A Poor Wise Man, Mary Roberts Rinehart [classic book list TXT] 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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By eleven o’clock the revolution was over. Sodden groups of men, thoroughly cowed and frightened, were on their way by back roads to the places they had left a few hours before. They had no longer dreams of empire. Behind them they could see, on the horizon, the city itself, the smoke from its chimneys, the spires of its churches. Both, homes and churches, they had meant to destroy, but behind both there was the indestructible. They had failed.
They turned, looked back, and went on.
*
On the crest of a hill-top overlooking the city a man was standing, looking down to where the softened towers of the great steel bridges rose above the river mist like fairy towers. Below him lay the city, powerful, significant, important.
The man saw the city only as a vast crucible, into which he had flung his all, and out of which had come only defeat and failure. But the city was not a crucible. The melting pot of a nation is not a thing of cities, but of the human soul.
The city was not a melting pot. It was a sanctuary. The man stood silent and morose, his chin dropped on his chest, and stared down.
Beside and somewhat behind him stood a woman, a somber, passionate figure, waiting passively. His eyes traveled from the city to her, and rested on her, contemptuous, thwarted, cynical.
“You fool,” he said, “I hate you, and you know it.”
But she only smiled faintly. “We’d better get away now, Jim,” she said.
He got into the car.
Late that afternoon Joe Wilkinson and Dan came slowly up the street, toward the Boyd house. The light of battle was still in Dan’s eyes, his clothes were torn and his collar missing, and he walked with the fine swagger of the conqueror.
“Y’ask me,” he said, “and I’ll tell the world this thing’s done for. It was just as well to let them give it a try, and find out it won’t work.”
Joe said nothing. He was white and very tired, and a little sick.
“If you don’t mind I’ll go in your place and wash up,” he remarked, as they neared the house. “I’ll scare the kids to death if they see me like this.”
Edith was in the parlor. She had sat there almost all day, in an agony of fear. At four o’clock the smallest Wilkinson had hammered at the front door, and on being admitted had made a shameless demand.
“Bed and thugar,” she had said, looking up with an ingratiating smile.
“You little beggar!”
“Bed and thugar.”
Edith had got the bread and sugar, and, having lured the baby into the parlor, had held her while she ate, receiving now and then an exceedingly sticky kiss in payment. After a little the child’s head began to droop, and Edith drew the small head down onto her breast. She sat there, rocking gently, while the chair slowly traveled, according to its wont, about the room.
The child brought her comfort. She began to understand those grave rocking figures in the hospital ward, women who sat, with eyes that seemed to look into distant places, with a child’s head on their breasts.
After all, that was life for a woman. Love was only a part of the scheme of life, a means to an end. And that end was the child.
For the first time she wished that her child had lived.
She felt no bitterness now, and no anger. He was dead. It was hard to think of him as dead, who had been so vitally alive. She was sorry he had had to die, but death was like love and children, it was a part of some general scheme of things. Suppose this had been his child she was holding? Would she so easily have forgiven him? She did not know.
Then she thought of Willy Cameron. The bitterness had strangely gone out of that, too. Perhaps, vaguely, she began to realize that only young love gives itself passionately and desperately, when there is no hope of a return, and that the agonies of youth, although terrible enough, pass with youth itself.
She felt very old.
Joe found her there, the chair displaying its usual tendency to climb the chimney flue, and stood in the doorway, looking at her with haunted, hungry eyes. There was a sort of despair in Joe those days, and now he was tired and shaken from the battle.
“I’ll take her home in a minute,” he said, still with the strange eyes!”
He came into the room, and suddenly he was kneeling beside the chair, his head buried against the baby’s warm, round body. His bent shoulders shook, and Edith, still with the maternal impulse strong within her, put her hand on his bowed head.
“Don’t, Joe!”
He looked up.
“I loved you so, Edith!”
“Don’t you love me now?”
“God knows I do. I can’t get over it. I can’t. I’ve tried, Edith.”
He sat back on the floor and looked at her.
“I can’t,” he repeated. “And when I saw you like that just now, with the kid in your arms - I used to think that maybe you and I - “
“I know, Joe. No decent man would want me now.”
She was still strangely composed, peaceful, almost detached.
“That!” he said, astonished. “I don’t mean that, Edith. I’ve had my fight about that, and got it over. That’s done with. I mean - ” he got up and straightened himself. “You don’t care about me.”
“But I do care for you. Perhaps not quite the way you care, Joe but I’ve been through such a lot. I can’t seem to feel anything terribly. I just want peace.”
