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

mind how far to take them into his confidence as to what he knew and guessed, but Rush made an end of his hesitation.

"Tell us, for heaven's sake, what it's all about.--Oh, you needn't mind Graham. He's as much in it as any of us. I suppose you know how he stands."

Wallace was conscious of an acute wish that they had not turned up until he'd had a chance to see Mary, but somehow he felt he couldn't go behind an assurance like that. So he told them what he had pieced together.

Rush grunted and blushed and said he'd be damned, but it was not a theme--this contention between his father and his stepmother--that he could dwell upon. He got hold at last of something that he could be articulate about, and demanded to know why, in these circumstances, Mary hadn't come straight to them at Hickory Hill instead of camping out, for the night, all by herself in the Dearborn Avenue house.

"She has an idea she must find a job for herself," Wallace said, feeling awkwardly guilty as if he had betrayed her; but the way Rush leaped upon him, demanding in one breath what the deuce he meant and what sort of job he was talking about, made it impossible to pull up.

He recounted the request Mary had made of him, concerning his sister in Omaha, and, last of all, stated his own misgiving--nothing but the merest guess of course--that she had been putting in this day answering advertisements. "She said she'd give me a picnic tea at five-thirty and tell me what she'd been doing."

"Well, it'll be no picnic for her," Rush exploded angrily. "I'll see her at five-thirty myself. She must be plumb out of her head if she thinks she'll be allowed to do a thing like that."

Once more, before Wallace could speak, it was Graham who intervened. "I want you to leave this to me," he said gravely. "I don't know whether I can settle it or not, but I'd like to try." He turned to Wallace. "Would you mind, sir, letting me go to tea with her at half past five in your place?"

It is possible that, but for Wallace's day-dream of himself offering Mary the shelter and the care she so obviously needed, he might have persisted in seeing her first and assuring her that he was to be regarded as an ally whatever she decided to do. Her voice as she had said, "I know I can never marry Graham" echoed forlornly in his mind's ear. But a doubt faint and vague as it was, of his own disinterestedness held him back. Graham was young; he was in love with her. That gave him right of way, didn't it?

So he assented. It was agreed that Rush should dine with Wallace at his apartment. Graham, if he had any news for them should communicate it by telephone. Instantly!


CHAPTER XXII

THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE

The instinct to conceal certain moods of depression and distress together with the histrionic power to make the concealment possible may be a serious peril to a woman of Mary Wollaston's temperament. She had managed at the telephone that morning to deceive Wallace pretty completely. Even her laugh had failed to give her away.

She was altogether too near for safety to the point of exhaustion. She had endured her second night without sleep. She had not really eaten an adequate meal since her lunch in town the day Paula had engineered her out of the way for that talk with Maxfield Ware.

There was nothing morbid in her resolution to find, at the earliest possible moment, some way of making herself independent of her father's support. Having pointed out Paula's duty as a bread winner she could not neglect her own, however dreary the method might be, or humble the results. In any mood, of course, the setting out in search of employment would have been painful and little short of terrifying to one brought up the way Mary had been.

A night's sleep though and a proper breakfast would have kept the thing from being a nightmare. As it was, she felt, setting out with her clipping from the help-wanted columns of a morning paper, a good deal like the sole survivor of some shipwreck, washed up upon an unknown coast, venturing inland to discover whether the inhabitants were cannibals. Even the constellations in her sky were strange.

Where, then, was Anthony March? Nowhere above her horizon, to-day at all events. The memory of him had been with her much of the two last sleepless nights. She had told over the tale of her moments with him again and again. (Did any one, she might have wondered, ever love as deeply with so small a treasury of golden hours for memory to draw upon?) But she could not, somehow, relate him at all to her present or her future. Her love for him was an out-going rather than an in-coming thing. At least, her thoughts had put the emphasis upon that side of it; upon the longing to comfort and protect him, to be the satisfaction to all his wants. Not--passionately not--to cling heavily about his neck, drag at his feet, steal his wayfarer's liberty,--no, not the smallest moment of it! This present helplessness of hers then, which heightened her need for him, served also to bolt the doors of her thoughts against him.

