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

she were memorizing its contents.

He gazed at her until a gush of tears blinded his eyes and he turned, blinking them away, to the untidy quires of score paper which he had tried to choose instead. It could not be that it was too late to alter that choice. The terror, for a moment, became articulate. She believed that it was too late. That was why she had come.

She spoke reflectively. "It would be called an accident, I suppose, that I came. I wrote to you but there was more to the message than would go easily in a note so I took it myself to your house. There was just a chance, I thought, that I'd find you there. I didn't find you, but I found Miss MacArthur. That was the only thing about it that could be called accidental. Your mother and sister were worried about you. They said it had been much longer than such periods usually were since they had heard from you. So I left my note and was coming away. Miss MacArthur said she would come with me and offered to drive me back to town. When we got into her car she said she thought she knew where you were and would take me to you. She did not say anything more nor ask any questions until she had stopped outside here at the curb, when she looked up and saw the lighted windows and said you were surely here. Then she pointed out the place in the dark where the stairs were and told me how to find your door. She waited, though, to make sure before she drove away. I heard her go."

He had no word to say in the little pause she made there. He felt the pulse beating in his temples and clutched with tremulous hands the wooden arms of his chair. Until she had mentioned Jennie MacArthur's name it had not occurred to him to wonder how she had been enabled to come to him. It could only have been through Jennie, of course. Jennie was the only person who knew. But why had Jennie disclosed his secret (her own at the same time, he was sure; she never would have expected Mary's clear eyes even to try to evade the unescapable inference)--why had she revealed to Mary, whom she had never seen before, a fact which she had guarded with so impregnable a loyalty all these many years?

The only possible answer was that Jennie had divined, under the girl's well-bred poise, the desperation which was now terrifying him. It was no nightmare then of his own overwrought imagination. Jennie had perceived the emergency--the actual life-or-death emergency--and with courageous inspiration had done, unhesitatingly, the one thing that could possibly meet the case. She had given him his chance. Jennie!

He arrived at that terminus just as Mary finished speaking. In the pause that followed she did not at first look at him. Her gaze had come to rest upon that abortive musical typewriter of his. Not quite in focus upon it, but as if in some corner of her mind she was wondering what it might be. But as the pause spun itself out, her glance, seeking his face, moved quickly enough to catch the look of consternation that it wore. She read it--misread it luckily--and her own lighted amazingly with a beam of pure amusement.

"I suppose it is rather overwhelming," she said; "a conjunction like that. I mean, that it should have been she who brought me here. But really, unless one accepts all the traditional motives and explanations that one finds in books, it shouldn't be surprising that she should undertake a friendly service for some one else she saw was fond of you, too. Not when one considers the wonderful person she is."

If his sheer adoration of her were enough to save her then she was safe, whatever the peril. But he doubted if it would be enough.

"Jennie and I were lovers once," he said. "But that came to an end for both of us a good while ago. Two or three years. And the last time she came to this room--one day in April it was--I told her about you and about _The Dumb Princess_." He laid his hand upon the stack of manuscript. "This. I had come home from that night at your father's house when you and I heard that song together, with my head full of it. I went nearly mad fighting it out of my head while I tried to make over that other opera for Paula."

"_The Dumb Princess_...?"

He nodded. "You see you hardly spoke that night, only at the end to say we mustn't talk. So I came away thinking of some one under a spell. A princess, the fairy sort of princess who could not speak until her true lover came to her. But instead of that I tried to go on working at that Belgian horror and stuck at it until it was unendurable. And then, when I came to the house to tell Paula so, it was you who came to me again, the first time since that night."

There had come a faintly visible color into her cheeks and once more she smiled, reflectively. "That's what you meant then," she mused. "I couldn't make it out. You said just before you went away, 'That's why it was so incredible when you came down the stairs instead.'"

She had remembered that!

"I ran away," he confessed, "the moment I had said it, for fear of betraying myself. And I went to work on _The Dumb Princess_ that day."

"You've done all that, a whole opera, since the fourteenth of May?"

"I worked on it," he said, "until I had to stop for the little vacation that--that ended at Hickory Hill. And I came straight back to it from there. I've been working at it all the time since. Now, except for the scoring in the second part of the third act, it's finished. I thought it was the thing I wanted more than anything else in the world. Just to get it written down on paper, the thing which that moment with you up in that little anteroom started. I've pretty well done it. As far as the music itself is concerned, I think I have done it."

