“Dear, how time flies. You must miss your father very much; he will have been a tremendous example to you.”
“Oh, he was—”
“I wish I had met him.” Coming from another man, these words might have sounded perfunctory; coming from Benet they were the warm and exact truth. Val smiled into his eyes.
“And your mother, child?” the corncrake voice of Mrs. Allerton struck in. “Beyond having an enthusiasm for Norse mythology—what about her? Is she in Chicago still?”
“No, she died seven years ago—before my father,” Val explained. She did not feel the need to elaborate on this point; to reveal that in fact her parents had not lived together for eight years before her mother’s death; Benet’s family had already found enough to deprecate in her history and circumstances without adding that to the score.
“Mercy, child—if she died when you were fourteen, who’s been looking after you all this time?”
No wonder you turn up to your engagement party so unsuitably dressed, the pale old eyes conveyed.
“Oh, I had an English governess—Miss Chumley.”
“Chumley, Chumley, humph—I think I recall the name. Didn’t she teach the Agnew girls at one time?”
Val didn’t know about that. “She is retired now. My father left her a house on Twenty-third Street. She gives a few French lessons, just to keep herself from becoming bored. I am staying with her at present.”
“And you have nobody else? No other relatives?” No one of a more respectable kind to provide you with a bit of background and countenance—no one but an ex-governess? the eyes suggested.
“I have an elder half-brother, Nils; but he lives in England. I have not seen him for several years.”
“In England? What’s his profession, child?”
Val was tempted to reply, He lives on his wits, which would, she was fairly certain, have been a fair statement of the case in regard to her brother Nils.
“He began training as a doctor,” she temporised. “At least he was doing so when I saw him last. But I believe that lately he has taken to medical journalism.”
“Indeed. All your family are literary, then.”
It seemed evident from Mrs. Allerton’s tone that, in her view, doctors were barely gentlemen, and medical journalists were a totally unknown and unacceptable breed of creature. A kind of wintry gloom began to augment the previous chill of her manner, as if no more were to be hoped from this contact; she looked restlessly about her.
“Sarah,” said Cousin James, “I can see Alma Warren trying to catch your eye; she is dying to tell you how well young Sam is doing at Harvard, poor thing, which means that he has not yet actually been expelled for gambling and playing the fool; she has had so little to rejoice over since Edward died. Shall I go and fetch her?”
“Do, James; they will be dancing presently and it will be impossible to hear anything at all. Well, Miss—Montgomery, it has been interesting to meet you. But you shouldn’t be lodging with a governess on Twenty-third Street, you know; good gracious, you might as well be at an hotel. I’ll ask my niece Amy Chauncey to call and see you; you’d be much better staying with her in Gramercy Park. She has three girls, so she can tell you how to go on.”
“Thank you, ma’am—” Val was going, politely and firmly, to decline this suggestion, but old Mrs. Allerton had already turned away and was absorbed in conversation with the tiny sallow vivacious Mrs. Warren, whose white lacy widow’s cap hardly accorded with a very dashing low-necked toilette—a Worth dress of lemon-yellow satin embroidered with iridescent beads.
Val exhaled a long, soft sigh, stepping aside with Benet.
“Oh dear! I don’t think I made a great hit with your granny.”
“Oh, you never can tell with her. She has that dry way—but if there’s one thing she respects, it’s spunk. She always—”
“Benet!” called the harsh old voice. “Benet, come here a minute. I want you to give Alma some advice about her house at Newport; what’s the good of having a lawyer in the family if you don’t make use of him?” she added with dry jocosity to the energetically nodding Mrs. Warren.
Benet gave Val’s arm a quick squeeze and reluctantly moved back to his grandmother.
This arrangement left Val rather conspicuously alone at the end of the ballroom. She drew a deep breath and looked calmly about her.
