The Crooked Lane Read online

  The Crooked Lane

  Frances Noyes Hart

  TO

  BETTY, COLIN and BRIAN

  AND THE MEMORY OF

  AN ENGLISH SPRING

  Contents

  I

  PARTY FOR A STRANGER

  II

  PARTY FOR A FRIEND

  III

  PARTY FOR AN UNKNOWN

  IV

  PARTY FOR THE PRESS

  V

  TEA PARTY

  VI

  PARTY FOR AN ACTRESS

  VII

  FAREWELL PARTY

  I

  Party for a Stranger

  The brown young man with the dark eyes and the charming, courteous smile did not seem nearly as disconcerted as he should have been by the fact that he was forty-two minutes late, the guest of honor, and to the best of his knowledge a total stranger to eleven of the thirteen people seated in an alertly decorous circle about Mrs. Temple’s famous crystal table in her famous gray-and-silver dining room. He stood in the doorway just long enough to permit the obviously scandalized butler to announce “Mr. Karl Sheridan!” in a loud, reproachful voice, and proceeded to cover the expanse of gray velvet carpet that lay between him and his hostess’s chair as swiftly and confidently as though he were the bearer of great good tidings.

  “Aunt Cara, it’s too wonderful to see you again! Now I know how I’ve been missing you for all these years. You got my message about that wretched train? It was good of you not to wait.”

  “My dear little K, I’m far too spoiled a lady to be good about waiting or anything else,” said Caroline Temple gayly. “And the dinner is far too good a dinner to be spoiled by any mere infant, even if he has come all the way from Vienna. No, don’t bother about Greg now; your seat’s over there, between the prettiest girl in Washington and the most outrageous woman in America, and you’re just in time for a fish soufflé that I trust will make the Tour d’Argent’s taste like lead sinkers. Come and tell me exactly how grateful you are later.”

  She dipped the pretty head with its wreath of feathery silver in a gesture that blended greeting and dismissal, and the young gentleman who had come all the way from Vienna clicked his heels in a bow that must have come from there, too, and followed the bitterly disapproving butler to the single vacant seat with a composure that was not generally an attribute of the young and tardy.

  The girl at his left, who was undoubtedly the prettiest one in Washington or a radius of several thousand miles of it, did not turn her head, even under the slight insistence of his gaze as he maneuvered the deep mauve-and-silver-brocaded chair into its most strategic position. Why didn’t more people in an exhausted world realize that down cushions and skillfully placed arms would go further to insure the success of any dinner party ever given than the most perfect pâté yet invented? He leaned back, luxuriously content, his eyes sweeping the table on which daffodils and cottage tulips and blue hyacinths bloomed as serenely as in a garden. All around the easy, gracious swing of its oval, women’s faces, soft and brilliant as flowers, rose above dresses like flowers in a lovely animated wreath.… Nice place, America, thought Karl Sheridan, smiling contentedly to himself; and as he smiled, his dark, grave young face dropped a good third of its twenty-eight severely disciplined years. An even nicer place, Washington, commented the dark eyes, shrewd, noncommittal, and amused. Something more profound, more sensitive, and more penetrating than mere shrewdness flashed for a moment behind their gray-green barrier and was gone. Nicest place of all, obviously, this charming, silvery room that was a garden—and fortune and Aunt Cara had seen to it that the most desirable place in it had fallen to his lot.

  A sidelong glance confirmed his first impression of hair of the palest amber silk, parted, sleeked, and woven into a knot that Nausicaa might have envied, a velvety sweep from brow to chin, fastidiously pure as any Florentine saint’s, and a wide, generous, beautiful mouth, curved magnificently in lacquer-red defiance—young as the latest toast from Hollywood, old with Cleopatra’s immortal challenge.

