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

than her wont, he thought.

"You needn't be afraid to say what's in your mind," he assured her.

"It wasn't that," she told him. "I realized that I had been quoting somebody else. Anthony March said once of Paula that if she had not been an artist she might have been a _dompteuse_."

John settled himself more comfortably against his tree trunk. A contact like this with his daughter's mind must have been inexpressibly comforting to him after a night like the one he had just spent. Its rectitude; its sensitiveness; the mere feel and texture of it, put his jangling nerves in tune.

"Is Ware the wild beast she has an inclination to tame in this instance?" he asked.

"He's nothing but a symbol of it," Mary said. Then she managed to get the thing a little clearer. "What she'd have done if she'd been like us and what we'd have had her do--Mr. Whitney and Wallace and I,--would have been to make a sort of compromise between her position as your wife and a career as Paula Carresford. We'd have had her sign a contract to sing a few times this winter with the Metropolitan or the Chicago company, go on a concert tour perhaps for a few weeks, even give singing lessons or sing in a church choir. That would probably have been Mr. Whitney's idea. Rather more than enough to pay her way and at the same time leave as much of her to you as possible.

"But that's the last thing in the world it would be possible for Paula to do. She must see a great career on one side,--see herself as Geraldine Farrar's successor,--and on the other side she must see a perfect unflawed life with you. So that whichever she chooses she will have a sense of making the greatest possible sacrifice. She couldn't have said to you what she did over the telephone if Mr. Ware hadn't convinced her that a great career was open to her and she couldn't have signed his contract if it had not involved sacrificing you."

She propped herself back against her hands with a sigh of fatigue. "There's some of the hair-splitting Paula talks about," she observed.

"It may be fine spun," her father said thoughtfully, "but it seems to me to hold together. Isn't there any more of it?"

"Well, it was balanced like that, you see," Mary went on; "set for the climax, like the springs in a French play, when I came along at just the moment and with just the word, to topple it over. Being Paula, she couldn't help doing exactly what she did. So, however it comes out, I shall be the one person she won't be able to forgive."

She knew from the startled look he turned upon her that this last shot had come uncannily close. She fancied she must almost literally have echoed Paula's words. If she needed any further confirmation she would have found it in the rather panicky way in which he set about trying to convince her that she was mistaken, if not in the fact at least in the permanence of it.

She insisted no further, made indeed no further attempt at all to carry the theme along and though she listened and made appropriate replies when they were called for, she let her wordless thought drift away to a dream that it was Anthony March who shared this shade and sunshine with her and that veiled blue horizon yonder. It was easier to do since her father had drifted into a reverie of his own. They need not have lingered for they had sufficiently talked away all possible grounds of misunderstanding, even if they had not reconciled their disagreement.

It occurred to her to suggest that they go back, but she dismissed the impulse with no more than a glancing thought. It was his burden, not hers, that remained to be shouldered at the cottage and it might be left to him to choose his own time for taking it up. Paula seldom came down much before noon anyhow.

As for John Wollaston, he was very tired. Paula's volcanic moments always exhausted him. He never could derationalize his emotions, cut himself free; and while he felt just as intensely as she did, he had to carry the whole superstructure of himself along on those tempestuous voyages. In the mood Paula had left him in this morning, there was nothing in the world that could have satisfied and restored him as did his daughter's companionship. The peace of this wordless prolongation of their talk together was something he lacked, for a long while, the will to break.

It was not far short of noon when they came back into the veranda together. He had walked the last hundred yards, after a look at his watch, pretty fast and after a glance into both the down-stairs rooms, he called up-stairs to his wife in a voice that had an edge of sudden anxiety in it. Then getting no response, he went up, two at a time.

Mary dropped down, limp with a sudden premonition, upon the gloucester swing in the veranda. The maid of all work, who had heard his call, came from the kitchen just as he was returning down the stairs. Mrs. Wollaston had gone away, she said. Pete had reported with the big car at eleven o'clock and Paula, who apparently had been waiting for him, had driven off at once having left word that she would not be back for lunch.

"All right," John said curtly. "You may go."

He was so white when he rejoined Mary in the veranda that she sprang up with an involuntary cry and would have had him lie down, where she had been sitting. But the fine steely ring in his voice stopped her short.

