A Poor Wise Man, Mary Roberts Rinehart [classic book list TXT] 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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“Father wants to see you to-night,” she wrote, “and mother suggests that as you are busy, you try to come to dinner. We are dining alone. Do come, Willy. I think it is most important.”
He took the letter home with him and placed it in a locked drawer of his desk, along with a hard and shrunken doughnut, tied with a bow of Christmas ribbon, which had once helped to adorn the Christmas tree they had trimmed together. There were other things in the drawer; a postcard photograph, rather blurred, of Lily in the doorway of her little hut, smiling; and the cigar box which had been her cash register at the camp.
He stood for some time looking down at the post card; it did not seem possible that in the few months since those wonderful days, life could have been so cruel to them both. Lily married, and he himself -
Ellen came up when he was tying his tie. She stood behind him, watching him in the mirror.
“I don’t know what you’ve done to your hair, Willy,” she said; “it certainly looks queer.”
“It usually looks queer, so why worry, heart of my heart?” But he turned and put an arm around her shoulders. “What would the world be without women like you, Ellen?” he said gravely.
“I haven’t done anything but my duty,” Ellen said, in her prim voice. “Listen, Willy. I saw Edith again to-day, and she told me to do something.”
“To go home and take a rest? That’s what you need.”
“No. She wants me to tear up that marriage license.”
He said nothing for a moment. “I’ll have to see her first.”
“She said it wouldn’t be any good, Willy. She’s made up her mind.” She watched him anxiously. “You’re not going to be foolish, are you? She says there’s no need now, and she’s right.”
“Somebody will have to look after her.”
“Dan can do that. He’s changed, since she went.” Ellen glanced toward Mrs. Boyd’s empty room. “You’ve done enough, Willy. You’ve seen them through, all of them. I - isn’t it time you began to think about yourself?”
He was putting on his coat, and she picked a bit of thread from it, with nervous fingers.
“Where are you going to-night, Willy?”
“To the Cardews. Mr. Cardew has sent for me.”
She looked up at him.
“Willy, I want to tell you something. The Cardews won’t let that marriage stand, and you know it. I think she cares for you. Don’t look at me like that. I do.”
“That’s because you are fond of me,” he said, smiling down at her. “I’m not the sort of man girls care about, Ellen. Let’s face that. The General Manager said when he planned me, ‘Here’s going to be a fellow who is to have everything in the world, health, intelligence, wit and the beauty of an Adonis, but he has to lack something, so we’ll make it that’.”
But Ellen, glancing up swiftly, saw that although his tone was light, there was pain in his eyes.
He reflected on Edith’s decision as he walked through the park toward the Cardew house. It had not surprised him, and yet he knew it had cost her an effort. How great an effort, man-like, he would never understand, but something of what she had gone through he realized. He wondered vaguely whether, had there never been a Lily Cardew in his life, he could ever have cared for Edith. Perhaps. Not the Edith of the early days, that was certain. But this new Edith, with her gentleness and meekness, her clear, suffering eyes, her strange new humility.
She had sent him a message of warning about Akers, and from it he had reconstructed much of the events of the night she had taken sick.
“Tell him to watch Louis Akers,” she had said. “I don’t know how near Willy was to trouble the other night, Ellen, but they’re going to try to get him.”
Ellen had repeated the message, watching him narrowly, but he had only laughed.
“Who are they” she had persisted.
“I’ll tell you all about it some day,” he had said. But he had told Dan the whole story, and, although he did not know it, Dan had from that time on been his self-constituted bodyguard. During his campaign speeches Dan was always near, his right hand on a revolver in his coat pocket, and for hours at a time he stood outside the pharmacy, favoring every seeker for drugs or soap or perfume with a scowling inspection. When he could not do it, he enlisted Joe Wilkinson in the evenings, and sometimes the two of them, armed, policed the meeting halls.
As a matter of fact, Joe Wilkinson was following him that night. On his way to the Cardews Willy Cameron, suddenly remembering the uncanny ability of Jinx to escape and trail him, remaining meanwhile at a safe distance in the rear, turned suddenly and saw Joe, walking sturdily along in rubber-soled shoes, and obsessed with his high calling of personal detective.
Joe, discovered, grinned sheepishly.
“Thought that looked like your back,” he said. “Nice evening for a walk, isn’t it?”
“Let me look at you, Joe,” said Willy Cameron. “You look strange to me. Ah, now I have it. You look like a comet without a tail. Where’s the family?”
“Making taffy. How - is Edith?”
“Doing nicely.” He avoided the boy’s eyes.
“I guess I’d better tell you. Dan’s told me about her. I - ” Joe hesitated. Then: “She never seemed like that sort of a girl,” he finished, bitterly.
“She isn’t that sort of girl, Joe.”
“She did it. How could a fellow know she wouldn’t do it again?”
