CHAPTER I.
The Coming of Mrs. Smith.
I'M sorry, Daughter, but I can't take you with me."
"Oh, daddy," I cried, for his words meant the end of weeks of cherished planning.
I am Maida Waring, the only child of Lawrence Waring, whose millions date from the day when, ragged and half starving, he had struck oil on his homestead land. I was nearly seven then, growing up like a wild thing in the open air, my only playmates the three Smith children from the next homestead. Mr. Smith and Daddy were great friends and often Mrs. Smith would come over to "Give a hand with the wash," or knead the big batch of bread,—work too heavy for my frail little mother's slender hands.
Mother died just before the money began to pile up and since then I have lived in boarding schools, while Daddy sent his money into many corners of the world only to have it come back doubled and trebled. Business has taken him to other countries many times and all my life I have longed to go with him. He had promised to take me after I graduated in June and all this past winter I had pored over maps and planned our itinerary. And Christmas vacation Daddy had given me a huge roll of bills, a charge account at all the shops and permission to buy anything and everything I wanted. It was like being given the freedom of fairyland.
That same evening a reporter came to interview Daddy, and asked questions about my future and when I would make my social début. Daddy talked of our plans and how he meant to buy a house in town when we came back. He gave the man one of my new pictures and even showed him an old tintype of both of us, taken by a traveling photographer the day after we struck oil.
The reporter borrowed the tintype and the Sunday paper published a full page about us. Daddy and I laughed over it, for Daddy has never become a snob or tried to deny the old days—when he had mother.
So you see how great was our disappointment when Daddy found that business would prevent his taking me. For with all his trips abroad Daddy has never really seen anything—for he's always had to meet a lot of other financiers and organize a trust or combine or something. I asked Daddy, when he came back from his first trip over, what he thought of England and he said the highballs were warm and he didn't like the shape of the glasses, so that just shows you.
Daddy and I have been good chums the times we've been together and I was simply dying to go abroad with him, and poke around in all the queer, out-of-the-way places, and see how people lived. Our transportation was all arranged—when Daddy found he would have to leave me here. But the question was—where could I go? I haven't a living relative with whom he could leave me; I was graduating the week before we meant to sail, and I flatly refused a post-graduate course which would keep me immured another year. Just when Daddy was arranging with Miss Farmingdale to chaperone me during the summer there came a letter from Mrs. Smith, asking me to spend the summer with her at Hard-a-lee, their estate on Sunset Island off Cape Cod.
Daddy had kept in touch with them all these years, for he could never forget how kind they had been to mother. "Coal Oil Dan" struck the first of his wells about two years after Daddy did. The Smiths are tremendously rich, of course, but they had made no more strenuous effort to get into society than Daddy had. They had spent much of their time abroad and educated the children there. Aside from Hard-a-lee, Daddy said they had a town house in Chicago and a villa at Palm Beach.
Her invitation solved Daddy's dilemma beautifully for him, and I felt that if I couldn't go with Daddy the next best thing was being with some one who had known and loved my mother. I was heart-hungry to talk about her and I never dare mention her to Daddy, even after all these years, for he chokes up and his eyes fill, and he goes away by himself for a long, long time.
We had left Paint Rock right after mother died so I hadn't seen any of the Smiths since I was seven, but I remembered her as a stout, fair cowlike woman, with a pleasant soft lisp. Daddy said she had a tendency to diamonds in the morning. She owned quantities of them but they never seemed to have lost their novelty for her. Her little girls had been oddly opposite in appearance and character; Lorna skinny, dark and fiery tempered. Bijou blonde and phlegmatic, like her mother, and stupid as a sheep. The boy, Alaric, I recalled as a stocky little fellow, whose solemn face concealed a perfectly impish propensity for teasing.
Daddy insisted upon my buying the nearest to a Paris outfit that our shops afforded and I found myself the possessor of a formidable pile of luggage for a school girl, accustomed to simple belongings.
"Mrs. Smith will come for you Friday afternoon," Daddy told me. "Alaric is bringing down the yacht and you will go back on that I wish you'd notice her town car—if you like it I'll order one for you. I suppose Lorna selected it—all soft grays and silver. And Alaric will teach you to drive this summer. I'll come down for a day before sailing," which statement consoled me very much. "Mrs. Smith suggests that you express your trunks," Daddy concluded, "for they are not certain just where they will dock and Mrs. Smith wants to go back at once."