"Have you any idea," he asked, "where she has gone or what she has gone to do? She came down," he went on without waiting for her answer,--"and looked for me. Waited for me. And thanks to that--walk we took, I wasn't here. Well, can you guess what she's done?"

"It's only a guess," Mary said, "but she may have gone to see Martin Whitney."

"Martin Whitney?" he echoed blankly. "What for? What does she want of him?"

"She spoke of him," Mary said, "in connection with the money, the twenty thousand dollars..."

He broke in upon her again with a mere blank frantic echo of her words and once more Mary steadied herself to explain. "Her agreement with Mr. Ware required her to put up twenty thousand dollars in some banker's hands as a guarantee that she would not break the contract. She mentioned Martin Whitney as the natural person to hold it. So I guessed that she might have gone to consult him about it;--or even to ask him to lend it to her. As she said, it wouldn't have to be spent."

"That's the essence of the contract then. It's nothing without that. Until she gets the money and puts it up. Yet you told me nothing of it until this moment. If you had done so--instead of inviting me to go for a walk--and giving her a chance to get away..."

He couldn't be allowed to go on. "Do you mean that you think I did that--for the purpose?" she asked steadily.

He flushed and turned away. "No, of course I don't. I'm half mad over this."

He walked abruptly into the house and a moment later she heard him at the telephone. She stayed where she was, unable to think; stunned rather than hurt over the way he had sprung upon her.

He seemed a little quieter when he came out a few minutes later. "Whitney left half an hour ago for Lake Geneva," he said. "So she's missed him if that's where she went. There's nothing to do but wait."

He was very nervous however. Whenever the telephone rang, as it did of course pretty often, he answered it himself, and each time his disappointment that it was not Paula asking for him, broke down more or less the calm he tried to impose upon himself. He essayed what amends good manners enabled him to make to Mary for his outrageous attack upon her. It went no deeper than that. The discovery that Paula was gone and simultaneously that he need not have lost her obliterated--or rather reversed--the morning's mood completely.

It was after lunch that he said, dryly, "I upset your life for you, half a dozen years ago. Unfairly. Inexcusably. I've always been ashamed of it. But it lends a sort of poetic justice to this."

She made no immediate reply, but not long afterward she asked if she might not go away without waiting for Paula's return. "It would be too difficult, don't you think?--for the three of us, in a small house like this."

He agreed with manifest relief. He asked if it was not too late to drive that afternoon to Hickory Hill, but she said she'd prefer to go by train anyhow. That was possible she thought.

He did not ask, in so many words, if this was where she meant to go. There was no other place for her that he could think of.


CHAPTER XXI

THE SUBSTITUTE

It was a good guess of Mary's that Paula had gone to borrow the twenty thousand dollars but it was to Wallace Hood, not to Martin Whitney, that she went for it; and thereby illustrated once more how much more effective instinct is than intelligence.

Martin, rich and generous as he was, originator as he was of the edict that Paula must go to work, would never have been stampeded as Wallace was in a talk that lasted less than half an hour, into producing securities to the amount that Paula needed and offering them up in escrow for the life of Maxfield Ware's contract.

Wallace was only moderately well off and he was by nature, cautious. His investments were always of the most conservative sort. This from habit as well as nature because his job--the only one he had ever had--was that of estate agent. But Paula's instinct told her that he wouldn't find it possible to refuse. I think it told her too, though this was a voice that did not make itself fairly heard to her conscious ear, that he would be made very fluttered and unhappy by it whether he granted her request or not.

What he would hate, she perceived, was the suddenness of the demand and the irrevocable committal to those five years; the blow it was to those domesticities and proprieties he loved so much. The fact that he would be made sponsor for those unchartered excursions to Mexico, to South America, and so on, under the direction of a libidinous looking cosmopolite like Maxfield Ware.

Why she wanted to put Wallace into the flutters she couldn't have told. She was, as I say, not quite aware that she did. But he had been running up a score in very minute items that was all of five years old. The fact that all these items went by the name of services, helpful little acts of kindness, made the irritation they caused her all the more acute.

I don't agree with Lucile Wollaston's diagnosis, that Paula could not abide Wallace merely because he refused to lose his head over her, but there was a grain of truth in it. What she unconsciously resented was the fundamental unreality of his attitude to her. Actually, he did not like her, but the relation he had selected as appropriate to