  She was wearing a dress cut with the audacity of a cynic and the skill of a master out of the snowy stuff, gauzy, crisp, and billowing, in which little girls go walking sedately through the pale May sunshine, with white rose wreaths on their heads and white rosaries in their hands. No jewels at all, save one great ruby on the fine, long hand; no other touch of color, save the red tips of the camellias pinned on either side of the waxen knot of tuberoses that made the little white satin bag as festive as a nosegay. A lady so young, so wise, so fair, and so sure of herself that she could leave her pearls at home, pin her flowers to her bag, and look sophisticated in organdy was worth coming four thousand miles to dine with, surely. It was ten thousand pities that the young man on her right seemed to have arrived at precisely the same conclusion, and was all too obviously expatiating on the fact in a voice that was low enough to conceal the contents of his talk, but not too low to confirm a Gaelic eloquence and fervor that the visitor from Vienna could only deplore.… Sheridan smiled again a trifle ruefully, nodded acquiescence to the butler with the Chablis, and turned dutifully to the lady on his left.

  Lady Parrish, who had for some time been only tenuously restrained by the exhausted young man on her far side, was contemplating him with a really ominous glitter in her round, dark eyes, luminous with all the arrogant melancholy of a prize Pekinese—a glitter that suggested, accurately enough, that she had been crouched to spring at something new in the line of diversion for a long, long time and that at last she had found it. The prospective victim eyed her with mingled apprehension and anticipation.

  It was difficult to place the lady’s age—an optimist might have guessed her at thirty-five, a pessimist at forty-seven, and they would have been almost equally in error. Every inch of her, from the flaming, particolored topknot, brilliant as a bunch of nasturtiums, to the heels of her slim, black velvet sandals, was as vibrant and charged with potential mischief as an electric wire—and there must have been close to seventy inches. She settled her chin deeper in the great black tulle ruff that vaguely suggested Pierrot in mourning, pushed the half-emptied plate from her with a gesture of finality, and addressed him in a voice that might easily have penetrated the remotest coat closet in the capital.

  “Aha! The policeman from Vienna!”

  “You flatter me,” replied the young man called K, amiably. “It is, I imagine, this same generosity that makes your too gracious sex call very young lieutenants Major?”

  “Snooty, too,” diagnosed the undaunted female competently. “Trying to put me in my place the first crack out of the box! Child, when you know me better—and, believe me, you’re going to know me better—you’re going to realize that there’s no place in this vale of tears to put me in. So just lean back and relax. You’re a policeman and you’re from Vienna, and you’re late enough to be a dowager. My God, what happened to you, anyway? We thought you were dead.”

  “I was unlucky enough to have the engineer decide that this would be the very day to run into a train wreck,” explained the young man, who had been tranquilly disposing of his excellent soufflé as he waited for the tumult and the shouting at his side to subside. “Eight miles this side of Baltimore. We stayed there three hours. Didn’t Aunt Cara deliver my excuses?”

  “Only thirty-two miles? Why didn’t you walk?”

  “Believe me, if I had for one moment suspected that you were waiting, I should have run—and every step of the way at that.”

  “There’s something funny about you,” said the lady on his left judiciously. “Not intentionally, of course, though I give you credit for trying hard enough. But you’ve got a weird little cuckoo accent, and Cara’s no more your aunt than she’s mine. No one in the world but
an only child could get as spoiled as Caroline Temple in a paltry sixty years.”

  “It is possibly the Harvard accent that confuses you,” proffered the young man helpfully. “I believe that mine is not the first to arouse adverse comment. And you say that Aunt Cara is sixty? You astound me!”

  He looked more skeptical than astounded, and more amused than either.

  “If that’s a Harvard accent, mine’s Notre Dame,” said the lady, with even profounder skepticism. “Harvard my eye!”

  The young man sighed deeply.

  “Well, you needn’t cry about it,” admonished Lady Parrish severely. “Are policemen always as irritating as this?”

  “I sighed only because I was wondering what I had acquired in four long years of Harvard, if not an accent,” he explained with his most charming smile. “But you are quite right; my favorite aunt is not my aunt at all—only my mother’s boarding-school roommate, and my own godmother.”