“She has had a pretty sad sort of lesson.”
Joe, his real business forgotten, walked on with eyes down and shoulders drooping.
“I might as well finish with it,” he said, “now I’ve started. I’ve always been crazy about her. Of course now - I haven’t slept for two nights.”
“I think it’s rather like this, Joe,” Willy Cameron said, after a pause. “We are not one person, really. We are all two or three people, and all different. We are bad and good, depending on which of us is the strongest at the time, and now and then we pay so much for the bad we do that we bury that part. That’s what has happened to Edith. Unless, of course,” he added, “we go on convincing her that she is still the thing she doesn’t want to be.”
“I’d like to kill the man,” Joe said. But after a little, as they neared the edge of the park, he looked up.
“You mean, go on as if nothing had happened?”
“Precisely,” said Willy Cameron. “as though nothing had happened.”
The atmosphere of the Cardew house was subtly changed and very friendly. Willy Cameron found himself received as an old friend, with no tendency to forget the service he had rendered, or that, in their darkest hour, he had been one of them.
To his surprise Pink Denslow was there, and he saw at once that Pink had been telling them of the night at the farm house. Pink was himself again, save for a small shaved place at the back of his head, covered with plaster.
“I’ve told them, Cameron,” he said. “If I could only tell it generally I’d be the most popular man in the city, at dinners.”
“Pair of young fools,” old Anthony muttered, with his sardonic smile. But in his hand-clasp, as in Howard’s, there was warmth and a sort of envy, envy of youth and the adventurous spirit of youth.
Lily was very quiet. The story had meant more to her than to the others. She had more nearly understood Pink’s reference to the sealed envelope Willy Cameron had left, and the help sent by Edith Boyd. She connected that with Louis Akers, and from that to Akers’ threat against Cameron was only a step. She was frightened and somewhat resentful, that this other girl should have saved him from a revenge that she knew was directed at herself. That she, who had brought this thing about, had sat quietly at home while another woman, a woman who loved him, had saved him.
She was puzzled at her own state of mind.
Dinner was almost gay. Perhaps the gayety was somewhat forced, with Pink keeping his eyes from Lily’s face, and Howard Cardew relapsing now and then into abstracted silence. Because of the men who served, the conversation was carefully general. It was only in the library later, the men gathered together over their cigars, that the real reason for Willy Cameron’s summons was disclosed.
Howard Cardew was about to withdraw from the contest. “I’m late in coming to this decision,” he said. “Perhaps too late. But after a careful canvas of the situation, I find you are right, Cameron. Unless I withdraw, Akers” - he found a difficulty in speaking the name - “will be elected. At least it looks that way.”
“And if he is,” old Anthony put in, “he’ll turn all the devils of hell loose on us.”
It was late; very late. The Cardews stood ready to flood the papers with announcements of Howard’s withdrawal, and urging his supporters to vote for Hendricks, but the time was short. Howard had asked his campaign managers to meet there that night, and also Hendricks and one or two of his men, but personally he felt doubtful.
And, as it happened, the meeting developed more enthusiasm than optimism. Cardew’s withdrawal would be made the most of by the opposition. They would play it up as the end of the old regime, the beginning of new and better things.
Before midnight the conference broke up, to catch the morning editions. Willy Cameron, detained behind the others, saw Lily in the drawing-room alone as he passed the door, and hesitated.
“I have been waiting for you, Willy,” she said.
But when he went in she seemed to have nothing to say. She sat in a low chair, in a soft dark dress which emphasized her paleness. To Willy Cameron she had never seemed more beautiful, or more remote.
“Do you remember how you used to whistle ‘The Long, Long Trail,’ Willy?” she said at last. “All evening I have been sitting here thinking what a long trail we have both traveled since then.”
“A long, hard trail.” he assented.
“Only you have gone up, Willy. And I have gone down, into the valley. I wish” - she smiled faintly - “I wish you would look down from your peak now and then. You never come to see me.”
“I didn’t know you wanted me,” he said bluntly.
“Why shouldn’t I want to see you?”
“I couldn’t help reminding you of things.” “But I never forget them, anyhow. Sometimes I almost go mad, remembering. It isn’t quite as selfish as it sounds. I’ve hurt them all so. Willy, do you mind telling me about the girl who opened that letter and sent you help?”
“About Edith Boyd? I’d like to tell you, Lily. Her mother is dead, and she lost her child. She is in the Memorial Hospital.”
“Then she has no one but you?”
“She has a brother.”
“Tell me about her sending help that night. She really saved your life, didn’t she?”
While he was telling her she sat staring straight ahead, her fingers interlaced in her lap. She was telling herself that all this could not possibly matter to her, that she had cut herself off, finally and forever, from the man before her; that she did not even deserve his friendship.
Quite suddenly she knew that she did not want his friendship. She wanted to see again in his face the look that
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