_ CHAPTER XVI. MRS. FENLOW IS ANGRY
"Harry, dear, do please conceal the newspaper in your handbag and carry it off with you," said Isabella Marne as her sister entered the dining room. The sun shone in upon a window full of blooming plants, a bowl of daffodils glowed upon the table and the whole room looked as cheerful and buoyant, as dainty and pleasing as did the little lady in a pink and white muslin gown who was putting the last touches to the breakfast table. "Mother is coming down this morning," she went on, "and I don't want her to see it."
"O, dear!" exclaimed Henrietta as she glanced at the head lines. "No, indeed, mother mustn't see this. It would worry her too much. Have you read it, Bella? Was he hurt?"
"The account says Mr. Brand wasn't hurt at all. But some of the others were--one rather badly, and Miss Andrews had her scalp cut. I hope it won't spoil her beauty."
"It must have been a narrow escape for them all," Henrietta commented in shocked tones as she glanced down the column. "Poor Mildred! She will be wild with anxiety and jealousy! You know, Bella, she can't bear for another woman to have a smile from him, or a little attention of any sort."
"Sh-h-h! Mother's coming! Do hide the paper quick and please talk real fast all through breakfast, so she won't think to ask for it until after you're gone. Mother would never, never let me go out with him in his auto again if she knew about this accident."
"I don't think you ought to, anyway, Bella. I wish you wouldn't."
"What harm does it do? And it gives me a little fun--about all I ever have, you know. Delia is having another season of introspection," she went on laughingly as Mrs. Marne entered the room and all three seated themselves at the table. "It has lasted two days already and I'm trembling with anxiety as to what will happen next. She was in such a brown study this morning that she would have sugared the eggs and salted the coffee if I hadn't been on the watch."
"Do you think she's making up her mind again to leave us?" said Mrs. Marne apprehensively.
"Oh, Delia's all right, except when she gets uneasy about the scarcity of matrimonial chances in this neighborhood. She doesn't really want to marry, at least not now, but she likes to think she could if she wanted to and she likes to see a new man once in a while, as she says, 'to pass a word with.' And I sympathize with her, even if I do have three letters a week from Warren."
"Bella!" exclaimed her mother, but with more amusement than reproof in her voice.
"You would, too, if you were twenty-five years younger," said Bella, leaning over to pat her mother's arm affectionately. "Anyway, I prove my sympathy with Delia by bringing to her all the stray crumbs of comfort I can find. I haven't told her yet--I'm waiting for her fit of introspection to reach the acute stage--but the grocer has got a new delivery boy, a nice young man, good-looking and polite. I wish somebody would be that kind to me!" she laughed, with a whimsical pout of her pretty lips. "Harry, if Mr. Brand says anything to you today about coming over here in his motor-car--" Henrietta looked up with a disapproving lift of her eyebrows and saw a sparkle of defiant mischief dancing in her sister's blue eyes--"just tell him, please," Bella proceeded with a toss of her head, "that my physician has ordered me to take an auto ride today as the only means of saving my life!"
It was mid-April and the very air thrilled with the hurry and promise of the spring that was making ready to leap at a single bound--would it be tomorrow, in three days, next week?--from swelling bud and bronzing tree into full flower and leafage. As Henrietta hastened down the street beneath budding trees busy at their yearly miracle and past little green lawns with their beds of crocuses and snowdrops and tulips, the splendid caressing sunshine bathed her in its gaiety, the smell of freshly turned earth challenged her to buoyant mood and the singing and fluttering and twittering of birds called her to equal delight in the radiant season. But all was not well with her world and she was more conscious of the anxiety in her heart than of the call of the spring that was storming at her senses.
True, she could begin to look forward now with reasonable surety, she told herself, to the last payment, in a very few months, upon their cottage with its little lawn and garden, and that would make sure, whatever might happen, a home for her mother. Bella would probably marry within a year the young physician to whom she had been engaged so long. They had waited for his graduation from the medical school of Harvard and now he wanted to be sure of a good enough practice to feel warranted in marrying. The delay had been necessary, too, on Bella's part, for her help in the care of their mother had been indispensable. But their improving financial prospects had acted like a magic draught upon Mrs. Marne and now, as she felt more and more assured of Henrietta's ability and success, she was rapidly growing so much better and stronger that she would soon be able to take care of their housekeeping and leave Bella free to marry as soon as her fiance could offer her a home.
But Henrietta was so anxious about other things that these untangling perplexities gave her small comfort. Her sisterly caution told her it was not prudent for Isabella to go so frequently with Felix Brand in his automobile. Twice since Brand's return from his last absence had she found, when she reached home at the end of the day, that Bella had just returned from a long drive, wherein Brand's machine had apparently torn to tatters all speed laws and appeared to onlookers as a mere streak of color. After such a trip Bella's heightened spirits, Henrietta thought, made her very lovely and bewitching, with the flush in her cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes and her merry talk.
