Linda Condon

J >> Joseph Hergesheimer >> Linda Condon

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

She was still in his arms, with her eyes closed. "Linda Condon?" he
said, in a tone of inquiry.

At the same breath in which she realized a kiss was of no importance
a sharp icy pain cut at her heart. It hurt her so that she gasped.
Then, and this was strange, she realized that--as a kiss--it hadn't
annoyed her. Suddenly she felt that it wasn't just that, but
something far more, a part of all her inner longing. He had put her
down and was looking away, a face in shadow with an ugly protruding
lip.

She saw him that way in her dreams--in the court under the massive
somber walls, with a troubled frown over his eyes. It seemed to her
that, reaching up, she smoothed it away as they stood together in a
darkness with the fountains, the hedges, dead, the world with never
a sound sleeping in the prison of winter.

XVII

Linda thought about Dodge Pleydon on a warm evening of the following
May. At four o'clock, in a hotel, Pansy had been married; and the
entire Feldt connection had risen to a greater height of clamorous
cheer than ever before. Extravagant unseasonable dishes, wines and
banked flowers were lavishly mingled with sentimental speeches,
healths and tears. Linda had been acutely restless, impatient of all
the loud good humor and stupid compliments. The sense of her
isolation from their life was unbearably keen. She would have a very
different wedding with a man in no particular like Pansy's.

After dinner--an occasion, with Pansy absent, where Mr. Moses
Feldt's tears persisted in flowing--she had strayed into the formal
chamber across from the dining-room and leaned out of a window,
gazing into the darkening court. Directly below was where Pleydon
had kissed her. She often re-examined her feelings about that; but
only to find that they had dissolved into an indefinite sense of the
inevitable. Not alone had it failed to shock her--she hadn't even
been surprised. Linda thought still further about kissing, with the
discovery that if, while it was happening, she was conscious of the
kiss, it was a failure; successful, it carried her as far as
possible from the actuality.

Pleydon, of course, had not written to her; he had intimated nothing
to the contrary, only asking her to let him know, at the Harvard
Club, if she changed address. That wasn't necessary, and now,
probably, he was back from South America. Where, except by accident,
might she see him? Markue, with his parties, had dropped from
Judith's world, his place taken by a serious older dealer in Dutch
masters with an impressive gallery just off Fifth Avenue.

That she would see him Linda was convinced; this feeling absorbed
any desire; it was no good wanting it or not wanting it;
consequently she was undisturbed. She considered him gravely and in
detail. Had there been any more Susanna Nodas in his stay south? She
had heard somewhere that the women of Argentine were irresistible.
Her life had taught her nothing if not the fact that a number of
women figured in every man's history. It was deplorable but couldn't
be avoided; and whether or not it continued after marriage depended
on the cunning of any wife.

Now, however, Linda felt weary already at the prospect of a married
life that rested on the constant play of her ingenuity. A great many
things that, but a little before, she had willingly accepted, seemed
to her probably not less necessary but distinctly tiresome. Linda
began to think that she couldn't really bother; the results weren't
sufficiently important.

Dodge Pleydon.

She slept in a composed order until the sun was well up. It was
warmer than yesterday; and, going to an afternoon concert with
Judith, she decided to walk. Linda strolled, in a short severe
jacket and skirt, a black straw hat turned back with a cockade and a
crisp flushed mass of sweet peas at her waist. The occasion, as it
sometimes happened, found her in no mood for music. The warmth of
the sunlight, the open city windows and beginning sounds of summer,
had enveloped her in a mood in which the jangling sentimentality of
a street organ was more potent than the legato of banked violins.

She was relieved when the concert was over, but lingered at her seat
until the crowd had surged by; it made Linda furious to be shoved or
indiscriminately touched. Judith had gone ahead, when Linda was
conscious of the scrutiny of a pale well-dressed woman of middle
age. It became evident that the other was debating whether or not to
speak; clearly such an action was distasteful to her; and Linda had
turned away before a restrained voice addressed her:

"You will have to forgive me if I ask your name ... because of a
certain resemblance. Seeing you I--I couldn't let you go."

"Linda Condon," she replied.

The elder, Linda saw, grew even paler. She put out a gloved hand.
"Then I was right," she said in a slightly unsteady voice. "But
perhaps, when I explain, you will think it even stranger,
inexcusable. My dear child, I am your father's sister."

