The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster (pdf to ebook reader txt) 📕

amazing how quickly that last words of his wife's snatched him out of that beatific abstraction.

"No, there is not," he said.

The tone of his voice was a good deal more familiar to his fellow directors in some of his enterprises, than it was to his wife. She looked at him as if she couldn't quite believe she'd understood.

"There is not what?" she asked.

"There is not a thing that we can do or are going to do about Rose and Rodney. We did something once before and made a mess of it. This time we're going to let them alone. They're both of age and of sound mind, and they've got each other's addresses. If they want to get together again, they will."

* * * * *

"I've had a perfectly bang-up evening," said Jimmy to Violet a little later when he took his leave.

"I know you have," she said dryly. Then, with a change of manner, "But I have, too, Jimmy. You believe that, don't you?"

"Sure I do," he said, and shook hands with her all over again. Violet was a good sort.

Riding home in the elevated train, Jimmy Wallace hummed what he conceived to be a tune. And when he did that ...!


CHAPTER II

A BROKEN PARALLEL

None of the speculative explanations Rodney's friends advanced for his having bought that precious solemn house of the McCreas, together with all its rarified esthetic furniture, exactly covered the ground. He didn't buy it in the expectation that Rose was coming back to live in it, and still less with the even remote notion of finding a successor to her. He hadn't bought it because it was a bargain. He had very little idea whether it was a bargain or not. And if there was a grain of truth in John Williamson's explanation, Rodney was only vaguely aware of it.

He'd have said, if he'd set about formulating an explanation, that he bought the house as a result of eliminating the alternatives to buying it. Florence meant to sell it to somebody, and if he didn't buy it, he'd have to move out. Rather disingenuously, he represented to himself that his dislike of moving out sprang from the trouble that would be involved in finding some other place to live in, furnishing it, reorganizing his establishment. Really, he hadn't time for that. Frederica would have done it for him in a minute, but he ignored that possibility.

Down underneath these shallow practical considerations, lay the fact that such a reorganization would have been a tacit acknowledgment of defeat; not only an acknowledgment to the world, which he'd have liked to pretend didn't matter much, but an acknowledgment of defeat to himself. What he had been trying to do ever since his return from that maddening talk with Rose in Dubuque, had been just to sit tight; to go on living a day at a time; to take the future in as small doses as he could manage.

Had he been the sort of person who finds comfort in mottoes, he'd have laid in a stock, such as, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof"; "Holdfast is the only dog"; "Don't cross your bridges until you come to them." As the period between the night of his discovery of Rose on the Globe stage and the day of his return from Dubuque receded, and as the fierceness of the pain of it died away again (because such pains do die away. They can't keep screwed up into an ecstasy of torment forever) the part he'd played in the events of it, seemed to him less and less worthy of the sort of man he'd always considered himself to be; a self-controlled, self-disciplined adult. He'd acted for a while there, with the savage egotism of a distracted boy; thrown his dignity to the winds; made a holy show of himself. Well, that period was over at all events. Whatever the future might confront him with, he could promise himself, he thought, to keep his head.

But for a while, he didn't want to be confronted with anything, let alone to start anything; not until he could get his breath; not until he had time to think everything out; discover, if possible, where the whole miserable trouble had begun. He'd go back to the beginning, sometime, and try to work it all out. It went, probably, a long way back of the night when that hasty speech of his about not jeopardizing the children's lives to gratify his wife's whims had set the match to her resolution to leave him and the babies and live a life for herself.

But, though he told himself every day that he must begin ordering his old memories, analyzing them, in search of the clue, he didn't begin the process. Spiritually, he just held himself rigidly still. He might have compared himself to a man standing off a pack of wolves, knowing that his slightest move would precipitate a rush upon him. Or, perhaps more nearly, to a man just recovering consciousness after an accident, afraid to stir lest the smallest movement might reveal more serious injuries than he suspected.

His mind had never worked so brilliantly as it was working now. The problems involved in his clients' affairs were child's play to him. He took them apart and put them together again with a careless, confident, infallible perspicacity that amazed his colleagues and his opponents. And, as Frank Crawford had pointed out, he took a savagely contemptuous pleasure in making those clients pay through the nose.