You can imagine how surprised I was on Friday morning, just after breakfast, when Miss Farmingdale sent word up to me that Mrs. Smith was in the dining-room. It was hours before I expected her, and I ran to the window and peeped out, before I went downstairs. A big, imposing-looking motor car stood at the curb, with a chauffeur and footman in the most conservative livery, and I sighed with relief. I'm not so much of a snob as most parvenue, I think, but I did want Miss Farmingdale to receive a good impression of our old family friend.
Somehow, the nearer I got to the drawing-room doors, the more difficult I found it to go on. I knew the first quarter of an hour was going to be a perfect horror of embarrassment, and I wished with all my heart that it was over.
As I reached the foot of the staircase, I heard a voice which made my heart jump right into my throat. How the sound of it carried me back through the years since I had heard it last! No one else in all the world had that funny, soft little drawl, and the odd lisp. It wasn't a lisp, exactly; at least, she didn't th-h her esses, if you know what I mean, but sort of slurred them, like a teakettle purring, impossible to reproduce in writing.
I tapped lightly at the door and then, without waiting for Miss Farmingdale to bid me enter, I pushed it open. A stout, motherly-looking woman, with a fluff of fair hair sat by the window. I flew straight into her arms. She hugged me until I felt my face rasp against something sharp on her breast, then held me off and looked at me, and hugged me again.
"My dear Maida! My dear little girl!"
"Aunt Julie! Oh, Aunt Julie!" I choked.
"How like your mother you are!" she murmured, brokenly. "How like dear Margaret! You are the very image of her when I knew her first. She was only a little older than you are now; you're nineteen, ain't—aren't you? Heavens! How time flies! I am so glad to see you again, dear child, and to know that you are going to be with us for a while. The children are so delighted they can hardly wait for you to come. … Mercy! when I look at you, I think I am talking to Margaret—You're her all over again!"
That was another little trait of Mrs. Smith's which I remembered suddenly; repeating herself. She had always done that. It was funny, the rush of little forgotten things which came trooping back in my thoughts all at once, answering the call of her voice.
"I—I am so glad, too, dear Aunt Julie!" I said shyly. "It is so lovely to see you again, and it was land of you to ask me to visit you. I have been looking forward to it ever since your letter came."
That was a fib, of course, but I wanted to be polite. She had changed, too. The years had made an inevitable difference. She had grown stouter than I remembered her, although her light hair showed no touch of gray, and there were little, faint lines about her eyes and mouth. There was something else, too, more than her outward appearance, which was changed. It was indefinite, intangible, I could not explain it, but I felt it, nevertheless.
I did notice, though, that her toilette was a little over-elaborate for morning wear and she was hung about with gold chains and things. As my eyes fell upon her gown, I saw that the object against which my cheek had pressed when she hugged me was a huge, old-fashioned brooch of rich, deep colored amethysts, and I gave a little exclamation of pleasure.
"It will be like the old days, to have you with us again," she was saying. "You remember them, Maida?"
"The old days? Indeed I do!" I cried. "Why I even recognize that brooch you are wearing! Do you remember the time, back home in Paint Rock, when you dropped it down the well?"
Miss Farmingdale tried to interpose austerely, but Mrs. Smith was too quick for her.
"I should say so!" she exclaimed heartily, with her little infectious laugh. "Think of your remembering such a thing as that all this time! But wait until you see the children. You'll hardly know them, they've grown like weeds."
Here Miss Farmingdale coughed authoritatively.
"Mrs. Smith has called for you earlier than was arranged for because she wishes to put her yacht out of commission for a time, as soon as the trip to Sunset Island has been made," she interposed. "You may go and prepare for an immediate departure, Miss Waring."
"Yes! Captain Andrews discovered that there is something wrong with the machinery, and it must be put right without delay. Isn't it provoking, just at the beginning of the season, too! I thought the Tortoise was thoroughly overhauled a month ago, but it must have been very negligently attended to," Aunt Julie explained. "Hurry now, dear, and we'll start. The children are so wildly impatient to see you."
I did hurry, but somehow I felt queer and disappointed. It was idiotic, of course, for me to feel that way. I knew it was only because of the lapse of time since I had seen her last, and that when this first sense of strangeness had worn off, ever3rthing would be all right. I hated myself for it, but I could not help criticizing Aunt Julie in my mind. She seemed common to me, her manner a little coarser than I had expected, in spite of her well-groomed, luxurious appearance, and the air of affluence she exuded at every breath.