Linda was invaded by a surprise equally made up of interest and
resentment. The first was her own and the second largely borrowed
from her mother. Besides, why had her father's family never made the
slightest effort to see her. This evidently had simultaneously
occurred to the other.

"Of course," she added, quite properly, "we can't undertake family
questions here. I shouldn't blame you a bit, either, if you went
directly away. I had to speak, to risk that, because you were so
unmistakably a Lowrie. It is not a common appearance. We--I--" she
floundered for a painful moment; then she gathered herself with a
considerable dignity. "Seeing you has affected me tremendously,
changed everything. I have nothing to say in our defense, you must
understand that. I am certain, too, that my sister will feel the
same--we live together in Philadelphia. I hope you will give me your
address and let us write to you. Elouise will join with me
absolutely."

Linda told her evenly where she lived, and then allowed Miss Lowrie
to precede her toward the entrance. She said nothing of this to
Judith, nor, momentarily, to her mother. She wanted to consider it
undisturbed by a flood of talk and blame. It was evident to her that
the Lowries had behaved very badly, but just how she couldn't make
out. She recalled her father's sister--her aunt--minutely, forced to
the realization that she was a person of entire superiority. Here,
she suddenly saw, had been the cause of all their difficulties--the
Lowries hadn't approved of the marriage, they had objected to her
mother.

Five years ago she would have been incensed at this; but now,
essentially, she was without personal indignation. She wanted, for
herself, to discover as much as possible about her father and his
family. A need independent of maternal influences stirred her. Linda
was reassured by the fact that her father had been gently born;
while she realized that she had always taken this for granted. Her
mother must know nothing about the meeting with Miss Lowrie until
the latter had written.

That was Friday and the letter came the following Tuesday. Linda,
alone at the breakfast-table, instantly aware of the source of the
square envelope addressed in a delicate regular writing, opened it
and read in an unusual mental disturbance:

"My dear Linda,

I hope you will not consider it peculiar for me to call you this,
for nothing else seems possible. Meeting you in that abrupt manner
upset me, as you must have noticed. Of course I knew of you, and
even now I can not go into our long unhappy affair, but until I saw
you, and so remarkably like the Lowries, I did not realize how
wicked Elouise and I had been. But I am obliged to add only where
you were concerned. We have no desire to be ambiguous in that.

However, I am writing to say that we should love to have you visit
us here. It is possible under the circumstances that your mother
will not wish you to come. Yet I know the Lowries, a very
independent and decided family, and although it is my last intention
to be the cause of difficulty with your mother, still I hope it may
be arranged.

In closing I must add how happy I was at the evidence of your blood.
But that, I now see, was a certainty. You will have to forgive us
for a large measure of blindness. Affectionately,

AMELIA VIGNE LOWRIE."

Almost instantaneously Linda was aware that she would visit the
Lowries. She liked the letter extremely, as well as all that she
remembered of its sender. At the same time she prepared for a scene
with her mother, different from those of the past--with the recourse
to the brandy flask--but no less unpleasant. They had very little to
say to each other now; and, when she went into her mother's room
with an evident definite purpose, the latter showed a constrained
surprise, a palpable annoyance that her daughter had found her at
the daily renovation of her worn face.

XVIII

Linda said directly, "I met Miss Lowrie, father's sister, at a
concert last week, and this morning I had a letter asking me to stay
with them in Philadelphia."

Mrs. Feldt's face suddenly had no need for the color she held poised
on a cloth. Her voice, sharp at the beginning, rose to a shrill
unrestrained wrath.

"I wonder at the brass of her speaking to you at all let alone
writing here. Just you give me the letter and I'll shut her up. The
idea! I hope you were cool to her, the way they treated us. Stay
with them--I guess not!"

"But I thought of going," Linda replied. "It's only natural. After
all, you must see that he was my father."

"A pretty father he was, too good for the girl he married. It's my
fault I didn't tell you long ago, but I just couldn't abide the
mention of him. He deserted me, no, us, cold, without a word--walked
out of the door one noon, taking his hat as quiet as natural, and
never came back. I never saw him again nor heard except through
lawyers. That was the kind of heart he had, and his sisters are
worse. I hadn't a decent speech of any kind out of them. The
Lowries," she managed to inject a surprising amount of contempt into
her pronouncement of that name. "What it was all about you nor any
sensible person would never believe:

"The house smelled a little of boiled cabbage. That's why he left
me, and you expected in a matter of a few months. He said in his
dam' frigid way that it had become quite impossible and took down
his hat."

