“All right. I'll come to the party. If the rest of you can stand it, I can!”
“It 'll do you good,” she returned, rustling into the hall. “Now take a nap, and I'll send one o' the help to wake you in time for you to get dressed up before dinner. You go to sleep right away, now, Bibbs!”
Bibbs was unable to obey, though he kept his eyes closed. Something she had said kept running in his mind, repeating itself over and over interminably. “His plans for you—his plans for you—his plans for you—his plans for you—” And then, taking the place of “his plans for you,” after what seemed a long, long while, her flurried voice came back to him insistently, seeming to whisper in his ear: “He loves his chuldern—he loves his chuldern—he loves his chuldern”—“you'll find he's always right—you'll find he's always right—” Until at last, as he drifted into the state of half-dreams and distorted realities, the voice seemed to murmur from beyond a great black wing that came out of the wall and stretched over his bed—it was a black wing within the room, and at the same time it was a black cloud crossing the sky, bridging the whole earth from pole to pole. It was a cloud of black smoke, and out of the heart of it came a flurried voice whispering over and over, “His plans for you—his plans for you—his plans for you—” And then there was nothing.
He woke refreshed, stretched himself gingerly—as one might have a care against too quick or too long a pull upon a frayed elastic—and, getting to his feet, went blinking to the window and touched the shade so that it flew up, letting in a pale sunset.
He looked out into the lemon-colored light and smiled wanly at the next house, as Edith's grandiose phrase came to mind, “the old Vertrees country mansion.” It stood in a broad lawn which was separated from the Sheridans' by a young hedge; and it was a big, square, plain old box of a house with a giant salt-cellar atop for a cupola. Paint had been spared for a long time, and no one could have put a name to the color of it, but in spite of that the place had no look of being out at heel, and the sward was as neatly trimmed as the Sheridans' own.
The separating hedge ran almost beneath Bibbs's window—for this wing of the New House extended here almost to the edge of the lot—and, directly opposite the window, the Vertreeses' lawn had been graded so as to make a little knoll upon which stood a small rustic “summer-house.” It was almost on a level with Bibbs's window and not thirty feet away; and it was easy for him to imagine the present dynasty of Vertreeses in grievous outcry when they had found this retreat ruined by the juxtaposition of the parvenu intruder. Probably the “summer-house” was pleasant and pretty in summer. It had the look of a place wherein little girls had played for a generation or so with dolls and “housekeeping,” or where a lovely old lady might come to read something dull on warm afternoons; but now in the thin light it was desolate, the color of dust, and hung with haggard vines which had lost their leaves.
Bibbs looked at it with grave sympathy, probably feeling some kinship with anything so dismantled; then he turned to a cheval-glass beside the window and paid himself the dubious tribute of a thorough inspection. He looked the mirror up and down, slowly, repeatedly, but came in the end to a long and earnest scrutiny of the face. Throughout this cryptic seance his manner was profoundly impersonal; he had the air of an entomologist intent upon classifying a specimen, but finally he appeared to become pessimistic. He shook his head solemnly; then gazed again and shook his head again, and continued to shake it slowly, in complete disapproval.
“You certainly are one horrible sight!” he said, aloud.
And at that he was instantly aware of an observer. Turning quickly, he was vouchsafed the picture of a charming lady, framed in a rustic aperture of the “summer-house” and staring full into his window—straight into his eyes, too, for the infinitesimal fraction of a second before the flashingly censorious withdrawal of her own. Composedly, she pulled several dead twigs from a vine, the manner of her action conveying a message or proclamation to the effect that she was in the summer-house for the sole purpose of such-like pruning and tending, and that no gentleman could suppose her presence there to be due to any other purpose whatsoever, or that, being there on that account, she had allowed her attention to wander for one instant in the direction of things of which she was in reality unconscious.
Having pulled enough twigs to emphasize her unconsciousness—and at the same time her disapproval—of everything in the nature of a Sheridan or belonging to a Sheridan, she descended the knoll with maintained composure, and sauntered toward a side-door of the country mansion of the Vertreeses. An elderly lady, bonneted and cloaked, opened the door and came to meet her.
“Are you ready, Mary? I've been looking for you. What were you doing?”
“Nothing. Just looking into one of Sheridans' windows,” said Mary Vertrees. “I got caught at it.”
“Mary!” cried her mother. “Just as we were going to call! Good heavens!”
“We'll go, just the same,” the daughter returned. “I suppose those women would be glad to have us if we'd burned their house to the ground.”
“But WHO saw you?” insisted Mrs. Vertrees.
“One of the sons, I suppose he was. I believe he's insane, or something. At least I hear they keep him in a sanitarium somewhere, and never talk about him. He was staring at himself in a mirror and talking to himself. Then he looked out and caught me.”
“What did he—”
“Nothing, of course.”
“How did he look?”
“Like a ghost in a blue suit,” said Miss Vertrees, moving toward the street and waving a white-gloved hand in farewell to her father, who was observing them from the window of his library. “Rather tragic and altogether impossible. Do come on, mother, and let's get it over!”
And Mrs. Vertrees, with many misgivings, set forth with her daughter for their gracious assault upon the New House next door.
CHAPTER V
Mr. Vertrees, having watched their departure with the air of a man who had something at hazard upon the expedition, turned from the window and began to pace the library thoughtfully, pending their return. He was about sixty; a small man, withered and dry and fine, a trim little sketch of an elderly dandy. His lambrequin mustache—relic of a forgotten Anglomania—had been profoundly black, but now, like his smooth hair, it was approaching an equally sheer whiteness; and though his clothes were old, they had shapeliness and a flavor of mode. And for greater spruceness there were some jaunty touches; gray spats, a narrow black ribbon across the gray waistcoat to the eye-glasses in a pocket, a fleck of color from a button in the lapel of the black coat, labeling him the descendant of patriot warriors.
The room was not like him, being cheerful and hideous, whereas Mr. Vertrees was anxious and decorative. Under a mantel of imitation black marble a merry little coal-fire beamed forth upon high and narrow “Eastlake” bookcases with long glass doors, and upon comfortable, incongruous furniture, and upon meaningless “woodwork” everywhere, and upon half a dozen Landseer engravings which Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees sometimes mentioned to each other, after thirty years of possession, as “very fine things.” They had been the first people in town to possess Landseer engravings, and there, in art, they had rested, but they still had a feeling that in all such matters they were in the van; and when Mr. Vertrees discovered Landseers upon the walls of other people's houses he thawed, as a chieftain to a trusted follower; and if he found an edition of Bulwer Lytton accompanying the Landseers as a final corroboration of culture, he would say, inevitably, “Those people know good pictures and they know good books.”
The