A Poor Wise Man, Mary Roberts Rinehart [classic book list TXT] 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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No problems troubled them. They had ceased to labor, and that was enough.
Had it not been for its leaders, the mass would have risen like a tide, and ebbed again.
Elinor had struggled to understand. This was not Socialism. Jim had been a Socialist for years. He had believed that the gradual elevation of the few, the gradual subjection of the many, would go on until the majority would drag the few down to their own level. But this new dream was something immediate. At her table she began to hear talk of substituting for that slow process a militant minority. She was a long time, months, in discovering that Jim Doyle was one of the leaders of that militant minority, and that the methods of it were unspeakably criminal.
Then had begun Elinor Doyle’s long battle, at first to hold him back, and that failing, the fight between her duty to her husband and that to her country. He had been her one occupation and obsession too long to be easily abandoned, but she was sturdily national, too. In the end she made her decision. She lived in his house, mended his clothing, served his food, met his accomplices, and - watched.
She hated herself for it. Every fine fiber of her revolted. But as time went on, and she learned the full wickedness of the thing, her days became one long waiting. She saw one move after another succeed, strike after strike slowing production, and thus increasing the cost of living. She saw the growing discontent and muttering, the vicious circle of labor striking for more money, and by its own ceasing of activity making the very increases they asked inadequate. And behind it all she saw the ceaseless working, the endless sowing, of a grim-faced band of conspirators.
She was obliged to wait. A few men talking in secret meetings, a hidden propaganda of crime and disorder - there was nothing to strike at. And Elinor, while not clever, had the Cardew shrewdness. She saw that, like the crisis in a fever, the thing would have to come, be met, and defeated.
She had no hope that the government would take hold. Government was aloof, haughty, and secure in its own strength. Just now, too, it was objective, not subjective. It was like a horse set to win a race, and unconscious of the fly on its withers. But the fly was a gadfly.
Elinor knew Doyle was beginning to suspect her. Sometimes she thought he would kill her, if he discovered what she meant to do. She did not greatly care. She waited for some inkling of the day set for the uprising in the city, and saved out of her small house allowance by innumerable economies and subterfuges. When she found out the time she would go to the Governor of the State. He seemed to be a strong man, and she would present him facts. Facts and names. Then he must act - and quickly.
Cut off from her own world, and with no roots thrown out in the new, she had no friends, no one to confide in or of whom to ask assistance. And she was afraid to go to Howard. He would precipitate things. The leaders would escape, and a new group would take their places. Such a group, she knew, stood ready for that very emergency.
On the afternoon of Lily’s departure she heard Doyle come in. He had not recovered from his morning’s anger, and she heard his voice, raised in some violent reproof to Jennie. He came up the stairs, his head sagged forward, his every step deliberate, heavy, ominous. He had an evening paper in his hand, and he gave it to her with his finger pointing to a paragraph.
“You might show that to the last of the Cardews,” he sneered.
It was the paragraph about Louis Akers. Elinor read it. “Who were the masked men?” she asked. “Do you know?”
“I wish to God I did. I’d - Makes him a laughing stock, of course. And just now, when - Where’s Lily?”
Elinor put down the paper.
“She is not here, She went home this afternoon.”
He stared at her, angrily incredulous.
“Home?”
“This afternoon.”
She passed him and went out into the hall. But he followed her and caught her by the arm as she reached the top of the staircase.
“What made her go home?”
“I don’t know, Jim.”
“She didn’t say?”
“Don’t hold me like that. No.”
She tried to free her arm, but he held her, his face angry and suspicious.
“You are lying to me,” he snarled. “She gave you a reason. What was it?”
Elinor was frightened, but she had not lost her head. She was thinking rapidly.
“She had a visitor this afternoon, a young man. He must have told her something about last night. She came up and told me she was going.”
“You know he told her something, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Elinor had cowered against the wall. “Jim, don’t look like that. You frighten me. I couldn’t keep her here. I - “
“What did he tell her?”
“He accused you.”
He was eyeing her coldly, calculatingly. All his suspicions of the past weeks suddenly crystallized. “And you let her go, after that,” he said slowly. “You were glad to have her go. You didn’t deny what she said. You let her run back home, with what she had guessed and what you told her to-day. You - “
He struck her then. The blow was as remorseless as his voice, as deliberate. She fell down the staircase headlong, and lay there, not moving.
The elderly maid came running from the kitchen, and found him half-way down the stairs, his eyes still calculating, but his body shaking.
“She fell,” he said, still staring down. But the servant faced him, her eyes full of hate.
