A Poor Wise Man, Mary Roberts Rinehart [classic book list TXT] 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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He left them there, sitting in the half light, and going out into the hall picked up his hat. Mrs. Boyd heard him and called to him, and before he went out he ran upstairs to her room. It seemed to him, as he bent over her, that her lips were bluer than ever, her breath a little shallower and more difficult. Her untouched supper tray was beside her.
“I wasn’t hungry,” she explained. “Seems to me, Willy, if you’d let me go downstairs so I could get some of my own cooking I’d eat better. Ellen’s all right, but I kind o’ crave sweet stuff, and she don’t like making desserts.”
“You’ll be down before long,” he assured her. “And making me pies. Remember those pies you used to bake?”
“You always were a great one for my pies,” she said, complacently.
He kissed her when he left. He had always marveled at the strange lack of demonstrativeness in the household, and he knew that she valued his small tendernesses.
“Now remember,” he said, “light out at ten o’clock, and no going downstairs in the middle of the night because you smell smoke. When you do, it’s my pipe.”
“I don’t think you hardly ever go to bed, Willy.”
“Me? Get too much sleep. I’m getting fat with it.”
The stale little joke was never stale with her. He left her smiling, and went down the stairs and out into the street.
He had no plan in his mind except to see Louis Akers, and to find out from him if he could what truth there was in Edith Boyd’s accusation. He believed Edith, but he must have absolute certainty before he did anything. Girls in trouble sometimes shielded men. If he could get the facts from Louis Akers - but he had no idea of what he would do then. He couldn’t very well tell Lily, but her people might do something. Or Mrs. Doyle.
He knew Lily well enough to know that she would far rather die than marry Akers, under the circumstances. That her failure to marry Louis Akers would mean anything as to his own relationship with her he never even considered. All that had been settled long ago, when she said she did not love him.
At the Benedict he found that his man had not come home, and for an hour or two he walked the streets. The city seemed less majestic to him than usual; its quiet by-streets were lined with homes, it is true, but those very streets hid also vice and degradation, and ugly passions. They sheltered, but also they concealed.
At eleven o’clock he went back to the Benedict, and was told that Mr. Akers had come in.
It was Akers himself who opened the door. Because the night was hot he had shed coat and shirt, and his fine torso, bare to the shoulders and at the neck, gleamed in the electric light. Willy Cameron had hot seen him since those spring days when he had made his casual, bold-eyed visits to Edith at the pharmacy, and he had a swift insight into the power this man must have over women. He himself was tall; but Akers was taller, fully muscled, his head strongly set on a neck like a column. But he surmised that the man was soft, out of condition. And he had lost the first elasticity of youth.
Akers’ expression had changed from one of annoyance to watchfulness when he opened the door.
“Well!” he said. “Making a late call, aren’t you?”
“What I had to say wouldn’t wait.”
Akers had, rather unwillingly, thrown the door wide, and he went in. The room was very hot, for a small fire, littered as to its edges with papers, burned in the grate. Although he knew that Akers had guessed the meaning of his visit at once and was on guard, there was a moment or two when each sparred for an opening.
“Sit down. Have a cigarette?”
“No, thanks.” He remained standing.
“Or a highball? I still have some fairly good whiskey.”
“No. I came to ask you a question, Mr. Akers.”
“Well, answering questions is one of the best little things I do.”
“You know about Edith Boyd’s condition. She says you are responsible. Is that true?”
Louis Akers was not unprepared. Sooner or later he had known that Edith would tell. But what he had not counted on was that she would tell any one who knew Lily. He had felt that her leaving the pharmacy had eliminated that chance. “What do you mean, her condition?”
“You know. She says she has told you.”
“You’re pretty thick with her yourself, aren’t you?”
“I happen to live at the Boyd house.”
He was keeping himself well under control, but Akers saw his hand clench, and resorted to other tactics. He was not angry himself, but he was wary now; he considered that life was unnecessarily complicated, and that he had a distinct grievance.
“I have asked you a question, Mr. Akers.”
“You don’t expect me to answer it, do you?”
“I do.”
“If you have come here to talk to me about marrying her - “
“She won’t marry you,” Willy Cameron said steadily. “That’s not the point I want your own acknowledgment of responsibility, that’s all.”
Akers was puzzled, suspicious, and yet relieved. He lighted a cigarette and over the match stared at the other man’s quiet face.
“No!” he said suddenly. “I’m damned if I’ll take the responsibility. She knew her way around long before I ever saw her. Ask her. She can’t lie about it. I can produce other men to prove what I say. I played around with her, but I don’t know whose child that is, and I don’t believe she does.”
“I think you are lying.”
