CHAPTER IV
Christmas Eve in the new home!
A Christmas tree that glittered and dazzled with its festoons of twinkling little bulbs of sapphire and gold, ruby, and orange, and violet, and pale lemon from its wide-spreading base in the center of the Bentons’ upstairs living room of their fourteen-room house on that most wonderful of driveways, Riverside, in New York—to the top-most branch that swept the high creamy ceiling jostling the fine bisque cherub that adorned that branch— And a house warming.
As Marjorie Benton with a long-drawn sigh of contentment looked for the hundredth time about this one new big room with its sweeping spaces, its gay cretonnes and deep, cushion-piled wicker chairs and out through the row of French windows across the dusky blue of the Hudson to the Palisades with their twinkling starlights, she felt that life at last was worth living. All this—all—and her arms moved in a comprehensive gesture impelled by her thoughts—was hers! Her home! What more fitting than that they should have their house warming on Christmas Eve. Marjorie’s tired nerves and body that ached a bit, too, in sympathy, reminded her that she had not been able to have all this ready for Christmas Eve without effort. But how glad she was that she had done it! Glad!
True, Hugh was glooming a little—sentimental glooming for a time he should be glad to have put behind him, but he would get over that she was sure. He would come to see that her judgment was best, and that this was the way to live. Once more she sighed with utter contentment as she rearranged a heavy strand of silver tinsel that dangled inartistically. It was all ready for the children now and she could take time to breathe. In a deep chair in front of the sputtering open fire on its quaintly tiled hearth she dropped down for a moment’s rest and retrospection.
How busy and interesting had been the few short months that had passed since the night Hugh had come home to her in Atwood with his wonderful news!
They had been most fortunate in securing the services of a capable and competent nurse for the children, so they could catch the early train to New York every day on their house-hunting expeditions. Their reward had been this beautiful little house on the Drive, with its view of the Hudson. To Marjorie it seemed a mansion with its fourteen rooms, its servants’ quarters in the attic, their garage with space for three cars, and oh, so many more things she had not at first thought of herself.
Then had begun the real work and pleasure of furnishing it. What a never-changing miracle it was to Marjorie to be able to select whatsoever she wished without having to hesitate and consider the price and durability of each article as she had always been obliged to do.
Every detail had been completed a few days before Christmas, when they bade farewell to their friends and the little village with its memories of five happy years, and moved into the new home.
Stretched lazily on Marjorie’s wicker chaise longue, smoking his after-dinner cigar, careless of his tumbling of his wife’s carefully selected new pillows, Hugh Benton let his gaze rove over the vivid scene. It paused as his eyes reached his wife sitting before the cheery fire, her slight smile telling of what she saw in the blazing logs. Because they were so close, so much to each other, Marjorie Benton felt this and as she turned in Hugh’s direction, her smile broadened as her features lighted up with expressed happiness. In a moment she was by his side, kneeling on a cushion in the old familiar child manner her husband knew and loved, and her fingers were running caressingly through his shock of dark hair.
“What do you think of it all, dear?” she asked exultingly. “Isn’t the tree wonderful? I think those decorators were marvelous, but I guess I’m not quite used to money yet, for I almost dread to think of the bill they’ll present.”
Slowly Hugh sat up, and reached for her hand. He patted it gently as he spoke.
“It has all been wonderful, dear,” he answered, “and you mustn’t forget you’re to forget the bills—but honey-girl,” and there was a little droop to the corners of his mouth and unmistakable yearning in his earnest eyes as he voiced his plaint, “somehow I can’t help missing the little old Christmas Eves we always had at Atwood. Remember how you and I would sit up nights ahead stringing popcorn, gilding walnuts, tinseling cotton to represent snow, and doing everything we could to have a pretty, effective tree for the kiddies, without hardly investing anything?”
Marjorie laughed as she gave his hand a playful squeeze. To her it was incomprehensible, with all this grandeur before him, that Hugh should regret the Atwood days.
“How funny, those other little trees were compared with this one, weren’t they?” she wanted to know.
But there was no gleam of answering mirth from Hugh.
“Umm, funny, maybe,” he agreed with an air of reservation. But there was a fuller meaning than Marjorie caught, as he added: “You’re right—one couldn’t possibly compare those other trees with this. Still,” and he was so plaintively appealing that his wife’s clear laughter rang out more bubblingly than ever, “still, we got a lot of happiness out of those funny little trees, didn’t we, dear?”
Marjorie was not going to commit herself too far.
“Yes—I suppose we did,” was her reluctant admission.
