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

sent for him, and that her intentions had been the opposite of those of the moralizing meddler he would take her for? If only she could make it up to him somehow. She would have liked to reach over and pull him down into her arms, mother him and tell him not to mind--there was something so intolerably pathetic about his effort to sit soberly straight--but she resisted this impulse savagely. The alcohol in her own veins was responsible for this. She could not quite trust herself not to go maudlin. So she froze herself tight and huddled away from him into her own corner.

She did not think beyond the address she had given to the chauffeur until they pulled up at her door. Then she turned to Rush and asked, "Where shall he take you? Are you staying at a hotel?"

"I am going to take you home," he said precisely.

She saw she did not dare to let him go. There was no telling what serious trouble he might get into, in his illicit civilian dress, if she turned him adrift now. So she said, simply, "Well, here we are. Come in."

She opened the street door with her latch-key, and punched on the hall lights. She dreaded the two flights of stairs, but with the help of the banister rail he negotiated them successfully enough. And then he was safely brought to anchor in her sitting-room. It was plain he had not the vaguest idea where he was.

"I'll make some coffee," she said. "That will--pull us both together. And it won't take a minute because it's all ready to make for breakfast."

She was not gone, indeed, much longer than that, but when she came back from her kitchenette he had dropped like a log upon her divan, submerged beyond all soundings. So she tugged him around into a more comfortable position, managed to divest him of his dinner-jacket and his waistcoat, unbuttoned his collar and shirt-band, took off his shoes, and covered him up with an eiderdown quilt. Then she kissed him--it was five years since she had done that--and went, herself, to bed.

At ten o'clock the next morning she sat behind her little breakfast table--it was daintily munitioned with a glass coffee machine, a grapefruit and a plate of toast--waiting, over _The Times_, for Rush to wake up. She looked more seraphic than ever, enveloped in a white turkish toweling bathrobe and with her hair in a braid. Her brother lay on the divan just as she had left him the night before. Presently the change in his breathing told her that he was struggling up out of the depths of sleep. She looked over at him and saw him blinking at the ceiling. When his gaze started round her way, she turned her attention to the busy little coffee machine which opportunely needed it.

It was a minute or two before he spoke. "Is that really you, Mary?"

She smiled affectionately at him and said, "Hello," adding with just an edge of good-humored mischief, "How do you feel?"

He turned abruptly away from her. "I feel loathsome," he said.

"Poor dear, of course you do. I'll tell you what to do. I've got a nice big bathroom in there. Go in and take a cold one." Then--"You've grown inches, Rush, since you went away but I believe you could still get into a suit of my pajamas--plain ones, not ruffly. Anyhow, I've another big bathrobe like this that you could roll up in. You'll be just in time for the coffee. You won't know yourself by then."

"I wish I didn't," he said morosely.

There wasn't much good arguing with that mood, she knew, so she waited a little.

"Is this where you live?" he asked. "You brought me here last night?"

"You brought me," she amended.

He frowned over that but didn't take it in. The next moment though he sat up suddenly and after a struggle with the giddiness this movement caused, asked, "Who else is here? Where's the other girl that lives with you?"

"She's not here now," Mary said. "We are all by ourselves."

He rose unsteadily to his feet. "I've got to get out of here quick. If anybody came in ..."

"Rush, dearest!" she entreated. "Don't be silly. Lie down again--Well, then take that easy chair. Nobody will come in." Then over his air of resolute remorse she cried, on the edge of tears herself, "Oh, _please_ don't be so unhappy. Do let's settle down and be comfy together. I don't have to go to the office to-day. My job's just about played out. But nobody ever comes here to see me in the daytime. And it wouldn't matter if they did."

But this change of attitude was clearly beyond him. "I'll have to ask you to tell me what happened last night. You were there at that restaurant with friends of yours I suppose. I must have disgraced you up to the hilt with them. I should think you'd hate the sight of me."

"You didn't disgrace me at all," she contradicted, and now the tears did came into her eyes. "They knew I was expecting you and I told Mr. Baldwin who you were. You came up in the nicest way and asked me to dance and when we went away together there wasn't a thing--about you--that they could see. I was on the point of tears myself because my plan had gone wrong. But that would have seemed natural enough to them."