But he could look neither back at Rose, nor forward to her. He could not, by any stretch of resolution, have nerved himself to the point of giving up that house that had nearly all his memories of her associated with it. There hadn't been a change of a single piece of furniture in it since she went away. Her bedroom and her dressing-room were just as she had left them. Her clothes were just as they had been left after the packing of that small trunk. She might have been off spending a week-end somewhere.

The attitude couldn't be kept up forever, he knew. Some time or other he'd have to cross the next bridge; come to some more definite understanding with Rose than that inconclusive ridiculous scene there in Dubuque had left him with. (_What_ a fool he had been that day!) There were the twins coming along. For the present, their nurse (It wasn't Mrs. Ruston. He'd taken the first reasonable excuse for supplanting her.) and the pretty little snub-nosed nurse-maid Rose had liked, could supply their wants well enough. But the time wasn't so far ahead when they'd need a mother. What would he do then; let Rose have them half the time and keep them half the time himself? He'd read a perfectly beastly book once,--he couldn't remember the title of it--about a child who had been brought up that way. But, at all events, he needn't do anything yet.

Meanwhile, it healed his lacerated pride to march along and keep the routine going. It was with a perfectly immense relief that he snatched at the chance to buy the McCrea house, and by so doing make the permanency of his way of life a little more secure. He could keep what he had, anyway. And he could show the world, and Rose, that he wasn't the broken frantic creature he knew she'd seen, and suspected it had glimpsed. John Williamson's explanation wasn't altogether wrong.

Perhaps, had it been possible for Jimmy Wallace to tell him, just as he told Violet and John Williamson, how Rose's voice "richened up as if the words tasted good to her," when she mentioned the fact that she heard from her husband "regularly but not much," he might have drawn the same favorable augury from it that Violet did. But from her answering communications, though he drew comfort, he got no hope.

It was Rose herself who began this correspondence, within a month of her arrival in New York. And Rodney, when he finished reading her letter, tore it to pieces and flung it into the fire, in a transport of disappointment and anger. The sight of her writing on the envelope had brought his heart into his mouth, of course. And when his shaking fingers had got it open and he saw that it indeed contained a letter from her, beginning "Dear Rodney," and signed "Rose," the wild surge of hope that swept over him actually turned him giddy, so that it was two or three minutes before he could read it.

But the thing ran like another instalment of the talk they had had in Dubuque. She knew he had been distressed over the shabbiness of her surroundings, knocking about with that road company, and she was afraid that in spite of the assurance she had then given him, he was still worried about her. She was sure he'd be glad to know that she'd quit the stage for good, as an active performer on it, at least; that she was earning an excellent salary, fifty dollars a week, doing a highly congenial kind of work that had good prospects of advancement in it. She had a very comfortable little apartment (she gave him the address of it) and was living in a way that--she had written "even Harriet," but scratched this out--Frederica, for example, would consider entirely respectable. So he needn't feel another moment's anxiety about her. She'd have written sooner, but had wanted to get fully settled in her new job and be sure she was going to be able to keep it, in order that she might have something definitely reassuring to tell him. And she hoped he and the babies were well.

It was not until hours afterward, when the letter was an indistinguishable fluff of white ash in the fireplace, that it occurred to him that it had no satirical intent whatever and that the purpose of it had been, quite simply, what it had pretended to be; namely, to reassure him and put an end to his anxieties.

As he had read it in the revulsion from that literally sickening hope of his, it had seemed about the most mordant piece of irony that had ever been launched against him. The assumption of it had seemed to be that he was the most pitiable snob in the world; that all he'd cared for had been that she'd disgraced him by going on the stage. He'd be glad to know that she was once more "respectable."

Well--this was the question which, as I said, he did not ask himself until hours later--wasn't she justified in believing that? Certainly that night, in her little room on North Clark Street, he'd given her reason enough for thinking so. But later, in Dubuque--well, hadn't he quoted Harriet to her? Hadn't he offered to help her as a favor to himself, because he couldn't endure it that she should live like this? Had he exhibited anything to her at all in their two encounters, but an uncontrolled animal lust and a perfectly contemptible vanity?

He bitterly regretted having destroyed the letter. But the tone of it, he was sure, except for that well merited jibe about Harriet, which had been erased, was kindly. Yet he had acted once more, like a spoiled child about it.

Could he write and thank her? In Dubuque she had asked him not to come back. Did that prohibition cover