“And say, do you remember,” Hugh rambled on, his eyes aglow with animation, “the night we cut out the movies to buy two whole ornaments the next day—I’ll tell you——”
Marjorie stopped him a little impatiently. She playfully placed her hand over his mouth.
“Now, Hugh darling, don’t lecture—there’s a good boy! I’m not going to let you on Christmas Eve. You’re just not used to things yet. When you are, you’ll just be bound to admit you have the wisest little wife in the world—” She stopped his protest with a quick caress as she got to her feet, and went over to the tree to place a life-like big doll and a “really, truly” railroad train in more conspicuous positions.
“It is beautiful, though, isn’t it, dear?” she repeated, and without waiting for his reply, hurried on: “There are two people I know who’ll think so if you don’t. Just wait till you see their eyes in the morning!”
She stifled an unwelcome yawn with the pat of fingers.
“More tired than I thought, dear,” she admitted. “I really must get some sleep. There’s so much to enjoy to-morrow. Coming along, or are you going to smoke for awhile?”
“Believe I’ll finish my cigar. Don’t stay awake waiting for me now—good-night, dearest, pleasant dreams, and a world of happy Christmases before you,” and he kissed her as he opened the door for her, in the old-world manner he never neglected.
Alone, Hugh Benton extinguished all the lights in the room, even those on the tree, and seated himself in the rocker before the fire. For a long time he sat smoking his cigar, gazing into the dying embers. His thoughts were of many things—of his years of unalloyed happiness—of his great love for his wife and babies, and then of this newly-acquired fortune. Marjorie’s theory of living he at last concluded appeared to be more sensible than his own, after all, and when he finally arose, it was with the full determination to use every power within his grasp to meet all the requirements due this new position of his. He would mold his life anew; become a man of affairs. With all that was in him he would strive diligently to reach the pinnacle of success that his ambitious wife had planned for him.
Boredom has long been the common complaint of the idle rich. Many things are excused because of it; many useless and reckless occupations condoned for and by that favored class on the ground that the time passes so slowly that they must have something to do. Whether or no this is exactly the case, however, is a moot question. To come right down to it, time generally passes a great deal more quickly for those who have more store of worldly goods than they would wish. To the woman of fashion and wealth months and days seem actually to have flown by from the time she made her more or less blushing début until she suddenly wakes one day to realize that there is gray in her hair, and that it will take arduous hours at the beauty parlors to smooth over the ravages of time in a once-unwrinkled countenance. Men, too—more often than not the man of unlimited means comes to know that middle life is upon him and that he has not accomplished any of the great things that he had once planned, always having known that with wealth to back him he could accomplish them. It is all the fault of time. It flies rapidly—too rapidly for those who have the means for gratifying every wish and whim.
The Bentons were no exception to the rule. Time flew by on such light wings for them that it was hard to realize that so much had been accomplished, so much changed in the three years that might have been so many months since they had left Atwood for New York. Of them all, though, the children had most readily accustomed themselves to the change and long since had become seasoned little New Yorkers with little noses turned up at less lucky youngsters who had no nice warm closed car to command whenever they wished a ride.
Hugh, too, at the end of the three years (though his change had been more gradual), might always have lived on Riverside Drive and known club life since his salad days. Unlike his wife, who in the first flush of her good fortune had elected play as her life work, Hugh had turned his attention to work. Ambitious as he was, and before his first success with his invention with no outlet for it, he had not let grass grow under his feet since he had changed his cottage in Atwood for a house on Riverside Drive. Personal attention to the details of the manufacture of his invention had brought him in contact with business men of wealth and solidity and deep down Hugh Benton was not the sort of man to neglect what opportunity threw in his way. From manufacturing to Wall Street had been but a step. Had Hugh Benton’s lucky fairy been with him day by day to wave her magic wand, he could not have had more fortune in his ventures. His was not the story of the ordinary novice. It was the thousandth one that daily draws more and more grist to the mills of the “big men” who rule so autocratically in that small street called Wall;—the story that draws adventurers with all the fascination that fishermen who daily cast their lines off the bathing beaches know because of tales of a solitary tide runner that some time has been known to become unwary.
So it was, that at the end of three years, Hugh Benton was a rich man. He was becoming richer. He might have been a blood relation of Midas, said those who had come eagerly to watch for a tip that might fall from his lips unguardedly, for in so short a time his had become the platitudinous but nonetheless expressive sobriquet of “Lucky Benton.”
