The Bent Twig Part 23

CHAPTER XXII

A GRATEFUL CARTHAGINIAN

Arnold Smith put another lump of sugar on his saucer, poured out a very liberal allowance of rum into his tea, and reached for a sandwich, balancing the cup and saucer with a deftness out of keeping with his long, ungraceful loose-jointedness. He remarked in an indifferent tone to Sylvia, back of the exquisitely appointed tea-tray: "I don't say anything because I haven't the least idea what you are talking about. Who _was_ Capua, anyhow?"

Sylvia broke into a peal of laughter which rang like a silver chime through the vine-shaded, airy s.p.a.ces of the pergola. Old Mr.

Sommerville, nosing about in his usual five-o'clock quest, heard her and came across the stretch of sunny lawn to investigate.

"Oh, _here's_ tea!" he remarked on seeing Arnold, lounging, white-flanneled, over his cup. He spoke earnestly, as was his custom when eating was in question, and Sylvia served him earnestly and carefully, with an instant harmonious response to his mood, putting in exactly the right amount of rum and sugar to suit his taste, and turning the slim-legged "curate's a.s.sistant" so that his favorite sandwiches were nearest him.

"You spoil the old gentlemen, Sylvia," commented Arnold, evidently caring very little whether she did or not.

"She spoils everybody," returned Mr. Sommerville, tasting his tea complacently; "'_c'est son metier._' She has an uncanny instinct for suiting everybody's taste."

Sylvia smiled brightly at him, exactly the brilliant smile which suited her brilliant, frank face and clear, wide-open eyes. Under her smile she was saying to herself, "If that's so, I wonder--not that I care at all--but I really wonder why you don't like me."

Sylvia was encountering for the first time this summer a society guided by tradition and formula, but she was not without excellent preparation for almost any contact with her fellow-beings, a preparation which in some ways served her better than that more conscious preparation of young ladies bred up from childhood to sit behind tea-tables and say the right things to tea-drinkers.

a.s.sociation with the crude, outspoken youth at the State University had been an education in human nature, especially masculine nature, for her acute mind. Her unvarnished a.s.sociation with the other s.e.x in cla.s.sroom and campus had taught her, by means of certain rough knocks which more sheltered boarding-school girls never get, an accuracy of estimate as to the actual feeling of men towards the women they profess to admire unreservedly which (had he been able to conceive of it) old Mr. Sommerville would have thought nothing less than cynical.

But he did not conceive of it, and now sat, mellowed by the rightness of his tea, white-haired, smooth-shaven, pink-gilled, white-waistcoated, the picture of old age at its best, as he smiled gallantly at the extremely pretty girl behind the table. Unlike Sylvia he knew exactly why he did not like her and he wasted no time in thinking about it. "What were you laughing about, so delightfully, as I came in, eh?" he asked, after the irretrievable first moment of joy in gratified appet.i.te had gone.

Sylvia had not the slightest backwardness about explaining. In fact she always took the greatest pains to be explicit with old Mr.

Sommerville about the pit from which she had been digged. "Why, this visit to Aunt Victoria is like stepping into another world for me.

Everything is so different from my home-life. I was just thinking, as I sat there behind all this glorious clutter," she waved a slim hand over the silver and porcelain of the tea-table, "what a change it was from setting the table one's self and was.h.i.+ng up the dishes afterwards. That's what we always do at home. I hated it and I said to Arnold, 'I've reached Capua at last!' and he said," she stopped to laugh again, heartily, full-throated, the not-to-be-imitated laugh of genuine amus.e.m.e.nt, "he said, 'Who is Capua, anyhow?'"

Mr. Sommerville laughed, but grudgingly, with an impatient shake of his white head and an uneasy look in his eyes. For several reasons he did not like to hear Sylvia laugh at Arnold. He distrusted a young lady with too keen a sense of humor, especially when it was directed towards the cultural deficiencies of a perfectly eligible young man.

To an old inhabitant of the world, with Mr. Sommerville's views as to the ambitions of a moneyless young person, enjoying a single, brief fling in the world of young men with fortunes, it seemed certain that Sylvia's lack of tactful reticence about Arnold's ignorance could only be based on a feeling that Arnold's fortune was not big enough. She was simply, he thought with dismay, reserving her tact and reticence for a not-impossible bigger. His apprehensions about the fate of a bigger of his acquaintance if its owner ever fell into the hands of this altogether too well-informed young person rose to a degree which almost induced him to cry out, "Really, you rapacious young creature, Arnold's is all any girl need ask, ample, well-invested, solid...."

But instead he said, "Humph! Rather a derogatory remark about your surroundings, eh?"

Arnold did not understand, did not even hear, leaning back, long, relaxed, apathetic, in his great wicker-chair and rolling a cigarette with a detached air, as though his hands were not a part of him.

But Sylvia heard, and understood, even to the hostility in the old gentleman's well-bred voice. "Being in Capua usually referring to the fact that the Carthaginians went to pieces that winter?" she asked.

"Oh yes, of course I know that. Good gracious! I was brought up on the idea of the dangers of being in Capua. Perhaps that's why I always thought it would be such fun to get there." She spoke rebelliously.