"There must have been more," Linda protested, suppressing a mad
desire to laugh.

"Not an inch," her mother asserted. "Nothing, after a little, suited
him. He'd sit up like a poker, just as I've seen you, with his lips
tight together in the Lowrie manner. It didn't please him no matter
what you'd do. He wouldn't blow out at you like a Christian and I
never knew where I was at. I'd come down in a matinee, the prettiest
I could buy, and then see he didn't like it. He would expect you to
be dressed in the morning like it was afternoon and you going out.
And as for loosening your corsets for a little comfort about the
house, you might as well have slapped him direct.

"That wasn't the worst, though; but his going away without as much
as a flicker of his hand; and with me like I was. Nobody on earth
but would blame him for that. I only got what was allowed me after
we had changed back to my old name, me and you. He never asked one
single question about you nor tried to see or serve you a scrap. For
all he knew, at a place called Santa Margharita in Italy, you might
have been born dead."

She was unable, Linda recognized, to defend him in any way; he had
acted frightfully. She acknowledged this logically with her power of
reason, but somehow it didn't touch her as it had her mother, and
as, evidently, the latter expected. She was absorbed in the vision
of her father sitting, in the Lowrie manner, rigid as a poker; she
saw him quietly take up his hat and go away forever. Linda
understood his process completely; she was capable of doing
precisely the same thing. Whatever was the matter with her--in the
heartlessness so often laid to her account--had been equally true of
her father.

"You ought to know what to say to them," Mrs. Moses Feldt cried, "or
I'll do it for you! If only I had seen her she would have heard a
thing or two not easy forgotten."

Linda's determination to go to Philadelphia had not been shaken, and
she made a vain effort to explain her attitude. "Of course, it was
horrid for you," she said. "I can understand how you'd never never
forgive him. But I am different, and, I expect, not at all nice.
It's very possible, since he was my father, that we are alike. I
wish you had told me this before--it explains so much and would have
made things easier for me. I am afraid I must see them."

She was aware of the bitterness and enmity that stiffened her mother
into an unaccustomed adequate scorn:

"I might have expected nothing better of you, and me watching it
coming all these years. You can go or stay. I had my life in spite
of the both of you, as gay as I pleased and a good husband just the
same. I don't care if I never see you again, and if it wasn't for
the fuss it would make I'd take care I didn't. You'll have your
father's money now I'm married; I wonder you stay around here at all
with your airs of being better than the rest. God's truth is you
ain't near as good, even if I did bring you into the world."

"I am willing to agree with you," Linda answered. "No one could be
sweeter than the Feldts. I sha'n't do nearly as well. But that isn't
it, really. People don't choose themselves; I'm certain father
didn't at that lonely Italian place. If you weren't happy laced in
the morning it wasn't your fault. You see, I am trying to excuse
myself, and that isn't any good, either."

"Unnatural," Mrs. Moses Feldt pronounced. And Linda, weary and
depressed, allowed her the last word.

XIX

Nothing further during the subsequent brief exchange of notes
between Miss Lowrie and Linda was said of the latter's intention to
visit her father's family. Mrs. Feldt, however, whose attitude
toward Linda had been negatively polite, now displayed an animosity
carefully hidden from her husband but evident to the two girls. The
elder never neglected an opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishness
or make her personality seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored from
her wide sense of the inconsequence of most things.

Yet she was relieved when, finally, she had actually left New York.
She looked forward with an unusual hopeful curiosity to the Lowries.
To her surprise their house--miles, it appeared, from the center of
the city--was directly on a paved street with electric cars,
unpretentious stores and very humble dwellings nearby. Back from the
thoroughfare, however, there were spacious green lawns. The street
itself, she saw at once, was old--a highway of gray stone with low
aged stone facades, steep eaves and blackened chimney-pots reaching,
dusty with years, into the farther hilly country.

A gable of the Lowrie house, with a dignified white door, a fanlight
of faintly iridescent glass and polished brasses, faced the brick
sidewalk, while to the left there was a high board fence and an
entrance with a small grille open on a somber reach of garden. A
maid in a stiff white cap answered the fall of the knocker; she took
Linda's bag; and, in a hall that impressed her by its bareness,
Linda was greeted by the Miss Lowrie she had seen.

