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

I begin at the bottom somewhere--Mr. Whitney, for instance, offering me a job at ten dollars a week in his bank--I'll kill him. I can't do that. I won't. At the end of about ten days, I'd run amuck. What I'd really like," he concluded, "for about a year would be just this." His gesture indicated the bathrobe, the easy chair and the dainty breakfast table. "This, all the morning and a ball-game in the afternoon. Lord, it will be good to see some real baseball again. We'll go to a lot of games this summer. What are the Sox going to be like this year?"

She discussed the topic expertly with him and with a perfectly genuine interest, at some length. "Oh, it would be fun," she finished with a little sigh, "only I shan't be there, you know. At least I don't think I shall." Then before he could ask her why not, she added in sharper focus, "I can't go home, Rush."

"Can't!" he exclaimed. "What do you mean by that?"

"Oh, nothing to make a fuss about," she said with a frown of irritation. "I wish you weren't so jumpy this morning,--or perhaps, it's I that am. All I meant was that home isn't a comfortable place for me and I won't go back there if I can help it--only I am afraid I can't. That's the trouble I wanted to talk to you about."

"I thought you liked the new stepmother," he said. "Hasn't she turned out well?--What am I supposed to call her, anyhow? I wanted to find out about that before I was right up against it."

"Call her?" Mary was a little taken back. "Why, anything you like, I should think. I've always called her Paula.--You weren't thinking of calling her mother, were you?"

"Well," he protested, "how should I know? After all, she is father's wife. And she must be fairly old."

"But, Rush, you've _seen_ her!"

"Only that once, at the wedding. She was made up to look young then, of course. Painted and dyed and so on, I suppose. I felt so embarrassed and silly over the whole thing--being just a kid--that I hardly looked at her. And that was a long while ago."

Mary laughed at that, though she knew it would annoy him. "She never paints nor dyes nor anything, Ruddy. She doesn't have to. She's such a perfectly raving beauty without it. And she's more beautiful now than she was then. She really is young, you see. Hardly enough older than we are to matter, now that we're grown up."

She saw Rush digesting this idea of a beautiful young stepmother whom he was to be privileged to call--straight off--by her first name, with a certain satisfaction, so she waited--rather conscious that she was being patient--for him to come back from the digression of his own accord. Presently he did.

"What does she do that you don't like?"

"She does nothing that isn't perfectly nice, and good-tempered, and--respectable," Mary assured him, and added on a warmer note, "Oh, and she's really amiable and lovely. I was being a cat. But I am truly fond of her--when I have her to myself. It's when she's with father ..."

She broke off there, seeing that she could not make that clear to him (how could she since she would not state it in plain terms to herself?) and hurried on, "It's really father whom I don't get on with, any more. He worries about me and feels sorry for me and wants me to come home. But I'm nothing to him when I do come--but an embarrassment.--No, it _isn't_ rot. He knows it himself and feels horrid about it and raises my allowance when I go away, though it was foolishly big already; and then, as soon as I'm back here he begins worrying again, and urging me to come home. He didn't insist as long as I was doing war work, but now that that's played out, I suppose he will.

"Oh, I know well enough what I ought to do. I ought to answer some advertisement for a typist--I can do that, but not stenography--and take a regular job. The sort you said you'd shoot Mr. Whitney for offering you. And then I ought to take a hall bedroom somewhere in the cross-town twenties and live on what I earned. That's the only thing I can see, and, Rush, I simply haven't the courage to do it. It seems as if I couldn't do it."

His lively horror at the bare suggestion of such a thing drew her into a half-hearted defense of the project. Numbers of the girls she knew down here who had been doing war work were going enthusiastically into things like that--or at least were announcing an invincible determination to do so. Only they were cleverer than she at that sort of thing and could hope for better jobs. They were in luck. They liked it--looked forward to a life of it as one full of engaging possibilities. But to Mary it was nothing, she hardly pretended, but a forlorn last shift. If one couldn't draw nor write nor act nor develop some clever musical stunt, what else was there for a girl to do?

"Well, of course," said Rush, in a very mature philosophical way and lighting a cigarette pretty deliberately between the words,--"of course, what most girls do, is--marry somebody." Then he stole a look around at his sister to see how she had taken it.

There was a queer look that almost frightened him in her blue eyes. Her lips, which were trembling, seemed to be trying to smile.

