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The Beloved Woman, a novel by Kathleen Thompson Norris |
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Chapter 25 |
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_ CHAPTER XXV Before she had been married ten days Norma dutifully went to call upon old Mrs. Melrose, being fortunate enough to find Leslie there. The old lady came toward Norma with her soft old wavering footsteps, and gave the girl a warm kiss even with her initial rebuke: "Well, I don't know whether I am speaking to this bad runaway or not!" she quavered, releasing Norma from her bejewelled and lace-draped embrace, and shaking her fluffed and scanty gray hair. "Oh, yes, you are, Aunt Marianna," the girl said, confidently, with her happy laugh. Leslie, coming more slowly forward, laughed and kissed her, too. "But why didn't you tell us, Norma, and have a regular wedding, like mine?" she protested. "I didn't know that you and your cousin were even engaged!" "We've worked it out that we were engaged for exactly three hours and ten minutes," Norma said, as they all settled down in the magnificent, ugly, comfortable old sitting-room for tea. She could see that both Leslie and her grandmother were far from displeased. As a matter of fact, the old lady was secretly delighted. The girl was most suitably and happily and satisfactorily married; justice had been done her, and she had solved her own problem splendidly. "But you knew he liked you," Leslie ventured, diverted and curious. "Oh, well----" Norma's lips puckered mischievously and she looked down. "Oh, you _were_ engaged!" Leslie said, incredulously. "He's handsome, isn't he, Norma?" "Yes," the wife admitted, as if casually. "He really is--at least I think so. And I think everyone else thinks so. At least, when I compare him to the other men--for instance----" "Oh, Norma, I'll bet you're crazy about him," Leslie said, derisively. Norma looked appealingly at the old lady, her eyes dancing with fun. "Well, of _course_ she loves her husband," Mrs. Melrose protested, with a little cushiony pat of her hand for the visitor. "I don't see that it's 'of course'," Leslie argued, airily, with a little bitterness in her tone. Her grandmother looked at her in quick reproof and anxiety. "The latest," she said, drily, to Norma, "is that my delightful husband is living at his club." "Now, Leslie, that is very naughty," the old lady said, warmly. "You shouldn't talk so of Acton." "Well," Leslie countered, with elaborate innocence, turning to Norma, "all I can say is that he walked out one night, and didn't come back until the next! Of course," she added, with a suppressed yawn that poorly concealed her sudden inclination to tears, "of course _I_ don't care. Patsy and I are going up to Glen Cove next week--and he can live at his club, for all me!" "Money?" Norma asked. For Leslie's extravagance was usually the cause of the young Liggetts' domestic strife. Leslie, who had lighted a cigarette, made an affirmative grimace. "Now, it's all been settled, and Grandma has straightened it all out," old Mrs. Melrose said, soothingly. "Acton was making out their income tax," she explained, "and some money was mentioned--how was that, dear?--Leslie had sold something--and he hadn't known of it, that was all! Of course he was a little cross, poor boy; he had worked it all out one way, and he had no idea that this extra--sixteen thousand, was it?--had come in at all, and been spent----" "Most of it for bills!" Leslie interpolated, bitterly. Norma laughed. "Sixteen thou----! Oh, heavens, my husband's salary is sixty dollars a week!" she confessed, gaily. "But you have your own money," the old lady reminded her, kindly, "and a very nice thing for a wife, too! I've talked to Judge Lee about it, dear, and it's all arranged. You must let me do this, Norma----" "I think you're awfully good to me, Aunt Marianna," Norma said, thoughtfully. "I told Wolf about it, and he thinks so, too. But honestly----" Even with her secret knowledge of her own parentage, Norma was surprised at the fluttered anxiety of the old lady, and Leslie was frankly puzzled. "No, Norma--no, Norma," Mrs. Melrose said, nervously and imploringly. "I don't want you to discuss that at all--it's _settled_. The check is to be deposited every month, or quarter, or whatever it was----" "Don't be a fool, Norma, you'll need it, one way or another," Leslie assured her. But in her own heart Leslie wondered at her grandmother's generosity. "Everybody needs more money. I'll bet you the King of England----" "Oh, kings!" Norma laughed. "They're the worst of all. I don't know about this one, but they're always appealing for special funds--all of them. And that's one thing that makes Wolf so mad--the fact that all they have to do, for ridiculous extravagances, is clap on a tax." But Leslie and her grandmother were not interested in the young engineer's economic theories. The old lady followed Norma's spirited summary merely with an uneasy: "You mustn't let your husband get any socialistic ideas, Norma; there's too much of that now!" and Leslie, after a close study of Norma's glowing face, remarked suddenly: "Norma, I'll bet you a _dollar_ you're rouged!" Before she left, the visitor managed a casual inquiry about Aunt Alice. Aunt Alice was fine, Leslie answered carelessly, adding immediately that no, Aunt Alice really wasn't extremely well. Doctor Garrett didn't want her to go away this summer, thought that move was an unnecessary waste of energy, since Aunt Alice's house was so cool, and she felt the heat so little. And Chris said that Alice had always really wanted to stay in town, in her own comfortable suite. She liked her second nurse immensely, and Miss Slater was really running the house now, the third nurse coming only at night. "But Aunt Alice never had a nurse at night," Norma was going to say. But she caught the stricken and apprehensive look on the old lady's face, and substituted generously: "Well, I remember Aunt Alice told me she had one of these wretched times several years ago." "Yes, indeed she did--frightened us almost to death," Mrs. Melrose agreed, thankfully. "And how is--how is Chris?" Norma felt proud of the natural tone in which she could ask the question. "Chris is fine," Leslie answered. She rarely varied the phrase in this relation. "He's hunting in Canada. He had a wire from some man there, and he went off about a week ago. They're going after moose, I believe; Chris didn't expect to get back for a month. Aunt Alice was delighted, because she hates to keep him in town all summer, but Acton told me that he thought Chris was sick--that he and Judge Lee just made him go." Well, her heart would flutter, she could not stop it or ignore it. Norma found