A Poor Wise Man, Mary Roberts Rinehart [classic book list TXT] 📗

tea-room, and a corner.

“I’ll tell you something, now it’s over,” he said, his bold eyes fixed on hers. “I loathe galleries and pictures. I wanted to see you again. That’s all. You see, I am starting in by being honest with you.”

She was rather uncomfortable.

“Why don’t you like pictures?”

“Because they are only imitations of life. I like life.” He pushed his teacup away. “I don’t want tea either. Tea was an excuse, too.” He smiled at her. “Perhaps you don’t like honesty,” he said. “If you don’t you won’t care for me.”

She was too inexperienced to recognize the gulf between frankness and effrontery, but he made her vaguely uneasy. He knew so many things, and yet he was so obviously not quite a gentleman, in her family’s sense of the word. He had a curious effect on her, too, one that she resented. He made her insistently conscious of her sex.

And of his. His very deference had something of restraint about it. She thought, trying to drink her tea quietly, that he might be very terrible if he loved any one. There was a sort of repressed fierceness behind his suavity.

But he interested her, and he was undeniably handsome, not in her father’s way but with high-colored, almost dramatic good looks. There could be no doubt, too, that he was interested in her. He rarely took his eyes off hers. Afterwards she was to know well that bold possessive look of his.

It was just before they left that he said:

“I am going to see you again, you know. May I come in some afternoon?”

Lily had been foreseeing that for some moments, and she raised frank eyes to his.

“I am afraid not,” she said. “You see, you are a friend of Mr. Doyle’s, and you must know that my people and Aunt Elinor’s husband are on bad terms.”

“What has that got to do with you and me?” Then he laughed. “Might be unpleasant, I suppose. But you go to the Doyles’.”

She was very earnest.

“My mother knows, but my grandfather wouldn’t permit it if he knew.”

“And you put up with that sort of thing?” He leaned closer to her. “You are not a baby, you know. But I will say you are a good sport to do it, anyhow.”

“I’m not very comfortable about it.”

“Bosh,” he said, abruptly. “You go there as often as you can. Elinor Doyle’s a lonely woman, and Jim is all right. You pick your own friends, my child, and live your own life. Every human being has that right.”

He helped her into a taxi at the door of the tea shop, giving her rather more assistance than she required, and then standing bare-headed in the March wind until the car had moved away. Lily, sitting back in her corner, was both repelled and thrilled. He was totally unlike the men she knew, those carefully repressed, conventional clean-cut boys, like Pink Denslow. He was raw, vigorous and possibly brutal. She did not quite like him, but she found herself thinking about him a great deal. The old life was reaching out its friendly, idle hands toward her. The next day Grace gave a luncheon for her at the house, a gay little affair of color, chatter and movement. But Lily found herself with little to say. Her year away had separated her from the small community of interest that bound the others together, and she wondered, listening to them in her sitting room later, what they would all talk about when they had exchanged their bits of gossip, their news of this man and that. It would all be said so soon. And what then?

Here they were, and here they would always be, their own small circle, carefully guarded. They belonged together, they and the men who likewise belonged. Now and then there would be changes. A new man, of irreproachable family connections would come to live in the city, and cause a small flurry. Then in time he would be appropriated. Or a girl would come to visit, and by the same system of appropriation would come back later, permanently. Always the same faces, the same small talk. Orchids or violets at luncheons, white or rose or blue or yellow frocks at dinners and dances. Golf at the country club. Travel, in the Cardew private car, cut off from fellow travelers who might prove interesting. Winter at Palm Beach, and a bit of a thrill at seeing moving picture stars and theatrical celebrities playing on the sand. One never had a chance to meet them.

And, in quiet intervals, this still house, and grandfather shut away in his upstairs room, but holding the threads of all their lives as a spider clutches the diverging filaments of its web.

“Get in on this, Lily,” said a clear young voice. “We’re talking about the most interesting men we met in our war work. You ought to have known a lot of them.”

“I knew a lot of men. They were not so very interesting. There was a little nurse -

“Men, Lily dear.”

“There was one awfully nice boy. He wasn’t a soldier, but he was very kind to the men. They adored him.”

“Did he fall in love with your?”

“Not a particle.”

“Why wasn’t he a soldier?”

“He is a little bit lame. But he is awfully nice.”

“But what is extraordinary about him, then?”

“Not a thing, except his niceness.

But they were surfeited with nice young men. They wanted something dramatic, and Willy Cameron was essentially undramatic. Besides, it was quite plain that, with unconscious cruelty, his physical handicap made him unacceptable to them.

“‘Don’t be ridiculous, Lily. You’re hiding some one behind this kind person. You must have met somebody worth while.”

“Not in the camp. I know a perfectly nice Socialist, but he was not in the army. Not a Socialist, really. Much worse. He believes in having a revolution.”

That stirred them somewhat. She saw their interested faces turned toward her.

“With a bomb under his coat, of course, Lily.”