With success, came all that it usually implies. His, too, had become the pleasures of the rich. Almost without knowing it, so subtle had come the transformation, home no longer held the joys it once did for the former bank employee. Roadsters of high speed, cards at any of the many clubs where he had been eagerly welcomed, fishing and hunting expeditions from the base of a hundred-thousand-dollar “shack” in the Adirondacks had taken the place of more homely pleasures. It had all come about so easily too. Looking back in one of his few retrospective moods Hugh Benton smiled as he recalled the thought he would never accustom himself to New York. He smiled a bit disdainfully at his own small viewpoint when he remembered how once he had believed he would be content as a gentleman farmer.
Only Marjorie Benton was dissatisfied, though she was queerly conscious that she ought not to be—that she had everything that she had once so sincerely believed necessary to her happiness. The artificiality of all about her had come to her with a shock, an eye opening all the more distressing because of its suddenness. Marjorie Benton had found out she did not know how to play. More, she had discovered she did not want to. At least she did not want to play as did those with whom she came in contact and who had, from the horizon of Atwood, seemed all that was most desirable in the world. For instance, one of her most eager plans when she once put herself to sleep planning was to play bridge and spend wonderful afternoons in the company of cultured and delightful women such as those of whom she had read and whom she hoped to emulate. One of her first steps had been to get an instructress, so that she would be prepared to enter “society.”
It had not been hard for the Bentons to enter the charmed circle. It had been surprisingly easy, in fact, for Hugh’s financial success opened many doors that might otherwise have been barred, and present-day “society” may well be trusted not to overlook the tales the journals have to tell of sudden wealth (and Hugh had proven good copy) however much they may profess to scorn it.
So she had met a great many people, as the wives of Hugh’s friends had called and invited her to one affair after the other. At first she had been fairly beside herself with joy. But it was of short duration. Try as she would, she simply could not “take” to any of these new friends. They were all so frivolous and petty. Life held nothing for them obviously but bridge, dress, theater and gossip.
Then had come the day of her own first bridge party and her first real shock and mute protest. Somehow the thought of playing for money had never entered her mind. She had imagined that they played for a prize, the same as they had done at home at their little whist socials; or perhaps society matrons simply played for amusement.
“You must be particularly nice to Mrs. Gregory,” Hugh told her when she was starting off for the bridge party at the exclusive Mrs. Arnold’s Fifth Avenue home. “She’s one of ‘the’ Gregorys, you know, and it will mean a great deal socially to have her good will.”
Marjorie promised. This would not be hard, for was it not her way to be particularly nice to all her own and her husband’s friends and acquaintances? It was Mrs. Gregory who gave Mrs. Hugh Benton her surprise and shock, however. At the table where she sat with three other players, including Hugh’s Mrs. Gregory, Mrs. Allen cut the cards languidly and remarked:
“Well, what shall it be? May I suggest a quarter of a cent?”
Mrs. Gregory suppressed a polite yawn.
“Oh, my dear!” was her reproof. “How can you suggest wasting our time so! You know I never play for anything less than two cents—it’s boring enough even then.”
So Marjorie Benton played for money. She had not in the least intended to, but she was too embarrassed to utter a protest. She played, and with a mind perturbed, of course, played badly. At the end of the afternoon she had lost sixty dollars. Her cheeks burned as she made out her check and laid it on the table.
All the way home as she sat comfortably in her limousine she thought of it. It wasn’t the money—sixty dollars meant nothing to Marjorie Benton—she would have felt precisely the same had she won. It was the principle of the thing that worried her—she felt utterly debased to think that she had spent an afternoon gambling. She couldn’t imagine just why it should affect her that way, unless it was her puritanical upbringing that arose to the surface, despite all her efforts to force it back.
When she told Hugh about it, he laughed, and called her a “little old-fashioned country girl.”
“Have you forgotten about ‘living in Rome,’ honey?” he said lightly. “Don’t let it upset you. You’ll get used to it!”
But Marjorie knew better. There was only one thing to do. So never again did she play bridge. Bridge bored her, she insisted, and she didn’t enjoy it.
With everything else it was the same. She couldn’t accustom herself to seeing the women drink cocktails at a luncheon, and the first time they passed their cigarette cases she almost gasped. But the thing that disgusted her above all else was the deceit that she discovered all about her.
Her eyes were opened to this. One afternoon she called on Mrs. James, society matron, and the wife of one of Hugh’s friends. When she entered the room, three women she had met previously were seated at the tea-table. Their conversation ceased as abruptly as if a curtain had been rung down in the middle of an act. She paid little attention to the matter at the time, as they were all so charming in their manner toward her, and greeted her so effusively.
