Read Ebook: The Indifference of Juliet by Richmond Grace S Grace Smith Hutt Henry Illustrator

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Ebook has 968 lines and 42701 words, and 20 pages

easy--come on," responded Anthony Robeson with cordiality. "I'll just telephone Mrs. Robeson."

"That's it," said Dr. Roger Barnes. "You don't dare not to. I understand. Go ahead. But if she's too much dashed let me know, will you?"

Anthony turned, laughing, into a telephone closet, from which he emerged in time to catch his train with his guests.

"It's all right," he assured them. "But it's only fair to let her know a few minutes ahead. You like to understand, Roger, before you start, don't you, whether your emergency case is a hip-fracture or a cut lip, so you can tell whether to take your glue or your sewing-silk?"

Anthony shook his head. "Evidently you don't know what guests in the remote suburbs on a stormy February night mean to a poor girl whose nearest neighbour is five hundred feet away. Your ideas of married life need a little freshening, too. They're pretty antique."

It was a half-mile from the station to the house--the "box of a house"--which had been Anthony's home for five months, and toward which he now led his friends with the air of a man about to show his most treasured possessions. He strode through the deepening snow as if he enjoyed the strenuous tramp, setting a pace which Wayne Carey, with his office life, if not the doctor, more vigorously built and bred, found difficult to maintain.

"Here we are," called the leader, pointing toward windows glowing with a ruddy light. The doctor looked up with interest. Carey was a frequent visitor, but the busy surgeon, old school-and-college chum of Anthony's though he was, was about to have his first introduction to a place of which he had heard much, but of whose nearness to Paradise he doubted with the strong skepticism of a man who has seen many a fair beginning end in all unhappiness and desolation.

As they stamped upon the little porch the door flew open, the brilliancy and comfort of a fire-and-lamplit room leaped out at them, a delicious faint odour of cookery assailed their hungry nostrils, and the welcome which makes all worth having met them on the threshold.

What she said to Tony must have been whispered in his ear if voiced at all, for the two guests, looking on with laughing, envious eyes, saw their hostess swept unceremoniously into a bearlike embrace, swung into the air as one thrusts up a child, poised there an instant, laughing and protesting, then slowly lowered to be kissed, and set down once more lightly upon the floor.

"Take them upstairs, Tony, please. Of course we can't let them go back to-night, now we have them. It's beginning to storm heavily, isn't it? I thought so. Take them to the guest-room, Tony--and dinner will be served as soon as you are down."

It was on his lips to say "rather more than you have," but it occurred to him in time that jokes on this ground are dangerous. Wayne Carey had been married in November, was living in a somewhat unpretentious way in a downtown boarding-house, and certainly had to-night so much of a lost-dog air that it made the doctor pause. So he substituted: "--rather more than I should have expected, even of a fellow who has got the girl he has wanted all his life," and fell to washing and brushing vigorously, eyeing meanwhile the little room with a critical bachelor's appreciation of beauty and comfort in the quarters he is to occupy. It was very simply furnished, certainly, but it struck him as a place where his dreams were likely to be pleasant for every reason in the world.

Downstairs, Juliet, in the dining-room, was surveying her table with the hostess's satisfaction. Opposite her stood a tall and slender girl, black-haired, black-eyed, with a face of great attractiveness.

"Rachel Redding," Juliet interrupted, lifting an affectionate glance across the table, "if you want to seem what you really are--my friend--you will let me do as I like."

"--dowager," finished Juliet gayly. "Well, I'll be proud of you, and you can be proud of me, if you like, and together we'll make those hungry men think there's nothing like us. The dinner's the thing. Isn't it the luckiest chance in the world I sent for those oysters this morning? Doctor Barnes is perfectly fine, but he never would believe in the happiness of married life if the coffee were poor or the beefsteak too much broiled. Doesn't the table look pretty? Those red geranium blossoms you brought me give it just the gay touch it needed this winter night."

Three men, standing about the wide fireplace, warming cold hands at its friendly blaze, turned expectantly as their youthful hostess came in, followed by a graceful girl in gray. Juliet presented her guests with the air of conferring upon them a favour, and they seemed quite ready to accept it as such.

