Chapter 25

In reply to her letter to her brother-in-law, Margaret received from him, a week later, a telegram that puzzled her greatly.


Charleston, S.C.

Important Berkeley estate business brings me to New Munich Thursday, February tenth.

WALTER.


She had ten days before his coming to anticipate with some uneasiness the shock he would certainly get in making the acquaintance of her husband's sisters and in seeing the kind of home she lived in.

"If only I could dispose of that navy blue owl on the sideboard!" she worried. "And of all that imitation onyx in the parlour! And the 'oil-paintings' in the sitting-room! As for Jennie and Sadie themselves—— Oh, what can Walter be coming here for? I don't suppose they've discovered coal on our estate. I hope not, such a dirty mess as it would make! More like our luck to discover we don't, after all, own the place."

But she found, when she announced her brother-in-law's prospective visit, that she herself had not yet got all the shocks and surprises the Leitzels were capable of affording her. Her Southern sentiment of hospitality received another unexpected blow in discovering that Jennie and Sadie quite seriously objected to entertaining her brother-in-law at their home.

"We ain't used to comp'ny stopping here," Jennie explained to her. "Danny's business acquaintances always go to the hotel. It wouldn't suit me just so well. We ain't so young as we used to be, and it would certainly be a worry to me to have company stopping here. You'd best not begin that kind of thing, Margaret. If your brother-in-law slep' and eat here, it would mebby give our Sadie the headache."

That New Munich hospitality, instead of being a condition of daily life as with Southerners, was so specialized an occasion as to cause the upsetting of a household and the expenditure of the nervous energy of a whole family, Margaret had come to recognize. People did not "keep open house"; they "entertained." But how was she to spring such a thing upon Walter, who knew no other standard of hospitality than that of the open Southern home? How explain to him upon his arrival that her home and her husband's was not open to him, and that he must stop at a hotel?

She had not at all solved the problem when in a wholly unlooked-for way it was solved for her. Confined to bed one day with a violent headache, and quite helpless to protect her babies from Jennie's hygienic theories, the twins were kept by their aunt in a hot, airtight room such as Jennie considered their proper environment, with the result that they cried all day; and the next day had heavy colds—their first disorder of any kind since their birth. But when Margaret, herself recovered, insisted upon taking them, suffering from influenza as they were, out into the chill air of a cold day in January, Jennie's thwarted will, thwarted affection, and wild anxiety for these babies of Danny's whom she loved almost fiercely, broke all bounds, and she gave Margaret her ultimatum.

"Or either you keep those children in the house till they're well already, or either I and Sadie leave this house where we have to look on at such croolities, and go to keep house by ourselves! Yes, this very day we go!"

Margaret paused in the strenuous work of getting little Daniel's arms into his coat sleeves, preparatory to his outing, and gazed up at Jennie with such a light of joyful hope in her eyes that Jennie, had she not been too blindly furious to see it, would certainly have withdrawn this proffered happiness from her now heartily detested sister-in-law.

"If Danny wasn't in Philadelphia to-day, I'd 'phone to his office and have him make you keep them in!" she raged frantically. "They'll get pneumonia, so they will!"

"Daniel couldn't make me, Jennie. I act under the doctor's orders. Daniel's a lawyer, not a physician. I'm taking the babies out to save them from having pneumonia."

"Daniel couldn't make you, couldn't he? Well, I can! Yes, and I mean what I say! You take these babies out on a day like this when they're sick, and I and Sadie move out this very day!" she harshly reiterated, under the delusion that Margaret would never put her to the test: for not only was Jennie incapable of realizing Margaret's utter indifference to the economic advantage of their joint housekeeping, but it also seemed to her wholly incredible that her sister-in-law could subject her devoted and indulgent husband to the suffering he would certainly undergo if deprived of his sisters' constant ministrations to his comforts.

"And when Danny comes home from Philadelphia to-night and finds us gone and our half of the furniture being moved out, what do you think he'll say to you for driving us out?"

Margaret, realizing that she must conceal the heaven opened up by this unexpected ultimatum, quickly cast down her eyes, that her tormentor might not see her quivering eagerness.

"I'll goad her to moving out!" she desperately resolved. "Oh! if only I can make it impossible for her to back down from her threat."

She suddenly raised her eyes again and laughed sarcastically. "Oh, you can't scare me with your threats! You'll not go!"

"You'll see whether we won't! You just dare to take those sick children outside this house, and you won't find I and Sadie here when you come home!"

"That won't worry me. You'll be back soon enough. Catch you leaving your brother's house! Oh, no, my dear, you don't fool me for one minute. Why, where on earth would you go?"

"Maybe you don't know," put in Sadie triumphantly, "that Jennie and me own the nice empty house at the corner that the tenants moved out of because we wouldn't repaper!"