I was bitterly ashamed of that thought the next minute. I told myself that I was no better than she, anyway, only I had become adapted to newly acquired prosperity more readily than an older person could. This critical snobbishness was all the fault of the veneer of eastern polish with which Miss Farmingdale had plastered me.
I descended again to the drawing-room, feeling wholesomely contrite and ashamed.
Miss Farmingdale bade me a chilly and admonitory farewell, and the great, front door closed with a heavy, well-bred thud behind me; closed forever and ever on my school days, and I felt as if I were stepping out into an unknown world with Aunt Julie.
The limousine was lined with the softest dove-gray cloth, and perfectly appointed in dull, unburnished silver. I made an instant mental resolve to have my own motor, an exact replica of this, inside, only I decided to have my monogram on the silver mountings and accessories smaller than the big, splashing, aggressive J. D. S. which sprawled over everything before me.
"So this is really Margaret's baby!" Aunt Julie beamed on me, adding with a little conscious laugh. "Tell me, Maida, do you think I have changed very much? I've grown to be an old woman, of course, but I mean in other ways."
She looked at me so anxiously that I quickly reassured her, despite my own contrary belief.
"Indeed, no, Aunt Julie! You haven't changed in the least I should have known you anywhere. And you haven't grown a bit old, either! You are just as I remember you when I was a little girl."
She laughed again, in a relieved way this time, as if her innocent vanity were appeased and reached for the silver handglass.
"You've no idea," she remarked, confidentially, "what money will do for your appearance, when you're beginning to go off a little in looks. I won't say there isn't a lot that's natural about me, yet, but you ought to see me before my maid gets through with me in the morning! If we'd always stayed as poor as we were when Daniel and I were married, I should be a wrinkled old woman now, bent with toil and care. Money is just everything in the world!"
"I don't know," I replied doubtfully. "Mother and Daddy were happy before he struck oil, and happiness is greater than everything else, isn't it?"
"Of course, but happiness depends on money, nowadays anyway. You're young, Maida, my dear, and I expect you have your illusions about romance, and love, and nobility, and fame maybe, but they're none of them realities unless wealth brings them to you. I know, your father knows, that money's the only thing that counts in the end."
She spoke with such queer intensity, that I turned and glanced at her. Her wide, placid eyes had narrowed to little cold slits, and gleamed like points of steel, and her face had fallen into lines which changed her whole expression. She was like a different woman, a stranger, and I felt afraid of her.
What a change the control of wealth must have made in her outlook on things, I thought to myself, since Uncle Dan's death!
As if my surprise had communicated itself to her, she turned quickly with the old pleasant smile I knew so well.
"There!" she exclaimed, "that sounded like a real old miser, didn't it? That's one of the dangers of money, I guess. It becomes a sort of god if you're not careful, especially if you haven't had it always.—Tell me about your school. Did you like it? That Farmingdale woman was a cold, stuck-up thing, worse than the nuns at the convent just outside of Paris where I finished Bijou. I very nearly did finish her altogether, poor child, for although their religion had all the improvements, ancient and modem, their drainage was awful, and Bijou had a very bad case of typhoid."
"I know. I was so sorry to hear of it," I replied. "Daddy told me. You wrote him, didn't you?"
"Oh, yes. I'd forgotten you knew. I was so worried and heartsick I had to tell somebody. Your father is closer to me than anyone in the world, except the children," she added. "He was Daniel's best friend, you know, always."
Aunt Julie's husband had been just "Dan" in former times, I remembered suddenly. I suppose she didn't consider it compatible with the dignity of the late oil plutocrat's position to abbreviate his name. My father is "Oil Well Waring" to the world at large, but I'm sure if Mother had lived, he would still have been "my Larry" to her.
"Didn't Lorna go to the same convent with Bijou?" I asked.
"Only for a little while. She was delicate, growing fast, and I found she was getting knock-kneed from the hard stone chapel floor, and hoarse from dampness."
"She had adenoids, anyway," I remarked suddenly, with horrible, unthinking rudeness, just as the thought popped into my head. But Aunt Julie didn't seem to mind.
"Yes, only we called them enlarged tonsils in the old-fashioned days," she added. "We had them burned out for a dollar and a half doctor's visit. Now it's a two hundred dollar operation, with a new name and a specialist, if you've got money and they know it. Lorna's got her adenoids still, and her appendix, too, and she'll have them till she dies, if I have anything to say about it! The Lord put them where they are for some purpose of His own, and I guess He knew the business of creation better than the doctors."