  “Just baptized into the family, hey? Proving that water’s thicker than blood, after all they’ve told me. What was your mother’s name?”

  “She was Hannele von Leiden, before she was my mother. You knew her perhaps?”

  “Well, I dimly remember crouching at the head of the stairs in a red merino wrapper and watching her lead a cotillion with my youngest uncle. She looked like the angel off the Christmas tree, but I’m pleased to say that that was my last cotillion. So you’re old Von Leiden’s grandson. That accounts for the accent, of course, and the slight aroma of delusions of grandeur that I smell in the background. What were our Austrian friends sending over here before they decided to be our enemies—ministers or ambassadors, or what not?”

  “My grandfather was the Austrian ambassador,” said the young man with great distinctness. “My father, who died when I was five, was an assistant secretary in the State Department. My stepfather has a blond mustache and is charming enough to merit even your attention. When I was seven I had a governess called Miss Trout, and when I was ten I had a dog called Don Juan, and when I was nineteen I had a roommate called Hinky Dink. I am five feet eleven, twenty-eight years old, very, very susceptible, but with so poor a memory that no harm is done. Now, is it not your turn?”

  “You’re a good bit fresher than I generally pick ’em,” commented Lady Parrish meditatively. “But I can feel myself falling. What are you particularly anxious to know about me?”

  “Your name,” said the young man promptly.

  “Are you telling me that you don’t know who I am? Me? I don’t believe it! You’re simply making it up.”

  “It is Aunt Cara who has confused me,” he explained humbly. “She assured me, you see, that she was placing me between the prettiest lady in Washington and the most entertaining one in the world. You fill so perfectly either formula that I find myself entirely at a loss.”

  “You’re a liar,” remarked the lady without any marked displeasure. “And twice in one sentence at that. You know perfectly well that Caroline Temple never said anything of the kind, and I know perfectly well that you’ve already had a good long look at Tess Stuart. I saw your eyes simply popping out of your head. Just to keep the record clear, I’m Lady Parrish. The Lady Parrish, I’d have you know, but Freddy to you, my pet—Freddy to you.”

  The young man sketched again that little inclination that was almost a bow.

  “And I, Freddy, am Karl Sheridan—though my friends are kind enough to call me K.”

  “I’d hate to tell you what my friends are kind enough to call me,” remarked Frederika Parrish with a gleefully reminiscent grin. “Not unless I had a pocketful of dashes and asterisks handy! How long are you—”

  The pale young man on her left said in a voice buoyed by the courage of desperation:

  “Freddy, ma toute belle, it is to me that you must listen now, if you please. For these fifteen minutes and more our charming hostess, she throws at me little looks of fury and indignation that go through me like so many sharp knives. Be merciful, I beg.”

  “A little less noise out of you, my lad,” counseled his unwilling neighbor with considerable asperity. “Can’t you see that I’m falling in love? It drives me straight out of my head to be interrupted when I’m falling in love. Besides, Tess is a lot too busy with Dion to be bothered with K. Now just eat your salad and keep quiet.”

  A deep, lovely young voice said sadly, “Dion hasn’t said a word to me for hours and hours. If you’re really a policeman, could you tell me whether they can arrest me for going to sleep at a dinner party?”

  Karl Sheridan swung towards the sound of that voice as abruptly as though a cord had jerked him, and found himself looking into a pair of immense eyes of the purest, the clearest silver gray—still and shining as the sky just before dawn, as young rain falling through a spring twilight, as moonlight on quiet waters. Wide-spaced, unwavering, transparently candid as a child’s, they met his so gravely and steadily that they turned the reckless gayety of the bright curved mouth into an unconscionable liar.

  “But, great heavens above, it is the War Baby!” cried the startled young policeman from Vienna.

  “I was wondering whether you’d remember,” said the deep voice tranquilly. “Sixteen years—that’s a long time to remember even an enemy. Welcome home.”

  “Oh, dear Lord, give me patience!” invoked Freddy Parrish passionately. “Just when he was practically mine forever—and now it turns out that they shared bibs and rattles. Oh, well, go on, go on, don’t pay any attention to me.”

