Quin
Copyright© 2025 by Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice
Chapter 5
Eleanor’s thoughts were still in a turmoil as she slowed her car to a within-the-law limit of speed and brought it to a dignified halt before an imposing edifice on Third Avenue. The precaution was well taken, for a long, pale face that had been pressed to a front window promptly transferred itself to the front door, and an anxious voice called out:
“Oh, Nellie, why did you stay out so late? Didn’t you know it was your duty to be in before five?”
“It’s not late, Aunt Isobel,” said Eleanor impatiently. “It gets dark early, that’s all.”
“And you must be frozen,” persisted Miss Isobel, “with those thin pumps and silk stockings, and nothing but that veil on your head.”
“But I’m hot!” declared Eleanor, throwing open her coat. “The house is stifling. Can’t we have a window open?”
Miss Isobel sighed. Like the rest of the family, she never knew what to expect from this troublesome, adorable, disturbing mystery called Eleanor. She worshiped her with the solicitous, over-anxious care that saw fever in the healthy flush of youth, regarded a sneeze as premonitory of consumption, and waited with dark certitude for the “something dreadful” that instinct told her was ever about to happen to her darling.
“I am afraid your grandmother is terribly upset about your staying out so late,” she said, with a note of warning in her voice.
“What made you tell her?” demanded Eleanor.
“Because she asked me, and of course I could not deceive her. I don’t believe you know how hard it is to keep things from her.”
“Don’t I!” said Eleanor, with the tolerant smile of a professional for an amateur. “Well, a few minutes more won’t make any difference. I’ll go and change my dress.”
“No, dear; you must go to her first. She’s been sending Hannah down every few minutes to see if you were here.”
“Oh, dear! I suppose I’m in for it!” sighed Eleanor, flinging her coat across the banister. Then, in answer to a plaintive voice from the library, “Yes, Aunt Enid?”
“Why on earth are you so late, sweetheart? Didn’t you know your grandmother would be fretted?”
The possessor of the plaintive voice emerged from the library, trailing an Oriental scarf as she came. Like her elder sister, she was tall and thin, but she did not wear Miss Isobel’s look of martyred resignation. On the contrary, she had the starved look of one who is constantly trying to pick up the crumbs of interest that other people let fall.
Enid Bartlett might have passed for a pretty woman had her appearance not been permanently affected by an artist once telling her she looked like a Botticelli. Since that time she had done queer things to her hair, pursed her lips, and cultivated an expression of chronic yearning.
“I haven’t seen you since breakfast, Nellie,” she said gently. “Haven’t you a kiss for me?”
Eleanor presented a perfunctory cheek over the banisters, taking care that it was not the one that had been kissed a few minutes before.
“Remember your promise,” Aunt Enid whispered; “don’t forget that your grandmother is an old lady and you must not excite her.”
“But she excites me,” said Eleanor doggedly. “She makes me want to smash windows and scream.”
“Why, Nellie!” Miss Enid’s mournful eyes filled with tears. Instantly Eleanor was all contrition.
“I’m sorry!” she said, with a real kiss this time. “I’ll behave. Give you my word I will!” And, with an affectionate squeeze of the hand that clasped hers, she ran up the steps.
The upper hall, like the rest of the house, was pervaded by an air of gloomy grandeur. Everything was dreary, formal, fixed. Not an ornament or a picture had been changed since Eleanor could remember. She was the only young thing about the place, and it always seemed to her as if the house and its occupants were conspiring to make her old and staid and stupid, like themselves.
At the door of her grandmother’s room she paused. As far back as she could remember, her quarrels with her grandmother had been the most terrifying events of her life. Repetition never robbed them of their horror, and no amount of spoiling between times could make up to her for the violence of the moment. It took all the courage she had to turn the knob of the door and enter.
A brigadier-general planning an important campaign would have presented no more commanding presence than did the formidable old lady who sat at a flat-top desk, issuing orders in a loud, decisive tone to a small meek-looking man who stood before her. The most arresting feature about Madam Bartlett was a towering white pompadour that began where most pompadours end, and soared to a surprising height above her large, handsome, masculine face. The fact that her hair line had gradually receded from her forehead to the top of her head affected no change whatever in the arrangement of her coiffure. Neither in regard to her hair nor to her figure had she yielded one iota to the whims of Nature. Her body was still confined in the stiffest of stays, and in spite of her seventy years was as straight as an arrow. At Eleanor’s entrance she motioned her peremptorily to a chair and proceeded with the business in hand.
“You go back and tell Mr. Bangs,” she was saying to the meek-looking person, “that I want him to send somebody up here who knows more than you do. Do you understand?”
The meek one evidently understood, for he reached nervously for his cap.
“Wait!” commanded Madam peremptorily. “Don’t start off like that, while I am talking to you! Tell Mr. Bangs this is the third time I’ve asked him to send me the report of Bartlett “ Bangs’ export business for the past year. I want it immediately. I am not in my dotage yet. I still have some say-so in the firm. Well, what are you waiting for?”
“I was waiting to know if there was anything more, ma’am.”
“If there had been I would have said so. Tell Hannah to come in as you go out.”
Eleanor looked at her grandmother expectantly, but there was no answering glance. The old lady was evidently in one of her truculent moods that brooked no interference.
“Has the plumber come?” she demanded of the elderly colored maid who appeared at the door.
“No, ma’am. He can’t get here till to-morrow.”
“Tell him I won’t wait. If he can’t come within an hour he needn’t come at all. Where is Tom?”
Hannah’s eyes shifted uneasily. “Tom? Why, Tom, he thought you discharged him.”
“So I did. But he’s not to go until I get another butler. Send him up here at once.”
“But he ain’t here,” persisted Hannah fearfully, “He’s went for good this time.”
Eleanor, sitting demurely by the door, had a moment of unholy exultation. Old black Tom, the butler, had been Madam’s chief domestic prop for a quarter of a century. He had been the patient buffer between her and the other servants, taking her domineering with unfailing meekness, and even venturing her defense when mutiny threatened below stairs. “You-all don’t understand old Miss,” he would say loyally. “She’s all right, only she’s jes’ nachully mean, dat’s all.”
In the turning of this humble worm, Eleanor felt in some vague way a justification of her own rebellion.
His departure, however, did not tend to clear the domestic atmosphere. By the time Madam had settled the plumbing question and expressed her opinion of Tom and all his race, she was in no mood to deal leniently with the shortcomings of a headstrong young granddaughter.
“Well,” she said, addressing her at last, “why didn’t you make it midnight?”
“It’s only a little after five.” Eleanor knew she was putting up a feeble defense, and her hands grew cold.
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