He paused there and pressed his lips together. Then he went on speaking, stiffly, one word at a time. "And I was saying to myself when you knocked that I would tear it up, every sheet of it, and set it alight in the stove yonder if it would take me back to that hour we had together at Hickory Hill."

The tenderness of her voice when she replied (it had some of the characteristic qualities of his beloved woodwinds) did not preclude a bead of humor, almost mischief, from gilding the salient points of its modeling.

"I know," she said. "I can guess what that feeling must be; the perfect emptiness and despair of having a great work done. I suspect there aren't many great masterpieces that one couldn't have bought cheap by offering the mess of pottage at the right moment. Oh, no, I didn't mean a sneer when I said cheap. I really understand. That very next morning out in the orchard, thinking over it, I managed to be glad you'd gone--alone. Your own way, rather than back with me to Ravinia. But--I'm glad I came to-night and I'm glad I know about--_The Dumb Princess_."

Watching her as her unfocused reminiscent gaze made it easy for him to do, he saw her go suddenly pale, saw the perspiration bead out on her forehead as if some thought her mind had found itself confronting actually sickened her. He waited an instant, breathless in an agony of doubt whether to notice or to go on pretending to ignore. After a moment the wave passed.

"I know that was a figure of speech," she resumed,--her voice was deadened a little in timbre but its inflections were as light as before. "But I wish--I'd really be ever so much--happier--if you'd give me a promise; a perfectly serious, solemn,"--she hesitated for a word and smiled,--"death-bed promise, that you never will burn up _The Dumb Princess_. At least until she's all published and produced. And I wish that as soon as you've got a copy made, you'd put this manuscript in a really safe place."

He turned away from her, baffled, bewildered. She had evaded the issue he had tried to confront her with. She had taken the passionate declaration of his wish to retrieve the great error of his life as a passing emotion familiar to all creative artists at certain stages in their work. It was a natural, almost inevitable, way of looking at it! He sat for a moment gazing abstractedly at his littered table, clutching the edges of it with both hands, resisting a momentary vertigo of his own.

She left her chair and came and stood beside him. She picked up one of the quires of manuscript, opened it and gazed a while at the many-staved score. He was aware of a catch in her breathing, like an inaudible sob, but presently she spoke, quite steadily.

"I wish I could sit here to-night and read this. I wish it made even unheard melodies to me. I'm not dumb but I am deaf to this. _There's_ a spell beyond your powers to lift, my dear."

She laid her hand lightly upon his shoulder and at her touch his taut-drawn muscles relaxed into a tremulous weakness. After a little silence:

"Now give me my promise," she said.

He did not immediately answer and the hand upon his shoulder took hold. Under its compulsion, "I'll promise anything you ask," he said.

She spoke slowly as if measuring her words. "Never to destroy this work of yours that you call _The Dumb Princess_ whatever may conceivably happen, however discouraged you may be about it."

"Very well," he said, "I won't."

"Say it as a promise," she commanded. "Quite explicitly."

So he repeated a form of words which satisfied her. She held him tight in both hands for an instant. Then swiftly went back to her chair.

"Don't think me too foolish," she apologized. "I haven't been sleeping much of late and I couldn't have slept to-night with a misgiving like that to wonder about."

His own misgiving obscurely deepened. He did not know whether it was the reason she had offered for exacting that promise from him or the mere tone of her voice which was lighter and more brittle than he felt it should have been. She must have read the troubled look in his face for she said at once and on a warmer note:

"Oh, my dear, don't! Don't let my vagaries trouble you. Let me tell you the message I came with. It's about the other opera. They want to put it on at once up at Ravinia. With Fournier as the officer and that little Spanish soprano as 'Dolores.' Just as you wrote it without any of the terrible things you tried to put in for Paula. It will have to be sung in French of course, because neither of them sings English. They want you there just as soon as you can come, to sign the contract and help with the rehearsals."

Once more with an utterly unexpected shift she left him floundering, speechless.

He had forgotten _The Outcry_ except for his nightmare efforts to revamp it for Paula; had charged it off his books altogether. What Mary had told him at Hickory Hill about her labors in its behalf