Mary Wollaston by Henry Kitchell Webster (best story books to read txt) 📕

wondered if he wasn't a little afraid of Paula. If he did not, in his heart, actually dislike her. But if this were true, why did he willingly devote so many of his hours to squiring her about, substituting for her husband? (She told herself, as one discovering a great truth, that a substitute was exactly what Heaven had ordained Wallace Hood to be.) She kept him going about Paula easily enough, as a sort of obbligato to these meditations and her name was on Wallace's lips when John Wollaston came into the room.

"Where is she?" he asked Mary. "I hoped I'd find her resting for to-night." Evidently he had been up to her room to see. The relief was plainly legible in his face when he got Mary's answer.

"She and Rush, eh," he said. "I'm glad they've made a start together, but they ought to be back by now. They drove, didn't they?"

She couldn't inform him as to that and by way of getting him to come to anchor, offered him his tea.

"Oh, I'll wait for the others," he said. "They can't be much later than this.--I'm glad she's taken a vacation from those songs," he went on presently from the fireplace. "She told me last night she'd been working all day with Novelli over them. Only sent him home about half an hour before it was time for her to dress for dinner. Do you suppose,"--this to Wallace--"that they're as wonderful as she thinks they are?"

It was obvious to Mary that Hood's reply was calculated to soothe; his attitude was indulgent. He talked to Mary about March as just another of Paula's delightful extravagances. March's indignant refusal, at first, to tune the Circassian grand, his trick of sitting on the floor under Paula's piano while she played for him, his forgetting to be paid, though he had not, in all probability, a cent in his pockets, were exhibited as whimsicalities, such as Wallace's favorite author, J.M. Barrie, might have invented. It was just like Paula to take him up as she had done, to work away for days at his songs, proclaiming the wonder of them all the while. "We're all hoping, of course," he concluded, "that when she's finished with them to-night, she'll sing us some of the old familiar music we really love."

The neat finality of all this, produced, momentarily, the effect of ranging Mary on the other side, with Paula and her musician. But just at this point, she lost her character of disinterested spectator, for Wallace, having put March back in his box and laid him deliberately on the shelf, abruptly produced, by way of diversion, another piece of goods altogether.

"I hope Mary's come home to stay," he said to John. "We can't let her go away again, can we?"

Afterward, she was able to see that it was a natural enough thing for him to have said. It would never have occurred to him, pleasant, harmless sentimentalist that he was, that John's second marriage might be a disturbing factor in his relation with Mary and that the question so cheerfully asked as an escape from the more serious matter that he had been talking about, struck straight into a ganglion of nerves.

But at the time, no such excuse for him presented itself. She stared for a moment, breathless, paled a little and locked her teeth so that they shouldn't chatter; then, a wave of bright anger relaxed her stiffened muscles. She did not look at her father but was aware that he was fixedly not looking at her.

"I don't know whether I am going to stay or not," she said casually enough. "There isn't any particular reason why I should, unless I can find something to do. You haven't a job for me, have you?"

"A job?" Wallace gasped.

"In your office," she explained. "Filing and typing, or running the mimeograph. It seems to be a choice between something like that and--millinery."

"That's an extravagant idea," her father said, trying for, but not quite able to manage, a tone that matched hers. "Good lord, Wallace, don't sit there looking as if you thought she meant it!"

"You do look perfectly--consternated," she said with a pretty good laugh. "Never mind; I shan't do anything outrageous for a week or two. Oh, here they come. Will you ring, dad? I want some more hot water."

Rush came into the drawing-room alone, Paula having lingered a moment, probably before the mirror in the hall. Mere professional instinct for arranging entrances for herself, Mary surmised this to be. And she may have been right for Paula was not one of those women who are forever making minute readjustments before a glass. But when she came in, just after Wallace Hood had accomplished his welcome of the returned soldier, it was hard to believe that she was concerned about the effect she produced upon the group about the tea-table. She didn't, indeed, altogether join it, gave them a collective nod of greeting with a faint but special smile for her husband on the end of it and then deliberately seated herself with a "No, don't bother; this is all right," at the end of the little sofa that stood in the curve of the grand piano, rather in the background.

When Mary asked her how she wanted her tea, she said she didn't think she'd have any; and certainly no cakes. No, not even one of Wallace's candied strawberries. There was an exchange of glances between her and Rush over this. "They have been having tea by themselves, those two," Mary remarked.

"No," said Rush, "not what you could call tea."

Paula smiled vaguely but didn't throw the ball back, did not happen, it appeared, to care to talk about anything. Presently the chatter among the rest of them renewed itself.

