Free Testimony Of Two Men by Taylor Caldwell Page A

things to do. Before I joined you today, I had a telegram from my mother. She is coming here four days earlier. I— I have arrangements to make. She wants a suite in the hotel.”
    Jonathan’s black brows drew down over his dark eyes. He
    shrugged. “Very well. Another day. My mother likes you, Bob.”
    Do you? thought Robert. He got in the phaeton with Jonathan and they drove off briskly.
     
    Jenny Heger continued to cultivate her father’s roses after the guests had left. But now there were tears on her cheeks, which she childishly wiped away with the back of her hands, leaving smudges on her skin.
    After a while she felt strong hands on her shoulders, and then fingers moving softly through the hot tangle of her black hair. She did not lift her head. She said, “I warned you not to touch me. One of these days you’ll make me kill you.”
    “Sweet Jenny,” said Harald. “You’re like a young, unbroken colt.”
    “Take your hands away from me!”
    Harald stood up, sighing. “I love you, Jenny. I want to marry you. What’s so offensive about that?”
    “I will really kill you,” said Jenny. She sat back on her heels and regarded him with hatred, her blue eyes one savage blaze.
    “I will surely kill you,” she repeated. She looked at him with all the power of her strong young body and spirit, and after a moment he strolled off.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The warm June weather had suddenly disappeared Now the sky was gray and misty and the air chill and damp. The mountains were lost in the white fog and moisture dripped from trees and shrubbery and eaves, though it was not raining.
    Jonathan Ferrier and his mother, Marjorie Ferrier, sat in the breakfast room of their sturdy red brick house with the white shutters and doors and trimmings of brass, brightly shined. The casement windows were shut tightly, the blue draperies partly drawn, the gas chandelier lit in this early morning, and a brisk little fire rustling on the white brick hearth. It was pleasant here and fragrant with potpourri and wax and coffee and burning wood, the room octagonal in shape, the walls palely painted, the furniture of light mahogany.
    Marjorie Ferrier, fifty-five years old, was tall and slender, having retained her girlhood figure and grace. She wore a well-fitting shirtwaist of white lawn and lace, the high neck boned, and a slim, long black skirt of soft silk. Her tall pompadour was black, with ribbons of gray through it, and there were small pearls at her ears. In appearance, she greatly resembled her son, Jonathan, for her complexion was dark, her face thin and planed, her mourn austere, her nose sharp and somewhat long, her black brows straight. But her eyes were brilliantly hazel, and large, like her son, Harald’s, with thick short lashes. It was from his mother, the former Miss Farmington, that Jonathan had inherited his “foreign” look, and not from his father, who was of French descent. Harald resembled his father, who had been more Anglo-Saxon in appearance than his truly Anglo-Saxon wife.
    Mrs. Ferrier was a handsome woman, elegant and restrained, and only the faint pallor about her lips suggested that she was not in the best of health. She never spoke of illness or disability, for she was a lady. She rarely descended to the personal, for she was a woman of reticences. Neither of her sons knew her well at all, and Jonathan the least. It was her nature to preserve her privacy even from her children, and though she had never punished them herself, she had, in their childhood, only to give them a stern glance to quell them. In many ways they feared her. They did not know that she loved them dearly.
    It was one of her aphorisms that a man was truly the head of the household. Since her husband’s death Jonathan had become that head. Gentlemen frequently read their newspapers or periodicals at the breakfast table, so she was not offended that Jonathan was reading. She was content to fill his coffee cup from her polished silver coffeepot,