Her recollection of the next few hours, though it contained some vignettes so sharp and deeply bitten in as to be, she fancied, ineffaceable, was in the main confused. She must have called upon ten or a dozen advertisers in various suburban districts of the city (she avoided addresses that were too near home and names where she suspected hers might be known). Her composite impression was of flat thin voices which she could imagine in excitement becoming shrill; of curious appraising stares; of a vast amount of garrulous irrelevancy; of a note of injury that one who could profess so little equipment beyond good will should so disappoint the expectation her first appearance had aroused. The background was a room--it seemed to have been in every case the same--expensively overfurnished, inexpressive, ill-fitting its uses, like a badly chosen ready-made coat. The day was not without its humors, or what would have been humors if her spirit could have rebounded to them. Chiefly, the violent antagonism she found aroused in two or three cases by the color of her hair.

The residuum of her pilgrimages was three addresses where she might call about the middle of next week, in person or by telephone, to learn the advertiser's decision. Well it would convince Wallace Hood that she was in earnest. That was something.

Wallace's coming to tea became, as the day wore on, more and more something to look forward to. All the things about him which in more resilient hours she had found irritating or absurd, his neutrality, his appropriateness, his steady unimaginative way of going always one step at a time, seemed now precisely his greatest merits. The thought of tea in his company even aroused a faint appetite for food in her and lent zest to her preparations for it. When she stopped at the neighborhood caterer's shop for supplies she bought some tea cakes in addition to the sandwiches she had ordered in the morning. She had managed to get home in good enough season to restore the drawing-room somewhat to its inhabited appearance, to set out her tea table, put on her kettle, and then go up-stairs and change her dress for something that was not wilted by the day's unusual heat. She was ready then to present before Wallace an _ensemble_ which should match pretty well her tone at the telephone this morning.

But when she answered the ring she supposed was his and flinging open the door saw Graham Stannard there instead, she got a jarring shock which her overstrung nerves were in no condition to endure.

"I persuaded Mr. Hood to let me come to tea in his place," he said. "It was rather cheeky of me to ask him, I'm afraid. I hope you will forgive me."

The arrest of all her processes of thought at sight of him lasted only the barest instant. Then her mind flashed backward through a surmise which embraced the whole series of events. An alarm at Hickory Hill over her failure to arrive (which somehow they had been led to expect), a dash by Graham (Rush not available, perhaps), into town for news. To Wallace Hood, of course. And Wallace had betrayed her. In the interest of romantic sentiment. The happy ending given its chance. A rich young adoring husband instead of a job as nursery governess in Omaha!

It took no longer for all that to go through her mind than Graham needed for his little explanatory speech on the door-step. There he stood waiting for her answer. The only choice she had was between shutting the door in his face without a word, or graciously inviting him to come in and propose to her--for the last time, at all events. It was not, of course, a choice at all.

"I'm afraid it's a terribly hot day for tea," she said, moving back from the doorway to make room for him to come in. "Wallace likes it, though. I might make you something cold if only I had ice, but of course there isn't any in the house. It's nice and cool, though, isn't it; from having been shut up so long?"

Anything,--any frantic thing that could be spun into words to cover the fact that she had no welcome for him at all, not even the most wan little beam of friendly tenderness. She had seen the hurt look come into his eyes, incipient panic at the flash of anger which had not been meant for him. She must float him inside, somehow, and anchor him to the tea table. There she could get herself together and deal with him--decently.

He came along, tractably enough, sat in the chair that was to have been Wallace's, and talked for a while of the tea, and how hot it was this afternoon, and how beautifully cool in here. It was hot, too, out at Hickory Hill but one thought little of it. The air was drier for one thing. He and Rush had commented on the difference as they drove in to-day.

"Oh, Rush came in with you, did he?" she observed.

He flushed and stammered over the admission and it was easy to guess why. The fact that her brother, as well as Wallace, was lurking in the background somewhere waiting for results gave an official cast to his call that was rather--asinine. She came to the rescue.

"I suppose he and Wallace had something they wanted to talk about," she commented easily, and he made haste to assent.

She steadied herself with a breath. "Did Wallace tell you," she asked, "about our explosion at Ravinia over Paula's new contract? And how furious both father and Paula are with me about it? And how I'm out looking for a job? He didn't say anything about his sister, did he; whether he'd written to her to-day or not?"

"Not whether he'd written. But he told us the rest. How you wanted to go to work. As a nursery governess."

He paused there but she did not break in upon it. She had given him all the lead he needed. With the deliberate care that a suddenly tremulous hand made necessary he put down his teacup and spoke as if addressing it.

"I think you're