The Allertons’ ballroom was of handsome and spacious dimensions; when all the double doors of the three anterooms were flung open, as now, the vista seemed immense. Gleams from the lustres along the walls and the gas chandeliers overhead were flung back from the glossy parquet in a confusing shimmer, disseminated and broken by the waft of full gauzy skirts and the come-and-go of black trousered legs. The centrally heated rooms were spiced with scents of hot wax and tulle, hair pomade, and the peppery sweetness from the groves of ferns and exotics which embowered the stairs and reception rooms. There were flowers in the younger girls’ hair, too: wreaths of rosebuds and forget-me-nots and forced apple blossom were fashionable that fall; while the coiffures of the older ladies, of course, flashed with diamond aigrettes and spangled feathers. With an effort Val refrained from raising a cautious hand to her own unadorned pile of cendré-fair hair, to make sure no wisp was out of place. Looking with dispassionate attention at all this radiance, ostensibly assembled in her own honour, she amused herself by trying to assess how much actual cash it might represent—thirty thousand dollars, forty? The mentality was quite outside her comprehension that could lay out so much money on a single evening and consider the outlay hardly more than she might the purchase of a peach from a sidewalk vendor.
I don’t like it, she thought soberly. How much I would prefer it if Benet’s family were poor—Irish immigrants—Polish—anything but what they are.
“Ah now—this is too bad—” said a gentle voice at her elbow. “But we all have to make allowances for my cousin Sarah, you know; she is over ninety and has had her own way for so long.”
“I think she is a very remarkable old lady,” Val said, smiling at the spare, white-haired, beautifully turned-out Mr. Dexter, who stood beside her. “It’s no wonder the whole family hold her in such reverence.”
“But still she shouldn’t have called Benet away from you just now. The belle of the ball ought not to have been left high and dry.”
“But you have kindly come to my rescue so I haven’t been. In any case I am not the belle of this ball, Mr. Dexter; I’m not equipped to be that, I’m afraid.”
“Come, come, my dear; I have too much respect for Benet to allow any disparagement of his taste; he goes for distinguished beauty, not fuss and furbelows, and I applaud his choice.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dexter; you are very kind; but I can’t keep up this kind of conversation, you know,” Valla said seriously. “I really am not used to compliments and flirtations.”
“Sensible young lady! You have used your time to better advantage, and Benet is the gainer.”
He nodded amiably to her, his narrow, lined face expressing nothing but friendliness; nevertheless she suspected that under his air of sympathy and encouragement, he was thinking: dull, provincial, too straitlaced, no party manners, what in the world can Benet see in her? How will she ever fit into this milieu?
It was true that Mr. Dexter had heaved an inward sigh, reflecting, Oh dear me, how this girl will encourage the latent Puritan which is already there in Benet; it’s not surprising that they took to one another.
Despite the sigh, he did not dislike the tall girl in her severe dark velvet, whose hair, though abundant, was far too plainly dressed and too ash-pale in colour to be esteemed in New York in the eighties; whose complexion, at variance with the blond hair, was disastrously tanned; her face indeed was almost brown. It was plain to Mr. Dexter’s eye that unlike the daughters of his friends round about, who carefully shrouded their porcelain skins under Shetland or barèg
e veils all through the summer, Miss Montgomery had never given her complexion a thought, except to keep it washed. Even the straight nose and regular features could not atone for that skin. How could the fastidious Benet have singled her out in the first place?
But the eyes—yes, Mr. Dexter had to admit that the eyes were very fine; her best feature; huge, and of a brilliant, Scandinavian sea-blue, their piercing gaze gave him the same sense of exhilaration and danger as might a plunge into the ice-cold Atlantic—not that Mr. Dexter would ever contemplate such a plunge. Her chin was round and firm—very firm; the set of mouth, chin, and jaw suggested a strong will and a very considerable degree of faith in her own point of view. Mr. Dexter sighed again.
