Bubbles and Troubles

By Ruth Moench Bell

(Previous chapter)

Chapter 4

Rhea went home and was glad to be hustled off to the coast. It was plain that if her father and mother had talked things over they had arrived at no amiable conclusions.

Her father’s sarcastic disapproval of all her mother said or did, the mother’s sneering indifference, the fact that her presence was almost totally ignored, combined to make the few meals and few minutes spent together almost intolerable.

Her father, usually so affectionate and proud of his daughter, seemed to have allowed his resentment against his wife to sour or chill his regard for his only child. This was, indeed, the hardest phase of this new condition for Rhea.

“I’d rather go back to Aunt Edith’s,” she pleaded with her mother. “She needs me. They will have to take such good care of Ralph and Ruth for weeks yet.”

“Your future is at stake,” Mrs. Leslie replied haughtily. “If 1 left you out there you are just at the impressionable age and very soon you would be falling in love with some common person and ruin your chances for life.”

“But Marjory’s beau, gentleman friend, I mean, the young man she steps out with, is not common. He is good and kind and honest. Anyone can see he worships Mugs.”

Mrs. Leslie turned on her daughter. “Do you mean to tell me that infant, Marjory, is actually ‘stepping out’ with a young man? Why, she is barely eighteen.”

“But what is the difference if he is a good man and they love each other?”

“It may be all right for Marjory to settle down in that stuffy little town and become narrow-minded and — “

“But Aunt Edith is not narrow-minded,” Rhea defended. “If any one is open-minded enough to learn and see things in a different light one is not narrow-minded.”

“I want you to have a chance to meet the world,” Mrs. Leslie cut the argument short.

At parting, Rhea’s papa gave her a brief, absent-minded kiss. He did not even glance in the direction of his wife; but deposited their bags and left the train abruptly. Rhea longed to clasp her arms about his neck and kiss the vexed, worried look from his face but dared not. She watched him leave the train and walk across the platform to their car. Her eyes smarted with tears when he started the car off without a backward glance at her.

“I can’t bear it, mother,” she cried.

“Oh, he’s no business acting so,” Mrs. Leslie snapped. However, she, too, seemed gloomy till the train was in motion. Soon people began making themselves at home for the long trip. Greetings were exchanged and soon Mrs. Leslie was her usual charming self.

Rhea, looking on with thoughts only for her father and their broken home life, commented to herself as she saw her mother chatting over the little train commonplaces every traveler indulges in. “Mama is lovely socially. She has so much charm and social tact. I don’t wonder every one loves her. Every one except papa. And other men seem to find her so charming.”

One of these other men, when they reached the coast, seemed to find Mrs. Leslie so charming that Rhea, in alarm, made a little plan of her own.

“I know all about women,” this blase young man of perhaps thirty-five years, remarked caustically. “I know all their tricks. They can’t fool me any more.”

Rhea was an exotic in this artificial setting and she took the dare. Before Mrs. Leslie was aware that Rhea, too, had charm and a certain saucy piquancy with youth and a distinction all her own, Barney Graham, who knew all the tricks of the sex and hence was vulnerable to none, was trailing Rhea about dazzled and fascinated, completely under her spell.

“It’s got to cease,” Mrs. Leslie remonstrated after an evening of coquetry in which the young girl had shown herself an apt pupil of the set about her. “I’ll take you home at once unless you leave him entirely alone.”

To Mrs. Leslie’s amazement, Rhea drew herself up with a hauteur which matched her own. “It is too late. Mamma,” she observed quietly. “I can’t leave him alone. I love him. Don’t look so. Mama, I only meant to jar him a little. He was so sure of himself. And I wanted to get him away from you for papa’s sake. I can’t bear to see other men pay you attentions and see you dance with them, half-dressed as you women are, especially when papa isn’t here. And now I love him myself, Mama. He’s had such a sad life. False women have made him feel that all women are false. I want to make up to him for all the happiness he has missed.”

“Rhea,” Mrs. Les|ie exclaimed, as she sank helplessly onto a chair, “he is thirty-five or more. He is already grey about the temples, and only a vaudeville actor, the most uncertain profession in the world. You shall not have him. I shall forbid him to speak to you again.”

“It is too late, Mama. We are already engaged to be married. And he has already left on one of h’s trips. He will meet me in Utah if you won’t let him come here. And we are going to do a vaudeville act together if we can get it accepted.”

“In vaudeville! You in vaudeville!”

“He says he knows I have talent. And we have rehearsed our act several times.”

“Rhea ! I’ll wire your father tonight.”

“Oh, by the way, there is a letter from papa’s attorney. It came while you were out.”

“From his attorney !” Mrs. Leslie went white. She read the missive with shaking fingers. Then she covered her face with her hands and moaned.

Rhea flew to her side. “What is it, Mama! What is it? “Divorce proceedings,” Mrs. Leslie cried in dull tones.

“Divorce !” Rhea shrank from the word as if it were tainted. It was an ugly word like murder, and perjury and theft. Words she had never figured into her world.

“Oh, Mama, Mama,” she exclaimed, “we musn’t let him do that!”

“We can’t stop him now. I should have taken warning before. All we can do is to hurry home and keep him from cutting us off without a penny.”

“Oh, the pennies,” Rhea shivered, remembering her papa’s troubled face as she last saw it. “Is that all papa means to you? Some day will Barney be to me only a meal ticket?”

“Surely you will stop that nonsense now,” the mother appealed. “You won’t give me that trouble, too.”

“Oh, Mjama, Mama, I would do anything for you and papa. But I can’t give him up. Papa would not ask it if he knew I loved him. Barney is all there is in the world for me now. Home wouldn’t be home without papa. I’ll have to make a new home for myself now. Oh, Mama, why have we left papa home alone all these months? Why didn’t we stay and do as he wished and try and make him happy ? Surely papa was entitled to that much when he made the living for us. A little visit away from home once in a while would have been all right. But papa has been at the steady grind ever since I can remember with never a holiday, scarcely.”

“Other women of means spend their winters in California,” Mrs. Leslie cried. “There is no reason why we should stick in that poky, little town. Others can make a living in California. He could, too, if he tried.”

“I wish I had got off the train and gone back with papa as I longed to do,” Rhea burst out. “I’ve hated to be taken off like this spending money papa works hard to get, while he is home lonely eating his meals at restaurants and coming home weary to an empty house. I wish I had done as I felt and gone back. Oh, then I’d never have met — ”

“Yes, then you’d never have met Barney Graham except across the foot-lights.”

“Mama.” Rhea exclaimed indignantly. “You’ve chased bubbles so long you can’t see how real Barney is to me or how real papa’s wishes and troubles are. And all these people who purr around you now and whom you try to be like wouldn’t nurse us through a fever if our lives depended upon them. They wouldn’t lend us five dollars if we were starving. It is all pretense and sham. They are just playing at living. All papa has wanted was a real home. And I’ll see that Barney has one when we earn enough money that we can settle down.”

(To be continued)