Bedelia Read online

  Bedelia had come into the room softly. She stood beside Charlie, the top of her head just reaching his nostrils. They had not grown bored with marriage and still enjoyed seeing themselves as a couple. Bedelia’s expression changed suddenly, a look of pain crossed her face and she hurried to straighten the pier glass.

  “You looked horrid, Charlie. Your lovely long legs, I couldn’t bear to see them so short and queer.”

  Charlie caught hold of her and held her close, breathing heavily. His eyes clouded. Bedelia slapped his cheek with light fingers. “We’ve got guests downstairs, we’ll have to get back to them.”

  The twilight had thickened. Bedelia went to the window. Her eyes were fixed on some distant point in the dusk. “Last Christmas,” she murmured. On the flowered drapes her hands tightened. “Last Christmas,” she repeated in a blurry voice.

  “New Orleans?”

  “We picked dark red roses and put them on the table. We had breakfast on the balcony.”

  “Are you sorry to be here, Biddy?”

  Her mouth, when it was not smiling, was small and perfect, a doll’s mouth. There were times when Charlie felt that he knew nothing about her. All that she had told him of her girlhood and first marriage seemed as unreal as a story in a book. When she related conversations she had had with people she used to know, Charlie could see printed lines, correctly paragraphed and punctuated with quotation marks. At such times he would feel that she was remote, like the heroine of a story, a woman he might dream about but never touch.

  “I’ve had an inspiration,” he said. “A Christmas gift for Abbie.”

  “What is it?” Bedelia asked eagerly.

  “The pearl ring.”

  Bedelia did not say anything.

  “Don’t you think it’s a good idea?”

  “We can’t, Charlie.”

  “Why not?”

  “You said it was cheap and vulgar.”

  “On you, dear. But Abbie wears artificial stones.”

  Bedelia shook her head.

  “Why not?” asked Charlie.

  “Your sort of people never wear imitation stones.”

  Charlie wondered if she was making fun of him. “Abbie does, my cousin Abbie. Did you notice that brooch?”

  Bedelia shrugged and walked away from her post at the window. She seated herself in a low chair which Charlie’s mother had used when she sewed. For this chair, Bedelia had chosen a covering of old rose moiré. The drapes and bedspread were of the same fabric, but otherwise the room was just as it had been when Charlie’s mother and father slept in it.

  “Let’s give Abbie the East Indian bangle,” Bedelia proposed.

  Charlie was shocked. “You can’t mean that.”

  Charlie had bought Bedelia the bangle while they were on their honeymoon. It was of finely wrought silver, as wide as a cuff and hung with small bells. Charlie, who liked to explore odd neighborhoods and queer shops, had wondered how the bangle had come as far west as Colorado, and because it seemed romantic to him had paid twenty dollars for it. This was too much to spend on a Christmas present for Abbie whom he saw not more than twice a year. Bedelia had paid five dollars for the black pearl ring. It was set in imitation platinum and surrounded by false diamonds.

  “The bangle’s too big for my arm. Too much bracelet.”

  “You didn’t say that when I bought it. You thought it very handsome when you tried it on.”

  The doll’s mouth could be petulant. “You liked it, Charlie, and wanted me to have it.”

  “What I don’t see is why you’re so obstinate about that cheap ring. Since you say you won’t wear it yourself.”

  Bedelia sighed.

  “Of course, dear, if you want to keep it, I shan’t insist on your giving it away. But since you said you’d never wear it again . . .” Charlie waited.

  She sat like a penitent child with bowed head and folded hands.

  “Unless you want to keep it as a souvenir,” he said bitterly. “To remind yourself that you’ve married a prig.”

  Bedelia smoothed the sheath of her velvet skirt over her legs, looked at the toe of a bronze slipper. “We can’t give Abbie that ring because I don’t have it any more.”

  “What!”

  “I’ve given it away. You didn’t like to see me wear it. You thought it was vulgar.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me in the first place? Before I’d lost my temper?”

  “You didn’t give me a chance.”

  She looked at him so innocently that Charlie had to laugh.