“Tell me more about your brother my dear—is he living in London?” By asking this, his main aim was to put her at ease; he had observed the rigid clasp of her fingers on the plumed fan, and the muscular tension at the corners of her mouth as she looked, rather forlornly, toward Benet, still in dutiful conference with his grandmother and the talkative Mrs. Warren. Another member had now joined their group: a short, dark, sallow girl with a pronounced resemblance to Mrs. Warren. She was beautifully dressed in voluminous billows of tea-rose pink silk, veiled by exquisite lace; but the choiceness of her costume appeared to give the young lady little satisfaction, for her head drooped dispiritedly over the posy of tight pink rosebuds she carried. Just occasionally she darted a furtive, wistful glance at Benet, who, apart from a kind smile as she joined them, had paid her no further attention.
“Oh—my brother.” Valla firmly turned her attention back to Mr. Dexter—who was being very nice to her after all. “Well, I should explain that he is my half-brother really, six years older than I. My mother, you see, was married before, but her first husband died. He was half Norwegian, a professor of medicine at Cambridge, England.”
“And your mother was English?”
“No, she was Norwegian.”
“So that accounts for your sea queen’s looks, my dear. Does your brother resemble you?”
“Yes, we are quite alike,” Val said, bypassing Mr. Dexter’s gallantry. “Nils takes after my mother—he is tall and fair and has a long nose.” She smiled faintly, thinking of her brother’s rather absurd clown’s face on top of his beanpole height.
“And has your brother ever visited America?”
“Oh, yes. When my parents were first married. They met in England, you see, when my father was over there writing a series of articles on English universities. My mother came back to live in New York and she brought Nils with her. His own father had died when Nils was only two, of some disease that he caught in the laboratory. But then—but later on, Nils went back to England to be educated there.”
“You must have missed him very much.”
“Yes, I couldn’t understand it at first—why he should have to go and I should have to stay.”
Unbidden, a scene rose before her inner eye: a bleak wintry scene, the hideous, refuse-covered, snow-covered wharves west of Murray Street, the piles and piles of her mother’s baggage, wooden trunks and leather cases, bandboxes and hatboxes, wraps and baskets and strapped-up steamer rugs; her mother, swanlike and elegant in a black velvet polonaise glittering with jet buttons and a vivid green muff, directing the porters, well in control of the operation. And Nils, even at twelve outstandingly tall, fair, and conspicuous, even at twelve indifferent to the cold, or the attention of strangers, or any ordinary human emotions, hanging over the ship’s rail, waving his fur cap, calling, “Back to England, hooray, hooray! Goodbye to horrible New York and I hope I never see it again as long as I live!”
Nils her childhood’s god, and devil.
Earlier he had reduced his little sister to tears by saying teasingly, “You’re too small to come on the packet. You’re just a nuisance. Nobody wants you. You have to stay here with boring old Chum. Boo-hoo, little Miss Blubbercheeks. You can take that to remember me by—it’ll have to last for years and years, so I’ll make it a good one,” and he had given her arm such a savage pinch that the bruise had lasted for three weeks. Not surprisingly she had burst into tears and Nils had then knelt down by her and put his arms round her solicitously—at which sight aunt Ellen Montgomery, there to see off her sister-in-law and give the parting an air of respectability, had said, “Oh, dear, brother, can it be right to part those poor children? See how the little thing feels it. Bad enough to lose her mother, but her brother too—”
“What can I do, Ellen?” her father said.
Friends and neighbours were told that Mrs. Montgomery was going to Europe for her health and would presently return. Val remembered her father coming to her room that night; they were living in the house on Twenty-third Street then. He sat on her bed, close and comforting, with his arm round her, and said, “Don’t cry, pet; you and I will have to look after each other now.”
Of course Val had sobbed, “Mama—Mama!” in a luxury of grief. But even then she had been clearly aware that she would far rather remain with her big, ugly, kind, capable father, who always kept his promises, who was there when he said he would be; who, when at home, however busy, always contrived a portion of time to play with her or read to her. Whereas Mama, fair and beautiful as the gilt angel on the Christmas tree, had a peevish, unpredictable temper. Plenty of slaps had come Val’s way, generally for her carelessness in crumpling or tearing some elegant flounce or lace trimming as she ran hopefully to climb on her mother’s lap.