Her aunt was composed, but there was a perceptible flush on her
cheeks, and she said in a rapid voice, after a conventional welcome,
"You must meet Elouise at once, before you go up to your room."

Elouise Lowrie was older than Amelia, but she, too, was slender and
erect, with black hair startling in its density on her wasted
countenance. Linda noticed a fine ruby on a crooked finger and
beautiful rose point lace. "It was good of you," the elder
proceeded, "to come and see two old women. I don't know whether we
have more to say or to keep still about. But I, for one, am going to
avoid explanations. You are here, a fool could see that you were
Bartram's girl, and that is enough for a Lowrie."

The room was nearly as bare as the hall: in place of the deep carpets
of the Feldts' the floor, of dark uneven oak boards, was merely waxed
and covered by a rough-looking oval rug. The walls were paneled
in white, with white ruffled curtains at small windows; and the
furniture, the dull mahogany ranged against the immaculate paint, the
rocking-chairs of high slatted walnut and rush bottoms, the slender
formality of tables with fluted legs, was dignified but austere.
There were some portraits in heavy old gilt--men with florid faces
and tied hair, and the delicate replicas of high-breasted women in
brocades.

There was, plainly, an air of the exceptional in Amelia Lowrie's
conduction of Linda to her room. She waited at the door while the
other moved forward to the center of a chamber empty of all the
luxury Linda had grown to demand. There was a bed with tall graceful
posts supporting a canopy like a frosting of sugar, a solemn set of
drawers with a diminutive framed mirror in which she could barely
see her shoulders, a small unenclosed brass clock with long exposed
weights, and two uninviting painted wooden chairs. This was not,
although very nearly, all. Linda's attention was attracted by a
framed and long-faded photograph of a young man, bareheaded, with a
loosely knotted scarf, a striped blazer and white flannels. His face
was thin and sensitive, his lips level, and his eyes gazed with a
steady questioning at the observer.

"That was Bartram," Amelia Lowrie told her; "your father. This was
his room."

She went down almost immediately and left Linda, in a maze of dim
emotions, seated on one of the uncomfortable painted chairs. Her
father! This was his room; nothing, she realized, had been disturbed.
The mirror had held the vaguely unsteady reflection of his face; he
had slept under the arched canopy of the bed. She rose and went to
a window from which he, too, had looked.

Below her was the garden shut in on its front by the high fence.
There was a magnolia-tree, now covered with thick smooth white
flowers, and, at the back, low-massed rhododendron with fragile
lavender blossoms on a dark glossy foliage. But the space was mainly
green and shadowed in tone; while beyond were other gardens, other
emerald lawns and magnolia-trees, an ordered succession of
tranquillity with separate brick or stone or white dwellings in the
lengthening afternoon shadows of vivid maples.

It was as different as possible from all that Linda had known, from
the elaborate hotels and gigantic apartment houses, the tropical
interiors, of her New York life. She unpacked her bag, putting her
gold toilet things on the chest of drawers, precisely arranging in a
shallow closet what clothes she had brought, and then, changing,
went down to the Lowries.

They surveyed her with eminent approval at a dinner-table lighted
only with candles, beside long windows open on a dusk with a glimmer
of fireflies. Suddenly Linda felt amazingly at ease; it seemed to
her that she had sat here before, with the night flowing gently in
over the candle-flames. The conversation, she discovered, never
strayed far from the concerns and importance of the Lowrie blood.
"My grandmother, Natalie Vigne," Elouise informed her, "came with
her father to Philadelphia from France, in eighteen hundred and one,
at the invitation of Stephen Girard, who was French as well. She
married Hallet Lowrie whose mother was a Bartram.

"That, my dear, explains our black hair and good figgers. There
never was a lumpy Lowrie. Well, Hallet built this house, or rather
enlarged it, for his wife; and it has never been out of the family.
Our nephew, Arnaud Hallet--Arnaud was old Vigne's name--owns it now.
Isaac Hallet, you may recall, was suspected of being a Tory; at any
rate his brother's descendants, Fanny Rodwell is the only one left,
won't speak."

