Rainbow at Dusk (The Emilie Loring Romances) by Emilie Loring

Author:Emilie Loring [Loring, Emilie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2021-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

XV

The Carolina sky was brilliantly blue where New York’s had been gun-metal gray. Trent drew a deep breath. December was already a few days old, yet this was one of those winter days that held a faint scent of spring and flower fragrance.

Great to be back even for a short time, he thought, as he sent his roadster ahead on the long, straight, oak-bordered avenue that led from the highway to the old brick plantation house, with its white-columned facade, now a Hunt Club in which he had guest privileges.

He left his car in a parking space and passed through a superb doorway, through large, high-ceilinged rooms with paneled walls and floors polished to glasslike smoothness, to the porch which commanded a grand view of the river. A lawn swept toward the water in sloping terraces which spread like a gigantic fan. Beyond the garden pool was the “summerhouse,” a two-story brick cottage with its iron-lace-framed porch, an antique gem which Ellen Marshall, a director of the Club, had had restored to its original beauty. Except for the dots far to the left which were golf players on greens as smooth as velvet, the place was deserted. Not a sign of life about the house.

The distant midget figures reminded him that he had come to collect his clubs. He might be ordered in a hurry to the new assignment. It would save time if he had them at Karrisbrooke.

A voice stopped him at the door of the locker room. A voice raised above the steady splash of a shower.

“He’s hinting he intends to divorce his wife.”

“He—is? Now what—d’ye—know about that?” The sentence had been punctuated by hard-drawn breaths as if the speaker were wielding a gigantic bath towel across wet shoulders.

“Anyone in the locker room?”

Trent imagined the business of looking around, stepped forward to show himself but stopped when a voice answered:—

“Nary a soul. The place is as deserted as the box office after the first-night critics panned my play.”

“That guy we were talking about never will try for a divorce,” the first voice carried on. “I happen to know he’s in dire need of the money he married to keep his racing-stable treading water. Hear he’s just sold Pug, that ace jumper of his, to the Karrisbrooke superintendent. There’s a guy with his foot on the social ladder. Watch him climb. Climb. Climb.”

“He doesn’t have to stick to the missus, does he? I’m talking about the horseman, not the superintendent. He’s got charm, he has. There are others who have money, or filthy lucre coming up, he can marry. I heard that the twice-mentioned superintendent is up to his neck in that same stable proposition and—I hear—both owners are running neck-and-neck after the same Pot of Gold.” The creak of a door. “I intend to speak to the house committee about that flashy guy who hangs round waiting for that same superintendent. He’s persona non grata here. California here I come! I’m a new man. A hot and cold shower certainly straightens out the cricks in the old joints.

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