for luncheon? Not that I am hungry, but life here just now is so much like life on shipboard that meal-time is an event of exciting magnitude! I must call Jennie to take these things—” Mrs. Vernon's voice trailed away into silence. Then, “Now, who do you suppose that may be?” she asked softly.
The living-porch was at the end of the house, the only feature not strictly in accord with its artfully artless Colonialism, but from it one commanded the white trellised gate set in the high hedge that enclosed the place, and Beryl, following her mother's gaze, saw a man leaning upon the gate. He held a pipe in his mouth and seemed to be dreamily regarding the house. Beside him, visible through the pickets, was a rather dirty, white dog.