  “What an inconsistent little creature you are, Biddy. To let me argue and make a fool of myself. I’ve been a bad-tempered boor. I apologize.”

  “Charlie, dear, I was horrid to you, wasn’t I? Will you forgive me?”

  “Forget it,” he said magnanimously.

  “Shall we give Abbie the bangle?”

  “Just as you wish.”

  “You see,” Bedelia said, trying on the bangle and showing him how it slid up and down on her arm. “It’s much too big. You go down to our guests, dear. It’ll look queer if we both stay up here too long. I’ll wrap Abbie’s gift and, when no one is looking, slip it under the tree.”

  Charlie could tell by her smile that Bedelia was pleased with her little scheme. He kissed her and left. She packed the bangle carefully and tied it with a red ribbon so that it should look like her other packages.

  Then she went to her dressing-table, opened the jewel-box and took out the ring set with the black pearl. She put it into the velvet box in which she had found her new garnet ring, and hid it in the hall cupboard, making sure that it was well back in the shadows.

  She returned to the bedroom on tiptoe, fetched Abbie’s gift, straightened the red bow, and hurried down the stairs, her high heels clicking on the treads.

  The party was over. Of the guests only Abbie, Ellen, and Ben Chaney remained. Abbie had gone back to the guest room to make a ceremony of removing her plumes, and had dragged Ellen with her. Ben was kneeling before the fire. Bedelia stood beside him, holding a basket filled with crumpled tissue paper and ragged ribbons. They watched silently as all the fine wrappings, the silver and gilt, were sucked into the flames.

  When all the papers had been burned and the room was neat again, Bedelia excused herself and hurried to the kitchen. Ben took the chair opposite Charlie’s and picked up the latest Literary Digest. Just as if he belonged here, Charlie thought for a stabbing moment, but dismissed the notion as ungenerous and picked up the new Atlantic Monthly.

  In the guest room Ellen was washing her hands at the marble stand behind the screen. When she had finished, she started out of the room.

  “Stay and talk to me,” Abbie commanded. She had taken off her hat at last and, as she expressed it, her hair was a perfect bat’s nest. “I have a question to ask you. Who’s this Chaney?”

  “An artist. He’s taken Judge Bennett’s house for the winter.”

  “The summer house? Up there in the woods? Why?”

  “How should I know?”

  Abbie’s head was bent forward and her hair fell over her face like a dark curtain. From behind the curtain floated her curious voice. “What kind of artist?”

  “He paints.”

  “Naturally. But what?”

  “Pictures.”

  Abbie swung back the curtain of her hair and rolled it over her rat. “You are annoying. What sort of pictures?”

  The contrast with Abbie’s rich inflection made Ellen’s voice a stingy monotone. “I don’t know.”

  “You could use a touch of rouge,” Abbie said. “Everyone does nowadays. Is he single?”

  “I’ve never heard that he was married.”

  “Try some of mine, Nellie.” Abbie nodded toward her gold meshbag. “It’s the newest thing, a dry powder, not nearly so vulgar as paint. Is he a gentleman?”

  “You sound like a character by Mrs. Humphry Ward,” Ellen said coldly.

  “Oh, do stop trying to be a highbrow. You know very well w
hat I mean. Not a teamster or policeman.” Abbie was at last pleased with her hair. After a long scrutiny of her face in the mirror, she said: “He puzzles me. Not that I mind a bit of mystery in a man. Bedelia seems to like him, doesn’t she?”

  “Does she?” Ellen tried to sound indifferent.

  Abbie gave her a long look. “You wouldn’t be so dull if you’d dress with some dash. There’s nothing so abhorrent to the masculine eye as a plaid silk shirtwaist. It simply shrieks old maid.”

  Ellen’s fair skin flushed. She liked to think of herself as The Tailored Girl and enjoyed wearing suits and shirtwaists.

  Abbie took a round pasteboard box out of her meshbag. “Use this,” she commanded.

  “I’d feel horrible.”

  Abbie rubbed the puff over a disk of carmine powder and thrust it toward Ellen. “With a single man around, I do think you’d try to make yourself more interesting.”