"That's father's idea," she said raggedly. "He's as anxious now that I should marry somebody--anybody, as he was that I shouldn't five years ago--before he found Paula. You see I am so terribly--left on his hands."

There was, no doubt, something comical about the look of utter consternation she saw on her brother's face, but she should not have tried to laugh at him for a sob caught the laugh in the middle and swept away the last of her self-control. She flung herself down upon the divan and buried her face in one of the pillows. He had seen men cry like that but, oddly enough, never a woman. What he did though was perhaps as much to the point as anything he could have done. He sat down beside her and gathered her up tight in his arms and held her there without a word until the tempest had blown itself out. When the sobs had died away to nothing more than a tremulous catch in each indrawn breath, he let her go back among the pillows and turn so that she could look up at him. By that time the sweat had beaded out upon his forehead, and his hands, which had dropped down upon her shoulders, were trembling.

"Well," she asked unsteadily. "What do you think of me now?"

He wanted to bend down and kiss her but wisely he forbore. "It's easy to see what's the matter," he said. "This war business you have been doing has been too much for you. You're simply all in." Then happily he added, "I'd call you a case of shell-shock."

She rewarded that with a washed-out smile. "What's the treatment going to be?" she asked.

"Why," he said, "as soon as I'm done tucking you up properly in this eiderdown quilt, I'm going out to your icebox and try to find the makings of an egg-nog. Incidentally, I shall scramble up all the rest of the eggs I find and eat them myself. And then I'll find something dull to read to you until you go to sleep. When it's dark enough so that my evening clothes won't attract too much attention, I'll go back and get into uniform; then I'll buy two tickets for Chicago on the fast train to-morrow, and two tickets for a show to-night; and then I'll come back and take you out to dinner. Any criticisms on that program?"

"Not just for this minute," she said contentedly. "I don't know whether I'm going to Chicago with you, tomorrow, or not."

"That's all right," he said. "I know all about that." He added, "I hope the other girl won't mind--the one who lives here with you. What was her name?"

"Ethel Holland? Oh, she went over to France with the Y.M.C.A. just about a year ago. I've tried to find somebody to take her place, but there didn't seem to be any one I liked well enough. So I've been living alone."

She saw his face stiffen at that but his only comment was that that simplified matters.


CHAPTER IV

THE PICTURE PUZZLE

There was a good quarter of an hour beginning with the tear-blurred moment when Mary caught sight of her father looking for her and Rush down the railway station platform, during which the whole fabric of misgivings about her home-coming dissolved as dreams do when one wakes. It had not been a dream she knew, nor the mere concoction of her morbid fancy. He had not looked at her like this nor kissed her like this--not once since that fatal journey to Vienna five years ago. Had something happened between him and Paula that made the difference? Or was it her brother's presence, that, serving somehow to take off the edge, worked a mysterious catalysis?

When John, after standing off and gazing wordless for a moment at this new son of his, this man he had never seen, in his captain's uniform with bits of ribbon on the breast of it,--tried to say how proud he was and choked instead, it was for Mary that he reached out an unconscious, embracing arm, the emotion which would not go into words finding an outlet for itself that way.

When they got out to the motor and old Pete, once coachman, now chauffeur, his eyes gleaming over the way Rush had all but hugged him, said to her, "You home to stay, too, Miss Mary?" her father's hand which clasped her arm revealed the thrilling interest with which he awaited her answer to that question. The importunity of the red-cap with the luggage relieved her of the necessity for answering but the answer in her heart just then was "Yes."

It was with a wry self-scornful smile that she recalled, later that day, the emotions of the ride home. If at any time before they got to the house, her father had repeated the old servant's question, "Are you home to stay, Mary?" she would, she knew, have kissed the hand that she held clasped in hers, wept blissfully over it and told him she wanted never to go away again. She hadn't minded his not asking because she thought she knew quite surely why he had not. He was afraid to risk his momentary happiness upon her answer. And why had she not volunteered the assurance he wanted so eagerly and dared not ask for? The beastly answer to that question was that she had enjoyed the thrill of his uncertainty--a miserable sort of feline coquetry.

Well, it had been short-lived, that little triumph of hers. It had stopped against a blank wall just when the car stopped under the _ports cochere_ of the Dearborn Avenue house. John's arm which had been around her was withdrawn and he looked with just a touch of ostentation at his watch. She knew before he spoke that when he did, his tone would ring flat. The old spell was broken. He was once more under the dominion of the newer, stronger one.

"I'm terribly late," he said.