The Custom of the Country (Romance Classic). Edith WhartonЧитать онлайн книгу.
when Undine regained its monumental threshold. She slipped through the marble vestibule and soared skyward in the mirror-lined lift, hardly conscious of the direction she was taking. What she wanted was solitude, and the time to put some order into her thoughts; and she hoped to steal into her room without meeting her mother. Through her thick veil the clusters of lights in the Spragg drawingroom dilated and flowed together in a yellow blur, from which, as she entered, a figure detached itself; and with a start of annoyance she saw Ralph Marvell rise from the perusal of the “fiction number” of a magazine which had replaced “The Hound of the Baskervilles” on the onyx table.
“Yes; you told me not to come—and here I am.” He lifted her hand to his lips as his eyes tried to find hers through the veil.
She drew back with a nervous gesture. “I told you I’d be awfully late.”
“I know—trying on! And you’re horribly tired, and wishing with all your might I wasn’t here.”
“I’m not so sure I’m not!” she rejoined, trying to hide her vexation in a smile.
“What a tragic little voice! You really are done up. I couldn’t help dropping in for a minute; but of course if you say so I’ll be off.” She was removing her long gloves and he took her hands and drew her close. “Only take off your veil, and let me see you.”
A quiver of resistance ran through her: he felt it and dropped her hands.
“Please don’t tease. I never could bear it,” she stammered, drawing away.
“Till tomorrow, then; that is, if the dressmakers permit.”
She forced a laugh. “If I showed myself now you might not come back tomorrow. I look perfectly hideous—it was so hot and they kept me so long.”
“All to make yourself more beautiful for a man who’s blind with your beauty already?”
The words made her smile, and moving nearer she bent her head and stood still while he undid her veil. As he put it back their lips met, and his look of passionate tenderness was incense to her.
But the next moment his expression passed from worship to concern. “Dear! Why, what’s the matter? You’ve been crying!”
She put both hands to her hat in the instinctive effort to hide her face. His persistence was as irritating as her mother’s.
“I told you it was frightfully hot—and all my things were horrid; and it made me so cross and nervous!” She turned to the looking-glass with a feint of smoothing her hair.
Marvell laid his hand on her arm, “I can’t bear to see you so done up. Why can’t we be married tomorrow, and escape all these ridiculous preparations? I shall hate your fine clothes if they’re going to make you so miserable.”
She dropped her hands, and swept about on him, her face lit up by a new idea. He was extraordinarily handsome and appealing, and her heart began to beat faster.
“I hate it all too! I wish we COULD be married right away!”
Marvell caught her to him joyously. “Dearest—dearest! Don’t, if you don’t mean it! The thought’s too glorious!”
Undine lingered in his arms, not with any intent of tenderness, but as if too deeply lost in a new train of thought to be conscious of his hold.
“I suppose most of the things COULD be got ready sooner—if I said they MUST,” she brooded, with a fixed gaze that travelled past him. “And the rest—why shouldn’t the rest be sent over to Europe after us? I want to go straight off with you, away from everything—ever so far away, where there’ll be nobody but you and me alone!” She had a flash of illumination which made her turn her lips to his.
“Oh, my darling—my darling!” Marvell whispered.
X
Mr. and Mrs. Spragg were both given to such long periods of ruminating apathy that the student of inheritance might have wondered whence Undine derived her overflowing activity. The answer would have been obtained by observing her father’s business life. From the moment he set foot in Wall Street Mr. Spragg became another man. Physically the change revealed itself only by the subtlest signs. As he steered his way to his office through the jostling crowd of William Street his relaxed muscles did not grow more taut or his lounging gait less desultory. His shoulders were hollowed by the usual droop, and his rusty black waistcoat showed the same creased concavity at the waist, the same flabby prominence below. It was only in his face that the difference was perceptible, though even here it rather lurked behind the features than openly modified them: showing itself now and then in the cautious glint of half-closed eyes, the forward thrust of black brows, or a tightening of the lax lines of the mouth—as the gleam of a night-watchman’s light might flash across the darkness of a shuttered house-front. The shutters were more tightly barred than usual, when, on a morning some two weeks later than the date of the incidents last recorded, Mr. Spragg approached the steel and concrete tower in which his office occupied a lofty pigeon-hole. Events had moved rapidly and somewhat surprisingly in the interval, and Mr. Spragg had already accustomed himself to the fact that his daughter was to be married within the week, instead of awaiting the traditional post-Lenten date. Conventionally the change meant little to him; but on the practical side it presented unforeseen difficulties. Mr. Spragg had learned within the last weeks that a New York marriage involved material obligations unknown to Apex. Marvell, indeed, had been loftily careless of such questions; but his grandfather, on the announcement of the engagement, had called on Mr. Spragg and put before him, with polished precision, the young man’s financial situation.
Mr. Spragg, at the moment, had been inclined to deal with his visitor in a spirit of indulgent irony. As he leaned back in his revolving chair, with feet adroitly balanced against a tilted scrap basket, his air of relaxed power made Mr. Dagonet’s venerable elegance seem as harmless as that of an ivory jack-straw—and his first replies to his visitor were made with the mildness of a kindly giant.
“Ralph don’t make a living out of the law, you say? No, it didn’t strike me he’d be likely to, from the talks I’ve had with him. Fact is, the law’s a business that wants—” Mr. Spragg broke off, checked by a protest from Mr. Dagonet. “Oh, a PROFESSION, you call it? It ain’t a business?” His smile grew more indulgent as this novel distinction dawned on him. “Why, I guess that’s the whole trouble with Ralph. Nobody expects to make money in a PROFESSION; and if you’ve taught him to regard the law that way, he’d better go right into cooking-stoves and done with it.”
Mr. Dagonet, within a narrower range, had his own play of humour; and it met Mr. Spragg’s with a leap. “It’s because I knew he would manage to make cooking-stoves as unremunerative as a profession that I saved him from so glaring a failure by putting him into the law.”
The retort drew a grunt of amusement from Mr. Spragg; and the eyes of the two men met in unexpected understanding.
“That so? What can he do, then?” the future father-in-law enquired.
“He can write poetry—at least he tells me he can.” Mr. Dagonet hesitated, as if aware of the inadequacy of the alternative, and then added: “And he can count on three thousand a year from me.”
Mr. Spragg tilted himself farther back without disturbing his subtly-calculated relation to the scrap basket.
“Does it cost anything like that to print his poetry?”
Mr. Dagonet smiled again: he was clearly enjoying his visit. “Dear, no—he doesn’t go in for ‘luxe’ editions. And now and then he gets ten dollars from a magazine.”
Mr. Spragg mused. “Wasn’t he ever TAUGHT to work?”
“No; I really couldn’t have afforded that.”
“I see. Then they’ve got to live on two