“I was never told,” said Lita calmly. “I’m afraid I’m engaged.”
Jim lifted his head with a jerk. “You were told a fortnight ago.”
“Oh, a fortnight! That’s too long to remember anything. It’s like Nona’s telling me that I ought to admire my drawing-room because I admired it two years ago.”
Her husband reddened to the roots of his tawny hair. “Don’t you admire it?” he asked, with a sort of juvenile dismay.
“There; Lita’ll be happy now — she’s produced her effect!” Nona laughed a little nervously.
Lita joined in the laugh. “Isn’t he like his mother?” she shrugged.
Jim was silent, and his sister guessed that he was afraid to insist on the dinner engagement lest he should increase his wife’s determination to ignore it. The same motive kept Nona from saying anything more; and the lunch ended in a clatter of talk about other things. But what puzzled Nona was that her father’s communication to Lita should have concerned the fact that she was dining at his house that night. It was unlike Dexter Manford to remember the fact himself (as Miss Bruss’s frantic telephoning had testified), and still more unlike him to remind his wife’s guests, even if he knew who they were to be — which he seldom did. Nona pondered. “They must have been going somewhere together — he told me he was engaged tonight — and Lita’s in a temper because they can’t. But then she’s in a temper about everything today.” Nona tried to make that cover all her perplexities. She wondered if it did as much for Jim.
IV
It would have been hard, Nona Manford thought, to find a greater contrast than between Lita Wyant’s house and that at which, two hours later, she descended from Lita Wyant’s smart Brewster.
“You won’t come, Lita?” The girl paused, her hand on the motor door. “He’d like it awfully.”
Lita shook off the suggestion. “I’m not in the humour.”
“But he’s such fun — he can be better company than anybody.”
“Oh, for you he’s a fad — for me he’s a duty; and I don’t happen to feel like duties.” Lita waved one of her flower-hands and was off.
Nona mounted the pock-marked brown steps. The house was old Mrs. Wyant’s, a faded derelict habitation in a street past which fashion and business had long since flowed. After his mother’s death Wyant, from motives of economy, had divided it into small flats. He kept one for himself, and in the one overhead lived his mother’s former companion, the dependent cousin who had been the cause of his divorce. Wyant had never married her; he had never deserted her; that, to Nona’s mind, gave one a fair notion of his character. When he was ill — and he had developed, rather early, a queer sort of nervous hypochondria — the cousin came downstairs and nursed him; when he was well his visitors never saw her. But she was reported to attend to his mending, keep some sort of order in his accounts, and prevent his falling a prey to the unscrupulous. Pauline Manford said it was probably for the best. She herself would have thought it natural, and in fact proper, that her former husband should have married his cousin; as he had not, she preferred to decide that since the divorce they had been “only friends.” The Wyant code was always a puzzle to her. She never met the cousin when she called on her former husband; but Jim, two or three times a year, made it a point to ring the bell of the upper flat, and at Christmas sent its invisible tenant an azalea.
Nona ran up the stairs to Wyant’s door. On the threshold a thin gray-haired lady with a shadowy face awaited her.
“Come in, do. He’s got the gout, and can’t get up to open the door, and I had to send the cook out to get something tempting for his dinner.”
“Oh, thank you, cousin Eleanor.” The girl looked sympathetically into the other’s dimly tragic eyes. “Poor Exhibit A! I’m sorry he’s ill again.”
“He’s been — imprudent. But the worst of it’s over. It will brighten him up to see you. Your cousin Stanley’s there.”
“Is he?” Nona half drew back, feeling herself faintly redden.
“He’ll be going soon. Mr. Wyant will be disappointed if you don’t go in.”
“But of course I’m going in.”
The older woman smiled a worn smile, and vanished upstairs while Nona slipped off her furs. The girl knew it would be useless to urge cousin Eleanor to stay. If one wished to see her one had to ring at her own door.
Arthur Wyant’s shabby sitting-room was full of February sunshine, illustrated magazines, newspapers and cigar ashes. There were some books on shelves, shabby also: Wyant had apparently once cared for them, and his talk was still coloured by traces of early cultivation, especially when visitors like Nona or Stan Heuston were with him. But the range of his allusions suggested that he must have stopped reading years ago. Even novels were too great a strain on his attention. As far back as Nona could remember he had fared only on the popular magazines, picture-papers and the weekly purveyors of social scandal. He took an intense interest in the private affairs of the world he had ceased to frequent, though he always ridiculed this interest in talking to Nona or Heuston.
While he sat there, deep in his armchair, with bent shoulders, sunk head and clumsy bandaged foot, Nona saw him, as she always did, as taller, slimmer, more handsomely upstanding than any man she had ever known. He stooped now, even when he was on his feet; he was prematurely aged; and the fact perhaps helped to connect him with vanished institutions to which only his first youth could have belonged.
To Nona, at any rate, he would always be the Arthur Wyant of the race-meeting group in the yellowing photograph on his mantelpiece: clad in the gray frock-coat and topper of the early ‘eighties, and tallest in a tall line of the similarly garbed, behind ladies with puffed sleeves and little hats tilting forward on elaborate hair. How peaceful, smiling and unhurried they all seemed! Nona never looked at them without a pang of regret that she had not been born in those spacious days of dogcarts, victorias, leisurely tennis and afternoon calls. . .
Wyant’s face, even more than his figure, related him to that past: the small shapely head, the crisp hair grown thin on a narrow slanting forehead, the eyes in which a twinkle still lingered, eyes probably blue when the hair was brown, but now faded with the rest, and the slight fair moustache above an uncertain ironic mouth.
A romantic figure; or rather the faded photograph of one. Yes; perhaps Arthur Wyant had always been faded — like a charming reflection in a sallow mirror. And all that length of limb and beauty of port had been meant for some other man, a man to whom the things had really happened which Wyant had only dreamed.
His visitor, though of the same stock, could never have inspired such conjectures. Stanley Heuston was much younger — in the middle thirties — and most things about him were middling: height, complexion, features. But he had a strong forehead, his mouth was curved for power and mockery, and only his small quick eyes betrayed the uncertainty and lassitude inherited from a Wyant mother.
Wyant, at Nona’s approach, held out a dry feverish hand. “Well, this is luck! Stan was just getting ready to fly at your mother’s approach, and you turn up instead!”
Heuston got to his feet, and greeted Nona somewhat ceremoniously. “Perhaps I’d better fly all the same,” he said in a singularly agreeable voice. His eyes were intent on the girl’s.
She made a slight gesture, not so much to detain or dismiss as to signify her complete indifference. “Isn’t mother coming presently?” she said, addressing the question to Wyant.
“No; I’m moved on till tomorrow. There must have been some big upheaval to make her change her plans at the last minute. Sit down and tell us all about it.”