"Yes," exclaimed Jennie, "we own it and it's empty; and it's all been cleaned only last week a'ready. So then you see if we couldn't move out of here perfectly convenient!"

Margaret's hopes rose higher, while at the same time she suffered fearful misgivings lest by any inadvertency on her part they be dashed.

"Ha!" she laughed derisively and most artificially. "You'd never move in there and lose the rent of that house! You can't fool me! I'm not scared. Come, baby dear, other little arm now!" she said, tugging at Daniel Junior's coat. "Fancy your moving out! Ha!"

Her utterly unnatural tone of taunting sarcasm ought not to have deceived even so slow a mind as Jennie Leitzel's, but the woman's rage dulled what penetration she ordinarily had and she was completely misled.

"I'm not trying to fool you!" she almost screamed. "I tell you that sure as you go out the door with those two twins, my brother, when he comes home this evening, will find us and our furniture gone, never to come back! I'll prove it to you, I'll prove it! And we'll take Emmy along, and there'll be no dinner for my poor brother when he comes home!"

"Oh, yes, there will," Margaret laughed quite sardonically. "There will be dinner and there will be two dear, devoted sisters. If you do take your departure, you'll be back soon enough!" Her unnatural tones kept it up, every phrase carefully calculated to force the consummation she so devoutly wished, though inwardly her very soul was sick at the part she played; for deep down in her heart there was an undercurrent of pity for these poor creatures so limited in their capacity for happiness and yet capable of fiercely loving the babies so dear to them all and the brother they had cherished from babyhood.

"You'll see, then, if we'll come back again!" Jennie hoarsely harked back at her. "Yes, you'll see! And you'll see what Danny'll——"

Margaret having tucked the babies warmly into their coach, laughed again devilishly as she wheeled them out to the porch.

"You'll be back! Bye-bye until I see you again!" And with a peal of mocking laughter, so cleverly melodramatic that she marvelled at her own hitherto unsuspected histrionic talent, she disappeared.

And so it transpired that the marriage of Daniel Leitzel afforded one more sensation to New Munich's not yet surfeited taste for gossip concerning their notable townsman; for when Daniel got home that evening at seven o'clock he found a dismantled and disordered house, no dinner, no cook, no sisters; only two sweetly sleeping babies in the nursery and a wife with a face uplifted with a new-born happiness and peace. So deep was the serenity that had settled upon her and upon the servantless, dismantled, and disordered household, that Daniel's rage and grief, his bitter reproaches, his lamentations over the extra expense his home would now be to him passed over her head as though it were nothing more than the somewhat irritating cackle of an old hen.

Daniel, after a call on his sisters at their new home down at the corner and a long and painful interview with them, in which they affirmed that unless he exercised his marital and scriptural authority to make Margaret apologize and promise that in the future she would treat them and their wishes with the consideration which was their due, they would not return to his house, though from this close proximity to him they could and would continue to see after his comforts—after this most unsatisfactory and upsetting conversation with his sisters, Daniel went to his bed very late that night, feeling, for the first time in his life, that he was abused of Fate; but Margaret lay awake long, revelling ecstatically in the realization that now at last she had a home of her very own; two lovely babies on whom she could expend the pent-up riches of her heart and in whom her own highest ideals might perhaps be wrought out; a friend who deeply shared her life and whom now she could freely bring into the sanctum of her own home. Oh, life was full and rich! She was young, she was strong, she was happy.

The husband asleep at her side was a negligible quantity in her estimate of her blessings; he was a responsibility she had incurred and to which she certainly meant to be faithful. It was not in his power to make her very unhappy.

But Margaret was, in fact, rejoicing a little too soon. Jennie and Sadie had gone out from her home, but they had not yet gone out of her life, as she was to realize later.

Daniel's anger was not modified when, next morning, he was obliged, for the first time in his life, to get up and attend to the furnace and the kitchen range. Margaret judiciously repressed her amusement at his plight.

"Oh, well, dear, you are not the only one. It's the first time in my life I ever had to get up and get breakfast," she offered what seemed to him most irrelevant consolation.

"Marriage," she reflected philosophically when, without kissing her good-bye, he left her to go to his office, "must be an adjusting of one's self to, and acceptance of, the inevitable, Daniel being the Inevitable!"

She decided, as she called up the Employment Office, that she needed three servants, but she did not have the temerity to engage more than one. For here was a point at which Daniel held the whip-hand: he could refuse to pay the wages of those he considered superfluous, and she had no money of her own.

"As Jennie and Sadie paid half of Emmy's wages," she reflected, "it will go hard with Daniel to have to pay the maid entirely himself. Anyway," she rejoiced, "I shan't now have to send Walter to a hotel."