He frowned at the name Baldwin, as if he were trying to recover a memory. Now he felt vaguely in his trousers pocket and pulled out the crumpled visiting card that had her note scribbled on the back of it. "You haven't told me yet what happened," he said.

"Oh, I was afraid you wouldn't remember." She looked away from him as she said it and a little unwonted color crept into her cheeks.

"Afraid?" he questioned.

"I wanted you to understand," she said, "and now I'll have to tell you again. It was because I was trying so hard not to meddle that I did. I sent that little note to you just to get a chance to tell you not to mind my seeing you there with those others--not to let it spoil your party. I couldn't bear to have you come to me to-day, or to-morrow or whenever it was, feeling--well, ashamed you know, and explanatory. That's what I tried to tell you last night but couldn't make you understand. So I did, really, just exactly what I was meaning not to. Of course, I loved you for coming away and I love having you here like this, all to myself. But I didn't mean to--to spoil things for you."

He stared at her a moment in blank inapprehension; then a deep blush came burning into his face. "You didn't understand," he said thickly. "You didn't know what those girls were."

"Oh, Rush!" she cried. "Of course I did. I knew exactly what they were--better than you. I even knew who they were. They live not very far from here."

He paled and his look was frightened. "How did you know that?" he demanded. "How could you know a thing like that?"

"They've lived here in the Village for years," she said, summarizing Baldy without quoting him as her authority. "One of them used to be an illustrator--or something--before she went--over the edge. They're two of our celebrities. One can't go about, unless he's stone blind, without picking up things like that."

"You did know what she was, then," he persisted, doggedly pushing through something it was almost impossible for him to say, "and yet, knowing, you asked me to leave you alone and go back to her. You wanted me to do that?"

"I didn't want you to!" she cried. "I hated it, of course. But men--people--do things like that, and I could see how--natural it was that you wanted to. And if you wanted to, I didn't think it fair that it should be spoiled for you just because we happened to recognize each other. I didn't want you to hate me for having spoiled it. That's all."

She gave him the minute or two he evidently needed for turning this over in his mind. Then she turned her back on the window she had withdrawn to and began again.

"I used to be just a big sister to you, of course. Ever so superior, I guess, and a good bit of a prig. And all this time over there in France with nothing but my letters and that silly picture of me in the khaki frame, I suppose you have been thinking of me, well,--as a sort of nice angel. I'm not either, really. I don't want to be either.

"I want to be somebody you feel would understand anything; somebody you could tell anything to. So that it would work the other way as well. Because I've got to have somebody to tell things to,--troubles, and worries. And I've been hoping, ever since your letter came, that it would turn out to be you."

"What sort of troubles?" He shot the question in rather tensely.

There was a breathless moment before she answered, but she shook it off with a laugh and her manner lightened. "There's nothing to be so solemn about as all that. We don't want to wallow. We'll have some breakfast--only you go first and tub."

He was too young and healthy and clean-blooded to resist the effect upon his spirits which the cold water and the fresh white bathrobe and the hot strong coffee with real cream in it produced. And the gloomy, remorseful feeling, which he felt it his moral duty to maintain intact, simply leaked away. She noted the difference in him and half-way through their breakfast she left her chair and came round to him.

"Would you very much mind being kissed now?" she asked.

His answer, with a laugh, was to pull her down upon his knee and hug her up tight in his arms. They looked rather absurdly alike in those two white bathrobes, though this was an appearance neither of them was capable of observing. She disengaged herself presently from his embrace and went to find him some cigarettes, refraining from taking one herself from a feeling that he would probably like it better just then if she did not.

Back in her own place over her coffee and toast, she had no difficulty in launching him upon the tale of his own recent experiences. What the French were like now the war was over; and the Boche he had been living among in the Coblenz area;--the routine of his army life, the friends he made over there, and so on. Altogether she built him up immensely in his own esteem. It was plain he liked having her for a younger sister instead of for an older one, listening so contentedly to his tales, ministering to his momentary wants, visibly wondering at and adoring him.

But she broke the spell when she asked him what he meant to do now.

He turned restlessly in his chair. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know what the deuce there is I can do. Certainly father's idea of my going back to college and then to medical school afterward, is just plain, rank nonsense. I'd be a doddering old man before I got through--thirty years old. I should think that even he would see that. It will have to be business, I suppose, but if any kind friend comes around and suggests that