Anthony looked on with interest to see a person whom he had known hitherto only as a pretty but poor young neighbour whom Juliet had engaged to help her for a certain part of every day, introduced as his wife's friend, and greeted by Doctor Barnes and Wayne Carey with quite evident admiration and pleasure. He looked hard at her, as Carey seated her, noticing for the first time that she was really worth consideration, and remembering vaguely that Juliet had more than once tried to impress him with the fact. If it had not been for the other fellows, with whose eyes as their host he was now stimulated to observe her, he might have been still some time longer in coming to the realisation that Juliet had found somebody in whom her genuine interest was not misplaced. But Anthony Robeson had all his life been singularly blind to the fascinations of most other women than Juliet. As he turned his keen gaze from Rachel Redding to the charming figure that sat on the other side of the table the satisfaction in his eyes became so pronounced that it could mean, Dr. Roger Barnes admitted to himself, as he caught it, nothing less than a very real happiness.

It was not an elaborate dinner. It was not by any means the sort of dinner Juliet might have prepared had she known that morning whom she was to entertain. It was merely a dinner planned with affectionate care to please and satisfy one hungry man who liked good things to eat--and amplified as much as possible in quantity after Anthony's message reached her. And by that admirable collusion between hostess and feminine friend which can sometimes be effected when the situation demands it, the dinner prepared for three seemed ample for five.

Between them Juliet and Rachel Redding served the various dishes and changed the plates which Anthony handed from his place. It was gracefully done and so simply that the absence of a maid was a thing to be enjoyed rather than regretted. When Juliet, in the softly sweeping dull-red frock which made of her a warm picture for a winter's night, slipped from her chair and moved about the room, or brought in from the kitchen a steaming dish, she seemed the ideal hostess, herself bestowing what her own hands had prepared. And when Rachel Redding offered a man a cup of fragrant coffee, smiling down in the general direction of his uplifted face without meeting his eyes, there was certainly nothing lost from his enjoyment of the beverage.

"Say, but this dinner has tasted just about right," was Wayne Carey's satisfied observation as he leaned back in his chair at last, after draining his third cup of coffee--and the pot itself, if he had but known it.

"Went to the spot?" asked Anthony, leaning back also with the expression of the friendly host. He was young to cultivate that expression, but he appeared to find no difficulty about it.

"It did--every last mouthful."

"Good. Now, if you fellows will come back to the fire and have a pipeful of talk we shall not be missed. In this house on ordinary occasions we reverse the order of after-dinner privileges--the men retire to the atmosphere of the sofa-pillows, and the women--I'm not allowed to tell what they do. But after remaining discreetly out of sight for some little time, during which faint sounds as of the rattle of china penetrate through closed doors, they reappear, pleasantly flushed and full of a sort of relieved joy."

"I know what I wish," said Roger Barnes, looking back from the dining-room doorway at young Mrs. Robeson; "I wish that when the dishes are all ready you would let me know. I should like nothing better than to have a dish-towel at them. I know all about it--my mother taught me how."

He looked so precisely as if he meant it, and the glance he sent past Juliet at Rachel Redding was so suggestive of his dislike to be separated for the coming hour from the feminine portion of the household, that his hostess answered promptly: "Of course you may. We never refuse an offer like that. We will try you--on promise of good behaviour."

When the door closed on the three Juliet produced from somewhere two aprons--attractive affairs on the pinafore order--one of which she slipped upon Rachel, the other donned herself.

"These are my kitchen party-aprons," she said gayly, noting how the pretty garment became the girl, "calculated to impress the masculine mind with the charm of domesticity in women. The doctor needs a little illustrated lesson of the sort. Life in boarding-houses isn't adapted to encourage a man in the belief that real comfort is to be found anywhere outside of a bachelor's club."

Before he was called the doctor forsook a half-smoked cigar and the seductive hollows of Anthony's easiest chair and marched briskly out to the kitchen.

"You see I distrust you," he announced, putting in his head at the door. "I'm afraid you will get them all done without me."

