A Poor Wise Man, Mary Roberts Rinehart [classic book list TXT] 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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When he stopped she was silent. Then:
“I wonder if you know how much you have told me that you did not intend to tell?”
“That I didn’t intend to tell? I have made no reservations, Lily.”
“Are you sure? Or don’t you realize it yourself?”
“Realize what?” He was greatly puzzled.
“I think, Willy,” she said, quietly. “that you care a great deal more for Edith Boyd than you think you do.
He looked at her in stupefaction. How could she say that? How could she fail to know better than that? And he did not see the hurt behind her careful smile.
“You are wrong about that. I - ” He made a little gesture of despair. He could not tell her now that he loved her. That was all over.
“She is in love with you.”
He felt absurd and helpless. He could not deny that, yet how could she sit there, cool and faintly smiling, and not know that as she sat there so she sat enshrined in his heart. She was his saint, to kneel and pray to; and she was his woman, the one woman of his life. More woman than saint, he knew, and even for that he loved her. But he did not know the barbarous cruelty of the loving woman.
“I don’t know what to say to you, Lily,” he said, at last. “She - it is possible that she thinks she cares, but under the circumstances - “
“Ellen told Mademoiselle you were going to marry her. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You always said that marriage without love was wicked, Willy.”
“Her child had a right to a name. And there were other things. I can’t very well explain them to you. Her mother was ill. Can’t you understand, Lily? I don’t want to throw any heroics.” In his excitement he had lapsed into boyish vernacular. “Here was a plain problem, and a simple way to solve it. But it is off now, anyhow; things cleared up without that.”
She got up and held out her hand.
“It was like you to try to save her,” she said.
“Does this mean I am to go?”
“I am very tired, Willy.”
He had a mad impulse to take her in his arms, and holding her close to rest her there. She looked so tired. For fear he might do it he held his arms rigidly at his sides.
“You haven’t asked me about him,” she said unexpectedly.
“I thought you would not care to talk about him. That’s over and done, Lily. I want to forget about it, myself.”
She looked up at him, and had he had Louis Akers’ intuitive knowledge of women he would have understood then.
“I am never going back to him, Willy. You know that, don’t you?”
“I hoped it, of course.”
“I know now that I never loved him.”
But the hurt of her marriage was still too fresh in him for speech. He could not discuss Louis Akers with her.
“No,” he said, after a moment, “I don’t think you ever did. I’ll come in some evening, if I may, Lily. I must not keep you up now.”
How old he looked, for him! How far removed from those busy, cheerful days at the camp! And there were new lines of repression in his face; from the nostrils to the corners of his mouth. Above his ears his hair showed a faint cast of gray.
“You have been having rather a hard time, Willy, haven’t you’?” she said, suddenly.
“I have been busy, of course.”
“And worried?”
“Sometimes. But things are clearing up now.”
She was studying him with the newly opened eyes of love. What was it he showed that the other men she knew lacked? Sensitiveness? Kindness? But her father was both sensitive and kind. So was Pink, in less degree. In the end she answered her own question, and aloud.
“I think it is patience,” she said. And to his unspoken question: “You are very patient, aren’t you?”
“I never thought about it. For heaven’s sake don’t turn my mind in on myself, Lily. I’ll be running around in circles like a pup chasing his tail.”
He made a movement to leave, but she seemed oddly reluctant to let him go.
“Do you know that father says you have more influence than any other man in the city?”
“That’s more kind than truthful.”
“And - I think he and grandfather are planning to try to get you, when the mills reopen. Father suggested it, but grandfather says you’d have the presidency of the company in six months, and he’d be sharpening your lead pencils.”
Suddenly Willy Cameron laughed, and the tension was broken.
“If he did it with his tongue they’d be pretty sharp,” he said.
For just a moment, before he left, they were back to where they had been months ago, enjoying together their small jokes and their small mishaps. The present fell away, with its hovering tragedy, and they were boy and girl together. Exaltation and sacrifice were a part of their love, as of all real and lasting passion, but there was always between them also that soundest bond of all, liking and comradeship.
“I love her. I like her. I adore her,” was the cry in Willy Cameron’s heart when he started home that night.
Elinor Doyle was up and about her room. She walked slowly and with difficulty, using crutches, and she spent most of the time at her window, watching and waiting. From Lily there came, at frequent intervals, notes, flowers and small delicacies. The flowers and food Olga brought to her, but the notes she never saw. She knew they came. She could see the car stop at the curb, and the chauffeur, his shoulders squared and his face watchful, carrying a white envelope up the walk, but there it ended.
