This was all plausible enough, and no real disparagement to Rodney, so Mrs Blackwood agreed.
“Can I do anything for you?” she asked her hostess at parting. “Have you everything you want? Are your servants satisfactory?”
“Not in every respect,” – Mrs Varian frowned. “But we’re lucky to keep them at all. Only by the most outrageous concessions, I assure you. If they get too overbearing, I may have to let some of them go.”
“Let me know, in that case, and I may be able to help you,” and with a few further amenities, Claire Blackwood went away.
“But if I were one of her servants I shouldn’t stay with her!” she confided later to a trusted friend. “I never saw a more foolishly emotional woman. She almost wept when she told me about her cook’s ingratitude! As if any one looked for appreciation of favors in a cook! And when she talked about Betty, she bubbled over with such enthusiasm that she was again moved to tears! It seems her first two little ones died very young, and I think they’ve always feared they mightn’t raise Betty. Hence the spoiling process.”
“And it also explains,” observed the interested friend, “why the parents discountenance the attentions of would-be swains.”
“Of course, – but Betty is twenty, and that is surely old enough to begin to think about such things seriously.”
“For the girl, – yes. And doubtless she does. But parents never realize that their infants are growing up. It is not impossible that Rod Granniss and Miss Betty have progressed much further along the road to Arcady than her elders may suspect. Why did the Varians come here, – where Rod is?”
“I don’t suppose they knew it, – though, maybe Betty did. Young people are pretty sharp. And you know, Rod was here in June, then he went away and only returned after the Varians arrived. Yes, there must have been some sort of collusion on the part of the youngsters.”
“Maybe not. I daresay Miss Betty has lots of admirers as devoted as young Granniss. Can’t you ask me to the picnic?”
“Not this one. It’s very small. And there are to be some guests at the house, I believe. The family interests me. They are types, I think. Betty is more than an ordinary flutterbudget, like most of the very young girls around here. And the older Varians are really worth while. Mr Varian is a brooding, self-contained sort, – I feel sorry for him.”
“There, there, that will do, Claire! When you feel sorry for a man – I remember you began by being sorry for Lawrence North!”
“I’m sorry for him still. He’s a big man, – in a way, a genius, – and yet he – ”
“He gets nowhere! That’s because he isn’t a genius! But he’s a widower, so he’s fair quarry. Don’t go to feeling sorry for married men.”
“Oh, there’s no sentiment in my sympathy for Mr Varian. Only he intrigues me because of his restless air, – his restrained effect, as if he were using every effort to keep himself from breaking through!”
“Breaking through what?”
“I don’t know! Through some barrier, some limit that he has fixed for himself – I tell you I don’t know what it’s all about. That’s why I’m interested.”
“Curious, you mean.”
“Well, curious, then. And how he puts up with that hand-wringing ready-to-cry wife! Yet, he’s fawningly devoted to her! He anticipates her slightest wish, – he is worried sick if she is the least mite incommoded or disturbed, – and I know he’d lie down and let her walk on him if she even looked as if she’d care to!”
“What a lot you read into a man’s natural consideration for his wife!”
“But it’s there! I’m no fool, – I can read people, – you know that! I tell you that man is under his wife’s thumb for some reason far more potent than his love for her, or her demand for affection from him.”
“What could be the explanation?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m curious. I’m going to find out, though, and that without the Varians in the least suspecting my efforts. Wait till you see her. She’s almost eerie, she’s so emotional. Not noisy or even verbally expressive, but her face is a study in nervous excitement. She seems to grab at the heartstrings of a mere passer-by, and play on them until she tears them out!”
“Good gracious, you make her out a vampire!”
“I think she is, – not a silly vamp, that the girls joke about, – but the real thing!”
CHAPTER II
Betty Varian
“Dad, you’re absolutely impossible!”
“Oh, come now, Betty, not as bad as that! Just because I don’t agree to everything you say – ”
“But you never agree with me! You seem to be opposed on principle to everything I suggest or want. It’s always been like that! From the time I was born, – how old was I, Dad, when you first saw me?”
Mr Varian looked reminiscent.
“About an hour old, I think,” he replied; “maybe a little less.”
“Well, from that moment until this, you have persistently taken the opposite side in any discussion we have had.”
“But if I hadn’t, Betty, there would have been no discussion! And, usually there hasn’t been. You’re a spoiled baby, – you always have been and always will be. Your will is strong and as it has almost never been thwarted or even curbed, you have grown up a headstrong, wilful, perverse young woman, and I’m sure I don’t know what to do with you!”
“Get rid of me, Dad,” Betty’s laugh rang out, while her looks quite belied the rather terrible character just ascribed to her.
One foot tucked under her, she sat in a veranda swing, now and then touching her toe to the floor to keep swaying. She wore a sand-colored sport suit whose matching hat lay beside her on the floor.
Her vivid, laughing face, with its big gray eyes and pink cheeks, its scarlet lips and white teeth was framed by a mop of dark brown wavy hair, now tossed by the strong breeze from the sea.
The veranda overlooked the ocean, and the sunlit waves, stretching far away from the great cliff were dotted in the foreground with small craft.
Frederick Varian sat on the veranda rail, a big, rather splendid-looking man, with the early gray of fifty years showing in his hair and carefully trimmed Vandyke beard.
His air was naturally confident and self-assured, but in the face of this chit of a girl he somehow found himself at a disadvantage.
“Betty, dear,” he took another tack, “can’t you understand the fatherly love that cannot bear the idea of parting with a beloved daughter?”
“Oh, yes, but a father’s love ought to think what is for that daughter’s happiness. Then he ought to make the gigantic self-sacrifice that may be necessary.”
A dimple came into Betty’s cheek, and she smiled roguishly, yet with a canny eye toward the effect she was making.
But Varian looked moodily out over the sea.
“I won’t have it,” he said, sternly. “I suppose I have some authority in this matter and I forbid you to encourage any young man to the point of a proposal, or even to think of becoming engaged.”
“How can I ward off a proposal, Dad?” Betty inquired, with an innocent air.
“Don’t be foolish. Of course you can do that. Any girl with your intelligence knows just when an acquaintance crosses the line of mere friendship – ”
“Oh, Daddy, you are too funny! And when you crossed the line of mere friendship with mother, – what did she do?”
“That