The placid conversation ran on unchanged throughout dinner and the
evening. Linda was relieved by the absence of any questioning;
indeed nothing contemporary, she realized, was held to be significant.
"I thought Arnaud would be in to-night," Elouise Lowrie said; "he
knew Linda was expected." No one, however, appeared; and Linda went
up early to her room. There, too, were only candles, a pale wavering
illumination in which the past, her father, were extraordinarily
nearby. A sense of pride was communicated to her by so much that
time had been unable to shake. The bed was steeped in the magic of
serene traditions.

XX

Arnaud Hallet appeared for dinner the evening after Linda's arrival;
a quiet man with his youth lost, slightly stooped shoulders,
crumpled shoes and a green cloth bag. But he had a memorable voice
and an easy distinction of manner; in addition to these she
discovered, at the table, a lighter amusing sense of the absurd. She
watched him--as he poured the sherry from a decanter with a silver
label hung on a chain--with a feeling of mild approbation. On the
whole he was nice but uninteresting. What a different man from
Pleydon!

The days passed in a pleasant deliberation, with Arnaud Hallet
constantly about the house or garden, while Linda's thoughts
continually returned to the sculptor. He was clearer than the
actuality of her mother and the Feldts or the recreated image of her
father. At times she was thrilled by the familiar obscure sense of
music, of longing slowly translated into happiness. Then more actual
problems would envelop her in doubt. Mostly she was confused--in her
cool material necessity for understanding--by the temper of her
feeling for Dodge Pleydon. Linda wondered if this were love. Perhaps,
when she saw him again, she'd be able to decide. Then she remembered
promising to let him know if she changed her address. It was possible
that already he had called at the Feldts', or written, and that her
mother had refused to inform him where she had gone.

Linda had been at the Lowries' two weeks now, but they were acutely
distressed when she suggested that her visit was unreasonably
prolonged. "My dear," they protested together, "we hoped you'd stay
the summer. Bartram's girl! Unless, of course, it is dull with us.
Something brighter must be arranged. No doubt we have only thought
of our own pleasure in having you."

Linda replied honestly that she enjoyed being with them extremely.
Her mother's dislike, the heavy luxury of the Feldt apartment, held
little attraction for her. Then, too, losing the sense of the
bareness of the house Hallet Lowrie had built for his French wife,
she began to find it surprisingly appealing.

Her mind returned to her promise to Pleydon. She told herself that
probably he had forgotten her existence, but she had a strong
unreasoning conviction that this was not so. It seemed the most
natural thing in the world to write him and, almost before she was
aware of the intention, she had put "Dear Mr. Pleydon" at the head
of a sheet of note-paper.

I promised to let you know in the spring when you came back from
South America where I was. I did not think I would have to do it,
but here I am in Philadelphia with my father's sisters. I do not
know just how long for, but a month, anyhow. It is very quiet, but
charming. I have the room that was my father's when he was young,
and look out of the window like he must have. If you should come to
Philadelphia my aunts ask me to say that they would be glad to have
you for dinner. This is how you get here....

Very sincerely,

LINDA CONDON.

She walked to a street crossing, where she dropped the envelope into
a letter-box on a lamppost, and returned to find Arnaud Hallet
waiting for her. He said:

"Everyone agrees I'm serious, but actually you are worse than the
Assembly." They went through the dining-room to the garden, and sat
on the stone step of a deep window. It was quite late, perhaps
eleven o'clock, and the fireflies, slowly rising into the night, had
vanished. Linda was cool and remote and grave, silently repeating
and weighing the phrases of her letter to Pleydon.

She realized that Arnaud Hallet was coming to like her a very great
deal; but she gave this only the slightest attention. She liked him,
really, and that dismissed him from serious consideration. Anyhow,
in spite of the perfection of his manner, Arnaud's careless dress
displeased her: his shoes and the shoulders of his coat were
perpetually dusty, and his hair, growing scant, was always ruffled.
Linda understood that he was highly intellectual, and frequently
contributed historical and genealogical papers to societies and
bulletins, but compared with Dodge Pleydon's brilliant personality
and reputation, Pleydon surrounded by the Susanna Nodas of life,
Arnaud was as dingy as his shoes.

She wondered idly when the latter would actually try to love her. He
was holding her hand and it might well be to-night. Linda decided
that he would do it delicately; and when, almost immediately, he
kissed her, she was undisturbed. No, surprisingly, it had been quite
pleasant. He hadn't mussed her ribbons, nor her spirit, a particle.
In addition he did not at once become impossible and urgently
sentimental; there was even a shade of amusement on his heavy face.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13