“I could give you that,” he said eagerly.
Edith smiled. Peace, in that noisy house next door, with children and kittens and puppies everywhere! And yet it would be peace, after all, a peace of the soul, the peace of a good man’s love. After a time, too, there might come another peace, the peace of those tired women in the ward, rocking.
“If you want me, I’ll marry you,” she said, very simply. “I’ll be a good wife, Joe. And I want children. I want the right to have them.”
He never noticed that the kiss she gave him, over the sleeping baby, was slightly tinged with granulated sugar.
OLD Anthony’s body had been brought home, and lay in state in his great bed. There had been a bad hour; death seems so strangely to erase faults and leave virtues. Something strong and vital had gone from the house, and the servants moved about with cautious, noiseless steps. In Grace’s boudoir, Howard was sitting, his arms around his wife, telling her the story of the day. At dawn he had notified her by telephone of Akers’ murder.
“Shall I tell Lily?” she had asked, trembling.
“Do you want to wait until I get back?”
“I don’t know how she will take it, Howard. I wish you could be here, anyhow.”
But then had come the battle and his father’s death, and in the end it was Willy Cameron who told her. He had brought back all that was mortal of Anthony Cardew, and, having seen the melancholy procession up the stairs, had stood in the hall, hating to intrude but hoping to be useful. Howard found him there, a strange, disheveled figure, bearing the scars of battle, and held out his hand.
“It’s hard to thank you, Cameron,” he said; “you seem to be always about when we need help. And” he paused. “We seem to have needed it considerably lately.”
Willy Cameron flushed.
“I feel rather like a meddler, sir.”
“Better go up and wash,” Howard said. “I’ll go up with you.”
It happened, therefore, that it was in Howard Cardew’s opulent dressing-room that Howard first spoke to Willy Cameron of Akers’ death, pacing the floor as he did so.
“I haven’t told her, Cameron.” He was anxious and puzzled. “She’ll have to be told soon, of course. I don’t know anything about women. I don’t know how she’ll take it.”
“She has a great deal of courage. It will be a shock, but not a grief. But I have been thinking - ” Willy Cameron hesitated. “She must not feel any remorse,” he went on. “She must not feel that she contributed to it in any way. If you can make that clear to her - “
“Are you sure she did not?”
“It isn’t facts that matter now. We can’t help those. And no one can tell what actually led to his change of heart. It is what she is to think the rest of her life.”
Howard nodded.
“I wish you would tell her,” he said. “I’m a blundering fool when it comes to her. I suppose I care too much.”
He caught rather an odd look in Willy Cameron’s face at that, and pondered over it later.
“I will tell her, if you wish.”
And Howard drew a deep breath of relief. It was shortly after that he broached another matter, rather diffidently.
“I don’t know whether you realize it or not, Cameron,” he said, “but this thing to-day might have been a different story if it had not been for you. And - don’t think I’m putting this on a reward basis. It’s nothing of the sort - but I would like to feel that you were working with me. I’d hate like thunder to have you working against me,” he added.
“I am only trained for one thing.”
“We use chemists in the mills.”
But the discussion ended there. Both men knew that it would be taken up later, at some more opportune time, and in the meantime both had one thought, Lily.
So it happened that Lily heard the news of Louis Akers’ death from Willy Cameron. She stood, straight and erect, and heard him through, watching him with eyes sunken by her night’s vigil and by the strain of the day. But it seemed to her that he was speaking of some one she had known long ago, in some infinitely remote past.
“I am sorry,” she said, when he finished. “I didn’t want him to die. You know that, don’t you? I never wished him - Willy, I say I am sorry, but I don’t really feel anything. It’s dreadful.”
Before he could catch her she had fallen to the floor, fainting for the first time in her healthy young life.
*
An hour later Mademoiselle went down to the library door. She found Willy Cameron pacing the floor, a pipe clenched in his teeth, and a look of wild despair in his eyes.
Mademoiselle took a long breath. She had changed her viewpoint somewhat since the spring. After all, what mattered was happiness. Wealth and worldly ambition were well enough, but they brought one, in the end, to the thing which waited for all in some quiet upstairs room, with the shades drawn and the heavy odors of hot-house flowers over everything.
“She is all right, quite, Mr. Cameron,” she said. “It was but a crisis of the nerves, and to be expected. And now she demands to see you.”
Grayson, standing in the hall, had a swift vision of a tall figure,
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