Only it would have amused an invisible spectator to note how those three Wollastons, blonde, dolichocephalic, high-strung, magnetically susceptible, responded, as strips of gold-leaf to the static electricity about a well rubbed amber rod, to the influence that emanated from that silent figure on the sofa. Rush, in and out of his chair a dozen times, to flip the ash from his cigarette, to light one for Mary, to hand the strawberries round again, was tugging at his moorings like a captive balloon. When he answered a question it was with the air of interrupting an inaudible tune he was whistling. John still planted before the fireplace, taking, automatically, a small part in the talk just as he went through the minimum of business with his tea, seemed capable of only one significant action, which he repeated at short, irregular intervals. He turned his head enough to enable him to see into a mirror which gave him a reflection of his wife's face; then turned away again, like one waiting for some sort of reassurance and not getting it. Mary, muscularly relaxed, indeed, drooping over the tea-table, had visible about her, nevertheless, a sort of supernormal alertness. Every time her father looked into the mirror she glanced at him, and she rippled, like still water, at all of her brother's sudden movements.

As for Wallace Hood, one look at him sitting there, as unresponsive to the spell as the cup from which he was sipping its third replenishment of tea, would have explained his domestication in that household;--the necessity, in fact, for domesticating among them some one who was always buoyantly upon the surface, whose talk, in comfortably rounded sentences, flowed along with a mild approximation to wit, whose sentiments were never barbed with passion;--who was, to sum him up in one embracing word, appropriate.

Mary, in addition to feeling repentant over her outbreak just before Paula came in, experienced a sort of gratitude to him for being able to sit squarely facing the sofa, untroubled by the absent thoughtful face and the figure a little languorously disposed that confronted him. His bright generalities were addressed to her as much as to the rest of them; his smile asked the same response from her and nothing more.

Nothing short of an explosion that shattered all their surfaces at once could have got a single vibration out of him. By that same token, when the explosion did occur, he was the most helpless person there, the only one of them who could really be called panic-stricken.

John had, at last, crossed the room and seated himself beside his wife. He spoke to her in a low voice but her full-throated reply was audible everywhere in the room.

"No, I'm not tired and I really don't want any tea. I've gone slack on purpose because that's how I want to be till nine o'clock. I've just eaten an enormous oyster stew with Rush. That's what we waited for."

John frowned. "My dear, you'll have ruined your appetite for dinner."

"I hope so," she said, "because I'm not to have any."

At that, from the other two men, there began an expostulatory--"No dinner!" "You don't mean ...!" but it was silenced by John's crisp--"You're planning not to come down to dinner, then?" "Oh, I'll come down," said Paula, "and I'll sit. But I don't mean to eat anything. Unless you think that will be too much like a--what is it?--skeleton at the feast."

"I think it would seem somewhat-exaggerated," he said.

"Well," Paula retorted, drawing the rest of the room into it again just as Wallace was making a gallant effort to start a subsidiary conversation to serve as a screen, "that's because you haven't heard those songs. If there's a singer in the world who'd dare--cut loose with them right after eating the sort of dinner Lucile will have to-night for Mary and Rush, I'd like to see him try it."

"I didn't mean to imply that they were not difficult. I dare say they are all but impossible. But it does seem to me that you are taking the occasion of singing them--a little too--emotionally."

The tone he was trying for was meant to have nothing in it--for other ears than hers, at least, beyond mere good-humored remonstrance. But her reply tore all pretense aside. She let him have it straight.

"You're the one who's being emotional about it," she said.

The blood leaped into his face at that but he did not reply.

"Look here, John," she went on--and her big voice swept away the polite convention that the others were not listening, "I've told you that this won't work and you must see now that that's true. There's still time to call up March and tell him that it's to-morrow instead of to-day. Because of Rush and Mary. Won't you let me do that?"

It is just possible that if he had been alone with her, he might have acknowledged the issue, might have admitted that this new composer whose works she had been so absorbed in, frightened him, figured in his mind as the present manifestation of a force that was trying to take her away from him. And having let her see that, he could safely enough have said, "Have your own way about it. You know what will work and what won't. Only make it as easy for me as you can." But in the presence of his children--it was they, rather than Wallace, that he minded--he was at once evasive and domineering.

"I thought we'd already disposed of that suggestion," he said. "If the situation is as it has been made to appear to me there is not the smallest reason why March should be put off; why Mary and Rush and the friends we have asked in to meet them, shouldn't be permitted to