His Family by Ernest Poole (popular ebook readers txt) 📕

in Edith’s heart was a cold dread of this season, she bravely kept it to herself; and she set about so determinedly to make a merry holiday, that her father admiring her pluck drew closer still to his daughter. He entered into her Christmas plans and into all the conspiracies which were whispered about the house. Great secrets, anxious consultations, found in him a ready listener.

So passed three blessed quiet weeks, and he had high hopes for the winter.

XXXI

If there were any cloud upon his horizon, it was the thought of Laura. She had barely been to the house since Edith had come back to town; and at times, especially in the days when things had looked dark for Roger, he had caught himself reproaching this giddy-gaddy youngest child, so engrossed in her small “ménage” that apparently she could not spare a thought for her widowed sister. Laura on her return from abroad had brought as a gift for Edith a mourning gown from Paris, a most alluring creation⁠—so much so, in fact, that Edith had felt it simply indecent, insulting, and had returned it to her sister with a stilted note of thanks. But Roger did not know of this. There were so many ways, he thought, in which Laura might have been nice to Edith. She had a gorgeous limousine in which she might so easily have come and taken her sister off on little trips uptown. But no, she kept her car to herself. And from her small apartment, where a maid whom she had brought from Rome dressed her several times each day, that limousine rushed her noiselessly forth, gay and wild as ever, immaculate and elegant, radiant and very rich. To what places did she go? What new friends was she making? What was Laura up to?

He did not like her manner, one evening when she came to the house. As he helped her off with her cloak, a sleek supple leopard skin which fitted her figure like a glove, he asked,

“Where’s Hal this evening?” And she answered lightly,

“Oh, don’t ask me what he does with himself.”

“You mean, I suppose,” said Edith, with quiet disapproval, “that he is rushed to death this year with all this business from the war.”

“Yes, it’s business,” Laura replied, as she deftly smoothed and patted her soft, abundant, reddish hair. “And it’s war, too,” she added.

“What do you mean?” her father asked. He knew what she meant, war with her husband. But before Laura could answer him, Edith cut in hastily, for two of her children were present. At dinner she turned the talk to the war. But even on this topic, Laura’s remarks were disturbing. She did not consider the war wholly bad⁠—by no means, it had many good points. It was clearing away a lot of old rubbish, customs, superstitions and institutions out of date. “Musty old relics,” she called them. She spoke as though repeating what someone else had told her. Laura with her chicken’s mind could never have thought it all out by herself. When asked what she meant, she was smilingly vague, with a glance at Edith’s youngsters. But she threw out hints about the church and even Christianity, as though it were falling to pieces. She spoke of a second Renaissance, “a glorious pagan era” coming. And then she exploded a little bomb by inquiring of Edith.

“What do you think the girls over there are going to do for husbands, with half the marriageable men either killed or hopelessly damaged? They’re not going to be nuns all their lives!”

Again her sister cut her off, and the rest of the brief evening was decidedly awkward. Yes, she was changing, growing fast. And Roger did not like it. Here she was spending money like water, absorbed in her pleasures, having no baby, apparently at loose ends with her husband, and through it all so cocksure of herself and her outrageous views about war, and smiling about them with such an air, and in her whole manner, such a tone of amused superiority. She talked about a world for the strong, bits of gabble from Nietzsche and that sort of rot; she spoke blithely of a Rome reborn, the “Wings of the Eagles” heard again. This part of it she had taken, no doubt, from her new Italian friend, her husband’s shrapnel partner.

Pshaw! What was Laura up to?

But that was only one evening. It was not repeated, another month went quickly by, and Roger had soon shaken it from him, for he had troubles enough at home. One daughter at a time, he had thought. And as the dark clouds close above him had cleared, the other cloud too had drifted away, until it was small, just on the horizon, far away from Roger’s house. What was Laura up to? He barely ever thought of that now.

But one night when he came home, Edith, who sat in the living room reading aloud to her smaller boys, gave him a significant look which warned him something had happened. And turning to take off his overcoat, in the hall he almost stumbled upon a pile of hand luggage, two smart patent leather bags, a hat trunk and a sable cloak.

“Hello,” he exclaimed. “What’s this? Who’s here?”

“Laura,” Edith answered. “She’s up in Deborah’s room, I think⁠—they’ve been up there for over an hour.” Roger looked indignantly in at his daughter.

“What has happened?” he asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” Edith replied. “They didn’t seem to need me. They made it rather plain, in fact. Another quarrel, I presume. She came into the house like a whirlwind, asked at once for Deborah and flew up to Deborah’s room.”

“Pshaw!” Roger heavily mounted the stairs. He at least did not feel like flying. A whirlwind, eh⁠—a nice evening ahead!

Meanwhile, in her room upstairs Deborah sat motionless, sternly holding her feelings down, while in a tone now kindly but more often full of a sharp dismay, she threw