For a while they discussed inconsequential topics, and then their conversation drifted to another woman, a member of their own set. At first there wasn’t anything really offensive in their remarks. It merely brought to the surface a feline quality unsuspected. But the conversation changed suddenly. To Marjorie it seemed these women surely couldn’t realize what they were saying. Like a pack of hungry wolves, they tore the woman they discussed into shreds.
Dumfounded, Marjorie sat and listened. She couldn’t believe it possible that four women could say such scandalous things of another they called friend. She was sure their assertions were untrue, as they insinuated things impossible for anyone to know. They surmised merely, and it was upon such scant evidence that they set about to wreck a woman’s reputation. She felt that she could tolerate it no longer, and was about to protest, when the woman who had been under the hammer entered the room.
To Marjorie’s consternation and amazement the four eager talkers welcomed the newcomer with open arms. Their terms of affectionate endearment seemed revolting, but it was when one effusively gushed: “Your ears must be burning, dear, we were just discussing you and remarking how unkind you were to deprive us of your charming society for so long a time,” that Marjorie felt that she had reached the limit of her endurance, and pleading an important engagement, hurried away.
Before she reached home, she remembered how strangely they had all acted when she entered the room. Like a clear light it dawned on her that they must have been discussing her just as they had this other woman.
Instances of this sort taught her shallowness and insincerity of the people with whom she had chosen to mingle, so she managed to see less and less of them all. Instead, she tried to interest herself in charity, and again she failed. Whenever she decided to do a kindness, a reporter would rush in, demand her picture for the front page of the society section, and make a sensation out of nothing at all.
Many women would have craved that very thing, and derived great pleasure from it. But not Marjorie Benton. With true gentility she shrank from publicity. If she wanted to help those in distress, she wanted to do it alone, in her own way, without having the whole world know of it.
She spent as much time as she could with the children while they were small, but as they grew older and tutors and governesses took the place of nurses, she found herself more and more lonely.
Once when Hugh asked her if she were happy, for a moment the inclination was strong to open up her heart and tell him exactly how she felt—but the thought of the children forced her to conquer it. For their sakes she would utter no word of complaint; her own feelings must be sacrificed for them and for her plans for their education and futures.
At the expiration of the five years’ lease on their home, Hugh purchased a magnificent home, within easy motoring distance of New York. A small army of servants were engaged to take charge of it.
Then for a time, Marjorie Benton was again happy. Always she had wanted just such gardens as Hugh’s increased fortune made possible on their new estate. Exquisite rare flowers diffused their perfume; shaded walks wound serpentinely through long vistas of greensward and shrubbery; miniature lakes, crystal clear with water lilies on their shining bosoms; fountains that spouted and sparkled in the sun that seemed never to shine so fair as on this wonder garden. At last she had one place of dreams-come-true. Only the fine stone benches that Hugh had imported were not part of the picture to her. They were so cold and hard—so reminiscent of the people for whom they were made. So, old-fashioned as she had come to admit herself to be, Marjorie Benton had her little rocker placed out in her garden and it was here that her happiest hours were spent, among her cherished flowers, wandering about, or sitting idly, reading or sewing. It disturbed her not one whit that Hugh found cause for mirth in her sewing.
“You can have a dozen women to do that for you, my dear,” he reminded her. “I thought you wanted to get away from all that sort of thing.”
But Marjorie only smiled her slow smile and made no attempt to make Hugh understand that she wanted to do something—that she must feel that her time was not all being wasted.
It was at this period that Hugh Benton branched out as a host. His dinners were becoming famous; his week-end invitations favors to be eagerly bid for. The big new house became the scene of many a social event, and the Bentons’ hospitality a thing to conjure with. When her husband’s friends were invited for the week-end, a dinner party, or any other sort of entertainment, Mrs. Benton was a charming and considerate hostess. Somehow, though, she was always in the background—she was with them, but never of them. She had given up even trying to enter into the spirit of their pleasures and amusements.
Her clothes, always of the finest materials and expensive, lacked style. Her evening gowns all had lace or net yokes, with sleeves reaching to the elbow. She wouldn’t wear a decollete gown, and to her innermost self she was forced to acknowledge that she could not overcome her old-fashioned notions of propriety.
Marjorie couldn’t realize that Hugh, now the ultra-modern host, was the same man who once had protested with bitterness against their present manner of life. While Marjorie stood still, his steps dashed madly ahead. He fairly reveled in it all. As a prince of good fellows he was hailed among his friends. Money he lavished at home and abroad; every whim of the children was indulged with a recklessness that was ruinous.