“Get away, you’re disgusting—you have egg on your tucker. Don’t touch my dress, your fingers are sticky. Mind, child, you are creasing my silk. Sit still—look what your little kicking feet have done. There—that’s enough—run away to Tabitha—or Hannah—or Chloe,” had been the constant refrain of Val’s childhood. Mama’s clothes, of course, were always wonderful; no wonder she did not want jammy fingers on them. It had been the era of crinolines; Val could remember one outfit in particular, a black alpaca skirt, looped up like curtains over a sea-blue serge underskirt, all worn under a wide-sleeved black poplin jacket with ruffled blue muslin undersleeves, a flat black hat and black-lace parasol; very Directoire, she later realised. The four-year-old Val had torn one of the blue-muslin ruffles and been banished to the nursery for a week in disgrace. What an immense amount of material there must have been in those huge ballooning skirts, she thought. No wonder Mama was nervous about my tearing her dresses.
And then Mama had sailed away to England in her tight-fitting black velvet and green muff.
“When will Nils and Mama come back?” Val had asked nightly for the first months. Her father, or Miss Chumley, or Tabitha, would give some vague answer. And by degrees Val gave up asking; by degrees the identities of her mother and brother became unreal and indistinct. One or two letters came from Mama, one or two cards, addressed to “Dear little Valla.” But these, somehow, did not carry conviction, did not represent the reality that Val remembered; her mother had never addressed her thus in speech; in actual fact they had never held a conversation at all. Mrs. Montgomery was always too busy getting dressed for some social occasion. I wonder what? Val speculated vaguely now, looking round the Allerton ballroom. Nothing like this, certainly. As the wife of a newspaper editor, in either New York or Chicago, she would never be admitted to the best circles of polite society; the Allertons or Babcocks or Chaunceys wouldn’t dream of opening their doors to her. I doubt if she could even get tickets to the Public Assemblies. Poor Mama! I daresay she would have given her ears to be standing where I am now. What an ambition! I doubt if anything else in my life would have earned her approval, but I’m sure my engagement to Benet would.
Whereas I can imagine Father’s comment: “Do what you like, my dearest girl, I’m glad of anything that makes you happy, but are you really sure that this will?”
Am I really sure?
Guiltily aware that she had let her attention slip away from Mr. Dexter, Val turned her eyes back to hi
m. He said, smiling, “I daresay you find this kind of thing rather a waste of time?”
“Oh—it isn’t that exactly. I mean, I’m sure it is wonderful for people who have been brought up to it. It’s just that I am not accustomed to—to such grandeur and formality.”
Mr. Dexter nodded his silver head gently up and down.
“It’s such a pretty spectacle,” he said. “Isn’t it? And yet there’s a lot of discipline about it really. We all know the rules and abide by them; without question we adhere to a set of conventions which I suspect that you, my dear, think ridiculously rigid and arbitrary.”
Val felt that she ought to protest; however, since in her heart she entirely agreed with his assertion she made no reply but bowed her head with a faint smile and wafted her fan to and fro. Glancing at her with a flash of respect, Mr. Dexter went on, “And the question I ask myself about you and Benet, in the most guarded possible terms, is this: who will give way?”
“Give way, Mr. Dexter? I’m not sure that I understand you.”
“When you and Benet are married—will you be able to persuade him to abandon this kind of existence?”
“But why should I do any such thing?” Val asked with genuine surprise. “I wouldn’t have the least intention of doing so. If he wants to go to balls—then of course he is fully at liberty to.”
“But you, my dear, will not be accompanying him?”
“Who can tell?” Her faint smile reappeared. “Perhaps I shall acquire a taste for them.”
“And the other thing I am wondering is,” he pursued peacefully, with his absent gaze fixed on a glossy green orange tree in a gilt pot, “how you will react to the family’s pressure to—er—make you conform to their way of life.”
“What—exactly—do you mean by that?” she inquired with caution.
“Well, of course, you must be aware that you will be expected to give up your—your professional and journalistic activities? I fear such pursuits could not possibly be countenanced in Benet’s wife.”