“Come in, Miz’ Latham. Set down in th’ parlor, Mis’ Jerry she in th’ liberry.—Ah reckon you two ladies knows each othah?”
Sitting in the crepuscular dimness of the Candler drawing room was a lady I didn’t recognize for a moment . . . she seemed, like the room, so of another period altogether. Not Georgian, however, but old Edwardian, with her black velvet hat and purple feather boa around her thin shoulders. Even then I could see she’d been lovely once . . . a sort of lass with a delicate air. She rose and held out her black-gloved hand.
“How do you do, Mrs. Latham?”
“Oh, Miss Doyle—I didn’t recognize you.”
“No, I’ve been ill.”
She pronounced the “been” as “bean.”
“But I’m quite recovered, now,” she said, with a kind of vague graciousness. “I’ve been sitting in this chair literally hours, waiting to see Judge Candler. He’s closeted with the young people. I’m afraid he hasn’t much time for an old woman, now he’s becoming so famous.”
She didn’t say it with the least rancour, but rather charmingly, as if she were more amused than put out.
“So I really must be going. I have several things to see to. Really, my dear, I wonder one ever gets as many things done as one does. My brother laughs at me—he says I’m just a potterer. Goodbye, my dear, remember you’re going to have tea with me one day soon. Goodbye! Make it real soon, won’t you? My dear brother was speaking of you just last night at dinner. He’d be charmed to see you!”
Miss Isabel Doyle went on out, and since Philander Doyle doesn’t know me from Adam, and Miss Isabel Doyle is known never to receive the people she asks to tea, I skipped that and sat down in the leather upholstered Chippendale chair she’d vacated. And I started—not violently, but definitely. That chair was cold as ice. Wherever Miss Doyle had been sitting, it was not there. And then—because I’m a natural-born busybody, I suppose—I found myself wondering why she’d bothered to say she’d been sitting in that chair literally for hours; wondering if, perhaps, it was just another patch out of the whole cloth of fantasy she always weaves.
I looked around the old room, lovely with age in spite of its dinginess. Its blue walls and white cornice and window trim and chair rail, carved but indistinct from a hundred coats of paint, and the horsehair carpet with its faded roses, all fitted so perfectly with the old furniture that generations of darkey hands had rubbed to a velvety satin patina. I doubted, some way, that Miss Doyle would have been just looking at any of this, or at the dark portraits on the wall. Then I heard the low confused murmur of voices through the closed door with the carved pineapple set in its broken pediment. It struck me instantly that that was where Miss Doyle had been: by that door, listening, deliberately, at the keyhole. That would account for the fib about the chair and her hasty departure under that barrage of nonsense about her dear brother.
I conquered an instant impulse to creep over to the door myself and find out, and it’s just as well I did; for at about the time I would have got there, and probably had my ear bent down to the polished brass keyhole, the door swung open, and Karen Lunt flashed out. She wasn’t in mink this time. She had on a simple black wool dress with enormous filigree silver buttons that set off her white skin and corn-colored hair as nothing else under heaven would have done. But it wasn’t the dress or the hair, or even what I’d heard at lunch, that brought me to a sharp focus. It was the look on her face, perhaps in the smile on her soft red mouth, perhaps in those two wide-set eyes, as blue as lakes and almost as big. Whatever it was, it was culminated perfectly in the quick little dance step she took toward the door, flicking her open palms together at the same time as if she were washing her hands, in the most complete and triumphant satisfaction, of a matter that was in the finished business basket. She hadn’t so much as seen me sitting between the two front windows in the high-backed leather chair, and I’m not small, nor is my gold wool number from Muriel King any more unobtrusive than Miss Doyle’s purple feather boa. Obviously Karen Lunt was so pleased with herself and whatever she’d accomplished behind the closed doors of Judge Candler’s study that she hadn’t eyes for anything else. Moreover, she hadn’t bothered to close the door behind her, entirely, and the next instant I heard Jeremy’s voice, throbbing passionately.
“I won’t, Dad—do you hear? I won’t! It’s blackmail, I tell you! It’s nothing else in the world!”
And Judge Candler’s voice, quiet and slow but oh so terribly firm:
“I’m disappointed in you, Jeremy. I never thought a child of mine would be selfish and grasping.”
I heard Jeremy’s voice break in a hard dry sob.
“I’d never have dreamed you would turn on Karen this way. I thought you were fond of her.”
“Fond of her?” Jeremy cried. “Fond of her? I hate her. I’ve always hated her—when she was going to Briar Hill and Sandy and I were wearing our cousins’ made-over clothes and going to the cheapest schools in Virginia, and you working like a dog to pay for that even. I’ve got a right to hate her! You’ve always loved her better than you did us—when you were sick it was her future you were worried about, not Sandy’s and Billy’s and mine! Ours was accidental—you didn’t know that old stock was going to be worth anything. You thought it was all right for me to get a job, but the idea of Karen getting one was unthinkable.”
“I thought you wanted to get a job.”
“I did!” Jeremy cried. “I wanted it so we could fix up the house a little, and Billy could ride, and do things other kids do, and so you wouldn’t have to bother about my clothes, and his—but I didn’t know you were still giving Karen her allowance every month. I didn’t mind giving up the rent we got from the carriage house. I didn’t mind your taking care of her when she was left without anything. But I do mind now! I won’t give that stock back. It isn’t hers, it’s Billy’s and mine, and we’ve got a right to it. She can’t have everything that belongs to us! She’d never have dared ask for it if——”
“Jeremy!” Judge Candler’s voice came down like the Chief Justice’s gavel in a babbling court room. “That will do. I’m asking you to turn back Karen’s stock. I expect you to do it. The papers will be ready tomorrow.”
There was a long stunned silence. Out of it at last I heard Jeremy’s voice, strangled but deadly calm.
“You’re asking something I can’t do, Father. It isn’t right—and if it were anybody else but——”
“I said that will do, Jeremy. The papers will be ready tomorrow.”
For a moment I heard nothing. Then the door into the hall closed, and I heard sharp light feet on the wide pine boards and saw Jerry’s plaid skirt flash by, and heard the front door slam, and in a moment the engine of a car cough violently a couple of times and start. In the next room I heard the creak of a swivel chair as Judge Candler settled down at the desk. Then, like Miss Isabel Doyle, I gathered up my bag and gloves and hurried out as quietly as I could.
3
It had started to snow again as I drove slowly back home along the