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

had signified simply, how rapturously delicious it was that she should have been so concerned for him. The possibility of a successful outcome to her efforts hadn't occurred to him.

She said, smiling with an amused tenderness over his confusion, "I haven't been too officious, have I?"

He knew he was being mocked at and he managed to smile but he had to blink and press his hand to his eyes again before he could see her clearly.

"It's not astonishing that you can work miracles," he said. "The wonder would be if you could not."

"There was nothing in the least miraculous about this," she declared. "It wasn't done by folding my wings and weaving mystic circles with a wand. Besides making that translation,--oh, terribly bad, I'm afraid,--into French, I've cajoled and intrigued industriously for weeks like one of those patient wicked little spiders of Henri Fabre's. I found a silly flirtation between Fournier and a married woman I knew and I encouraged it, helped it along and made it useful. I've used everybody I could lay my hands on."

What an instrument of ineffable delight that voice of hers was,--its chalumeau tenderness just relieved with the sparkle of irony. But he was smitten now with the memory of his own refusal to go to Ravinia so that Paula would remember him again. He blurted out something of his contrition over this but she stopped him.

"It was only because I wanted you there. I would not for any conceivable advantage in the world have let you--oh, even touch these devices that I've been concerned with. But I've reveled in them myself. In doing them for you, even though I could not see that they were getting anywhere.

"Everything seemed quite at a standstill when I left Ravinia Thursday, but on Thursday night the Williamsons dined with Mr. Eckstein and went to the park with him; and they all went home with father and Paula afterward, Fournier and LaChaise, too; and everything happened at once. I got a note from Paula this morning written yesterday, asking where my translation was, but not telling me anything. And as she wasn't at home when I telephoned to answer her question I didn't know until to-night.

"But about six o'clock James Wallace telephoned from the park and told me all about it. He wanted you found and sent to Ravinia at once. Having wasted half the season and more, they're now quite frantic over the thought of losing a minute. And Jimmy says immensely enthusiastic. So, all you have to do now is to go up there and lord it over them. You'll hear it sung; you'll hear the orchestra play it. You will make a beginning toward coming into your own, my dear. Because even if you don't care for it as you did, it will be a step toward--the princess, won't it?"

She dropped back against the cushion as from weariness, and sudden tears brimmed into her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. He came to her at that in spite of the gesture that would have held him away.

"You must believe--it's nothing--but happiness," she gasped.

He sat down upon the arm of the chair and a little timidly took her in his hands, caressed her eyes and her wet face until at last she met his lips in a long kiss and sank back quieted.

He stayed on the chair arm however and their hands remained clasped through a recollecting silence. She said presently:

"There are two or three practical things for you to remember. You mustn't be irritated with Violet Williamson. She has let herself become a little more sentimental about Fournier than I think in the beginning she meant to be and you may find her under foot more than you like. You mustn't mind that. And you'll find a very friendly helper in James Wallace. There is something a little caustic about his wit, and he suspects musicians on principle; but he will like you and he's thoroughly committed to _The Outcry_. He is a very good French scholar and over difficulties with the translation, where passages have to be changed, he'll be a present help."

He took her face in both his hands and turned it up to him. "Mary," he demanded when their eyes met, "why are you saying good-by to me?"


CHAPTER XXIV

THE WHOLE STORY

The shot told. The harried, desperate look of panic with which she gazed at him and tried, tugging at his hands, to turn away, revealed to him that he had leaped upon the truth. Part of it anyhow. He closed his eyes, for an instant, for another unaddressed prayer that he might not falter nor let himself be turned aside until he had sounded the full depth of it.

When he looked at her again she had recovered her poise. "It was silly," she said, "to think that I could hide that from you. I am going away--to-morrow. For quite a long while."

"Are you going away--physically? In the ordinary literal sense, I mean; or is it that you are just--going away from me?"

Once more it was as if a trap had been sprung upon her. But this time he ignored the gasp and the sudden cold slackness of the hands he held and went on speaking with hardly a pause.

"I asked that question, put it that way, thinking perhaps I understood and that I could make it easier for you to tell me." He broke off, there, for an instant to get his voice under control. Then he asked, steadily, "Are you going to marry Graham Stannard?"

She gasped again, but when he looked up at her there was nothing in her face but an incredulous astonishment.

