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

but he can't."

"I suppose I made an infernal fool of myself," he remarked, after a little silence.

She blew, for answer, an impudent smoke ring up into his face.

He continued grumpily to cover his relief that she had not been more painfully explicit,--"I suppose I shall have to make up some sort of damned apology to him."

"I don't know," she said. "That's as you like. I don't believe he'd insist upon it. He understood well enough."

He looked at her intently. "Has there been any better news from father since I went out?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Except that there's been none. Every hour now that we aren't sent for counts. What made you think there might have been?"

He said he didn't know. She looked a little more cheerful somehow, less--tragic. Evidently her visit to the Corbetts had done her good.

His eye fell once more on the manuscript. "Did he go off and forget that?" he asked. "Or did he mean to leave it for Paula? And what shall we do with it,--hand it over to her or send it back?"

Thoughtfully Mary straightened the sheets and closed the cover. "I'll take care of it for him," she said.


CHAPTER XII

HICKORY HILL

Pneumonia, for all it is characterized by what is called a crisis, has no single stride to recovery, no critical moment when one who has been in peril passes to safety. Steinmetz and Darby were determined that Mary and all the household should understand this fully. She had waylaid them in the hall as they were leaving the house together--this was seventy-two hours or so after Anthony March's call--and demanded the good news she was sure they had for her. There was a look about them and a tone in their voices that were perfectly new.

They would not be persuaded to say that her father was out of danger. There was very little left of him. His heart had been over-strained and this abnormal effect was now, in due course, transferred to the kidneys. All sorts of deadly sequellae were lying in ambush.

But the more discouraging they were, the more she beamed upon them. She walked along with them to the door, slipping her arm inside Doctor Darby's as she did so. "If you only knew," she said, "what a wonderful thing it is to have the doctors stop being encouraging and try to frighten you, instead. Because that means you really do think he's getting well."

"The balance of probability has swung to that side," Steinmetz admitted in his rather affected staccato. "At all events he's out of my beat." His beat was the respiratory tract and his treatment the last word in vaccines and serums.

She held Darby back a little. "Must we go on feeling," she asked, "that anything could happen any minute? Or--well, could Rush go back to the farm? Graham Stannard has gone to New York, I think, they're partners, you know, so he must be rather badly wanted. And this waiting is hard for him."

Rush could go, of course, Darby assured her. "For that matter," he went on with a quick glance at her, "why don't you go with him? Take your aunt along, too. For a few days, at least. You couldn't do better."

She demurred to this on the ground that it didn't seem fair to Paula. If there was a period of Arcadian retirement down on the books for anybody, it was Paula who was entitled to it.

But Paula, as Darby pointed out, wouldn't take it in the first place, and, surprisingly, didn't need it in the second. "She told me just now that she'd slept eighteen hours out of the last twenty-four and was ready for anything. She looked it, too."

He understood very well her irrepressible shrug of exasperation at that and interrupted her attempt to explain it. "It's another breed of animal altogether," he said. "And at that, I'd rather have had her job than yours. You're looking first rate, anyhow. But your aunt, if she isn't to break up badly, had better be carried off somewhere." He glanced around toward Steinmetz who had withdrawn out of ear-shot. "There are some toxins, you know," he added, "that are even beyond him and his microscopes."

Mary had meant to broach this project at dinner but changed her mind and waited until Aunt Lucile had withdrawn and she and Rush were left alone over their coffee cups for a smoke.

"Poor Aunt Lucile! She has aged years in the last three weeks. And it shows more, now the nightmare is over, than it did before."

"Is it over? Really?" he asked.

"Well, we don't need miracles any more for him. Just ordinary good care and good luck. Yes, I'd say the nightmare was over."

"Leaving us free," he commented, "to go back to our own."

"You can go back to the farm, anyhow," she said. "I asked Doctor Darby, especially, and he said so. He wants me to go along with you and take Aunt Lucile. Just for a week or so. Is there any sort of place with a roof over it where we could stay?"

He said, "I guess that could be managed." But his tone was so absent and somber that she looked at him in sharp concern.

"You didn't mean that the farm was your nightmare, did you?" she asked. "Has something gone terribly wrong out there?"

"Things have gone just the way I suppose anybody but a fool would have known they would. Not worse than that, I guess."