I giggled, and then a queer little feeling came over me. It was taking quite a long while for us to reach the yacht landing, and suddenly I noticed we were going north instead of south. Aunt Julie saw my look of bewilderment, and laughed frankly at her own forgetfulness.
"I do believe it slipped my mind to tell you," she said. "I explained to Miss Farmingdale before you came down. We changed our plans at the last minute, and anchored in the Hudson, just below Tarrytown. It was a whim of Alaric's. There's a girl, the daughter of a big broker downtown, whose summer house is near there, and Alaric is crazy about her. He is such a comfort to me, dearie, he always does the right thing. I was afraid he was going to be a little rough, in some ways, like his father, but he just took to culture like a burro to carrots. Land knows he spends money enough in a year to keep a royal family, but it gets him in with the right people, and that's the main thing. Wasn't it lucky, that I was so set on giving him a fine, high-sounding name? Daniel wanted him called Uriah, you know, after his father, but I put my foot down on that!
I wanted to giggle again, but her eyes were fixed on me, so I began to chatter about school, and my intention to make a real home for Daddy in the autumn, and all that we meant to do together.
The car skimmed along the smooth, sunny roads through the lovely, vivid greens of early summer. In spite of my disappointment about going abroad with Daddy, I felt really glad I was alive, and young, with the future so bright, and everything so lovely!
I think I must have told more to Aunt Julie in the next hour, than I had in ten years, to anyone. I felt that she sort of read between the lines, and understood perfectly the things I left unsaid. She impressed me now, in my older judgment, as being shrewd in her matter-of-fact, kindly way, in spite of her disingenuousness. I know I talked more than ever before in my life. It was like floodgates opening, But for some reason the gates didn't open really wide, at that. There were little intimate thoughts which I kept back instinctively, although I didn't know why.
"We're almost there now," observed Aunt Julie, at last "Oh, I forgot to tell you, Maida, we have another guest, a friend of Alaric's, going on with us to Hard-a-lee for a visit. I'm sure you will like him immensely, we all do. He's a Frenchman, Monsieur Pelissier."
I felt a little sorry. I had taken it for granted that I would be the only guest, and I should have liked to be alone with the family for a few days.
However, I murmured a conventional polite phrase or two about my pleasure at the prospect of meeting him, and asked when we would get under way.
"Oh, immediately," Aunt Julie quickly replied. "Do you like the water?"
"Yes, indeed, I love it!" I cried, enthusiastically. "Don't you, Aunt Julie?"
"Just between ourselves, I don't!" she returned. "I suppose I'd be sick, even on a ferryboat, and I'm scared too. Alaric makes fun of the Tortoise, and he's always after me to get a faster boat, but this is enough for me. He's got a racing motor-boat up at Sunset Island that he goes shooting around in, and it just brings my heart up in my mouth to see him. I won't let the girls go out with him. Bijou don't want to, she's a lot like me, but Lorna would dare anything. I never know what that girl's going to do next! I declare she keeps me on the jump the whole time!"
"She hasn't changed very much, then, has she?" I laughed. "She always was a little unexpected, as I remember her."
"Unexpected!" echoed Aunt Julie. "If you should put a stick of dynamite under Lorna she couldn't be more sudden, sometimes. I don't know how I ever came to have a child like her."
We were going down hill now, and the sharp salty breeze blew in at the open window. The road narrowed and dipped sharply as we neared the river, and we rolled over the railroad tracks and out upon a little wharf. The Hudson was beautiful, with bright sunlight gleaming upon it and across its glistening expanse the purple green of the rising hills like the banked-up somber clouds of a summer storm. Busy steamers and fussy little tugs were hurrying up and down the river, and right in shore a tiny, graceful white yacht rode at anchor, pulling at the ropes with the out-going current, as if she were anxious to be off, and impatiently awaited our coming.
Three figures were standing at the rail watching our approach; two young men in flannels, and a girl in a long white sweater. The sun glinted on her fluffy, golden hair, and I knew that she must be Bijou. A dinghy was beside the wharf, with an immaculate, bronzed sailor at the oars, and another at the bow, waiting to hand us in.
"I don't see Lorna!" Aunt Julie's voice trembled, and her face all at once became strained and ghastly beneath its frank mask of powder. "Where can she be?"
We quickly reached the yacht and a dainty little ladder with covered steps was let down.
"You go first, dearie," said Aunt Julie.
I grasped the rail, and placed my foot upon the lowest step when a man's voice cried sharply from above.
"My God, where's Lorna?"