He couldn’t comprehend Marjorie’s attitude. Surely this was what she had insisted she wanted. What was the matter with women, anyway? He pleaded with her to take her place in society and mingle more among people, but uselessly; he became angry and impatient, and called her attention to the fact that it was she who had planned their new life and not he, and at last had come the settling down, the acceptance of things as they were, Marjorie going on in her strait-laced conventional way, not as unhappy as she might have been had there not come that subtle rift between her and her husband which in five years had reached undreamed-of width; Hugh resigned and indifferent, always kind and courteous, but seeking his own pleasure, and living his life in his own way.
To Marjorie Benton had come one final pang when Hugh had decided it would be more agreeable and comfortable all around if he had his own suite of rooms. She had dropped a few tears of regret as she arranged those rooms for him, and in the general upheaval she had come upon his old ebony military brushes that had so long reposed on their joint bureau in their bedroom in the Atwood cottage. Marjorie remembered how she had got them for his birthday, and hers was a twisted little smile as she laid the little brushes down to compare them with Hugh’s new ones of ivory. How insignificant they looked! And how dear! She turned and her wide eyes roved through the big room in search of familiar objects. Yes, there was his smelly old pipe, the slippers she had embroidered herself, a little shabby now from much wear and with their gay flowers faded, but— And the little beaten metal humidor. It was with a start that she looked up to find Hugh in the room, giving instructions to his impeccable English valet. He saw the little pile on a big wicker table. His hand shot out to sweep them all from their resting places and Marjorie Benton heard the little metal clang of protest as they piled into a waste paper basket.
“Here, take all this old junk out and burn it,” he coolly advised. “Enough stuff around here without all this old junk——”
His wife’s smile was wan. “Old junk—” How far Hugh had gone from the dear sentimental old days! It seemed like so much of the days of Atwood were in the same category. Was everything to go the same way—everything of that old time, only five years as men counted time, but still so infinitely of a long, long ago to go the same way, become “old junk.” It was with a little gesture of benediction that Marjorie laid the little ebony brushes in the basket with the rest.
Hugh turned to her a little querulously.
“My dear,” he observed, “don’t you think it would be just as well to let the servants attend to this? They probably think it strange that you so often show such inclination to do their work.”
And meekly the woman left what was to her a labor of love. She would have liked Hugh to remember when he was in his suite that it was her care that made him so comfortable. She could have thought of him in his deep arm-chair before his blazing logs glancing at the wide mantel where she had placed photographs of herself and the children; of his smile when he saw how carefully she had arranged his smoking materials as he had once liked her to arrange them. But Hugh preferred differently. He preferred the cold, stolid, mechanical efficiency of his expressionless English serving man. Long Marjorie Benton sat before her own little fire in her gold and ivory boudoir and thought it all out. What had happened to them in these five years?
After Hugh’s removal to his own quarters there came times that his wife often did not see him for two or three days at a time. Late returning from his club, he said he did not care to disturb her; mornings he would leave too early or else so late that he would not take the time to see her. And so, these two who had once been soulmates, were slowly drifting apart.
Marjorie had not even the consolation of her children now partly to assuage the loneliness that she had come to admit was the one thing in her life amid all the gaud that was real. But there was some consolation in their very absence. She was accomplishing for them all that she had long ago planned.
Elinor was attending a select school for young ladies, and Howard had been sent to prepare for college. She counted the days until Elinor should grow up and once more be at home. Then she would have a real companion. What wonderful times she and her daughter would have together. Of course, Elinor had been willful and stubborn as a little girl, but she was confident that she would leave all that behind her when she finished school.
And then some day Howard would return from college, ready to take his place in the world, and perhaps after that he would bring a dear, sweet girl to her, and she would have another daughter to love.
Dreaming of days to come, putting from her mind all she could the days that were gone, Marjorie Benton sat gazing into her fire until the clang of the dressing chimes reminded her that she must dress. That was something Hugh always insisted on. And she got languidly to her feet with a sense of being far from happy over the prospective dinner as she recalled the two effusive, pompous business friends Hugh was having to dinner.
She smiled as she saw her children’s pictures looking up at her with answering smiles from their gold frames in their places on her gold-strewn dressing table, the toilet things Hugh had given her the past Christmas with far less interest than he had her celluloid set long ago, the little set she kept tucked away in a bureau drawer so that she might use them when she chose.
How sweet Elinor was!
How manly Howard!
She smiled in her old mother way as she lifted each picture and kissed it in turn. And some day— It could not be long now—time flew so——
“Things are not so bad after all, dear ones,” she whispered as she set them down. “They could not be with any woman who has such lovely children as mine—so much happiness to look forward to.”
• • • • •
And so were bridged the years between.