The Indifference of Juliet. Grace S. RichmondЧитать онлайн книгу.
isn’t it?” asked Robeson with the air of the delighted proprietor. “Of course everything looks gone to seed, but paint and a lawn-mower and a few other things will make another place of it. It’s good old colonial, that’s sure, and only needs a bit of fixing up to be quite correct, architecturally, small as it is.”
He led the way up the weedy path, Mrs. Dingley and Juliet exchanging amused glances behind his back. He opened the doors with a flourish and waved the ladies in. They entered with close-held skirts and noses involuntarily sniffing at the musty air. Anthony ran around opening windows and explaining the “points” of the house. When they had been over it Mrs. Dingley, warm and weary, subsided upon the door-step, while Juliet and Anthony fell to discussing the possibilities of the place.
“You see,” said Anthony, mopping his heated brow, “it isn’t like having big, high rooms to decorate. These little rooms,”—he put up his hand and succeeded, from his fine height, in touching the ceiling of the lower front room in which they stood—“won’t stand anything but the most simple treatment, and expensive papers and upholsteries would be out of place. It will take only very small rugs to suit the floors. The main thing for you to think of will be colours and effects. You’ll find five hundred dollars will go a long way, even after the repairs and outside painting are disposed of.”
He looked so appealing that Juliet could but answer heartily: “Yes, I’m sure of it. And now, Tony, don’t you think you’d better draw a plan of the house, putting in all the measurements, so we shall know just how to go to work? And I will go around and dream a while in each room. Give me the photograph, you devoted lover, so I can plan things to suit her.”
Anthony laughed and put his hand into his breast-pocket. But he drew it out empty.
“Why—I’ve left it behind,” he admitted in some embarrassment. “I really thought I had it.”
“Oh, Tony! And on this very trip when we needed it most! How could you leave it behind? Don’t you always carry it next your heart?”
“Is that the prescribed place?”
“Certainly. I should doubt a man’s love if he did not constantly wear my likeness right where it could feel his heart beating for me.”
“Now I never supposed,” remarked Anthony, considering her attentively, “that you had so much romance about you. Do you realise that for an extremely practical young person such as you have—mostly—appeared to be, that is a particularly sentimental suggestion? Er—should you wear his in the same way, may I inquire?”
“Of course,” returned Juliet with defiance in her eyes, whose lashes, when they fell at length before his steadily interested gaze, swept a daintily colouring cheek.
“Have you ever worn one?” inquired this hardy young man, nothing daunted by these signs of righteous indignation. But all he got for answer was a vigorous:
“You absurd boy! Now go to work at your measurements. I’m going upstairs. There’s one room up there, the one with the gable corners and the little bits of windows, that’s perfectly fascinating. It must be done in Delft blue and white. Since I haven’t the photograph”—she turned on the threshold to smile roguishly back at him—“memory must serve. Beautiful dark hair; eyes like a Madonna’s; a perfect nose; the dearest mouth in the world—oh, yes——”
She vanished around the corner only to put her head in again with the air of one who fires a parting shot at a discomfited enemy: “But, Tony—do you honestly think the house is large enough for such a queen of a woman? Won’t her throne take up the whole of the first floor?”
Then she was gone up the diminutive staircase, and her light footsteps could be heard on the bare floors overhead. Left alone, Anthony Robeson stood still for a moment looking fixedly at the door by which she had gone. The smile with which he had answered her gay fling had faded; his eyes had grown dark with a singular fire; his hands were clenched. Suddenly he strode across the floor and stopped by the door. He was looking down at the quaint old latch which served instead of a knob. Then, with a glance at the unconscious back of Mrs. Dingley, sitting sleepily on the little porch outside, he stooped and pressed his lips upon the iron where Juliet’s hand had lain.
III.—Shopping with a Chaperon
“Five hundred dollars,” mused Miss Marcy, on the Boston train next morning. “Six rooms—living-room, dining-room, kitchen, and three bedrooms. That’s——”
“You forget,” warned Anthony Robeson from the seat where he faced Juliet and Mrs. Dingley. “That must cover the outside painting and repairs. You can’t figure on having more than three hundred dollars left for the inside.”
“Dear me, yes,” frowned Juliet. She held Anthony’s plan in her hand, and her tablets and pencil lay in her lap. “Well, I can spend fifty dollars on each room—only some will need more than others. The living-room will take the most—no, the dining-room.”
“The kitchen will take the most,” suggested Mrs. Dingley. “Your range will use up the most of your fifty. And kitchen utensils count up very rapidly.”
“It will be a very small range,” Anthony said. “A little toy stove would be more practical for our—the kitchen. How big is it, Juliet?”
“ ‘Ten by fourteen,’ ” read Juliet. “From the centre of the room you can hit all the side walls with the broom. Speaking of walls, Tony—those must be our first consideration. If we get our colour scheme right everything else will follow. I have it all in my head.”
So it proved. But it also proved, when they had been hard at work for an hour at a well-known decorator’s, that the tints and designs for which Miss Marcy asked were not readily to be found in the low-priced wall-papers to which Anthony rigidly held her.
“I must have the softest, most restful greens for the living-room,” she announced. “There—that——”
“But that is a dollar a roll,” whispered Anthony.
“Then—that!”
“Eighty-five cents.”
“But for that little room, Tony——”
“Twenty-five cents a roll is all we can allow,” insisted Anthony firmly. “And less than that everywhere else.”
The salesman was very obliging, and showed the best things possible for the money. It was impossible to resist the appeal in the eyes of this critical but restricted young buyer.
“There, that will do, I think,” said Juliet at length, with a long breath. “The green for the living-room and for the bit of a hall—No, no, Tony; I’ve just thought! You must take away that little partition and let the stairs go up out of the living-room. That will improve the apparent size of things wonderfully.”
“All right,” agreed Anthony obediently.
“Then we’ll put that rich red in the dining-room. For upstairs there is the tiny rose pattern, and the Delft blue, and that little pale yellow and white stripe. In the kitchen we’ll have the tile pattern. We won’t have a border anywhere—the rooms are too low; just those simplest mouldings, and the ivory white on the ceilings. The woodwork must all be white. There now, that’s settled. Next come the floors.”
There could be no doubt that Juliet was becoming interested in her task. Though the July heat was intense she led the way with rapid steps to the place where she meant to select her rugs. Here the three spent a trying two hours. It was hard to please Miss Marcy with Japanese jute rugs, satisfactory in colouring though many of them were, when she longed to buy Persian pieces of distinction. If Juliet had a special weakness it was for choice antique rugs.
She