She felt more helpless than ever. The doctor came less often, but the vigilance was never relaxed, and she had, too, less and less hope of being able to give any warning. Doyle was seldom at home, and when he was he had ceased to give her his taunting information. She was quite sure now of his relations with the Russian girl, and her uncertainty as to her course was gone. She was no longer his wife. He held another woman in his rare embraces, a traitor like himself. It was sordid. He was sordid.
Woslosky had developed blood poisoning, and was at the point of death, with a stolid policeman on guard at his bedside. She knew that from the newspapers she occasionally saw. And she connected Doyle unerringly with the tragedy at the farm behind Friendship. She recognized, too, since that failure, a change in his manner to her. She saw that he now both hated her and feared her, and that she had become only a burden and a menace to him. He might decide to do away with her, to kill her. He would not do it himself; he never did his own dirty work, but the Russian girl - Olga was in love with Jim Doyle. Elinor knew that, as she knew many things, by a sort of intuition. She watched them in the room together, and she knew that to Doyle the girl was an incident, the vehicle of his occasional passion, a strumpet and a tool. He did not even like her; she saw him looking at her sometimes with a sort of amused contempt. But Olga’s somber eyes followed him as he moved, lit with passion and sometimes with anger, but always they followed him.
She was afraid of Olga. She did not care particularly about death, but it must not come before she had learned enough to be able to send out a warning. She thought if it came it might be by poison in the food that was sent up, but she had to eat to live. She took to eating only one thing on her tray, and she thought she detected in the girl an understanding and a veiled derision.
By Doyle’s increasing sullenness she knew things were not going well with him, and she found a certain courage in that, but she knew him too well to believe that he would give up easily. And she drew certain deductions from the newspapers she studied so tirelessly. She saw the announcement of the unusual number of hunting licenses issued, for one thing, and she knew the cover that such licenses furnished armed men patrolling the country. The state permitted the sale of fire-arms without restriction. Other states did the same, or demanded only the formality of a signature, never verified.
Would they never wake to the situation?
She watched the election closely. She knew that if Akers were elected the general strike and the chaos to follow would be held back until he had taken office and made the necessary changes in the city administration, but that if he went down to defeat the Council would turn loose its impatient hordes at once.
She waited for election day with burning anxiety. When it came it so happened that she was left alone all day in the house. Early in the morning Olga brought her a tray and told her she was going out. She was changed, the Russian; she had dropped the mask of sodden servility and stood before her, erect, cunningly intelligent and oddly powerful.
“I am going to be away all day, Mrs. Doyle,” she said, in her excellent English. “I have work to do.”
“Work?” said Elinor. “Isn’t there work to do here?”
“I am not a house-worker. I came to help Mr. Doyle. To-day I shall make speeches.”
Elinor was playing the game carefully. “But - can you make speeches?” she asked.
“Me? That is my work, here, in Russia, everywhere. In Russia it is the women who speak, the men who do what the women tell them to do. Here some day it will be the same.”
Always afterwards Elinor remembered the five minutes that followed, for Olga, standing before her, suddenly burst into impassioned oratory. She cited the wrongs of the poor under the old regime. She painted in glowing colors the new. She was excited, hectic, powerful. Elinor in her chair, an aristocrat to the finger-tips, was frightened, interested, thrilled.
Long after Olga had gone she sat there, wondering at the real conviction, the intensity of passion, of hate and of revenge that actuated this newest tool of Doyle’s. Doyle and his associates might be actuated by self-interest, but the real danger in the movement lay not with the Doyles of the world, but with these fanatic liberators. They preached to the poor a new religion, not of creed or of Church, but of freedom. Freedom without laws of God or of man, freedom of love, of lust, of time, of all responsibility. And the poor, weighted with laws and cares, longed to throw off their burdens.
Perhaps it was not the doctrine itself that was wrong. It was its imposition by force on a world not yet ready for it that was wrong; its imposition by violence. It might come, but not this way. Not, God preventing, this way.
There was a polling place across the street, in the basement of a school house. The vote was heavy and all day men lounged on the pavements, smoking and talking. Once she saw Olga in the crowd, and later on Louis Akers drove up in an open automobile, handsome, apparently confident, and greeted with cheers.
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