  Mr. Sheridan prepared to obey this injunction with alacrity and a brief valedictory smile.

  “No, but surely it wasn’t Tess that we called you?” he demanded urgently of the snow maiden at his side. “No, wait, I remember perfectly; it was Charity—Charity Stuart, and you wore red mittens with gauntlets up to your elbows, and a red béret far back on your head, and a red wool sash around your waist, and you could throw the hardest, straightest snowball in Lafayette Park, even though you were only six years old and a girl at that!”

  “If you knew what the little girls and boys used to say when they called me Charity,” the girl with the lost War Baby’s eyes was saying, “you wouldn’t be surprised that I abandoned it fifteen years ago. Poor Mother apologized humbly and tried to make up for it by suggesting Tess—from her maiden name, you know—she was Hope de Tessaincourt. It’s my middle name, too, so I really have a right to it.”

  “Charity de Tessaincourt Stuart.” The young man repeated it thoughtfully. “Such a great name for such a little girl in red mittens; no, I do not blame you for changing it. And Tess has a brave sound. I had forgotten that your mother was French.”

  “Not really French. Just New Orleans. But, K, how could you possibly have forgotten?”

  “I was only eleven when I left, you see—or was it twelve? But I have not forgotten how pretty she was with those little dark fur muffs and Parma violets—and all the pearls and lace—and those great parasols with frills like flowers.”

  “Oh, you do remember!” she cried. “That’s the way I love to remember her, too, with hats like bouquets, and little veils that made her eyes look bigger and darker than anyone else’s, and little gloves, soft as white kittens and smelling of orris, wrinkling around her wrists.”

  “Remember her?” he repeated. “But—do you, too, have to remember her then?”

  “Yes—oh, yes. She died when I was ten; didn’t you know?”

  “She was a most lovely lady,” he said gently. “I had not heard.”

  “It was a long time ago,” she told him, curving her mouth bravely in reassurance. But the clear and steadfast eyes said, uncomforted, It was yesterday.

  “I wish I could remember my father so clearly and so well, but I was only five, and now all I can remember is how sometimes I would look up quickly from the floor where I was playing just so that I could catch them smiling at each other with their eyes, as if they shared some strange and beautiful secret. It was because I remembered that smile so well, I think, that I
came all the way back to America to go to his college.”

  “And your mother—she married again? I heard you telling Freddy Parrish about your stepfather. When it began to seem as though I weren’t ever going to get any first-hand information, I eavesdropped shamelessly!”

  “Yes, almost ten years ago, to the best fellow in the world, and certainly the best chemist. We are all of us great friends.”

  “But, K, I still can’t possibly see how you could forget that my mother was almost French. Don’t you remember—that’s how those simply magnificent rows started? Don’t you remember Mademoiselle making me pray every night that the Kaiser would die of an apoplexy, and how you said that that was a cad’s trick, and I was so frantic that I banged my head against a cherry tree until I had a bump as big as a duck’s egg, because I simply couldn’t bear not being big enough to hurt you? That was when you started calling me the War Baby, and all the other children did, too. Oh, you can’t say that you don’t remember!”

  “But of course, of course I remember! Do I not then! And how you came flying at me like three kinds of a small mad thing!” He threw back his dark head with a sudden shout of delighted laughter. “I can still see those wild legs kicking out in their leather gaiters—and what is more, I can still feel them!”

  “That’s splendid; I sound like a very estimable child. And you,” she added severely, “sound like a horrid, horrid little boy.”

  “Poor War Baby!” he condoled. “Standing there with those little paws curled up into angry balls inside those red mittens, crying—crying like a fountain and never making any sound at all. I can see you now!”

  “I still cry that way. Absurd, isn’t it?”

  “Do you still cry, then? A great girl like you?”

  She said briefly, in the low voice that stamped even light and trivial words with a strange significance:

  “Not often.… Not now.… Have you come back to Washington to live?”