“All right. But I can produce the goods.”
Willy Cameron went very pale. His hands were clenched again, and Akers eyed him warily.
“None of that,” he cautioned. “I don’t know what interest you’ve got in this, and I don’t give a God-damn. But you’d better not try any funny business with me.”
Willy Cameron smiled. Much the sort of smile he had worn during the rioting.
“I don’t like to soil my hands on you,” he said, “but I don’t mind telling you that any man who ruins a girl’s life and then tries to get out of it by defaming her, is a skunk.”
Akers lunged at him.
Some time later Mr. William Wallace Cameron descended to the street. He wore his coat collar turned up to conceal the absence of certain articles of wearing apparel which he had mysteriously lost. And he wore, too, a somewhat distorted, grim and entirely complacent smile.
The city had taken the rioting with a weary philosophy. It was tired of fighting. For two years it had labored at high tension for the European war. It had paid taxes and bought bonds, for the war. It had saved and skimped and denied itself, for the war. And for the war it had made steel, steel for cannon and for tanks, for ships and for railroads. It had labored hard and well, and now all it wanted was to be allowed to get back to normal things. It wanted peace.
It said, in effect: “I have both fought and labored, sacrificed and endured. Give me now my rest of nights, after a day’s work. Give me marriage and children. Give me contentment. Give me the things I have loved long since, and lost awhile.”
And because the city craved peace, it was hard to rouse it to its danger. It was war-weary, and its weariness was not of apathy, but of exhaustion. It was not yet ready for new activity.
Then, the same night that had seen Willy Cameron’s encounter with Akers, it was roused from its lethargy. A series of bomb outrages shook the downtown district. The Denslow Bank was the first to go. Willy Cameron, inspecting a cut lip in his mirror, heard a dull explosion, and ran down to the street. There he was joined by Joe Wilkinson, in trousers over his night shirt, and as they looked, a dull red glare showed against the sky. Joe went back for more clothing, but Willy Cameron ran down the street. At the first corner he heard a second explosion, further away and to the east, but apparently no fire followed it. That, he learned later, was the City Club, founded by Anthony Cardew years before.
The Denslow Bank was burning. The facade had been shattered and from the interior already poured a steady flow of flame and smoke. He stood among the crowd, while the engines throbbed and the great fire hose lay along the streets, and watched the little upper room where the precious records of the Committee were burning brightly. The front wall gone, the small office stood open to the world, a bright and shameless thing, flaunting its nakedness to the crowd below.
He wondered why Providence should so play into the hands of the enemy.
After a time he happened on Pink Denslow, wandering alone on the outskirts of the crowd.
“Just about kill the governor, this,” said Pink, heavily. “Don’t suppose the watchmen got out, either. Not that they’d care,” he added, savagely.
“How about the vaults? I suppose they are fireproof?”
“Yes. Do you realize that every record we’ve got has gone? D’you suppose those fellows knew about them?”
Willy Cameron had been asking himself the same question.
“Trouble is,” Pink went on, “you don’t know who to trust. They’re not all foreigners. Let’s get away from here; it makes me sick.”
They wandered through the night together, almost unconsciously in the direction of the City Club, but within a block of it they realized that something was wrong. A hospital ambulance dashed by, its gong ringing wildly, and a fire engine, not pumping, stood at the curb.
“Come on” Pink said suddenly. “There were two explosions. It’s just possible - “
The club was more sinister than the burning bank; it was a mass of grim wreckage, black and gaping, with now and then the sound of settling masonry, and already dotted with the moving flashlights of men who searched.
To Pink this catastrophe was infinitely greater than that of the bank. Men he knew had lived there. There were old club servants who were like family retainers; one or two employees were ex-service men for whom he had found employment. He stood there, with Willy Cameron’s hand on his arm, with a new maturity and a vast suffering in his face.
“Before God,” he said solemnly, “I swear never to rest until the fellows behind this are tried, condemned and hanged. You’ve heard it, Cameron.”
The death list for that night numbered thirteen, the two watchmen at the bank and eleven men at the club, two of them members. Willy Cameron, going home at dawn, exhausted and covered with plaster dust, bought an extra and learned that a third bomb, less powerful, had wrecked the mayor’s house. It had been placed under the sleeping porch, and but for the accident of a sick baby the entire family would have been wiped out.
Even his high courage began to waver. His records were gone; that was all to do over again. But what seemed to him the impasse was this fighting in the dark. An unseen enemy, always. And an enemy which combined with skill a total lack of any rules of warfare, which killed here, there and everywhere, as though for the sheer joy of killing. It struck at the high but killed the low. And it had only begun.
Dominant family traits have a way of skipping one
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