  “I’m not one of your predatory females.”

  “You’d be better off if you were.” Abbie was merciless. There was no other way of moving Ellen. “At least you must let me do your hair over. Nobody wears it that way anymore.”

  “I do. And, moreover,” Ellen challenged, her back rising, “nothing in the world could induce me to wear a rat. I think they’re filthy and disgusting.”

  “Then every fashionable woman is filthy and disgusting.

  “Bedelia is stunning and she doesn’t wear rats.”

  “Bedelia has a style of her own. She can afford to be different. Besides, her hair is dyed and quite conspicuous enough.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Touched-up. I’m very sharp about that sort of thing.”

  “But Bedelia wouldn’t. She’s so natural. Why are you so catty about her, Abbie?”

  “Why are you defending her, Nellie?”

  “Please don’t call me Nellie.”

  “Why not? We always used to.”

  “I don’t like nicknames any more.”

  Abbie raised her eyebrows. She knew Ellen too well to go on badgering her. Besides, she had other questions to ask. “Has he money?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t play innocent. When a single man comes to a town like this, it’s every woman’s duty to know the facts.”

  Ellen relaxed a little. “I haven’t thought much about it, but he’s evidently got some kind of income or he couldn’t afford to stay in the country all winter and paint. Besides, he has a machine.”

  “Let me warn you, my dear, a machine means nothing. Do you remember when my dear Walter bought the electric? We drove around like millionaires and he’d only paid a small deposit on it. You can buy cars on credit, you know.”

  Ellen did not approve of Abbie’s lightness in speaking of her ex-husband. New York might take divorce for granted, but Connecticut still spoke of it in whispers.

  “He gave Bedelia a dozen white roses,” Abbie remarked.

  “He gave Charlie a box of cigars. It’s only decent of him to repay their hospitality.”

  “You needn’t snap at me. I merely observed that he buys extravagant gifts. Not a poor man’s habit.” Abbie had finished her hair and restored her complexion. She went behind the screen to wash her hands.

  Ellen’s voice rose above the running water. “There’s something about him. Would you trust him, Abbie?”

  Abbie whirled around, holding her dripping hands before her. “Why must you be so intense? You behave like the third act of a melodrama. What’s wrong with him?”

  “What do you think of him? Honestly, I mean, not as a bachelor who seems to have money, but as a human being. Would you trust him?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  Ellen came close and looked squarely into her friend’s face. In spite of her simplicity and Abbie’s affectations, they were the same sort—big, bony, honest New England girls. “It’s as if he wanted something of us here. He’s made friends too fast. I know that artists are supposed to be unconventional, but that’s not it. His manners are good enough on the surface, but there’s something about him that I don’t understand. He came here in November knowing no one and now he’s everybody’s chum. And he’s always asking women to have tea with him.”

  “You are provincial. In New York no one thinks twice when a man asks a woman for tea. Particularly an artist.”

  “He asks so many questions,” Ellen complained.

  “You sound as if you’d been out to tea with him yourself.”

  “I work. I haven’t time to go out for tea, but I’ve had dinner with him at Jaffney’s and he’s called a couple of times.”

  “Then you’re not so indifferent, are you? Dinner, evening calls, and he hasn’t talked to you about his painting?”

  “He doesn’t talk about himself.”

  “How strange for a man.”

  “He’s always asking about other people’s lives, the most personal questions. About their incomes, whether they’re well off or not.”

  “Sounds like normal curiosity.”

  “Evidently New York’s made you forget that we were taught never to mention things like that.”

  “You’re still a child, Ellen. If I didn’t know you so well I’d think your naïveté was a pose. Have you asked Bedelia what she thinks of him?”

  Ellen seemed not to have heard.

  “You’d never catch her dining with a man and not knowing what sort of pictures he paints. And don’t tell me he hasn’t asked her to have tea with him.”

  “He’s often here in the afternoon. Sometimes they walk,” Ellen said quietly. “Of course Charlie and Bedelia are his closest neighbors except for farmers like the Keeleys or those Polish people up the hill.”