So there was one alternative shorn away; one that he had not conceived as more than a very faint possibility. It was not into matrimony that her long journey was to take her. He pulled himself up with a jerk to answer--and it must be done smoothly and comfortably--the question she had just asked him. How in the world had he ever come to think of a thing like that?

"Why, it was in the air at Hickory Hill those days before you came. And then Sylvia was explicit about it, as something every one was hoping for."

"Was that why you went away?" she asked with an intent look into his face. "Because he had a--prior claim, and it wouldn't be fair to--poach upon his preserves?"

He gave an ironic monosyllable laugh. "I tried, for the next few days to bamboozle myself into adopting that explanation but I couldn't. The truth was, of course, that I ran away simply because I was frightened. Sheer panic terror of the thing that had taken hold of me. The thought of meeting you that next morning was--unendurable."

She too uttered a little laugh but it sounded like one of pure happiness. She buried her face in his hands and touched each palm with her lips. "I couldn't have borne it if you'd said the other thing," she told him. "But I might have trusted you not to. Because you're not a sentimentalist. You're almost the only person I know who is not."

She added a moment later, with a sudden tightening of her grip upon his hands, "Have you, too, discovered that sentimentality is the crudest thing in the world? It is. It is perfectly ruthless. It makes more tragedies than malice. Ludicrous tragedies--which are less endurable than the other sort. Unless one were enough of an Olympian so that he could laugh." She relaxed again and made a nestling movement toward him. "I thought for a while of you that way."

He managed to speak as if the idea amused him. "As an Olympian? No, if I had a mountain it wouldn't be that one. But I like the valleys better, anyhow."

"I know," she said contentedly. Then her voice darkened. "I'm just at the beginning of you--now..." The sentence ended unnaturally, though he had done nothing to interrupt it.

Deliberately he startled her. "What time does your train go, to-morrow?" he asked. "Or haven't you selected one? You haven't even told me where it is you are going."

Through his hands which held her he felt the shock, the momentary agony of the effort to recover the threatened balance, the resolute relaxation of the muscles and the steadying breath she drew.

"Oh, there are plenty of trains," she said. "You mustn't bother.--Why, Wallace Hood has a sister living in Omaha. (Wallace Hood, not James Wallace. It would be terrible if you confused them.) She's been trying for months to find a nursery governess. And I've been trying--perhaps you didn't know; the family have been very unpleasant about it--to find a job.--Oh, for the most realistic of reasons, among others. Well, it occurred to me the other day that Wallace's sister and I might be looking for each other."

There she paused, but only for a moment. Then she added, very explicitly, "So I'm going to Omaha to-morrow."

Even her lying she had to do honestly. She preferred, he saw, that he should remember she had lied to having him recall that she had tricked him by an evasion.

One need not invoke clairvoyance to account for his incandescent certainty that she had lied. The mere unconscious synthesis of the things she had said and left unsaid along the earlier stages of their talk, would have amounted to a demonstration. Her moment of panic over his discovery that she was saying good-by, her irrespressible shudder at the question whether she was going away in the ordinary literal sense of the phrase; finally, her pitiful attempt to avoid, in answer to his last question, a categorical untruth and then her acceptance of it as, after all, preferable to the other. But it was by no such pedestrian process as this that he reached the truth.

He knew, now, why he had been terrified from the moment she came into the room. He knew why she had wrung that promise from him--a death-bed promise she had dared with a smile to call it--that he would not, whatever happened, destroy _The Dumb Princess_. It would be a likely enough thing for him to do, she had perceived, when he learned the truth. She could not--sleep, she had told him, until that surmise was laid.

There were, as she had said, plenty of trains to that unknown destination of hers, but he thought that that word sleep offered the true clue. She was a physician's daughter; there must be, somewhere in that house, a chest or cupboard that would supply what she needed. They'd find her in her own bed, in that room he had once cast a glance into on his way up-stairs to Paula.

The conviction grew upon him that she had her plans completely laid; yes, and her preparations accomplished. That quiet leisureliness of hers would not have been humanly possible if either her resolution or the means for executing it had remained in doubt. It was likely that she had whatever it was--a narcotic, probably; morphine; she wouldn't, conceivably, resort to any of the corrosives--upon her person at this moment. In that little silken bag which hung from her wrist.

He clenched the finger-nails into the palms of his hands. This thing was a nightmare. He had fallen asleep over his table; had only to wake himself.--It would not do to play with an idea like that. Nor with the possibility that he had misread her mind. He knew. He was not mistaken. Let him never glance aside from that.

For one moment