"She's young and gay-spirited and has so few pleasures," Henrietta thought, regardless of the fact that she herself was younger and had just as few, "that I feel awfully mean to object to anything that seems so innocent. But it is reckless of him to go so fast, and this accident last night--oh, I'm afraid it's dangerous. And then there's Mildred--if he was engaged to anybody else I shouldn't think anything about that; but--well, mother thinks it's all right and lovely of him to give Bella a little outing now and then; and if it wasn't I suppose he wouldn't do it."
But on this last point Henrietta was not without uneasiness. For little rifts were beginning to appear in that perfect confidence she had felt until recently in her employer. She had thought him the soul of uprightness and honor, but in his business affairs, nearly all of which passed through her hands, she knew that he had begun to make use of the barest falsehoods and to practice evasions and tricks that made her blush with shame to be the medium by which they were transmitted to paper.
Simple, sturdy forthrightness being the backbone of Henrietta's character, she could not help feeling as if she were an accomplice in his shiftiness and untruths when she typed and mailed his letters. She told herself that it was none of her affair, that she was no more than a machine in the work she did for him and that to look after her own morals was all that was incumbent upon her. Nevertheless, she was a good deal disturbed about it on this bright morning.
"He seems so different from what he was a few months ago," she thought with a sigh. "I don't understand why he should change so. I almost begin to feel like trying to find another situation. But I mustn't think about it now, for I can't afford yet to take any risks."
Her thoughts turned to another phase of Brand's character upon which also she was beginning to have doubts. She did not see many people, but a few bits of talk had reached her ears which made her wonder if the man whose character she had believed to be almost ideally fine and noble were not after all a devotee of sinister pleasures. She had begun to feel conscious, after his last return, of a feeling toward him of physical repulsion and this she knew was growing upon her. As she recalled these things her thoughts flashed uneasily back to her sister. She felt wretchedly ignorant and uncertain as to what she ought to do and wished there were some one better versed in worldly knowledge than herself to whom she could go for advice.
"I can't talk it over with mother," she thought, "because it would make her worry about it and about me, and I don't like to go to Dr. Annister, because he has enough troubles to listen to, with all those half-crazy patients of his, and Mrs. Annister admires Mr. Brand so much that she'd be offended by any suggestion that he isn't all right and--well, I don't think she's very level-headed anyway. I wish I could see Mr. Gordon again--it seems a long time. But I ought not to tell him anything about these things even if I should see him, since there seems to be so much feeling between him and Mr. Brand.
"And I'm afraid Bella wouldn't pay much attention to anything that was contrary to her own desires, anyway. I don't like the kind of influence Mr. Brand seems to be having over her. I understand it, because he used to make me feel that way myself--dissatisfied and selfish and wishful of all sorts of delightful things that I couldn't have. Well, I went through it all right, without any bad results except my own ugly feelings; and she's so dear and sweet and so happy-natured I guess she will, too, after a little."
She reached the avenue where ran the trolley line that carried her to the ferry and saw that she had just missed a car.
"Oh, dear! Isn't that provoking?" she muttered as she watched it rattling on its way. "And there isn't another one in sight yet. I hope I won't have to wait long, for I do want to get there early this morning, there's so much to do today."
Her thoughts sped on to her office and the duties that awaited her and hovered over the familiar figure of her employer at work at his desk.
"I don't see," she argued with herself, "how it can be true that he is living a bad life when he is working so hard."
She remembered how eagerly upon his return he had plunged into the work awaiting him and with what absorption he had devoted himself to it ever since. Repeatedly during the last two or three weeks he had told her that never before had he worked so rapidly and so easily and with such satisfaction in the results.
With keen pleasure and interest she was watching his design for the capitol building take form beneath his fingers, thinking it more beautiful than anything he had done before. Once she had told him, laughingly, that she believed the fairies must come in the night and touch his pencil with magic, else it would not be possible for him to put upon paper so rapidly a thing so lovely.
Only yesterday he had shown her the finished cartoon for the front elevation and with a catch of her breath she had exclaimed, "Oh, Mr. Brand, it is exquisite! I don't know why it is so beautiful, for it looks simple, but, somehow, it seems exactly right."
And he had nodded and smiled in a pleased way and said:
"Yes, that's just it--that's what I wanted to do. It's all in the proportions, and I think, for the first time in my life, I have got them just right."
As she recalled the conversation an automobile whizzed past her, slowed down and returned, and she saw Mrs. Fenlow leaning out and calling to her:
"I thought it was you, Miss Marne! Waiting for a trolley, aren't you? Well, don't wait, jump in with me. I'm going to the city and I'll take you right to your office."
Henrietta had met Mrs. Fenlow a number of times during the long-drawn-out time when the architect was endeavoring to meet her wishes with a design for the country house she had determined to build up the Hudson. She had found the elder woman's open speech and breezy manners amusing, but she had also conceived liking and respect for the sincerity and warm-heartedness that were evident underneath a rather brusque and erratic exterior.
She had been pleased and touched also by the hearty affection and comradeship between Mrs. Fenlow and her only son, Mark Fenlow, her eldest child. Henrietta had met the young man several times in her employer's office and also at his theatre party and house-warming the previous autumn. She knew that Mark had been graduated from college the previous spring and afterwards had been taken into a trust company in which his father was a stock-holder and director and that his mother, who was very proud of him, expected him to climb the ladder rapidly and become an important figure in big financial operations. Henrietta had found him a debonair youth, full of gay humor and high spirits and having, apparently, much of the same kind of good-heartedness and sincerity which she admired in his mother.