"Not a bit of it. Here you are," and Juliet tied a big white apron about a large-sized waist. "Here's your towel. No, don't touch the glass; a man is too unconscious of his strength."

"A surgeon?" demurred Rachel softly, from over her steaming dishpan.

"Thank you, Miss Redding," said the doctor, smiling.

"Ah, how stupid of me," Juliet made amends swiftly. "Miss Redding remembers that when I got my telephone message to-night I told her that the most distinguished young specialist in the city was coming here to dinner. A hand trained to such delicate tasks as those of surgery--here, Dr. Roger Barnes, forgive me, and wipe my most precious goblets."

"You'll have my nerves unsteady with such speeches as that," said he, but he accepted the trust. He held the goblets and the other daintily cut and engraved pieces of glass with evident pleasure in the task.

Meanwhile Juliet and Rachel made rapid work of the greater part of the dishes, handling thin china with the dexterity of housewives who love their work--and their china. Talk and laughter flowed brightly through it all, and when the doctor had finished his glass he looked disappointed at seeing not much left to do. At the moment Rachel was scrubbing and scraping a big baking-dish, portions of whose surface strongly resisted her efforts, in spite of previous soaking. The assistant, looking about him for new worlds to conquer, fell upon this dish.

"Here, here," said he, "let me have it. I'll use on it some of the unconscious strength Mrs. Robeson credits me with."

But Rachel clung to the dish. "Proper housekeepers," she averred, "always say 'That's all, thank you,' as soon as the china is done, and finish the pots and kettles after the guest has gone back to pleasanter things."

"I see. Did you ever have a man for dish-wiper before?"

"Never a surgeon," admitted Miss Redding.

"Then you don't appreciate the fact that a man likes to do big things which make the most show and get the credit for them."

He took the dish away from her by a dexterous little twist in which conscious strength certainly asserted itself. Rachel, laughing, with a dash of colour in cheeks which were normally of dark ivory tints, accepted the dish-towel he handed her.

"Hallo, there," cried Wayne Carey's voice from the door. "You're having more fun out here than we are in there, and that's not fair. The lord of the manor is getting so chesty over the delights of a country home in a February snowbank that he's becoming heavy company."

"No room for you here," returned the doctor, removing with a flourish the last candied sugar lump from the bottom of the big dish, and beginning to swash about vigorously in the hot water. "We do something besides talk out here; we work. Our kitchen is so small we have to waste no time in steps; as we dry the things we chuck them straight into their places."

Suiting the action to the word he caught up a shining cake-tin and cast it straight at Carey. That gentleman dodged, but Anthony caught it, performed upon it an imitation of the cymbals, then turned about and laid it in a nest of similar tins upon a shelf in an open closet.

"Ah, but I'm well trained," he boasted.

"If you were you wouldn't put it away wet," observed Rachel slyly.

Anthony withdrew the tin, wiped it with much solicitude, and replaced it.

"These little technicalities are beyond me," he apologised. "Your real athlete in kitchen work is your scientific man. See him dry that bean-pot with the glass-towel. Now, I know better than that."

"Go away, all of you," commanded the mistress of the place. "Go back to the fire and we'll join you. If you are very good we'll bring you a special treat by-and-by."

"That settles it," said the doctor, and led the retreat, but not without a backward glance at the little kitchen.

Juliet had gone into the dining-room with a trayful of glass and silver. Rachel Redding was plunging half a dozen white towels into a pan of steaming water. Barnes stood an instant, staring hard at the slender figure in the white pinafore, the round young arms gleaming in the lamplight--then he turned to follow the others. There are some pictures which linger long in a man's memory; why, he can hardly tell. With all his varied experiences Dr. Roger Barnes had never before discovered how attractive a background a well-kept kitchen makes for a beautiful woman, so that she be there mistress of the situation. Long after he had gone back to the fire his absent eyes, while the others talked, were studying the--to him--unaccustomed and singularly charming scene he had just left in the kitchen.

When Juliet and Rachel came in at length they found a plan afoot for their entertainment. Wayne Carey was standing at the window showing cause why the whole party should go out and coast upon the hill near by.

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