no answer ready, and though she lifted her cup to her lips, to hide her confusion, she could not taste it. The strangeness of Chris's sudden departure was no mystery to her; he had been shocked and stunned by her marriage, and he had run away from the eyes that might have pierced his discomfiture. Still, her hands were trembling, and she felt oddly shaken and confused. Leslie carried the conversation away to safer fields, and shortly afterward Norma could say her good-byes. Everybody, Leslie said, walking with her to the corner, wanted to know what the bride wanted for a wedding-present. Norma told Wolf, over their candle-lighted supper table, an hour or two later, that he and she would be bankrupted for life returning them. Yet she loved the excitement of receiving the gifts; naturally enough, loved Rose's ecstasies over the rugs and silver and mahogany that made the little New Jersey house a jewel among its kind. It was what Norma had unhesitatingly pronounced an "adorable" house, a copy of the true colonial green-and-white, quaint and prim enough to please even Leslie, when Leslie duly came to call. It stood at the end of a tree-shaded street, with the rising woods behind it, and Norma recklessly invested in brick walks and a latticed green fence, hydrangeas in wooden tubs and sunflowers and hollyhocks, until her stretch of side garden looked like a picture by Kate Greenaway. When it was all done, midsummer was upon them, but she and Wolf thought that there had never been anything so complete and so charming in all the world. The striped awnings that threw clean shadows upon the clipped grass; the tea table under the blue-green leaves of an old apple tree; the glass doors that opened upon orderly, white-wainscoted rooms full of shining dark surfaces and flowered chintzes and gleaming glass bowls of real flowers; the smallness and completeness and prettiness of everything filled them both with utter satisfaction. Norma played at housekeeping like a little girl in a doll's house. She had a rosy little Finnish maid who enjoyed it all almost as much as she did, and their adventures in hospitality were a constant amusement and delight. On Saturdays, when Rose and Harry and Aunt Kate usually arrived, Wolf could hardly believe that all this ideal beauty and pleasure was his to share. The girls would pose and photograph the baby tirelessly, laughing as he toppled and protested, and kissing the fat legs that showed between his pink romper and his pink socks. They would pack picnic lunches, rushing to and fro breathlessly with thermos bottles and extra wraps for Miggs, as Harry Junior was usually called. Once or twice they cleaned the car, with tremendous splashing and spattering, assuming Wolf's old overalls for the operation, and retreating with shrieks into the kitchen whenever the sound of an approaching motor-car penetrated into their quiet road. Mrs. Sheridan characterized them variously as "Wild Indians", "Ay-rabs", and "poor innocents" but her heart was so filled with joy and gratitude for the turn of events that had brought all these miracles about, that no nonsense and no noise seemed to her really extravagant. It was an exceptionally pleasant community into which the young Sheridans had chanced to move, and they might have had much more neighbourly life than they chose to take. There were about them beginners of all sorts: writers and artists and newspaper men, whose little cars, and little maids, and great ambitions would have formed a strong bond of sympathy in time. But Wolf and Norma saw them only occasionally, when a Sunday supper at the country club or a Saturday-night dance supplied them with a pleasant stimulating sense of being liked and welcomed, or when general greetings on the eight-o'clock train in the morning were mingled with comments on the thunderstorm or the epidemic of nursery chicken-pox. When Rose and Harry were gone, on Sunday evenings, Wolf and Norma might sit on the side steps of the side porch, looking off across the gradual drop descent of tree-tops and shingled roofs, into a distant world silvering under the summer moon. These were their happiest times, when solitude and quiet spread about them, after the hospitable excitements of the day, and they could talk and dream and plan for the years ahead. She was an older Norma now, even though marriage had not touched her with any real responsibility, and even though she was more full of delicious childish absurdities than ever. The first months of their marriage had curiously reversed their relationship, and it was Norma now who gave, and Wolf who humbly and gratefully accepted. It was Norma who poured comfort and beauty and companionship into his life, who smiled at him over his morning fruit, and who waited for him under the old maple at the turn of the road, every night. And as her wonderful and touching generosity enveloped him, and her strange wisdom and new sweetness impressed him more and more, Wolf marvelled and adored her more utterly. He had always loved her as a big brother, had even experienced a definite heartache when she grew up and went away, a lovely and unattainable girl in the place where their old giddy dear little Norma had been. But now his passion for his young wife was becoming a devouring fire in Wolf's heart; she absorbed him and possessed him like a madness. A dozen times a day he would take from his pocket-book the thin leather case she had given him, holding on one side a photograph of the three heads of Rose, his mother, and the baby, and on the other an enchanting shadow of the loosened soft hair and the serious profile that was Norma. And as he stood looking at it, with the machinery roaring about him, and the sunlight beating in through steel-barred windows sixty feet high, in all the confusion of shavings and oil-soaked wood, polished sliding shafts streaked with thick blue grease, stifling odours of creosote and oily "wipes", Wolf's eyes would fill with tears and he would shake his head at his own emotion, and try to laugh it away. After awhile he took another little picture of her, this one taken under a taut parasol in bright sunlight, and fitted it over the opposite faces; and then when he had studied one picture he could turn to the other, and perhaps go back to the first before his eyes were satisfied. And if during the day some thought brought her suddenly to mind, he would stop short in whatever he was doing, and remember her little timid upglancing look as she hazarded, at breakfast, some question about his work, or remember her enthusiasm, on a country tramp, for the chance meal at some wayside restaurant, and sheer love of her would overwhelm him, and he would find his eyes brimming again. _ |
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