"Have you seen the morning paper?" was Mrs. Fenlow's first remark, as Henrietta settled into her seat.
"You mean the accident Mr. Brand had with his automobile? Didn't they have a fortunate escape!"
"That man has the luck of the Irish army!" declared Mrs. Fenlow.
"Did you notice that he was the only one to escape without any injury, though the cause of it was evidently his reckless driving? That's the way things always happen with him. He gets his pleasure and other people take the consequences."
Mrs. Fenlow's tone was so sharp and bitter that Henrietta looked at her in surprise. There were signs of trouble in her face, which bore also something of a war-like aspect. Dark hollows under her eyes and little lines about her mouth seemed to tell of mental anguish. But her lips were pressed together determinedly and she held her head high.
"But he can't go on like this much longer. He's bound to have a smash-up some of these fine days."
"What do you mean, Mrs. Fenlow?" queried Henrietta, wide-eyed.
Mrs. Fenlow had been speaking straight ahead of her, into the air, as if, absorbed in her own bitter thoughts, she had for the moment forgotten her companion. At the girl's question she turned with a quick movement suggestive of the swoop of a bird of prey.
"Pardon me, my dear, if I use disrespectful language about your employer. The Good Lord knows I have reason enough for it. But you needn't feel uneasy because I say it in your hearing, for I'm going to his office this very day to say the same things, and worse, to his face. When I think of the way he's used his influence over Mark--and I believed him the pink of perfection and was as pleased as an old fool over his friendship for my boy! My God!"
Her voice sank to a whisper of such fierce indignation that Henrietta shrunk a little away, staring in astonishment at her set face and quivering lips.
"Of course," she presently went on in a more natural tone, "Mark ought to have known better, he ought to have had more sense and more strength of character than to yield to that sort of temptation. But he was only a lad, and Felix Brand was old enough to know the danger there was in it for a young fellow like that. And Mark admired him so much he thought whatever Brand did must be all right."
She broke off into sudden silence and Henrietta saw her wipe a tear from the corner of her eye. The girl was so confused and embarrassed by these signs of keen emotion and hidden trouble and so ignorant of their cause that she could think of nothing that seemed well to say or do, and so she, too, remained silent until presently the elder woman turned to her again and spoke more gently.
"Don't mind me, my dear. I'm in great trouble--on Mark's account. I've had an awful blow, and I don't know yet how it will all come out. I don't want to be unjust to Felix Brand, but I can't help thinking that he's largely responsible for it. I know he was for the beginning of the whole thing. And I've found out that poor Mark's not the only one--" she was talking off into the air again, oblivious of the girl beside her--"who's paying for the consequences of Felix Brand's private pleasures. It's time he began to pay for some of them himself."
Her voice, quivering with the indignation and anguish she was trying to conceal, subsided into a muttering whose words Henrietta could not distinguish and finally she lapsed into silence. At the door of the building in which was Brand's suite of offices she said to her companion:
"I'm going up with you, my dear, if you'll let me. I want to see Mr. Brand without delay and if he isn't here yet I'll wait for him."
Miss Marne, busy at her desk with the morning's mail, heard sounds from her employer's private room during Mrs. Fenlow's call that betokened a change in the friendly relations formerly existing between them. She could hear the woman's voice raised in what seemed to be bitter denunciation and the man's replying in sneering tones. These seemed so unlike Felix Brand that she paused for a moment in her work, astonished at the unaccustomed note. During the last few weeks she had seen him several times give way to sudden temper, but even these outbursts, unprecedented though they were in her experience of him, had not seemed to her so foreign to his usual affable manner and pleasant speech as did the harsh, sarcastic antagonism of the voice in which she could hear him speaking to Mrs. Fenlow.
"But it must be Mr. Brand," thought his secretary, looking in puzzled wonder at the door into his room, "for there's surely nobody else in there."
As she gazed, held by her surprise, a letter in her hands, the wrathful voices rose again, now one, then the other, and in Mrs. Fenlow's she presently caught the words, "Hugh Gordon."
At that came the sound of the man springing to his feet, of an overturned chair rattling to the floor, of a blow upon his desk and a loud and angry oath. The girl started with a whispered exclamation of amazement and horror. Her shocked ears heard her employer denouncing both Gordon and his caller and heard the rustle of the woman's dress as she hurried across the room.
In her anger and indignation Mrs. Fenlow had rushed to the first door that met her eyes, which chanced to be the one into Henrietta's room. As she opened it she flung back over her shoulder at Brand, in a white heat of scorn and wrath:
"You whited sepulchre! I'm done with you and all my friends shall know what you are!"
She rushed past Henrietta without seeming to see her, and on through the outer room into the corridor. The door into Brand's office was left wide open and Henrietta saw him standing beside his desk, his face so distorted with passion that for a moment she doubted that it was he, and, apparently--and here again she could hardly believe her eyes--shaking his fist at his departing visitor. _