He got up then and went over to the sideboard, coming back with a decanter of old brandy and a pair of big English glasses. She declined hers as unobtrusively as possible, just with a word and a faint shake of the head. But it was enough to make him look at her.

"You didn't drink anything at dinner, either, did you?" he asked.

She flushed as she said, "I don't think I'm drinking, at all, just now."

"Being an example to anybody?" he asked suspiciously.

She smiled at that and patted his hand. "Oh, no, my dear. I've enough to do to be an example to myself. I liked the way it was out at the Corbetts'. They've gone bone-dry. And,--oh, please don't think that I'm a prig--I am a little better without it--just now, anyway. Tell me what's gone wrong at the farm."

"This is wonderful stuff," he said, cupping the fragile glass in his two hands and inhaling the bouquet from the precious liquor in the bottom of it. "It's good for nightmares, at any rate." After a sip or two, he attempted to answer her question.

"Oh, I suppose we'll come out all right, eventually. Of course, we've got to. But I wish Martin Whitney had done one thing or the other; either shown a little real confidence and enthusiasm in the thing or else stepped on it and refused to lend father the money."

"Lend?" Mary asked. "Did he have to borrow it?"

He dealt rather impatiently with that question. "You don't keep sixty or eighty thousand dollars lying around loose in a checking account," he said. "Of course, he had to borrow it. But he borrowed it of Whitney, worse luck--and Whitney being an old friend, pulls a long face over it whenever we find we need a little more than the original figures showed. That's enough to give any one cold feet right there.

"Graham's father is rich, of course, but he's tighter than the bark on a tree. He's gone his limit and he won't stand for anything more. He can't see that a farm like that is nothing but a factory and that you can't run it for any profit that's worth while without the very best possible equipment. He wanted us to pike along with scrub stock and the old tools and buildings that were on the place and pay for improvements out of our profits. Of course, the answer to that was that there wouldn't be any profits. A grade cow these days simply can't earn her keep with the price of feed and labor what it is. We didn't figure the cost of tools and modern buildings high enough--there _was_ such a devil of a lot of necessary things that we didn't figure on at all--and the consequence was that we didn't put a big enough mortgage on the place. Nowhere near what it would stand. And now that we want to put a second one on, Mr. Stannard howls like a wolf."

The mere sound of the word mortgage made Mary's heart sink. She looked so woebegone that Rush went on hastily.

"Oh, that'll come out in the wash. It's nothing to worry about really, because even on the basis of a bigger investment than we had any idea of making when we went in, it figures a peach of a profit. There's no getting away from that. That's not the thing about it that's driving Graham and me to drink."

He stopped on that phrase, not liking the sound of it, and in doubt about asking her not to take it literally. She saw all that as plainly as if she had been looking through an open window into his mind. He took another deliberate sip of the brandy, instead, and then went on.

"Why, it's the way things don't happen; the way we can't get anything done."

He did not see the sympathetic hand she stretched out to him; went back to the big brandy glass instead, for another long luxurious inhalation and a small sip or two. "It's partly our own fault, of course," he went on, presently. "We've made some fool mistakes. But it isn't our mistakes that are going to beat us, it's the damned bull-headed incompetence of the so-called labor we've got to deal with."

He ruminated over that in silence for a minute or two. "They talk about the inefficiency of the army," he exclaimed, "but I've been four years in two armies and I'll say that if what we've found out at Hickory Hill is a fair sample of civilian efficiency, I'll take the army way every time. There are days when I feel as if I'd like to quit;--go out West and get a job roping steers for Bob Corbett, even if he is bone-dry."

She thought if he played any longer with that brandy glass she must cry out, but he drained it this time and pushed it away. With an effort of will she relaxed her tight muscles.

"I suppose I must have looked to you like a hopeless slacker," he said, "or you wouldn't have asked Darby to send me back to work. No,--I didn't mean to put it that way. I look like one to myself, that's all, when I stop to think. Only you don't know how it has felt, this last six weeks, to go on getting tighter and tighter in your head until you feel as if you were going to burst. I went out and got drunk, once,--just plain, deliberately boiled--in order to let off steam. It did me good, too, for the time being."

She didn't look shocked at that as he had expected her to--gave him only a rather wry smile and a comprehending nod. "We're all alike; that's the trouble with us," she said. "But you will take us out to Hickory Hill, won't you? Aunt Lucile and I. I'll promise we won't be in the way nor make you any more work."

She saw he was