  The wind had risen. It screeched through the woods, whined around the corners of the house, set shutters to shivering and rattled window-panes.

  “Supper’s ready. Bedelia wants to know if you are,” Ben Chaney said. He lounged against the frame of the door as nonchalantly as if the house were his own.

  “Where did you get your manners?” Abbie asked. “Weren’t you taught to knock when you come into a room?”

  “Not when the door’s open.”

  Abbie looked at Ellen, who looked away.

  THE HOUSE HAD been more formal in old Mrs. Horst’s day. Charlie had been a considerate son who would not distress his dear mother by criticizing her father’s and grandfather’s tastes in architecture, but before the flowers were withered on her grave he had unlocked the drawer that contained his plans for remodeling the house. In spite of his modern education, Charlie favored the old New England style of building and was one of the foremost architects in the movement to bring back to fashion the best features of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before he left for his holiday in Colorado, he had had all the balconies, tower, and scrollwork decorations removed and the house restored to its original lines. The bow window had been left because it was a pleasant place to sit on sunny afternoons.

  He and Bedelia had worked together on the interior decoration. All the wallpapers and upholstery fabrics were her taste. They had had only one quarrel and that because she had refused to discard his mother’s good Orientals and use rag rugs in their place.

  She had a natural talent for housekeeping. With less fuss than his mother had made with her two servants, Bedelia and the young girl, Mary, kept the house like a pin.

  Tonight she had left the centerpiece on the table and used her new Madeira doilies under the plates. Red candles shed light upon the meal. She had cooked the main dish herself. It was a casserole of rice cooked with tomatoes, okra, clams, chicken, pimentos and olives, and flavored with saffron. Charlie was not given any. Mary brought him a bowl of plain boiled rice.

  “Dyspepsia,” he confessed.

  “You!” cried Abbie.

  “It must be his nerves,” Bedelia said. “He works too hard. You’d think his foreman was a complete ignoramus the way poor Charlie has to run to Bridgeport every day.”

  Ellen asked if
he had seen the doctor.

  “I do wish you’d use your influence, Ellen. I beg and beg and he doesn’t pay the slightest attention.”

  “Let’s talk of pleasanter things,” Charlie said.

  But Abbie had a theory. “He probably got it out West. I hear the food is simply . . .” she could not find the right word and wrung her hands.

  “You’re wrong,” Charlie said. “There are some excellent restaurants in Denver, and at the hotel at Colorado Springs they had a French chef.”

  “I shouldn’t like that,” Abbie sniffed. “If I went to Colorado, I’d expect bear meat or buffalo.”

  “Is this a Western dish?” asked Ellen, helping herself to the rice.

  “No, it’s a recipe I learned in New Orleans. Jambalaya, they call it. They make it differently, with river shrimps and crabs . . .”

  “New Orleans,” Abbie interrupted. “I thought you came from California. Didn’t you tell me Bedelia came from California, Charlie?”

  “I was born in California, but I’ve lived in a lot of places. I lived in New Orleans with my first husband.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go there,” Abbie said. “They say it’s quite civilized. Have you ever seen a Mardi Gras?”

  “She’s as good as Cable when she describes it,” Charlie boasted. “Tell them about the French Quarter, dear, and the artists.”

  “Everything?”

  “Why not? Are you ashamed?”

  “No, you know I’m not.” Bedelia gave Charlie a warm smile and a small confidential wink. “But these people are different, dear. They’ve always been conventional and protected . . .”

  “Oh, do tell us,” squealed Abbie.

  “It’s not that sort of thing,” Bedelia said, laughing. “You see, we were very poor. Most people would rather confess to sin than poverty, wouldn’t they? My husband and I were desperately poor. We lived in a garret.” She was gleeful, as if there was something romantic about it. “He was an artist, you see, of good family, but his people wanted him to go into business and wouldn’t give him an allowance. We didn’t mind being poor because we were young and healthy and in love, and most of our friends were poor artists, too. We had lots of fun, and if we could afford a chicken and a bottle of Italian claret, we’d give a party.” Her voice, fading off at the end, hinted at richer memories.