“He didn’t bulge.”

“Good-looking?”

“Well, rather.”

“How old is he, Lily?” one of them asked, suspiciously.

“Almost fifty, I should say.”

“Good heavens!”

Their interest died. She could have revived it, she knew, if she mentioned Louis Akers; he would have answered to their prime requisite in an interesting man. He was both handsome and young. But she felt curiously disinclined to mention him.

The party broke up. By ones and twos luxuriously dressed little figures went down the great staircase, where Grayson stood in the hall and the footman on the doorstep signaled to the waiting cars. Mademoiselle, watching from a point of vantage in the upper hall, felt a sense of comfort and well-being after they had all gone. This was as it should be. Lily would take up life again where she had left it off, and all would be well.

It was now the sixth day, and she had not yet carried out that absurd idea of asking Ellen’s friend to dinner.

Lily was, however, at that exact moment in process of carrying it out.

“Telephone for you, Mr. Cameron.”

“Thanks. Coming,” sang out Willy Cameron.

Edith Boyd sauntered toward his doorway.

“It’s a lady.”

“Woman,” corrected Willy Cameron. “The word ‘lady’ is now obsolete, since your sex has entered the economic world. He put on his coat.

“I said ‘lady’ and that’s what I mean,” said Edith. “‘May I speak to Mr. Cameron?’” she mimicked. “Regular Newport accent.”

Suddenly Willy Cameron went rather pale. If it should be Lily Cardew - but then of course it wouldn’t be. She had been home for six days, and if she had meant to call -

“Hello,” he said.

It was Lily. Something that had been like a band around his heart suddenly loosened, to fasten about his throat. His voice sounded strangled and strange.

“Why, yes,” he said, in the unfamiliar voice. “I’d like to come, of course.”

Edith Boyd watched and listened, with a slightly strained look in her eyes.

“To dinner? But - I don’t think I’d better come to dinner.”

“Why not, Willy?”

Mr. William Wallace Cameron glanced around. There was no one about save Miss Boyd, who was polishing the nails of one hand on the palm of the other.

“May I come in a business suit?”

“Why, of course. Why not?”

“I didn’t know,” said Willy Cameron. “I didn’t know what your people would think. That’s all. Tomorrow at eight, then. Thanks.”

He hung up the receiver and walked to the door, where he stood looking out and seeing nothing. She had not forgotten. He was going to see her. Instead of standing across the street by the park fence, waiting for a glimpse of her which never came, he was to sit in the room with her. There would be - eight from eleven was three - three hours of her.

What a wonderful day it was! Spring was surely near. He would like to be able to go and pick up Jinx, and then take a long walk through the park. He needed movement. He needed to walk off his excitement or he felt that he might burst with it.

“Eight o’clock!” said Edith. “I wish you joy, waiting until eight for supper.”

He had to come back a long, long way to her.

“‘May I come in a business suit?’” she mimicked him. “My evening clothes have not arrived yet. ‘My valet’s bringing them up to town tomorrow.”

Even through the radiant happiness that surrounded him like a mist, he caught the bitterness under her raillery. It puzzled him.

“It’s a young lady I knew at camp. I was in an army camp, you know.”

“Is her name a secret?”

“Why, no. It is Cardew. Miss Lily Cardew.”

“I believe you - not.”

“But it is,” he said, genuinely concerned. “Why in the world should I give you a wrong name?”

Her eyes were fixed on his face.

“No. You wouldn’t. But it makes me laugh, because - well, it was crazy, anyhow.”

“What was crazy?”

“Something I had in my mind. Just forget it. I’ll tell you what will happen, Mr. Cameron. You’ll stay here about six weeks. Then you’ll get a job at the Cardew Mills. They use chemists there, and you will be - “

She lifted her finger-tips and blew along them delicately.

“Gone - like that,” she finished.

Sometimes Willy Cameron wondered about Miss Boyd. The large young man, for instance, whose name he had learned was Louis Akers, did not come any more. Not since that telephone conversation. But he had been distinctly a grade above that competent young person, Edith Boyd, if there were such grades these days; fluent and prosperous-looking, and probably able to offer a girl a good home. But she had thrown him over. He had heard her doing it, and when he had once ventured to ask her about Akers she had cut him off curtly.

“I was sick to death of him. That’s all,” she had said.

But on the night of Lily’s invitation he was to hear more of Louis Akers.

It was his evening in the shop. One day he came on at seven-thirty in the morning and was off at six, and the next he came at ten and stayed until eleven at night. The evening business was oddly increasing. Men wandered in, bought a tube of shaving cream or a tooth-brush, and sat or stood around for an hour or so; clerks whose families had gone to the movies, bachelors who found their lodging houses dreary, a young doctor or two, coming in after evening office hours to leave a prescription, and remaining to talk and listen. Thus they satisfied their gregarious instinct while within easy call of home.

The wealthy had their clubs. The workmen of