"They got everlastingly beaten by the Romans," advanced Mr.

Sommerville.

"Yes, but they had had one grand good time before! The Romans couldn't take _that_ away from them! I think the Carthaginians got the best of it!" Provocative, light-hearted malice was in her sparkling face. She was thinking to herself with the reckless bravado of youth, "Well, since he insists, I'll _give_ him some ground for distrusting my character!"

Arnold suddenly emitted a great puff of smoke and a great shout of "Help! help! Molly to the rescue!" and when a little white-clad creature flitting past the door turned and brought into that quiet spot of leafy shadow the dazzling quickness of her smile, her eyes, her golden hair, he said to her nonchalantly: "Just in time to head them off. Sylvia and your grandfather were being so high-brow I was beginning to feel faint,"

Molly laughed flas.h.i.+ngly. "Did Grandfather keep his end up? I bet he couldn't!"

Arnold professed an entire ignorance of the relative status. "Oh, I fell off so far back I don't know who got in first. Who _was_ this man Capua, anyhow? I'm a graduate of Harvard University and I never heard of him."

"I'm a graduate of Miss Braddon's Mountain School for Girls," said Molly, "and _I_ think it's a river."

Mr. Sommerville groaned out, exaggerating a real qualm, "What my mother would have said to such ignorance, prefaced by 'I bet!' from the lips of a young lady!"

"Your mother," said Molly, "would be my great-grandmother!" She disposed of him conclusively by this statement and went on: "And I'm not a young lady. n.o.body is nowadays."

"What _are_ you, if a mere grandfather may venture to inquire?" asked Mr. Sommerville deferentially.

"I'm a _femme watt-man"_ said Molly, biting a large piece from a sandwich.

Arnold explained to the others: "That's Parisian for a lady motor-driver; some name!"

"Well, you won't be that, or anything else alive, if you go on driving your car at the rate I saw it going past the house this morning,"

said her grandfather. He spoke with an a.s.sumption of grandfatherly severity, but his eyes rested on her with a grandfather's adoration.

"Oh, I'd die if I went under thirty-five," observed Miss Sommerville negligently.

"Why, Mr. Sommerville," Arnold backed up his generation. "You can't call thirty-five per hour dangerous, not for a girl who can drive like Molly."

"Oh, I'm as safe as if I were in a church," continued Molly. "I keep my mind on it. If I ever climb a telegraph-pole you can be sure it'll be because I wanted to. I never take my eye off the road, never once."

"How you must enjoy the landscape," commented her grandfather.

"Heavens! I don't drive a car to look at the landscape!" cried Molly, highly amused at the idea, apparently quite new to her.

"Will you gratify the curiosity of the older generation once more, and tell me what you _do_ drive a car for?" inquired old Mr. Sommerville, looking fondly at the girl's lovely face, like a pink-flushed pearl.

"Why, I drive to see how fast I can go, of course," explained Molly.

"The fun of it is to watch the road eaten up."

"It _is_ fascinating," Sylvia gave the other girl an unexpected reinforcement. "I've driven with Molly, and I've been actually hypnotized seeing the road vanish under the wheels."

"Oh, children, children! When you reach my age," groaned Arnold, "and have eaten up as many thousand miles as I, you'll stay at home."

"I've driven for three years now," a.s.serted Molly, "and every time I buy a new car I get the craze all over again. This one I have now is a peach of an eight. I never want to drive a six again,--never! I can bring it up from a creep to--to fast enough to scare Grandfather into a fit, without changing gears at all--just on the throttle--" She broke off to ask, as at a sudden recollection, "What was it about Capua, anyhow?" She went to sit beside Sylvia, and put her arm around her shoulder in a caressing gesture, evidently familiar to her.

"It wasn't about Capua at all," explained Sylvia indulgently, patting the lovely cheek, as though the other girl had been a child. "It was your grandfather finding out what a bad character I am, and how I wallow in luxury, now I have the chance."

"Luxury?" inquired Molly, looking about her rather blankly.

Sylvia laughed, this time with a little veiled, pensive note of melancholy, lost on the others but which she herself found very touching. "There, you see you're so used to it, you don't even know what I'm talking about!"

"Never mind, Molly," Arnold rea.s.sured her. "Neither do I! Don't try to follow; let it float by, the way I do!"

Miss Sommerville did not smile. She thrust out her red lips in a wistful pout, and looking down into the sugar-bowl intently, she remarked, her voice as pensive as Sylvia's own: "I wish I _did_! I wish I understood! I wish I were as clever as Sylvia!"

As if in answer to this remark, another searcher after tea announced himself from the door--a tall, distinguished, ugly, graceful man, who took a very fine Panama hat from a very fine head of brown hair, slightly graying, and said in a rich, cultivated voice: "Am I too late for tea? I don't mind at all if it's strong."

"Oh!" said Molly Sommerville, flus.h.i.+ng and drawing away from Sylvia; "_Lord_!" muttered Arnold under his breath; and "Not at all. I'll make some fresh. I haven't had mine yet," said Sylvia, busying herself with the alcohol flame.

"How're you, Morrison?" said Mr. Sommerville with no enthusiasm, holding out a well-kept old hand for the other to shake.