“You devil!” she said. “If she’s dead, I’ll see you hang for it.”
But Elinor was not dead. Doctor Smalley, making rounds in a nearby hospital and answering the emergency call, found her lying on her bed, fully conscious and in great pain, while her husband bent over her in seeming agony of mind. She had broken her leg. He sent Doyle out during the setting. It was a principle of his to keep agonized husbands out of the room.
Life had beaten Lily Cardew. She went about the house, pathetically reminiscent of Elinor Doyle in those days when she had sought sanctuary there; but where Elinor had seen those days only as interludes in her stormy life, Lily was finding a strange new peace. She was very tender, very thoughtful, insistently cheerful, as though determined that her own ill-fortune should not affect the rest of the household.
But to Lily this peace was not an interlude, but an end. Life for her was over. Her bright dreams were gone, her future settled. Without so putting it, even to herself, she dedicated herself to service, to small kindnesses, and little thoughtful acts. She was, daily and hourly, making reparation to them all for what she had cost them, in hope.
That was the thing that had gone out of life. Hope. Her loathing of Louis Akers was gone. She did not hate him. Rather she felt toward him a sort of numbed indifference. She wished never to see him again, but the revolt that had followed her knowledge of the conditions under which he had married her was gone. She tried to understand his viewpoint, to make allowances for his lack of some fundamental creed to live by. But as the days went on, with that healthy tendency of the mind to bury pain, she found him, from a figure that bulked so large as to shut out all the horizon of her life, receding more and more.
But always he would shut off certain things. Love, and marriage, and of course the hope of happiness. Happiness was a thing one earned, and she had not earned it.
After the scene at the Saint Elmo, when he had refused to let her go, and when Willy Cameron had at last locked him in the bedroom of the suite and had taken her away, there had followed a complete silence. She had waited for some move or his part, perhaps an announcement of the marriage in the newspapers, but nothing had appeared. He had commenced a whirlwind campaign for the mayoralty and was receiving a substantial support from labor.
The months at the house on Cardew Way seemed more and more dream-like, and that quality of remoteness was accentuated by the fact that she had not been able to talk to Elinor. She had telephoned more than once during the week, but a new maid had answered. Mrs. Doyle was out. Mrs. Doyle was unable to come to the telephone. The girl was a foreigner, with something of Woslosky’s burr in her voice.
Lily had not left the house since her return. During that family conclave which had followed her arrival, a stricken thing of few words and long anxious pauses, her grandfather had suggested that. He had been curiously mild with her, her grand father. He had made no friendly overtures, but he had neither jibed nor sneered.
“It’s done,” he had said briefly. “The thing now is to keep her out of his clutches.” He had turned to her. “I wouldn’t leave the house for few days, Lily.”
It was then that Willy Cameron had gone. Afterwards she thought that he must have been waiting, patiently protective, to see how the old man received her.
Her inability to reach Elinor began to dismay her, at last. There was something. sinister about it, and finally Howard himself went to the Doyle house. Lily had come back on Thursday, and on the following Tuesday he made his call, timing it so that Doyle would probably be away from home. But he came back baffled.
“She was not at home,” he said. “I had to take the servant’s word for it, but: I think the girl was lying.”
“She may be ill. She almost never goes out.”
“What possible object could they have in concealing her illness?” Howard said impatiently.
But he was very uneasy, and what Lily had told him since her return only increased his anxiety. The house was a hotbed of conspiracy, and for her own reasons Elinor was remaining there. It was no place for a sister of his. But Elinor for years had only touched the outer fringes of his life, and his days were crowded with other things; the increasing arrogance of the strikers, the utter uselessness of trying to make terms with them, his own determination to continue to fight his futile political campaign. He put her out of his mind.
Then, at the end of another week, a curious thing happened. Anthony and Lily were in the library. Old Anthony without a club was Old Anthony lost, and he had developed a habit, at first rather embarrassing to the others, of spending much of his time downstairs. He was no sinner turned saint. He still let the lash of his tongue play over the household, but his old zest in it seemed gone. He made, too, small tentative overtures to Lily, intended to be friendly, but actually absurdly self-conscious. Grace, watching him, often felt him rather touching. It was obvious to her that he blamed himself, rather than Lily, for what had happened.
On this occasion he had asked Lily to read to him.
“And leave out the politics,” he had said, “I get enough of that wherever I go.”
As she read she felt him watching her, and in the middle of a paragraph he suddenly said:
“What’s become of Cameron?”
“He must be very busy. He is supporting Mr. Hendricks, you know.”
“Supporting him! He’s carrying
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